The parent is trying to tell that off-topic is not welcomed by some users. I am the same opinion, I don't want to see on HN news about some non-technical political thing in LA or India , or see 3 days in a row someone toy Rust project.
You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO, some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on topic. But don't submit something like "God says vaccine is bad but hearth pills are good" since is obvious off topic , though I am curious about such illogical believes if I want to learn more there is a better forum for that.
Entirely agree about political stories and rust projects du jour (I’d go as far as associating out-of-topic posts on $random_software about how it’s be much better in rust).
Just ignore/downvote/flag and move on, though. Nobody is forcing anyone else to read anything, and it’s normal that some people here are interested in things in which I’m not. None of us is the arbiter of what should or should not be on HN. Not us mere posters, anyway.
I am not clear about flagging, I don't want to get myself tagged because I flag-ed someone 3rd submission of his weekend Rust project, or those COVID conspiracies/magic cures, I could offend some free-speech extremist if I have the opinion that the HN is not the correct place for that.
> You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO …
It’s handy for jumping to the bottom of a control loop if the language lacks a CONTINUE statement - the sin being outweighed by cleaner and easier to maintain code.
Sure, but even if you have continue some languages give you the GOTO so you can exit out from nested loops, useful when you need to work say with pixel colors in a big image, you need all the performance you can get.
Sure, but the parent was implying that if we reject some content is because we don't want our mind changed. A forum should have a scope/topic and it should reject off-topic posts.
I love subreddits with clear rules, then you don't see articles or comments that go in tangents, memes or american or international politics. The moderators can decide the gray area after user report. So trying to post some COVID or politics stuff in one of the good moderated subreddits will be removed and it is not because we don't want to open our mind.
I am not attacking Trump or americans here,
is a story from my country where in a very religious family the daughter failed to convince her mother to get the vaccine, the reason was soem Jesus /God does not allow it but for some reason God allows the mother to take pills/medicine for her heart ... makes no sense , if God gifted you a bad heart then WTF do you take unnatural pills, why did you vaccinated your children but for COVID you somehow found in the Bible that this vaccine is too much.
Probably a "horse dewormer pill", which is what all the Trump supporters are popping these days instead of getting vaccinated and wearing masks, because they don't trust doctors or medical science or vaccines.
> So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.
You're trying way too hard to make this about bias. There are more charitable and simpler explanations, such as signal-to-noise ratio and the expectation that submissions to HN are focused on geek-oriented science and tech topics.
I'm saying there is bias. And I'm saying it because it is healthy to acknowledge that we're both capable of bias and denial of same.
The reply you are quoting is currently at -3. Voting is more about about affecting visibility than whether one agrees or not. Or ideally should be. Does this tell us something? Doesn't it kind of prove my point for me?
I downvoted it because it's just a boring snipe and has no real substance. This comment, while ever so slightly more substantial, is still little more just some vague claims and accusations.
As far as I'm concerned that it's downvoted only "proves" that people tend to prefer more substantial conversation than this. If you had posted something of value I wouldn't have downvoted it, even though I probably would have disagreed with it.
> I'm saying there is bias. And I'm saying it because it is healthy to acknowledge that we're both capable of bias and denial of same.
I'm sorry but you're just doubling down on your baseless assertion. Just because you argue everyone might have their personal bias that does not mean that everyone around you is desperately trying to not challenge their beliefs. That's a very specific and very personal interpretation that you're trying to pin on everyone around you without any basis.
Meanwhile, there are simpler and reasonable explanations that you somehow decided to ignore.
I was disagreeing with the premise that Hacker News is, or should be, very narrow in scope. Though I'll grant you that there are certainly degrees to this. There are regularly posts that make me wonder why they were posted to HN when I first see them here - and yet, these often manage to enrich my day.
There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.
What I was talking about in the quoted bits of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024069 didn't have to do with topic scope. It had to do with article quality, which is orthogonal to that. I agree with you completely that HN should be broad rather than narrow in scope—that's highly desirable and we spend a lot of time trying to nudge and nurture things in that direction.
Just for clarity, when I was talking about how users are emotional about the front page and react intensely when they see something they don't think belongs there, it was in the context of an experiment we'd run to randomly place stories from /newest on the front page. Users reacted disastrously, not so much because of scope but because the median article's quality is just really low. That's true about in-scope topics like programming as well as other topics. I hope that makes sense.
As for 'who gets to be a member' - we don't restrict that nor want to restrict that. Everyone with intellectual curiosity, i.e. everyone, is welcome. The only requirement is actually using the site in that spirit. This is not so easy, of course, especially when the more activating topics show up.
The parent is trying to tell that off-topic is not welcomed by some users. I am the same opinion, I don't want to see on HN news about some non-technical political thing in LA or India , or see 3 days in a row someone toy Rust project.
You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO, some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on topic. But don't submit something like "God says vaccine is bad but hearth pills are good" since is obvious off topic , though I am curious about such illogical believes if I want to learn more there is a better forum for that.
Entirely agree about political stories and rust projects du jour (I’d go as far as associating out-of-topic posts on $random_software about how it’s be much better in rust).
Just ignore/downvote/flag and move on, though. Nobody is forcing anyone else to read anything, and it’s normal that some people here are interested in things in which I’m not. None of us is the arbiter of what should or should not be on HN. Not us mere posters, anyway.
I am not clear about flagging, I don't want to get myself tagged because I flag-ed someone 3rd submission of his weekend Rust project, or those COVID conspiracies/magic cures, I could offend some free-speech extremist if I have the opinion that the HN is not the correct place for that.
2 replies →
> You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO …
It’s handy for jumping to the bottom of a control loop if the language lacks a CONTINUE statement - the sin being outweighed by cleaner and easier to maintain code.
Sure, but even if you have continue some languages give you the GOTO so you can exit out from nested loops, useful when you need to work say with pixel colors in a big image, you need all the performance you can get.
I don't think it is hard to pick clear examples. It is harder to pick clear policies for examples that end up in some gray area.
Sure, but the parent was implying that if we reject some content is because we don't want our mind changed. A forum should have a scope/topic and it should reject off-topic posts.
I love subreddits with clear rules, then you don't see articles or comments that go in tangents, memes or american or international politics. The moderators can decide the gray area after user report. So trying to post some COVID or politics stuff in one of the good moderated subreddits will be removed and it is not because we don't want to open our mind.
1 reply →
>God says vaccine is bad but hearth pills are good
Anyone else wondering what a "hearth pill" is?
Possibly, the word “health” was mis-typed on a phone and then wrongly auto-corrected to be “hearth”.
>Anyone else wondering what a "hearth pill" is?
typo/bad spell, I meant heart
I am not attacking Trump or americans here, is a story from my country where in a very religious family the daughter failed to convince her mother to get the vaccine, the reason was soem Jesus /God does not allow it but for some reason God allows the mother to take pills/medicine for her heart ... makes no sense , if God gifted you a bad heart then WTF do you take unnatural pills, why did you vaccinated your children but for COVID you somehow found in the Bible that this vaccine is too much.
Probably a "horse dewormer pill", which is what all the Trump supporters are popping these days instead of getting vaccinated and wearing masks, because they don't trust doctors or medical science or vaccines.
> So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.
You're trying way too hard to make this about bias. There are more charitable and simpler explanations, such as signal-to-noise ratio and the expectation that submissions to HN are focused on geek-oriented science and tech topics.
I'm saying there is bias. And I'm saying it because it is healthy to acknowledge that we're both capable of bias and denial of same.
The reply you are quoting is currently at -3. Voting is more about about affecting visibility than whether one agrees or not. Or ideally should be. Does this tell us something? Doesn't it kind of prove my point for me?
I downvoted it because it's just a boring snipe and has no real substance. This comment, while ever so slightly more substantial, is still little more just some vague claims and accusations.
As far as I'm concerned that it's downvoted only "proves" that people tend to prefer more substantial conversation than this. If you had posted something of value I wouldn't have downvoted it, even though I probably would have disagreed with it.
> I'm saying there is bias. And I'm saying it because it is healthy to acknowledge that we're both capable of bias and denial of same.
I'm sorry but you're just doubling down on your baseless assertion. Just because you argue everyone might have their personal bias that does not mean that everyone around you is desperately trying to not challenge their beliefs. That's a very specific and very personal interpretation that you're trying to pin on everyone around you without any basis.
Meanwhile, there are simpler and reasonable explanations that you somehow decided to ignore.
2 replies →
Playing 00's music on an 80's radio station isn't challenging someone's fondness of 80's music, it's just annoying.
I was disagreeing with the premise that Hacker News is, or should be, very narrow in scope. Though I'll grant you that there are certainly degrees to this. There are regularly posts that make me wonder why they were posted to HN when I first see them here - and yet, these often manage to enrich my day.
There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.
What I was talking about in the quoted bits of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024069 didn't have to do with topic scope. It had to do with article quality, which is orthogonal to that. I agree with you completely that HN should be broad rather than narrow in scope—that's highly desirable and we spend a lot of time trying to nudge and nurture things in that direction.
Just for clarity, when I was talking about how users are emotional about the front page and react intensely when they see something they don't think belongs there, it was in the context of an experiment we'd run to randomly place stories from /newest on the front page. Users reacted disastrously, not so much because of scope but because the median article's quality is just really low. That's true about in-scope topics like programming as well as other topics. I hope that makes sense.
As for 'who gets to be a member' - we don't restrict that nor want to restrict that. Everyone with intellectual curiosity, i.e. everyone, is welcome. The only requirement is actually using the site in that spirit. This is not so easy, of course, especially when the more activating topics show up.
There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.
And no risks in being too open about who gets to be a member of your club?
1 reply →