dimino

Everyone has a price tag, silly to pretend otherwise.

There's a certain old-guard zealotry that's a common thread on HN, amplified by the echo chamber.

Can't wait until it dies off.

So like, what is the counterargument? Google keeps projects alive that drain resources for longer?

I guess I don't understand what people want here.

I think of it in terms of energy gaining/draining, but I meant more from the "big 5" test perspective, as well as the other groups of personality tests you can take like DISC and Meters-Briggs.

In general I'm fairly skeptical of personality tests, beyond just intro/extro version, for the similar reason that a) I can test vastly different based on my mood and b) people tend to tie their self image to the results and you end up with a tail-wagging-dog situation.

I tend to be a bit skeptical when studies are based on extroversion and introversion, if only because I can test on all parts of the spectrum depending on my mood.

I think people shackle their identity to their *version, and it can be limiting.

You could tell your coworker (or your direct report if we're taking this analogy seriously) to clean up his work area. A child's room isn't a completely private space, and it's where they do their "work" (getting dressed, homework, play time, etc.).

Okay but you're flying into DCA, not BWI or IAD, and from there it's a ~15 minute metro into the heart of the city.

Agree with you on the other points, though.

Hey, it might be a bug that a "real" user could encounter, if you need any kind of motivation to actually look into it!

Bringing the database back up with a fix does improve your customer experience, however!

The example of the child being asked to clean his room reminds me a great deal of a bad engineer being asked to clean up his code.

A) I've been on HN for 10 years, I'm not "coming from" or "struggling to adjust" anywhere and B) I didn't mean "other message boards" I meant literally every other community I belong to, both professionally and personally. Online and offline.

HN isn't special, dang is the problem, specifically dang. He needs to go. If he goes, I can thrive just fine. During the times he leaves me alone I thrive in here. When he attacks me, that's when I struggle.

This addiction to HN being a special place is complete and utter nonsense, and if that's the koolaid you're drinking, we have little to say to one another.

Advice is good, I don't want to seem like I'm critical of the post or anything, I just thought it's worth pointing out the differences in goals of the folks who tend to give the most popular startup advice from your specific situation.

That difference might help explain why there might be a perceived gap in what's here vs. what's on pg's blog, for example.

It seems like startup advice is based on the repeatable observations that people who've worked with a lot of startups have discovered. That means there are a bunch of situations that don't get covered because they don't come up a lot.

When playing an odds game like startups, you want to do all the maximally viable things possible, but that doesn't mean other decisions aren't also viable, they're just not observed to be as successful, so they're not mentioned. Doesn't mean they won't work.

There's also opportunity cost. What could this team have done if they were working on something more... disruptive? The execution here is incredible, applying that to a new problem would have probably also done very well.

It's not a personal attack, it's my opinion. I've worked with people who think that way, and I'd prefer if they didn't exist in the industry. How would you prefer I shape that comment so it's not crossing some magical line?

I am aware, generally, how things are. My complaining here is not confusion, it's frustration. I know I can change my behavior to elicit a better response, but I'm frustrated that it's relevant. People should have thicker skin, and when people dish it out (as what was going on here), I should be allowed to give it back. Dang's not commenting on anyone else's posts here, though there were many other rule violators.

It's an unfair application of the rules.

Edit: This post is 0 minutes old, how does it have a downvote already? This is the shit I'm talking about...

You've completely misunderstood my goals in talking to you. This is a public forum, and I'm making a case for why I think the people who read what I write should believe what I'm arguing. This isn't about you, or me, it's about convincing others that the viewpoint I hold is a valid one.

Your opinion of me, your ability to help/not help me, and all the other interpersonal things you're bringing into this are just your baggage. I thought you wrote a great article that had a few specific passages I felt dang should in particular read, and I called that out publicly. If that's "thread shitting", I think maybe you need to re-evaluate the kind of personal relationship you have with people who read your writing.

I think your edit here is an emotional one, and I'm not really going to address it further beyond pointing out in the very comment you're replying to I take some responsibility for my role in how I'm treated here.

Dang doesn't understand any of what you said, and makes zero attempt at improving, neither himself nor the site at large.

I am certainly not guiltless, but consider the fact that I have none of these problems anywhere else I interact with others. Why is it just on HN that I run into these struggles? I am in lots of communities through my daily interactions, and I successfully navigate those, so what's special about HN, other than dang and the site's mechanics?

This place cannot handle dissent. That's literally the definition of a toxic environment, and dang does nothing to create safety for people who might not agree with the mainstream view. That's on him.

I think faking growth until you achieve actual growth is the time-honored tradition of social media websites, and can flip a failure into a success by getting people to feel that, "Am I missing out?" feeling again.

I don't think WT:Social is doing that right now though, so not sure what their plan is to combat what you're talking about.

Definitely, which is why doing it just to get small blocks of code won't work. It has to be part of the entire design, and sliced at real, logically separate spacings.

It's hard! But immensely rewarding if you get it right. You have to be thoughtful as you design and build.

People don't like hearing dissent, or people who disagree with them. My tone is a reaction to the hostility I'm experiencing as a result of that friction.

Most forums have some kind of backstop that prevents the vindictive from causing too much harm. This forum has a vindictive moderator. He needs to go.

> HN is regularly being updated and improved.

No it's not, nor is it growing anywhere near what you guess it's growing at. I'd guess it's stagnant or even dying a bit in 2019.

I usually post from diminoten, but moved to this account to try and figure out why I was getting downvoted instantly nearly every time I commented, and why I was losing the same karma as votable posts that I had in the span of seconds sometimes.

HN is not built to handle dissent. Privileges are based on votes, there are minimal to no vote protection tools in place, the guidelines are used as cudgels to beat people who disagree with the popular view, and the moderator (there's more or less only one, dang) prefers to smokescreen and gaslight anyone he doesn't like with generic comments that don't follow the very guidelines he's trying to enforce. Just look at his comment history; it's full of "This doesn't follow guidelines" without any elaboration, and when he does elaborate, it's an incredibly cynical and not-generous interpretation of the comment he's saying isn't acceptable, which is itself a violation of the HN guidelines, specifically the one about addressing the best form of an argument.

Most of the problem is the fact that dang is the primary active moderator on HN. If others were to take over, and he were to be removed or retire, HN would become substantially better, possibly overnight.

Dang needs to be removed for this site to grow and improve. People think HN is growing; it is not. The quality people who used to post here are more or less gone, and HN isn't attracting new quality posters to fill their shoes, precisely because dang moderates very poorly, which pushes away prospective high value posters.

The reality is, it's high time for a replacement to HN.

You know moderation is at an IP level, we've had multiple discussions about it, and I'm clearly still getting hit with the rate limit, so when you say "to work around restrictions" it's obviously disingenuous on your part. Someone/multiple people are auto-downvoting everything I comment on with my other account, so I switched to see if it kept happening. Unsurprisingly, it didn't until I mentioned it again, and it started up immediately after.

As for the other comment you made (can't reply directly, rate limit), it isn't a low information post, I'm showing a screenshot of the message I get when I hit the rate limit.

You're literally gas lighting right now, it's insane.

You also know if you actually do anything else beyond rate limiting I'll just go dark, which is even "worse" for you, so this so-called "leniency" is nonsense. Just stop.

Edit: You can't use multiple accounts to get around rate limits, as you and I have discussed multiple times, so I'm not "doing" anything that constitutes a ban, but feel free to ban at your leisure. Over the years you've established yourself firmly as an unreasonable person, so there's no point trying to treat you like one.

I'm not doing anything like that, but please, pretend that I am, seems like your go-to move here anyway.

Of course there are trade offs, of course we live in imperfect situations where we have to deal with shit that isn't ideal, but sitting around pretending like everything is alright is just lying to ourselves.

You're stuck in PG because your DevOps team is a bunch of incompetent dolts, so yeah, make the best out of the bad situation and go ahead and use something like Que.

Just don't develop Stockholm Syndrome while doing it.

People in this thread are protecting their own egos by expressing how great PG is as a message broker, but it's harmful to the industry to let that kind of attitude perpetuate.

I can tell you, from experience in this very thread, it feels about as shitty. :/

It's marginalization, fundamentally. A very small group of people (or a single person) decides to use their power to silence you, tell you how wrong you are, and tie your hands behind your proverbial back so you can't defend yourself.

Dang supports it, and others join in. I can't tell you how many times I'll be browsing HN and see my score drop from one page load to the next by exactly as many points as I have comments in my history that can be downvoted. Or how many times a comment of mine gets flagged for reasons that have nothing to do with the HN guidelines.

This forum is broken, and is in dire need of disruption.

I cannot overstate how important this concept is. Write code (and DESIGN SYSTEMS) that fit in your brain, because the faster you can reload it back into your brain, the quicker you can dispatch bugs and new features down the line.

Nothing in my professional career has caused me more anxiety than encountering complex code to solve a simple problem. It's infuriating, and has long lasting deleterious effects for the life of that code.

What's especially insidious about this problem is that for folks who value short term success over sustainability, they'll struggle with this for a long time, and have all kinds of reinforcement to be skeptical that any of this is even a problem. Once you get used to struggling with complex code some people start to think it's all that can be written.

This isn't an aggressive tone, except to people who have their own emotional investment into the topic.

I put out what is given.

People are literally saying to default to using PG for "everything". That's the attitude I'm arguing against.

What's frustrating about this conversation is that I'm literally, right now, supporting two different queueing systems based on PG and Redis, so I get on a very real level, the tradeoffs. I know in great detail the problems that come up, but HN is not conducive to talking at that level of detail. At this point every comment I make is flagged and downvoted, so why would I pay time into a system that has clearly decided my opinion isn't relevant?

You're literally doing it right now, my comment got flagged, lol...

Don't bother suggesting innovation in HN, it hasn't been updated in 10+ years, and for some reason they're proud of that fact.

Not talking about dead comments, talking about the rate limiting that's selectively applied to certain IPs/accounts.