HN: one of the last remaining Great Good Places of the Internet, a lone tavern in an iconic gateway town to the now not-so-wild west.
Beyond the western borders of this little town, the tech gold rush has both expanded to epic proportions, affecting all the economies in the world, and also gone through enough booms and busts that the phrase "gold rush" seems somehow off.
As more and more young'uns join and jaded veterans return to throng the tavern alike, it often seems to be on the brink of either exploding with the largest gun fight in history, or jumping the shark.
The secret is the man at the corner of the bar @dang, always around with a friendly smile and a towel on his shoulder. The only sheriff in the west who still doubles as the friendly bartender: always polite, always willing to break up a fight with kind words and clean up messes himself.
Yes a cold-hard look from him is all it takes to get most outlaws to back down, yes, his Colt-45 "moderator" edition is feared by all men, but the real secret to his success: his earnest passion (some call it an obsession) for the seemingly sisyphean task of sustaining good conflict - letting it simmer but keeping it all times below the boiling point based on "the code":
"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
May the last great tavern in the West and it's friendly bartender-sheriff live long and prosper.
Right you are. I ran across that quote in her collection "The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men". She included the quote but not the paper. I thought it was amazing, so I wanted to read the paper—which was not easy to find. Eventually someone dug me up a copy, and it turned out that the quote was the only interesting thing in it. But what a quote. I don't know of anything more relevant.
If any of you want to explore Marion Milner, the place to start is "A Life of One's Own"- a work of original genius: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Ones-Own-Marion-Milner/dp/041555.... Everyone says "think for yourself" but she actually did it. Oh and her brother won the Nobel Prize in physics. Quite a family.
It's definitely only a great, good place from a certain perspective. People I respect greatly refer to "the orange site" as "toxic", "misanthropic" or "misogynistic" and full of "microdosing" "VC worshipping wankers" who don't read TFA.
It's definitely taken a different path than the one it was on c.2010 where any entrepreneur was effectively worshipped. I'm not sure if it's better or worse. The site rarely brings me joy. If it disappeared tomorrow I wouldn't miss it, but I wouldn't know what to do with myself.
Meh. You're applying selective judgement when talking about Twitter, saying it's entirely reasonable because you are very good at avoiding the awful parts of it.
Do the same with HN and you will see the good parts of it are entirely reasonable as well.
Taken as a whole, I don't see how Twitter as a whole is reasonable. In my opinion, on average it is probably the most toxic, inane popularity contest of any social media.
That said, this is a Thanks HN post, so I don't really care to make this a whole discussion about the blue site vs the orange site.
I guess my perspective is more so that many folks on HN openly celebrate HN, and feel that it is objectively good, and folks who don't agree with that are firmly ostracized. Criticism of HN doesn't do well here.
Conversely I don't know of a single person who uses Twitter who doesn't believe it to be an absolute hellsite of inane misery.
Beyond the western borders of this little town, the tech gold rush has both expanded to epic proportions, affecting all the economies in the world, and also gone through enough booms and busts that the phrase "gold rush" seems somehow off.
As more and more young'uns join and jaded veterans return to throng the tavern alike, it often seems to be on the brink of either exploding with the largest gun fight in history, or jumping the shark.
And yet, against all odds, it retains its original magnetism - drawing throngs that grow in number and diversity while seers like https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 and https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tptacek continue to return - dispensing worldly wisdom worth its weight in gold from corner tables.
The secret is the man at the corner of the bar @dang, always around with a friendly smile and a towel on his shoulder. The only sheriff in the west who still doubles as the friendly bartender: always polite, always willing to break up a fight with kind words and clean up messes himself.
Yes a cold-hard look from him is all it takes to get most outlaws to back down, yes, his Colt-45 "moderator" edition is feared by all men, but the real secret to his success: his earnest passion (some call it an obsession) for the seemingly sisyphean task of sustaining good conflict - letting it simmer but keeping it all times below the boiling point based on "the code":
"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
May the last great tavern in the West and it's friendly bartender-sheriff live long and prosper.