It's high quality when the content is within HN's bubble. Anything related to health, politics, or Microsoft is full of misinformation, ignorance, and garbage like any other site. The Microsoft discussions in particular are extremely low quality.
When economics has come up I've been curious and asked my brother about some of the stuff in the more upvoted comments (he has his PhD in economics with a focus on labor specifically) his reaction has always been something like "that doesn't match my understanding of that" or "I think their analysis is a bit oversimplified".
My experience here is that it's pretty good for things outside of tech (at least better than the average internet) but definitely not great.
I don't have a PhD but I do have some background in economics, and economics is consistently one of the worst areas on HN. I think it's representative of society in general. There's something about economics that makes it feel like you can just reason through it with common sense, whereas that's rarely true in reality.
IMO HN actually scores quite highly in terms of health/politics and so forth content because the both mainstream and fringe ideas get both shown and pushback.
A vaping discussion brought up glycerin used was safe and the same thing used in smoke machines and someone else brought up a study showing that smoke machines are an occasional safety issue. Nowhere near every discussion goes that well but stick around and you’ll see in-depth discussion.
Go to a public health website by comparison and you’ll see warnings without context and a possibility positive spin compared to smoking. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/index.html I suspect most people get basically nothing from looking at it.
> IMO HN actually scores quite highly in terms of health/politics and so forth content because the both mainstream and fringe ideas get both shown and pushback.
As someone with domain expertise here, I wholeheartedly disagree. HN is very bad at percolating accurate information about topics outside its wheelhouse, like clinical medicine, public health, or the natural sciences. It is also, simultaneously, extremely prone to overestimating its own collective competency at understanding technical knowledge outside its domain. In tandem, those two make for a rather dangerous combination.
Anytime I see a post about a topic within my area of specialty, I know to expect articulate, lengthy, and completely misguided or inaccurate comments dominating the discussion. It's enough of a problem that trying to wade in and correct them is a losing battle; I rarely even bother these days.
It's kind of funny that XKCD #793[0] is written about physicists, because the effect is way worse with software engineers.
As a software engineer married to a healthcare professional, I disagree strongly about the quality of the healthcare discussions here. A whole lot of the conversation is software engineers who think that they can reason from first principles in two minutes about this thing that professionals dedicate their whole lives to mastering, and who therefore don't understand the most basic concepts of the field.
Sometimes I try and engage, but honestly, mostly I think it's not worth it. Otherwise you end up doing this with your life: https://xkcd.com/386/
> about this thing that professionals dedicate their whole lives to mastering
After doing some healthcare work I ended up understanding that some topics are not well known even by the professionals dedicating their whole lives to that because there are big gaps in the human knowledge on the topics.
I agree that people that think they can reason in two minutes about anything are a problem, but it's not a healthcare only issue (same happens for politics, economics, environment, etc.)
Engineers have the luck to work in the field where many things have a clear, known explanation (although, try to make an estimation about how long a team will implement a feature, and everybody will come up with something else).
As to the uncertainty and mysteries, you are 100% correct. One of the big failure modes for engineers in dealing with human health is the assumption that things are as simple and logical as the stuff we build, when it's simply not at all like that. There are (1) big arguments over basic things like "why do SSRI's work?" Outside of LLM's I can't think of a thing in software where we are still arguing about why things work in production. We never say "Why does Postgres work?" in the same way. (2)
And yes, this is true for many other areas of discussion at HN. It's just that it is most obvious to me in the area that my wife specializes in, because I pick up enough via osmosis from her to know when other people don't even have my limited level of understanding.
1: Or at least were 15 years ago when my wife told me about it- the argument might have been largely concluded and she just never updated me since I don't keep up with the medical literature the way she does.
2: Two decades ago there was a huge push for the "human genome project" under the basis that this would be "reading the blueprints for human life" and that would give us all of these medical breakthroughs. Basically none of those breakthroughs happened because we've spent the past 20 years learning all of the different ways that it is NOT a blueprint and that cells do things very differently from human engineers.
Regarding the human genome project specifically it was research and no matter what was claimed (give us all of these medical breakthroughs) we (as the public) should understand there is no guarantee. Similarly to how most tech startups propose plans that lead to huge scales and ROI, but nobody is amazed when 3-4 years later they have a modest revenue (the lucky ones).
Spend time with medical researchers and they start disparaging Doctors. Everyone wants that one authoritative source free from bias, but IMO even having a few voices in the crowd worth listening to beats most other options.
I disagree. Even politics spurs intelligent, nuanced discussion here on HN.
And to hold up discussions about MS as an example of 'extremely' low quality discussion is, ah, interesting. Do you have any recent examples of such discussions?
I also don't care if people leave because HN isn't 'entertaining' enough. I don't come here for that, and I don't expect the community members that make this place what it is to either.
Idk, compare it to a forum like lobste.rs that has a much more strict filter for what's allowed. Personally I find lobste.rs a lot less entertaining because it's too on-topic and has a stuffy feeling
Politics and philosophy discussions here are intelligent in that most of the commenters aren’t dumb. They tend to be entirely uneducated and resistant to the educated.
I hide every single article about MS because it's filled with all the neckbeardy tropes about their products being garbage spyware, switch to Linux, they're stealing your data, the OS is trash etc. It's comments from people who have never managed large scale MS based environments comparing their Windows Home to the other 90% of the business ecosystem that has nothing to do with home users or MS's main cash cow, businesses, Azure/Entra and M365. I'm done wasting my breath on MS here.
None of which fit your description of “neckbeardy tropes about their products being garbage spyware, switch to Linux, they're stealing your data, the OS is trash”.
And it isn’t just me, because if you look at those comments, I was talking to other people who weren’t invoking those “neckbeardy tropes” either
