Ask HN: What was your favorite comment in 2020?

[gftsantana]

Comments on Hacker News can be very well thought, I'm often impressed with the quality of discussion, although I don't participate much. I'm curious, what do you think was the most insightful comment of 2020?

[ra7]

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22045384:

> I sometimes find myself thinking, "why would you do that!?" and that's when I realize that what that really means is I'm the one who's not understanding something. I should be asking myself, "why would they do that?"

This is my favorite because it’s simple, but so powerful. I’ve tried to stick to this advice since I saw that comment. And I think it has made me kinder and much more willing to empathize with others and give chances.

Every time I find myself judging or criticizing others, I keep reminding myself of this comment and almost always end up with a different perspective.

[orky56]

We've all become critics and no longer appreciate the world around us. Becoming aware of the social fabric and the associated norms can be daunting initially but also strangely fulfilling once we learn to recognize them. I've used similar logic as a designer to first understand why things are designed the way they are before impulsively recommending how things could be done better. It's a fine balance between recognizing chaos and channeling it for sustainable benefit.

[giantg2]

That question doesn't get asked enough. I'm tired of getting downvoted with no comments. I'm tired of people not understanding the subtleties of my positions and arguing against me just based on a communication issue.

[Bakary]

Why not ask "Why do people misinterpret my comments" as per the concept in the quote and start from that to improve the way you communicate?

If people frequently misinterpret you, it's logically sound to look at the common denominator

[giantg2]

It's not that frequent. It seems it's just a subset if the readers who misapply what I say. If it were a large part of the group, then I would be looking at myself more closely. I would guess that everyone has been misunderstood at some point on here.

[veddox]

Just yesterday I was about to downvote somebody for what I thought was a ludicrous suggestion. But when I started writing a reply, I realized that a), he may actually have had a point, and b), though I was still sceptical, I didn‘t actually understand the issue well enough to refute him.

[The_rationalist]

I would even say that if you're not frequently getting downvoted with no comments, then your comments are harmfully not enough contrarian. If only there could be a webextension that would act as a meta recommender-system for HN comments that would highlight such sufficiently contrarian authors then I could quickly, heuristically read those more than average, valuable comments.

[giantg2]

You can just scroll to the bottom. That's where all the downvoted comments go.

[The_rationalist]

Being on the bottom is an aggregate that factor in the recency of the comment, isn't it? Moreover ideally only a subset of comments would be highlighted (e.g not the ones downvoted too much) and would benefit from making stats from the user comments history in order to increase the signal to noise ratio

[giantg2]

True, in the absence of downvoted comments, it would just be the older ones on the bottom.

[Bakary]

As a corollary to that person's insight, I've noticed that the reflex to judge and criticize is very strong. Avoiding unnecessary criticism and judgment and focusing on your own life takes constant conscious effort, even though it's probably one of the most logical choices you can make. This is particularly true when the people whom you criticize are manifestly doing quite well in general compared to you.

Commenting online can be an exception of course. Let's not rid ourselves of every sin...

[murm]

> This is particularly true when the people whom you criticize are manifestly doing quite well in general compared to you.

In these cases someone might be doing hundred things right in their life and the one mistake is what catches all the attention and provokes criticism. I feel like if only humans could view themselves with the same ruthless no-excuses mentality as they do view others they would immediately realize how much there is in their own life to fix and fixing all that would probably keep them too busy to unnecessarily point fingers at others.

(I'm not saying that criticism is always unnecessary, but that there's probably all kinds of low-hanging fruit in people's own lives that they're not just able to perceive. This blind spot of course applies to me too which I find frustrating at times).

[vulcan01]

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1170/

[ipnon]

This anonymous comment on how to be a better sandbagger, minimizing the work you do at your job so you can maximize your salary to time spent ratio.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300272

The ethics are obviously debatable, but its an elaborate application of the hacker ethos to the problem of feeling like you're wasting away 9 to 5, Monday to Friday on a job that in the grand scheme of things no one really cares about or makes any real difference.

[el_dev_hell]

Damn, that was a rollercoaster!

Ethics aside, I respect their self awareness the most.

[wallflower]

> On the way home from last day of school before summer holidays I saw some bird chick on the ground, next to a closed wall of bricks, on the walkway, between one-way street with heavy traffic and a steep hill on the other side...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24002955

[tashi]

Wow. I would gladly buy a whole book of bird stories, or really stories about anything, from this person.

[sigil]

This comment explaining that no, AlphaFold really is a breakthrough:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25306954

This comment on EUV fab processes sent me down a rabbit hole. I had no idea how much the state of the art has improved!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131424

Another rabbit hole comment, this time on compact nuclear fusion and REBCO tape:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24632653

This comment that reined in the hyperbole around GPT-3, while still leaving space for fun and exploration, struck a nice balance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346972

[adamredwoods]

Not from 2020 but I discovered it this year: from oraguy on making a change in the oracle source code:

> - Submit the changes to a test farm consisting of about 100 to 200 servers that would compile the code, build a new Oracle DB, and run the millions of tests in a distributed fashion.

> - Go home. Come the next day and work on something else. The tests can take 20 hours to 30 hours to complete.

> - Go home. Come the next day and check your farm test results. On a good day, there would be about 100 failing tests. On a bad day, there would be about 1000 failing tests. Pick some of these tests randomly and try to understand what went wrong with your assumptions. Maybe there are some 10 more flags to consider to truly understand the nature of the bug.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

[SilasX]

Great summary of all the things websites do wrong, which break accessibility and your general ability to build upon them with other tools:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324718

And a related, more recent comment from 2020 that identified a key failure mode:

> We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25489203

[tamersalama]

> Nobody ever looks at a person driving a ferrari and thinks, "wow, they must have washed a lot of dishes to afford that car," and yet we still think "if I just wash these dishes hard enough I'll drive a ferrari one day."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049978

[superasn]

I found most of the comments in thread pretty insightful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043088

But i found this one comment which really resonated with me:

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine.

<snip>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043088

[backing]

> As someone who has personally had to use Alteryx in multiple projects, fuck Alteryx. What an absolute garbage piece of software.

I've already written a rant about it before and I don't have the energy to repeat myself, but do not fool yourself into thinking switching from excel to Alteryx is doing yourself any favors. You're just trading one monster for another.

Save yourself a huge amount of money, not to mention your sanity and just take the time to learn some Python, Julia, literally anything else to get the same results faster, more reliably, and not be locked into that noveau Oracle-esque nightmare.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791017

[tkgally]

One category of comment I find particularly interesting are personal reflections on career experiences. Here are three:

“... As I became more senior and had junior employees working alongside me, I could see how quickly they would get frustrated when they couldn’t perform at my level. ...”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23861738

“... I spent years at a time not working or even thinking about how to make money. ... I can tell you that for me personally I don't think it was ideal. ...”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23947858

“... I knew years before finishing [my Ph.D.] that I was just not cut out for a life in academia, and positioned myself in the best way I knew how for a life in industry, but I did not anticipate just how truly painful the experience would be. ...”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25446582

[jds375]

This top level comment chain explaining quantum teleportation was great and insightful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25466836

[mrkwse]

Perhaps not the most insightful, but definitely my favourite:

> I'd rate the news as "vibing" on a scale of clickbait to party for the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25035508

[corobo]

I didn't want to comment while this post was doing the front page but your comment made my day yesterday thank you

[mrkwse]

I got a lot of joy from your assessment so likewise

[the_only_law]

Can't find the thread, but there was a big thread about being a poor developer where one commenter had claimed they left software for networking because "it involved more systems-thinking than logic-thinking" and that that made it better suited to him. It put in words and helped me describe the same about myself as well helped me understand why I wasn't good at certain things. I'm just not willing to take the pay / potential pay-cut like they did.

[brundolf]

I got a really good laugh out of this one, and if you stretch the definition a bit you might be able to call it insightful:

> By the way, I decided to also quick summarize the usual HN threads that have the trigger word iPhone in it...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23003595

[pmiller2]

Not terribly insightful, but this is definitely my favorite comment that I made:

> Yeah, TIL Mathematica knows what a goat is, and can recognize one on sight.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489614

I had fun writing that. :)

[brainbag]

I've actually been trying to find my top quote of 2020 again, so if anyone knows it I'd love to get a link. Someone mentioned an approach to optimizing for removing annoyances instead of new improvements. As a parent of a toddler in quarantine and a busy startup cofounder, my past processes for optimizing for ever-higher quality of life have largely been unavailable. Once I started looking around for annoyances, I realized there were so many mostly small ones. I began the process of resolving them, and it's been very satisfying.

[bobbydreamer]

Mine is this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23100864

dmoreira 12 hours ago [-] doing it consistently over a long period of time. It took me years to realize that all nighters and overwork were a big mistake. What truly works is to show up everyday consistently for years. Like Bill said, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

[tutfbhuf]

Can't remember the Headline, but it was something regarding Microkernel usage on constrained devices. In case the most stripped down version of linux does not fit.

[Samantha97]

>Neural nets share as much with biological brains as decision trees do with forests: nothing at all.

[The_rationalist]

They do share some concepts to some extent, approximately. Notably the idea of activation function and of backpropagation. But yes clearly they're too different in most cases to make valid analogies between them.

It's still an open question why we can't port a biological neural brain on regular CPU (a neumomorphic system) One could say it's because emulating a brain (e.g Blue brain) require too much compute and/or that we lack observability (we can't easily records all the state data that constitute a brain) but that doesn't preclude emulating a simple brain such as the one of c ellegans (302 neurons whole nervous system!!) and I've never met a satisfying explanation as to why this is so hard and where can I track progress on this task.

[veddox]

I always appreciate a good bug story. Here‘s one I just came across, following a discussion linked above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044952

[egberts1]

“I don’t work for you”.

[krono]

In the same vein as "Do your own homework, OP." or am I misreading?

[abdabab]

Source?

[kleer001]

Every thread by a student or dev looking for detailed information and techniques they should be coming up with or should know by now or at the very least how to search the goddamn thing themselves instead of bothering people.