A taxonomy of tech haters | Hacker News Reader

A taxonomy of tech haters

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43 pointsvikrum23 comments

My favourite kind of tech hater, which I am one of, is the "Your application of technology creates more problems than it solves" hater.

This type of hater rails against new technologies that have no realized advantage over old analog/interpersonal systems besides appearing more high-tech (and thus making the user appear to be 'in tune' with the times).

Ever seen a AV presentation room decked out with the state of the art of 2004-5? Shit like ceiling lights, projector screens and projectors, and sound systems that can only be controlled from a piece of shit pre-iPad tablet PC that takes 5 minutes to get turned on and another 5 minutes to work... when simple mechanical switches on the wall near the door would have worked just fine.

This sort of tech is characterized by taking a system or process that worked perfectly fine and reliably without a computer/software, and adding unreliable computers and software that don't actually give you any new useful capabilities.

The "IntelliLink" South Park episode does a great job of representing and mocking the sort of tech that I am talking about.

Oh dear, that's me.

Top of my shit list is tech which doesn't just creates more problems, it creates extremely damaging problems by replacing stuff that is mistaken for "old fashioned".

Voting machines that undermine the accountability and transparency of democratic elections, public transport chip cards that violate privacy in a way the Stasi could only dream of, that sort of thing.

Describing people who dislike your thing as 'haters' is a little bit pop-music-10-years-ago.

I can believe something adds no value without being secretly jealous of it.

Well, disliking and hating are far apart on my spectrum. And I think I am not alone.

9: People hater. Blogger that writes about the types of people that he's better than.

10 Critic Hater: Culture critics who criticize other culture critics?

11: Critic hater hater.

OK, fair enough :)

Locked in a cycle of hate until the end of time. Just how it should be.

Don't want to sound rude, but to me this is just a nice collection of labels to slap at anyone who disagrees with one's opinion on a tech subject.

I personally prefer to just ignore "haters", but critics are more than welcome!

Missing my (least) favorite one: the "world priorities hater." Hates anything built by intelligent people that doesn't directly solve the problems they perceive to be important. Most often seen when small startups execute useful tools well.

My favorite example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519814, an app I use constantly that makes my life better but was trashed in the top comment for solving a "first world problem."

I think that's an entirely reasonable stance. I wouldn't necessarily agree, but you could argue that it's a waste of human resources to build applications that in the end only make the lives of a fortunate few slightly more convenient.

That logic can be applied to just about anything ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation) and when used in the context I linked only serves to belittle the work of others while distracting from the constructive conversations about the product itself.

There are plenty of opportunities to talk about what problems we should all be working on but one of the great things about hn, especially when introducing a new product, is that you can focus on discussions about improving the product that you've chosen to build.

"Look what I built!"

"A car? Pfft, why don't you build a well in Africa?"

":-("

vs.

"Look what I built!"

"Oh wow a car, have you thought about a more aerodynamic shape? What kind of engine is in it? Ooh, you made the speedometer part of the windshield! Love it! Hate the name though, no one will find it on google"

...which one of those communities would you rather be a part of as the builder?

At first the worst thing about haters is that often they have fake arguments. I believe that in general if you don't like something, you can either ignore it or at least use some kind of constructive criticism, so sometimes it is really annoying when you see that the criticism has serious flaws.

But recently I started to appreciate the value of lemming haters: who is not able to understand when to use or not a technology regardless of what other thinks, is destined to be a loser in engineering. Engineering is a matter of braveness, you trust your judgment, so you are able to do great things instead to follow the common opinions. So, what happens is that lemming haters create a filter for lame people from entering into a community, which in the long term can be a blessing.

Lemming Hate can also be useful for pushing the industry/community forward in positive ways. For an example, see the lemming hate of goto (for which Dijkstra was arguably the catalyst). goto has several legitimate purposes (at least in some languages..) but it is best if inexperienced engineers avoid it as a rule of thumb unless they know exactly why goto is the best solution for a particular problem, and can articulate why the rule of thumb should not apply.

Yes, it is best if we educate everybody properly instead of relying on the formation of this sort of Lemming Hate. However little memes like "goto statement considered harmful" are easier to spread throughout the industry than a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the value of different sorts of control structures. If you want to get a message out fast and have it widely heard, these sort of lemming/meme messages are invaluable.

My favourite kind of hater is the loner hater.

Work with other person's code? No

Readability? Who needs it

Source version control? I will just email you the files

Design patterns, agile methods? That's stupid hippies shit

Using library/framework?No, I will write my own.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of them in the wild.

(edit: formatting)

Another hater I run into: The criticism hater. (And I don't mean to imply that the author of the blog post is one of them.) Point out real flaws in technologies that other people like (such as git, OpenGL, etc.) and you'll get a flood of people insisting that you're just stupid for not understanding, or that you're trying to use it wrong, or you don't know the "right way" of using it. You're trying to have a legitimate conversation about why you find a tool lacking, but it's all your fault to these people.

Someone somewhere said they hated Comic Sans. After hearing this repeatedly and persistently others too eventually started hating on Comic Sans. Doesn't really know why they hate Comic Sans, but they do. MongoDB, NodeJS, and Redis have met a similar fate.

Huh. MongoDB certainly has achieved status as a stereotype for magpies and using the wrong fit technology for a purpose, but to say that the aforementioned three technologies are as reviled as Comic Sans is simply ludicrous.

Especially not node.js, which has pretty much godlike reverence.

Node.js does not. Maybe Redis does for it's advertised use case of caching.

Node.js was commonly hated on for missing crucial scalability features that are being fixed bit by bit. But why people bothered to reinvent those features on top of node instead of using adequate existing systems is a typical tale of tech for tech sakes that asks to be hated on.

Who hates NodeJS? The package management is phenomenal, and just because it's ugly with async doesn't mean you can't fix it with something like Bluebird...

Other than that, it's just a javascript-based server. Not a lot there to hate...

Node itself is perfectly fine, and I use it plenty. It's the culture around it that hits all the wrong notes for me.

Personally I know a gazillion of haters of Nodejs. The 3/4 of it are surely also haters of javascript so it come as natural consequence.

The main reason is infact "Wat? Javascript on the server? Yeah, why do not use just something like php3?"

Javascript is the new perl for them.

I hate node.js (I also love it) for the same reason. The stuff you resolved with async a few years ago you're expected to resolve with q but now you should learn bluebird no wait it's all about highland now. But you still have to wrap everything because stdlib is still err first and that's what everyone actually uses, along with async.

I would add the 'meh hater' and the 'contrarian hater' (the latter sometimes applies to me).

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