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Comment by peter_l_downs | Hacker News Reader

Elaborate on this; write a blog post. I'll gladly give you another up vote.

> But there's something about the negativity and criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites.

Honestly, I have had the opposite experience. Everyone here seems focused on getting work done and making great things, yes, but the little criticism that I do see is always well thought-out and explained. Instead of it 'grating' on me, I value it highly, because it's almost all of excellent quality.

> I think people here tend to assume that [...] to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage.

Who? That's a foolish viewpoint that I cannot believe anyone here would hold. I haven't run across anyone who seems like they subscribe to this belief — have you?

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That is of course an assumption I'm making, but one that's come from years of using HN. More recently there was the article about the girl from Pakistan who received technical certification and sadly passed away. There was a good amount of comments that took a fully rational approach to assessing her credentials concluding that what she'd done was not worthy of praise. That seemed terribly inhuman, and I feel people of this community are more prone to act that way.

I seem to recall there was also a substantial reaction against those comments.

I remember that. The nice thing about those comments is that most of them seemed to be focused entirely on correcting journalistic exaggeration, and not on maliciously bashing someone, even if that was the way they were perceived. I know, that doesn't really sound like a nice thing, but I've seen enough actual malicious behavior to much prefer the "inhumanity" of only acting like an asshole as a purely accidental side-effect of being persnickety about technical correctness.

There are a lot of aspects of the Human Condition that I'm not too fond of, so feel free to act inhuman with good intentions around me any time!

> > I think people here tend to assume that [...] to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. Who? That's a foolish viewpoint that I cannot believe anyone here would hold. I haven't run across anyone who seems like they subscribe to this belief — have you?

I, and I suspect many others, have subscribed to this belief. When working on purely technical problems, I find that there's no need to bring emotions in. There's just the problem, the problem, and nothing but the problem. When I bring emotions in, I lose focus on the technical aspects of the problem, which are all that I need to solve it.

A problem never made you mad or excited? Did you never get motivated or deterred by a problem?

I think keeping emotions out is an illusion.

Here's my personal experience with these sorts of issues: http://joshkaufman.net/working-in-public-is-weird/

Well written, thanks for sharing. Here's my viewpoint, from the situation of the people asking things of you: http://peterdowns.com/posts/ask-for-help.html

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