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I wonder what kind of collective trauma could be causing the HN community to frontpage articles about Chesterton's fence a few times a year.
by auntienomen 5y ago
I wonder what kind of collective trauma could be causing the HN community to frontpage articles about Chesterton's fence a few times a year.
- brodouevencode 5y agoIts downstream of the collective trauma experienced by those who as a result insist on changing everything all the time, often with no good reason.
- foobarian 5y agoIt's not trauma, it's fear of what would happen if there weren't articles on HN about Chesterton's fence a few times a year.
- parentheses 5y agomust be the second order effects of said trauma
- shadowgovt 5y agoI expect it's a frequent side-effect of working on large systems with many interdependencies.
- jqgatsby 5y agoBefore we stop frontpaging articles about Chesterton's fence, we must first understand why the articles are being frontpaged to begin with.
- leobg 5y agoI like what you did there.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoPerhaps it is the trauma of non-consensual changes in software and especially user interfaces that we are forced to deal with regularly?
- dogleash 5y agoI think it's cheekier than that. It's a deliberate attempt to watch people miss points, argue, and split hairs over the mildest of mild rules of thumb.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoThings get reposted all the time, is there something particularly odious about Chesterton's Fence?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stinkytaco 5y agoWhat I tend to notice about this is how easily people seem to fall on both sides of this fence (pun slightly intended). People can be annoyed that a change broke their workflow (why didn't anyone bother to find out if this was in use), while simultaneously pushing to change other things without applying Chesterton's Fence (we should just do ... to solve this problem). Like so many logical constructs, it really just seems to exist so we can apply it when we are frustrated, not in our day to day decision making.
- dang 5y agoI don't think that's happening. Here are the Chesterton's Fence stories that have made HN's front page: Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 - March 2020 (85 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 - Nov 2016 (26 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 - May 2016 (2 comments) There was also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196731, which was on the front page for 5 minutes before we buried it. It's true that it's an internet cliché though—so much so that Chesterton seems in danger of turning into his fence.
- neartheplain 5y agoYoung developers often propose large-scale rewrites with little sense of the costs or risks involved. Changing old code often has unintended side-effects.
- exolymph 5y ago?? This phenomenon applies to every topic on the front page. We like to rehash the same concepts and subjects over and over.