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Comment by ericbarrett | Hacker News Reader

1. Pick a random tech stack

2. Make a blog post and share on HN

3. Let the commenters tell you everything you did wrong and what they would have done instead

Put more seriously—I think if you don't have an external professional network to lean on, then you should blog it, talk at conferences, etc. Saying "we aren't sure this is right but it's what we came up with" will definitely invite comment. Keep an open mind and remember any publicity is good publicity: your harshest critics will still be engaging and giving you feedback.

I don't think chat services (IRC, Matrix, Discord) are a good fit here, unless used to talk to a group of people you already know and have some cachet with. But I might just be old-school.

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> 1. Pick a random tech stack

> 2. Make a blog post and share on HN

> 3. Let the commenters tell you everything you did wrong and what they would have done instead

It's called Cunningham's Law[0]:

> Cunningham is credited with the idea: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." This refers to the observation that people are quicker to correct a wrong answer than to answer a question.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Law

Nice to see someone born in Florida represented.

Was this downvoted because it was a joke or because people didn't get the joke? I can accept the former, but not the later.

According to Wikipedia, Ward Cunningham is from Indiana.

Thank You!

Include a throwaway line about considering a microservices architecture and let the roasting begin...

And web scale with mongodb as well. Or the latest web 3, nft or Blockchain tech

This is great thanks

You're doing it wrong. You're supposed to correct them by telling them that Cunningham's Law doesn't apply.

/meta

You missed a trick. You're supported to say it is Murphy's Law and then someone will come along and tell you it is actually called Cunningham's Law, thereby proving Cunningham's Law.

Here's guessing that was intentional, so yet another proof: *supposed.

> 3. Let the commenters tell you everything you did wrong and what they would have done instead

The Codeless Code : The Purple Beggar - http://thecodelesscode.com/case/170

> ...

> The monk opened his laptop. “Five separate posters have each called me a blithering idiot and offered a simple solution to my problem, which they claim to have tested on their own systems.”

> Yishi-Shing nodded. “My walk once took me past a beggar whose sign read, You do not DARE throw coins at ME! His body was purple with bruises but his bowl was always full.”

Wrong answer post is best done … anonymously.

I read lots of highly ranked comments here that I think are pretty wrong. There are lots of quite idiosyncratic opinions that are popular on hn but tend to be pretty wrong. On this site you’re mostly looking at a small subset of programmers who tend to spend a lot of time online and the conventions on this site tend to encourage authoritative and contrarian opinions, so while there are a lot of comments and many are good, you can get quite a biased sample. I think it would often be unwise to follow all the advice in high-ranking (or low-ranking) hn comments but I have no advice for differentiating what is rot from what is not.

I agree. I have deep knowledge of a somewhat narrow aspect of tech (and a very shallow knowledge of a much broader base, like many of us.)

Comments regarding the areas I have expertise in are frequently quite wrong, but worded confidently.

It makes me wonder how wrong comments about other areas are - ones I'm not well-versed enough in to disprove.

I think when I'm looking for a discussion I'm not really after a single answer that is "right". Rather, you're looking at the things in common and different between multiple answers, finding out how people weigh tradeoffs, and so on.

Sometimes entire comment sections can be wrong/bad. One way is for early comments to be wrong and for the corrections to fail to overcome the feedback cycle of bad takes pushing each other up. Another is for threads to devolve into repetitive flame wars which can create a lot of comments and mislead someone who might think that opinions repeated in many comments are commonly held (rather than strongly felt and easily regurgitated by a few).

For this reason, I don’t think a wisdom-of-the-crowds approach is valid.

If you are going to blindly follow HN or other site's comments, then it will not help. But as far as giving different perspectives HN and reddit/programming etc are good

A tech stack is not an architecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxJPQ5qXisw#t=45s

See? It works!

> I don't think chat services (IRC, Matrix, Discord) are a good fit here

At least I'm not alone. I find the quality of the conversation in random online communities lacking. I toyed with the idea of joining vetted professional communities (paid or invite-only) but I haven't yet. Suggestions are welcome.

I'm also curious about vetted professional communities.

I'm not a part of one, but the only community formed online that I've found to last, was one with a weekly video meeting with a few people from the larger community. This actually outlasted the original community.

It's just so easy for any member to become inactive in the community without regular interaction. Free communities on Discord can plausibly be a great option, with the major caveat that the core interactions are over regular scheduled video calls, instead of mostly messages in large group chats.

Back in the 00's, the J2ME IRC channel was perfect for this. You could describe an architecture or an implementation and get different views from friendly expert peers. Non-toxic, too.

The C channel was the opposite. Any question was met with "google it" or "we're not going to do your homework for you." If the question was really specific, then the conversation turned to how it wasn't good for discussion in this channel because it was machine dependent.

Anecdotally, I've found that with lower-level tooling a more contentious and toxic community is attracted. The higher the barriers and difficulty of the tool seems to justify people's poor attitude of "figure it out, dipstick. I did."

Specifically I have lived your anecdote. Early aughts, I was in highschool at the time and asked that C channel for some advice building my first 2D RPG game in C (was using BASIC, then Pascal/Delphi before this). Literally got the exact response "we're not going to do your homework for you" when all I was asking was for some direction (libraries etc) + any existing example projects that I could read.

Honestly, I find that most highly technical people are miserable and not very receptive to helping someone learn the ropes. The majority of the peers I've worked with would rather isolate and protect their work, rather than to work collaboratively - and, I 100% get it. I've seen so many people thrown under a bus just for asking simple questions in regards to their solution. Unfairly so.

Yeah, that is sad.

Also, I have noticed a similar correlation in front-end development. There is a consensus amongst recruiters and decision making that react is the best framework around. First it is NOT a framework ( and it would be better if it was one ), second, it was created 8 years ago when js6 wasn't out yet, and it was addressing a problem since then fixed by native js proxies. Most reactjs Devs are junior, or at best intermediate- but junior, really, since they've only worked with on library all their career, calling themselves full stack engineering, but can't write one SQL query, or cannot write anything else than js.

Those communities are very toxic, because the deliver crap code, they think they are super good and very confident about it, and they absolutely love to trash everyone that disagree with them.

See, you got the elitist toxicity, and the noob toxicity. If I had to choose, I'll run with the elites 100%. At least, we get a hope to deliver.

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