No, of course the word you're after is "tact". (And even as a foreigner, it annoys the heck out of me when people mix them up [which you didn't!], ususally as in "take another tact" when they mean "take another tack" [where 'tack' is a originally a sailing term for flipping the sail to the other side of the boat when going against the wind, IIUC; so the expression means "go in a slightly different direction"].)
I'm just riffing on Heikki's remark about foreign languages: In my primary language, Swedish, "tack" means "thank you" but is also often used for Eng. "please" -- so "Kan du ... , tack?" means "Could you ... , please?".
Rational fundamentalism is not the one ring to rule them all. There is room for love and compassion in the world. I know (painfully well) that Internet forums (and this one in particular) anything but empower empathy, but that doesn’t make it any less true or valuable.
There is room for love and empathy. There really is. Logical, rationalistic supremacy notwithstanding.
Nobody is perfect. We shouldn’t expect anyone to be. Being kind and considerate is not a waste of anyone’s time, it’s not disrespectful nor patronising.
Maybe all of this is not true for OP, maybe they’re so zen they immediately see past their human instinct to attach themselves to their work (a well known and documented human trait). But it can’t hurt to be tactful , just in case they’re not.
I know I personally would’ve felt hurt if that first comment were the reply to something I did. I might, hopefully, have realised that it was, indeed, a useful comment and that I should swallow my pride. And I hope I would have the presence of mind to reply with a smile and a thank you. But it would be a pretense.
Why put each other through that? We can be truthful and tactful. There is no reason to be blunt.
I can understand the desire to unshackle ourselves from the low entropy morass of politeness. It’s fake and not what you really feel, right? The truth shines through anyway, so do them the honour of not sugar coating it, and be straight? I do understand, but hear this: you lack the nonverbal cues to make that incredibly delicate call. Face to face you would see the twitch in someone’s eye, the soft breeze of disappointment whisking along their face. A tear of pain streaking their human heart while they smile and nod and say thank you. You have an incredibly attune radar for empathy, and you would adjust. But when you lose all that, and the medium for your truth is this harsh knife forged from the soulless steel of words, it cuts more sharply than you can imagine.
In a text only medium, I implore everyone on HN: take a moment to consider our humanity. Not just here, but in all threads. Not just of the person we reply to, but of those we speak of. They might read it one day. And they, too, are human.
(I should say the painful irony in this rant is palpable to anyone who knows me :( but I am not proud of it. Perhaps it’s precisely why I feel so strongly. It does, after all, take one to know one.)
This is a slight modification of the principle of charity, something I think is incredibly important and underemphasized, especially for online text communication.
Because, that could be the wrong action to take. Could you, Would you, Will you, I want you to, You should, The project is stupid unless you, etc.
Therefore, the author should communicate well enough to be understood.
It costs nothing to be polite.
The best route is probably to clarify that it seems like a good concept, and you think that adding x and y would be the best features to focus on that would make it even better.
I, of course, am merely propagating the cycle.
So from then on, when I wanted something, I said "please and thank you."
I think this was my first social hack. I just wish it had worked better!
I swear at least once there was more instances of "pls" and thnx" (there seems to be a significant overlap between people who overuse the words and people who don't bother to type them properly, though that may be the linguistic snob in me talking) than all other words combined. It backfired by making the message difficult to read so I binned it and read the next.
[1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow/commit/6e42e06488a592784e5d3d2...