10 ms·

Name It, and They Will Come

357 points by stablemap 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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ignoramous 8y ago
Pretty much summarises comment threads here on news.yc much like this blog post: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ One way to avoid the pitfall of folks resorting to talk abt 'universally shared experiences' is to take control of the conversation: One way to do that is to offer AMA, or ask a question yourself. I've seen the keybase founders (esp malgorithms) and to an extent the Cloudflare founders (esp jgrahamc) do it pretty successfully here. An example of an independent developer (browsh) shaping the conversation to their benefit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552
- jgrahamc 8y ago
  For clarity... I wasn't a founder of Cloudflare, but I was an early employee. I try to answer questions about Cloudflare, or comments about the company, here when I have the time. I do the same on Twitter (and to a certain extent on Reddit). I have code that monitors HN for mentions of "Cloudflare" and emails me within a couple of minutes.
faizshah 8y ago
My problem with open sourcing my code is I always feel like someone else must have done it already and done it better. On the subject of irrelevant comments: I see HN more as a place to discuss topics relating to the OP link rather than discussing the OP link itself. A lot of the value of HN for me comes from learning how other people see a subject or what related ideas/libraries there are. For me as a commenter, the threads I like are exactly the ones that a submitter might not like: threads filled with many semi-related comments. I do think we absolutely have a problem with overly negative and discouraging comments on HN (and the programming community in general) though. The worst kinds of comments are comments like the “yet another js framework...” on someone’s show HN. You’re discouraging someone’s work on their specific library by bringing up some larger problem you see in the industry. So I absolutely agree that those sorts of semi-related comments belong in a separate post on that specific issue.
- jeena 8y ago
  About the 'someone else must have done it better already' if I can't find it then others might have not been able to do that either, that is where my solution could help. And even if not then just having a alternative implementation from which others can learn is pretty neat.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > My problem with open sourcing my code is I always feel like someone else must have done it already and done it better. Why does your thing have to be the best? There’s nothing wrong with your think existing; who knows, it might actually be the best or end up becoming the best someday.
Deimorz 8y ago
I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just describes the usual internet bike-shedding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples), and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how to do it, or why it would help.
- deleted 8y ago
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- veritas_veritad 8y ago
  something meta about this comment
- DelightOne 8y ago
  You tell a story in which you show the problem and the solution besides. There is no other way to create interest. It has to solve a problem of yours (a potential problem may be enough). If you don't know it does, why would you care about the solution? Or that's my interpretation of the article anyway.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead comment like people are doing in this thread. (It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give more focused responses).
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    If that's the case, then it appears that the suggested solution -telling a story- doesn't work...
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Worked for many. Few things work for all people. Some need more time, others never get it. What's important is if it's better than the baseline of not doing what he suggests.
wwv25 8y ago
Thanks for the writeup, Dan. This is how I feel about most code reviews. It's difficult to comprehend all the code and focus on the _actual_ problem being solved rather than naming conventions and syntax. And yes, I realize the irony by posting a tangentially-related comment on HN.
hasahmed 8y ago
I have an issue with the formatting
munk-a 8y ago
That sort of minimalist looking webpage using a big round font for the headers really does make it hard to absorb the gist of the post - sorry, have I overreacted? Perhaps a less fleeting writing style could have set up a more concrete thesis that would deliver a conclusion to their statement. That last bit is actually quite relevant - due to law of triviality and such there will always be bikeshedding, but the way to cut through that (in my opinion) is to clearly set a scenario, set an agenda, open with a problem and set the dialog up to resolve the problem. This is why I have begun (usually) refusing any meetings without a clearly outlined agenda, and when agendaless meetings get an agenda sometimes I'll duck out of the meeting and submit feedback in writing _to_ the agenda. This is also why I have a bit of an issue with this article, it is titled in such an irrelevant manner that it can't help but generate bikeshedding around it - the title is good and catchy sure, but I really don't understand how it relates to the actual meat of the article (which does raise some relevant points). If the suggestion is that naming (adding a short descriptor) to... "stuff" makes it easier to keep discussions about that stuff on topic then please back it up with an example, provide some justification, instead the article reaches ~95% then doing a hard right to inject a catchy quote that seems unrelated to the rest of the verbiage.
- danabramov 8y ago
  I love the meta-ness of this comment. Not sure if it was intentional :-) One concrete example of naming a problem is “callback hell”. Example of “telling a story” to explain it: https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html Once you have a few articles like this, the quality of discussions on the topic rapidly goes up. For React, David Nolen’s and James Long’s early posts did the same thing.
  - munk-a 8y ago
    It was, to my knowledge there isn't a great way to flag that sort of thing on the web (short of * WINK *)... I thought the fact that I apologized for having "overreacted" when discussing the blog post hosted on overreacted.io would be a bit of a give away. That callback hell story differs from the one above in that I think it delivers a much better summary statement at the end and way forward - I have some opinions on it's aim as I think it is eschewing power in terms of a more comfortable expression for imperative programmers - but the article is well sized, clear, humorous and suggests a solid remediation for the perceived problem.
nothrabannosir 8y ago
[on the subject of HN negativity raised in other posts—sorry for hijacking this post about post hijacking!] One problem with HN, which I would love to hear othersʼ opinion about, is: the HN Guidelines incentivise negative colour in threads. You get 10 upvotes, and 1 critical comment: to anyone reading the entire thread now looks negative. Noone sees the silent "+1"s, which, I feel, do add a lot of positivity and encouragement! I honestly don’t know what to change, or how. Hiding scores is great: it avoids the asinine karma peacocking, endemic in most similar forums. Allowing "+1" comments would probably be worse. But the result is there. I think HN has a lot more positivity than we can see. But it remains hidden in the database. Positivity on HN is write-only. Negativity is world readable.
- adventured 8y ago
  My take on that issue is it doesn't matter in any regard. It couldn't be any more meaningless. A scenario: a show HN post gets ~60 upvotes reasonably quickly and gets to the front page. Inside the post you have ten or so comments, three of which are negative or quasi negative (sometimes merely skeptical, sometimes overtly harsh). Two people really liked it and said so, five comments are mostly off topic. The negative comments are at the top in the thread (posted by members with higher default ranking scores); the positive comments are short on content and are near the bottom of the thread (posted by weaker ranking members). That setup doesn't seem like it would be great. In fact it's spectacular. The post is going to end up with 100+ upvotes over time and it's getting a wave of traffic to it. It's the huge number of readers that never comment, and or never even sign up for an account, that are by far the most valuable part of the equation. The typical negative/cynical/skeptical comments are mostly meaningless - so long as you actually have a good product. I can't emphasize that enough, I need a far stronger word than meaningless here. You have a chance, with that wave of traffic, to convert people that want to believe in what you're doing - that's where all of your focus must be, those are the people you must not fail. If it worked any other way in actuality, no product launch on HN would ever succeed. They'd all be buried by skepticism. It's the unseen angelic adopters on HN that matter more than anything else. Focus on delighting them and everything else will flow from it. My advice on negative comments (unless they're definitely well earned, in which case you better act on them): put them in your mouth and eat them. Negative HN comments are like eating plain rice cakes. In the scheme of life, they're about the least concerning - most benign - things you're going to run into in the list of negatives when trying to build something, launch a product, run a business, and so on. Every other real problem with business or a product/project is drastically harder to push down and digest. At a minimum let the negative HN comments be a gentle introduction to how hard doing something successfully actually is (gentle because, again, negative HN comments are the easiest thing to mentally deal with - among negatives - that you will ever run into).
atlassubbed 8y ago
I've always liked Dan Abramov's posts. He is very real, if that makes sense. This one really helps me mentally. Showing new work the world is hard, and people will always have something negative to say. There's also the issue of timing. When is it "too early" to show off a project? I always wanna post my projects to HN but then I remember how my documentation isn't done, or how I haven't written any tutorials or articles, and I figure I'd better wait, otherwise people will just bounce because they didn't find anything. I think the fraction of people who look at source code because they didn't find any docs is very small.
coldtea 8y ago
Even if you don't understand the point the author is trying to make, this part you should be able to understand perfectly, and I find it a perfectly accurate description of what happens 90% of the time: = = = = The top comment thread picks on the coding style in a README example. It turns into an argument about indentation with over a hundred replies and a brief history of how different programming languages approached formatting. There are obligatory mentions of gofmt and Python. Have you tried Prettier? Somebody mentions that open source projects shouldn’t have beautiful landing pages because it’s misleading marketing. What if a junior developer falls for it without fully understanding the fundamentals? In a response, somebody argues the landing page design is boring. Additionally, it’s broken in Firefox. Clearly, this means the project author doesn’t care about the open web. Is the web as we know it dying? It’s time for some game theory… The next comment is a generic observation about the nature of abstractions, and how they can lead to too much “boilerplate” (or, alternatively, “magic”). The top reply explains that one shouldn’t confuse “simple” with “easy”. Actually, Rich Hickey gave a very good talk about this. Have you watched it? Finally, why do we need libraries at all? Some languages do well with a built-in standard library. Is npm a mistake? The leftpad accident could happen again. Should we build npm right into the browser? What about the standards? Confused, you close the tab.
- baddox 8y ago
  This quoted section on its own makes it sound like Dan is complaining about all the people who aren't discussing the thing he (the creator of the tool/library/idea) wanted them too. I thought the same thing as I first read this section. But I think it becomes clear that he's not making that complaint, or at the very least, he describes a clear reason why people tend to discuss certain concepts, and offers a way to try to get your concepts discussed.
  - munk-a 8y ago
    I disagree, I think the article was very lacking when it came to actually offering concrete advice to address the situation or, at least, was very obtuse in the giving. To have a focused discussion on Thing X, ask for a focused discussion. The scenario he stated (discussions on the README getting picked up and whitespace preferences being spun into a mini-holy war) is just... it's going to happen unfortunately. But that discussion wasn't one the author initiated for feedback, it was a general comment thread on the repository. If you, as an author, want to spark an intelligent discussion on your product than do just that, present the points you want to debate while allowing some freedom for that noise since it isn't always useless. Instead of: "Hey HN, I just wrote a badass new streaming protocol" and linking to the github source, specifically mention your concerns about continuing to rely on TCP for video streaming and the buffering lag it induces, link to a blog-ish thing which links to your source but frames a number of questions or doubts you have around your project if you, indeed, are at a loss and want to turn to the internet as a whole to try and solve them. Basically, as I do in my workplace, refuse to let your discussion/meeting/whatever become a vaguely directed waste of time - set a clear agenda (i.e. a set of specific points in a blog post) to help funnel the discussion toward the useful parts. In the resulting chatter you'll probably get some whitespace criticism (spaces are simply poor manners, #tabs4lyfe) you'll get some chatter about your question (and on HN that'll be floated to the top) and you might get someone who dug behind your question and found that - yea TCP is bad, but if you're going to use UDP you'll need to have some solid check-summing in place which your project currently lacks. So, you need to direct the discussion, but allow noise, without noise you'll eventually settle the discussion into a local maximum of functionality where everyone is nodding and saying "Yup we did it, it's not a solvable problem but we've clearly come up with the best partial solution."
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josepot 8y ago
And what happens when you tell the story and everybody just completely ignores you? TBH I find that a lot more frustrating than ppl missing the point on what you were trying to say. That is exactly is what happened to me a week ago... I will keep on trying, though :-)
KorematsuFred 8y ago
As a researcher you will notice that simple and catchy title for your paper will give you far more citations than a paper that has more descriptive titles. If you are publishing a paper about new way to optimize a problem, just give it a fancy name first.
retrac98 8y ago
This kind of thing is very frustrating for creators. It’d be cool if comments could be sorted based on their relevance to the article, post, project, or idea as a default, rather than just by time or popularity.
Areading314 8y ago
I find this to be spot on. I've frequently seen internal projects in companies called "Data Event System" or "Progam Manipulator" or some other nonsense. Sometimes giving a name to a project will dramatically change the way people talk about it.
asadlionpk 8y ago
This is very accurate as of my recent experience on doing a Show HN here[1][2]. I did get very good feedback but many of the comments were just stupid. Still, posting here did help the project as the broader audience doesn't care about a random's HN opinion. 1. https://zeroserver.io/ https://zeroserver.io/ 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828
- willio58 8y ago
  Weird, I actually thought of your Show HN post while reading this. I think this was because the response on HN seemed very negative, but then I saw the project was trending on Github for days after the HN post.
  - asadlionpk 8y ago
    The post did help project take off. It's just a little annoying to read negative comments when we can easily convey the same point in a constructive way. I still love this place and am a big lurker for a long time. I am pretty sure if we were a bit more humane, many many lurker will actively participate, which would be a win-win.
- aliswe 8y ago
  Agreed, the comments in your thread were deplorable (to a large extent). Be aware that most people on HN simply appeal to high profile personalities and don't really have the judgment to deem something usable or not. IMNSHO, that is.
ilaksh 8y ago
I would love for my project to get on the home page and be filled up with irrelevant comments. Normally anything I try to share is completely ignored.
- aliswe 8y ago
  I can see why. HN is not for very divergent submissions, they rarely take off here. Your submissions are kinda not-so-familiar to the great masses so they don't fly. People just being curious without being familiar with the subject won't check them out because the number of upvotes haven't reached a critical level. Try something more populistic, and especially deriving from an established trend, and I think you'll appeal to the mob. How about: "ReactJS rewritten in Go in 24hrs" That was a jest, by the way...
pedalpete 8y ago
Wow, most of the comments in this thread completely miss the point, which... is the point. So meta. We suffered this exact same issue for years, but it isn't only in git, readme or marketing pages that the problem exists. When pitching or telling people what we do, because what we are doing is new, we struggled to find the right words and therefore, got blank stares about what we were doing. The same thing happens with the introduction of many new products and systems. We have gone through many iterations of how to describe our product and the industry moves making it the next big thing. From "3d visualizations" to "interactive 3d scenes" and currently settling in on "spatial media". Each version gets successively better, but until you give someone a hook to hang your product on, they don't know what to do with it. That is the shared vocabulary. For us, it goes like this. "The future of media is spatial,viewers expect to be able to control their perspective in a 3d scene. We've seen this with VR, 360 video, and gaming. We are another type of spatial media. We're like drone shot video, but the viewer is in control of their perspective, and we create the scene without a camera."
- topoftheforts 8y ago
  With that description I still have no idea about what you actually do. Maybe that's not actually the pitch and you're just giving an example, or maybe not, just wanted you to give you my feedback :)
  - pedalpete 8y ago
    Thanks, we've found this to be significantly better than what we were saying before, it's still a work in progress. "We're like drone shot video, but the viewer is in control of their perspective" Most people get that.
    - deleted 8y ago
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flwralex 8y ago
"By now, you’re convinced: This idea deserves to be heard." This week my first public project got 7 git stars. The feeling is fantastic. I don't have homepage or story, but I have a nice diagram :) The question for me is why I'm releasing this, to feed the ego monster or because I really beleive it's worth it? I hope it's not the first, but not sure, tbh.
- topoftheforts 8y ago
  It might as well be a combination of the two, but to be honest I don't think it's an issue. If those ego boosts are what keeps you building something useful, that's great and you probably deserve them. It's a bit like social networks for exercise (Strava etc) - the whole thing is just people looking to show off because they've exercised, but if that's what's keeping them in shape, then great!
- aliswe 8y ago
  As a side note, I think you'll get a whole lot more stars with a screenshot and a one line description in the readme (before the mobile github fold for readmes)
qwerty456127 8y ago
> Finally, it’s the launch day. You publish the project on GitHub. You tweet about it and submit the landing page to the popular open source news aggregators. What are some popular open source news aggregators oter than HN?
novarek 8y ago
I'm not really seeing what you would gain with a story in this context. If your project "hit the front page of a popular news aggregator" I would say is because you already have the story.
jaequery 8y ago
am i the only one who was expecting him to say, after he had posted his project to HN, he would got no upvotes and sadly his project remained invisible to the public? because getting to front page on news site like HN/Reddit, there is some luck factor too, kind of like winning a lottery, unless you learned to gamify it.
petercooper 8y ago
We tend to discuss things that are easy to talk about. AJAX (as it was at the time) is a prime example of what Dan's talking about, I think. As a term that enveloped the whole idea of having JavaScript dynamically load content from a server, it really brought developers together in discussing and experimenting, and even resulted in naming a publication on the topic (Ajaxian). Did it matter that almost no-one was really fetching XML (the X in AJAX)? No. "HTML5" played a similar role for a bunch of technologies 7-8 years ago, even including technologies that were nothing to do with the HTML5 spec (such as WebGL). Or DHTML 15-18 years ago. We now see something similar with "serverless" which a lot of people criticize as a pointless term except it is bringing together discussion around a group of related concepts and is valuable in that role alone. Other such terms that are ultimately ambiguous under close scrutiny but which allow discussion and communities to organize around them: IaaS, SaaS, NoSQL, devops..
- Theodores 8y ago
  Ajaxian - I can remember that. For a while it was a must read. Like 'Byte' in a generation before or 'Scientific American' a generation before that, 'Ajaxian' enabled you to learn about the future in a way where you felt quite privileged to be in on the story. HTML5 also came with some publications that made you feel inspired. HTML5Rocks existed once. HTML5Doctor limps on with no content and someone paying the hosting much like Ajaxian does. As per the model railway example given in this thread these are the leftovers from the original geeks that created the scene. HTML5 became all about how you could embed video without a Flash player. The geeks thought it was all about semantic markup. But for the people that see words as just shapes on a page the 'video without Flash' bit was all they could relate to. Absolutely nobody apart from a few HN people are using HTML5. That is no exaggeration. Go to any of those billion dollar web companies, check out the code and it is just Div Soup. Go onto Wordpress. It is all Div Soup. There are no themes that use HTML5 beyond chucking in a 'header' and 'footer' tag here and there. Yet a third of the web is supposed to be powered by Wordpress. Go onto a website builder service like Wix. Same story, yet more Div Soup. We never got the XML bit of AJAX. It ended up 'AJAJ' if anything as it is just some JSON object that is what gets worked with. With HTML5 we never got the semantic elements apart from the 'video' one. We got rounded buttons from CSS3 though. I think the whole semantic thing was a mistake. The likes of Google have AI robots that can see pages and work out what is going on. So if you have a visually well designed page their robot is fine with that. Unless you are writing a page for the government's site on special needs then to hell with accessibility. That is how it seems. The geeks that enthused about semantic HTML5 elements left the party a long time ago. The people who think HTML5 means you don't need flash took over and thought that was all there was to it. The denial is an important thing though. People can keep working as they were before but believe they have new skills, adapted and changed.
talkingtab 8y ago
I wonder to what extent this is determined by the platform? There is a kind of response that occurs on HN and every other platform I know that seems reflexive. I've tried at times and utterly failed to move from "commenting on" to "doing something" or "further discussion" and it just does not seem to work. Perhaps it is me but perhaps there is some other style or format that would provide a better vehicle. I find the concept of "name it and they will come" funny and interesting and would like to explore it more, but how?
Smithalicious 8y ago
The author's understanding is that these pepole would be discussing the project proper if they weren't discussing other things instead. I don't think he's right there. People love to talk and tend to flock to wherever conversation is happening. These people were never partciularly interested in discussing the project anyways; they were just browsing and saw an opportunity to jump into the discussion with something they do really care about, such as indentation styles or the nature of abstraction or what have you. Also, the conclusion is a typical case of something that sounds insightful, but doesn't make any actual sense. I don't have even the slightest clue as to what the author is trying to say.
coleifer 8y ago
Why does this guy write about "we" so much? He tries to come off as a "sensitive" guy but underneath "we" all see the desperation and pleas for approval.
keyle 8y ago
If you toggle the dark/bright mode enough time, your eyes will hurt. You will come to the conclusion that only the dark mode is enjoyable and readable. Sorry, if it's true.
playeren 8y ago
I find the authors choice of font to be sub-optimal.
foobarbecue 8y ago
This made sense until the last line. If the conclusion was "focus on telling your story well so that people understand the point of your work," I would understand that. But he concludes with "name it, and they will come." So... he's saying that your product needs a good name? I don't get it.
Animats 8y ago
The title of the article is the best part. Naming your new thing and owning the meaning of that name is valuable. The rest of the article is much weaker.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
I'm not sure if those fonts work together, and those pinks are clashing as well. Also, what's with the newsletter? And why is this on a private blog, not something truly open? I can't even pull this using git?
nookv 8y ago
Well if the thing you're trying to create is really new (let alone zero to one), then it'll probably be difficult to explain concisely without ending up with several sentences full of "trivial" details. I think Dan's example about irrelevant comments and the reasons behind it are clear, but the ending about naming and telling a story does not provide a good enough solution. Not sure if his intention was to offer any solutions at all but I wonder if anyone anyone has found some great techniques that guides launching "completely new" ideas to market. (if you do please let me know) When I look at the first ride-hailing companies or other zero to one companies it seems like they started out by: 1. Coining a definition. 2. Telling a story. 3. Ignoring irrelevant feedback. 4. A wide spread of calculated trial and error marketing, eventually one will do the magic. Is there a better way?
groundCode 8y ago
I’m waiting for a comment about why the author chose to Write the fictional project in JavaScript to take the top comment spot and the language wars to begin....
jondubois 8y ago
>> Usually, you feel like you’re creating something. But this time, it feels like you are discovering something as if it already existed. I can relate to this. >> It’s not that people didn’t like the project. You know it has tradeoffs and expected people to talk about them. But that’s not what happened. >> Instead, the comments are largely irrelevant to your idea. I can't relate to this part. I authored a somewhat popular open source server/framework project (over 5k stars on GitHub now) and my main problem for years was that there weren't enough people using or commenting on it. The few people who were commenting on it over the years were consistently and exclusively giving positive feedback. Someone even wrote their master degree thesis about my project's scalability and performance. Developers started writing many clients libraries for it (there are now clients in pretty much every major language including more obscure ones such as Unity and one is currently being written for Unreal Engine). For 5 years, I was constantly searching for criticisms and problems to justify why my project wasn't more popular (so that I could fix the problems) but nobody offered any criticism. Instead people kept telling me that the project was underrated and deserved more attention. It's pretty heavily used now; it gets a lot of downloads on npm, for some reason, it just got steady linear growth and still it doesn't get talked about much. Now I'm thinking that maybe the problem is simply that I'm not active on Twitter.
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lbj 8y ago
Its relevant, its concrete, I agree with everything he said. But mostly I just got caught up in his writing-style which is incredibly enticing. Well done man!
ratsimihah 8y ago
I feel like it doesn't apply to just software projects, but it's a phenomenon that affects life more generally. It's so much easier to bring our focus on and talk about what we understand that we might just dismiss what's truly important but requires effortful thinking. Universal shared experiences are easy to talk about. That includes topics like code formatting, verbosity vs magic, configuration vs convention, differences in the community cultures, scandals, tech interviews, industry gossip, macro trends and design opinions.
exebook 8y ago
I like it that you can change day/night mode in the top right corner of his page. Although this should probably be the part of the browser.
aarong11 8y ago
Your site is broken on firefox

357 points by stablemap 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Pretty much summarises comment threads here on news.yc much like this blog post: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ One way to avoid the pitfall of folks resorting to talk abt 'universally shared experiences' is to take control of the conversation: One way to do that is to offer AMA, or ask a question yourself. I've seen the keybase founders (esp malgorithms) and to an extent the Cloudflare founders (esp jgrahamc) do it pretty successfully here. An example of an independent developer (browsh) shaping the conversation to their benefit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552

jgrahamc 8y ago
For clarity... I wasn't a founder of Cloudflare, but I was an early employee. I try to answer questions about Cloudflare, or comments about the company, here when I have the time. I do the same on Twitter (and to a certain extent on Reddit). I have code that monitors HN for mentions of "Cloudflare" and emails me within a couple of minutes.

faizshah 8y ago

My problem with open sourcing my code is I always feel like someone else must have done it already and done it better. On the subject of irrelevant comments: I see HN more as a place to discuss topics relating to the OP link rather than discussing the OP link itself. A lot of the value of HN for me comes from learning how other people see a subject or what related ideas/libraries there are. For me as a commenter, the threads I like are exactly the ones that a submitter might not like: threads filled with many semi-related comments. I do think we absolutely have a problem with overly negative and discouraging comments on HN (and the programming community in general) though. The worst kinds of comments are comments like the “yet another js framework...” on someone’s show HN. You’re discouraging someone’s work on their specific library by bringing up some larger problem you see in the industry. So I absolutely agree that those sorts of semi-related comments belong in a separate post on that specific issue.

jeena 8y ago
About the 'someone else must have done it better already' if I can't find it then others might have not been able to do that either, that is where my solution could help. And even if not then just having a alternative implementation from which others can learn is pretty neat.
saagarjha 8y ago
> My problem with open sourcing my code is I always feel like someone else must have done it already and done it better. Why does your thing have to be the best? There’s nothing wrong with your think existing; who knows, it might actually be the best or end up becoming the best someday.

Deimorz 8y ago

I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just describes the usual internet bike-shedding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples), and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how to do it, or why it would help.

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veritas_veritad 8y ago
something meta about this comment
DelightOne 8y ago
You tell a story in which you show the problem and the solution besides. There is no other way to create interest. It has to solve a problem of yours (a potential problem may be enough). If you don't know it does, why would you care about the solution? Or that's my interpretation of the article anyway.
coldtea 8y ago
>I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead comment like people are doing in this thread. (It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give more focused responses).
- Vinnl 8y ago
  If that's the case, then it appears that the suggested solution -telling a story- doesn't work...
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Worked for many. Few things work for all people. Some need more time, others never get it. What's important is if it's better than the baseline of not doing what he suggests.

wwv25 8y ago

Thanks for the writeup, Dan. This is how I feel about most code reviews. It's difficult to comprehend all the code and focus on the _actual_ problem being solved rather than naming conventions and syntax. And yes, I realize the irony by posting a tangentially-related comment on HN.

hasahmed 8y ago

I have an issue with the formatting

munk-a 8y ago

That sort of minimalist looking webpage using a big round font for the headers really does make it hard to absorb the gist of the post - sorry, have I overreacted? Perhaps a less fleeting writing style could have set up a more concrete thesis that would deliver a conclusion to their statement. That last bit is actually quite relevant - due to law of triviality and such there will always be bikeshedding, but the way to cut through that (in my opinion) is to clearly set a scenario, set an agenda, open with a problem and set the dialog up to resolve the problem. This is why I have begun (usually) refusing any meetings without a clearly outlined agenda, and when agendaless meetings get an agenda sometimes I'll duck out of the meeting and submit feedback in writing _to_ the agenda. This is also why I have a bit of an issue with this article, it is titled in such an irrelevant manner that it can't help but generate bikeshedding around it - the title is good and catchy sure, but I really don't understand how it relates to the actual meat of the article (which does raise some relevant points). If the suggestion is that naming (adding a short descriptor) to... "stuff" makes it easier to keep discussions about that stuff on topic then please back it up with an example, provide some justification, instead the article reaches ~95% then doing a hard right to inject a catchy quote that seems unrelated to the rest of the verbiage.

danabramov 8y ago
I love the meta-ness of this comment. Not sure if it was intentional :-) One concrete example of naming a problem is “callback hell”. Example of “telling a story” to explain it: https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html Once you have a few articles like this, the quality of discussions on the topic rapidly goes up. For React, David Nolen’s and James Long’s early posts did the same thing.
- munk-a 8y ago
  It was, to my knowledge there isn't a great way to flag that sort of thing on the web (short of * WINK *)... I thought the fact that I apologized for having "overreacted" when discussing the blog post hosted on overreacted.io would be a bit of a give away. That callback hell story differs from the one above in that I think it delivers a much better summary statement at the end and way forward - I have some opinions on it's aim as I think it is eschewing power in terms of a more comfortable expression for imperative programmers - but the article is well sized, clear, humorous and suggests a solid remediation for the perceived problem.

nothrabannosir 8y ago

[on the subject of HN negativity raised in other posts—sorry for hijacking this post about post hijacking!] One problem with HN, which I would love to hear othersʼ opinion about, is: the HN Guidelines incentivise negative colour in threads. You get 10 upvotes, and 1 critical comment: to anyone reading the entire thread now looks negative. Noone sees the silent "+1"s, which, I feel, do add a lot of positivity and encouragement! I honestly don’t know what to change, or how. Hiding scores is great: it avoids the asinine karma peacocking, endemic in most similar forums. Allowing "+1" comments would probably be worse. But the result is there. I think HN has a lot more positivity than we can see. But it remains hidden in the database. Positivity on HN is write-only. Negativity is world readable.

adventured 8y ago
My take on that issue is it doesn't matter in any regard. It couldn't be any more meaningless. A scenario: a show HN post gets ~60 upvotes reasonably quickly and gets to the front page. Inside the post you have ten or so comments, three of which are negative or quasi negative (sometimes merely skeptical, sometimes overtly harsh). Two people really liked it and said so, five comments are mostly off topic. The negative comments are at the top in the thread (posted by members with higher default ranking scores); the positive comments are short on content and are near the bottom of the thread (posted by weaker ranking members). That setup doesn't seem like it would be great. In fact it's spectacular. The post is going to end up with 100+ upvotes over time and it's getting a wave of traffic to it. It's the huge number of readers that never comment, and or never even sign up for an account, that are by far the most valuable part of the equation. The typical negative/cynical/skeptical comments are mostly meaningless - so long as you actually have a good product. I can't emphasize that enough, I need a far stronger word than meaningless here. You have a chance, with that wave of traffic, to convert people that want to believe in what you're doing - that's where all of your focus must be, those are the people you must not fail. If it worked any other way in actuality, no product launch on HN would ever succeed. They'd all be buried by skepticism. It's the unseen angelic adopters on HN that matter more than anything else. Focus on delighting them and everything else will flow from it. My advice on negative comments (unless they're definitely well earned, in which case you better act on them): put them in your mouth and eat them. Negative HN comments are like eating plain rice cakes. In the scheme of life, they're about the least concerning - most benign - things you're going to run into in the list of negatives when trying to build something, launch a product, run a business, and so on. Every other real problem with business or a product/project is drastically harder to push down and digest. At a minimum let the negative HN comments be a gentle introduction to how hard doing something successfully actually is (gentle because, again, negative HN comments are the easiest thing to mentally deal with - among negatives - that you will ever run into).

atlassubbed 8y ago

I've always liked Dan Abramov's posts. He is very real, if that makes sense. This one really helps me mentally. Showing new work the world is hard, and people will always have something negative to say. There's also the issue of timing. When is it "too early" to show off a project? I always wanna post my projects to HN but then I remember how my documentation isn't done, or how I haven't written any tutorials or articles, and I figure I'd better wait, otherwise people will just bounce because they didn't find anything. I think the fraction of people who look at source code because they didn't find any docs is very small.

coldtea 8y ago

Even if you don't understand the point the author is trying to make, this part you should be able to understand perfectly, and I find it a perfectly accurate description of what happens 90% of the time: = = = = The top comment thread picks on the coding style in a README example. It turns into an argument about indentation with over a hundred replies and a brief history of how different programming languages approached formatting. There are obligatory mentions of gofmt and Python. Have you tried Prettier? Somebody mentions that open source projects shouldn’t have beautiful landing pages because it’s misleading marketing. What if a junior developer falls for it without fully understanding the fundamentals? In a response, somebody argues the landing page design is boring. Additionally, it’s broken in Firefox. Clearly, this means the project author doesn’t care about the open web. Is the web as we know it dying? It’s time for some game theory… The next comment is a generic observation about the nature of abstractions, and how they can lead to too much “boilerplate” (or, alternatively, “magic”). The top reply explains that one shouldn’t confuse “simple” with “easy”. Actually, Rich Hickey gave a very good talk about this. Have you watched it? Finally, why do we need libraries at all? Some languages do well with a built-in standard library. Is npm a mistake? The leftpad accident could happen again. Should we build npm right into the browser? What about the standards? Confused, you close the tab.

baddox 8y ago
This quoted section on its own makes it sound like Dan is complaining about all the people who aren't discussing the thing he (the creator of the tool/library/idea) wanted them too. I thought the same thing as I first read this section. But I think it becomes clear that he's not making that complaint, or at the very least, he describes a clear reason why people tend to discuss certain concepts, and offers a way to try to get your concepts discussed.
- munk-a 8y ago
  I disagree, I think the article was very lacking when it came to actually offering concrete advice to address the situation or, at least, was very obtuse in the giving. To have a focused discussion on Thing X, ask for a focused discussion. The scenario he stated (discussions on the README getting picked up and whitespace preferences being spun into a mini-holy war) is just... it's going to happen unfortunately. But that discussion wasn't one the author initiated for feedback, it was a general comment thread on the repository. If you, as an author, want to spark an intelligent discussion on your product than do just that, present the points you want to debate while allowing some freedom for that noise since it isn't always useless. Instead of: "Hey HN, I just wrote a badass new streaming protocol" and linking to the github source, specifically mention your concerns about continuing to rely on TCP for video streaming and the buffering lag it induces, link to a blog-ish thing which links to your source but frames a number of questions or doubts you have around your project if you, indeed, are at a loss and want to turn to the internet as a whole to try and solve them. Basically, as I do in my workplace, refuse to let your discussion/meeting/whatever become a vaguely directed waste of time - set a clear agenda (i.e. a set of specific points in a blog post) to help funnel the discussion toward the useful parts. In the resulting chatter you'll probably get some whitespace criticism (spaces are simply poor manners, #tabs4lyfe) you'll get some chatter about your question (and on HN that'll be floated to the top) and you might get someone who dug behind your question and found that - yea TCP is bad, but if you're going to use UDP you'll need to have some solid check-summing in place which your project currently lacks. So, you need to direct the discussion, but allow noise, without noise you'll eventually settle the discussion into a local maximum of functionality where everyone is nodding and saying "Yup we did it, it's not a solvable problem but we've clearly come up with the best partial solution."

deleted 8y ago

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josepot 8y ago

And what happens when you tell the story and everybody just completely ignores you? TBH I find that a lot more frustrating than ppl missing the point on what you were trying to say. That is exactly is what happened to me a week ago... I will keep on trying, though :-)

KorematsuFred 8y ago

As a researcher you will notice that simple and catchy title for your paper will give you far more citations than a paper that has more descriptive titles. If you are publishing a paper about new way to optimize a problem, just give it a fancy name first.

retrac98 8y ago

This kind of thing is very frustrating for creators. It’d be cool if comments could be sorted based on their relevance to the article, post, project, or idea as a default, rather than just by time or popularity.

Areading314 8y ago

I find this to be spot on. I've frequently seen internal projects in companies called "Data Event System" or "Progam Manipulator" or some other nonsense. Sometimes giving a name to a project will dramatically change the way people talk about it.

asadlionpk 8y ago

This is very accurate as of my recent experience on doing a Show HN here[1][2]. I did get very good feedback but many of the comments were just stupid. Still, posting here did help the project as the broader audience doesn't care about a random's HN opinion. 1. https://zeroserver.io/ https://zeroserver.io/ 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828

willio58 8y ago
Weird, I actually thought of your Show HN post while reading this. I think this was because the response on HN seemed very negative, but then I saw the project was trending on Github for days after the HN post.
- asadlionpk 8y ago
  The post did help project take off. It's just a little annoying to read negative comments when we can easily convey the same point in a constructive way. I still love this place and am a big lurker for a long time. I am pretty sure if we were a bit more humane, many many lurker will actively participate, which would be a win-win.
aliswe 8y ago
Agreed, the comments in your thread were deplorable (to a large extent). Be aware that most people on HN simply appeal to high profile personalities and don't really have the judgment to deem something usable or not. IMNSHO, that is.

ilaksh 8y ago

I would love for my project to get on the home page and be filled up with irrelevant comments. Normally anything I try to share is completely ignored.

aliswe 8y ago
I can see why. HN is not for very divergent submissions, they rarely take off here. Your submissions are kinda not-so-familiar to the great masses so they don't fly. People just being curious without being familiar with the subject won't check them out because the number of upvotes haven't reached a critical level. Try something more populistic, and especially deriving from an established trend, and I think you'll appeal to the mob. How about: "ReactJS rewritten in Go in 24hrs" That was a jest, by the way...

pedalpete 8y ago

Wow, most of the comments in this thread completely miss the point, which... is the point. So meta. We suffered this exact same issue for years, but it isn't only in git, readme or marketing pages that the problem exists. When pitching or telling people what we do, because what we are doing is new, we struggled to find the right words and therefore, got blank stares about what we were doing. The same thing happens with the introduction of many new products and systems. We have gone through many iterations of how to describe our product and the industry moves making it the next big thing. From "3d visualizations" to "interactive 3d scenes" and currently settling in on "spatial media". Each version gets successively better, but until you give someone a hook to hang your product on, they don't know what to do with it. That is the shared vocabulary. For us, it goes like this. "The future of media is spatial,viewers expect to be able to control their perspective in a 3d scene. We've seen this with VR, 360 video, and gaming. We are another type of spatial media. We're like drone shot video, but the viewer is in control of their perspective, and we create the scene without a camera."

topoftheforts 8y ago
With that description I still have no idea about what you actually do. Maybe that's not actually the pitch and you're just giving an example, or maybe not, just wanted you to give you my feedback :)
- pedalpete 8y ago
  Thanks, we've found this to be significantly better than what we were saying before, it's still a work in progress. "We're like drone shot video, but the viewer is in control of their perspective" Most people get that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

flwralex 8y ago

"By now, you’re convinced: This idea deserves to be heard." This week my first public project got 7 git stars. The feeling is fantastic. I don't have homepage or story, but I have a nice diagram :) The question for me is why I'm releasing this, to feed the ego monster or because I really beleive it's worth it? I hope it's not the first, but not sure, tbh.

topoftheforts 8y ago
It might as well be a combination of the two, but to be honest I don't think it's an issue. If those ego boosts are what keeps you building something useful, that's great and you probably deserve them. It's a bit like social networks for exercise (Strava etc) - the whole thing is just people looking to show off because they've exercised, but if that's what's keeping them in shape, then great!
aliswe 8y ago
As a side note, I think you'll get a whole lot more stars with a screenshot and a one line description in the readme (before the mobile github fold for readmes)

qwerty456127 8y ago

> Finally, it’s the launch day. You publish the project on GitHub. You tweet about it and submit the landing page to the popular open source news aggregators. What are some popular open source news aggregators oter than HN?

novarek 8y ago

I'm not really seeing what you would gain with a story in this context. If your project "hit the front page of a popular news aggregator" I would say is because you already have the story.

jaequery 8y ago

am i the only one who was expecting him to say, after he had posted his project to HN, he would got no upvotes and sadly his project remained invisible to the public? because getting to front page on news site like HN/Reddit, there is some luck factor too, kind of like winning a lottery, unless you learned to gamify it.

petercooper 8y ago

We tend to discuss things that are easy to talk about. AJAX (as it was at the time) is a prime example of what Dan's talking about, I think. As a term that enveloped the whole idea of having JavaScript dynamically load content from a server, it really brought developers together in discussing and experimenting, and even resulted in naming a publication on the topic (Ajaxian). Did it matter that almost no-one was really fetching XML (the X in AJAX)? No. "HTML5" played a similar role for a bunch of technologies 7-8 years ago, even including technologies that were nothing to do with the HTML5 spec (such as WebGL). Or DHTML 15-18 years ago. We now see something similar with "serverless" which a lot of people criticize as a pointless term except it is bringing together discussion around a group of related concepts and is valuable in that role alone. Other such terms that are ultimately ambiguous under close scrutiny but which allow discussion and communities to organize around them: IaaS, SaaS, NoSQL, devops..

Theodores 8y ago
Ajaxian - I can remember that. For a while it was a must read. Like 'Byte' in a generation before or 'Scientific American' a generation before that, 'Ajaxian' enabled you to learn about the future in a way where you felt quite privileged to be in on the story. HTML5 also came with some publications that made you feel inspired. HTML5Rocks existed once. HTML5Doctor limps on with no content and someone paying the hosting much like Ajaxian does. As per the model railway example given in this thread these are the leftovers from the original geeks that created the scene. HTML5 became all about how you could embed video without a Flash player. The geeks thought it was all about semantic markup. But for the people that see words as just shapes on a page the 'video without Flash' bit was all they could relate to. Absolutely nobody apart from a few HN people are using HTML5. That is no exaggeration. Go to any of those billion dollar web companies, check out the code and it is just Div Soup. Go onto Wordpress. It is all Div Soup. There are no themes that use HTML5 beyond chucking in a 'header' and 'footer' tag here and there. Yet a third of the web is supposed to be powered by Wordpress. Go onto a website builder service like Wix. Same story, yet more Div Soup. We never got the XML bit of AJAX. It ended up 'AJAJ' if anything as it is just some JSON object that is what gets worked with. With HTML5 we never got the semantic elements apart from the 'video' one. We got rounded buttons from CSS3 though. I think the whole semantic thing was a mistake. The likes of Google have AI robots that can see pages and work out what is going on. So if you have a visually well designed page their robot is fine with that. Unless you are writing a page for the government's site on special needs then to hell with accessibility. That is how it seems. The geeks that enthused about semantic HTML5 elements left the party a long time ago. The people who think HTML5 means you don't need flash took over and thought that was all there was to it. The denial is an important thing though. People can keep working as they were before but believe they have new skills, adapted and changed.

talkingtab 8y ago

I wonder to what extent this is determined by the platform? There is a kind of response that occurs on HN and every other platform I know that seems reflexive. I've tried at times and utterly failed to move from "commenting on" to "doing something" or "further discussion" and it just does not seem to work. Perhaps it is me but perhaps there is some other style or format that would provide a better vehicle. I find the concept of "name it and they will come" funny and interesting and would like to explore it more, but how?

Smithalicious 8y ago

The author's understanding is that these pepole would be discussing the project proper if they weren't discussing other things instead. I don't think he's right there. People love to talk and tend to flock to wherever conversation is happening. These people were never partciularly interested in discussing the project anyways; they were just browsing and saw an opportunity to jump into the discussion with something they do really care about, such as indentation styles or the nature of abstraction or what have you. Also, the conclusion is a typical case of something that sounds insightful, but doesn't make any actual sense. I don't have even the slightest clue as to what the author is trying to say.

coleifer 8y ago

Why does this guy write about "we" so much? He tries to come off as a "sensitive" guy but underneath "we" all see the desperation and pleas for approval.

keyle 8y ago

If you toggle the dark/bright mode enough time, your eyes will hurt. You will come to the conclusion that only the dark mode is enjoyable and readable. Sorry, if it's true.

playeren 8y ago

I find the authors choice of font to be sub-optimal.

foobarbecue 8y ago

This made sense until the last line. If the conclusion was "focus on telling your story well so that people understand the point of your work," I would understand that. But he concludes with "name it, and they will come." So... he's saying that your product needs a good name? I don't get it.

Animats 8y ago

The title of the article is the best part. Naming your new thing and owning the meaning of that name is valuable. The rest of the article is much weaker.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

I'm not sure if those fonts work together, and those pinks are clashing as well. Also, what's with the newsletter? And why is this on a private blog, not something truly open? I can't even pull this using git?

nookv 8y ago

Well if the thing you're trying to create is really new (let alone zero to one), then it'll probably be difficult to explain concisely without ending up with several sentences full of "trivial" details. I think Dan's example about irrelevant comments and the reasons behind it are clear, but the ending about naming and telling a story does not provide a good enough solution. Not sure if his intention was to offer any solutions at all but I wonder if anyone anyone has found some great techniques that guides launching "completely new" ideas to market. (if you do please let me know) When I look at the first ride-hailing companies or other zero to one companies it seems like they started out by: 1. Coining a definition. 2. Telling a story. 3. Ignoring irrelevant feedback. 4. A wide spread of calculated trial and error marketing, eventually one will do the magic. Is there a better way?

groundCode 8y ago

I’m waiting for a comment about why the author chose to Write the fictional project in JavaScript to take the top comment spot and the language wars to begin....

jondubois 8y ago

>> Usually, you feel like you’re creating something. But this time, it feels like you are discovering something as if it already existed. I can relate to this. >> It’s not that people didn’t like the project. You know it has tradeoffs and expected people to talk about them. But that’s not what happened. >> Instead, the comments are largely irrelevant to your idea. I can't relate to this part. I authored a somewhat popular open source server/framework project (over 5k stars on GitHub now) and my main problem for years was that there weren't enough people using or commenting on it. The few people who were commenting on it over the years were consistently and exclusively giving positive feedback. Someone even wrote their master degree thesis about my project's scalability and performance. Developers started writing many clients libraries for it (there are now clients in pretty much every major language including more obscure ones such as Unity and one is currently being written for Unreal Engine). For 5 years, I was constantly searching for criticisms and problems to justify why my project wasn't more popular (so that I could fix the problems) but nobody offered any criticism. Instead people kept telling me that the project was underrated and deserved more attention. It's pretty heavily used now; it gets a lot of downloads on npm, for some reason, it just got steady linear growth and still it doesn't get talked about much. Now I'm thinking that maybe the problem is simply that I'm not active on Twitter.

deleted 8y ago

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lbj 8y ago

Its relevant, its concrete, I agree with everything he said. But mostly I just got caught up in his writing-style which is incredibly enticing. Well done man!

ratsimihah 8y ago

I feel like it doesn't apply to just software projects, but it's a phenomenon that affects life more generally. It's so much easier to bring our focus on and talk about what we understand that we might just dismiss what's truly important but requires effortful thinking. Universal shared experiences are easy to talk about. That includes topics like code formatting, verbosity vs magic, configuration vs convention, differences in the community cultures, scandals, tech interviews, industry gossip, macro trends and design opinions.

exebook 8y ago

I like it that you can change day/night mode in the top right corner of his page. Although this should probably be the part of the browser.

aarong11 8y ago

Your site is broken on firefox