Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Name It, and They Will Come

overreacted.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 116 posts

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#11

Post by munk-a »

That sort of minimalist looking webpage using a big round font for the headers really does make it hard to absorb the gist of the post - sorry, have I overreacted? Perhaps a less fleeting writing style could have set up a more concrete thesis that would deliver a conclusion to their statement.

That last bit is actually quite relevant - due to law of triviality and such there will always be bikeshedding, but the way to cut through that (in my opinion) is to clearly set a scenario, set an agenda, open with a problem and set the dialog up to resolve the problem. This is why I have begun (usually) refusing any meetings without a clearly outlined agenda, and when agendaless meetings get an agenda sometimes I'll duck out of the meeting and submit feedback in writing _to_ the agenda. This is also why I have a bit of an issue with this article, it is titled in such an irrelevant manner that it can't help but generate bikeshedding around it - the title is good and catchy sure, but I really don't understand how it relates to the actual meat of the article (which does raise some relevant points).

If the suggestion is that naming (adding a short descriptor) to... "stuff" makes it easier to keep discussions about that stuff on topic then please back it up with an example, provide some justification, instead the article reaches ~95% then doing a hard right to inject a catchy quote that seems unrelated to the rest of the verbiage.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#12

Post by nothrabannosir »

[on the subject of HN negativity raised in other posts—sorry for hijacking this post about post hijacking!]

One problem with HN, which I would love to hear othersʼ opinion about, is: the HN Guidelines incentivise negative colour in threads. You get 10 upvotes, and 1 critical comment: to anyone reading the entire thread now looks negative. Noone sees the silent "+1"s, which, I feel, do add a lot of positivity and encouragement!

I honestly don’t know what to change, or how. Hiding scores is great: it avoids the asinine karma peacocking, endemic in most similar forums. Allowing "+1" comments would probably be worse.

But the result is there. I think HN has a lot more positivity than we can see. But it remains hidden in the database.

Positivity on HN is write-only. Negativity is world readable.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#13

Post by DelightOne »

Deimorz wrote: post #6

I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just describes the usual internet bike-shedding ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples ), and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how to do it, or why it would help.

You tell a story in which you show the problem and the solution besides. There is no other way to create interest. It has to solve a problem of yours (a potential problem may be enough). If you don't know it does, why would you care about the solution?

Or that's my interpretation of the article anyway.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#14

Post by atlassubbed »

I've always liked Dan Abramov's posts. He is very real, if that makes sense. This one really helps me mentally. Showing new work the world is hard, and people will always have something negative to say. There's also the issue of timing. When is it "too early" to show off a project? I always wanna post my projects to HN but then I remember how my documentation isn't done, or how I haven't written any tutorials or articles, and I figure I'd better wait, otherwise people will just bounce because they didn't find anything. I think the fraction of people who look at source code because they didn't find any docs is very small.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#15

Post by coldtea »

Deimorz wrote: post #6

I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just describes the usual internet bike-shedding ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples ), and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how to do it, or why it would help.

>I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say.

It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead comment like people are doing in this thread.

(It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give more focused responses).

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#16

Post by coldtea »

Even if you don't understand the point the author is trying to make, this part you should be able to understand perfectly, and I find it a perfectly accurate description of what happens 90% of the time:

= = = =

The top comment thread picks on the coding style in a README example. It turns into an argument about indentation with over a hundred replies and a brief history of how different programming languages approached formatting. There are obligatory mentions of gofmt and Python. Have you tried Prettier?

Somebody mentions that open source projects shouldn’t have beautiful landing pages because it’s misleading marketing. What if a junior developer falls for it without fully understanding the fundamentals?

In a response, somebody argues the landing page design is boring. Additionally, it’s broken in Firefox. Clearly, this means the project author doesn’t care about the open web. Is the web as we know it dying? It’s time for some game theory…

The next comment is a generic observation about the nature of abstractions, and how they can lead to too much “boilerplate” (or, alternatively, “magic”). The top reply explains that one shouldn’t confuse “simple” with “easy”. Actually, Rich Hickey gave a very good talk about this. Have you watched it?

Finally, why do we need libraries at all? Some languages do well with a built-in standard library. Is npm a mistake? The leftpad accident could happen again. Should we build npm right into the browser? What about the standards?

Confused, you close the tab.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#17

Post by Vinnl »

coldtea wrote: post #15
Deimorz wrote: post #6

I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just describes the usual internet bike-shedding ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples ), and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how to do it, or why it would help.

> I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead comment like people are doing in this thread. (It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give more focused responses).

If that's the case, then it appears that the suggested solution -telling a story- doesn't work...

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#18

Post by coldtea »

Vinnl wrote: post #17
coldtea wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead comment like people are doing in this thread. (It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give more focused responses).

If that's the case, then it appears that the suggested solution -telling a story- doesn't work...

Worked for many. Few things work for all people. Some need more time, others never get it.

What's important is if it's better than the baseline of not doing what he suggests.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#19

Post by danabramov »

munk-a wrote: post #11

That sort of minimalist looking webpage using a big round font for the headers really does make it hard to absorb the gist of the post - sorry, have I overreacted? Perhaps a less fleeting writing style could have set up a more concrete thesis that would deliver a conclusion to their statement. That last bit is actually quite relevant - due to law of triviality and such there will always be bikeshedding, but the way t…

I love the meta-ness of this comment. Not sure if it was intentional :-)

One concrete example of naming a problem is “callback hell”. Example of “telling a story” to explain it: https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html

Once you have a few articles like this, the quality of discussions on the topic rapidly goes up.

For React, David Nolen’s and James Long’s early posts did the same thing.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#20

Post by stonogo »

munk-a wrote: post #11

That sort of minimalist looking webpage using a big round font for the headers really does make it hard to absorb the gist of the post - sorry, have I overreacted? Perhaps a less fleeting writing style could have set up a more concrete thesis that would deliver a conclusion to their statement. That last bit is actually quite relevant - due to law of triviality and such there will always be bikeshedding, but the way t…

> That sort of minimalist looking webpage using a big round font for the headers really does make it hard to absorb the gist of the post - sorry, have I overreacted?

I agree, but fortunately for us the people who adopt this weird presentation format almost universally write in a very specific style. I find it easier to just read the headers (or, if they're really bad writers, the headers plus the sentences they felt necessary to typeset in bold), since that's usually the whole message. The rest is some kind of weird boilerplate, like the narrative version of lorem ipsum.

If there were more consistency in HTML tag usage I'd write a browser extension to throw everything away except the useful text, but we haven't reached that design mecca yet.

Post reply on HN