Comment by tptacek
6 days ago
They already are against the rules here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(This is a broader restriction than the one you're looking for).
It's important to understand that not all of the rules of HN are on the Guidelines page. We're a common law system; think of the Guidelines as something akin to a constitution. Dan and Tom's moderation comments form the "judicial precedent" of the site; you'll find things in there like "no Internet psychiatric diagnosis" and "not owing $publicfigure anything but owing this community more" and "no nationalist flamewar" and "no hijacking other people's Show HN threads to promote your own thing". None of those are on the Guidelines page either, but they're definitely in the guidelines here.
Thanks for a lot of references!
One comment stands out to me:
> Whether to add it to the formal guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is a different question, of course. I'm reluctant to do that, partly because it arguably follows from what's there, partly because this is still a pretty fuzzy area that is rapidly evolving, and partly because the community is already handling this issue pretty well.
I guess me raising this question is because it feels maybe slightly off that people can't really know about this unwritten rule until they break it or see someone else break it and people tell them why. It is true that the community seems to handle it with downvotes, but it might not be clear enough why something gets downvoted, people can't see the intent. And it also seems like an inefficient way of communicating community norms, by telling users about them once they've broken them.
Being upfront with what rules and norms to follow, like the guidelines already do for most things, feels more honest and welcoming for others to join in on discussions.
The rules are written; they're just not all in that one document. The balance HN strikes here is something Dan has worked out over a very long time. There's at least two problems with arbitrarily fleshing out the guidelines ("promoting" "case law" to "statutes", as it were):
* First, the guidelines get too large, and then nobody reads them all, which makes the guideline document less useful. Better to keep the guidelines page reduced down to a core of things, especially if those things can be extrapolated to most of the rest of the rules you care about (or most of them plus a bunch of stuff that doesn't come up often enough to need space on that page).
* Second, whatever you write in the guidelines, people will incline to lawyer and bicker about. Writing a guideline implies, at least for some people, that every word is carefully considered and that there's something final about the specific word choices in the guidelines. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" for a lot of nerds like us.
Perhaps "generated comments" is trending towards a point where it earns a spot in the official guidelines. It sure comes up a lot. The flip side though is that we leave a lot of "enforcement" of the guidelines up to the community, and we have a pretty big problem with commenters randomly accusing people of LLM-authoring things, even when they're clearly (because spelling errors and whatnot) human-authored.
Anyways: like I said, this is pretty well-settled process on HN. I used to spend a lot of time pushing Dan to add things to the guidelines; ultimately, I think the approach they've landed on is better than the one you (and, once, I) favored.
> Second, whatever you write in the guidelines, people will incline to lawyer and bicker about. Writing a guideline implies, at least for some people, that every word is carefully considered and that there's something final about the specific word choices in the guidelines. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" for a lot of nerds like us.
God I hate this. And it cuts across society, not just on HN or among nerds. Something like 10% or so of the people I interact with seem to just rules-lawyer their way through life as a default. "Well... as you can see in the rule book, section 5, paragraph 3, the rule clearly says we shouldn't do X, but it doesn't say we mustn't do X, so I'm clearly allowed to do X." Insufferable.
2 replies →
This is the correct answer. If you're curious about what other sorts of things are disallowed by common law, look at dang and tomhow's comments that say "please don't":
dang: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
tomhow: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Corrected second link: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> This is the correct answer.
Where does that saying come from? I keep seeing it in a lot of different contexts but it somehow feels off to me in a way I can't really explain.
It's not "off" unless you're simply reading it literally. If you do that, then it's a verbose way of saying "I agree". But the connotations are something like "I agree, strongly, and in particular am implying (possibly just for effect) that there are objectively right and wrong answers to this question and the other answers are wrong." The main difference is the statement that there is an objective answer to what people may be treating as a subjective question.
If it helps, you can think of it as saying more about possible disagreeing opinions than about the specific opinion expressed. "This answer is right, and the people who disagree are 'objectively' wrong."
It took me some time to catch on to this. It can certainly be jarring or obnoxious, though sometimes it can be helpful to say "yo people, you're treating this like a subjective opinion, but there are objective reasons to conclude X."
4 replies →
It's the first time I've ever commented that, and I was trying to figure out a way to omit it. I don't like that sort of phrase either, I especially hate comments that just go "This.", but they're rare on HN so I'm in good company.
Ultimately, I put it because:
- It was the most directly informative comment on the thread;
- It had been downvoted (greyed out) to the very bottom of the thread; and
- I wanted to express my support before making a fairly orthogonal comment without whiplashing everyone.
The whiplashing concern is the problem I run into most generally. It can be hard to reply to someone with a somewhat related idea without making it seem like you're contradicting them, particularly if they're being dogpiled on with downvotes or comments. I'd love to hear other ways to go about this, I'm always trying to improve my communication.
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That answer is incorrect. Common law can only be created by courts.
Moot pedantry. Nobody said this creates state level common law, in the US or elsewhere.
Just that this forum uses a common law styled system - and even added "think of X as..." making clear this refer to this analogy, not to official state law.
https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060886.p...
Uh huh. And, as tptacek said, dang and tomhow are the courts here. So what they have consistently ruled is the common law here.
This comment from Dang 5 months ago is a little more nuanced and allows for some usage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44704054
The key point seems to be "generated comments", not "use of LLMs".
Maybe some of these things should be added explicitly to the rules so people will flag violations.
> no hijacking other people's Show HN threads to promote your own thing
This seems to happen a lot, so apparently not a very well enforced rule.
Like most things in life that make reference to information outside of one's context window, runtime linter warnings would go a long way.