I flagged this --- it's virtually content free --- but that's a futile gesture given how susceptible HN is to this particular form of social engineering.
Not if you run it through ReadBetweenTheLines().
Hey Thomas, lighten up. Normally I'd agree with you, but not today. This post hit me just right...
I'm having a shitty day. Really shitty. 6 levels deep into garbage that never should have been written, trying to add one little feature. Asking myself every 7 minutes if I have time to rewrite without shifting everything else out a week.
I just returned from my 5th candy bar break in the past two hours, wondering why I'm still a programmer. Honestly, today was one of those days when supermarket clerk actually started sounding good.
Then I read this post and suddenly found the energy to make it through the day. I'll strap some kludgy fix onto this shit, ship it out, have a beer, and all will be fresh tomorrow.
Frankly, I'd rather read one post to save my day than 50 to save the world. But that's just me, motherfuckers.
Ultimately the evolving community here will make the final judgement. I just feel that the guidelines can be adjusted to reflect what is acceptable.
That's really the curse of comedy. The whole point of comedy is to be subversive, to sneak in under the radar of "good taste" and "propriety." But it's hard to do that, a lot of the time it gets rejected out of hand, and it seems very inconsistent.
Comedy is subversive, but the venue is usually not. When a comedian gives a routine on stage, the audience is primed and has certain expectations. When the audience's expectations are not aligned, it is bad for both the comedian and the audience.
My limited experiences on HN as a junior user have yielded a certain kind of fuzziness as to what is acceptable. On any given day, there is a lot of variance in the content, but usually HNish and that's a good thing. Officially, the guidelines are posted and they have an emphasis on intellectual stuff/tone, but leave evocative content unexplained. So the community decides, which is usually sporadic, hap-hazard, heavily-dependent on who posted the submission (people have expectations about what Zed Shaw is going to say), and the touchiness of the content. This probably doesn't happen in other communities that are more clearly guided as either relaxed or strict.
I think that's a good thing. It keeps people on their toes, rather than trotting out the same stupid jokes time and time again. I'll vote for something that's funny in a unique way, but downvote anything smacking of a stupid meme that's been done to death.
It is true that you are given more slack when your name is known. Think of it as a corollary to the Picasso rule -- others have to know that you know the rules before you are given more leeway on how to break them.
The bottom line is that humour is easy to upvote, and in-jokes are easy to accumulate in any online community, and so we must be ever vigilant. There's nothing wrong with humour now and again, but it requires ongoing, active rejection, and yes, a bit of hypocrisy to avoid becoming Reddit, where every single story has a contentless pun-filled thread 20 levels deep with a reputation of 1000 at the top falling off logarithmically.
That path leads to http://www.reddit.com
Reddit does a better job at support a diverse community of interests and personalities than any single Web forum in the history of computing, IMHO. It could be the next Usenet if it received the funding and infrastructure it deserves.
I honestly do not get all the hating on Reddit that takes place on here.
I can't keep up with Reddit. Too much noise. Good you have time to. HN currently give ~80-100 RSS items daily to me which is good enough to keep me from surfing all day, and still keep up with latest tech news.
Lighten the hell up - the message between the lines is that many programming teams are heavier on process than they need to be.
I really do believe this stuff is a slippery slope. It makes the site worse. Just like yesterday's "Apple Says Yes" comment thread. But I made my snarky comment about it, hit my flag button, and now I'm done. I'm not out for a holy war.
On another note: sorry about your day.
- Douglas Adams in "Mostly Harmless"
http://www.russianpaintings.net/articleimg/malevich/malevich...
I'd probably Wrong your post, then UnWrong it so I could Wrong it again.
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.
6. the incongruity of this.
Seems fine to me.
But the fact that this link has 700 upvotes and so many comments makes me cringe. All those talks about HN quality getting worse -- I was never sure if I agree. I am now.
I just wish he hadn't built a caricature.
Note: we're just nerding out. I'm reacting to your attempt to imply that that this is entirely or even mostly a joke. I don't really care. And, like I said, to the extent that it's not a joke, I agree with it.
Yak shaving means getting deep into a series of tasks that are apparently unrelated to your final goal, but which logically follow from it: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_t...
When you're shaving a yak, it might be a productive step whose necessity is not apparent until you analyze the problem. However, the term is usually employed when you feel logically compelled to do something, but your intuition tells you that it isn't necessary. You trust your intuition more, but you feel compelled to shave the yak anyway because there's a logically compelling argument for shaving the yak, and you can't justify not shaving the yak.
Yak shaving as applied to process means things like the Dilbertesque meeting to define the goals for choosing the committee to comment on the draft of the process to change the process. Logically, if you believe in the value of process, changing your process is an important thing and can't be done without process. Process requires buy-in, so you need a public draft of the process before it can be adopted. Obviously, the comments of random stakeholders won't automatically assemble themselves into coherent feedback, so you need a committee of representatives from different process stakeholders to compile the feedback. Choosing the committee is a politically sensitive task, so it should be done transparently, and the choices must be justified. So let's get together to define objective goals for choosing the committee members to head off any hard feelings.
Somewhere that chain of logic must be interrupted. No, we don't need any meetings, we don't need any documentation of goals, we don't need a list of stakeholders, and we don't need to produce a public draft for review. We can just do it and it will be fine. Maybe that comes at the top level -- we don't need a process to change the process -- or maybe you stop at a lower level -- okay, we need a documented process to change the process, but we don't need to publish a formal draft and get feedback.
You can't logically justify doing something without any process. You can always imagine things that can go wrong, and you can always imagine more layers of process to prevent those things from going wrong. You could justify an absence of process by performing an evaluation of the risks involved in proceeding without process, but that itself would be a layer of process.
At some point you have to stop trying to mitigate risk and JUST DO IT. At that point it may be helpful to pretend you're Jules from Pulp Fiction and toss around a few "motherfuckers" so you feel bad-ass enough to face the awesome responsibility of, say, choosing a meeting room without consulting a committee and without even articulating a reason for not consulting a committee. That last part is what makes it completely bad-ass, because you aren't even pretending to be responsible. You don't give a FUCK. You're going to choose that motherfucking meeting room for that motherfucking meeting, and you aren't going to explain how, and any motherfucker who wants you to explain how you chose that motherfucking meeting room can talk to your motherfucking balls, and if he can't pull his head out of his motherfucking asshole to find them you will stick them in there so he can chat with them at his motherfucking leisure.
I have seen many projects fail in big companies because management are frightened of programming. The "risk mitigation" is using large teams of people with the right "skillset" who don't need to think very much because they are doing things according to the "industry best practice" using expensive third party software so that the in-house programmers don't have to make hard decisions.
If you work in an environment like that, and you're reading this, you are probably part of the problem because you are keeping the stupidity alive by struggling through the process and letting management get something delivered. Best to step away from the stupidity and let it fail.
Now I'm going to go and do some programming.
With a title containing 'motherfucker' ----- you should have known it wasn't totally serious.