[davesims]

Sure, not a book review for NYT, but it is the top comment on HN, which has the unfortunate consequence of being the first impression a lot of people had of an article that had a lot of hard, thoughtful work put into it.

It also caused some to actually not read the article, and that's what drew me out. Annie's work here deserved a better first impression from the HN community, and I think anyone who has an interest in _why would benefit from reading it. The anonymity thing was a sidebar at best.

[raganwald]

I feel for you. I have felt the same way. Not so long ago, someone resubmitted an old essay of mine about coffee machines and open source.

In that essay, I called myself a small-s socialist.

What do you suppose was the top comment on the HN discussion? A long diatribe about someone’s pet subject, Libertarianism, which generated more than half of the ensuing comments.

It seems that on Hacker News, one man’s signal is another man’s noise.

[davesims]

Well said, thanks raganwald!

Being a writer myself, I'm sensitive (probably overly) to the amount of work that goes into a piece like that. The fact that Annie made herself learn Ruby and get deep enough into the specifics of Matz, _why, dhh and the whole Ruby mythology I think needs to be encouraged. Not a lot of writers take that amount of care and time to understand their subject the way she did. It was good journalism.

[brianpan]

Getting off-topic (although, I think we're already there)- I have been finding HN discussions harder to navigate lately. I still miss seeing the post voting scores.

I don't remember if how the comment thread display has changed, but it's getting ridiculous. People respond to the top comment because anything lower will be ignored. This top "thread" is taking up 80% of page.

I understand that this isn't supposed to be Reddit and I'm supposed to work a little harder to digest the information, but I find it very unlikely that people are going to read this entire comment page and find the signal in the noise.

I came to HN after reading the article and I'm not finding the discussion I was hoping for.

EDIT: Maybe what HN needs is an enhancement suite like RES.

[duncanbojangles]

It would help me tremendously if HN offered the option to "fold" comments and children of those comments like on Reddit. I do this often to get past the meme threads and onto the real meat and potatoes. But, I think that may be outside the scope of HN's style or design of the interface.

[thinkalone]

I use a Greasemonkey script which does exactly that, and quite well - I searched for the title of the script to grab a link to it, but it looks like there may be a few different options to choose from: https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sour...

[_exec]

javascript:(function()%7Bvar s=document.createElement('script');s.type='text/javascript';s.src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.1/jquery.min...;

Save it as a bookmark and run it on each page.

[Nick_C]

I'd like to use this, but it has been corrupted by URL shortening. Viewing the source doesn't fix it.

Can you re-enter this as code (indent 4 spaces).