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patio11 Mar 23, 2009 | on: Please quit posting blog-comments | context
I'll take the other point of view, as a) I haven't noticed this become problematic and b) engage in it myself, on occasion. My reasons, which I will write here to avoid having the world caught in a loop: 1) HN community norms require comments to be short and minimally formatted to avoid causing consternation on the thread. (People get upset if you do anything which causes line formatting to change. Big blocks of text which requiring scrolling past are right out.) Not all worthwhile thoughts are pithy and minimalist. 2) Keeping content on HN is perhaps a passable solution for the HN community, but the nature of the evolving discussion plus the fact that Google can't tell which comments are the 1% gem-like insights and which comments are the bottom 20% means that, from the perspective of the 99.999..% of humanity which isn't here, nothing on this site ever happened. 3) Troll might be the wrong D&D monster: lets try a dragon, with a horde of about 100,000 misc. coins, gems, art items, and magical items, and no filing system to speak of. (Oh, except you can call items back if you remembered to make note of their True Name.) Seriously -- permanence of comments leaves something very much to be desired. I know my favorite comment ever is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 . You know how I found that? I Googled for the place offsite where I quoted him, and then followed the link back to the original. 4) A disinterested rational observer would note that over the course of a day the #1 story generally generates about 4,000 pageviews, almost 100% from highly technical ad-blind people, many of whom have noscript installed. Previous experience with that sort of audience leads me to believe that the economic value of an HNlanche is about $1 if that. As a get rich quick scheme it is inferior to Amazon Turk. (Posting articles is only a tool for SEO to the extent that a cynical, picky audience believes you are producing linkworthy content. I think anyone who gets a link here clearly put in enough work to deserve it.) 5) Linking out (and linking in) has salutary effects on preventing intellectual incest, groupthink, and ivory tower-ism. Or, to be blunt: when people talk about HN on their blogs its an opportunity to be exposed to a new community of readers as something other than a group of Erlang advocates with immense superiority complexes. 6) People have often requested a "super-upvote" or some similar method of signaling that a particular comment is significantly more important than the background noise. Posting offsite is a zero-programming-required implementation of a self super-upvote: it says "I thought what I was about to say was so important I went to the trouble of taking this offsite." Given that people do it very freaking seldom, that is a decent first approximation for "Wow, he sure feels strongly that this post adds value". |
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shadowsun7 Sep 27, 2010 | on: What K. Told Me About Starting Up | context
This deserves another mention: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 Is K. right? Maybe. That depends on what context he's thinking about - the kind of startups he's done, probably. I suspect that he's likely making an attempt (a regretful one, I must add) to generalize whatever it is he's learnt, and apply that to every single bloody startup there is out there. Because almost everything he's saying is utter rubbish, applied to web startups. The context isn't right. Google won because of cleaner design? Right. Sure. The iPod was a lousier product? Right. Sure. Microsoft and Windows as an example of how to do things? I'm not sure if that's the right advice he should be giving to a young student-entrepreneur. 'Be like Microsoft' doesn't make much sense when you consider the fact that Microsoft wasn't much like Microsoft when they first started out. Paul Buchheit has an opposing view point (http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is-...) that you should consider - one of the many people who say things that run contrary to K.'s advice, I must add. (See also pg's How to Start a Startup http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html) I suppose it all boils down to: a) what kind of business do you want to build? Because that determines b) who you listen to. If you want to get into K.'s space, that's fine. He's probably right. But if you want to build a Google, or an Apple - heck, even a Microsoft ... well you should consider looking elsewhere. |
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rkaede May 18, 2015 | on: Ask HN: What are some of the best HN comments that you've… | context
"You just have to figure out which part of the animal kingdom you're in" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 |
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neillyons Sep 25, 2020 | on: Work on What Matters | context
Good advice but there is more than one way to succeed. I'll link to the Zoo analogy which explains this further https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 |
This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends.
His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that's because they're all "outliers".
But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that's only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world's animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.
And it's insane to regard the tiger and the parrot and the snail as "outliers". Sure, they're unique, just as snowflakes are unique. But, in fact, there are a lot of different kinds of cats and birds and mollusks, not just these three. Indeed, there are creatures that employ some cat strategies and some bird strategies (lions: be a sharp-eyed predator with claws, but live in communal packs). The only way to argue that tigers and parrots and snails are "outliers" is to ignore the existence of all the other creatures in the world, the ones that bridge the gaps in animal-design space and that ultimately relate every known animal to every other known animal.
So, yes, it's insane to try to follow all the advice on the Internet simultaneously. But that doesn't mean it's insane to listen to 37signals advice, or Godin's advice, or some other company's advice. You just have to figure out which part of the animal kingdom you're in, and seek out the best practices which apply to creatures like you. If you want to be a stalker, you could do worse than to ask the tiger for some advice.
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[1] The ants are gonna win. Hölldobler and Wilson told me so.