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Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

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Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

#321

Post by [deleted] »

JimmieMcnulty wrote: post #315
dang wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interpretations inevitably differ, but I don't think those comments come close to matching your descriptions and I can't imagine that most users would either. They seem tediously neutral to me.

Isn’t that the problem? You see your own shallow dismissals as tediously neutral, but others as violations of the guidelines. For example, in this comment here that I’m replying to, you caveat what you say, and yet you don’t caveat any of the comments I’ve cited as ”your opinion”, despite them being the same value judgements of someone else’s writing. “Please stop .” Is about as textbook of a “shallow dismissal” as o…

[deleted]

Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

#322

Post by JimmieMcnulty »

dang wrote: post #319
JimmieMcnulty wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that the problem? You see your own shallow dismissals as tediously neutral, but others as violations of the guidelines. For example, in this comment here that I’m replying to, you caveat what you say, and yet you don’t caveat any of the comments I’ve cited as ”your opinion”, despite them being the same value judgements of someone else’s writing. “Please stop .” Is about as textbook of a “shallow dismissal” as o…

Users here are extremely quick to push back if we do something they find objectionable. That's in fact how the moderation practices have evolved in the first place—by intense operant conditioning: if you do X and immediately get swarmed by wasps, you're less likely to do X in the future. Slowbanning and rate limiting are two different things. Your account is rate limited. That's standard practice in a number of cases…

> Users here are extremely quick to push back if we do something they find objectionable.

This is simply not true; you act like you're the only person who's been around here for 15 years. There is simply no mechanism to organize any kind of meaningful pushback. Additionally, by virtue of the fact that you already dismiss the people (like me, with your declarative statements about the nature of my comments) who give you this pushback, it's not clear you'd even notice. Just looking at your history I can see a number of folks who fundamentally disagree with how you give feedback, but I guess to you that's not "valid" pushback?

I only feel safe to give you this pushback in the first place because I know your moderation efforts are ineffective to how I prefer to use HN. Otherwise I'd be afraid of getting actioned against, as you aren't a rational actor when it comes to taking actions against users on HN.

Further, you have this habit of making declarative refutory statements such as these without justification or elaboration. That's pretty much the exact definition of "shallow dismissal".

For example, a "serial abuser" might actually just be someone you disagree with who you then take action against as part of that disagreement, but the way you operate is clearly without that possibility in mind.

Edit: What[0] would[1] you[2] call[3] these[4] comments[5], if[6] not[7] pushback[8][9]? Or do these not count because you dislike these users? I'm quite sure, in your mind, you've dismissed these complaints as invalid, and I think that's an error.

Also no, none of these are me. Also also not for nothing but 'tptacek seems to spend an inordinate amount of time defending your work in the form of replies to complaints, and I personally think that's a massive waste of his time, but c'est la vie...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857054

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32831746

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801256

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32782368

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32777165

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32777628

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32780934

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32773572

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32776460

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32772466

Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

#323

Post by Tomis02 »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #116

There is a real world example of a complex, critical, domain that has followed this approach religiously for years: prescription drugs. Every prescription drug is given an essentially nonsense non-proprietary (generic) name, with only broad categories identified by a stem (drugs ending in "mab," e.g., are monoclonal antibodies, those ending in "vir," are anti-virals). Names that are suggestive of medical target or us…

That's actually a great example and it illustrates OP's point. If prescription drugs were given names based on their perceived meaning or target, things could get extremely confusing and/or misleading later when the meaning or target change (but the name stays the same). As it stands, choosing "random" names definitely seems like the lesser of two evils. The names may seem awkward at first but once you get used to them there's nothing particularly bad about them.

> it would take a real optimist to say that brings any clarity or long term order to the process by which medical professionals learn or refer to the drugs they prescribe and administer

In this case I don't think you can have the cake and eat it too, unless you can somehow prove that the chosen descriptive name will forever remain meaningful and descriptive.

Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

#324

Post by dang »

JimmieMcnulty wrote: post #322
dang wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users here are extremely quick to push back if we do something they find objectionable. That's in fact how the moderation practices have evolved in the first place—by intense operant conditioning: if you do X and immediately get swarmed by wasps, you're less likely to do X in the future. Slowbanning and rate limiting are two different things. Your account is rate limited. That's standard practice in a number of cases…

> Users here are extremely quick to push back if we do something they find objectionable. This is simply not true; you act like you're the only person who's been around here for 15 years. There is simply no mechanism to organize any kind of meaningful pushback. Additionally, by virtue of the fact that you already dismiss the people (like me, with your declarative statements about the nature of my comments) who give y…

I'm talking about the kind of pushback that happens when we get something seriously wrong and a significant subset of the community gets riled up about it. In the links you've listed, the one example that comes close to that is the pushback against how I moderated the QE thread. In that case I realized I'd made a mistake, and made a bunch of changes. Backing down, acknowledging the mistake, and changing direction is the only thing that works in response to a genuine wave of community dissatisfaction.

I'm not talking about resentful responses from individual users—those are inevitable, if only because misunderstandings are inevitable on the internet, and they don't (necessarily) indicate community discontent. On the contrary, by and large the community downvotes and flags those comments. It's the admins who usually come along and unkill them later.

I'm sure it must be very annoying to be around here for 15 years only to see some random asshole get anointed the big boss of the place and start banning people left and right. But I'm a bit more interested in what people (including you) think I'm doing wrong than you seem to assume.

Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

#325

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #324
JimmieMcnulty wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users here are extremely quick to push back if we do something they find objectionable. This is simply not true; you act like you're the only person who's been around here for 15 years. There is simply no mechanism to organize any kind of meaningful pushback. Additionally, by virtue of the fact that you already dismiss the people (like me, with your declarative statements about the nature of my comments) who give y…

I'm talking about the kind of pushback that happens when we get something seriously wrong and a significant subset of the community gets riled up about it. In the links you've listed, the one example that comes close to that is the pushback against how I moderated the QE thread. In that case I realized I'd made a mistake, and made a bunch of changes. Backing down, acknowledging the mistake, and changing direction is…

[deleted]

Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

#326

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #324
JimmieMcnulty wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users here are extremely quick to push back if we do something they find objectionable. This is simply not true; you act like you're the only person who's been around here for 15 years. There is simply no mechanism to organize any kind of meaningful pushback. Additionally, by virtue of the fact that you already dismiss the people (like me, with your declarative statements about the nature of my comments) who give y…

I'm talking about the kind of pushback that happens when we get something seriously wrong and a significant subset of the community gets riled up about it. In the links you've listed, the one example that comes close to that is the pushback against how I moderated the QE thread. In that case I realized I'd made a mistake, and made a bunch of changes. Backing down, acknowledging the mistake, and changing direction is…

[deleted]

Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

#327

Post by JimmieMcnulty »

dang wrote: post #324
JimmieMcnulty wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users here are extremely quick to push back if we do something they find objectionable. This is simply not true; you act like you're the only person who's been around here for 15 years. There is simply no mechanism to organize any kind of meaningful pushback. Additionally, by virtue of the fact that you already dismiss the people (like me, with your declarative statements about the nature of my comments) who give y…

I'm talking about the kind of pushback that happens when we get something seriously wrong and a significant subset of the community gets riled up about it. In the links you've listed, the one example that comes close to that is the pushback against how I moderated the QE thread. In that case I realized I'd made a mistake, and made a bunch of changes. Backing down, acknowledging the mistake, and changing direction is…

What annoys me is your continued refusal to acknowledge the unfair lack of recourse available for someone who disagrees with a decision you’ve made, and your flippant attitude around making those decisions when it comes to people you don’t seem to respect.

You’re hiding your behavior behind the mob mentality that punishes dissent, claiming that a shallow dismissal response is valid because the HN mob has attacked with downvotes, so violating your own policies is acceptable.

The fact that I was able to find so many examples in just the past week should concern you. It won’t, because it’s clear you don’t “count” those issues as legitimate, but it should and you should.

“I’m interested in what people think I’m doing wrong.” doesn’t mean you’re interested in improving, however. There are easy, concrete steps you could take; simple rewordings, a policy change or two, that would vastly improve how you interact with the “fringe” of HN.

Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

#328

Post by smsm42 »

yuan43 wrote: post #108

The author seems to be talking about names for two totally different things, lumping them under the term "component." Whimsical project name? No problem. Whimsical type name within a project? Really bad idea. Whimsical variable name? Don't even think about it. The concept the author is missing is "convention." Whimsical project names fall within a well-understood and used convention. The convention for type and varia…

I'm not sure I agree with the first one either... I kinda can guess what BigQuery does - probably something with querying a lot of data, so if that's what I need to do, I'm going to check it out, but if not, I'd ignore it. But what does Splunk do? Who knows. Which of the projects with names Beam, Mahout, Samza and Flink I'd need to read about if I need to store and query a lot of data? And after I read about them, would I remember year later which of them does what?

Re: Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

#330

Post by smsm42 »

dagw wrote: post #33
e1g wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter example, there are plenty of successful projects/brands with highly descriptive names: TypeScript, RHEL, GitHub, AWS, GraphQL, HAproxy, Sendmail, QuickBooks, …

QuickBooks I'm assuming this is a tool for quickly laying out and publishing books. Or perhaps a tool for quickly searching for and downloading books to my iPad or ebook reader.

At least there's a meaning of word "book" that matches what it does. So once you learned what it does, you can make a mental note of "ah, those books". Imagine it was named FluffyTurtle instead. Good luck remembering what it does even if you already looked it up 20 times before. And not confusing it with SparklyCamel, which is an inventory manager for plumbers.
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