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Comment by ltbarcly3 | Hacker News Reader

I was looking for an article about the Kafka queue system. Is this hackernews or unemployed philosopher news?

Please don't post this sort of swipe. It's fine if you're uninterested in (Franz) Kafka; plenty of the rest of us are, and the submission is perfectly on topic.

It's in HN's DNA (not to mention the opening paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) that it covers a wide range of topics, far beyond just computing, tech, and startups and definitely including arts and letters, among other things. Historical material is welcome too.

Acting like the rarer species should be wiped out is a lame way to treat this site.

On the other hand, when a title is going to mislead and confuse most readers, it would be courteous to extend or clarify the title such as:

"(Franz) Kafka: An End or a Beginning?"

That is, unless the goal is to mislead and feel smug about it.

On my screen, it shows up as "Kafka: An End or a Beginning? (lareviewofbooks.org)" which was all the information I needed to determine that it related to the Author before clicking through.

As both zellyn and the site guidelines point out, the domain name is part of the title here, so it wasn't as ambiguous as all that.

Not spoon-feeding readers is part of what makes HN HN.

I've been on HN for about 10 years now... It used to be 99.99% on topic stories about startups and technology.

Now it's just random 'interesting' things? That's what reddit is for IMO.

I think Franz Kafka is lot more interesting than yet another Apache Java project.

Hey! An open source distributed messaging stream is just not another Apache Java project. Kafka's made my life a lot easier at work.

>made my life a lot easier at work

Was it just an enhancement or complete metamorphosis?

A country doctor recommended it to us. We put it through the trial and then went to the judgement. All in all it saved us a lot of money and we are hunger artists no more.

I feel that I've missed something nice here. I'll have to read more.

Because an employed engineer is such a higher form of existence

Who said or implied that?

Wow. I'd like to see you solve the dining philosophers problem without a robust distributed messaging system.

A bit of both. Count me as an employed procrastinating philosopher.

Good coders know what they are doing is applied philosophy.

This is just a tautology, since by the same logic every activity that requires any kind of thought is just 'applied philosophy'.

Apparently to some folks and the rules of this place, people can post things that are fairly interesting. So -shrugs-

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