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You say that and then immediately become an example of what hes talking about. This "shallow jab that contributes nothing new or meaningful" is, in some circles

You say that and then immediately become an example of what hes talking about. This "shallow jab that contributes nothing new or meaningful" is, in some circles, known as a "joke." I'm continually frustrated by people who think that misinterpreting comments as harmful is a useful activity.

mintplant 9y ago
Not really -- I didn't downvote that comment. And I still dispute the notion that negativity is rare or always shunned on this board: to the contrary, it's so commonplace that an actual rule [0] had to be added to try to sway things in the other direction. Jokes have their place, but bringing up the failure of Hurd in every GNU-related post is banal. And saying they "never really stepped up" to your level as a mighty kernel developer, as if the people who brought us glibc and coreutils lack an understanding of OS internals, just seems rude and curiously out of touch. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916
- luckydude 9y ago
  So negativity here is not rare, when people don't like something they are fast to jump on it. What I was trying to get at is this, if you care about your upvotes, hacker news promotes a sort of hive mind. Which is somewhat like "say only nice things unless you are clearly swatting down something that is obviously wrong". Which is mostly fine, fantastic in fact. I'm fine with it, hacker news is really pleasant because of the (more or less ) quality of the posts and especially the quality of the comments. I'd much rather have it be this way than a free for all, those go bad pretty fast. So I'm for the hive mind, I was just pointing out that you can't make jokes and be upvoted. The joke wasn't banal at all IMO. GNU has done a lot of good, I've been there since the beginning and paid attention along the way. They have also been pretty self serving with their choices, every project has to sign away their rights and then GNU takes full credit for the project even though they had nothing to do with it other than it being GNU troff for example. Given their tendency to take credit for stuff that they didn't do, and their claim that they can do an OS but clearly can't, that joke is funny as heck. If you don't get that, sorry, you haven't been paying attention. () The quality of the posts in the area of programming, especially systems programming, is spotty. Some stuff is great, stuff I didn't know (there is a lot of that here and I'm very grateful for it, it's why I stick around), some stuff is meh, and then there is stuff like "wow, look at $OBVIOUS, isn't that cool?" that gets upvoted. That last one I just don't get, but whatever, the good stuff is good. The signal/noise ratio here is better than any other programmer oriented site I've found.

mintplant 9y ago

Not really -- I didn't downvote that comment. And I still dispute the notion that negativity is rare or always shunned on this board: to the contrary, it's so commonplace that an actual rule [0] had to be added to try to sway things in the other direction. Jokes have their place, but bringing up the failure of Hurd in every GNU-related post is banal. And saying they "never really stepped up" to your level as a mighty kernel developer, as if the people who brought us glibc and coreutils lack an understanding of OS internals, just seems rude and curiously out of touch. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916

luckydude 9y ago
So negativity here is not rare, when people don't like something they are fast to jump on it. What I was trying to get at is this, if you care about your upvotes, hacker news promotes a sort of hive mind. Which is somewhat like "say only nice things unless you are clearly swatting down something that is obviously wrong". Which is mostly fine, fantastic in fact. I'm fine with it, hacker news is really pleasant because of the (more or less ) quality of the posts and especially the quality of the comments. I'd much rather have it be this way than a free for all, those go bad pretty fast. So I'm for the hive mind, I was just pointing out that you can't make jokes and be upvoted. The joke wasn't banal at all IMO. GNU has done a lot of good, I've been there since the beginning and paid attention along the way. They have also been pretty self serving with their choices, every project has to sign away their rights and then GNU takes full credit for the project even though they had nothing to do with it other than it being GNU troff for example. Given their tendency to take credit for stuff that they didn't do, and their claim that they can do an OS but clearly can't, that joke is funny as heck. If you don't get that, sorry, you haven't been paying attention. () The quality of the posts in the area of programming, especially systems programming, is spotty. Some stuff is great, stuff I didn't know (there is a lot of that here and I'm very grateful for it, it's why I stick around), some stuff is meh, and then there is stuff like "wow, look at $OBVIOUS, isn't that cool?" that gets upvoted. That last one I just don't get, but whatever, the good stuff is good. The signal/noise ratio here is better than any other programmer oriented site I've found.