Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics | Hacker News Reader

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics

ycombinator.com

88 pointsrms37 comments

I was a bit disappointed with the Zed Shaw flame war. On a good technical article people started to express their feelings about Zed, avoiding to discuss the technical issues raised.

Still the subject remains shady even it is affecting seriously the hacker world.

[UPDATE] A separate thread was made to discuss the shady issues: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709583

I agree with this very much. Slashdot suffers greatly from this (or it thrives on it, depends on your point of view I guess).

Apple vs Microsoft, Republicans vs Democrats, GPL vs BSD license, RIAA vs the world etc the discussions are always the same and nobody learns a thing.

It's a mindset problem, a flamewar does not do anything to advance the topic it just causes everybody to dig in just a little deeper.

Only to the participants. I actually find many of the arguments interesting, if repetitive. After you have seen the SAME arguments many times though it does get wearing.

Actually, the arguments can be useful to help get newbies try different programs/environments and you explore WHY you agree or disagree with various viewpoints. The emacs vs vi flames I read when I was first getting started caused me to keep trying to use vi, until I was finally able to understand why I found it so difficult. (I just cannot get used to its modes; I continually forget whether I am in insert, append, or command mode and have to go back and fix the goofs that causes.)

EDIT: I should have read down a little further before commenting; the idea of a wiki exploring the differing opinions is excellent from my POV.

The above was actually talking more about the "religious" wars than flaming as such. The best flaming site I have seen was Panda's Thumb back several years ago; they often had hundreds on comments with atheists, creationists, and religious-apologist atheists screaming back and forth at each other, but it was very entertaining, I've rarely read Panda's Thumb for the last few years since they've quit the flaming.

>Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

is the entire guideline, too long for a title.

I know this is off-topic, but your username is slightly misleading. :)

Yes, it's something of a joke. :D http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124391

I don't know when ever I see it I always think root mean square.

"Classic flamewar topics" is interesting enough to define further. Is it a small list of banned arguments? Is it more a set of behaviors?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_%28Internet%29

My favorite of these topics (edit: I meant "classic" on the internet as a whole, not specifically to Hacker News. How many classic flamewar arguments do we really have?) is the discussion about .999 repeating equaling one. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692338 links to a physics forum discussing it for 400 forum pages. It goes on because no one ever gets the right answer because both sides are correct and wrong at the same time and it's completely an issue of definition. The answer is to define the problem more precisely which allows you to argue that the naive perspective is ultimately correct for the hyperreal number system.

.999 wasn't really a flame topic is it? Some people learned stuff they didnt know about infinity. Others presented fairly good arguments for .999... != 1 and we spent time disproving that. ANd others introduced Hyperreal numbers whihc some hadn't heard of.

No one got angry or passionate or flamey as I saw it... the topic never made it much onto the main page and was a nice discussion.

Im not disagree with the sentiment "avoid flame topics" - I just dont think that is a good example.

A better one would be the current TC article on the main page (and all the boring meta discussion on "ban techcrunch" and flaming about pg & ma being buddies).

Right, it wasn't a flame war here, I was referring to the 400 page version on PhysOrg. We could handle the topic -- by the end of the PhysOrg thread (I only read the last page) they're calling each other retards over the definition of continuous for limits.

A topic that gets ugly here sometimes and where no one ever has anything new to say is genes, nationality, and IQ.

Meta discussion is a very different type of flame topic. It's also been extremely important to defining the character of this board so seperating it MetaFilter style is a drastic step. How can we discourage metatalk when it is annoying but allow it when it is interesting?

Ok yes so the thread was a flamewar - but the way I saw the topic was as a conversation starter (rather than just post an Ask HN thread). I doubt many people read past the first page :)

But I take your point.

In terms of meta discussion; all that is fine. I just mean it should be considered "non gratis" to bring up flamey meta topics. Like Ban TC and so forth. It's been discussed a billion times before and always leads to flaming.

EDIT: I also love the rule that says if you've been here for less than a year dont moan about thinks going reddity - that's another pet-hate meta topic of mine :(

A topic that gets ugly here sometimes and where no one ever has anything new to say is genes, nationality, and IQ.

Respectfully agreeing, but sharpening the definition, I would say that the topic rarely gets ugly here on HN (it gets terribly ugly most of the time elsewhere online) and that I personally had a lot of new things to say on that topic the first few times I posted on it here. I do research on that topic

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

that most other online participants have never bothered to do.

In general, a discussion that revolves around the exact definition of pretty much any concept is more or less sure to lead to retarded internet raging.

That's unfortunate because many of the most difficult and interesting discussions, philosophical or otherwise, boil down to the meanings of English words.

I have to disagree. I do a lot of pseudo-philosophical and non-philosophical arguing (my s.o. is a philosophy student), and I've realized that, as years have gone by and I've gotten better at this type of discussion, the best first step is to precisely define what each word is assumed to mean in that context and then proceed to arguing what does that mean to the topic at hand.

As a counter example, I was greatly unnerved the other day at watching a bar discussion between two friends that revolved on whether or not one could make money daytrading. Friend A said "obviously you can't, the market is random", while friend B insisted that "well, with mathematics you can predict the way it will go". This went on for hours (I refused to join) while they both had clearly very different meanings for the words "random", "luck" and "mathematics". I believe that, had they stopped early enough to define those terms, they wouldn't have argued.

Of course, sometimes the discussion is specifically about the definition of a few key words. Even then, I find what really helps is agreeing on some restricted definitions for other "primitive" words and using those primitives to build up definitions for the words in question. For example, person A could argue that selfishness is actually a form of blindness, while person B insists that it is not really so, and one can be selfish while seeing what others are doing. This way they can argue, by having pre-defined what "blind" "see", etc mean in this context.

Discussions about the meaning of words are easily just philosophical traps where one person says A and the other hears B.

I don't feel discussions that break down to the meanings of English words are interesting. Scholasticism went out of favor in part because proving things based on the assumption that Aristotle or the Bible is correct does not help once you question the source. And arguments based on the definition of "is" are also built on a shaky foundation.

Keep pulling and you have two options. You can base things on what you observe, which leads to science, or what you on things you assume which leads no where when others don't agree to the same assumptions. It's only when people have the same assumptions that you can have really interesting discussions such as Math or a good logic puzzle.

Wittgenstein's position. I agree.

I really like cute animal pictures.... it's a shame I have to post those elsewhere. :)

I complain here about inappropriate stuff a lot, and I you know you're kidding but: As far as fluff goes I'll take cute animal pictures over all the other fluff that shows up here.

Obviously the Apple II is far superior to the TRS-80 family for any serious computing task. Ataris are good for gaming and the Commodore 64 has a disk-drive that's too slow for any practical use. As for the MSX machines, they have no soul.

I am sorry. Could not resist.

Note: This post is best viewed at 300 bps.

The Atari wasn't just for games!

Oh, my. Now we've gone and done it...

Well the C64 disk drive was good enough for gaming, I can tell you that for sure.

God told me that if you interpret the bible correctly, it proves that Man's fingers were designed to use vi, not emacs. But only on Windows. Discuss.

Perhaps one of the recurring topics that I think introduce flame wars on here is all of the Mac-PC articles that keep popping up. They never introduce anything new or provide anything beyond attempting to justify fanboydom.

Would it be fair to say that all topics explored in Paul Graham essays,

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

which includes my favorite topic of education reform, are not classic flamewar topics?

It would be fair to say, "use your discretion". Any topic can be presented in an inflammatory manner.

That's an interesting response. That implies that something that is very much a core topic of HN discussion could be nothing but flame bait if the treatment of it in the submission is sufficiently inflammatory.

Exactly. I may enjoy pie, but you won't win my favor by presenting me a pie to the face.

like... Flash?

Instead of restarting flamewars just link to the original flamewar?

That's an interesting idea. Imagine a wikipedia-like site that aimed to be the definitive guide to known flamewars. I'm just trying to comprehend the carnage that such a system would cause between the people who cared about the site for what it represented vs the people who just cared about their varying legs of the debate.

feuerkrieg.com is available.

It would be great if, instead of posting the same arguments over and over, people were editing and strengthening a canonical version of that argument. At least you'd get higher-level flamewars.

The difficulty would be preventing people from deliberately weakening the other side's argument.

Prejudiced users could vote their way into threads in order to support the particular details and rebuttals to which they subscribed.

Then you could use the data from the results to morph it into a dating site. Particularly twisted members could opt for the 'opposites' option. Or you could make it random. You don't know until you turn up for coffee - mwuhahahah!

People said that the internet would make the human race more open and tolerant. I have other ideas.

I've had this idea several times, because there are a lot of discussions (not just flamewars) that end up being repetitive from iteration to iteration, forum to forum, including the classic online beer discussion (a combination of making-fun-of-American-beer, the counterargument that America has several good microbrews, and a friendly discussion about which microbrews and imports people like.)

We should get together and have a hateful and vitriolic exchange about how to put it together.

While we are at it, please avoid FUD, payperpost, PR submarines and tabloid gossip.

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