Where have all the hackers gone?

To be honest, it feels like engaging in a cultural war. I don’t want to liken this to any kind of mainstream cultural war, but instead liken it to the old tech cultural wars, like Emacs versus Vim or some shit like that.

I feel like saying positive things about Go is a bit of a fucking minefield, because somebody (especially here on HN) is going to talk about how Go is Awful and Bad and made for stupid people or some shit like that. I’m tired of it. I’m gonna go hang out with the Java developers and the people doing work in Ruby on Rails or PHP.

> Infusion of traditional Business and Capital culture, which traditionally serves smoother-brains, the boring, and the unimaginative.

There’s an entire culture of people in tech who refuse, on some kind of principle, to understand or work with people in business / capital / management unless the people in business / capital / management somehow prove their street cred on the technical side. Like, the people who say that they can’t work for a manager unless the manager could do their job!

This is just a shitty echo of the “wow, startups are hard” cartoon panel. If you see somebody doing management or business poorly, and you think “wow, managers are stupid” then you’re falling into the same trap. If you think, “this is why you need a manager with deep technical expertise” then you’re falling into the same trap, but with extra steps.

If you want to work with people who have deep technical expertise, and you specifically DON’T value people with management or leadership skills (unless they also have technical expertise to justify their existence), then you have fallen into the trap and your attitudes are going to make the team more dysfunctional. You’re going to bring the team into conflict with other teams and with the goals of the business.

Anyway. This article doesn’t just promise flamebait, it seems to relish the flamebait, enjoy the flamebait. It seems to be steeped in the idea that pissing people off is a sign that you’re speaking the truth. I think some people have observed that people who speak the truth often piss people off, and then optimized for it. Goodhart’s Law and all that.

Patent trolls?

The two aren't equivalent (you're using a catchall exception handler in Ruby but not in Java, and are printing a stack trace in java but not in Ruby). Here's the equivalent Ruby:

    begin
      File.readlines('/path/to/your/file.txt').each {|line| puts line}
    rescue Errno::ENOENT => e
      puts e.backtrace
    end

You don't know what the other person really wanted or thought - and neither did the author, apparently. The breakdown in communication here is that you, and the author, had certain expectations, assumptions, and unknown information, and you both made conclusions based on all that variable, unknowable, uncommunicated stuff.

Rather than assume what's going on in the other person's head, ask them. Assume good faith until evidence to the contrary. It allows less judgement and negativity, which leads to more fruitful conversation.

I think this is just "colder" Europeans that can't understand that Americans are usually genuinely happy in those interactions. Like, they aren't being fake or lying to you when they are overly nice and positive. It's just how they actually feel.

I'm neither American nor European but I honestly always felt that Americans are much warmer and genuine than Europeans whenever I visit. But I guess it is harder to see when you are used to be in a colder "rude by default" environment.