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Comment by Timja | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33360234 is considered to put other people's work down.

I asked about some terms and if they are common among the HN crowd. Ako replied that people who are doing enterprise software integrations know them. Then I ask if the HN crowd is nowadays people who are doing enterprise software integrations. (Because that is not what I would associate with hackers / startup founders. So maybe what initially was a community of hackers + startup founders is now a community of grown ups with enterprise jobs.)

Whose work have I put down by asking this?

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I guess I took your comment as putting down "enterprise software integrations" as inferior and putting down the community as being "about that".

If you say that wasn't your intent, I believe you, but I doubt that I'm the only reader who took things that way. It can be difficult to read intent accurately from short internet comments. Ultimately the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

To be honest I still find it hard to read that comment and not feel that it was being snide. If one takes your question at face value, it answers itself: of course the community is not "about that"—it's got all sorts of people doing all sorts of things.

It's not hard to figure out what an unfamiliar (to you) product or forum community is about - by a bit of googling for the former and reading and participation for the latter. Maybe it's not your intent but you come off as if you're conducting some sort of interrogation which most people aren't all that keen on. It's also mentioned in the site guidelines:

Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.

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

There are plenty of startups that focus on enterprise (integration) software, don't see how these are mutually exclusive. And you can be both a hacker at night and an enterprise software engineer by day.

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