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Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? I along with many of my fellow enginee

Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? I along with many of my fellow engineers use Atom everyday and love it. Sure it has some shortcomings but if anything this retrospective from the Atom team shows that they're trying to address those shortcomings at a rapid clip. I love that it's an entirely open source system and that it is written in the accessible Javascript language so that anyone can contribute. I love that I feel like I can change any aspect of the editor fully, without limitations imposed by some vendor. Atom, like any editor, is not for everybody. I don't care much for Sublime but it certainly has its strengths- I don't pounce on HN posts about Sublime spouting negativity because it's not my preferred editor. Please, fellow engineers, before you post something negative think about a project you've worked on that you were most passionate about and cared most about and then remember that projects like Atom do require passionate developers and those developers likely deserve a bit more than snark or non-constructive negativity. Thank you Atom contributors! I think the idea and ongoing evolution of Atom is a special project and I hope to one day make some contribution of my own, in some form, to the core or plugins!

GreenStodd 9y ago
Just like with every forum, circle jerks reign supreme
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
natecavanaugh 9y ago
Personally, Atom is not my editor of choice (team Sublime!), but I really hope Atom succeeds. I do love it's hackability, and I would much rather have my plugins in JS, but alas, it's just not fast enough for me, yet. However I held onto Textmate until 2010 and Sublime wore me down, so I'm a laggard as well. So no negativity from me, because I just want a great editor that I can control and hack on. But I'll be real, I don't see it happening for a little bit. If sublime were to support JS plugins, I fear Atom might be in trouble at that point, TBH.
- brennebeck 9y ago
  If sublime natively supported JS plugins I think all Electron-based editors would be in trouble.
- ExactoKnight 9y ago
  This may sound like heresy but I seriously encourage checking out today's version of Visual Studio. I dev on Ruby and I am a hardcore Sublime user, which is about as far away from Microsoft-friendly as you can get, and I have been really impressed by it. Their app store is advanced, and crucially they allow Visual Studio to be setup with key bindings that match Sublime's, meaning switching over is really easy with almost little to no need to learn new macros. IDE's like Visual Studio can allow you to do code and class refactorings that make Sublime look like a joke.
  - oblio 9y ago
    Yeah, but the Visual Studio installer still sucks, there's no portable version that I know of, and extending it is a major undertaking. Plus, it's Windows only (the version for Mac is mostly a different app). It is a great app, I agree, but it also comes with its own legacy.
    - ExactoKnight 9y ago
      I'm using the Mac version. Started with it today. It felt like getting all the benefits of RubyMine without the learning curve of needing to learn its non-Sublime macros, thanks to Visual Studio's option to automatically map key commands to mimic Vim, Sublime or Atom. Not sure how difficult extending it is, but on day one in their app store I found all the important ruby bindings I needed to replicate what I value most in my Sublime set up: i.e. ruby linting and rubocop. The switch was so painless I hardly noticed I wasn't using Sublime -- except in the moments of joy when I found the other powerful things it can do. This stands in big contrast to RubyMine -- an IDE I absolutely also adore for its power -- but one that I found challenging to pick up due to its custom macros.
      - 9y ago
whatyoucantsay 9y ago
> Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? The moderators have almost certainly played a part. Selectively permitting snark from the in-group is easy in the short run, but eventually incurs a cost to the community.
- jejrjntkpou 9y ago
  s/in-group/in-meme Apple products are bad now despite having a pretty similar rate of technical glitches they always did It’s just the changes impact the HN crowd more now so complaining em masse is allowed It’s meme-tribalism No one wants to be the one to have to give up on their meme
  - emj 9y ago
    This is a wonderful subject, memes and group think, I would say everyone feels like they are part of an minority/snowflake community in some of their views. Memes just makes it easier to get that feeling. So it is not possible to have these discussions without the out-group interpreting your remarks as snarkiness. Handling that is hard, FUD is one way to handle it, compassion another. Social interactions are hard.
- andrewbinstock 9y ago
  I think the moderators do an excellent job on HN. The signal to noise ratio is pretty high here and while there is snark, there's far less than in most other forums.
  - whatyoucantsay 9y ago
    One stark difference between HN, Product Hunt, and other maker forums is that HN is a very critical audience. It's even been specifically called out as such by Pieter Levels in his new book, Make.
- sctb 9y ago
  Snark is against the guidelines, and I can tell you that the moderators find it dreadfully boring, whomever the source. We could use your help if you come across highly-ranked snark to please downvote, flag, or email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't see everything on the site, but we do read all of those emails. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ploxiln 9y ago
Positivity is marketing, you can get that anywhere. I come to places like HN to see what's honestly bad about various technologies and tools. And don't tell me no editors are really worse than any other editors. That's crap.
- yalph 9y ago
  How you say things also matter. If you are an asshole about shit people will be less likely to share their work with you.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Avshalom 9y ago
>> written in the accessible Javascript language so that anyone can contribute Anyone that knows JavaScript.
- brennebeck 9y ago
  Which is a very substantial population.
  - oneweekwonder 9y ago
    Lowest common denominator. We put it on every kids desktop in the 1990's. We put it on every kids phone in the 2000's. We are shocked when they reinvent the wheel with in the 2010's. Now in 2020 they are trying to tell me all the kinks are worked out with frameworks and to get your javascript to work in a browsers you first need to compile/transpile it. Skip the whole multi-platform idea and focus on electron with all the custom bells/whistle not available on all the platforms. Btw how does meltdown/spectre affect the outlook on security with all these application in their own little v8 kingdoms? I'm not cynical, I'm concerned.
    - ExactoKnight 9y ago
      Indeed. The mess we're in is one of crap upon crap. I wanted to use a CSS framework the other day, and I all but had to rip the project apart manually just to get the files without them stuffing a heavy build tool like Gulp down my throat. All of this... just to get some !@#$ing CSS.
    - oblio 9y ago
      And before that every computer had C and Basic. There seems to be a common aspect here, the default programming languages suck :)
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        My first one came with ZX Basic and Z80. The next one came with debug and GW Basic. Followed by another one with debug, GW Basic and QBasic. I always had to buy my Assemblers, Pascal and C++ compilers. Which computers came with C, besides UNIX workstations?
rubyn00bie 9y ago
My general dislike for Atom wasn't anything to do with the editor itself, I've just always been sore they used CoffeeScript which is a language I personally _loathe_. I was excited to have a sublime replacement I could hack on, but that killed it for me. It was that it was so inaccessible and for such a asinine reason (a language purely for syntactical sugar). JavaScript is the lingua franca of the internet for fucks sake... I'll stop ranting about that. BUT NOW.. for anyone else like me-- it looks like, from my quick glance, there's not much CoffeeScript left in the repo. So maybe it's time to give it a chance again.
- subsection1h 9y ago
  > CoffeeScript which is a language I personally _loathe_. [...] it was so inaccessible You know JavaScript, yet CoffeeScript is inaccessible? WTF. I had never written a line of Lisp in my life before using Emacs, but that didn't stop me from writing hundreds of lines of Emacs Lisp during the first weekend that I used Emacs. What's up with the unwillingness (or inability?) that many web developers seem to have for using more than one or two programming languages?
  - rubyn00bie 9y ago
    Why would I learn something which doesn't offer me any value? CoffeeScript is literally syntactical sugar, which I believe, adds levels of indirection to the code and makes it more difficult long-term to support, read, and develop. Not only that, but JavaScript's evolution has made nearly every reason to use it moot. Also FWIW-- I've done vastly more native and server-side programming over the last... oh, seven years than "web." So... I don't think this is something with "web developers."
  - keymone 9y ago
    yeah, I could see myself saying the same but not about coffeescript. That thing just needs to go away, seriously. Having to constantly keep a mental model of two languages when you write code outweighs any benefits from syntax sugar and supposed readability. It was nice ten years ago when JavaScript was absolutely horrendous but not now.
rayiner 9y ago
> Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? My experience is that Engineers are just snarky and cynical. Especially about text editors. Frankly, HN is a lot more constructive than Slashdot or Reddit was back in the day.
- cududa 9y ago
  Not sure I entirely agree with the second bit. I adored Reddit until everyone abandoned digg for it. Just about every post had some expert commentary
emmelaich 9y ago
I tend to see the cynicism/ridicule only at first. As comments accumulate it balances out. Overall it is not cynical. I would say it has improved over the years actually! Perhaps there's lots of cynics hunched over their keyboard hitting refresh on HN so they can jump in. Who knows?
aphextron 9y ago
Ask a group of carpenters about what brand of hammer they use and see if you get cool, calm, rational responses.
_d8fd 9y ago
Beats me. I use Atom everyday and spend zero time wishing I had a better editor.
- eagsalazar2 9y ago
  Comment from actual Atom user, doesn't think it sucks, amazing!
- ExactoKnight 9y ago
  Honestly, the strongest text editors are those that integrate with an IDE that also syncs with your runtime. The kind of debugging and refactorings you can do in that kind of set up are mindblowing, and it took me years of doing it the old vim/sublime/atom way before realizing this.
Khaine 9y ago
> Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? Why would you build a text editor on top of a web browser engine? Who would think that is a good idea?. Of course it is not going to be performant, it is being used for something it was not designed for. On top of that, cross-platform apps built using the one stack are horrible. They never feel exactly like native apps. If this was 20 years ago, atom would be built with java using swing. It would be just as slow and just as un-native. Java apps on the desktop are ridiculed for a reason. The only difference is that now they are using 'trendy' things. I think blind Freddy could tell you that, yes you can build a text editor on top of a web browser, but performance, and usability will suck. That is why everyone is so cynical, because it is so obvious.
- eagsalazar2 9y ago
  Dude you are so off base. Atom for daily driving is not slow at all and on OSX feels perfectly native and well integrated with the OS. So your entire point is dependent on assumptions that the UX sucks and the performance is worse than many native apps, both of which in this case are completely wrong. Please consider going back to the parent post and contrasting that with your way out of bounds response that ends with "everyone is so cynical, because it is so obvious" in light of the fact that all the outcomes you assume are just not right.
  - QasimK 9y ago
    The last time I tried atom a year ago (for the second time) it was so slow I had to write this to warn my future self: https://github.com/QasimK/my-setup/blob/master/atom.md https://github.com/QasimK/my-setup/blob/master/atom.md (Nov 19 2016). This was on a modern powerful desktop.
    - dangamble 9y ago
      I'd imagine after a year of updates it would be the perfect time to give it another spin. Not saying it's any better but to negate something entirely because of a bad experience over a year ago is a little over the top IMO.
SkyLinx 9y ago
Well said!

GreenStodd 9y ago

Just like with every forum, circle jerks reign supreme

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

natecavanaugh 9y ago

Personally, Atom is not my editor of choice (team Sublime!), but I really hope Atom succeeds. I do love it's hackability, and I would much rather have my plugins in JS, but alas, it's just not fast enough for me, yet. However I held onto Textmate until 2010 and Sublime wore me down, so I'm a laggard as well. So no negativity from me, because I just want a great editor that I can control and hack on. But I'll be real, I don't see it happening for a little bit. If sublime were to support JS plugins, I fear Atom might be in trouble at that point, TBH.

brennebeck 9y ago
If sublime natively supported JS plugins I think all Electron-based editors would be in trouble.
ExactoKnight 9y ago
This may sound like heresy but I seriously encourage checking out today's version of Visual Studio. I dev on Ruby and I am a hardcore Sublime user, which is about as far away from Microsoft-friendly as you can get, and I have been really impressed by it. Their app store is advanced, and crucially they allow Visual Studio to be setup with key bindings that match Sublime's, meaning switching over is really easy with almost little to no need to learn new macros. IDE's like Visual Studio can allow you to do code and class refactorings that make Sublime look like a joke.
- oblio 9y ago
  Yeah, but the Visual Studio installer still sucks, there's no portable version that I know of, and extending it is a major undertaking. Plus, it's Windows only (the version for Mac is mostly a different app). It is a great app, I agree, but it also comes with its own legacy.
  - ExactoKnight 9y ago
    I'm using the Mac version. Started with it today. It felt like getting all the benefits of RubyMine without the learning curve of needing to learn its non-Sublime macros, thanks to Visual Studio's option to automatically map key commands to mimic Vim, Sublime or Atom. Not sure how difficult extending it is, but on day one in their app store I found all the important ruby bindings I needed to replicate what I value most in my Sublime set up: i.e. ruby linting and rubocop. The switch was so painless I hardly noticed I wasn't using Sublime -- except in the moments of joy when I found the other powerful things it can do. This stands in big contrast to RubyMine -- an IDE I absolutely also adore for its power -- but one that I found challenging to pick up due to its custom macros.
    - 9y ago

whatyoucantsay 9y ago

> Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? The moderators have almost certainly played a part. Selectively permitting snark from the in-group is easy in the short run, but eventually incurs a cost to the community.

jejrjntkpou 9y ago
s/in-group/in-meme Apple products are bad now despite having a pretty similar rate of technical glitches they always did It’s just the changes impact the HN crowd more now so complaining em masse is allowed It’s meme-tribalism No one wants to be the one to have to give up on their meme
- emj 9y ago
  This is a wonderful subject, memes and group think, I would say everyone feels like they are part of an minority/snowflake community in some of their views. Memes just makes it easier to get that feeling. So it is not possible to have these discussions without the out-group interpreting your remarks as snarkiness. Handling that is hard, FUD is one way to handle it, compassion another. Social interactions are hard.
andrewbinstock 9y ago
I think the moderators do an excellent job on HN. The signal to noise ratio is pretty high here and while there is snark, there's far less than in most other forums.
- whatyoucantsay 9y ago
  One stark difference between HN, Product Hunt, and other maker forums is that HN is a very critical audience. It's even been specifically called out as such by Pieter Levels in his new book, Make.
sctb 9y ago
Snark is against the guidelines, and I can tell you that the moderators find it dreadfully boring, whomever the source. We could use your help if you come across highly-ranked snark to please downvote, flag, or email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't see everything on the site, but we do read all of those emails. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ploxiln 9y ago

Positivity is marketing, you can get that anywhere. I come to places like HN to see what's honestly bad about various technologies and tools. And don't tell me no editors are really worse than any other editors. That's crap.

yalph 9y ago
How you say things also matter. If you are an asshole about shit people will be less likely to share their work with you.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Avshalom 9y ago

>> written in the accessible Javascript language so that anyone can contribute Anyone that knows JavaScript.

brennebeck 9y ago
Which is a very substantial population.
- oneweekwonder 9y ago
  Lowest common denominator. We put it on every kids desktop in the 1990's. We put it on every kids phone in the 2000's. We are shocked when they reinvent the wheel with in the 2010's. Now in 2020 they are trying to tell me all the kinks are worked out with frameworks and to get your javascript to work in a browsers you first need to compile/transpile it. Skip the whole multi-platform idea and focus on electron with all the custom bells/whistle not available on all the platforms. Btw how does meltdown/spectre affect the outlook on security with all these application in their own little v8 kingdoms? I'm not cynical, I'm concerned.
  - ExactoKnight 9y ago
    Indeed. The mess we're in is one of crap upon crap. I wanted to use a CSS framework the other day, and I all but had to rip the project apart manually just to get the files without them stuffing a heavy build tool like Gulp down my throat. All of this... just to get some !@#$ing CSS.
  - oblio 9y ago
    And before that every computer had C and Basic. There seems to be a common aspect here, the default programming languages suck :)
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      My first one came with ZX Basic and Z80. The next one came with debug and GW Basic. Followed by another one with debug, GW Basic and QBasic. I always had to buy my Assemblers, Pascal and C++ compilers. Which computers came with C, besides UNIX workstations?

rubyn00bie 9y ago

My general dislike for Atom wasn't anything to do with the editor itself, I've just always been sore they used CoffeeScript which is a language I personally _loathe_. I was excited to have a sublime replacement I could hack on, but that killed it for me. It was that it was so inaccessible and for such a asinine reason (a language purely for syntactical sugar). JavaScript is the lingua franca of the internet for fucks sake... I'll stop ranting about that. BUT NOW.. for anyone else like me-- it looks like, from my quick glance, there's not much CoffeeScript left in the repo. So maybe it's time to give it a chance again.

subsection1h 9y ago
> CoffeeScript which is a language I personally _loathe_. [...] it was so inaccessible You know JavaScript, yet CoffeeScript is inaccessible? WTF. I had never written a line of Lisp in my life before using Emacs, but that didn't stop me from writing hundreds of lines of Emacs Lisp during the first weekend that I used Emacs. What's up with the unwillingness (or inability?) that many web developers seem to have for using more than one or two programming languages?
- rubyn00bie 9y ago
  Why would I learn something which doesn't offer me any value? CoffeeScript is literally syntactical sugar, which I believe, adds levels of indirection to the code and makes it more difficult long-term to support, read, and develop. Not only that, but JavaScript's evolution has made nearly every reason to use it moot. Also FWIW-- I've done vastly more native and server-side programming over the last... oh, seven years than "web." So... I don't think this is something with "web developers."
- keymone 9y ago
  yeah, I could see myself saying the same but not about coffeescript. That thing just needs to go away, seriously. Having to constantly keep a mental model of two languages when you write code outweighs any benefits from syntax sugar and supposed readability. It was nice ten years ago when JavaScript was absolutely horrendous but not now.

rayiner 9y ago

> Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? My experience is that Engineers are just snarky and cynical. Especially about text editors. Frankly, HN is a lot more constructive than Slashdot or Reddit was back in the day.

cududa 9y ago
Not sure I entirely agree with the second bit. I adored Reddit until everyone abandoned digg for it. Just about every post had some expert commentary

emmelaich 9y ago

I tend to see the cynicism/ridicule only at first. As comments accumulate it balances out. Overall it is not cynical. I would say it has improved over the years actually! Perhaps there's lots of cynics hunched over their keyboard hitting refresh on HN so they can jump in. Who knows?

aphextron 9y ago

Ask a group of carpenters about what brand of hammer they use and see if you get cool, calm, rational responses.

_d8fd 9y ago

Beats me. I use Atom everyday and spend zero time wishing I had a better editor.

eagsalazar2 9y ago
Comment from actual Atom user, doesn't think it sucks, amazing!
ExactoKnight 9y ago
Honestly, the strongest text editors are those that integrate with an IDE that also syncs with your runtime. The kind of debugging and refactorings you can do in that kind of set up are mindblowing, and it took me years of doing it the old vim/sublime/atom way before realizing this.

Khaine 9y ago

> Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? Why would you build a text editor on top of a web browser engine? Who would think that is a good idea?. Of course it is not going to be performant, it is being used for something it was not designed for. On top of that, cross-platform apps built using the one stack are horrible. They never feel exactly like native apps. If this was 20 years ago, atom would be built with java using swing. It would be just as slow and just as un-native. Java apps on the desktop are ridiculed for a reason. The only difference is that now they are using 'trendy' things. I think blind Freddy could tell you that, yes you can build a text editor on top of a web browser, but performance, and usability will suck. That is why everyone is so cynical, because it is so obvious.

eagsalazar2 9y ago
Dude you are so off base. Atom for daily driving is not slow at all and on OSX feels perfectly native and well integrated with the OS. So your entire point is dependent on assumptions that the UX sucks and the performance is worse than many native apps, both of which in this case are completely wrong. Please consider going back to the parent post and contrasting that with your way out of bounds response that ends with "everyone is so cynical, because it is so obvious" in light of the fact that all the outcomes you assume are just not right.
- QasimK 9y ago
  The last time I tried atom a year ago (for the second time) it was so slow I had to write this to warn my future self: https://github.com/QasimK/my-setup/blob/master/atom.md https://github.com/QasimK/my-setup/blob/master/atom.md (Nov 19 2016). This was on a modern powerful desktop.
  - dangamble 9y ago
    I'd imagine after a year of updates it would be the perfect time to give it another spin. Not saying it's any better but to negate something entirely because of a bad experience over a year ago is a little over the top IMO.

SkyLinx 9y ago

Well said!