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Comment by izietto | Hacker News Reader

I see a discussion but it's not too harsh to me. Do you come from a Western country? People coming from Western countries tend to be more demanding about discussion friendliness sometimes for my experience

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I agree. There are also huge individual differences. I have a military background and we generally don't "gift wrap" our feedback. "This bad because X" is constructive, helpful and to the point, and it doesn't mean that the person receiving the feedback is incompetent. Some people seem to take it that way.

Accepting failure is integral to learning and growth, but a key part of that is identifying the weak points and learning from them.

Edit: s/gift wrap/sugar coat

Contrary to both your comment and the parent's, one of the project's developers (not sure they are the main developer, but one of them) admitted in the referenced pull request that they were too harsh in their response to the contribution:

> Now I am rereading my first comment an see that it is too rude. I am sorry for that. I was in a bad mood when wrote this.

Yep and he apologized as you noticed, so I can't see anything too frightening to me.

What countries would be less friendly in your experience?

Let me clarify that I'm not talking about countries and people, I'm talking about language. For example, English language puts "please" every time you are telling someone to do something, in my language (Italian here), you don't do that. If you are not a good English speaker (like me), you suddenly become someone who gives commands to other people in a rude way.

> People coming from Western countries tend to be more demanding about discussion friendliness sometimes

> People

I'm a bit confused, are you talking about people and countries or not? In your original comment you explicitly said "people" and "countries"

They are talking about the way people from these countries typically phrase things as a result of their native language, rather than trying to characterize the actual personalities of the people from these countries. We just add more friendly sounding little filler phrases in our speech and often phrase instructions/commands as requests in English. This doesn't make us fundamentally nicer or more reasonable, it is just a social convention.

Thank you for explaining that at my place :) I wasn't even referring to "Western" countries, I mean I come from Italy, which actually is a Western country, and when I read native English speakers I notice many differences that I'll never be able to reproduce

I'm just curious; why did you specifically say western countries, if you didn't mean western countries? Or say people if you didn't mean people?

Because I'm not a good English speaker, I'm sorry about that

You're a great English speaker, which is why it was just confusing since you're clearly able to articulate when you _don't_ mean people and countries.

Well, I appreciate that I can write decently :D but it requires me a lot of effort, my English skills are a source of big troubles at interviews with other countries. Sometimes I just get confused translating and I say something for something else

In fairness to your point, I guess I technically can't comment on your speaking, but your writing is definitely great. I wouldn't have guessed you're not a native speaker. Do you practice speech often? I'm a language learning fan but not a huge fan of talking in any language, so my speech always lags behind my writing in languages I study.

I never practice speech, that's something I should do, but my problem is that I like too much the English language spoken by an Italian person, and also I don't like the English pronounce. That's a strong obstacle to any improvement on English language sounds. I love written English, that's why I can write it, but I just don't like how it sounds, that's why I can't speak it.

> English language puts "please" every time you are telling someone to do something

As a native English speaker: no it doesn't. Whoever told you that was gaslighting you, a corporate-politically-correct shitheel, or both. (Or being sarcastic, or cargo-culting something they picked from one of the previous categories, or some other breakdown of communication.)

I'm not GP, but many Asian cultures apparently have a much more blunt culture than many "western" countries.

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