I think they are highly overrated and underrated at the same time. I think that useful opinions based on the practical experience of making stuff work, are extremely undervalued.

A lot of opinions aren’t bought by experience though. Opinions on the best x, are largely useless in my eyes, and easy to come by. You’ll see it in almost any HN discussion on a specific tech these days. I mean, when is the last time you saw a HN thread about JavaScript where half of it wasn’t a debate on why JS is good/shit and how WASM is the next Jesus?

I wouldn’t call all of those opinions undervalued, because they have no real use and serve no purpose. X is typically terrible and unproductive, but it’s also lovable and very productive. With almost everything there are pros and cons, and the only truly valuable opinions on anything are from people who make it work or crashed trying and then succeeded by doing something else.

I think this world needs a whole lot of “talk is cheap, show me the code”, but once someone actually does the work, I think we should learn from their experience. I think HN has been great at sharing the useful opinions, at least so far.

This was a semi-useless opinion by the way.