His posts are ridiculous. I’ve never once seen him say anything positive. It’s always condescending, presumptuous and elitist bullcrap. How he’s ended up with so much karma when his comments are consistently scraping the barrel is beyond me.
I went through some and it doesn't seem so. Yes, he is opinionated, but so are many HN-ers. His set of opinions is quite specific though (based on the comments I see, MS SQL Server users are a minority here, for example) so you might have that impression.
> How he’s ended up with so much karma
We're supposed to be adults but we still fall for this behavior engineering trick called karma. Really, who cares? What does it change in my life if I have a few points more or less?
One could even argue that you can create more value for the community by lowering your karma, making comments that are alien to the collective mindhive. A downvote is almost impulsive in such cases, but your comment (before it greys out) can spark a thought, an interest, an idea, or even some important doubt that would otherwise not arise.
But there is a difference between incorrect comments and comments that are broad generalisations presented in an obnoxious way. The former sparks informative conversations whereas the latter adds little informative value while pissing people off. I suspect the real value of the latter is just likeminded people patting themselves on the back for being “awesome”. Which I don’t particularly rate as a positive effect for discourse let alone the wider HN community
I didn’t used to be that way and there are still plenty of folk on here who aren’t just posting to sound clever. So I don’t think it’s fair to cast the same judgement for the entire active member base.
But in terms of your general point, I do agree the signal to noise ratio has gotten a lot worse over the years. Unfortunately that’s just part of the natural evolution of communication platforms. Happens to every message board, IRC channel, Facebook group and so on and so forth.
The issue isn't that he's mentioning a specific tool that a minority uses. It's that his solution isn't even appropriate for the gp's scenario that had these 2 desirable properties:
(1) send one file
(2) the file is queryable (with SQL language)
I never downvote pjmlp's posts but the following type of comment isn't just opinionated... its tone will also be perceived as condescending:
- "I do exactly the same with traditional RDMS. Export to single file isn't nothing new."
So to entertain that suggestion, what single file would MS SQL Server export?
option A: Let's say we export to a single text CSV. Ok, we now satisfied the single file property -- and that's if we pre-join all relational tables into a diskspace-hogging output where columns repeat redundant denormalized data. But text files are not easily queryable. You either have to re-import into another tool that can run SQL commands or import into Excel to play with filters.
option B: Let's export to single MDF file. Now we're asking recipients to have MS SQL Server installed and ATTACH the mdf file.
The above "MS SQL Server solutions" are more complicated than a single SQLite file queryable with a zero-install Sqlite CLI utility.
But hey, offering up "alternative solutions" with a condescending tone is regular sport for HN so I guess we all roll with it. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)
He has 65728 karma because of his many posts since December 12, 2010, but his h-index (community impact) is very low compared to others: https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/reports/ha...
This is one of the, leave a small comment on everything type of users.