Perhaps more unfortunately, I find that writing for academic conferences and journals makes me a worse writer too. It's different, but having to laser focus on 'selling' the paper throughout the paper makes it hard to communicate. Many of my favorite CS papers could never be published in a 'good' journal or conference today. Good research writing is really hard, but it seems like the publication process makes it harder, not easier.
Had my eyes opened recently by just how wild people can get with their inferences. Defense is impossible when you're asserting X, but also have to explicitly assert the entire universe of not-X.
And then they either ignore you or call you a liar, because the only reason they bothered to comment was to post their manifesto against y anyway.
They are long because I was trying to be thorough, but more so I was trying to make sure I pre-addressed all of the arguments I knew would come (particularly in my enterprise DMARC deployment article).
I realize that what the author talks about here is part of why I do that.
As a reader, I really appreciate the table of contents.
Maybe what your friends meant was that your piece was too long without a table of contents, from which they could jump to a place for reference, or skip it because they were already familiar with the material.
That’s a shame because one of HN’s explicit guidelines [1] is to respond to the “strongest possible interpretation of what someone says”.
But also: I don't really get why he'd want to do that. I read the article, and I get his complaints, but they don't really seem to have anything to do with other people reading his site. They sound like reasons for _him_ to not post to and engage on HN, not reasons to try to stop people coming from HN from reading his site. His site doesn't seem to have comments, so why does it matter who reads it? I really must be missing something.
Here is the snippet of code that does the redirect:
<script>
try {
if (document.referrer) {
const ref = new URL(document.referrer);
if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') {
window.location.href = 'https://google.com/';
}
}
} catch (e) {}
</script> window.location.href = 'https://google.com/';
That snippet redirects people who arrive at macwright.com from Hacker News.
To be fair, my comment probably allays whatever doubt the author might have about blocking HN :)
How is that working out for you? I would imagine half the internet stops working?
I do have one exception: I whitelist youtube-ui.l.google.com. As much as I hate Google, everyone on earth posts their video to Youtube, and invidious is too janky to replace it. I hope I live long enough to see a world where humanity has found a more ethical video repository than Google.
I guess it’s just in the nature of aggregators that get really popular and allow comments.
> Should you explicitly forestall likely misinterpretations? Yes, if they're misinterpretations a reasonably smart and well-intentioned person might make. In fact it's sometimes better to say something slightly misleading and then add the correction than to try to get an idea right in one shot. That can be more efficient, and can also model the way such an idea would be discovered.
> But I don't think you should explicitly forestall intentional misinterpretations in the body of an essay. An essay is a place to meet honest readers. You don't want to spoil your house by putting bars on the windows to protect against dishonest ones. The place to protect against intentional misinterpretations is in end-notes. But don't think you can predict them all. People are as ingenious at misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want to hear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things they want to do but know they shouldn't. I suspect it's the same skill.
And this is one reason I've been resistant to identifying with nerd / hacker culture for a long time. Everytime I encountered it it was often just a pissing contest about things anyone could easily look up and prove both the arguing assholes were both wrong / right as often was the case.
There's a reason why "Ackchyually Guy" and The Simpsons Comic Book Guy resonate.
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
This seems pretty interesting to me.
In general I sense a lot of HN-hate, and I get it: HN comments can be pedantic, can be know-it-all, can be Silicon Valley centric, and supports threading which often leads to bickering or uninteresting low-value tangents.
I... ignore threads that don't interest me or that seem overly confident.
I don't understand why stereotyping and hating happens, but it isn't new.
He's a really excellent person, and I'm glad he does the things he does.
Unfortunately, I don't see how to escape it, at least for me that's just the nature of the work.
Also I use NoScript so the redirect didn't work for me.
For the record I have macwright.com as well as the top upvoted HN links in my RSS feed.
I do totally agree that the best writing comes not when you’re trying to build the ultimate defense against takedowns, but when you can express yourself more creatively.
try { if (document.referrer) { const ref = new URL(document.referrer); if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') { window.location.href = 'https://google.com/'; } } } catch (e) { }
Overly pedantic intentional misunderstandings pervade comments here and if you react to those by trying to defend against them you weaken yourself. Love it!
“If you’re lucky, you end up being good at a few things. If you’re really lucky, those are also the things you like doing. I’m good at writing articles that get upvoted and discussed on Hacker News, or news.ycombinator.com. But I don’t like it.
Writing on the internet can be a two-way thing, a learning experience guided by iteration and feedback. I’ve learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and comments that were fun but would make articles less focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was.
Writing for the Hacker News audience makes my writing worse.
I don’t like what Hacker News has become – or a lot of the web, for that matter. But I’m part of the discourse. I’ve written critical articles, mean tweets, silly comments, the whole lot of it. It’s impossible to separate one thing from another and neatly place blame. But it’s simple to notice a thing you want less of and turn it off.
So I can flex the freedom of an independent blog by embracing what seems good and pushing away what I don’t like. Redirecting Hacker News links away from this website makes sense to me. Traffic to this website doesn’t pay my bills. Disengaged readers just looking for a hot take don’t return to my site, or recognize me when I write something else, or write blog posts of their own and bring new creativity to the indie web.
Maybe posts will be less viral (I can hear, as I write that, someone writing “you haven’t written a hit in years, Tom!”), but writing viral posts or maximizing hits wasn’t my goal when I set out and it isn’t now.
Anyway, the RSS feed works great. The HTML site works pretty well. I tweet most new articles I write. Business as usual, just less of the orange site.”