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I was very surprised to see that your article about golang got flagged here on HN. Never realized that go was such a sensitive topic. I assume this is related?

I was very surprised to see that your article about golang got flagged here on HN. Never realized that go was such a sensitive topic. I assume this is related? Can anyone in the golang community give some context?

komuW 4y ago
I don't think the flagging has anything to do with the Golang community. From my understanding, that came from the HN moderators themselves. @dang made some explanations on one of those threads
- andrelaszlo 4y ago
  Oh, I missed that! Didn't realize the article was considered so inflammatory. I guess I'm desensitized :) Reading what dang wrote makes it seem really sensible. Links to dang's comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207126
- dang 4y ago
  The flags came from users. That's almost always the case (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
  - andrelaszlo 4y ago
    Not sure what happened to my comment but I guess you hid it dang? Thanks! It wasn't my intention to reignite the whole thing.
    - dang 4y ago
      A user marked it offtopic, which downweighted it. A few longstanding HN users have the ability to do this, as part of an experiment we've been running. I've written about it in a few places: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31228950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31228950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117569 The downweighting is intended for when overly generic or offtopic subthreads are stuck at the top of a page, choking out more interesting or on-topic conversation. (Unfortunately it caused some trouble a while back because one such downweighted subthread was critical of a YC startup, and a much more important rule is that we moderate HN less when YC or YC startups are the topic. But it was a straightforward mistake—the user who marked the thread generic just didn't realize that the topic was YC related.) Since it's an experiment, we want to keep an eye on it. Currently I have the software send an email each time a downweight is applied, so we can review them as part of going through the regular HN inbox. When I saw this one, it was such a perfect example that I came to the thread and auto-collapsed it as well. So that's its current status: downweighted and auto-collapsed. Btw, basically none of these situations get created intentionally. They're a tragedy-of-the-commons thing where each person does what they do innocently but it all adds up to something suboptimal. That's pretty much what moderation exists for: to jiggle the system when it gets stuck in one of its failure modes.
dijit 4y ago
@dang had a (reasonable sounding) post on the original thread stating that hacker news generally dislikes having meta-commentary of the day prior posting on the front page. If this topic gets flagged then we’ll know if it was go specific I suppose. EDIT: Why am I flagged?
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  The issue isn’t there programming language discussed, it’s the choice of commentary. His submissions have been getting more and more trolling lately and that leads to negative discourse. We all have our own particular axes to grind but even me, someone who is language agnostic, is getting tired of the tone of those submissions.
  - sph 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - fasterthanlime 4y ago
      Please don't downrank that one, too. I'm genuinely sorry about the week y'all have had, but this comment thread is the /only/ one asking about "the controversy" (which is dead and gone - everyone has decided whether I had a point or was being a jerk), please just nuke comments asking about it rather than preventing discussions about the cost of cloud hosting, how attacks work, how to mitigate them, etc. I certainly didn't DDoS myself just to "game the system". It happened, I learned a bunch of things, did an extensive post-mortem, a lot of folks are finding it interesting, that's it - no smart trolling here, just content. I certainly could use a break from "the discourse" as well.
      - hu3 4y ago
        Regardless of your intentions, the demeaning title and snark of that post is fuel for flamewars. Given that it's not the first time, one could reasonably conclude that it was on purpose. It's a net negative to HN and users are on their right to flag should this kind of content appear again. Not to mention that contrasting Go to Rust is a tired subject of little service to the software engineering community given their small intersection in usecases. edit: 2 instant downvotes. I stand by what I say. HN is valuable because of curation and flamebaits being historically frowned uppon.
nindalf 4y ago
I’m not from any community, but programming languages will always be a sensitive topic. It’s because languages are platforms. Your productivity in any language is directly proportional to your time and effort investment in it. It's in your best interests to pick the language that's likely to thrive and spend time learning it's ins and outs. On the flip side, betting on a horse that doesn't win could mean the loss of months or years of effort. This is why people evangelize the platforms they're invested in - convincing other people to join improves the health of the platform, increasing their return on investment. This evangelizing can sometimes become contentious if others perceive it as an attack on their platform. People defend their language mostly because they don't want to see it lose popularity. If it did, their language's viability is threatened and their investment is in jeopardy. It's also partly because they've spent so long on it that it's become a part of their identity. A person who thinks of themselves as a “Go developer” rather than a “developer” is going to take that article personally.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  There are interesting parallels across a wide range of human behaviour. People get invested in cultures, languages, philosophies, economic models, religions, etc... E.g.: the "east vs west" fight in Ukraine is a great example. One side is invested in the democratic/capitalistic model, the other in the autocratic/central-planning model. The war isn't just over a patch of land on the border of Europe. If people are willing to start a shooting war with actual blood, violence, and death over a mere "ideology", then it shouldn't come as a surprise that developers are willing to go to a "war of words" over their favourite language or platform.
- dcminter 4y ago
  I think, also, that Go hasn't generally had a lot of criticism (aside from the generics débâcle) in this venue, so the "attack" might be hitting some especially sensitive skin. As an aside, I very much enjoyed "A half hour to learn Rust" from fasterthanli.me as it got me to actually start writing simple stuff in the language so I'm a little biased in favour of the author, but the critique didn't seem to be particularly harsh. As someone who's primarily a Java dev I'm used to seeing much more biting (and often inaccurate) condemnation of my own preferred tool! [1] https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
rob74 4y ago
Well, if you write a blog post with the title "Lies we tell ourselves to keep using [X]" (where [X] is a reasonably popular programming language), that implies that you think using [X] is a mistake and everyone who is currently using [X] is either clueless, deluded or trapped by "sunk costs". If you then continue with an article that further expands on just how bad [X] is in your opinion and that it has almost no redeeming qualities, that's pretty much the definition of flamebait...
- andrelaszlo 4y ago
  Ok, I get it! I was mostly surprised, but reading dang's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207191) it starts to make sense. The dots that I didn't connect was that the post was a reply to the response on HN and since the post was controversial, it (being a HN comment, in a sense) should have been "more thoughtful and substantive, not less". Perhaps the headline was the worst part of the article? Like you say - "Lies we tell ourselves to keep using [X]" could have just been "Common reasons to use [X], and why I disagree with them". Thanks for pointing it out!
fasterthanlime 4y ago
I'm begging the comment section here to not touch on this topic today — I'm really not trying to cause a third flamewar, and intentionally didn't mention the name of news aggregators or direct links to the articles themselves in that piece. I was hoping for the discussion here to be around similar experiences, how DDoS really has become a commodity, how other folks's websites is architected, how various platforms fare against these threats (and what it costs), whether folks were are of Cloudflare's default caching policies, or its DDoS protection. Anything BUT rehashing the discussions of the past few days: everybody is over that. If you do want to discuss those, you can move that conversation to my subreddit, or my twitter, or heck, send me an e-mail. (Also, and I've stated this elsewhere many times: the Go community doesn't have to answer for that. This is one individual having well-timed fun, let's please PLEASE leave it at that)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

komuW 4y ago

I don't think the flagging has anything to do with the Golang community. From my understanding, that came from the HN moderators themselves. @dang made some explanations on one of those threads

andrelaszlo 4y ago
Oh, I missed that! Didn't realize the article was considered so inflammatory. I guess I'm desensitized :) Reading what dang wrote makes it seem really sensible. Links to dang's comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207126
dang 4y ago
The flags came from users. That's almost always the case (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
- andrelaszlo 4y ago
  Not sure what happened to my comment but I guess you hid it dang? Thanks! It wasn't my intention to reignite the whole thing.
  - dang 4y ago
    A user marked it offtopic, which downweighted it. A few longstanding HN users have the ability to do this, as part of an experiment we've been running. I've written about it in a few places: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31228950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31228950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117569 The downweighting is intended for when overly generic or offtopic subthreads are stuck at the top of a page, choking out more interesting or on-topic conversation. (Unfortunately it caused some trouble a while back because one such downweighted subthread was critical of a YC startup, and a much more important rule is that we moderate HN less when YC or YC startups are the topic. But it was a straightforward mistake—the user who marked the thread generic just didn't realize that the topic was YC related.) Since it's an experiment, we want to keep an eye on it. Currently I have the software send an email each time a downweight is applied, so we can review them as part of going through the regular HN inbox. When I saw this one, it was such a perfect example that I came to the thread and auto-collapsed it as well. So that's its current status: downweighted and auto-collapsed. Btw, basically none of these situations get created intentionally. They're a tragedy-of-the-commons thing where each person does what they do innocently but it all adds up to something suboptimal. That's pretty much what moderation exists for: to jiggle the system when it gets stuck in one of its failure modes.

dijit 4y ago

@dang had a (reasonable sounding) post on the original thread stating that hacker news generally dislikes having meta-commentary of the day prior posting on the front page. If this topic gets flagged then we’ll know if it was go specific I suppose. EDIT: Why am I flagged?

hnlmorg 4y ago
The issue isn’t there programming language discussed, it’s the choice of commentary. His submissions have been getting more and more trolling lately and that leads to negative discourse. We all have our own particular axes to grind but even me, someone who is language agnostic, is getting tired of the tone of those submissions.
- sph 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - fasterthanlime 4y ago
    Please don't downrank that one, too. I'm genuinely sorry about the week y'all have had, but this comment thread is the /only/ one asking about "the controversy" (which is dead and gone - everyone has decided whether I had a point or was being a jerk), please just nuke comments asking about it rather than preventing discussions about the cost of cloud hosting, how attacks work, how to mitigate them, etc. I certainly didn't DDoS myself just to "game the system". It happened, I learned a bunch of things, did an extensive post-mortem, a lot of folks are finding it interesting, that's it - no smart trolling here, just content. I certainly could use a break from "the discourse" as well.
    - hu3 4y ago
      Regardless of your intentions, the demeaning title and snark of that post is fuel for flamewars. Given that it's not the first time, one could reasonably conclude that it was on purpose. It's a net negative to HN and users are on their right to flag should this kind of content appear again. Not to mention that contrasting Go to Rust is a tired subject of little service to the software engineering community given their small intersection in usecases. edit: 2 instant downvotes. I stand by what I say. HN is valuable because of curation and flamebaits being historically frowned uppon.

nindalf 4y ago

I’m not from any community, but programming languages will always be a sensitive topic. It’s because languages are platforms. Your productivity in any language is directly proportional to your time and effort investment in it. It's in your best interests to pick the language that's likely to thrive and spend time learning it's ins and outs. On the flip side, betting on a horse that doesn't win could mean the loss of months or years of effort. This is why people evangelize the platforms they're invested in - convincing other people to join improves the health of the platform, increasing their return on investment. This evangelizing can sometimes become contentious if others perceive it as an attack on their platform. People defend their language mostly because they don't want to see it lose popularity. If it did, their language's viability is threatened and their investment is in jeopardy. It's also partly because they've spent so long on it that it's become a part of their identity. A person who thinks of themselves as a “Go developer” rather than a “developer” is going to take that article personally.

jiggawatts 4y ago
There are interesting parallels across a wide range of human behaviour. People get invested in cultures, languages, philosophies, economic models, religions, etc... E.g.: the "east vs west" fight in Ukraine is a great example. One side is invested in the democratic/capitalistic model, the other in the autocratic/central-planning model. The war isn't just over a patch of land on the border of Europe. If people are willing to start a shooting war with actual blood, violence, and death over a mere "ideology", then it shouldn't come as a surprise that developers are willing to go to a "war of words" over their favourite language or platform.
dcminter 4y ago
I think, also, that Go hasn't generally had a lot of criticism (aside from the generics débâcle) in this venue, so the "attack" might be hitting some especially sensitive skin. As an aside, I very much enjoyed "A half hour to learn Rust" from fasterthanli.me as it got me to actually start writing simple stuff in the language so I'm a little biased in favour of the author, but the critique didn't seem to be particularly harsh. As someone who's primarily a Java dev I'm used to seeing much more biting (and often inaccurate) condemnation of my own preferred tool! [1] https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust

rob74 4y ago

Well, if you write a blog post with the title "Lies we tell ourselves to keep using [X]" (where [X] is a reasonably popular programming language), that implies that you think using [X] is a mistake and everyone who is currently using [X] is either clueless, deluded or trapped by "sunk costs". If you then continue with an article that further expands on just how bad [X] is in your opinion and that it has almost no redeeming qualities, that's pretty much the definition of flamebait...

andrelaszlo 4y ago
Ok, I get it! I was mostly surprised, but reading dang's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207191) it starts to make sense. The dots that I didn't connect was that the post was a reply to the response on HN and since the post was controversial, it (being a HN comment, in a sense) should have been "more thoughtful and substantive, not less". Perhaps the headline was the worst part of the article? Like you say - "Lies we tell ourselves to keep using [X]" could have just been "Common reasons to use [X], and why I disagree with them". Thanks for pointing it out!

fasterthanlime 4y ago

I'm begging the comment section here to not touch on this topic today — I'm really not trying to cause a third flamewar, and intentionally didn't mention the name of news aggregators or direct links to the articles themselves in that piece. I was hoping for the discussion here to be around similar experiences, how DDoS really has become a commodity, how other folks's websites is architected, how various platforms fare against these threats (and what it costs), whether folks were are of Cloudflare's default caching policies, or its DDoS protection. Anything BUT rehashing the discussions of the past few days: everybody is over that. If you do want to discuss those, you can move that conversation to my subreddit, or my twitter, or heck, send me an e-mail. (Also, and I've stated this elsewhere many times: the Go community doesn't have to answer for that. This is one individual having well-timed fun, let's please PLEASE leave it at that)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]