This is a prime example of why I prefer HN’s moderation. On SO, even though you’re objectively wrong — this is a link to a completely different site and discussing it from a different angle — your active participation on the site would probably have given you the ability to close this conversation and ruin the discussion for those interested. I’m glad that HN doesn’t allow that, so we can roll our eyes at the obviously incorrect tag and get back to participating without having the rug yanked out from under us.
On Stack Overflow, splitting the posts between two targets would be "ruining it", because there is an explicit goal of keeping that information together. But more importantly, the entire point there is not to have free-running, threaded discussion. Obviously the practices should be different here.
There is nothing in the submitted article that isn't part of or significantly different than the large discussion already ongoing/passed. The discussion about toxic community etc. The short blog post is basically just another comment on that greater discussion. The discussion which is already over there. No need to split it up or repeat it again days later. It's a duplicate discussion.
I disagree, and that’s what I value here: you can add your tags, and we can opt to follow or ignore them as we see fit. That’s far better than the SO model of a site participant having the ability to shut down the conversation for everyone.
But also, a note: conversations are never finished. People talked about this broad topic yesterday, but I didn’t see it yesterday to be able to weigh in. I’m here today, saw this topic, and started talking about it with the other people who stumbled across it just now. I would be highly annoyed with a friend if I brought up an interesting subject and they replied that they’d already discussed it with someone else over dinner last night so there’s no need to talk about it again. I wasn’t there last night. Even if there was a recording of it, that would be a stale artifact I could interact with, other than to contact last night’s debaters and try to continue on with a subject they’d already finished with.
You're welcome to continue the 'unfinished' conversation over there. The thread isn't closed. This article isn't bringing anything new. And yet is forcing the thousands and thousands of HNers who saw the previous main discussion and news days ago to see it again? Sorry you weren't there, sorry you missed it. It's the bringing it up and repeating much of the discussion so soon that's the hinderance. Stuff moves pretty fast around here.
I think I'd prefer to have it here with people who are still engaged and actively discussing it, rather than whispering to ghosts in another thread that people have moved past.
But no one's forcing anyone to see this version of it. It's just a link they can skip past, although if enough people upvote this post to keep it on the front page, then apparently a significant chunk of the readership hasn't gotten tired of seeing it yet.
Sorry some of you missed it. And in particular with this one, a lot more people saw the original one and discussed it. It's a huge thread. And now just repeating alot of the talking points in that thread here because again, the submitted post isn't anything new, it's hardly a substantial blog post. Part of the dupe notice is to highlight that maybe your talking point was already covered recently in another thread. You are forcing us to see it again because you're pushing it onto the front page again and into a hundred feeds as if it's fresh. But it's not. It's just a split up/repeated thread about something from 4 days ago. Anyways, OP maybe didn't realize it but you've been around long enough to know things move fast around here.
Oh, man. That was kind of the end of the line for me, too. I’d get roped into conversations trying to defend the question, which wasn’t even mine, because I thought it was novel and interesting enough to be worth answering in the first place. And then I asked myself what I was doing getting suckered into these talks. I don’t need that kind of tarpit.
How on earth did wokeness even come up there? You’d have zero notion of my political leanings if you only read the words I’d written there. How badly do you have to phrase a question or answer to have it downvoted for being not-woke? “So I’m trying to write a GET route in FastAPI, which has a great ass, by the way, amirite?, and I’m getting the error that…”
Wokeness is a control mechanism. If you tread one inch off the "correct" path (as any normal person is going to do occasionally), you will get stomped. For example:
[jane]
Using "delete this" is perfectly safe in C++
[neil]
Jane, not at all. For example .....
[moderator]
neil, i think you are disrespecting jane - 6 hour ban.
And I am not joking about this. But it was only the company employee moderators that did this, and they did it excessively. They also got rid of the few mods who knew how to mod and wouldn't toe the line.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Suppose HN allowed regular users to perform certain moderation actions. I use that and start powertripping and deleting all your posts, for instance. In that scenario, I expect dang would reach out to me pretty quickly and tell me to please stop doing that.
In that case, dang would be part of the "vetted set of mods" I mention with the power to overturn my decisions, because HN is paying him to make sure the site runs in line with its vision, even if that means disagreeing with the "ground-level" moderators.
I'm pretty sure you and I see eye to eye on this, given your other comments on the topic here.
Not OP but I think it’s the same problem. Mods got a pat on the back for “curating” (i.e. quickly closing) incoming questions, so they leaned far too far toward closing them ASAP for specious reasons because it rewarded themselves.
Sure, there was a whole appeals process you could go through if you had infinite time and patience to beg the same cohort for permission, pretty please, to ask the question on the ask-the-question website, but the graph of people willing to do so over time looks a lot like their traffic graph.
I disagree. Look at the moderator election threads[0] and a good chunk of the would-be mods’ stories are demonstrating how good they are at deleting and flagging and downvoting content.
And that stuff is important, but when it becomes a metric to optimize and brag about…
Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwellers got their way and drove everyone else away.
Instead of a rich interaction forum, it became a gamified version of Appease The Asshole. I stopped playing when I realized I’d rather be doing almost anything else with my free time.
For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run, who is empowered to say “I appreciate your efforts but this isn’t how we want to do things here” and veto the ruiners. Otherwise you inevitably seem to end up with a self-elected bureaucracy that exists to keep itself in place, all else be damned.
(Bringing it back to a local example, I can’t imagine HN without dang and the new mods. Actually, I guess I can: it would look a lot like Reddit, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but I vastly prefer the quality of conversation here, thanks.)
Fully agreed with your reason for leaving, but I'll throw in: it's absolutely terrible at showing time relevant information, seemingly on the theory that someone will dedup and edit every question and answer as it becomes history rather than helpful.
That became more and more clear as the site and content aged, and afaict they have done absolutely nothing to address it. So after a few years the site had good information... but often only if you had accidentally time traveled.
I had FAR too many cases where the correct answer now was much further down the page, and the highest rated (and correct at the time) answer was causing damage, and editing it to fix that would often be undone unless it was super obvious (if I even could). It shifted the site from "the most useful" to "everything still needs to be double checked off-site" and at that point any web search is roughly equivalent. And when it's not a destination for answers, it's not a destination for questions (or moderation) either.
Definitely. And interestingly, that sucked for authors of the old answers, too. I had a few highly ranked answers from around 2010 or so. Every now and then I’d get a new notification about someone telling me I was completely wrong and should be embarrassed. Look, my time traveling friend, that answer was perfectly reasonable when I wrote it 16 years ago. It’s not my fault that the ebbs and currents of SO pushed you to it today. I’d answer differently today, but I’m not going to go back and “fix” all my old suggestions to keep them up to date.
That’s the weird feedback loop from practically forcing new askers back to the old answers, which was bad for everyone involved.
The Android filesystem APIs are a perfect example of this. The old answers no longer work because Google keeps restricting what apps can do. If you're lucky, someone might post a comment or a new (non-accepted) answer.
> For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run
That was Jeff Atwood. Who said a lot of very interesting things about how the site was explicitly intended to differ from traditional forums where "perfectly good" questions are constantly asked.
> Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay.
This is absurd and I can't think of anything remotely like this happening in practice. The opposite is true: popular questions attract dozens of redundant, low-quality answers that re-state things that were said many years ago, list two different options from two other different previous answers, list a subset of options from some previous answers, describe some personal experience that ultimately led to applying someone else's answer with a trivial modification for personal circumstances unrelated to the actual subject of the question, etc. etc.
My back-of-my-head benchmark is still my old Amiga. Here's[0] a full-blown GUI email app that was perfectly nice to use. The entire package, complete with all its custom GUI classes and 3 sets of icons, took 1.4MB uncompressed.
I know the thousand legitimate reasons why modern apps are larger. It's not all bloat and inefficiency, either, except in the harshest sense that old apps tended to use byte-optimized data structures like linked lists instead of faster, but less space-efficient structures like hash maps. They have to deal with higher resolutions, although the command to draw an empty white 320x200 square on the screen should be approximately the same size as to draw a 2000x1500 one. And yet, wow, it doesn't seem like it should need to be that much bigger.
Thunderbird for Android supports pretty much everything Gmail supports and probably more, but it's "only" 40MiB in size. Even on Android, that's a 3x size reduction.
I don't know why iOS apps in general are so much larger than Android apps (that doesn't just seem to be a Google problem) but you certainly don't need the full size of the Gmail app.
> I don't know why iOS apps in general are so much larger than Android apps [...]
Rough guess: It probably wouldn't be this dramatic of an increase, but could it be something to do with iOS disallowing Just-in-Time compilation, and forcing Ahead-of-Time? I've always wondered.
Same. I ran the build farm at a large company, and HPUX was there solely to build releases and run their tests. I never touched it for any other reason, and that as little as possible.
Egads, was Itanic ever slow for anything not manually optimized to run on it.
Depends on what it’s unwilling to break. “The compiler generates code that segfaults when you multiply 13 * 37, but someone found a way way to trap it and used that as a faster way to make syscalls on Prime minicomputer, so we had to add -ffix-four-eight-won, which the original implementor misspelled in 1993 so we can’t fix that, either, for backward compatibility.”
Some of its actual weirdnesses seem no less odd than that to people who aren’t C experts, I assure you.
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