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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Imagemagick is great and I love it.

But most people are not comfortable using CLI or someone may just not want to install it for one off conversion. Also webapp works on smartphones, tablets or anything with browser, while Imagemagick does not.

Imagemagick is ofcourse lot more feature rich and fast. If anyone is already comfortable using Imagemagick, webapp is not for them.

These points are only weakly in favor of such a web app. Don't like CLI? Use gimp or similar. Don't want to install anything? On some OS it might make sense. On that OS consider Paint. It probably does not support webp, but if you're serious about webp you have tools. Smartphone/tablet? Is there even a need to do conversion on those? Privacy? Use an operating system that has some reputation, like Debian stable, not a web app. IMHO this web app is a nice exercice for its author.

HN feedback has become cancer. OP, this site is great, and even as a highly technical user, I'd use this site in a heart beat. Thank you!

“Cancer” is a little melodramatic.

Negative feedback (including yours, and mine, and that of those who may reply to this disagreeing with me) has its place.

I’ve seen forums (fora?) where almost everyone is exclusively positive (like some reddit look-what-I-made topics), and that well-intentioned behavior can be pretty unhelpful if you’re trying to get different perspectives on your own project.

Yet there are always people there who bend over backwards to make someone feel bad if the person was (sarcasm: rude enough) to suggest there may be a way to improve something. Enforcing the positivity-only social norms.

I’m glad that HN, by contrast, stands out as having more free range thinkers who tell it like it is.

This is wholly true, but the comment above makes absurd claims ("Smartphone/tablet? No one converts there! Want privacy? Use Debian!"), bending backwards to say something negative.

It may seem negative, but it is also true.

You cannot have privacy with web apps. At all. Ever.

Please don't respond to a bad comment with swipes and putdowns. HN is a statistical distribution across a wide spectrum of comments. The only helpful thing to do is to make sure your own contributions raise the median quality, rather than dragging it down further. Your comment would have been fine without the first sentence. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

> HN feedback has become cancer

It's all too easy to succumb to false feelings of generality about this kind of thing [1], because (a) there's a spectrum, as I mentioned, and (b) we're all inclined to notice the things we dislike, and weight them more heavily [2]. But these are all comments that other users posted to the same thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060780

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30049509

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048458

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047502

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047488

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047403

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046427

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050602

Those commenters all managed to offer positive feedback without combining it with negative generalizations about others. If you could do the same in the future, that would be very helpful.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Fair enough, thanks for the gentle reminders to maintain decorum. Will do!

This is so much of a HN comment that I wonder if it's satire or written by a bot.

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I sometimes think we're approaching a future where people will learn to bake bread by scraping the topping off frozen pizza unless we make an effort to educate users on how to use the tools they have at their disposal.

This, exactly. We're raising a generation where coding is synonymous with a browser, and the browser is effectively an operating system. It's getting a bit silly.

I don't see the value of commendeering a browser to run applications that would run more efficiently on the OS natively.

MacOS also included the Scriptable Image Processing System `sips`

https://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/1/sips/

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