I'll take a thoughtful essay on architecture and the power of government over the crap OMG look at this crazy Sh!t! and the self help How to lose weight/How to get a date/How to be social. articles which are hitting the front page more and more often.
A lot of HN users are in Silicon Valley, and most people in SV know California Ave. This is the neighborhood Facebook just moved to, among other things.
I meant nothing towards you. PG's gonna write essays on whatever he wants. I was just pointing out evidence of the adulation/infatuation some of the HN denizens have for you.
BTW I know Calif. Ave. too, I used to eat at Chu's every now and then (the little potsticker hole-in-the-wall shop). Is that still there?
I'm fine with non-lame non-hacking posts, by any author. Most life/computer-hacking stories posted here are formulaic and sad. This brief slice of humanity far exceeds the average story.
For the nth time: everything on Hacker News does not have to be about programming. This is a community made of real people who have real feelings and most importantly people who can have mature conversations about anything that matters.
Ass kissing? Ugh.
If you don't like a story, flag it. Stop whining or leave.
It's a herd phenomenon. Even if PG writes something utterly pointless, he gets upvoted to the stratosphere. It would be nice if this changed. Intelligent and successful people like PG don't need this kind of adulation.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think this comment shows a slight lack of... something... hmm...
This is a bit disorganized, but I'll try to lay out how the gears are turning in my head:
When you implicitly call out a community or someone very admired in that community (whose also running things for free for a lot of people's enjoyment), it's courageous but it burns some of your future ability-to-speak-out-and-others-will-listen-edness.
If you were to make similar comments frequently, eventually people would just shrug it off instead of burning the mental energy to apply difficult critical thinking.
Now, I was one of those disagreeable kids who used to argue with teachers when they got their math or chemistry wrong, and eventually I stopped doing that and started thinking:
"Do I want to burn some of my speak-out-and-people-will-listen-edness on this particular topic?" Because you only have so much, and you might want to use it on something important later.
Does the tree submission get submitted and voted if it's not Paul Graham or another very admired poster? Probably not. But it's a minor thing to take a banner up against, and it just oh-so-slightly decreases the resources you have by taking up that banner. And maybe it minorly gets on the nerves of a few people, and they don't like it, and so you get oh-so-very-slightly less attention/goodwill in the future.
You have to think about your goal. Is your goal to get the teacher to correct their mistake and move forward? Or is it to boost your ego?
If it's the former, it's probably better to approach them later, in private, and point it out politely. They will correct the problem next session, or send out an email between sessions.
Either that, or be very polite, e.g., "Excuse me, Mr. Smith, but you wrote down <wrong stuff> there. Why isn't it <right stuff>?"
If you say, "Mr. Smith, you're wrong. It should be <right stuff>, not <wrong stuff>" you are strictly speaking correct, but you'll humiliate them. It feels good for your ego -- I'm smarter than the teacher! -- but probably won't advance the class.
This isn't about the "sorry state of education," it's about knowing what people feel when you blurt shit out in class.
Why is it the student's responsibility to protect the teacher's ego?
Here is the admittedly unusual way in which I look at it: In most cases, the school system (including the teachers) is implicitly claiming that students are better off in school with them than anywhere else. When a ludicrous claim like this is being made and enforced, I don't see why they should be cut so much slack.
It's not the student's responsibility to protect the teacher's ego, it's the student's responsibility to be reasonable. Standing up and yelling because the teacher forgot a semicolon in some example code, for instance, is a waste of everyone's time, not just the teacher's.
Your somewhat extreme example notwithstanding, are you saying it's unreasonable for a student to point it out when a teacher is giving incorrect information to the class?
I'm saying "It depends." My experience with that behavior indicates that it's usually counterproductive- either nitpicking like my previous example, or axe grinding that isn't really helping. Think an Ayn Rand follower interrupting a class on Marxism every few moments.
The problem, really, is that it's impossible to make a fully qualified statement and still be engaging. As a speaker, you have to skip over some detail somewhere, thus there is always going to be a place to jump in and act an ass.
Interesting post, but since a lot of people here seem to make a big deal about their objectivity, I can see why this would annoy TriinT enough that he'd post about it. As you imply, he might've thought about it and decided it was worth risking some of that goodwill.
I stand by my comment. My opinion is based on evidence: some high-karma members can get away with stuff other members can't get away with. If a newbie posted about oaks getting hacked, the post would be flagged right away. Of course, since PG runs HN, the community should indeed cut him some slack as a token of gratitude.
My comment was an attack on the herd phenomenon, not on PG. It was not meant to offend anyone. If it does offend anyone, well, I really don't care. If it burns some of my future ability-to-speak-out-and-others-will-listen-edness, then I don't care either. Worst case scenario, I can always join with a new username, like IamNotTriinT.
I agree that the comments shouldn't offend anyone.
I disagree with your reasoning, though. This neighborhood is (apparently) pretty well known in Ye Olde Silicone Valley(e). That being the case, I'll bet any number of nerd bloggers or private individuals could have written it up and gotten upvotes; perhaps not as many, but that's not a problem unless you dislike the idea of reputations in general.
The other factor to consider is this: that the people upvoting are aware that PG has more clout than the average poster, are aware that this is a slightly less-hackerly story, and are upvoting it because they approve of the additional attention PG can help bring to it.
Please note that my initial comment was a reply to a comment on herd behavior, not a statement that oak tree hacking in non-kosher. In any case, I would much rather read about oak trees than yet another retarded TechCrunch article...
This isn't utterly pointless. I'm glad I know about it, and I wouldn't have without this essay.
Or were you just saying "in general"? If so, point me to something PG has put online that is utterly pointless. He has a remarkably good filter for useful content, even within his own essays there are rarely sentences that are extra.
For starters, I didn't say that the story about oaks getting hacked is pointless. Note also that I didn't say that PG puts pointless essays online.
My comment was on what PG comments on HN. If somebody asks PG a question and he briefly replies "yes", the comment gets upvoted beyond what is reasonable, even if it's the question, NOT the answer, that carries the interesting information. Hell, a Y/N answer only carries 1 bit of information...
I was trying to point out that, contrary to popular belief, HN is not immune to herd phenomena. In a way, this might be a good sign. It shows that we're humans. It shows that computers haven't yet passed the Turing test.
One genuine full-entropy bit of information on an important subject can be very valuable. You can double your wealth with one bit. (Toy example: you know whether a roulette wheel is going to come up red or black next time. You stake everything you own on the outcome. There are of course less-toy examples and less hair-raising ways to make money out of bits.) It doesn't take all that many bits to state (e.g.) Maxwell's equations.
I largely agree with you about this post, though I don't mind its being here and I read it with interest despite not living anywhere near Silicon Valley. And I agree that PG gets much more karma than a clone who happened not to be called PG would (which suggests an interesting experiment...), and that that's kinda silly. But don't disparage bits.
"One genuine full-entropy bit of information on an important subject can be very valuable."
Oh, it sure can! For instance, suppose that we're back in 1986. The Microsoft IPO has just taken place. I ask God if Microsoft will ever be a huge success, and God tells me: "yes". There you go, 1 bit of information that would have made me very rich. However, despite the worship, I have doubts that PG has become himself God. Hence, his 1-bit answers are less valuable than God's 1-bit answers ;-)
Assuming for the sake of argument that in 1986 you'd have expected Microsoft not to be a huge success, a "yes" answer to that question would have been considerably more than 1 bit of new information for you. (And therefore, of course, a "no" answer would have been somewhat less than 1 bit of new information.)
Of course I agree that a bit from PG is not as reliable as a bit from God (making the obviously-necessary assumptions about God). But that's not a problem about bits. :-)
Silly. First of all, pg virtually never writes anything pointless. Even if he does, a little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
At any rate, pg is a recursive input to the hn community. Part of this community is pg. Part of this community is you and me, too, but a bigger part is him.
A large part of why I came here in the first place is pg's essays, which span the gamut. I came to think of him as a clear thinker, so I'm going to pay more than usual attention to anything he has to say.
No one (yes, this includes you) can apprehend what's true and make decisions only by reason and observation. We use heuristics, such as giving extra weight to the opinions of other smart people. In the olden days, they called it respect.
All the people I respect this way can unashamedly and unreservedly admit to respecting other people themselves. When it's mutual, it's called friendship. Sometimes it's called love.
In my book there's a difference between respect and adulation. Sure, a high-karma member is likely well-known by the community (especially if he has a track record of solid and insightful comments) and will likely get away with a silly comment once in a while. This is natural.
I just wanted to stir things up a bit and stress that dissent can be good. If HN ever becomes a monoculture due to excessive inbreeding and indoctrination, it will become uninteresting because everyone will think the same. There's richness in variety of ideas / opinions.
The fact that it's ranked so highly just goes to show the amount of ass kissing going on here.