hah! that one really defines it! 
the more technical or archaic a topic is, the more i find the comments are generally self-filtering and you get good posts.
Agree. Itâs also why, for some YouTube videos which are niche and not widely popular, the comments are actually useful â but for videos viewed 100,000+ times, reading the comments will actually make you stupider.
Popularity can be a curse.
Itâs probably some sort of steganography to arrange for the next ⌠hmm ⌠the next âŚ
the next orang utan programming fortran convention in egypt.
Dear Jeff,
I came across your blog a couple of weeks ago --got the link from MSDN Mag. Since that time, reading through Coding Horror has been an acitivity on my daily list. Coding Horror is just awesome, creative and informative. I would like to see the whole post archive compiled into a book. Will this be a reality some day?
Keep up the good Coding Horror,
Yousef
Blogs are like software, they are better when they are well written and commented.
Wrong. Comments suck. Except this one, which is perfect.
You trust the reviews on Amazon?
The reviewer reputation system on Amazon positively encourages people whoâve not read the books to post reviews. My first Windows Forms book got a review from one of Amazonâs star reviewers who apparently hadnât realised the book wasnât about ASP.NETâs Web Forms, and he dinged me for missing out some controls that donât, in fact, exist in Windows Forms. It was pretty clear from the review that he guy had only read the table of contents and posted a review based on that. And judging by the vast number of reviews he had posted, he wouldnât have had time to do any more than that for most of the books. And yet Amazon rewarded him for his âeffortsâ. The system is open to being gamed, with inevitable consequences.
Moreover, many publishers have departments dedicated to astroturfing (faking up the appearance of grass roots support) so a great many of the reviews you read are just an extension of the official marketing blurb at the top.
Sturgeonâs law holds sway on Amazonâs review system. (Although thinking about it, itâd be surprising if the figure was as low as 90%.)
(And lest anyone think this may be sour grapes on my part, my current book gets pretty good reviews on Amazon. My co author, Chris Sells, puts a lot of effort into encouraging people who liked the book to write Amazon reviews. So I donât do badly from it, although that fact in itself just reinforces my view that the review system is highly distorted.)
By the way Jeff, I gave up reading comments on your blog a long long time ago. I only read them now when Iâm considering posting my own, because I want to avoid redundancy. The reason? Itâs because despite what you may think about the relative values, Iâve alway found your original blog posts about 100x more interesting than the comments.
(If youâre wondering why I bother to post comments at all in that case, itâs because I believe the comments are mostly useful to the blog author, rather than its readers. If you feel you derive value from the comments, Iâm happy to oblige.)
Actually, thinking about it, itâs surprising that you donât link into comment threads more often. Your blog is richly interlinked to itself, but rarely (never?) to the comments. If you believe the comments are that much better than the main feature, why donât you link back to threads of interest when you revisit themes?
They spelt Kilimanjaro wrong! AND orangutan!!! And the comma should be a semi-colon.
Definitely not computer generated then. 
Jeff, the feedburner counter is dropping!
I expect the blogger to have considered everything that may eventually be posted in the comments of a blog post before said post is posted. If your readers have to point out mistakes or suggest obvious improvements in the comments of a post, youâre not doing your job right.
And if you think that blog post you quoted is funny, maybe someone should post a definition of âfunnyâ next. But then again, you visit Fark.
Sorry I didnât read all of your post, but I was trying to get to the end quickly so I could write a comment on it.
1 Like
Iâd like to agree with a previous poster(s): the next step is a comment rating system, or maybe a tagging system so the post can arranged by topic. And of course people could choose which ordering system to use! Most comments are very similar, and out of 100 comments, there maybe 2 or 3 intersting thoughts, which get lost amongst the many similar comments.
Comments? I have two words for youâŚ
YouTube Comments.
If you were introducing someone to the concept of comments and showed them YouTube, theyâd run off screaming thinking the Internet was full of morons.
And yeah, comments are good things⌠until they become multi-page scrolling horrors 
Whatever or whoever posted that comment doesnât even know how to spell Philippines.
Amazon filters the comments intensively.
If you review in your comment, that Amazon for example did not retract a defective part, the comment is never published, in spite of being true and written antiseptic.
They just filter out all comments, which show cruelly, but true facts in Amazons behaviour.
They may of course do this, but many donât know about this not nice manners. Otherwise, this is against their self-set rules.
I only trust the comments there as far as i can spit.
Only if the comments rubbish a product, iâll accept them as true.
Blogging about blogging⌠This isnât why I come here.
As always, very nice post!
Iâm writing a post on this âa blog without comments is not a blogâ. Thanks for the insight. [=
To those who think the comment was auto-generated and therefore uninteresting or irrelevant, I humbly submit that you may have missed the point of that comment.
@hello said:
âprogramming is all about knowing⌠[some really weird random stuff] âŚitâs hard to define, really.â
Iâd guess that the first and last words were not at all random; heâs just saying that one of the reasons programming is hard is because we canât even be sure what âprogrammingâ is.
Sounds like something out of the âHitchhikerâs guide to the galaxyâ.
The best definition of programming indeed, will show it to all my classmates, I wonder what their reaction would be. Great post!
The definition sounds just like what this neural network would have generated: