HN is a bubble within a bubble. It’s where Kagi rules the search world and Google is all but a dessicated corpse. It’s also a place with a karma system, encouraging only the most bubbleworthy discussion and discouraging any posts from dissidents. I would put a negative weight on sentiments here when averaging them with those elsewhere.
I regularly see "posts from dissidents" here on HN, but I do notice that they are all strongly written, well-argued and often contain citations to support their position. Is there an asymmetry in the way karma is awarded to "bubble" and "non-bubble" positions? Probably, but that doesn't mean non-bubble never makes it.
Could it be that karma rewards different things than you believe?
So it takes strong writing, good arguments, and citations for a dissident to have any hope of being seen. Since that doesn’t describe every upvoted HN comment, what are you really saying here?
that expecting to see the full range of human opinion on any even vaguely controversial topic in a single context is foolish, and that i'm tired of people complaining about "dissidents" not showing up on HN when they clearly do (even if they are (surprise!) in a minority of top-ranked comments.
ps. I never downvote on HN unless someone has actually made a grievous factual error or is being personally abusive.
Not saying you are wrong, but let's not dismiss the need for good argumentation when you say something out of the norm. Dissidence with arguments does a great service to everyone involved.
Having said that, people here do downvote based on opinion allignment, which is very hurtful. I've seen perfectly legit comments (with sources) that are out of the norm being downvoted because people just don"t agree with them
if you turn showdead on in your profile, you'll see a lot of absolute crap that should be dead. But I've also started to notice more and more comments that don't deserve to be flagged dead. Just comments against the hivemind, which sucks. I asked dang if he'd be willing to give an endpoint that just surfaces dead items but he refused.
HN is useful for discussion on cutting edge stuff. It's a great place to overhear conversations about what's important to tech people. I've learned a lot from this community. But you're right -- certain insular, minority opinions seem to get unusual airtime here. They make the discussions unbalanced.
I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments. If enough users here used it, it would reverse these trends and force dissenting opinions to be taken seriously. This is not reddit, where the average greyed out comment is some nazi stuff. Here, most greyed out comments are just feather rustlers doing their duty. We are lucky to have them, else we surround ourselves with sycophants and yes-people.
Arguably it also led to a complete lack of change, with the civil machinery simply being renamed and now serving a different master. The military and police now work for those in power, not the people. An autocracy pretending to be a democracy.
True, happens in all other places where they achieved 'independence' from their colonial masters. Animal Farm ( by George Orwell) is a script that rulers use to govern the peasants successfully.
It’s the other way around. Working at Google (or any other FAANG) for a time period past your personal “bullshit limit” will ensure you will never do anything ambitious with your life ever again.
ChatGPT is also frequently incorrect. It becomes obvious in some cases, particularly in areas you are an expert in.
Reminds me of a PG essay about a "Dunning-Kruger pass". [0]
When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
To some extent we have already developed some filtering against Reddit et al to protect our bayesian priors, but many who lack those filters could suffer greatly from encountering the internet.
Isn’t it obvious? Look around. Hackers have been stamped out even on hacker news. Now it’s all FAANG lifers and MBA or VC types trying their hand at grifting. Nothing good comes of that. Whoever is making the next thing “for real” just gets acquired and shut down.
Moreover, get out of your echo chamber and you’ll see that for a majority of humanity Google is the internet. You have to supplant the utility, not just the brand. Most businesses cannot handle the latter let alone the former. If you want something to replace Google, you have to think about replacing the internet itself. But not many are that bold.
> What is the alternative, though? This is an honest question, I really want to know: How would the "this is horrible, how can you deign to work that way?" crowd coordinate thousands of people on a project to create something that is bigger than what 5–20 people can create?
Nobody needs to be co-ordinating thousands of people. 5–20 people can create Instagram. The entire problem in these companies is that leadership is so out of touch they cannot differentiate between a checklist and a product, and empire-building is their proxy for value. The solution is to change the leadership, but it is usually too late in large orgs (the new leadership has to be brought in somehow from somewhere, and that will be done the same way the current leadership happened).
So the real solution is for those who care to go elsewhere, out-compete, and out-succeed. Then quit after acquisition, if such a thing happens.
"Just never develop software in a medium or large company" is a take, I'll give you that. I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of software developed is vastly more productive than Instagram, and tied to real world processes that need coordination. Your 5 people team will do fuck all to program the control software for a crane arm activator, because they'll never get even close, and if they were actually given access, you would have to coordinate with hardware people and actual engineers (the ones with detailed plans and calculations before building anything, I mean, not us software "engineers"), you would have to figure out what the construction companies using it actually need from your software. A similar story could be told for most any area of software development - it generally is tied to other areas, and unicorn examples of how wonderfully easy the world is if you develop a time wasting app for phones is not applicable to the majority of us.
I totally agree with you last point. Not the least for the egoistical reason of higher chance of better products for me, that way :)
