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Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

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Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#151

Post by dlkf »

deltree7 wrote: post #69
hallway_monitor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are assuming the worst intentions here but anyone who has worked in an enterprise knows sometimes it's useful to build tools for your use and not to share. The tool might not even be allowed, C# is probably not in the supported platforms and even if it was, getting it into the official repos can be arduous. If OP really cared about maximizing everyone's productivity of course they would share the tool…

Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. That's a dumb understanding of economics and even management. Also, scaling tools to more than one user is incredibly hard. Software development is still custom / art. This tool works because it is suited to OPs workflow and his "way of thinking". In order to make it work for others, it needs lots of improvement and g…

> Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive.

This is either trivial or underdetermined. It depends on how you define "unproductive":

- If you define "unproductive" as "produces at a lesser rate than the new, increased productivity level" then it's just a tautology.

- If your definition of "unproductive" is not relative to the new rate, then you have to stipulate a reasonable definition of "productivity" and show that it was not being met prior to the automation. You haven't done this.

It might turn out that the second bullet is easy enough to do in the domain you're talking about. But it's worth using language precisely if you're going to tell people that they have a "dumb understanding" of whatever you're discussing.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#152

Post by afrodc_ »

CrazyStat wrote: post #91
deltree7 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. That's a dumb understanding of economics and even management. Also, scaling tools to more than one user is incredibly hard. Software development is still custom / art. This tool works because it is suited to OPs workflow and his "way of thinking". In order to make it work for others, it needs lots of improvement and g…

> Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. Maybe in some imaginary world with spherical cows, infinite demand, and no friction (physical or transactional). In the real world, increasing productivity so that one person can do the job that ten used to do very often results in layoffs. 70 years ago there were hundreds of thousands of telephone switchboard opera…

This is so true. Anecdotally, my dad worked in FABs on chips and stuff in the 90s during the dot com boom before they stripped all those jobs away to outsourcing and it basically destroyed him as an older man. Funny how we're desperately trying to get the silicon manufacturing back after we sold out.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#153

Post by floatingeye »

It's strange to me that you think this was a choice of developers instead of marketers or business holders. My understanding is the impetus behind this decision is that likes / dislikes have a negative effect on people in the social space. Though it makes things slightly harder to navigate in the youtube space, I think overall it is a well intentioned change.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#154

Post by speedgoose »

cfn wrote: post #136

Since everyone is trading stories, here is mine: I once worked in a newspaper at the start of desktop publishing (DTP) and Word. They received the news from Reuters (as an example) in some strange format and had two people employed specifically to reformat and correct that text using Word before going to DTP. I wrote a Word macro (more like half recorded, half edited) that did 90% of the work because it was painful f…

Did you tell their boss?

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#155

Post by andrewla »

I think many of us have tricks for circumventing paywalls, and I avoid posting them whenever possible.

I wish there were a way to stop people from doing it in the comments as well because once the trick becomes widespread enough then the glitch will be "fixed" and I'll have to find a new method.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#156

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

varsketiz wrote: post #120
pavel_lishin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenter complaints about negative, unproductive responses to things they've posted; immediately gets negative, unproductive response.

Why do you consider it unproductive? I think the perspective provided is very reasonable - if something did not work once, maybe you shouldn't stop doing it forever. What do you think would be a productive response to this complaint?

Actually I think it's on you to say why you don't think the response was unproductive.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#157

Post by BeetleB »

uhtred wrote: post #42
BatteryMountain wrote: post #9

Yeah I do this. Most of what I build, nobody knows about it nor is it release into the wild. Latest example: at my current workplace we have some crappy custom compilers for our platform.... I've rebuilt them in a way that I like (and using C# instead of Java), that enables me to use it in a small visual studio code plugin that enables me with real time error messages as I code against our platform, so basically cons…

I get this. If you tell people, and it gets released into the official tool chain, you will also probably then be its "owner". More work for you with no extra money.

I was looking for this among all the responses. Surprised you're the only one who mentioned it.

In my first job, I would make constant productivity improvements like this. This resulted in two problems:

1. The team became dependent on them, but only I would maintain them (management's directive). Although productivity went up, management saw me as the bottleneck because if the tool acted poorly, that team member's work was held up until I fixed it. I ended up with a lot more responsibilities, yet had to keep up with all my teammates who were using the tool to be more productive. That's a recipe for burnout. And except for one bonus one year, I didn't get paid more and it was made clear to me that all this stuff would not contribute to a promotion.

In summary: I needed to maintain all this, do my "regular" job, and had no option not to work on the tools any more.

2. Since management loved all these tools, they decided to own them: Prioritized features, changed behavior for the worse, etc. I now had to not only maintain my babies, but I had no say on the development of said babies.

I was eventually fired for not being productive enough on my "real" work.[1]

I'm not jaded, though. Now in every new job, I test the waters. If management acts this way again, I stop showing people my productivity tools, and slowly look for another job. Often, management really does appreciate and reward me.

[1] Well, and for other reasons. I quit first, and they retroactively fired me :-)

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#158

Post by Hekioi »

literallyWTF wrote: post #133
Hekioi wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are writing software! It's our fucking job to optimize the world around us. How do you think can we, as a society, advance while doing bullshit jobs? Make me obsolete!

And then what? What makes you think the leaders/rulers of our society will then somehow “pay us back”? You’ll just end up broke and without a job.

I don't want to do bullshit work just to be entertained.

I want a society were no one needs to work and we only reach it when the amount of people we need is getting so much less that our society needs to rethink this "work".

Without a job? My work ethic is to work in a way that I'm not needed.

And still I'm needed but instead of doing the same old shit everyday I can innovate because I don't need to fix old shitty written stuff.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#160

Post by DrammBA »

corobo wrote: post #149
DrammBA wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the only argument I've seen opposing the removal of dislikes so far. Are there any others? Even silly reasons, anything other than "bad tutorials tho" Is that argument not enough? It is now harder to distinguish good videos in a video platform filled with sub-par content, any other argument would pale in comparison.

Edit: the dislike counter on this comment is 2, you can ignore it! At least here the site makes it hard to read if you're visually impaired. Now that's a dislike button! For me, no. I've never used the dislikes for this, it seems like such a crowbarred in reason everyone latched on to for lack of a better argument I tend to judge the content on the content

Personally I don't have the time to judge all the potential content I want to see on the content itself, so I have to rely on indirect factors like dislike to quickly dismiss a video.
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