How Baby Boomers Broke America - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/5280446/baby-boomer-generation-america-steve-brill/ <comment><USER2> My view:

1\. Remove the popular election of senators, replaced with the original case of each state legislature appointing its own 2 senators. Decentralizes the money aspect, makes it more likely that senators will focus on what benefits their state.

2\. Federal Reserve is a big problem - there is no reason for US Dollars to have interest rates, any interest rates, attached to them. Leave off all the other theories etc. concerning the role of the Federal Reserve (which is a weird non-government agency that even Congress has limited oversight over). Just, don't attach interest to each dollar issued.

How much interest would $100 issued by the Fed 100 years ago in 1918, have thrown off in the last century?

Even Aristotle spoke against interest on money...

<comment><USER3> In the US since 1980 neoliberals broke the banking system in the US in the name of 'efficiency'. Efficiency to a neoliberal means efficiently being able to extract rents.

So before 1980 if you graphed the US banking system you would see a tree structure. With the Fed on the top, leading to the regional reserve banks, the member banks. Then down to local banks. This meant that the flow of bank capital was more or less evenly distributed country wide.

What happened was the banking system was flattened by removing limits on regional competition. Before 1980 it was illegal for banks to loan money outside their region. Once those restrictions were removed that lead to wildly uneven banking capital distribution. And then during the 2008 shadow banking crisis the Feds removed the wall separating investment banks from retail banks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess the world feels different to people in different places.

I'm a young Boomer / Old Gen Xer, and to me things are pretty good right now. Jobs are available, 401k balances are good, etc. My own kids are in college or headed to college, and the same is true for most of my friends (across the economic spectrum).

I read about how disastrous things seem to this author, but I haven't seen it. My business travels have taken me to both coasts and I live in the middle, I don't see the widespread misery described. I see opportunity for all stripes of people being offered and taken.

To be sure, I do think life will be tougher for our kids. The same economic opportunities I had have changed, but there seem to be new ones springing up.

I think it's just life going on. Good luck to next generations....

<comment><USER5> Your experience is very anecdotal as is what I'm about to share.

For comparisons, we always need a reference point. I believe your reference point is where you currently reside in America. And the misery described in the article may not be as bad as you think given that as your reference.

I probably don't travel within the U.S. as much as you do, but I've traveled to a lot of places, mostly large coastal cities, so I don't know what it's like for those in more rural and less developed parts of America, like the South. However, I've traveled abroad a little bit or have known people that have been to some very different places: Japan, China, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, Finland, Argentina, Brazil, etc. If you've been to San Francisco recently, our transportation infrastructure is functional, but old, dirty, and not very timely at all. Some of the stations are filled with homeless and the mentally-ill alike. We don't have enough public restrooms, so they defecate on the streets. I don't know how long it takes to repair roads in your town, but road projects here take a very long time to complete and seem to be done only during daytime hours which is the least convenient for commuters. Compare this to Japan where the streets are clean, people don't walk and people receive apologies for a train that departs early by seconds: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42009839](http://www.bbc.com/news/world- asia-42009839).

I bring all this up, because I feel like we only compare ourselves to ourselves. We seem to have this idea that America is still the best at most of the things that we do. I feel like American ingenuity is lost. What is America producing that we and the rest of the world want? Some of our software that can only exist because we have some great infrastructure in place that allow people to kickstart a business easily and perhaps our entertainment, but I don't see much else.

I'm an Asian-American in my 30s, born and bred in San Francisco. I actually grew up in the inner-city. What that entails is a run-down and under-funded school system made up of all minorities with the exceptions being a few teachers that dared step foot in an urban school in an undesirable part of town.

Have you ever asked yourself or took a look at how the friends in your circle came to be? I ask this only because our social circles are cultivated. We all make choices along the way that shape those that we are surrounded by either by choice of school, employment, geography, or other things. I always say to people when we watch sports, "we're watching the same game, but we can come away with completely different interpretations of what transpired or what is actually happening".

Major cities like San Francisco and New York are made up of transplants. I do software in San Francisco. It's funny when people tell me that San Francisco is "diverse" or when they ask, "where are all the SF natives?". It may be diverse because you see a lot of people of different colors, but in San Francisco, most people of the same color hang out with those that share their skin color. That alone could be telling of how highly cultivated our social circles are. Transplants working in tech in San Francisco are usually of a few backgrounds: white or Asian and highly educated. It is devoid of any significant representation from Hispanic/Latino-Americans or Black/African- Americans and I should also mention other Asian-Americans from backgrounds not Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, like Laotian, Vietnamese, Cambodian. People hardly ever ask me why, but being somebody that went to school with all of the above minorities, I have a fairly good idea, as some of them are formerly friends of mine that whose lives I can peer into on social media. I'm able to infer what their lives are like based on the questions they ask and the things that they think or have discussions about. I can also infer what their socio- economic status is based on these things. What I know, think, and care about compared to them are completely different. I was fortunate enough to attend one of the top universities in the nation. We lead completely different lives and my income is probably several multiples of theirs. That said, despite being in one of the wealthiest nations, we are a country that sees the least economic mobility between generations, save for a few. I introspect my life from time to time and I can glean from my own observations that my social circle is made up of more and more successful people. Some would call it diverse on the basis of ethnic background/color of someone's skin, but if the basis was upbringing and environment, it's probably not very diverse.

While I'm Asian-American and on the outside I may look like my fellow Asian- Americans in tech, very few people understand that I know many Asian-Americans that have dropped out of school and working dead-end jobs with no ladder. I consider myself very lucky and fortunate.

When you or I travel, we don't visit areas of despair or less desirable parts of town do we? I know I don't, so do we really get the complete picture?</comment></comment>


Hacker News is depressing - <AUTHOR> http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/may/hackerNewsIsDepressing <comment><USER2> I do not read the comments on HN of the pieces I write.

I used to. I used to love hearing really smart people help out with whatever was puzzling me. Perhaps I can get back to that.

But damn, this is a negative bunch. Whatever topic, whatever opinion you have, it's somebody's hot-button issue and somebody else doesn't understand what the fuck you are saying. Sometimes this is the same person. Most times this is dozens of people.

At MicroConf a few of us were talking about the kind of junk traffic that HN sends any more. "It's like having a bunch of angry nerds drive by in a bus throwing food at you" one person ventured. Another had a better analogy: "It's like having a busload of grumpy senior citizens show up at your store, picking through stuff, complaining about the prices, going on about irrelevant things, and generally being ornery, obnoxious and trashing everything that you've done."

This is not a problem of individuals. HNers are some of the best folks in the world. This is simply a problem of aggregating tens of thousands of content consumers in one spot and trying to have a single conversation. I think HN has scaled as far out as it's going to.

<comment><USER3> _> This is simply a problem of aggregating tens of thousands of content consumers in one spot and trying to have a single conversation._

If I may offer a counter point. One of the complaints about users on HN is how they treat Show HNs. The worst thing is arguably working on something and getting totally ignored. The second worst thing is probably getting verbal abuse for your project, from people you respect, no less.

When this happened to me (being ignored that is), I decided to try another community for feedback. It was 4chan/g. Now 4chan has the reputation of being somewhat of a sewer, but my experience was as different as night and day. People were interested, and above all: friendly and constructive.

So why am I not hanging out in /g then? I believe that HN has a higher ratio of users who are "my kind of people", commenters who I feel I have a connection with. But as it is, this comes at a price, because HN can be a less civil place. I don't this is written in stone, however, we can and should work on improving this dynamic.

<comment><USER2> What concerns me is that _the appearance of knowing what the hell you are talking about and actually knowing what the hell you are talking about is not that different_

An example: many times I offer startup advice. Now, if you read my profile, you'll realize that all I can do is feebly try to repeat what I've read. I'm nowhere near an expert. But sometimes I feel that the things that I've read could be helpful to others. So I make what appears to be a knowledgeable comment in the spirit of trying to help. Yes, it sounds a bit cold, analytical, but it has that air of something that might be useful.

We got hundreds of comments like this, on any topic you'd like. Yes, we also have some world-quality researchers that come here and help out. But to the reader, it all looks the same.

We easily confuse the social nature of appearing to be critical and helpful -- let's be honest, looking smart to our peers -- with the actual value we might be providing.

HN is a place to go to read really biting comments that appear to dissect things into their core elements. But many times it's just wankers making easy criticisms from a Monday-morning quarterback perspective.

I love the open forum, and I love the personalities and people here, but as you grow, social posturing gets way more traction than actually providing value, _even though both types of comments are indistinguishable from each other_. That's just a function of crowds.

<comment><USER4> That's probably a really important insight

We do get crap articles being posted (there is less decent meat on HN)

But we want the comments to be insightful and relevant. Which basically means rewarding those who have domain insight / experience. Which is hard.

FOr example, if there is a thread on web security and cookies, I would like to see tptacek's comments near the top so I can see them

But how to automate that? Its feasible I suspect but not easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find this post by Dave Winer a bit hypocritical? The reason he is writing about Hacker News being depressing is because of the comments against his article on Yahoo acquisitions and Marissa Mayer. As he says, he wrote it in 15 mins and I'd probably write something similar - but what he doesn't mention is how depressing that post must have been if Marissa were to read it. He makes a point about abuse being bad - but did he stop to consider that he wasn't being exactly friendly in his post about Marissa? He was publicly discussing a fairly "closed door" meeting he had and extrapolating that into a rant.

Basically, if you're going to publicly throw stones, I feel it's fairly expected that someone is going to be throwing stones back your way. There is nothing perfect about Hacker News - but I don't think that Dave Winer is perfect either. Blocking off content is not the solution, however, and I'm not sure what the solution really is. Sticking your head in the sand, perhaps? At any rate, if there is a solution, I'm sure pg and YC will work something out.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a top-voted dissenting opinion on Dave's piece yesterday, I find myself compelled to chime in.

> I honestly don't care what the HN trolls, and the people who upvote them, > supposedly "think" about me.

If that's true, why 750 words on the subject?

The issue I take with Dave Winer is that he seems to feel as though his accomplishments or contributions somehow elevate his words beyond criticism.

I will say again what I said yesterday – his post "about" Marissa Mayer was something I can only characterize as whiney. We can call it other things if that's less offensive: petulant, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, perhaps. But the sense of entitlement to the respect and admiration of other people was something that dripped off of the post, and then off of his comments, and is a recurring theme, to my eye, of the man's writing.

His poor rhetorical choices – name-dropping, specifically – overshadowed his point. That's the gamble you make when writing headline-driven link bait.

But guess what? _Fuck me_ , because I'm just some guy on the internet. But guess what else? So is Dave.

Participating in a technology doesn't afford a permanent apotheosis to all of one's self and works. Your words must still carry their own water. There's effective persuasion and then there's ineffective persuasion. Those outcomes vary depending on the audience.

Now we all have a choice: we can tightly corral our words. We can be selective in our audience, we can dole out our rhetoric with caution and precision.

Or we can blast that shit out to the whole of the world.

Now, Dave is quite excited to tell us how he helped make such a feat possible. And the consequence of his great work is we all get to talk about it. And sometimes we're not going to agree.

Sometimes we're not going to worship.

And that's life.

I take the point very well that HN comments can be pretty toxic. But a lot of the dissent around what gets posted from Dave Winer seems pretty legit. Even PG has weighed in on his poor attitude:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644147>

<comment><USER7> I'm another guy on the internet, and I just want to tell you, you don't have to be mean to people on the internet. You don't have to write nice things to everybody, but mean things just suck. Writing mean things just makes the world more mean. I'd rather not read mean things, and I'm sure you'd rather not write mean things. There's too little time in life for that.

How do you think Dave's going to take this post? He writes that HN is full of people just attacking him. > The issue I take with Dave Winer is that he seems to feel as though his accomplishments or contributions somehow elevate his words beyond criticism. Bam, right in the nuts. Fuck you, and fuck your accomplishments.

I'm sorry if my post sounds mean, I really want you to have the happiest possible life and a great time here. But if his post is terrible, you don't have to pollute your head with it and pollute my head by writing mean things about it.

I don't come here to read wishy washy "great job dude!" posts, but I don't come here to gossip about how people think they've got a "permanent apotheosis" or whatever. He's just a dude on the internet, you're just a dude on the internet. Be nice to each other. Life is too short to do otherwise.

Best of luck!

<comment><USER6> Do you think he was nice to Marissa Mayer in his post?

<comment><USER8> Do you think that absolves you from being nice to him?

<comment><USER6> Absolutely. Live by the sword, etc. And I feel the same applies to me. I heard many candid responses. Didn't agree with all of them. Learned from some.

Which is the way it's supposed to work.

<comment><USER8> Another person's transgressions doesn't absolve you from being civil in response. That's what civilization _means_.

It's not always easy, but it's an ideal we should hold ourselves to if we want our community to be a place worth spending time.

<comment><USER9> What transgressions?

It was just a story!

You guys are amazing to me, how you can inflate something as simple as a story into this monumental thing.

I wrote the piece in 15 minutes. You're spending 48 hours debating every nuance of something that means nothing.

Totally bizarre.

<comment><USER8> Sorry Dave, this is bigger than just you :)

I care about being a part of a community that doesn't let the escalation of (real and perceived) slights debase the overall conversation. That's what _I'm_ talking about. You spent 15 minutes on a story, I've spent the last few years trying to be a constructive part of this community.

<comment><USER9> Okay that's cool. It's just that you said some things about me that are wrong. You seem like a nice person. Just know that I'm not who you think I am.

I get this all the time. When people hear how I talk they're suprised because it's not the voice they hear when they read my writing. But I write just the way I talk. Funny how that is. ;-)

<comment><USER8> I _am_ a nice person, and I didn't actually say anything negative about you. I meant "transgressions" in a purely hypothetical way. Trying to make the point that now matter how pompous some blogger is, we should all be civil to each other here.

Don't mind me, I am just holding back the tide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure what he's proposing. If he means let site owners specify that people not be able to submit their sites to HN, I've actually daydreamed occasionally about doing that myself for paulgraham.com. But it might not work in practice, because determined submitters would just mirror the text elsewhere and submit that.

He's right though that Twitter has a big advantage in that it's easy to ignore jerks. It might be a good idea to introduce some form of following or blocking here.

<comment><USER11> Following, perhaps, but not blocking.

One of the nice things that HN affords is that it doesn't really support filter bubbles--at least until mods or the community downvotes you to oblivion. Thus, there's a good chance that people at least get exposed to ideas they might otherwise ignore.

Hell, I can think of several posts where I've strongly disagreed with somebody else, only to be in jovial agreement or discussion a few days later. I'm not sure that a blocking mechanism is really needed; if people are being deliberate and abusive trolls, we have ways of dealing with that, right?

<comment><USER12> You don't block the people you disagree with. You block the jerks, the obvious trolls, the negative shit aka noise.

<comment><USER13> I never use such features unless it is really trolling, in which case I expect the flagging system to solve the problem or anti-spam techniques. I don't really like I need protection from people's thoughts, not saying people who want such features do but it's not my thing.

<comment><USER11> Exactly--the flagging feature is there to deal with real trolls.

Let's be honest--usually, blocking (in a community which has other ways of dealing with abusive users) is just a way of helping people be intellectually lazy and filtery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm very sorry it has come this far.

It's easy to forget we have a tendency to make remarks about people online that we would never bring up in a personal conversation. I'm not excluding myself here, I too feel I'm sometimes harsher online than offline - and it sadly also happened in the Dave Winer thread yesterday. People can come across in a certain way through their writing that we would never attribute to them if we met them face to face - yet that's all we have to go on in most cases.

Keeping these difficulties in mind that are inherent to all online communities, I think this article is a damning statement about our discussion style here specifically. It's important to acknowledge that _most_ commenters on HN do not behave that way, but some do and they are very loud. To make matters worse, "good" people sometimes overshoot their target because something in a news item or an article pushes their buttons, leading to a disproportionate response.

All in all I think HN has a lot to offer. I said it before, but it bears repeating: I come here to have insightful discussions with clever people who sometimes disagree with me. HN is the only community that does this for me, because I feel there are many like-minded hackers present who have a lot of value to contribute through both their work and their opinions.

At the same time I believe we should take a long hard look at these other instances where we're simply not at our best. Again, this includes myself specifically.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"It's important to acknowledge that most commenters on HN do not behave that way, but some do and they are very loud."_

I think part of this is just the dynamics of community-moderated comments. In my experience, the way to get upvotes in _any_ such forum (not just HN) is to express an opinion in the strongest terms you possibly can. "X is dead" gets upvotes. "X has some challenges to overcome, and it might" doesn't. People like and respond to simple, clear arguments that don't admit weakness or uncertainty.

This dynamic then feeds on itself, as the people who are the best at forcefully stating their opinions become top commenters, crowding out more cautious voices and providing a bad role model that the next generation of would-be top commenters follows.

How do you fix this? It's poisoned so many great communities I've belonged to, so I wish I knew. But I don't.

EDIT: I have seen one mechanism that helps mitigate this: hide the users' actual karma scores.

Karma is a scoring mechanism. That turns forums that use it into a video game (of the type very well parodied by <http://www.forumwarz.com/about>). Participants compete with each other to see who can get the highest score. Hiding the actual numbers from users takes some of the fun out of this, which cuts down on trolling.

Slashdot used to show your exact karma score, and they had these exact same problems. Eventually they switched to just a text label ("Excellent", say, for high-karma users) that indicated your general karmic position, and the comments got a lot better very fast. Nobody's going to put as much time in to go from "Excellent" to "Excellent" as they might to go from, say, 2,500 to 5,000.

<comment><USER14> You fix it with heavy-handed moderation that actively punishes curtly written content.

<comment><USER15> This is true. It works very well for reddit.com/r/AskHistorians. This is, by far, one of the highest-quality sub-reddits on the site, and it's because of active, heavy-handed moderation that enforces a strict rule set. (e.g. no speculation)

<comment><USER16> Same for Metafilter (though the rule set is much less strict).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dave is the victim?

"They assumed that I was being "egotistical" for thinking that Google ever cared what I thought, and arrogant that I think they should care what I think now."

As this might be about me, as I wrote "No, it's typical for your ego."

Several years ago I've sent Dave mails with ideas, which one of them he posted without attribution or credit to his blog. With some mistakes I've made included. In an ongoing mail discussion he credited himself, including the mistakes.

About personal attacks:

The way he handled Marissa on his blog:

"All I remember of it was there came a point in the conversation when Mayer had had enough. She just got up and left. I think the people remaining in the conference room were a little embarassed."

He has no problem making people look bad, especially if it helps getting attention. Getting push back he then follows up presenting himself as the victim. He has also no problem calling other peoples assholes

"Now I think there's a solution to letting the assholes control the conversation..."

in a piece about discussion culture.

Google for "Dave Winer" returns a lot of stories that are similar. Before accepting Daves view on this, I wish people would do some research into Dave Winer.

<comment><USER18> How he behaves elsewhere is not relevant to people here making direct personal insults.

<comment><USER17> I thought I'd respond to personal accusations.

<comment><USER18> Respond to them how you like if you're doing it there. But here? People prefer better conversation.

<comment><USER17> We disagree that Daves established behavior in different situations is relevant to the discussion on the submission here. I think this is relevant to his comments about HN, you're not.

Attacking people, getting push back, getting personal and portraying himself as a victim is a pattern that can be found over the last decade. Talking about this pattern is relevant when we discuss the behavior of HN posters here. Especially if Dave provokes this behavior in others with the goal of getting attention to himself. Then people agreeing on HN behavior in the comment of the second submission just play according to the book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I respect Dave but he has to realize, experienced as he is at blogging, that...this is the Internet, where no one knows you're a dog...or even an Internet pioneer. And he's done his fair share of rush-to-judgment posting...my first knowledge of him was during the whole Suggested Users List spat, in which he accused organizations, such as the NYT, of participating in payola: [http://scripting.com/stories/2009/03/12/whyItsTimeToBreakOut...](http://scripting.com/stories/2009/03/12/whyItsTimeToBreakOutOfTwit.html)

The Internet is no different or less immune to abusive discussion than every other form of human communication...but at least it's one in which it's possible for any participant, big or small, to improve the discussion, and so keeping scripting.com (assuming that he considers his writing there to be overall helpful) off of HN would be a disservice.

<comment><USER18> > this is the Internet,

The Internet is a big place. If you want YouTube comments ("Lol yuo dikk yo mama haet you die of cancer!!1!" you can go to youtube.

> at least it's one in which it's possible for any participant, big or small, > to improve the discussion

Yes. Let's keep working at making HN better.

Comments like this (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5731152>) should be vigorously downvoted.

<comment><USER20> In the same vain, why do we have random blog posts on hn. If you wanna blog, take it to a blog. If you wanna show off some tech or code, bring it to hn.

EDIT: I'm not just talking about this specific post, I don't really care when linus yells at somebody in a mailing list etc. If it's some opinion piece or fluff piece I just don't really get why it's here.

<comment><USER21> > If it's some opinion piece or fluff piece I just don't really get why it's > here.

Perhaps because a subset of people find it interesting/enforces their opinions/serves as ammunation against what they dislike/etc etc ..

It might be hard to prevent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _So I have a suggestion for Paul Graham, the guy who runs Hacker News. Give sites the option of blocking links from Hacker News._

That could certainly be implemented (either on Hacker News, or by the site owner doing a redirect to a permanent 404 based on the referrer).

But that seems like a loss. It's a loss to HN if links to scripting.com were forbidden. Also, within the thread that he is talking about there was a great deal of meta-discussion about the way in which HN was reading the article and reacting to its author.

<comment><USER23> Does it matter whether it's a loss to HN? When people/groups abuse their privileges, taking those privileges away is not a bad thing. Maybe having a few good sites block HN would cause commenters to think more carefully before posting vitriol, or upvoting it. I missed the thread the first time around, but I looked it up, and it's pretty disappointing. Despite there being lots of top-level comments about the actual content of the blog post, the highest top- level comment is just a mean personal attack. I see it on a lot of other HN posts too, and I don't get it. How does it contribute anything to say that this or that topic isn't worth talking about and, by the way, the author smells and he has a funny name?

<comment><USER24> Linking is not a privilege. If you put your stuff out on the internet you can't choose who gets to discuss it.

I don't approve of HN's conduct at all, it's one of the things I detest about internet communities, and HN, though the best of them, is no exception. But asking HN to change because someone was offended by the most predictable behavior is silly.

<comment><USER23> As jgrahamc mentioned, you can choose to block incoming traffic with HN as the referrer (although this is not foolproof for a number of reasons); you do not have the right to download other people's content without restriction. Also, you do not have the right to have your discussion hosted on HN; if pg chose to, he would be well within his own rights to implement a feature like this.

<comment><USER24> > Also, you do not have the right to have your discussion hosted on HN; if pg > chose to, he would be well within his own rights to implement a feature like > this.

I agree; I wasn't taking a stance on whether or not HN should do so. I was simply pointing out the irony of a blogger protesting about being linked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is tricky.

On one hand, Hacker News, despite being one of the best of its kind, is a programming community, and programming communities (or similarly populated communities: online gaming, etc.) are possibly the most overwhelmingly negative and vitriolic I find online. (Huge exception: StackExchange.) I find it perplexing that the business & finance communities I visit are consistently more civil and constructive. Remember the developer who got flamed for creating (not promoting or arguing the superiority of, merely posting on GitHub) an sed/awk replacement? Our community is an overwhelmingly mean one at times.

(You can dress it up as engineers/developers/hackers being more honest, more blunt, less MBA-y, whatever. It's unpleasant and hurts people's feelings.)

On the other hand, in the midst of all the ad hominem of yesterday's discussion (you can find it here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455>) there was a lot of valid commentary which Dave Winer (whom, for the record, I have never talked to nor do I know his accomplishments) seemed to ignore. The reasonable extrapolation from _My One Talk with Marissa Mayer_ was that Winer felt she was an individual whom did not respect developers' viewpoints or a more 'balanced' view of the web. Specifically, he says:

 _All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition._

And I think it's entirely valid to say that, hey, isn't it a massive logical leap to get here from the anecdote of the 'BlogThis!" button?

Winer seems to be asking Hacker News to be polite, which I think is important: but I think it's better that Hacker News is _good_ , and along the way it seems obvious that being polite is better than not being impolite.

<comment><USER26> Would you mind telling me what business and finance communities you've found interesting?

<comment><USER27> I'm not parent, but I think /r/business and /r/finance on Reddit are quite interesting. They're relatively low-trafficked subreddits that can still maintain centrist (balanced) and informative discussions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection.

On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have _loved_ for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible.

On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a _the biggest problem we have._ Programmer-types are just not as supportive/empathetic as nearly everyone else I know. And I'm not talking about criticism, I'm talking about needless mean, shitty behavior that gets repeated and defended all too often. When the Linus/"Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!"[2] was posted to HN every single top comment was defending Linus' behavior.

Linus' mission and position do not excuse his language. In defending users, he's still attacking a person.

It upsets the hell out of me, and I think its a big part of why many women (and I'm sure men) prefer not to engage in programming communities. Even on _StackOverflow_ I see people being horrible to confused newcomers, instead of steering them in the right direction.

I think rooting out this kind of shitty behavior is the most important thing we can do to advance programming communities and make others feel welcome. By miles. _Especially_ if we want to alleviate gender and general newcomer disparities.

This article reminds me of one from 117 days ago, "What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project".[3]

<comment>~~

[1] There were some remarks in the article that just left me confused, such as:

> They said I thought JavaScript was a bad language. How funny, because I'm > writing almost all my code these days in JavaScript. They say I'm old and > out of date. Funny. They're the ones who are out of date! :-)

???

<comment>~~

[2] <https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75>

Some excerpts:

> Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

> It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And > you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?

> If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We > never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?

> Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage > and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously.

If you talked to your spouse like that it would be called abuse.

I was horrified by the HN reactions. You can read some of them here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962912>

<comment>~~

[3] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767>

<comment><USER29> >the meanness of programming communities is a the biggest problem we have

Or maybe it's our biggest asset. In a world filled with bullshit (how many people you think _really_ empathize with you - vs. just going through the motions?), it's refreshing to have a little corner where they honestly tell you why your ideas suck and your background is deficient. It kind of comes with the profession, yes. Only a relentlessly critical kind of person can effectively hunt down bugs and deal with dozens of other frustrating problems everyday.

<comment><USER30> There is no fundamental incompatibility between being honest and being respectful and understanding.

You can tell someone "you suck, go back to the corner of the Internet you came from, I don't have time for this", or you can tell them "your skills don't seem to be quite at the level where we can accept your contributions; in particular, you don't understand X, Y, and Z very well and it shows in your code. I'm short on time, but if someone else has time to explain why that would be great."

The difference is almost immeasurable between those two interactions, even though they are saying the same thing.

I've made this point before regarding derision, which I think is the true issue. I'll quote myself, since I've already written the thing[1]:

"Derision is not curtness. It is not impatience. It is explicit, intentional putting-down of someone because they aren't as good at something as you are or think they should be. And it is a poison. Unfortunately, if you take it frequently enough, it becomes habit. It becomes second nature. And you stop noticing it's poisonous. And so, unfortunately, it is an oft-enjoyed poison in intellectual circles. It doesn't help anything. It doesn't help you understand the world or other people. It doesn't really save you that much time. It simply makes you feel better about yourself."

[1] - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4921579>

<comment><USER31> I understand that this might be specific to me, but I'd actually rather have someone tell me:

"You're useless. For god's sake stop contributing until you get your sh _t together"

rather than:

"your skills don't seem to be quite at the level where we can accept your contributions; in particular, you don't understand X, Y, and Z very well and it shows in your code. I'm short on time, but if someone else has time to explain why that would be great."

I don't have a good explanation why that is. Maybe it's because I feel some condescension in the second while the first one is just plain raw "I don't have time to deal with your sh_t. You're an adult: fix it and come back later".

<comment><USER32> The more polite response gives at least some shred of a foothold on which the recipient can find out how to better themselves. "Fix your shit" does't explain how your shit is lacking, or the major things you don't understand.

e.g., if I were to post some patch that used bubble sort, one could easily say " _This is total crap. Don't come back until you fix your shit_ ". If I were a noob, that wouldn't help me contribute better. If one were to rather say something like, "This is very inefficient," and then mention something about O notation or efficient sorting, and point out that this is a performance- critical section of the code, I might be more likely to actually take the time to learn enough to be able to fix it.

Consider also the effect on newer programmers. They start, they commit crap, you tell them to die in a fire. They get better, and years later decide that they're not going to bother fixing bugs in your project because "that guy's a jerk". Constructive criticism, or at the very least politeness, helps prevent poisoning the well of talent that is interested in working with you.

<comment><USER33> Programming, more so than many other fields, has a strong tradition of self- improvement and education. Tell any "noob" that they are an idiot for using bubble sort and they should have more than enough resources and know-how to figure out why they are wrong and correct it themselves. (Either they independently invented it themselves, in which case they are at least moderately clever and you just told them the name of what they created (what they should google), or they googled it in the first place so they should be able to google it again).

Is it best, in a controlled environment with both low signal and noise, to take your time and explain things in detail in a "civil" manner? Sure. That works great in (small) classrooms for example. In a public kernel dev mailing lists though? No, a fuck off should suffice. If the recipient of the fuck off wants more, they can seek it in a more appropriate place.

IRC is somewhere in the middle; usually civility or ignoring the person works best. This is particularly true since most IRC channels are fairly explicitly there for people who want to give or receive advice. I've only told someone who was seeking help from me on IRC to fuck off once, and that is when he demanded I talk with him on skype instead of IRC, and pressed the issue.

Edit: I suppose I shouldn't expect a civil response if I explain in a civil manner why I don't think civility is always necessary. Hoisted by my own petard perhaps?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Yikes, pg is not gonna be happy.

Honestly I feel like the only option is to just stop accepting new members at a certain point, because above a certain tolerance it stops being a community and becomes a city. CIP: I'm in a rural town for a couple days and everytime I walk outside everyone I pass says "Hi" or "Good Afternoon," the first time that happened I was kinda surprised I tried to figure out if I knew that person from somewhere, because where I come from (Chicago) strangers on the street ignore you, they don't wish you a good day and smile...

There's the whole "you can't know more than 150 people" study [1]. Which I think is very apt here, obviously we have to scale that idea (as anything less than like 5000 people means it doesn't exist when it comes to the web) but it might be a good idea to stop accepting new members or cut the community into chunks, if you wanna keep things from getting worse...

Finally, I've begun to really like OSC's version of the internet as presented in Ender's Game, at least when it comes to having real discussions.

[1]<http://bit.ly/10iAy6P>

<comment><USER35> > Honestly I feel like the only option is to just stop accepting new members > at a certain point

Huh? So what's the cut off date then? I noticed your account was only created 86 days ago.

Making a forum an invite-only clubhouse doesn't improve discussion.

<comment><USER8> _Making a forum an invite-only clubhouse doesn't improve discussion_

It might, but at what cost?

<comment><USER35> You'd get no users, content or discussion. Just look at lobste.rs

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> _> They say I'm old and out of date. Funny. They're the ones who are out of date! :-)_

The kind of people I seek out on line are people who understand the truth as something separate from them, which comes from a diverse and complicated objective reality. The kind of people I abhor are those whose personal power derive from punishment/reward of those around them in order to climb the social ladder.

There are more and more of the 2nd kind here on HN. There is more short sightedness, and _more ageism_. There is far less broad technical knowledge, and the level of Computer Science knowledge seems to have fallen dramatically. There are people who casually mix up "collide" with "collude" and will downvote you for pointing that out.

HN has gotten bigger. As usual, it's gotten stupider as a side effect.

</comment><comment><USER37> The site seems to be struggling with the traffic spike. Here is the google cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/may/hackerNewsIsDepressing)

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't know about depressing but the amount of drama on HN seems on the rise lately and I don't find it all that entertaining or interesting. I guess this old tune is played out but, I remember a time when things where better.

<comment><USER39> "the amount of drama on HN"

Is it homogenous and if not, is it still a problem?

My very quick glance at the situation looks like someone's not too happy about getting savaged because he positions himself as a lightning rod in the past and was writing about a fluffy social topic relating to a fluffy social issue in a fluffy social arena. The whole steaming pile does not sound like HN-type material. OK, I don't particularly care.

What I do care is the air is kept clean for a real "hacker" "news" technical article like "Nimrod 0.9.2 released". I don't even use Nimrod and I found it an interesting article and discussion. A tad flamey around the unicode spat, but unicode is a magnet for that kind of thing and even the tiny little flame (like a birthday candle) was vaguely technical and interesting so its at least semi-excusable. Overall a fine quality article, perhaps because all the "yer mom" comments fresh from 4chan were magnetically attracted to fluffy unicorn social hour over there, keeping them away from the "real" articles.

There are numerous other "hacker news" articles I could have used as an example of genuine hacker news. But fluffy unicorn social hour decoy articles are fairly rare. So we're in no danger of being overrun.

The TLDR being that periodic (intentional?) seeding of HN with drama, kept carefully firewalled away from the real articles, keeps the air clean.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, I certainly don't think all hope is lost there is plenty of good stuff still showing up on HN which is why I still come here but, there is a somewhat noticeable trend towards the dramatic happening lately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> _I subscribe to the Hacker News feed, which does not include comments. It's very useful stuff. So the links themselves are good._

To each his own: My HN reading favors comments over links by at least an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER41> I'm pretty sure I end up getting more information overall out of the comments, but if you weigh it based on uninformed vitriol versus useful content, using an article-only feed wins out pretty easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not sure if it's any consolation, but some people were downvoting personal insults, and in the few minutes I spent reading the thread some people were calling out personal insults as a bad thing, and asking people not to do it.

More people need to downvote direct personal insults.

The author is right that it's a problem.

<comment><USER42> I don't have a downvote button, probably because I'm new and I don't have enough karma. I wanted more than once to downvote insulting comments, but alas, I cannot.

I can upvote, however, meaning that I have both the ability to insult in comments and upvote insults that agree with whatever I want to insult at the time. That seems like a recipe for abuse if/when the userbase increases unexpectedly by a large magnitude, as older users wouldn't have the numbers for cutting down this behavior.

But other than closing down registrations and sending new applicants to "Hacker News 2", I don't know how to fix this.

<comment><USER43> The simple solution would be to weight votes (upvotes and downvotes) by a function of karma, so that the upvotes from lower-karma new users that can't yet downvote would be less powerful than downvotes from longer-established users.

(OTOH, that could have undesirable side effects, as it could, outside the domain of managing tone, result in a strong bias for older technologies and against new technologies, if it is the case that, on average, technical folks have a tendency to get attached to the technologies that were "hot" when they were establishing themselves and prone to seeing newer technologies as threats -- that's something I've seen enough to suspect it is a general, though far from universal, trend.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Not everyone here is a troll. Some of us just like to read interesting things.

</comment><comment><USER45> Expected WHAARGARBL, received WHAARGARBL. Entertaingly so, though.

(ref: [http://www.popehat.com/2010/03/11/racial-babyocalypse- provok...](http://www.popehat.com/2010/03/11/racial-babyocalypse-provokes- inevitable-whaargarbl/) )

<comment><USER46> Aren't there already plenty of other places on the internet to go find that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What depresses me is the endless introspection as displayed by this thread. The constant need to include everyone as belonging to some enlightened community just for owning a username.

</comment><comment><USER48> The biggest problem with the "this is how we are, deal with it because it's efficient and direct" is that it's just not true.

There is nothing efficient about being a dick.

There are basically two ways that being a curt dick can be functional: [1] The other parties involved are extremely empathetic and look past the messenger to understand the message. [2] The curt dick has enough power to brow beat / intimidate / badger others into getting their way.

Neither of these are long term sustainable solutions, because empathy between parties is a two-way street. Simply put, you can't sustain empathy unless the other party grows.

Hackers pride themselves on the "fuck you" attitude that disrupts stuff, and I get that, and I like it. But the flip side of that is that an inflexibility to understand and communicate with others ultimately will dull your edge and you'll wind up short of what you want to achieve.

It's not what you say, it's how you say it - not because it's a nice feel good thing, but because how you say something is incredibly important in efficiently disseminating your message, and often time the success of your goals depends on it.

Writing off people who push back on you being a dick is writing off an entire population of people who don't see the world 100% your way... you know, like everyone besides you on the goddamn planet.

</comment><comment><USER49> I agree with this sentiment. I was really surprised by the response to Dave's post yesterday. It was extremely disappointing to read such vitriol over what seemed like a fairly straightforward and useful observation about acquisitions.

The real question is how do we fix it? I have often thought that what I would prefer would be a fully curated news feed rather than one managed by the upvote system. But this wouldn't seem to work well in practice. I would be relying on the persistent effort of a small number of curators, who might get sick or bored or go on holiday or they just might never exist in the first place - who wants to hand curate a new feed for some other people?

But what if we provided a very simple tool for producing a curated feed, so a curator could just right click in their browser to add a link to their feed. What then if we allowed the readers to aggregate these curators? The aggregation is yet another (semi)curated feed which can be followed for further aggregated.

This could (possibly) produce a single feed very similar to HN, but it seems likely that we could easily seek out a feed which was heavy on CS theory and light on VC politics (or the other way around).

The biggest challenge that I see is making it engaging to the curators. Right now we allow submissions and you get points for submitting something that gets upvoted or for making upvoted comments. I think we can make the experience rewarding but there are a lot of details, wherein live devils.

Maybe it sounds like I just recreated reddit, but this system would not have any votes, just aggregation of curated feeds.

Any thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER50> There were definitely a few overly harsh and trollish comments on the article yesterday attacking Dave, but looking at it now it seems like 90% of the comments were either defending Dave or attacking his critics or apologizing for the trolls. It sucks that the comments seemed to turn into a referendum on Dave but it was still orders of magnitude more civil and intelligible than how it would have gone down on any other site.

I don't know that HN itself is the problem here, it's still pretty exemplary compared to the competition. Maybe a broader point could be made that it's depressing that the site with by far the best comments can still descend into those kinds of discussions.

For context, it's also worth noting that Dave is no stranger to controversy and has angered more than a few people over the years. I have no idea whether he was right or wrong in those situations, but I'm sure that that animosity played a role in some of the comments people made yesterday. Many of the really negative comments didn't seem like typical kneejerk Internet comments so much as people with grudges against him personally, and those grudges bled out into the discussion. Again, no judgement either way here, just providing context.

</comment><comment><USER51> There has been a recurring pattern of quite vitriolic ad hominem attacks on certain people on HN in a way that I can only describe as "celebrity-bashing" for quite while now. Other favorite targets are for instance RMS and Gruber.

This isn't just the odd troll. There's a lot of cheerleading going on in the form of upvotes, even though the attacks don't contribute anything, and would normally be downvoted into light grey.

</comment><comment><USER52> Wait, i'm confused. Author brings up Twitter (of all things..) as an example of a network where you can block people you don't want to deal with.

Okay, but then he then jumps from that to suggesting that HN implement a feature that doesn't let people on another site talk about whatever site they please?

That doesn't even make sense, or am I just missing something here?

</comment><comment><USER53> There's about 6 top level comments that are negative.

In the big thread, there are 9 negative comments (the rest being sidetracks or push back). A couple of the smaller top levels have a second or third negative remark.

Of course these numbers are highly subjective. I wouldn't call it a torrent. Much of it certainly served no purpose.

Was there some other negative activity?

</comment><comment><USER54> I thought people were a bit harsh yesterday too

<comment><USER55> Context? I'm not up to date :(

<comment><AUTHOR> The discussion in question is here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455>

It was about this post by Dave Winer: [http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/may/myOneTalkWithMarissaM...](http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/may/myOneTalkWithMarissaMayer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I don't care if it takes 15 minutes or 15 hours, if you are going to call a person or company untrustworthy (or worse), you better be ready for blow- black.

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't think this is reactionary. I am still a fairly new user and hardly participate for various reasons, one being that I come here for the programming resources because I just started learning to program.

I'll preface what I think with this: I grew up with a computer since the early 90s. I used BBS's, and online communities since then. Internet culture always seemed to me to be very abusive, with very few exceptions. And as Dave says, there is a whole aspect of anonymity that makes people very comfortable when saying whatever they want, since they feel there will be no retribution.

For me, HN is one of the better places when compared to other forums I visit, such as music ones (not the technical side of music, by the way).

The one common problem I see is a user not giving another the benefit of the doubt. When I took an online course at university, the prof sent us a link regarding "Netiquette". It was actually very interesting. I can't find the exact one he sent the class, but it was something like this: [http://ctlt.ubc.ca/distance-learning/learner- support/communi...](http://ctlt.ubc.ca/distance-learning/learner- support/communicating-online-netiquette/)

Anyway, one thing that stuck with me is asking genuine, courteous or friendly questions when you disagree with someone. There were many, many times when I would read someone's point of view which I thought were absolutely false. But I took the recommended route of asking a question to clear up some information. This is what I mean by giving the person the benefit of the doubt.

I think a lot of people worry that all of this is a competition and everyone's out to prove they are right. It is difficult to admit one is wrong, I know. But those who are sometimes right go out of their way to try and humiliate others with snarky or sarcastic comments. I used to be exactly like that when I was a kid participating in online communities in the 90s. Then I read something Oscar Wilde wrote: One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

It's pretty simple, but it works. You think you're right? Fine. But play nice. It may seem disingenuous, but ask questions which you think will lead the person to what you think is right. I've done it and many times the person knew something I didn't. Sometimes we were talking about different things. Sometimes I was right, but hey, at least the person learnt something new, and I learnt how to be a better person. And, of course, many times I was wrong, and I think to myself, "I'm glad I wasn't an asshole to him/her right off the bat".

I think we would benefit from interacting with others online the way we would if we were talking to them in person.

</comment><comment><USER58> Reading the comments yesterday was as Dave said, depressing. I ended up closing the window because I really didn't want read any more of the comments. People began attacking his second name and that was when it went further than too far.

</comment><comment><USER59> The problem is he implored people to stop being "personal" while calling them "assholes." Ad hominems and hypocrisy do not typically help if your actual agenda is to improve the situation.

</comment><comment><USER60> If you've got a public blog, I'd say that's analogous to having a public twitter account (i.e. anyone can see your tweets).

On a public twitter account, if you block someone they can still see your tweets, and they can still talk about you. You just can't see it.

Blocking a post from HN would mean people on HN wouldn't even see it or be able to talk about it. We might be assholes, but we should still be able to talk about stuff within the parameters laid out by HN.

Another solution might just be to disable commenting in your posts if the referer is HN.

</comment><comment><USER61> Compare: [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters- ope...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door- heal-or-die.html)

<comment><USER62> A tale of two butthurts.

Online discourse is not in the best shape. That said, despite wanting to feel bad for both authors, the stench of their misplaced entitlement prevents me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing I've learned from years online when you think you're hearing a tone in someone's post, unless you want to be a fool, you should check it out with the other person because you're probably not getting it.

Writing doesn't convey tone like speech does. I might be very happy yet you hear someone that is unhappy. This is pure projection.

That is, of course, if you're interested in responding to reality, as opposed to having some other motive.

</comment><comment><USER63> Some of the arguments here are that if you post something to the web, you can't be in control of where it ends up. While I agree with that sentiment on the whole, HN shouldn't be a place where you submit articles that are clearly just somebody's snippet of an opinion, but rather actual _news_ or human interest stories that err on the tech side. Others are suggesting that you just avoid the thread that is about you, and I think that's irresponsible; people have the right to correct information about themselves and their opinions.

We've seen all sorts of ShowHNs where the person who made it wasn't ready to post it yet, but someone got ahead of them. They rush into the comments to do due diligence, but sometimes the damage is already done. Now if the author wanted to post it again once it is finally complete, they'll likely end up with comments like "Didn't we see this already?" and potentially get less click-throughs considering. We've seen blog entries torn to shreds and the author show up hours late to a dead thread, hoping to do any necessary damage control or simply answer questions that could have changed the entire flow of conversation.

Not being fully in control of where my content ends up and not being able to be in every conversation about what I write is a big contributor to why I don't write at all. When someone posts my content here, it's assumed that it's to be taken seriously or that it is worthwhile. Despite that not being the case, people respond as though it is, and thus we find ourselves in this situation.

Even if there was some sort of tag like #nohn or something to highlight the fact that if discussion on the issue should be kept on the site because, as it wasn't intended to be a HN-worthy piece. That way, if it's posted anyways (as I don't believe in blocking the URL entirely), the author's intent is clear.

</comment><comment><USER64> I believe this is the textbook definition of the word "flounce". The guy could have just banned referer URLs from HN, instead he blogs just to say goodbye. Funny stuff.

Also, what's with both his commenters and HN describing one another's commenters? There are shitty, stupid people everywhere, folks, and nobody is superior to anyone else. Except SomethingAwful goons, because, well... you know.

<comment><USER65> His comments section is basically an echo chamber. Sounds familiar...

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> First off, most of your guys on here know me now and my background with Google not being a good one, so I don't have a bias opinion.

I think at least the devs at Google DO care and they take pride in their work (like every damn dev should). The problem that happens when your company (Google) services so many is that your voice isn't heard against the noise...(I think weev felt this with ATT).

I didn't get a chance to read the comments on the Mayer article (feel free someone to reply a HN link), but if you were getting personally attacked, that's immature of whoever trolled you. HOWEVER.....You can't generalize your experience with Semantics and assume that Mayer will be the same way. I think Mayer is doing a great job, and given her position at Yahoo will lead it the right way. (Still waiting for Yahoo to redesign that ugly homepage though, wasn't she credited for Google's simplistic search homepage?).

Side Note: I thought I read somewhere that Google's chief PR (the decider) went to work for the Obama Admin?

<comment><USER67> >I didn't get a chance to read the comments on the Mayer article (feel free someone to reply a HN link).

Here you go: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455>

<comment><USER66> Thanks nivla, I had a chance to speed read most of them. I didn't see too much trolling other than from Dave responding to almost every comment on there (fanning the flames).

Just like I said earlier, Dave is personalizing his past experiences and shoving them on Mayer. The CEO of Semantics lead him on, but the BIG DIFF here is that Mayer is the CEO and like I think the brightest comment on there said, Mayer has to have a very thorough plan. She has alot to prove in this position, to shareholders, to her team, the board, and to everyone pushing the PR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I've noticed the same thing. I wrote this post[1] a month ago. I put a lot of time into it and posted it on /r/haskell. I got some very insightful comments and good discussion. Two days ago it got posted to HN and the comments were very different. Lots of people saying "I don't understand this, this post sucks" but very few responded to me when I asked _where_ they were stumbling so I could fix it[2].

The upshot to all this is, I got way more exposure through HN than through /r/haskell, and a lot of people loved the post. I've gotten some cool emails out of this. So overall, I'd say trolls sure suck but the nice emails make it all worthwhile.

[1] [http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_...](http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_monads_in_pictures.html) [2] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5736004>

</comment><comment><USER69> Name a community with coherent discourse (not Twitter) that does _not_ have a problem with negativity.

</comment><comment><USER70> There are two often overlooked reasons why this happens:

1\. Thoughtful, contributing comments take a lot of effort to write, and people who write them can do other productive things. Pretty much every time I put effort into a thoughtful comment it gets ignored. It's particularly upsetting when it's "ask HN" or "show HN" type of thing - not a reply, not an up vote, do you even listen when you ask? So I stopped writing thoughtful comments ( * ), except for my own benefit - when I need to write something down to really think it through.

2\. With the post title like you had I assumed it was celebrity gossip and did not even click the link. You can imagine the type of people that did click the link anyway. By choosing a subject you're choosing the audience.

( * )Ironically, this comment took me some effort to write. :)

</comment><comment><USER71> As with anything, you shouldn't take it too seriously. Yes, it's depressing that trolls get upvoted ("A troll is someone who, finding that no-one likes them, decides to pretend that it's on purpose."), yes it hurts to have supposedly intelligent people pick apart everything you say or do, but hey, don't let the bastards grind you down. Try to remain positive; sometimes just being obstinately optimistic will make the worst of humanity run away screaming or quietly fume.

And yes, sometimes I've been that asshole; don't take it personally; it's me, not you :)

That being said, just because you know a language is "bad" doesn't mean you won't use it (that comment is directed not just at the OP but also the trolls who assumed he was an idiot for knowingly using a "bad" language).

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm sorry you had to deal with this.

</comment><comment><USER73> People make their choices when they participate in HN comment streams. As far as I can tell, there is no RSS feed for comments here and there is no advanced way of keeping track on commenting. You have to manually browse to participate yourself into the conversations.

Over the few years, HN has sort of become the Digg and Reddit. There are far and few substantial conversations in visible view (yes count mine as unsubstantial as well).

From the logical perspective, the circle of HN needs to break off from its core and diverge into many different circles. There may already be few inner circles (hidden from the public view) I can't tell. But it seems logical that this big public circle is all inclusive, where everything goes.

</comment><comment><USER74> There's a fair amount of electronic bullying even here on HN, often shrouded in politically correct techie language.

Tearing down is always easier than building up and, as others have pointed out, as a community gets larger, the negativity tends to rise as well. It takes a lot of emotional energy to deal with a sea of people you respect who always have a significant portion ready to jump down your throat. This is one problem I have with social applications that grow sufficiently: There's always a mob somewhere large enough to lynch you. Sometimes that emotional energy might be better spent dealing with your in-laws or a few tough but valuable customers.

</comment><comment><USER75> I like and value most HN comments, but I agree that there is quite a bit of negativity. One way to look at it is that if the average commenter even accidentally makes a negative comment once per year, and if 10,000 people view a thread, that's the potential for 27 destructive comments.

It doesn't help that negativity enforces itself, so it doesn't take long before a thread can be inundated with a hostile attitude. But how to address that?

I don't know how it might work, but what if there was an option for the author to include a picture of themselves (on HN)? That might humanize the discussion, by reminding people that they're talking to a real person...

</comment><comment><USER76> The author of the submitted blog post writes,

"One of the main reasons it doesn't work is that people don't ask questions to clarify. They jump to conclusions, some of which are very wrong."

I think that is the nub of the issue. People who are genuinely curious about an issue try to find out more. I routinely upvote comments here on any subject that ask for more information or more sources on factual statements made in articles submitted to HN or factual statements made in comments. We don't all have the same background in life experience and formal education, and I often learn new facts about the world from other Hacker News participants. I can't always assume that I understand another person's comment on the first read. Moreover, quite a few participants here write English as a second language. (How many Americans can write in ANY language besides English?) So sometimes the first thing to do when replying to an article submitted to HN is to ask follow-up questions. Another good thing to do is to point to other sources, if you know of any, for more information.

Civility is a core value of Paul Graham, the founder of Hacker News. He wants us to be able to disagree politely

<http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html>

when we do disagree, and the Hacker News welcome message

<http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>

distills the basic rules of the site into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

Don't be rude. Don't be mean. That's not easy, but that is the community guideline here. Or maybe not being mean or rude IS easy, if you practice it. It's worth finding out how much we could all habituate improving our social skills by how we behave here on Hacker News.

AFTER EDIT: It's worth pointing out that I wrote all of the above part of what I wrote before I really wrapped my mind around the fact that, after all, the submitted blog post comes from Dave Winer, whose blog posts I have been reading for more than a decade. I still stand by my statement that we may all as well be as civil as we possibly can and as factual as we possibly can here on Hacker News. This is a community we can all improve by our individual actions. That said, I think Dave Winer and plenty of other bloggers have plenty to learn from the best comment threads on Hacker News, the comment threads that most follow pg's aspirations for this site, precisely because there is a back-and-forth in the comments and a fact-checking that many bloggers shy away from. The difference between a blogger and a journalist is that a journalist is a reporter who writes for an editor. Sometimes bloggers write only for themselves, and when they do, they can learn from comments, if only they are willing to do so. When a blogger writes about another public figure, the blogger has to be able to take the heat, or maybe the blogger should find another kitchen.

</comment><comment><USER77> The site seems to be down. Here is cached version: [http://realcache.com?q=http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/ma...](http://realcache.com?q=http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/may/hackerNewsIsDepressing)

</comment><comment><USER78> Talking about the technical aspects: is this really something Paul Graham can do? Wouldn't blocking inbound links be handled on the client side, perhaps via mod_rewrite or something along those lines? Come to think of it, isn't scripting.com doing exactly this?

Yeah, it's not perfect: it's actually really easy to get around, because all you have to do is copy/paste the link. But the overwhelming majority of the abusers won't even do that much work: they'll assume the link is dead, the nerd-rage will cool off, and they'll go elsewhere, leaving nothing on your site but a line in the server log.

</comment><comment><USER79> Yup, I also felt bad when I saw folks laying into Mr Winer yesterday. I was going to submit a "hey, be reasonable, lets have less of the ad hominem" but then I saw a few people had already done that. Of course, I voted those up.

But the real problem is also one of the unique features of HN; I couldn't flag or vote down any of the offending comments because I don't have enough karma. That's a shame, because it feels like I just have to sit on my hands and watch the bile flow. I think this makes the world appear rather worse than it is to anyone watching...

</comment><comment><USER80> Many of the, probably, younger people here are understandably confused at all the vitriol directed at this Dave Winer whenever his name comes up. It probably seems mysterious and irrational, if you're not familiar with the context, which is decades of behavior that simply disqualifies him to chastise others about honesty or decency. To get caught up, start at <http://www.mackido.com/Press/CarlsSaga.html> .

</comment><comment><USER80> I was surprised, even in the context of something as frankly incoherent as this rant, to hear someone talk about "discourse" on Twitter. Especially someone who recently [0] described Twitter as "grunting and snorting".

[0] [http://thenextweb.com/eu/2011/04/13/dave-winer-twitter-is- mo...](http://thenextweb.com/eu/2011/04/13/dave-winer-twitter-is-mostly-about- grunting-and-snorting-but-it-could-be-much-more/)

</comment><comment><USER81> Dave nailed it. It's why I rarely comment and never post. HN is one of the most unfriendly spots on the net. It's downright hostile.

I love the curated links, but that's about it. Trying to engage in conversation is a crap shoot. You might learn something, but you might encounter someone just dying to turn district attorney on you and just wanting to rip into you. I'll pass.

And God forbid you have a negative view on vi/vim.

Let the downvoting begin.

</comment><comment><USER82> Remember the two bulls joke from Colors? [1]

Think of Dave Winer as Robert Duvall. He's telling you a story about the promises and reality of acquisitions.

Those of you complaining about him? You're Sean Penn.

Thing is, someday you'll be telling this to a young 'un, just like Penn did at the end of the movie.

"The explanations required by the young are wearying." [2]

[1]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbUxePfsoWE>

[2]: Look it up.

</comment><comment><USER83> "One of the main reasons it doesn't work is that people don't ask questions to clarify. They jump to conclusions, some of which are very wrong."

Do people realise that Winer reads and replies on HN? Would they ask a question to clarify if they knew he would?

Even when there is a general submission, it is not always obvious that OP or Original Author is participating. Reddit highlights the OP in a discussion which can be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER84> Yup, HN commenters can feel like a stampede of negativity bearing down on you sometimes (and with increased frequency it seems). But then you can't really post your thoughts and ideas to the web then take umbrage when _some people_ don't like it.

That said, I don't have a fugging clue why people objected to the original article, or what the point of their objections were.

So in summary: Eveyone's wrong.

</comment><comment><USER85> Going one level meta, there's a specific thing that bugs me in this discussion. I'm seeing the words "abuse" and "butthurt" used a lot. Using either word makes a claim that the negativity in the previous thread was or was not excessive. But it doesn't make an argument to that effect. It's just an unsupported, emotion-tugging claim. That's bad debate. Please stop.

</comment><comment><USER86> Reminds me of:

"In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down."

\-- James Wolcott

People will read whatever they want into whatever there is.

</comment><comment><USER87> _One of the main reasons it doesn't work is that people don't ask questions to clarify. They jump to conclusions_

It's funny to see Winer complaining about commenters being too quick to criticize from a limited background... when the whole issue starts from an article he wrote "in 15 minutes" criticizing Melissa Mayer based on a single short conversation.

</comment><comment><USER88> I've been reading hacker news for more than 6 years, without doing any successful projects of my own. That's depressing.

</comment><comment><USER89> I've been a reader much much more than a commenter here. But I developed a habit of ignoring any negativity expressed here. I think it is a skill not less important in dealing with life in general and in organizations.

However, yesterday I was really burnt out emotionally on some personal matters. And I've yet to fully recovered...

</comment><comment> brown9-2 It's worth considering if the meaning of this article/complaint changes at all if you replace the words "Hacker News" with "Internet messageboard".

Is this something unique to HN, or something that many popular messageboards with anonymous posting features have in common? My guess would be the latter.

</comment><comment><USER90> One of the most comprehensive guides to diplomatic critiques I've seen was written for the Critters science fiction & fantasy writing workshop. It serves a critical need in that venue:

<http://critters.org/c/diplomacy.ht>

</comment><comment><USER91> Somewhat off topic:

why does scripting.com want to load assets from localhost:

      <script type="text/javascript"
        src="http://127.0.0.1:5337/opmlEditor/comments/button?title=Hacker%20News%20is%20depressing&editorialDomain=comments.scripting.com">
      </script>

<comment><USER92> He runs his own authoring system, OPML Editor (a derivative of Userland Radio / Userland Frontier). That listens on port 5337. So that's fetching something local, except it will only work on his box, possibly anyone else running OPML Editor on theirs too if there's some common shared code running in that environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Isn't this a general problem with the internet? i.e. the authors of content know exactly what everyone is saying about them.

This isn't a problem with offline or private discussion because authors have no way of knowing what we said.

</comment><comment><USER94> I think the OP could email pg and he'd add them to the block list.

<comment><USER9> Is there such a thing?

<comment><USER94> Some domains are banned for spam. Not really the prescribed use in this case though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I just don't get his emphasis on outliners. You can't model any kind of many- to-many relationship with that. Outlines don't even reflect how we think.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why blog then?

</comment><comment><USER96> this might be a good time to say good-bye to HN.

so long and keep all your rotten fish.

</comment><comment><USER97> I put myself on a self-imposed break (which I'm breaking now, sorry; it seems to be more of a one-post-per-day policy) from HN because I don't want to be contributing to the problem. But as long as the quality of my posts doesn't degrade (flame wars do that) I think 1 per day is fine.

I think we, as a group, tend to be shitty judges of character, but our arrogance blinds us to the need for improvement. We're cynical about "people" in general, but we latch on too quickly to businesspeople who seem above-the- fray or decent, often based on superficial signals. (This is like the creepy guy who fabricates a relationship with a girl because she smiles at him.)

A consequence of this is that we can't perceive it when we the people above us play divide-and-conquer games against us. Language wars. This team against that team. IDE-users vs. command-line developers. Efficient but "not dedicated" 8-to-6 family guys vs. inefficient all-nighter types. Pro-Google vs. anti-Google. Facebook users vs. Facebook haters. Young vs. old. We've all been monstrously played and most of us don't even see it.

Your enemy isn't the guy who wrote the shitty code. He was quite possibly working under an obscene deadline in a job he couldn't afford to lose. No, the enemy is the boss who mandates you use the shitty code (using the nicest possible language, i.e. "we won't be able to deliver unless <horrible technical compromise that damages your career>") instead of letting you rewrite it; when he makes a common enemy out of the original architect, he's fucking playing you.

Most of our road-wear that we get in this career comes from wrong assumptions we make when divide-and-conquer games are played against us. We eventually wise up to the bad character of the players, but we retain those biases for a long time, and start saying things like "every shop I know of that used the JVM ( _N_ = 1) was unable to hire good people"... when the real reason that shop couldn't hire talent was that it paid poorly.

Just what I've seen. All this incivility and in-fighting comes out of our willingness to tear each other apart based on superficial differences, and that's something that's been inculcated in us from above. Why? Because we're fucking easy to control that way.

</comment><comment><USER98> As the author of one of the "negative" comments yesterday -- <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738748> \-- I'll scurry out of the bomb shelter long enough to offer a counterpoint.

I view this entry as a bit of a tantrum, by someone who cares so little about the comments on Hacker News that he has repeatedly slandered the site and its regulars, and while encouraging others to post this very link in a comment earlier today simultaneously demands that this site not link to him. This strikes me as a little childish and bizarre for someone who, as I think we all know, understands a bit about the internet.

He is attempting to bully a group, using tactics more commonly found in grade school, and is threatening to cancel recess for everyone.

If you are a public figure, which Winer is for his contributions to the industry, "you" become bigger than the person. You become a message bus and a context. That comes with a lot of benefits, which includes that every opinion gets broadly spread regardless of merit, but it also means that context becomes a legitimate target for criticism, and a persistent wrapper around all messages, _because_ your opinions are broadly spread regardless of specific merit. It is not reasonable to demand that each message be evaluated outside of that context.

And I'll reword what I wrote yesterday to fit this particular entry, which is that many of his posts have become deeply depressing. Many follow the pattern of aggrieved entitlement and disenfranchisement (and to repeat what I said yesterday, fit the bigoted stereotype about older developers. As one of the only people who even mentioned age -- and as a _40 year old developer_ \-- I find it bizarre if Dave thought that was an insult about his age, when in reality it was a comment about him seemingly veering towards becoming the cliche).

It is fantastic that he is working on new, interesting stuff, but the message that percolates out continues to be rather morose.

</comment><comment><USER99> >I honestly don't care what the HN trolls, and the people who upvote them, supposedly "think" about me.

If only that were true, I'd have spent _even less_ time this week on meta-HN- drama.

And I reject or _seriously, seriously, seriously_ lament that "discourse has moved to twitter". That sounds like the opener to George Orwell's 2084 or something.

</comment><comment><USER100> The Internet is depressing. Let's blow it up and go play frisbee.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why does HN even allow blog posts. If it isn't showing off new tech or code why is it here?

<comment><USER18> 1) HN is about more than code and tech.

2a) HN wants people to link to the original source article. So, in theory, blogs would not get posted.

2b) HN asks people not to editorialise when submitting links. Thus, if you want to include some text about an article you're submitting you're supposed to make a blog post, with a link to the article in the blog, and then post to HN the link to your blog post.

At least, that's how I understand it. It feels sub-optimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Want to get rid of the majority of trolls, abuse and unnecessarily negative behavior? Remove anonymity.

These fake points don't do much at all.

<comment><USER102> I think I've posted this here before, but there is some evidence that eliminating anonymity does not improve civility: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good- evidence-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence- that-real-name-policies-fail-to-improve-comments/)

Anonymity or pseudonymity do, however, have benefits that should be considered before eliminating them. Whistleblowers and employees of companies being discussed are the two that come to mind immediately.

<comment><USER103> I have noticed that in Anonymous and pseudonymous environments people seem more willing to speak from personal experience and in the first person, which enhances and personalizes discourse. Actually, my favorite environment of all time was enforced anonymity with hiding comments that got downvoted. Without the ego payoff of persistent identity, ignoring the trolls was actually effective and people who's comments weren't engaged with just left. The discussion that was left was insightful and frequently constructive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> In my opinion, many people who are gifted academically suffer damage in childhood - quite a lot of the time this damage is manifested in unfortunate ways .. the human ego is a very active protagonist.

<comment><USER104> On reflection, that was pretty cynical. I apologise.</comment></comment>


US Navy launches live-fire missiles in 'warning to China' - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3076768/us-navy-launches-live-fire-missiles-warning-china <comment><USER2> Try to read this thinking about North Korea instead of the US. Really makes it easy to see how this is pure propaganda spin.</comment>


With Plug, Create A Personal, Subscription-Free Dropbox With Your USB Drives - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/10/with-plug-create-a-personal-subscription-free-dropbox-with-your-usb-drives/ <comment><USER2> Here's their Kickstarter: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud- guys/plug-the-brai...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug- the-brain-of-your-devices)

They mention in the "The Tech" section that they're doing a VPN between the "Plug" and clients and that they've gotten it to punch thru "any main NAT & firewall we tested" and further say "it's decentralized when possible" but don't go into any more specifics. I'd like to know what their mechanism is for resolving the Plug's public IP address. Presumably they'll be running some dynamic DNS servers or some proprietary location protocol but since they make a point of saying they're not a subscription service I am immediately dubious as to how they plan to continue to finance running those servers.

This entire class of products just makes me sad. It would be really neat to live in a world where the bandwidth (and lack of transfer quotas) actually existed that would permit us to take advantage of the exceedingly cheap large storage devices that we can purchase and put on our home and business networks. I don't see that world existing any time soon, at least in the United States.

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing they're running a reverse SSH tunnel through their own servers which your devices then connect to to get to your hard drive. Probably connecting to a common port such as 80 or 443 to avoid any issues with firewalls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From their Kickstarter: "With Plug, we invented a technology to transfer files instantly. No matter their size, no matter their number."

I hate to see an interesting project make silly claims like that. Whatever the truth of the matter is, it won't match what they seem to be implying.

<comment><USER5> They likely mean sending an authorization to your files instead of the actual files.

Which is very, very silly as a claim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is this similar to or different from PogoPlug? [http://pogoplug.com/devices](http://pogoplug.com/devices)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure how this is better than BitTorrent Sync [http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html](http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html).

BTSync runs on many NASes, and $40 Raspberry Pi.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks in some way similar in concept of File Transporter from Connected Data:

[http://www.filetransporter.com](http://www.filetransporter.com)

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of Pogoplug.

<comment><USER6> That's what I was thinking. The only issue is accessing PogoPlug as a file system. I had to access it as root and create a Samba share, but it's not very reliable. I have one of the older PogoPlugs (pink).

<comment><USER9> Me too! I ran into the same sort limitations, eventually hacked it into some sort of linux server. I've probably still got the pink guy at the bottom of some junk box somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If it's true that they've gotten it to punch thru any main NAT & firewall they've tested it's already ahead of Bitcasa, who STILL hasn't added proxy settings to their client.

</comment><comment><USER11> What is the advantage over dropbox? My dropbox app already automagically uploads photos taken from my phone. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER12> No monthly fee for unlimited storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does Plug provide any redundancy or "RAID" like features?

<comment><USER14> Looks like you can pay $5/month to do it on their servers. No idea on the purely local solution

<comment><USER15> I didn't see anything about them having their own servers, but they do mention you can use something like BitCasa or Carbonite along side Plug, which run about $5/month for unlimited backups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait, so I have to keep my computer ON (the one which has this USB device connected) and I am supposed to feel I am using Dropbox?

I could do a whole lot more if I could keep one of my computer ON 24x7x365 without using a $69 device.

<comment><USER2> The computer with the USB devices connected is the "Plug" itself. It's just a tiny embedded server w/ a USB device port on one end and wired Ethernet on the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> how different it is from TonidoPlug? TonidoPlug also provides personal cloud sync.</comment>


How much Passive Income do you make? - <AUTHOR>

How much income do you make from apps? From your web apps? How did you do it?! <comment><USER2> Instimage.com here.

I make nothing. How I do it? It's fairly complex.

Step 1: Build a kickass website, take 6 months

Step 2: Deal with Paypal

Step 3: Rework

Step 4: Deal with Paypal

Step 5: Launch

Step 6: Recurring Step. Post Blog post, spam your FB friends until you lose them.

Step 7: It's built and they don't come.

Step 8: Move onto next idea? Or repeat Step 6/7 until you're ready to move on...

<comment><USER3> Awesome. I'd be so into this thread if it turned into "how you _fail to make money_ passively."

<comment><AUTHOR> I took your advice and created a thread. This could be more interesting.

<comment><USER4> I think it's important for people to realize that there are tons of projects that never generate income or workout as planned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That was asked yesterday, and the day before, and this front-page post is still on the front of the "ask" page:

"How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431573)

<comment><USER6> Recurring is not the same as passive though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm working on a Bitcoin trading bot. I won't go into the details of how it works, but it's capable of making a few hundred per day, depending on how much money it's given to work with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats pretty cool. but are you afraid of government regulation and not being able to convert the bitcoin into cash?

<comment><USER7> It's still profitable after taxes and whatnot. It actually takes advantage of how Bitcoin is converted into cash ;-).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> $0.02 (2 cents) so far, adsense

<comment><USER9> me too, from adsense account.</comment></comment>


OAuth 2.0 support in Mashery's I/O Docs Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mashery/iodocs

<comment><AUTHOR> Our intern, Alex Adkins (@alexarcel) learned her some JavaScript, Node.js, Jade, and some OAuth 2.0 spec. She took some of our early jankiness, did some cleanup (more to come), and added some goodness (also more to come). Thanks a bunch Alex, and great stuff.

If any of you folks have APIs that use OAuth2, or you're a dev that wants to play around with APIs that use OAuth2, I/O Docs is a useful interactive documentation tool that you might want to check out. It's light weight, easy to configure, simple to deploy and open source.

</comment><comment><USER2> For any API of any size, I think this kind of documentation is essential. As a developer, I know I've written useful code that I would have skipped just because the company had interactive docs and I saw how easy some of the things were.</comment>


Show HN: ShouldYouBlank – Turn your followers into customers with a quiz - <AUTHOR> http://shouldyoublank.com

<comment><USER2> Subscribed for early access. Submit your startup to [http://betapage.co](http://betapage.co)</comment>