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Comment by nexuist | Hacker News Reader

Some of this is probably culture shock. Dan grew up in Russia and immigrated to the UK. Russian engineering material is usually very direct. If you do something stupid, then it will say what you are doing is stupid. There is no thought towards the feelings of whoever is told they're doing something stupid. Western textbooks for better or worse try to not be as scathing and try to gently let the reader know that they are going down the wrong path.

I much prefer the Russian approach. We are professionals doing professional work, our feelings are not part of it and if your ego matters to you that's your own problem. It is objectively stupid to use something named __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED because, even if it works, you're not meant to use it! And they made it very, very, unmistakably clear. Dan did the right thing by not budging.

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To be clear, I don’t think the person is stupid, and I don’t believe I’ve called them stupid. I appreciate the intent to support me, but I also find it a bit of a stretch that answering “is DO_NOT_USE supported” with “no, it’s not supported” must be a consequence of a culture shock. :) But I’m biased so idk.

I didn’t get the impression from the reader that they were a beginner, or someone struggling, or someone who doesn’t “know they’re on the wrong path”. My impression was that a professional came to get an authoritative answer on a level of support of an API, and I tried to provide it.

Oh, I didn't think you were calling them stupid! That's part of what I mean as the culture shock - that Westerners will respond to being told they're doing something stupid as if it was an insult to themselves, and not an insult on what they're doing, disregarding the fact that smart people can do stupid things and vice versa. What the OP was trying to do _is_ stupid, but that doesn't make them a stupid person. They could in fact be a very experienced engineer who has delivered beautiful and capable web apps. I don't believe your intent was to make the OP feel stupid, but perhaps the lack of sugarcoating and straightforwardness of your response makes it seem like that. I don't think you were impolite either, it's just that terse responses usually signal impatience and may get misconstrued as anger, despite the intent being to clearly communicate a simple message.

Fair enough! I feel like with questions like this, there is a lot at stake because they will be referred to in conversations (“should we use this field? seems like it’s no big deal”) so perhaps some of the bluntness of the property name rubbed off on my response.

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