Comment by MillenialMan
5 years ago
My experience of Hacker News comments is not positive. They tend to be very convincing but actually kinda bullshit (or just vacuous), which is arguably a lot worse than communities that are transparent.
5 years ago
My experience of Hacker News comments is not positive. They tend to be very convincing but actually kinda bullshit (or just vacuous), which is arguably a lot worse than communities that are transparent.
That’s what Dan is saying - but once in awhile you find a pearl in an area you know enough about to confirm.
Otherwise it’s best to assume everything you read here is full of it.
I was responding to the idea that it's better than everywhere else on the internet. That hasn't really been my experience. Discord is better, StackOverflow is better, even Reddit is often better if you're looking at specialist communities.
But to be honest I rarely find pearls here. Even many of the "pearls" in the article are just well-written articulations of stuff that is... kind of obvious. Some are inversions of ordinary wisdom for the sake of inversion. Only some carry new information.
I find the most valuable stuff here tends to be arguments where someone knows their shit but is going against the grain, and that person will usually be flagged into oblivion. But there aren't many places you see someone like that responding in context to the mainstream dogma.
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Interestingly though, reading through it I explicitly remember a lot of the comments he quoted, e.g. the FedEx Airport one (which was really interesting). It's kind of crazy to think the site is small enough that we're all reading the same good stuff.
The most valuable to me are when someone with major historical domain knowledge stops by to detail some historical event in the IT world.
Unfiltered stories from those who were there are often useful, even if their memory of how it transpired may not be entirely accurate.
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