An End to Negativity in the Tech Community | Hacker News Reader

An End to Negativity in the Tech Community

jsconf.eu

66 pointscramforce14 comments

There's trolling, and then there is the negativity which comes from utter weariness with things. You spend 5 years on the mailing list, trying to help all the newbies, but it just never gets any better. Every week there's a new guy who didn't read the archives, who never even bothered to look at the documentation or the FAQ, or who thinks he knows (after a 10 minute reading of the Wikipedia article) that he knows exactly what's "wrong" with your project and that his ideas will solve everything. You spend 5 years politely pointing them to the right place, or gently explaining the problems with what they're proposing, but nobody ever learns. Then you just start ignoring them, because you've run out of politeness--this is how we get 3 year old bug reports with 20 "me too!" comments and a single "Won't fix. Closed" from the developer. But all the other people have started ignoring them too, except the very-recently-noobs. Who don't know any answers, but will happily post all sorts of misinformation and noise. So you start to answer questions like "How to download iso plz?" with "Look at the fucking front page of the website", instead of the old "Here's a link, and you'll need bunzip2 installed to unpack the file". You've spent years trying to be nice and polite but it never seems to help--you just get more entitled idiots asking the same crap, so maybe it's time to try being nasty.

In the end, of course, it doesn't help, but it sure feels good to get that out. I'm working on it, because it's not good for the community, but it's hard to avoid sometimes.

So, when you become the equivalent of a weathered, crotchety old man in the Open Source community, in IRC, at meetups, or anywhere else... kindly fuck off.

Sorry to be so blunt, but that's the point, here. It's fine not to want to help annoying beginner #5,000,000, but it doesn't require being an ass to the community, at large. Just keep your mouth shut, unless you have something nice or helpful to say, please.

It sounds like you are describing burnout. Normally being easily irritated by expected behavior means that one is tired,

Beginners are going to ask the same questions. Some of them will ask for help rather than read the documentation because they learn better through social interactions than through reading. Some will propose ideas that seem good to them but the community has already found them flawed.

When one reaches the point of being easily irritated by known normal behavior, it is time to get out of there to prevent negative behavior. Take some time off from the mailing list. It sounds like you have at least spent 5 years. It could be longer. Take a break. Rest. Ask others in the community to help out beginners.

Yeah, basically I got burned out. I've backed off from the mailing list, probably post 1/8th what I used to.

Even though the Dart hate is the most recent example, I think the issue of negativity & trolling is much larger than one new language release. It seems that if anyone comes up with a new technology/idea that doesn't fit the exact zeitgeist of a particular community it is immediately & thoroughly slammed.

Having a 'thick-skin' is all well and great, but truth is a lot of people don't, and criticism hurts. Constructive criticism can be a very useful thing, but being adrift in a sea of 'constructive criticism' with not a dot of positivity in sight is just demoralising.

I know it can seem that if a bad idea is not immediately killed you will be stuck with it forever & sometimes this is the case, but not always. Sometimes things are just different, people have different ideas. If someone has a different idea that to you seems stupid, smile politely and walk (run?) away.

Bad ideas eventually become self-evident anyway, you will have just saved some time.

DART is not the product of some 16 year old hacker with a thin skin, DART is the product of a company worth $200 billion dollars and that company has enough market share to make something like DART something I have to deal with. If a 16 year old hacker came up with DART it would only succeed on it's merits, when a $200 billion dollar company invents something like this they use that money to shove this language down your throat.

Just because Google hired James Gosling doesn't mean they need to put him back to work recreating Java.

If the VM is exposed and we can compile whatever language down to DART VM byte code I'm all for it, if DART means programming in DART then I will shout from the rooftops how much it sucks in hopes I never have to deal with it.

Google didn't write DART, Google employees did. Maybe they should have known better, I don't know--I have not looked into DART at all. I recently released a project that had been funded by the US Government, but that doesn't mean it didn't suck when people trashed it in comments.

"I have an important message about negativity. Please watch this 34 minute video to find out what it is."

No.

Stop being so negative. Here, I found this video to explain it to you...

My reaction, too. Wish it had "[video]" in the anchor text.

27 minute

FTFY

DART is just a more java like javascript. Java sucks and so does DART. All that's missing from DART is checked exceptions (and namespaces apparently, I miss typing __PR_ReallySecretStruct from C). Can we have DWORDS? Please?

Look at this DRECK and tell me it doesnt remind you of Java.

https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleedi...

Negativity? It seems like he's complaining about criticism. DART sucks and people are saying so, get over it. It's not just an email, it's a 200 page spec outlining exactly how and why the language is the retarded child of C and Java for browsers.

We all adopted javascript and you still have to typeof(blah) to find out if a variable is defined. I think that stuff sucks, and if you're improving javascript you might as well get rid of the java line noise at the same time.

If you're building a language for the web in 2011 I'd hope it at least has namespaces, monads, variables immutable by default, partial application, etc. It's not 1956 when these ideas were new.

I'll be negative about DART in hopes that it sucks less and isn't java/C for browsers. I'm done with languages that are just syntactic sugar for a JMP instruction and pushing a this pointer on to the stack. Maybe a language where we can glue functions together like:

  let addByOneMultiplyByTwo = (add 1) >> (mul 2)

No thanks, I'll stick to coffeescript where the emphasis is on telling the browser what to do, not how to do it.

A main function is just an implementation detail not something that should be part of the language. Not all programs start in main and it's just an artifact that the first function some operating systems look for is called "main". I really don't need implementation details dating back to Jan 1, 1970 to clutter up a new language.

http://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/dartLangSpec.pdf check page 72 to see that main() is actually a part of the language. WTF?

The bad thing is bashing without trying to understanding the problem they are trying to solve and the audience they are targeting.

Tempted to start calling HN "Hater News"...

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