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That's almost every article on HN, though. Don't use inheritance, don't use C, use Kubernetes, don't use Kubernetes, etc etc.

I suspect the thing that's bothering people in the comments here isn't as much that the author is making an argument but that the author is making an argument on cultural grounds?

People are fed up with the constant identity-politics culture-war bait. Mainstream news is already full of that stuff. HN in general is far more interested in the technical articles of the author.

It's kind of fun because any comment can be stated in a an objectionable way, I think.

"Don't talk about identiy politics and things that seem like "dentity-politics culture-war bait".

It's a fun game. You could do the same thing to this comment if you chose.

I don't like Kant, but there might be something to the principle of unverisality...

The difference being that the culture isn't awash in people demanding adherence to Kant. It seems that every time someone voices an objection to the tiresome identity-politics that is so prevalent today, others will ensure the conversation devolves into a discussion of slippery definitions and pedantic dismissals of the complainant's understanding.

The truth is, _many_ people are fed up with the dominant leftist dogma that permeates almost every area of culture, government, and the economy today. We can argue until the sun goes down about the nature and specifics of what that entails, but people are reacting to _something_; it does exist, irrespective of any failure to describe it well.

It's not leftist dogma. Leftists aren't capitalists, friend. Hard to argue the government and economy are post capitalist.

And most leftists I know absolutely hate performative progressivism. Dems are widely mocked in leftist circles for doing stunts but not doing anything to help. Like Pelosi wearing Kente cloth while doing nothing to aid African people.

So please, you might actually have people who agree with you in the leftist camp, stop bundling us with the Dems.

That conflation of dems/leftists is central to one side of the "identity-politics culture-war bait". They aren't going to stop doing it.

However, when folks do it, you know that they are just un-self-critically engaging in something that they putatively dislike in other folks.

Not to get to annoying on the topic, but I do find it fun to unpack.

Ironically, the hated "I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour" position is central to the idea that "we [HN] are fed up with the constant identity-politics culture-war bait."

That claim is about who "we" are, and it's stated with a great deal of certainty, even if there is a bit of cowardly rhetorical hedging.

And that claim is supposedly consistent because the claimant has over-determined the "we":

so that claimant isn't making a universal statement, just a statement of "I" and the "We" to which that "I" belongs.

Which seems like a pretty normal move- notice the concern with "_many_ people" and the demand that we don't look too far into what that population might actually mean.

I've been on HN for a decade, have some karma, and no, I am not part of that "we" apparently- a fact for which I am grateful, as I am grateful I don't feel compelled to vote for capitalist Democrats.

Still, I think that it really is worth not looking too deeply into what they are saying because their point will be lost: they get to say who "we" are and what kinds of things "We" are sick of, and they don't feel bad about it because it's not univeral, so the cowardly hedging that they did means they aren't being hypocritical.

I personally don't care if folks are hypocrites though, because it makes for a pretty cool set of tea leaves to read about where folks minds are at.

I come here specifically because I try not to hang out with the kinds of sociopaths that wreak havoc on my world via badly implemented technology, but it's an easy place to check their general mental weather.

So, yeah, they aren't gonna agree, see the internal contraditions, understand the distance between lefitsts and performative DEI folks, etc.

But, happily for me, they will keep displaying their terrible opinions so I don't have to rebuild connections with real-life assholes just to keep my ear to the ground about what horrible new thing is coming to our world.

I thought the article was interesting and informative even though I won't recoil at use of the term. Getting upset at the authors opinion is just as useless as getting upset about the thing they complain about, but boy do these comments do the former.

This seems to be a characteristic of many high functioning people, especially successful engineers. There is a "correct" way of living your life, conducting your business, using your text editor, etc. It's helpful in that it ensures consistency and focus. The downside is that people become desensitised to nuance.

In this particular example, the word cargo in cargo cult is redundant. All cults have ridiculous ceremonies for cult members to engage in. These ceremonies come from human nature, our inability to distinguish correlation from causation. We're told to conduct a ceremony, get a good outcome, then believe it's the ceremonies that caused the outcome. Just call them ceremonies, because that's what they are.

However, when Feynman wrote his speech he must have thought that a cargo cult is a much more graphic metaphor than a dry lecture about stats and human biases.

Cargo cults are a specific kind of cult where the ceremonies come from imitating some other community. And complaints about cargo cult programming aren't only about people doing ineffective things, it's also about people seeing someone else doing something effectively but then not doing the work to understand why it's effective. It's a complaint about people being so close to being much more effective, but then snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Did you read the article? That is very much the pop sci definition of cargo cult that is incorrect.

The cargo cults were made by people who were enslaved and violently oppressed and then believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors (e.g. flour, rice, tobacco, and other trade) should belong to them

> believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors

I'm not sure that was in the article was it? These were exotic goods brought from overseas.

I'm not trying to say there was no oppression, but the examples in which they believed the trade goods should belong to them were still about trade goods which arrived by boat.

"[The leader proclaimed] that the ancestors were coming back in the persons of the white people in the country and that all the things introduced by the white people and the ships that brought them belonged really to their ancestors and themselves."

(edit - certainly these goods may well have been produced through the oppression of other peoples elsewhere!)

It's easy for people who get paid to think to overthink things. He's overthinking it.

It's hard enough for people to communicate as it is. Now we're being asked to research the ancient history, etymology and moral underpinnings of words and phrases when all we really want to do is communicate with our colleagues. I think it's okay to use any word or phrase as long as everyone knows what it means, and accurate communication has been achieved.

People who find themselves with more time and money than sense on their hands have the privilege of writing articles like this. That's wonderful. Good for him. I'm happy for him. The rest of us can just carry on like we never read that article because although it's quite interesting, it's also absolutely useless.

> Unfortunately it feels like we are heading to

> "I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour"

Depending on which avenues of the web you were on more than 10 years ago, even if that was some of the side streets on Tumblr or Twitter or whatever, we long ago already reached that point. It’s just gotten progressively more mainstream with each passing year, but the backlash was always going to come, and we’re living it.

Or, depending on who you conversed with at the forum...

How do we disprove the null hypothesis that this is a part of human nature and there have always been and will always be people that state their opinions as fact to be more persuasive, and that those voices tend to dominate over the more tempered ones?

Well, it's one thing to do it for these silly and easy examples, but how about :

"Surely if the case for the damage caused by smoking / drugs / climate change / platforms were to be made clearly and undeniable, people would not need to be told to stop using it, They just would."

But they don't, typically because this involves doing very hard changes in their lives.

So, you have to keep the pressure for decades (or even centuries) of the "I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour" kind, if you want to have any hope for the behaviours to change.

And at some point, it just becomes tiresome to always have to debate this, you know ? (How long can you can keep debating with people who think that aspects of fascism / Putin's behavior is good ?)

Anyway, I will keep publicly shaming the kind of developer scum who in 2025 still uses the likes of GitHub / Discord / LinkedIn, and doesn't even have the decency to admit there might be something problematic with them.

>"Surely if the case for the damage caused by smoking / drugs / climate change / platforms were to be made clearly and undeniable, people would not need to be told to stop using it, They just would."

Smoking - undeniable, but addictive. Yet despite the difficulty in quitting, smoking is in decline. Many smokers have tried to quit. They don't need more hectoring, they need support.

Climate Change - Broad consensus is not the same as undeniable. Rapidly becoming undeniable. Change is happening, belatedly, and perhaps too late, but it is occurring.

Drugs - Far too broad a category to be undeniable in practically any aspect. Definitely disagreement on the correct course of action on every aspect.

Platforms - even more nebulous. Harms are alleged for many platforms but those claims are still a long way from being undeniable, yet the exodus from certain platforms would suggest that people leave when they feel the need.

>And at some point, it just becomes tiresome to always have to debate this, you know ?

Forcing your will on others because getting them to agree with you has become tiresome, does not seem to me, to be a productive way to change minds.

> (How long can you can keep debating with people who think that aspects of fascism / Putin's behavior is good ?)

As long as it takes, with reason, information, and compassion.

>Anyway, I will keep publicly shaming the kind of developer scum who in 2025 still uses the likes of GitHub / Discord / LinkedIn, and doesn't even have the decency to admit there might be something problematic with them.

I struggle to see the difference between shaming and bullying. Declaring people to be scum because they use a service you have a problem with just alienates them. When you have provided a list of services that includes so many people you declare to be scum. You have done even more than that. You have alienated yourself.

I would like to think that I stand on my principles. I have never had a FaceBook or LinkedIn account. I do not, however, vilify those who make different decisions from myself.

An odd aspect of much of this how I have always thought of myself as a very left-wing person, yet I found myself increasingly distant from people proclaiming themselves to be left-wing. The principles I value that leads to me to feel left wing are compassion, inclusion, freedom, and support. I can't reconcile those values with people who declare themselves to be lefties to seem to be so opposed to them.

Recently someone posted a George Orwell quote on HN.

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

Now it seems a lot of people do their bullying in the name of fighting Fascism while seeing Fascism in the myriad forms of things theey disagree with.

One of the characteristics that led Steve Rogers to be selected for Captain America was his answer to the question

"Do you want to kill Nazis?"

His response,

"I don't want to kill anyone, but I don't like bullies; I don't care where they're from."

The writer of those lines had a message about what it meant to be a good person.

Please have compassion. Instead of calling-out or publicly shaming, have a one-on-one conversation, listen and understand their position, explain your own.

Those are all great points, but it's not all that simple, because of the Paradox of Tolerance (Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and others).

And those values of yours (and I guess, mine too) are probably even more bottom wing than left wing : and as you well know there have been scores of left wing anti-liberal regimes in the last two centuries, with plenty of disastrous results.

(With the extra issue that 'liberal' also sometimes stands for right-wing, under a quite different meaning.)

----

And I'm not a saint, so there's also aspects of both lashing out because social trends make you feel like in a box that is closing in, and also self-flagellation because of sometimes being tempted into using platforms (with their addictive features and social benefits).

(Also of course some platforms are less problematic than others.

Also, there's an extra aspect when most of the platforms are from a foreign country (USA) that has been sliding in an anti-liberal direction (on their 'left' too) for many decades now. Why tolerate these platforms when you don't even have indirect democratic control over their companies ?)

But yeah, compassion and "cultivate your own garden first".