“Peak HN” Occurences | Hacker News Reader

“Peak HN” Occurences

hn.algolia.com

62 pointsversion_five55 comments

Most are comical enough to almost warrant being auto-flagged for unsubstantive, but some of them are spot on replies to examples of pedantry and an out of touch unsocialized audience within some really fascinating threads, I think this is a cool use of algolia

I saw this one as well some time ago that's sort of the same idea of looking for a certain kind of comment ("why not simply"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415725

and I feel like I have seen other queries along the same lines from time to time

HNers want people to color them things.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Colour me canadian…

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

In my mind "Peak HN" or "Stereotypically HN" has always been this very distinct display of arrogant superiority while pedantically nitpicking some minor fault in OP's comment. Like, someone writes a five paragraph post, clearly an expert in some topic, and the first reply is "Ackshually, you are wrong: You said 'all' in paragraph 3, sentence 12, where you should have said 'some' because I can easily point out a counterexample. Therefore your entire five paragraph post is invalid!" I think it's a pattern all of us (or should I say most of us) have seen...

"Peak HN" is someone claiming your argument implies something you never actually meant, that can only follow through some arm-twisting of logic or reducto absurdum. Happens lot.

Random downvotes out of disagreement.

Oh, so you're saying only things you meant are what you said? Yeah right. Peak HN (This might be the most "meta" thing I've ever done - mockingly saying "Peak HN" while satirizing something mentioned in a comment defining Peak HN in response to a submission about an Algolia search of HN for the phrase "Peak HN." Oh wait, this parenthetical is one step further meta. ← And now that sentence. ← and now that sentence → Oh noooo)

We have to go deeper

> Like, someone writes a five paragraph post, clearly an expert in some topic, …

No, you’re wrong. It’s never five. Usually three, some times four, possibly seven. Never five.

Absolutely, or similarly in response to a detailed blog post or product release: "Actually this could never work because [reason I just thought of]"

False. Although this is good, comments that start with a single sentence “False.” and go downhill from there are my peak HN.

I disagree. Comments that start with a single setence "False." are too few and far between to truly be "peak HN". Comments that start with a single sentence "I disagree." are much more plentiful, as can be verified with Algolia.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Those links reminded me of the classic "by this logic"

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Why not simply search for "False." with Algolia then ?

Too easy. That’s just what they’d expect.

Unsurprisingly, all the first results are now from this post

It might be fun to train a classifier that outputs the "HN Peakness" value of a comment, using the parent comments from this search as positive training samples.

This is peak HN

Nah, peak HN would be someone writing a shitty scraper in Rust to do the same thing without taking the time to realize there’s an algolia api available.

I would argue "peak HN" would be shitting on a side project with no practical purpose that was obviously done for learning/fun because they did something somebody else already did and didn't have a perfectly unique idea.

You'd find way more occurences if you google this, Algolia is really bad and has not improved in years.

Does anyone know why HN submissions that are searching HN almost invariably use Algolia rather than just site:news.ycombinator.com? I have never seen any link or even reference to Algolia outside of HN.

Scroll down to the bottom of every HN page, there is a "Search:" box and it uses Algolia as the search engine.

And Algolia is a YCombinator company: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/algolia

interesting, but what do you mean by "doing it for lulz/fun"?

I've never heard of that business model

A Peak HN comment should include:

* Assumption that all humanity prefers and is extremently competent with the command line, and GUIs are merely there to hinder them.

* A statement about how any kind of tradeoff favouring aesthetics over performance is on a spectrum between stupid and evil.

* Paul Graham quote, as that establishes fact without further evidence.

* A few condescending comments about how you've been coding for a very, very long time - since the times when programming was done properly by experts.

* Absolute assertion that the article is clickbait

If we taught everyone JUST A LITTLE command line, I think we'd all be a bit happier with our computers.

Expecting your first interaction to be effortless is as dismissive of skill and as ridiculous as expecting to be able to play violin while riding a bike on your first interaction with either.

Lets make everyone earn their x86 assembly badge before they are allowed to use a CLI, and work up to any potential additional privileges from there.

Sprinkle in some naive liberalism

And just a dab of main character syndrome

Bonus points for naive [techno-]libertarianism, and conflating the two.

* (deserved) Praise for dang

* Vehement loathing for Facebook, but in love with Tiktok

* Sea-lioning[1] and dismissal of comments where each sentence is not cited with academic papers

1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-int...

And the occasional comment about how the story should never have gone anywhere near the home page.

> A few condescending comments about how you've been coding for a very, very long time - since the times when programming was done properly by experts.

To be fair, the average quality of professional development work has dropped as the number of developers has increased, the demand for developers has increased and the focus on fundamentals in programming related curriculum has decreased.

It's a necessary evil as we have no room for gatekeepers to prevent perfectly adequate developers from helping with the immense amount of work that needs to be done. The downside is putting up with obnoxious MacBook toting soydevs who think their insert hybridization of two tech fads will change the world.

> how you've been coding for a very, very long time

I think comments ignoring or dismissing any technology or tech-industry attitude/habit from more than about five years ago would be even more Peak HN.

* a complaint about the linked page not working without JavaScript (yes, it does not)

* A pained pivot to the responder’s favorite hobby horses

Scrolling through hundreds of replies not about the topic, but a small, pedantic, niche interpretation of it, or events loosely connected to it. So comically so, it's as if bots were written to reply to posts and they miss the point completely.

I know we're not supposed to make socks, but this one was too good to pass up.

This isn't a peak HN green account until you go on a deranged, racist tirade and get it banned within an hour.

Yikes. I am unwilling to take things that far. But, my password is fishprongstudypost953 if anybody wants to steal this account

Is there a way to exclude terms from an hn.algolia.com search? Would be great to exclude this very thread

I would be curious, is there a “CJ sub” somewhere dedicated to HN? Fertile grounds for that

/r/ShitHNSays

Yup. Additionally, https://twitter.com/search?q=shithnsays or search for "the orange site"

This feels like it's one step removed from the sort of people who hate listened to Howard Stern in the 90s. I get it, there are dumb comments. Whatever. It's the Internet. But posting screenshots of random HN comments to some Twitter hashtag so you and your followers can have a laugh? That's something.

edit/ Words.

...and sitting on HN trashing Twitter users is different how, exactly?

People on HN do the same with just about everyone and everything outside the community, all the time. The site guidelines prevent HN from getting what it gives so some people choose to seek catharsis elsewhere.

n-gate.com

Sadly not up to date, it stopped in mid-August 2021.

Don't violate the prime directive.

So funny that the linked article is now just quotes from this thread.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There used to be like 20 of these a day, but the site grew out of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com