jorgearturo

It is buggy for sure; But many of the Spotify apps I use work fine on Linux even without support though.

I'm constantly divided between two options.

1. "Tapping into the zeitgeist and participate proactively is great." As you put it so eloquently :)

2. The alternative is to follow your own curiosity and read whatever you really have a hunger for.

Time is so limited it can get hard to choose reading material sometimes.

For sure, persuasion is all about exploiting the backdoors of your consciousness to influence your free will. Powerful stuff man.

Even though a solid package manager was enough to get me on board, I deeply agree with you in that building a community around it will make all the difference.

I'd also like to think it will be a bit less difficult for Mozilla to accomplish this because, well, Mozilla's values inspire loyalty, even love in my case, I love Mozilla.

I'm aware publishing GIFs on HN is off-topic and I realize this might be a bit childish but I couldn't help myself, and also, you sound like a lad with a sense of humor so you might appreciate it :P

http://imgur.com/gallery/BkXYbMj/

Whoever else might see this post, I'm sorry, this is just such great news I had to celebrate somehow.

Not sure if I understood you correctly but as far as I know HN uses algorithms already for this sort of taks.

That's cool but I'd like to have better control, so I'm designing a custom HN curator myself. And I've noticed some other people have done the very same thing themselves.

Well, there's some high value on learning lessons by yourself, it may have taken some time from your life, but you ended up understanding better the in and outs. So good for you my friend.

I found it curious that something is never mentioned in that post. That is, not voting at all.

So yeah, I generally agree with PG in that

    > it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement

So my current take on this whole vote up/down to convey agreement/dissagreement discussion would be not voting at all unless you find it pertinent.

Also IMHO, in other types of reasoning one should be a bit faster to downvote, for example 'rudeness', or worse, 'hate messages', for those ones I downvote immediately, or flag and sometimes even educate (if the person seems to be just confused, and I make one attempt only, if the person is not interested in changing their mind, I skip).

Other types of reasoning deserve a different approach, for example; Interesting comments I upvote even if I don't agree. Well redacted but uninteresting comments I leave untouched (I don't vote up nor down).

And there are many other considerations for different scenarios and different types of reasoning, I mostly prefer not to waste time, but I liked this post about kindness and find the topic of community very engaging and relevant to me. Maybe because I'm starting to build a community myself.

I admit that I'm a bit faster to upvote, for anything that deserves positive feedback; attention, approval, agreement, endorsement, celebration, applause, kudos, kindness, etc. And I'm OK with that.

> assuming good faith on the poster

haha I get it. And that's also very kind of you.

I do it too sometimes, trying not to lose perspective of the true purpose of the conversation taking place of course; a single upvote in a bombarded comment won't cause detriment to the conversation but it will provide some motivation for the participant to keep trying to participate (assuming good faith on the poster, as well).

For example in StackOverflow, if I notice a -1 post but the post has some value, I'll upvote it even if it wasn't particularly useful for my issue, in order to give it a chance to be reevaluated without a negative bias of that -1

I find it a bit funny/curios on why we do such things. I've always known I'm not the only one doing that, it's one of those unsaid things that happen on the net, part of its culture.

Don't you think that would break the minimalist design? I don't think it would benefit, not to mention it would be a little too opinionated.

I suspect HN's up/down system follows the pattern of simplicity by design and for good reason; the reason being the flexibility to welcome a cognitive diverse audience.

Apparently HN's decline in audience quality over time was expected from the start¹; quality and popularity seem to be inversely correlated, but the voting privilege threshold is a good way to maintain culture values to some degree.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but given the fact this community was conceived as "an experiment"¹ to explore and empower the hacker community, I suspect one of the points has always been that the "best" ideas float to the top. In this case, the "best" ideas are always relative to the values of the community as a whole; the sum of criteria of the engaged participants, a very diverse audience.

That diverse audience can have multiple motives to vote up or down, according to each individual mindset; it can be agree/disagree, constructive/non-constructive, as you proposed, yes, but it also can be interesting/uninteresting, like/dislike, kind/unkind. Or many other criteria that are not necessarily antonyms; amazing/disgusting, enlightening/TLDR, etc.

So this singular up/down "un-opinionated" system's simplicity allows a cognition diversity one-size-fits-all dynamic, any change in UX would have to be planned for a justifiable purpose and very carefully executed.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Well then, it seems to me that you have a very healthy approach to votes and flags.

It should be common sense but I suspect not everyone with the ability to downvote has such considerations and the HN guidelines¹ offer very little comment on that.

I'm guessing that mods think that once you've risen above the downvote reputation threshold you must be qualified and should have a good criteria on how to use this newly given privilege.

I'm not trying to tell anyone how to do their job, but maybe it would be useful to add some guidelines for that too (Voting, specifically), I think I like your guidelines.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I was trying to be crystal clear. But I liked your conciseness more than my long-winded reasoning break down.

I've found that the most healthy way to deal with people that dismiss your entire argument/point/opinion by nit-picking your grammar (or similar) is to dismiss them back, kindly.

The kindly part is so important; their attitude shows that they don't have an open mind at the moment; dismissing kindly leaves a moral door open so that in the infrequent (but not rare) event that they'll have an open mind later in the day (or later in a lifetime), they may remember your reasoning and revisit the logic in their minds and agree with you, sometimes they acknowledge you merit for it and sometimes they don't, but when they do, bingo, you just made an intellectual ally, but that works only if you were kind and treated them with respect.

Pick your battles; If you insist on proving yourself right and antagonize people (remember even trolls are people) you make gratuitous enemies and waste resources in general; time, energy, focus, etc.

Trust me, I've turned foes into allies several times in my short lifetime. And more importantly, I've saved myself from wasting time and headaches. Kindness works miracles and saves time.

Be kind, rewind (your mind?).

And don't forget to read the welcomming page and the guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't agree with mreiland. I didn't dismiss you donizx, your first comment was a smart POV.

mreiland is just being rude, he probably had a bad day or was recently frustrated with some discussion gone eerie with a climate change denier and he's taking it out on you. And he's worried about climate change, that's understandable, cut him some slack.

If you don't want to waste your time with climate change deniers, just skip and don't address them, that's cool, life is short no doubt about that.

If you find yourself in a situation where somehow you DID address them (maybe because you care about the world, and you DO sound like someone reasonable that cares about important matters), that means you already decided to use some time on them climate change deniers, so make the most of it, remember they're human beings and treat them with respect and you might end up inspiring them to actually listen to you to understand instead of listening to retort (like most people do when they're on defensive mode), be kind and you might even end up incepting some sense into their minds.

Trust me, kindness works miracles.

Oh hey, you wrote that? You might have mentioned it on another thread because I have it on my amazon wishlist already. xP

I've just promoted your book up in the long to-read list.

Disclaimer: I didn't downvote you, I just comment to offer some insight (unrequited perhaps).

You said:

  >> People can't read the unsaid stuff.

  >> feminized (weakened or neutralized)

And not sure about this one, but maybe also for sounding a bit like a nazi supremacist.

Being kind is not about displaying inferiority.

I don't think you're a bad fellow, but it sounds like, for you, it feels cool to consider yourself superior because you are "right" most of the times and you "win" a lot of arguments.

Many times you can end up thinking you were right because no one present was able to overthrow your reasoning, and sometimes you end up thinking you were right because you stated your arguments with "natural vigor" and people just lost motivation on engaging with you in conversation.

You might be of the opinion of "who cares about downvotes if I'm superior because I know I'm right", but you might consider caring about the message those downvotes entail in this particular case.

Why? To make it relevant to you: Because learning to read the unsaid stuff is powerful.

Also, consider the Dunning–Kruger effect.

> So why was I being sidelined? I demanded answers. Dustin did not disappoint.

Nice, you have some storytelling skills :) I'd bet those will come in handy once you learn to apply them for your human communication skills.

haha that's hilarious, I don't think I have enough rep to make my voting count, but I nevertheless upvoted you just in case.

And I should warn you! I WILL make a T-shirt and give you credit.

You might be right. Even when in many cases you can immediately tell downvotes were necessary, deserved and the commenter should've seen it coming.

I've also encountered many cases that confused me a bit and at the time didn't quite understand why those people/commenters were being downvoted.

So I've spent a long time just reading HN without commenting, trying to first understand the culture, the news are just as important as the people curating them IMHO. After sometime I've begun to understand the different mindsets and dynamics; there are many discernible reasons to be downvoted by the community, there's for example, being perceived as a shill or a strawman, and etc. And correct me if I'm wrong but there's also the secret/magic algorithms making the mod's jobs easier, I don't think those algorithms are perfect and may make mistakes sometimes, that's understandable.

But there are still enough cases that I suspect ended up being downvoted just because disagreement motive or maybe even for irrational emotion (very rarely do strong emotions come with reason) motive. And there's also the case of Trigger-happy-downvoting individuals, all these latter cases generate such damage that I have * sometimes * even found myself a bit suspicious of the worth of the HN community as a whole.

But I stressed "sometimes" for a reason...

...One has to understand that communities change, that's a fact, and as YC has had success and obtained more and more media attention (and therefore HN as well), different kind of audiences have joined the flock (me included, since a few years ago).

My guess is that HN's community is still adapting to the new audience, must be tough since there must be thousands of real people along with hundreds of fake accounts (some with nefarious purposes) and bots.

In the end, you'll find it more useful to acquire a thick skin and a "deal with it" attitude towards gratuitous negativity (down-voters included), but not an impermeable shell because sometimes there's some useful criticism behind rude negativity, just don't take it personal and master the art of spinning the conversation towards a constructive direction.

Side note: >> anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names.

Amazingly well phrased, I had to point that one out :)

Unfortunately, I don't think "aha!-you're-not-exactly-right" kind of people are going away anytime soon, they've been around on the net since I first laid mouse on it (the 90s, I'm not that old) and they've conquered the technical forums for a reason. Some people simply have that sort of mindset, one just needs to wear the "deal with it" hat and get over it.

In fact, those people are very useful and most of them have helped me from time to time, so I'm grateful for them.

Side note: >> assume-I'm-not-an-idiot-kid-please-get-off-my-lawn-been-there-done-that-have-the-tee-shirt-thanks

Thank you for that, I'll use it sometime, not sure why or when, but it's so funny I must! :D

I find many things troubling in your statement, I'll explain myself as constructively as possible without sacrificing pragmatism (I hope all the following doesn't come as condescending, I'm just trying to help here).

1st of all. This is not facebook. Upvotes and downvotes are not likes/dislikes.

That said, here's another way to explain what I meant: Commenting is not about pleasing readers (is also not about displeasing, so be kind, like the post recommends). If "someone important" likes or dislikes what you said, should not have such an impact that would make you consider changing your mind, your mind should be changed by feedback in the form of comprehensive information, that kind of feedback is much more meaningful than someone else's emotion (or even disagreement by itself without feedback provided).

There can be many reason/motives to upvote/downvote, but emotion is not reason, acting on emotion alone is just compulsive.

I don't think PG would ever downvote you if he dislikes what you said, I'd like to think he's more sophisticated than that; he would either have an interest (motive) on muting the info you introduce to the conversation (but that's sketchy), or even better he would provide feedback (reason) on why he disagrees with you. (But I have absolutely no idea on how would PG make decisions, I'm just being rhetorical here and using PG as an example of "someone important")

So my point is:

You should not make comments expecting PGs approval (or any other figure you consider "someone important", which is what I stated as a "perceived moral leader"), because that's the very definition of a "herd-like mindset of following perceived moral leaders", if HN introduces tools that allow that mindset, the community's value will suffer. Being inspired by leaders is cool, but allowing them to make your mind just by liking or disliking what you said is very dangerous (and immature).

You should participate in a conversation with confidence, and to obtain confidence you need to be well informed and prepared to test your ideas.

EDIT: Rephrased a few things, but didn't change substance I hope.

I'm against trigger-happy flagging/downvoters too. On the other hand, I actually like the fact that Reddit's and HN's communities are different in that way. I go to Reddit when I'm hungry for lots of information and want to have a good time, also to get in touch with a broader internet community. I come to HN when I want to know what's making an impact, and that means -among MANY other things- surviving criticism.

So I would not complain because HN needs criticism. I'd rather suggest a technical solution through UX design, for the false alarm flagging mostly.

I agree with you.IMHO, graying out text is a way to convey censorship. Allowing each individual to configure his HN experience sounds positive to me. I like reading controversial opinions just like you. For me, it's both a way to challenge my worldview and a way to understand a particular community better.

> I'd be less annoyed by a downvote from pg, because I probably deserved it, than a downvote from someone completely random, who I might not care about.

I admire PGs work too, but don't you think this criteria would introduce to the community a herd-like mindset of following perceived moral leaders instead of evaluating ideas for their own standing?

I was not criticizing your use of # at all. Using # to comment is perfectly fine I guess. Now that you mentioned it, it might be a bit confusing for newbies, but don't worry I don't think anyone would try to send the command 'Crap' over a super user session, although why the hell not? haha

Nice. Now that we're getting all stackoverflowy in here, it would be worth mentioning two other handy tips.

Preventing typo mistakes with bash autocomplete is even better than correcting mistakes afterwards, it also makes typing so much faster. It works with commands AND it also works for files inside the current working directory.

Hint: start typing your command and then hit TAB, voilà! Note: if there are more than 1 command/file option that starts with the same chars you wrote, hit TAB twice and you will have all the options displayed in front of you, it comes in handy to remember fast instead of browsing documentation.

Command example:

$ git rem[TAB] ---> $ git remote

$ git remote a[TAB] ---> $ git remote add

File example:

$ git add i[TAB] --> $ git add index.js

Multiple options example (TAB twice):

$ git r[TAB,TAB]

(will give you the options:)

rebase relink replace revert reflog remote request-pull rm release repack reset

The result is NO TYPOS! ;)

--------------------------

It would also be worth remembering the unix convention of using $ for regular user prompt and # for super user prompt.

In other words:

$ <--- if this is your prompt you're working on a regular user session.

# <--- if this is your prompt you're working on a super user session and you don't need sudo.

Again, that is just a convention, your OS/distro could be different.

Anandtech has already tested a beta version

It's an interesting experiment but I don't think Google is aiming to please the crowd with the need for "native apps" anyways and they wouldn't be terribly interested in keeping the native VLC dependencies alive and/or compatible. It seems pretty obvious to me that Google is trying to push the mainstream consumer market into a "cloud computing/services lifestyle", it only makes sense because their whole business model revolves around web users. So VLC is out, Netflix/Playstore is in.

Not for me, don't get me wrong, I'm not that kind of consumer and it may be safe to state that most people within the HN crowd isn't either. I'm personally following and waiting for the Novena[1] laptop and open hardware to be launched.

Even if chromeOS is removed and Gnu/Linux is loaded instead, chromebooks' keyboards look abysmally ugly and useless to me, otherwise I would at least be excited about the inexpensive hardware.

So yeah, as a consumer I can distill my opinion about this product to "meh...", but as a web developer though, that's a different story, the possibility of Google hardware converting handheld mobile users to desktop-ish mobile users and reaching a broader international audience makes me almost enthusiastic about Chromebooks.

After all, until some potentially better hardware project (Firefox OS [2] or Indie Phone [3], who knows) expands to the netbook-ish form factor ("Lapfox"?/"Indiebook"?), the not-so-open inexpensive Chromebook hardware & affordable by hundreds of millions (potentially billions, we'll see) introduces and welcomes new demographics to the web and is better for the world (in the short run) than almost-fully-open expensive hardware that only a few million can afford (for now), don't you think?

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop

[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/

[3] https://ind.ie/about/

Some people seem to be missing the point and I don't blame you because brands are given a lot of protagonism in their announcement. But I think the presence of renowned/popular brands in their announcement is just marketing collateral as part of a bit more complex marketing strategy that involved partnerships, and that might be confusing for anyone if deeper thought is not involved.

IMHO the essence of this product is neither about enforcing brand loyalty nor saving time.

1- Brand loyalty benefits well established brands, yes, so amazon probably got big companies on board by offering brand placement on their marketing material among other benefits.

2- Saving time (and cognitive flow/energy) benefits consumers, yes. There is some risk to follow brand reputation instead of product quality, agree, but that is a manageable risk, so amazon can potentially get consumers on board.

The essence and reason of why this product/service came to be, answers to one question only; 'How does amazon benefit?' and it is brilliant.

From my POV this little button is not just a way to introduce an enhanced experience to an existing and growing consumer behavior[1] that would result in greater sales for amazon; more than a product they introduced a service/platform[2] that can be seamlessly integrated to new home appliances, so amazon is effectively expanding its presence into a diverse and conveniently positioned custom/customizable 'points of sale' inside people's homes, making itself more and more ubiquitous as time goes by and more companies and individual innovators adopt their new service/platform, and their investment to accomplish this was little compared to the alternative of investing in manufacturing their own home appliances, but that's not brilliant, that's only natural and expected from a company like amazon.

It also places amazon's brand on not all but many people's minds as a high-tech high-quality home appliances brand by association to the actual home appliances brands, and amazon is not really manufacturing that kind of hardware (...yet), that's the brilliant part (an opportunity that they may or may never exploit, either because non-compete agreements or because it wouldn't make sense for their business plans or because Jeff Bezos decides not to because reasons, an opportunity nonetheless).

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-future-of-food-delivery-1/... [2]: https://www.amazon.com/oc/dash-replenishment-service

Exactly, a cellphone app can get the job done but it is a great cognitive deviation from whatever task you had at hand at the moment you realize you ran out of something(1). So amazon's dash button is not an innovation on getting something done, but get it done faster and more conveniently, and that alone makes sense for an enterprise whose profit depends greatly from understanding consumer behavior. So I agree with TeMPOraL, it is not ridiculous at all.

And there's a bigger picture outside of comparing the convenience between using this little button as opposed to mobile apps, but that's off topic for this branch of the conversation, if you're interested IMHO & my brief reasoning, read this other brach[2] (also because DRY).

(1): Optimally you realize you are about to run out of something before it happens. [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299505