> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article.

I’ve said this before on other threads, and it seems to resonate with others, so I’ll say it here too:

I personally don’t care near as much about a single person’s opinion of a particular topic, as much as I care about the discussion of many people around a particular topic.

And by “topic”, in the case of HN, I mean the title of an article.

I often wish HN would just allow titles to get posted and HN folks just have a discussion around that. (Similar to Ask HN, but not necessarily in the form of a question.)

I’m a terribly slow reader, so there’s no way I could take time out of my already busy day to read this (very long, dense) article of a single person’s opinion of a single topic, especially if I don’t even know whether this person is an expert on said topic.

I guess this is particularly true when it’s a subject I’m only interested in on the surface, vs. caring more deeply about a particular subject.

I get much more ROI reading many people’s shorter discussions vs. a lengthy single opinion (again, given the time it would have taken me to read the article).

I have to strongly disagree. The lengthy article has much more thought put into it. It's almost always better researched and the author usually has relevant experience or expertise, and those are usually at least known to the reader in some way or easily discovered.

I have seen many, many cases where a big portion of the top comments are either saying something similar to what the author of the article said, or they are asking a question, or raising a rebuttal, that is already addressed in the article.

Comments are short and probably have close to zero research on average. Experience may play a part, but people don't usually offer up the resume with a comment, so you have no idea if they even have credibility. And there are mountains of witticisms, anecdotes, or emotional arguments that add little to nothing of value to the conversation.

Personally, I almost always read the article and then skim the comments to see if anybody has added any thoughts I might find interesting.

There’s not much to disagree with here.

I simply stated my experience — I never even said my experience was right or that it is wrong to read the article, or that others should experience HN the way I do.

I’m a slow reader and don’t have time to read lengthy articles, and therefore am drawn more to discussion.

You are (likely) a quicker reader and are drawn more to articles.

There’s room for both of us in the world — and on HN (I hope).

You said "I often wish HN would just allow titles to get posted and HN folks just have a discussion around that". If there's anything I can wholeheartedly say I disagree with it's that, so yes there's a lot to disagree with here.

I think that was an inadvertent juxtaposition of the words "just" and "allow": the GP probably didn't mean that links to articles should be forbidden, and only subjects for discussion ("titles") should be allowed to be posted.

At least I read their comment as "I often wish HN would allow, besides links, just titles to get posted and HN folks just have a discussion around that".

Would you still wholeheartedly disagree with that, too?

A part of the problem here is distinguishing which articles are worth reading. I may know that a Dan post is probably good, but if I saw this exact same headline taking me to a long article on <random tech news site>, I'd probably skip it and skim the comments instead, since chances are the article itself is near worthless.

I very much disagree with this. In fact, this article is a perfect counterexample to what you're saying, ironically - it's a lengthy, well thought out essay that the author clearly spent a lot of time thinking about and putting together. Quite honestly, it's very unlikely that any number of pithy HN comments could match up to it, and I say that with a fair amount of respect for the HN community at large. It's just very unlikely they're going to have insights on the same level: the author of the post had at least a couple of weeks of actual concentrated effort to put together thoughts on the topic.

Plus I just have a lot of respect for the author. Dan Luu is a smart guy.

> And by “topic”, in the case of HN, I mean the title of an article.

The thing is, the topic of the actual article is generally more interesting than the topic suggested by a naive reading of the title (as is the case here).

People discussing things based on titles leads to generic discussions that recur again and again and go nowhere. Whereas the actual topic of the article's content is rather more specific and could lead to an actual new and more specific discussion that might actually go somewhere.

Possibly, but I would bet that many people are upvoting these articles based off a combination of the title + the discussions of the title, which would suggest enough people find those two things interesting (which is why it’s at #1 and why most of the comments are around the title vs. the subject).

Also, if the subject is more interesting than the title, then authors should consider being more thoughtful around a title that fits the subject, vs. making sure people click the article.

> Also, if the subject is more interesting than the title, then authors should consider being more thoughtful around a title that fits the subject, vs. making sure people click the article.

The problem with this is that, frequently -- as is the case here I'd say -- there is no easy way to properly pin down the actual topic in the space of a reasonable title. The title will necessarily be more broad than the actual topic; if you in general take titles as wholly delineating the topic, rather than suggesting the general space they're in, you're making a mistake.

Sticking only to those topics that can be wholly expressed in the space of a brief title is a big limitation on topics; as I said above, taking titles as topics just leads to the same discussions over and over.

I absolutely understand where you're coming from here, but in practice and reality, the point of the title really is to make sure people click the article.

I agree about the comments here often being the most interesting part.

But I think that the best way to start the conversation is usually with a well-written article.

If there would only be a title and no article, I'm pretty sure that I would find the comments to be less interesting.

But maybe I'm wrong, and since my argument is based on the original article being well-written, maybe it isn't true for most posts.

But I still think that I would rather try to find the posts with good articles, and just ignore the rest, and hopefully, that is what the ranking system does (at least help with).

Conversely, often it's more interesting to read a single person's well researched opinion than a dozen one-off comments.

But on Hackernews those one-off comments can come from years of studying the same topic. Sometimes even explaining why the long well researched opinion missed something so important that the whole article is wrong.

No, they dont. Which is pretty clear everytime something you do know a lot about pops up. Majority of it is just people shooting their opinions over coffee break. Which is fine, we go here to relax and slack, but does not produce super educated opinions.

I guess it depends on the topic.

If the topic is some change in the latest release of a programming language, I usually find the comments here to be helpful.

But if the topic is global politics or economy, then sure, the quality here isn't much better than some other random social media site.

    I often wish HN would just allow titles to get 
    posted and HN folks just have a discussion around 
    that. (Similar to Ask HN, but not necessarily in the 
    form of a question.)

Sounds like a real recipe for hivemind to me. I mean, any community struggles with hivemind a bit. But, at least with discussions centered around articles that exist outside HN, we get a little fresh air.

    especially if I don’t even know whether 
    this person is an expert on said topic.

He's a pretty respected voice, or at least popular on HN.

I find it very valuable to look into the authors of linked articles, see which authors pop up on HN frequently, etc.

Gives you an idea of who the leading voices in the industry are, helps you to know which way the winds are blowing.

Especially for somebody with a slower reading speed this may be crucial; helps to understand which article may actually be worth the time investment.

Sure, but then we’re discussing the topic as set by the post’s title, not the actual topic(s) addressed by the post’s content, which are quite a bit more complex and nuanced than a title of a few characters could ever convey.

What if we want to hold a conversation about the actual post content? Should we add a tag such as [please read]?

Why not both? There is good discussion being held on both topics in this thread.

That’s the benefit of nested comments, to allow different top-level discussions where others can discuss what is being shared by top-level commenters.

My original point was to not be “depressed” by others choosing to not take the time to read the article, and have a discussion on the topic rather than the subject.

> I will note that I often wish Dan Luu was a bit less apparently-uniformly-confident in some of the statements he writes. He does back up what he says, but he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating.

Dan Luu is one of my favorite currently-active bloggers. He's obviously a smart person with a good amount of experience in specific areas.

However, I have to agree with your assessment. He has a tendency to present his personal anecdotes and perspective as the infallible ground truth and build elaborate essays and logic around it. I hesitate to talk about it because I think his blog is valuable, albeit if the reader can take it as one person's perspective rather than the absolute truth.

The biggest example of this effect is his Twitter thread about his tendency to fail interviews ( https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 ). He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API. It's not at all surprising that anyone would be struggle to pass interviews like this, but he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him.

The interview topic is especially challenging because blaming the interviewer is so very appealing to his audience of developers (who all abhor interviews and hate rejection even more). I think my disappointment comes from the fact that he's well-positioned to display some humility and teach some lessons about how someone can learn from their shortcomings, yet instead he uses his platform to further demonize his interviewers and make some worst-case assumptions about why he didn't get these jobs.

I think the best way to read this blog, like any, is to remember that the author is just another person with another set of perspectives and opinions. There's a lot of value there, as long as you take it with a grain of salt and remain open to other lines of reasoning.

I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview. In which case you are not hiring Dan Luu, but a different guy who has most likely internalised a different world-view and set of values. Even if you assume he can compartmentalize his interview performance skills, he will have at least devoted time to that, instead of to something "more useful".

I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.

So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider how your interview process might interact with such a person. If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is."

Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a large number of developers with attitudes and experience that lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions with tech interview processes because those processes may be fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer and whether that would be useful when added to the existing team. It could be that such developers would be as good or better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-winning interview performances.

> I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview.

This is the problematic logic I was trying to highlight: It's written as though he's infallible. He knows the correct answers to the interview questions, but he also deduces what his interviewers are thinking and why they're wrong.

The other possibility is that maybe the interviewers know what they're doing when they decline him, even when he answers the questions correctly. Interviews are about more than just reciting the correct answers to the questions, but he only discusses them as a sort of pass/fail quiz where the candidate is supposed to guess what the interviewer wants to hear.

My perspective is likely quite different as a hiring manager. The part where he talks about Palantir walking him out the door despite correctly answering the questions as fast as they can deliver is the kind of thing that happens when the interviewers agree that someone is smart, but isn't a good fit for the team. If you do enough interviews, you eventually come across people far more brilliant and successful than yourself whom you would nevertheless not really see fitting into your company's work culture. Someone who openly boasts about dodging interview questions and debating interviewers because they think they can read the interviewer's mind (and they are wrong) fits this description. You know they'll do fantastic things somewhere, but they're not the kind of person you're looking for to fill the open position on your team.

> I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.

Neither do I! I never meant to imply as much. Dan posted the long Twitter thread over a period of several weeks, so it appeared in my timeline frequently. I only brought it up as an example of his writing style, not his career.

I've not gotten the job offer from some interviews in which I aced the tech but in which I did not 'fit' (how do I know, well recruiters and people from company told me but also I knew, I often either breeze through interviews or I fail miserably and these I breezed)

In one interview where I would have gotten it but didn't the reason was basically I wasn't submissive, the tech lead was in my opinion rude and so when he made some technical mistakes I pointed them out. Why did I do that? Because I did not need the job. If I had needed the job I would have been submissive.

Perhaps a lot of interviews fail to hire Dan because the interview process is geared towards hiring someone who needs the job. Why is this? No idea, especially as lots of interviews take place with someone who already has a job and the new place wants to attract. But for some reason companies want to attract flies with vinegar and not honey, contra the old adage.

on edit: regarding on why I did that, well I also did it because the lead was rude. Otherwise I wouldn't have pointed out when they were wrong.

What do you mean when you say "hiring a guy like Dan Luu"? If I were to be on a team with a guy like Dan Luu, what might I expect?

Im asking as someone who does not generally read his blog.

The dude is a good writer, but not a rockstar engineer.

I used to work with Dan Luu, and he's a far better social media writer than he is an engineer.

Not sure how I feel about an anon account presumably created for the sole purpose of denigrating someone's ability.

A kid showing their age.

When I started at a company, I listened to stand-ups of 'yeah 4 weeks' and whined I could do it -today-. And I could. I was a rockstar, everyone else was an old lump.

FF to today and I realize how much I didn't know. Mostly business relations, relations with product, proper testing and pipeline integration, and honestly...just thinking. I used to be prolific and just write and write. Today I think way more than I write, and accomplish more.

Really trying to keep this in mind lately. The code is the easy part.

This would be more meaningful if we knew what you think makes a rockstar engineer.

Some people value extreme speed.

Others are impressed by somebody who will dive down a rabbit hole and follow however deep it leads, discovering the linker bug or kernel driver interaction that causes a failure, and patching it.

Or maybe you are impressed that they go away for a month, talking to nobody, and come back with a complete system all ready to ship.

Or they write libraries that everybody uses because they are so exactly what people need.

Or they are always available to explain things to junior people and get them going in the right direction.

Each of those would be unusually valuable, at some places, and would have trouble getting any recognition, at others.

The dude couldn't write code. Not a bad hardware engineer though.

> He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API.

I think describing what he's doing as "bragging" is fundamentally misreading him. He's just very honest, regardless of how people will perceive it. And he needs to work in environments where that trait will be perceived positively, because he feels it's not an option to turn it off.

I'm sure that, for people who put up a social front as easily as they breathe, Dan's style can be viewed as simply a more elaborate social front, a form of peacocking that he feels he can get away with because of his technical skill.

It's a weird world we live in, where being honest is viewed as the strangest, most exotic and elaborate conceit.

> he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him.

In the thread you linked, he links another thread (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447268693075841024) where his interviewer was wrong. And what's fun about Dan Luu is, he actually cares about answering a question correctly more than he cares about the intense pressure to "play the game" - that is, to conform, be agreeable, and affirm the viewpoint of whoever has power in a situation so that they like him. He wants to work in a position where that tendency is valued. Sadly, it usually isn't.

Personally I don't take it to the extreme he does, but I admire him for doing so. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with you; it is the world that's wrong.

You can adapt to survive in that wrong world, sure, but that doesn't make the observation incorrect.

The most popular writers on this site (and others) have this habit of presenting their opinion as the ground truth and it annoys the heck out of me. There are VERY few things I can be confident about, I don't pretend to be that smart. Then you get people like Jordan Peterson who present a mix of truth and unsourced, unverifiable nonsense with the same confidence and charisma, who become thought leaders. Nobody is going to listen to the person saying "I'm not sure" or "I don't know".

I read the article so I'm gonna respond here ;)

As a counter-anecdote I'll offer my experience working for a company that built large precision machinery. Many of the parts of said machinery were built by subcontractors. The quality was extremely high. We did do certain things in house if they require special expertise and we did have the capability to do rapid prototyping but it wouldn't make any business sense for us to purchase all the equipment to make all those parts that we subcontracted.

I think this is common in many industries. (Automotive?)

Even with software this is far less than clear cut. There's plenty of times where you should not build it yourself and the quality stuff isn't always terrible. Seems like there's some cherry-picking going on in the examples re: bad software. Sure, there's lots of bad software, but there's also awesome software that works really well. Building it yourself isn't a guarantee that it'll work well. 90% of the time the people that think they can do better if they build it themselves can't, they just don't know it yet. And sure Kyle is great but there are plenty of solid databases built before he was around (before he was born?) by companies like IBM and Microsoft.

I've seen companies build in-house tooling that's much worse than what's available off the shelf and have an endless drain of resources due to that.

Build vs. buy isn't an easy call. I'll agree with that.

I felt like there was a self contradiction in the essay. You can't get great software but you can get great engineers that will build the great software in house? I don't think your chances of finding the team that can build that are any greater. You're just as likely to hire a bunch of people you think can do this and then find out they can't. 5 years later. Which sort of jives with the commentary of experts doing shoddy work...

EDIT: I'd also say that the examples of the stuff that was built in-house that was superior might be a case of survivorship bias.

EDIT2: Thinking more about machines... motors, sensors, cables, connectors, bolts, power supplies, pumps, linear rails, screws, etc. etc. all of which you buy, never make, the quality is generally very good, and it's almost unimaginable that you can be completely vertically integrated.

I've never worked in the automotive industry, but I've worked adjacent to it occasionally.

The amount of effort put into ensuring that suppliers do what they need to do and do it well is huge. Companies always have two (or more) suppliers and if you keep only to the letter of the contract, you get cut.

They can afford to put so much effort into managing suppliers because volumes are large and margins are low.

There are also cultural issues at play; he makes the point that things that are inevitable in one culture are unthinkable in another and different industries have different cultures

The difference between machinery and software in this example is that one is outsourcing manufacturing and the other design.

When you outsource manufacturing you're asking the other party to create exact replicas according to very specific specs your own engineers created.

With software the outsourcing usually includes outsourcing a large part of the design, which is inevitable, as there is no significant manufacturing you can outsource. Writing the software is creating the detailed specs. In software there is only product design, you don't really have to put a lot of effort into creating exact copies of the original design.

Linear rails -- THK. Pumps -- Iwaki. Optical glass & microscopes -- Kenko, Nikon, Canon. Sensors/Switches/Relays -- Omron. Imaging, Passives, Semiconductors -- Toshiba, Epson, Panasonic. Chips -- Renesas.

All made in Japan. Few or no Silicon Valley equivalents. Makes you wonder.

Consumer product build quality and outsourcing quality are the exact same problem. Somebody is making a thing and they don't make it well and the customer isn't happy. There is nothing special about the problem, it's simply hard to build things well. When you prioritize "shipping" over quality, you make crap. If you try to avoid the difficulty of quality by hiring somebody else to do it and they also prioritize "shipping" over quality, you buy crap.

Re: "getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally", they either paid the wrong people, or they were trying to solve the wrong problem, or weren't good at using the product. If you're making Toyotas and you buy your parts from CheapPartCo, chances are good you end up with a crap car. If you buy your parts from Denso, at least you have the chance it will turn out well. If you take the Denso parts and assemble them terribly, you still end up with a crap car. And if you shouldn't have even used that part because your overall design was crap, you also end up with a crap car.

I'd say it's more likely the average person/company/etc will not make something well. Not only does it take more skill and hard work to make things well, they end up more expensive. If things are made well they probably took a lot more work to make them well, or the people who make things well are in higher demand. Show me a company that pays a premium for good vendors and full training for all their staff and holds back products until they pass a Steve Jobs-level of quality engineering, and I'll show you a company whose products work well, and probably charge a premium. (The only exception I know of is Toyota, because they are crazy enough to literally stop a production line just to troubleshoot a tiny issue. Their focus on quality has led to efficiency which reduces cost and increases production. But this is all Lean 101)

And this isn't a tech-specific problem because everything in the world has quality issues. The reason GM couldn't make a half-decent car while Toyotas were rock solid for decades was simply working harder on quality. You have to work hard to make something work well.

A bit different. End user/who decide to buy/whose money is used/ are often different for B2B products.

It's like most people don't read carefully or for comprehension: https://jakeseliger.com/2022/01/31/most-people-dont-read-car...

(A few of the replies I've gotten purely answered the title and didn't discuss the content.)

Most people can’t. “Read carefully or for comprehension” would probably translate to level 4/5 prose literacy skills in the NCES NAAL (National Center for Education Statistics National Assessment of Adult Literacy). Recent survey puts this group (level 4/5) at 12% of the adult population. Levels 4 and 5 are no longer separated because of the small percentage of people that fall into group 5. Level 4 tasks require you to be able to understand something in the presence of distractors. Just to make up an example, think about the last time you sent an email to someone that had two questions in it. Did they answer both questions? (I’m actually a bit unsure that this falls in level 4.)

(Level 5 includes tasks such as “compare and contrast complex information, or to generate new information making high-level inferences or using specialized background knowledge”.)

> Just to make up an example, think about the last time you sent an email to someone that had two questions in it.

Pretty often they are answering easy question and leaving the harder one sleep. Pretty often, the goal is to get rid of you email as fast as possible so that they can go back to what they actually want to be doing.

In Marketing/Outreach, we're encouraged to write at a 9-10 year old reading level.

Twelve percent?? That is scary.

This explains so much about our ambient media environment and misinformation.

> ... they think I’m going to tell them the secret, and instead I tell them there is no real secret, just execution and practice.

Ha!

> …he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating.

A.k.a. “avoiding weasel words”. I don’t mean to be clever here, it’s just that it’s far more efficient to assume that reader can make their own informed decision, and give them citations & instructions for reproducibility to help them along the way, rather than shovel a bunch of weasel words into the parts of your writing that are less grounded in reproducible facts.

There are also different expectations for blog posts and heavily researched&vetted articles.

I don't think what you're calling weasel words are weasel words.

"Up to 50% faster!" is weasel wording. It says "slower or faster, but not more than 50% faster," but it sounds like it's saying faster.

What GP is asking for is calibrating for uncertainty. Phrases like "I've seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been part of," or "study[ref] after study[ref] has confirmed this" help clarify what premises and hypotheses are well-supported by prior work/experience and what is the author's speculation. IMO It serves a useful purpose!

> IMO It serves a useful purpose!

I have to disagree! I simply do not understand what useful purpose it serves—IF we are allowed to assume that our readers have a proficient level of prose literacy. The default assumption, when someone is talking or writing, is that they are communicating their own opinions and thoughts, experiences, anecdotes.

I don’t know about you, but when I think back to taking writing classes in school, if I wrote something like “I've seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been part of” in my paper, any good writing teacher I’ve ever had would cross it out. Same as “it is my opinion that” or “I have recently started to form some beliefs in the matter at hand after reviewing some materials that came into my possession” or other… filler. It pads out the document and only tells us things that we should already know, or be able to figure out.

The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from factual claims and evidence is… well… something you’d expect from a proficient reader!

I feel like I'm missing something here.

> The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from factual claims and evidence is… well… something you’d expect from a proficient reader!

How does a proficient reader separate facts from opinions if good writing doesn't disambiguate facts and opinions? Do they just assume?

e.g.: Butter is about as healthy as vegetable oil. Arugula is healthier than lettuce.

I can cite a meta-analysis for one of the above statements. The other is just my opinion, and I have done no research into the topic. How would a proficient reader tell them apart if there's no calibrating for uncertainty?

Side note: I went through the original blog post again, and there are lots of examples of Dan Luu doing exactly what I'm writing about, to the point where I'm confused why the original commenter thinks he's not using a different tone based on uncertainty.

Examples:

"I once watched, from the inside, a company undergo this cultural shift"

"I've both worked at companies that have tried to contract this kind of thing out as well as talked with many people who've done that"

> How does a proficient reader separate facts from opinions if good writing doesn't disambiguate facts and opinions? Do they just assume?

Facts and opinions are not different qualities of the same claim, but different claims to begin with. “Butter is about 18% water, by weight” is a factual claim and “butter is about as healthy as vegetable oil” is probably opinion because the word “healthy” is, well, often vague and not something people agree on, at least in this context.

> Side note: I went through the original blog post again, and there are lots of examples of Dan Luu doing exactly what I'm writing about, to the point where I'm confused why the original commenter thinks he's not using a different tone based on uncertainty.

Yes, I get a sense that there may be some more cogent complaint that the original commenter has, a complaint which provoked the comment, but I can’t figure out what that complaint is from the comment.

Just that people who complain about tone often have something else to complain about, but tone is more obvious.

Nothing in Dan Luu’s writing is ever ambiguous. Quite the opposite.

He just writes in the same voice for both researched facts/studies and personal anecdotes. But it’s always very clear which is which, and an informed reader should (IMO) not have a problem differentiating.

The commenter you’re replying to is objecting to unnecessary couching and cloaking of opinion/anecdote. And I think there’s very, very little of that in Dan Luu’s writing — and it comes off as a “matter-of-fact tone.”

I disagree. it sometimes gives me that feeling as well even though I like the guy and his blog. i don't know if it's a cultural thing. i'm no native english storage

People hold beliefs of different levels of confidence. I have some opinions I’m very confident in and others that are merely vague hunches. My level of confidence in something is the signal I’m trying to convey, not merely the fact that it is my thought at all.

It can also be useful to communicate brief info about why I have a particular confidence level. “I had a friend who…” vs “I’ve seen several times…” vs “Several studies have found…”

> when I think back to taking writing classes in school

Yeah I think most of that stuff was bullshit. Or, being more charitable, they were trying to convey a general idea like “don’t overly hedge” with a coarse rule like “never use hedging language”.

I think most writing “rules” tend to be coarse approximations at what good writing really is. Another example is “give your essays a general structure, introduce your main point, etc.” => five paragraph essays.

I hedge a lot in HN comments. Uncharitably, because I’m thinking defensively about how people respond to my comments. Charitably, because it’s more accurate that way.

Long-form content suffers from hedging more that HN comments do. As a writer, you may think highly of your confidence level, and you may want to communicate the difference between a claim that you’re confident about and a claim that you are unsure about, but the right way to do that is to provide the information necessary for other people to come to the same conclusion. If that’s not possible, or it’s not germane, or you’re just busy doing something else, then you don’t do it, and that’s okay. It’s often just irrelevant for people to understand how much you believe something.

The tradeoff I see here is between clarity and precision. If you focus too much on precision, the clarity of whatever you’re trying to say suffers.

"The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from factual claims and evidence is… well… something you’d expect from a proficient reader! "

The ability to communicate the level of confidence in a statement is something I hope for in proficient communicators.

I'm not sure "efficient" is the word you're looking for here. For a given post, there's only one of the poster, and presumably many readers...

You’re going to have to explain more of the argument, because I don’t follow.

It sounds like you are arguing that writers should spend more time spelling things out for readers which aren’t very good at reading comprehension. That doesn’t seem very efficient—it wastes most people’s time, since the writer is spending more time spelling things out explicitly and avoiding ambiguity, all of the readers with decent reading comprehension skills have to spend more time sifting through crap that doesn’t add value to the text (for them), and only the people with lower reading comprehension skills get any benefit. People with lower reading comprehension skills are less likely to be reading text-heavy blogs in the first place!

The following claim may be controversial—generally, there is a tradeoff between clarity and precision, and the right tradeoff depends on the context and what your goals are. The internet, and forums like HN, distort our perception of where the correct tradeoff is, because the people complaining about lack of precision are the loudest. You should be aware of who your audience really is… is it people capable of interpreting claims in persuasive documents? Or is it people who decide to complain on HN?

I think the additional clarity benefits smart people too. And fast readers can read faster over text with redundancy than maximally cryptic prose.

The sweet spot of course is a short, clear and correct explanation, but finding that can take a lot of effort.

Giving a confidence level is different from using weasel words. Weasel words make statements weaker or even vacuous. Confidence levels make statements more precise. Here's an example:

    statement: Alice stole the briefcase

    +weasel_wording: I think it's possible Alice could have stolen the briefcase 

    +confidence_level: I'd bet 5:1 that Alice stole the briefcase

Also note that I didn't say I wanted Dan to write less confidently. I wanted him to convey more varied confidence.

If there is any doubt regarding the stealing, then in this example i prefer the weasel wording version. The first one is incorrect, the last one you're suggesting an accuracy that you can't really back up, in order to convince someone.

So in this case the weasel wording doesn't make the statement weaker as it shows strength to admit you may be wrong.

I agree some people hide behind uncertainty and "weasel" in order to avoid accountability for anything they say.

What that requires though is they caveat everything.

I really respect people who say they are 99% sure and 60% sure when appropriate.

It requires a level of honesty not just to the audience but to the self to admit openly what you are and aren't sure about.

Is it more honest? Or is it just more self-centered, or more defensive, or more timid? Are you admitting that you aren’t sure about something, or are you brazenly assuming that people care about how confident you are about things, or are you defensively trying to say the least possible?

Framing this as a matter of “honesty” is, well reductive.

Your confidence is irrelevant to the discussion, unless there’s some particular reason which makes it relevant. A good reader should not hang much weight on your confidence anyway.

> Is it more honest? Or is it just more self-centered, or more defensive, or more timid?

Yes it is more honest. Pretending certainty where you don't have none is lying and pretty often has exact that effect. It is way more egoistic and self centered to act with certainty just so you dont look "defensive" or "timid".

Because then you are exchanging truth for feeling good from appearing strong.

> are you brazenly assuming that people care about how confident you are about things, or are you defensively trying to say the least possible?

This does not make any sense as accusation. You are expressing level of confidence. You can do that independently of whether "people care". It is also perfectly OK to defensively say the least possible. Literally nothing wrong with that.

Aggressively saying maximum, even if you know it is likely half truth at best, is much much worst.

> he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating

At least the parts about build vs buy sound extremely familiar to me. Setting up and integrating something you’ve bought often takes as much or more time than building it yourself.

The best argument for buying is that you’d make all stakeholders equally unhappy.

Reminds me of hiring an in-house team of Salesforce engineers to build out and maintain the hugely expensive CRM you bought because you… didn’t want to spend engineering time on a CRM.

The new CTO getting drunk on sales Kool aid and deciding to move many functions to Salesforce was a strong signal of incompetence at a previous workplace.

I read it but it's a mind dump that's not well structure so it's hard to follow. If asked I couldn't give you an answer to the title. I still don't know, " Why it's hard to buy things that work well." He has a lot of citations and footnotes but if it's hard to follow then the essay becomes a bunch or random thoughts which get condensed into the title. I suspect that's why most of the comments relate only to it.

It is very common to see HN commenters only address the title not the contents of the web page, a genuine phenomenon IMO.

Experiment: No titles, just URLs. What would happen.

I have some experience with this as I freqently stream edit HTTP response bodies to make customised web pages using only simple HTML wrapped around only the data I am interested in, no cruft. For example, when I do web searches I process the response, i.e., the SERP, into simplified HTML, e.g., <li><a href=[url]>[url]</a>. I do not include titles.

Titles can be descriptive and helpful, however I find most times they are a distraction. Think about the "clickbait" tactic. It is heaviliy reliant on misleading titles.

I'd personally just stop using hacker news. Clickbait is a trait of media consumption for decades now, we have to learn to live with it.

> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article.

This is a HN pattern as old as the hills. If the headline invites bikeshedding, most people will bikeshed. If the article is long and complex, almost no one will read the article. This one has both.

To be fair, I read it, but not all the way to the end. This was almost a novel.

Because I’m a writer, I’m going to be a bit pedantic here. Novels start around 50,000 words and usually take several hours to read. ;)

Novella then? Guess that’s still not quite what the article is, but it’s a bit hard to get through in one sitting.

Huh? It's not bikeshedding to focus on a particular subtopic.

You are depressed for other reasons. People read the title and connected more with the title than the hard-to-read and dense article. If anything, call it a click-baity title.

It is hard to buy consumer products that work well also. Look at the number of things you order on Amazon, and see how satisfied you are with stuff. All the synthetic material low-quality stuff.

So not only did you not read the article , you are offended at the idea that you should have to read the article at all ?

Comments here are often more interesting than the linked articles. I think the 'comment on title' phenomenon is acceptable and possibly good here.

The article is yet another one about supply and demand that ignores first day of microeconomics price theory:

If supply is low, demand is high, the price goes up.

In what way is the article about that? How is Apple getting a better chip by learning to do it themselves, because cpu manufacturers are trapped by misaligned benchmarks, just a trivial statement about supply and demand?

It isn't about supply and demand at all, but about another, even more basic, economic concept: incentives, and a second relatively modern economic concept, information asymmetries.[1] Over-summarising and over-simplifying:-

"Third-party service providers are incentivised to minimise their costs. If their clients cannot assess the quality of their service and/or end-users cannot reward or penalise them based on the quality of the services, then quality is poor, because it is cheaper to not provide services and later argue about it than to provide the service. Third party deficiencies/misbehaviour get so bad sometimes that there are no gains from trade and occasional losses.

"Internally, inside companies, the incentives may be to act similarly to third-parties, or they may not. This depends on "culture"."

And here the essay would be improved with an analysis of the compnents of "culture" that matter. It talks about trustworthiness of company leadership, but that is only one factor, surely.

1. Akerlof's "Market for Lemons" paper is the seminal one here.

Perhaps the strategic decisions of one the largest and one of the most complex organisations in human history cannot be explained by simple reference to undergraduate microeconomics

And if the market is inefficient, the pricing will be irrational (for certain ideas of what “irrational” means).