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

51–60 of 116 posts

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#51

Post by saagarjha »

faizshah wrote: post #5

My problem with open sourcing my code is I always feel like someone else must have done it already and done it better. On the subject of irrelevant comments: I see HN more as a place to discuss topics relating to the OP link rather than discussing the OP link itself. A lot of the value of HN for me comes from learning how other people see a subject or what related ideas/libraries there are. For me as a commenter, the…

> My problem with open sourcing my code is I always feel like someone else must have done it already and done it better.

Why does your thing have to be the best? There’s nothing wrong with your think existing; who knows, it might actually be the best or end up becoming the best someday.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#52

Post by yellowapple »

baddox wrote: post #49
munk-a wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I think the article was very lacking when it came to actually offering concrete advice to address the situation or, at least, was very obtuse in the giving. To have a focused discussion on Thing X, ask for a focused discussion. The scenario he stated (discussions on the README getting picked up and whitespace preferences being spun into a mini-holy war) is just... it's going to happen unfortunately. But t…

I actually think your suggestions are perfectly compatible with a charitable interpretation of this article. > Instead of: "Hey HN, I just wrote a badass new streaming protocol" and linking to the github source, specifically mention your concerns about continuing to rely on TCP for video streaming and the buffering lag it induces, link to a blog-ish thing which links to your source but frames a number of questions or…

Maybe Dan should've told a story instead of leaving HN room to bicker about his vague "solution" ;)

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#53

Post by jaequery »

am i the only one who was expecting him to say, after he had posted his project to HN, he would got no upvotes and sadly his project remained invisible to the public?

because getting to front page on news site like HN/Reddit, there is some luck factor too, kind of like winning a lottery, unless you learned to gamify it.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#54

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #16

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 approach…

[deleted]

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#55

Post by skybrian »

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 believe part of the point is that we often go beyond bike-shedding to off-topic bike-shedding. Something written in X language turns into a discussion of whether X is a good language. An announcement from company Y becomes a discussion of everything else Y has ever done. It's a website and has a design, so let's discuss web design.

On-topic bike-shedding would actually be an improvement.

I believe this happens most often with announcements that are legitimate news but kind of boring. The larger, generic topic is more interesting and it's sorta related, so it's more attractive to talk about that.

A possible solution: be more interesting. Tell a story.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#56

Post by mikekchar »

danmaz74 wrote: post #43
coldtea wrote: post #16

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 approach…

The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page. I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen…

There once was a model railway enthusiast. He loved trains and knew just about everything about them. He had a wonderful collection of model trains. One day he met someone with the same love of model railways. Together they built complex simulations and had their trains running together. They wrote software that could schedule the trains, etc, etc. A few more people noticed and while most people said, "Wow. These guys are the real geeks" a few said, "Wow. These guys are amazing" and joined the group. Eventually there was a small club of highly dedicated model railway enthusiasts who knew practically everything about model railways.

One day there was a person who like model railways, but wasn't really that into it. However, he noticed the model railway club and realised right away that these people are amazing. He would go to the meetings just to bask in the glory of the incredible things that these people built. Eventually, he couldn't keep it to himself. He told a whole bunch of his friends and they all showed up too.

The model train club started to get bigger and the original members couldn't be happier. When they first started most people looked down their noses at them. Now they were downright popular. One day some of the members said, "This really amazing stuff is really amazing, but I wonder if there is a way for me to approach this without being quite so geeky. I have a family and I don't have so much time. I want my train setup to be super awesome, but I don't really care that much about the details".

Lots of the other members were in the same boat and so they worked hard to have a kind of "scaled down" setup that would appeal to people who didn't have the time or energy to devote themselves completely to model railways. The club became even more popular due to this and lots of people who really liked trains, but weren't that interested in model railways started to show up.

Eventually several of the members started to have outings to visit train museums and to have photo competitions on train themes. To raise money they even made a calendar with pictures of trains. The model side of the club was a little bit less accessible to most of the membership because the core group of enthusiasts were interested in highly technical details that most other members were not interested in.

Eventually, it was decided that the model railway club should change it's name and purpose in order to be more accessible and welcoming to new members. It would now be the train enthusiasts club. Of course model train enthusiasts would have a place, but it would be appreciated if they refrained from having heated discussions about highly technical and inaccessible topics like programming train simulations and the like.

Eventually, the original model railway enthusiast stopped going to the club. He liked the people. They were great and friendly, but he was, after all a model railway enthusiast.

If you take something that appeals to 1% of the population and scale it to include 20% of the population, it morphs into a thing that the 20% group likes, not the 1% group. Can't be helped. It's just a matter of numbers. It happens everywhere.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#57

Post by topoftheforts »

pedalpete wrote: post #42

Wow, most of the comments in this thread completely miss the point, which... is the point. So meta. We suffered this exact same issue for years, but it isn't only in git, readme or marketing pages that the problem exists. When pitching or telling people what we do, because what we are doing is new, we struggled to find the right words and therefore, got blank stares about what we were doing. The same thing happens wi…

With that description I still have no idea about what you actually do. Maybe that's not actually the pitch and you're just giving an example, or maybe not, just wanted you to give you my feedback :)

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#58

Post by topoftheforts »

flwralex wrote: post #45

"By now, you’re convinced: This idea deserves to be heard." This week my first public project got 7 git stars. The feeling is fantastic. I don't have homepage or story, but I have a nice diagram :) The question for me is why I'm releasing this, to feed the ego monster or because I really beleive it's worth it? I hope it's not the first, but not sure, tbh.

It might as well be a combination of the two, but to be honest I don't think it's an issue. If those ego boosts are what keeps you building something useful, that's great and you probably deserve them.

It's a bit like social networks for exercise (Strava etc) - the whole thing is just people looking to show off because they've exercised, but if that's what's keeping them in shape, then great!

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#59

Post by petercooper »

stonogo wrote: post #20
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…

I'm trying to figure out what both you and the grandparent poster are getting at. Usually on HN we're criticizing people for having too much crap on their pages, hard to decipher designs, tiny text, and what not.. not that their pages are clean and minimalist. What's "weird" about a clean page that's mostly text?

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#60

Post by petercooper »

We tend to discuss things that are easy to talk about.

AJAX (as it was at the time) is a prime example of what Dan's talking about, I think. As a term that enveloped the whole idea of having JavaScript dynamically load content from a server, it really brought developers together in discussing and experimenting, and even resulted in naming a publication on the topic (Ajaxian). Did it matter that almost no-one was really fetching XML (the X in AJAX)? No.

"HTML5" played a similar role for a bunch of technologies 7-8 years ago, even including technologies that were nothing to do with the HTML5 spec (such as WebGL). Or DHTML 15-18 years ago.

We now see something similar with "serverless" which a lot of people criticize as a pointless term except it is bringing together discussion around a group of related concepts and is valuable in that role alone.

Other such terms that are ultimately ambiguous under close scrutiny but which allow discussion and communities to organize around them: IaaS, SaaS, NoSQL, devops..

Post reply on HN