8 ms·

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 le

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 5y ago
[flagged]
- fasterthanlime 5y 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 5y 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.
    - mplanchard 5y ago
      And yet here you are responding to a post that is asking we keep this thread on topic by trying to rehash said flameware.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - hu3 5y ago
        My comment has a point: it is directed to the author because they do not recognize the blatant flamebait appeal of their posts even after all the drama. Your comment, not so much.
        mplanchard 5y ago
        My comment was a suggestion as to why you might be receiving downvotes. This thread isn’t the place to exercise your need to express your disapproval and/or suspicion of the author regarding their previous posts. If you’d like to have a direct conversation with the author, there’s plenty of contact info on their website. All you’re doing is dragging this post down into more useless argumentation about something that has already been covered again and again in the previous posts.
        hu3 5y ago
        You're just making it worse by trying to gatekeep whatever others should comment. My original comment has a point and is on-topic for the thread regardless if you agree or not. You're just dragging this unproductive and offtopic conversation you started. Please stop dragging this needlessly with ad-hominem attacks.
        mplanchard 5y ago
        nit: ad-hominem is attacking the person rather than what they’re doing or their argument, e.g. saying that someone is an idiot rather than refuting their argument. There’s nothing ad-hominem in any of my arguments: I’m just pointing out that what you’re doing is unproductive and off-topic and giving my opinion about why you’re being downvoted. You could and reasonably did say the same thing about my arguing with you (that it’s unproductive), but that wouldn’t be an ad-hominem attack. You’re attacking my actions, not my person.
  - dang 5y ago
    This one is a great article and I don't see it as related to the other pieces (causally yes, but topically no). So, not a problem. Actually we usually downweight rapid follow-ups from the same site when there has been a major thread just recently (the intention is always to avoid too much repetition along any axis) but I took a look at this article last night and it was so good that I ignored that rule. A good article is more important than a good rule.
- jamincan 5y ago
  This is a ridiculously ungenerous interpretation of Amos's blogging motivations. What troll waits two years to stir the pot? There's absolutely no need to be inflammatory and I think his posting history demonstrates that he absolutely is not a troll.
- dang 5y ago
  It's rarely so deliberate. In fact it's basically never that deliberate because even if the intention were diabolically trollish (which is uncommon and I don't think the case here), HN is too random to respond reliably. People are almost always just posting things they like/agree with and then other people, with different tastes and backgrounds, react differently. Sometimes by bursting into flames. All of her fingertips burst into flames All she could say was, "Oh extinguish them, James!" - Robyn Hitchcock
pja 5y ago
Except that, as far as I can tell at least, Amos is not the one posting these articles. The problem is that he’s writing interesting, informed commentary on topics that are hot button issues for people who are a tad over-sensitive about their career choices :) You can be a happy Go programmer, whilst also recognising that the language has limitations & things it’s really not good at. That would be the mature, honest response to these articles. What is not a mature, honest reponse is DDOSing the guy because you (the generic you, not you specifically hnlmorg!) don’t like his opinions.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  > You can be a happy Go programmer, whilst also recognising that the language has limitations & things it’s really not good at. That would be the mature, honest response to these articles. The problem is the author preemptively shrugged off those responses by ostensibly accusing those coders of having Stockholm Syndrome. It was content like that which caused the issues. Regardless of whether it’s eloquent trolling or just a genuine but passionate piece, it was touching on an already hot topic with poor consideration about how it would be received. And that’s fine for a personal blog. But when you then see your articles explode online and then proceed to write follow up pieces in the same tone and intended for the same audience (regardless of whether he directly submitted it to HN), it’s harder to dismiss as someone not trying to exploit flame wars to booster their own blogs traffic. I guess they succeeded in that too; albeit a DDoS attack wasn’t quite what they intended. To be clear, I don’t agree with the DDoS attack. Nor do I believe they deserved it (what they actually deserved was just for the articles to get flagged and forgotten) but I can still blame the author for the arguments on here when they saw the existing discourse and decided to write follow up pieces of equally antagonistic tones.
  - simon_o 5y ago
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      > Aren't you exactly the type of person pja is referring to, when he mentions "tad over-sensitive about their career choices"? I don’t write Go in my day job (nor have I ever). So no, I’m not even remotely that type of person. > The articles were perfectly fine. The problem you have with them is that you don't like the author's opinion. It wasn’t the technical opinions I disagreed with, quite the opposite actually. I largely agreed with the technical points. It was the flourishes they used to express those opinions. Much like yourself now, he was rather rude and presumptuous about others. You’ve made several assumptions about me here that are wildly inaccurate and completely unwarranted. Am I being over-sensitive to your comments? No. I’m just calmly telling you you’re out of line making them. But it’s comments like yours that do lead to escalations in tone that usually end up in arguments, like those we’ve seen at the weekend. > Your GitHub disagrees. I’ve been writing software for more than 30 years and have used over 20 languages to varying degrees - at least a dozen professionally. I’ve even designed a few DSLs in my time too. My GitHub profile is a relatively recent thing because “everyone was doing GitHub” so the vast majority of my code is on a private git server on my home server. I’m not inclined to open source every piece of code I’ve written and a lot of my earliest contributions to other open source projects do pre-date GitHub becoming mainstream. In fact I’ve been doing this so long that I have a binder full of code print outs that I used to take to interviews. ;) (or maybe I threw that out a couple of house moves ago?) While the vast majority of code I’ve published on GitHub is Go, that’s only because at the time of creating the GitHub profile I was considering going for a Go job (I didn’t in the end but the profile still helped my CV). There’s only really one project on GH that I actively maintain. The rest I just leave up because they’re there already. One thing I’ve learned from my time is that all languages have their pain points. Rust included. And sometimes an academically worse language might be better suited for a specific task. So I tend not to make assumptions about people for their choice of language. ;) Edit: worth adding that I used to be like you guys, being highly critical about languages. In the 90s I used to mock PHP as a stupid Perl. And in the 80s I was mocked by Assembly developers for writing in Pascal. I’ve grown up since then though. As I’m sure a lot of the Rust folks who mock Go eventually will do.

sph 5y ago

[flagged]

fasterthanlime 5y 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 5y 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.
  - mplanchard 5y ago
    And yet here you are responding to a post that is asking we keep this thread on topic by trying to rehash said flameware.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - hu3 5y ago
      My comment has a point: it is directed to the author because they do not recognize the blatant flamebait appeal of their posts even after all the drama. Your comment, not so much.
      - mplanchard 5y ago
        My comment was a suggestion as to why you might be receiving downvotes. This thread isn’t the place to exercise your need to express your disapproval and/or suspicion of the author regarding their previous posts. If you’d like to have a direct conversation with the author, there’s plenty of contact info on their website. All you’re doing is dragging this post down into more useless argumentation about something that has already been covered again and again in the previous posts.
        hu3 5y ago
        You're just making it worse by trying to gatekeep whatever others should comment. My original comment has a point and is on-topic for the thread regardless if you agree or not. You're just dragging this unproductive and offtopic conversation you started. Please stop dragging this needlessly with ad-hominem attacks.
        mplanchard 5y ago
        nit: ad-hominem is attacking the person rather than what they’re doing or their argument, e.g. saying that someone is an idiot rather than refuting their argument. There’s nothing ad-hominem in any of my arguments: I’m just pointing out that what you’re doing is unproductive and off-topic and giving my opinion about why you’re being downvoted. You could and reasonably did say the same thing about my arguing with you (that it’s unproductive), but that wouldn’t be an ad-hominem attack. You’re attacking my actions, not my person.
- dang 5y ago
  This one is a great article and I don't see it as related to the other pieces (causally yes, but topically no). So, not a problem. Actually we usually downweight rapid follow-ups from the same site when there has been a major thread just recently (the intention is always to avoid too much repetition along any axis) but I took a look at this article last night and it was so good that I ignored that rule. A good article is more important than a good rule.
jamincan 5y ago
This is a ridiculously ungenerous interpretation of Amos's blogging motivations. What troll waits two years to stir the pot? There's absolutely no need to be inflammatory and I think his posting history demonstrates that he absolutely is not a troll.
dang 5y ago
It's rarely so deliberate. In fact it's basically never that deliberate because even if the intention were diabolically trollish (which is uncommon and I don't think the case here), HN is too random to respond reliably. People are almost always just posting things they like/agree with and then other people, with different tastes and backgrounds, react differently. Sometimes by bursting into flames. All of her fingertips burst into flames All she could say was, "Oh extinguish them, James!" - Robyn Hitchcock

pja 5y ago

Except that, as far as I can tell at least, Amos is not the one posting these articles. The problem is that he’s writing interesting, informed commentary on topics that are hot button issues for people who are a tad over-sensitive about their career choices :) You can be a happy Go programmer, whilst also recognising that the language has limitations & things it’s really not good at. That would be the mature, honest response to these articles. What is not a mature, honest reponse is DDOSing the guy because you (the generic you, not you specifically hnlmorg!) don’t like his opinions.

hnlmorg 5y ago
> You can be a happy Go programmer, whilst also recognising that the language has limitations & things it’s really not good at. That would be the mature, honest response to these articles. The problem is the author preemptively shrugged off those responses by ostensibly accusing those coders of having Stockholm Syndrome. It was content like that which caused the issues. Regardless of whether it’s eloquent trolling or just a genuine but passionate piece, it was touching on an already hot topic with poor consideration about how it would be received. And that’s fine for a personal blog. But when you then see your articles explode online and then proceed to write follow up pieces in the same tone and intended for the same audience (regardless of whether he directly submitted it to HN), it’s harder to dismiss as someone not trying to exploit flame wars to booster their own blogs traffic. I guess they succeeded in that too; albeit a DDoS attack wasn’t quite what they intended. To be clear, I don’t agree with the DDoS attack. Nor do I believe they deserved it (what they actually deserved was just for the articles to get flagged and forgotten) but I can still blame the author for the arguments on here when they saw the existing discourse and decided to write follow up pieces of equally antagonistic tones.
- simon_o 5y ago
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    > Aren't you exactly the type of person pja is referring to, when he mentions "tad over-sensitive about their career choices"? I don’t write Go in my day job (nor have I ever). So no, I’m not even remotely that type of person. > The articles were perfectly fine. The problem you have with them is that you don't like the author's opinion. It wasn’t the technical opinions I disagreed with, quite the opposite actually. I largely agreed with the technical points. It was the flourishes they used to express those opinions. Much like yourself now, he was rather rude and presumptuous about others. You’ve made several assumptions about me here that are wildly inaccurate and completely unwarranted. Am I being over-sensitive to your comments? No. I’m just calmly telling you you’re out of line making them. But it’s comments like yours that do lead to escalations in tone that usually end up in arguments, like those we’ve seen at the weekend. > Your GitHub disagrees. I’ve been writing software for more than 30 years and have used over 20 languages to varying degrees - at least a dozen professionally. I’ve even designed a few DSLs in my time too. My GitHub profile is a relatively recent thing because “everyone was doing GitHub” so the vast majority of my code is on a private git server on my home server. I’m not inclined to open source every piece of code I’ve written and a lot of my earliest contributions to other open source projects do pre-date GitHub becoming mainstream. In fact I’ve been doing this so long that I have a binder full of code print outs that I used to take to interviews. ;) (or maybe I threw that out a couple of house moves ago?) While the vast majority of code I’ve published on GitHub is Go, that’s only because at the time of creating the GitHub profile I was considering going for a Go job (I didn’t in the end but the profile still helped my CV). There’s only really one project on GH that I actively maintain. The rest I just leave up because they’re there already. One thing I’ve learned from my time is that all languages have their pain points. Rust included. And sometimes an academically worse language might be better suited for a specific task. So I tend not to make assumptions about people for their choice of language. ;) Edit: worth adding that I used to be like you guys, being highly critical about languages. In the 90s I used to mock PHP as a stupid Perl. And in the 80s I was mocked by Assembly developers for writing in Pascal. I’ve grown up since then though. As I’m sure a lot of the Rust folks who mock Go eventually will do.