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Comment by delish | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to see what others think about your comment, notyourwork. To me (maybe only me!) it looks like you're putting a pithy stamp on what the GP said. Going a little farther, it looks to me like you're taking credit for what the GP said. I do not see the value of saying, "To sum all that in a nutshell: Collaborate." I see a value in what the GP said.

That said, this is the first time I've criticized this kind of comment. I've seen people pithily-sum-up others a lot. If others disagree with me, I'll take that into account.

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Your 2 paragraph criticism of one a one sentence comment is way more obnoxious and contributes less.

What he was trying to do is summarize and give a one word interpretation/other way of looking at it, not trying to do something insidious and inane as trying to steal credit for an HN comment.

Sometimes it helps to have a point summed up in the briefest possible way. What never helps, though, is posting inane accusations of ulterior motives to HN comments.

I have to agree with delish on this matter. Notyourwork's comment actually took away from the conversation. jhchen's assertions of, "be familiar with the project", "don't just start writingcode", and "your contribution is not free for the project" is not summed up nicely with the word "collaborate". To some people, collaborate might mean to put in a pull request without caring whether it is wanted or not, the exact opposite of what the OP said. "Collaborate" can be taken in so many ways that it is useless, and in this instance actually takes away from the message.

A closer summary of what the OP said is "Don't waste the project maintainers time" which, while much better than "collaborate", is still a waste of time and misses the specific advice the OP gives.

Delish is justified in calling out notyourwork's comment for providing nothing useful. If I wrote a comment like the one notyourwork wrote I would be feeling guilty for writing a comment just for points. Also the size of a comment is not a good basis for criticism.

> I'm curious to see what others think about your comment, notyourwork. To me (maybe only me!) it looks like you're putting a pithy stamp on what the GP said.

The response was a long winded way of saying collaborate with people and don't work in a closed box. I was merely trying to summarize that open source can be a simple and beautiful thing. It's not complicated to get involved but tossing pull requests over the wall isn't the way to do it which brings us back to precisely what I said. Sorry you didn't find value in it.

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