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Comment by alex1138 | Hacker News Reader

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Or "nice project, I've done exactly the same 10 years before..." Or "cool project, but why haven't you tried [insert obscure software]".

The list goes on.

the "why not xxxx?" comments really are the height of disrespect, ignoring someone else's effort to instead show how smart they are, while being lazy about it. I bet 9/10 people who make such comments never even look at the original project in any depth, let alone try it out in anger.

That might be the case sometimes but it is incredibly uncharitable to assume so by default. This is a discussion forum for the technically inclined. "Why not X" is an entirely reasonable, even valuable, question. It's not ignoring the other party's efforts but rather attempting to learn from them. Why _didn't_ you use this framework that at first glance appears to be the obvious and easy thing? There must be a good reason and I'd like to learn about it.

The topic has been discussed at length here before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21675717

very often there is no reasoning given.

There could instead be warm fellow-feeling where everyone maintains respectful silence about alternatives, everybody with a new project gets a lovely ego boost, and I remain uninformed about what else exists.

If that doesn't come in the form of a discussion grounded in the original post, I could just as well have asked chatgpt and wouldn't have known the difference.

all about you, all the time, right?

I mean, there's room for both things. It would be bad if nobody at all was willing to fawn over a new project and call it exciting instead of shooting it down. (After all, it might be my project ...)

Shouldn't be sensitive about people asking "why didn't you do this?" though, or "that reminds me of my own thing that I made back in the stone age". Those are useful and reasonable points, if not made unkindly. Reality is unkind.

It's hard to explain, but easy to spot when someone is genuinely contributing and when it's just ego-boosting.

We can at least agree we are talking about the latter.

Thinking about it, I really don't know, couldn't say for sure what people do. I'm gonna let them get on with it. Here endeth the meta-comment. :)

i'll know what to think if i see "what about... ?" though

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