Hacker News Reader

Comment by nautilus12 | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to see a trend in hacker news stories of the type:

Why bad for you thing is actually good for you. or Why thing everybody likes is not so great after all.

Is everyone on hacker news just a compulsive contrarian?

This article has a clickbait title with a more reasonable premise in the body. No, technical debt isn't good, just like getting jabbed with a sharp object in the throat isn't good for you. The reasonable point the article is making is that there are some things worse than accruing technical debt, like spending too much time making an ivory tower system that doesn't actually have product fit. Similarly, getting jabbed with a sharp object in the throat in the case of a tracheotomy can be necessary, but that doesn't mean that you should run around jabbing yourself in the throat just for the sake of it. Technical debt is similar; sometimes necessary, but never choose it for its own sake.

> but that doesn't mean that you should run around jabbing yourself in the throat just for the sake of it.

You say that but at the same time there's people that voluntarily had holes drilled in their skull.

> Is everyone on hacker news just a compulsive contrarian?

No we're not.

I am!

Yes, possibly maybe. Oh never mind.

I disagree with you, though I am not sure where that puts me.

In solid opposition to me, I assure you.

On shaky ground

The title of this article matches the tone, but doesn't really match the content. The author makes several good points that would be better characterized as, "given that technical debt is inevitable, try to make simple, easy to manipulate tools."

More likely that contrarian headlines garner more activity than their obvious or expected counterparts, pushing them to higher rankings more frequently. Here on hn, it’s possible that if a user reads a headline they already agree with, they will say to themselves “oh ya, I know that already, don’t need to read that.” Then when they see a contrarian headlibe they say to themselves “hmm, what’s this.” I would posit something more along those lines. Although I now realize, your comment may have been rhetorical in the sense of suggesting that this post (and others like it) take advantage of this trend but lack in substance.

It is a strange phenomenon, that the brain tends to ignore things that are expected, and is often jarred by the unexpected. It’s maybe one of the downfalls of expecting the unexpected. Because it makes even the unexpected seem ordinary. Or maybe the reverse is true, and expecting the unexpected makes the ordinary seem extraordinary.

I’m gonna go and have some breakfast.

> Although I now realize, your comment may have been rhetorical in the sense of suggesting that this post (and others like it) take advantage of this trend but lack in substance.

Yeah this is what I was getting at. Ive been noticing that people have been dissatisfied with the quality of content recently citing marketing type activities like this. Kind of wish it could just be a forum without the competitive drive that we are bombarded with everywhere else.

We read "man bites dog" stories, not "dog bites man" stories. Exceptions are inherently more newsworthy.

The danger is that readers may be led to believe that the exceptions are the norm.

It is clickbait. Just enough for you to click, read and comment. If the article actually relayed the content - How to manage technical debt better you might not even open the link.

The clickbait title trend is a blogging thing more than a HN thing. We see it here because there are lots of links to blogs.

Having a community that challenges assumptions is why I come here.

Even going back to my teen years I've always tried to avoid ending up in a bubble of agreement. It's become even more important of a skill in the age of the internet.

Whenever I'm told that I'm not allowed to disagree for some reason or another, I immediately stop and reevaluate my views. Usually they don't change, but it's worth it for the times that they do.

And often times when I've changed my views like that, there's a cultural shift a little while later. A lot of what is held as sacred truth is due to fear of the "opposing idea" being right.

Think about programming in the late 90s and early 2000s, but not believing OO to be a panacea. I use OO when it's appropriate, but it's often not. And speaking up about that in those times meant you were viewed as ignorant.

If you program in Java in the year 2000, you have a vested interest in OO adoption. You've invested your time in a language that was explicitly designed to not allow for anything but OO. And if OO is not the end-all be-all of programming, then maybe you've wasted your time. So anyone claiming otherwise is indirectly threatening your livelihood. You're terrified that they might be right, so you insist that they never could be.

Yeah but what happens when it becomes a compulsion? After a while it becomes kind of annoying.

I'm just here for an argument.

There you go again..

No you're not

I once had a dream of an article popping up on HN, with hundreds of upvotes and a single comment on it saying:

We agree!

I woke up immediately because that isn’t possible.

We agree!

Au contraire. It is about paradigm shifting and has nothing to do with compulsive contrarianism.

I feel it’s easy to become a compulsive contrarian on Hackernews because of how many people are often willing to support or defend your contrarian view.

Yes, I'm not

It’s just good ol clickbait.

I would have to disagree

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