11 ms·

You can't impress developers

265 points by cmbaus 13y ago

ksikka 13y ago
I am a developer and I was impressed.
cmbaus 13y ago
This conversation reminds of the old programmer joke: How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five. One to screw in the light bulb and four to say, "I could have done that."
- nullspace 13y ago
  Offtopic, but a quick googling led me to this: http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~omri/Humor/lightbulb.html http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~omri/Humor/lightbulb.html Fun read!
  - idoco 13y ago
    Off-Offtopic! But I loved this one: How many Prolog programmers does it take to change a light bulb? False.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - quarterto 13y ago
      How many Javascripers does it take to change a lightbulb? NaN.
    - DHowett 13y ago
      How many ed users does it take to change a light bulb? ?
  - reinhardt 13y ago
    Nice, but where's the Java Enterprise (tm) solution?
- bambax 13y ago
  Funny! But why just five? It would work just the same with "hundreds"...
  - codeka 13y ago
    Being specific is funnier than being general: http://2012.scriptfrenzy.org/node/413100 http://2012.scriptfrenzy.org/node/413100
- baddox 13y ago
  Surely at least one or two of them would say "Instead of wasting time with light bulbs I would have been building something people want."
  - hoka 13y ago
    And the other two built a social network for the lightbulbs?
    - vidarh 13y ago
      I believe there's either products or perhaps a kickstarter for lamps where the light will change depending on whether your friends lamps are on or off.
- zalew 13y ago
  > How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? none. it's a hardware problem.
  - Afforess 13y ago
    And the converse, How many electrical engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. It'll be fixed in a driver patch.
- pledg 13y ago
  I could have made this joke much more succinctly in another language.
- davewiner 13y ago
  What's so impressive about screwing in a lightbulb. I don't get it.
  - handelaar 13y ago
    That's a bit too subtle for this place these days, colleague
    - davewiner 13y ago
      At least you got it! ;-)
ecspike 13y ago
Brython has bubbled up on HackerNews several times. It might not be "not impressed", just "not impressed anymore." Edit: Added quotation marks.
- aroman 13y ago
  This. I didn't say anything on the Brython post from yesterday, but I certainly wasn't very impressed having seen it at least twice before on HN and what with the dozens of foo-to-JS transcompilers that have been cropping up lately. I didn't upvote, I didn't downvote, and I didn't comment though. Maybe the lesson is "if you don't have something nice[1] to say, don't say it at all". [1] or meaningfully constructive, at least
  - ecspike 13y ago
    HN Search shows separate Brython posts from 3, 4, and 5 months ago.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
akkartik 13y ago
You can't impress developers on HN. There's something about the social dynamics of large groups of developers online that causes relatively-uninteresting criticisms to dominate. But when somebody's actually trying something out, rather than just kibitzing? They're a lot friendlier. If you couldn't impress developers we'd never switch to new technologies. And yet here we are, with rack and sinatra and cucumber and node and clojure.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  That's my main problem with the tone that's coming to be more and more apparent- The criticisms just aren't interesting. It's disappointing to open a discussion thread and have the top couple of comments be some negative nitpick of something that's shallow or irrelevant. Next time you're about to post, ask yourself if it's the most interesting thing you could say about the topic. If it's not, why not think for a moment and then post what is most interesting?
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  I'm not sure that the "new technologies" you listed are very good examples. Rack, for instance, isn't really that much different from CGI, FastCGI, SCGI, NSAPI, ISAPI, Apache modules, and so forth. It's just one more way of invoking custom code to handle an HTTP request. This is something we've been doing for many years now, and it really isn't "new". The same goes for Sinatra. I remember seeing Perl and Tcl code in the 1990s that essentially did the same thing. It's pretty much the most basic and obvious way of handling such a situation. Cucumber reminds me of some internal software I dealt with at one firm back in the 1980s. Business analysts would write English-like acceptance tests, then feed them to a program that would generate PL/I code that'd automatically test different aspects of an accounting system. Clojure is perhaps the worst of the examples. It's merely a dialect of a programming language that's over 50 years old. Many of us first worked with Lisp decades ago. Even targeting the JVM doesn't make it special, given that the Java platform has been publicly available for almost 20 years, and was targeted by non-Java languages well before Clojure attempted it. While the implementations may be new, the ideas surely aren't. Having worked with equivalent technologies in the past, sometimes decades ago, many of us here just don't find them interesting or special in any way.
philwelch 13y ago
I think this underlines what Hacker News has become. At first, Hacker News was about people discussing technology, but also about building things and sharing them, and it was a very supportive community that would actually give useful feedback. Now we're more interested in being hypercritical dicks and gossiping about the tech industry.
cmccabe 13y ago
Are the examples given by the author really that worthy of respect? If you write yet another unnecessary Foo to Javascript translator, or over-complicate your code to show off how well you know the dark corners of your chosen language (both examples given by Chris), should people really be impressed? And if people aren't, should they put on a fake smile and pretend to be?
- cryowaffle 13y ago
  Hah, the satire (more likely irony) is so thick.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  Yeah, I think the article was aimed at you and your kind.
- DanBC 13y ago
  > should people really be impressed? And if people aren't, should they put on a fake smile and pretend to be? Offering a critique doesn't have to be fake smiles, nor does it have to be slagging off. People can ignore posts. Or people can offer calm advice about why something is suboptimal.
  - VMG 13y ago
    Which was exactly what happened in the comments. I haven't read one impolite response.
- spicavigo 13y ago
  If you are not impressed, ignore. If you smell something fishy about the developer, call it out (Giving benefit of doubt wherever possible. For eg, the developer could have started to code a week ago, or he wrote the translator in 1 hour flat. All admirable acievements). Just don't be evil.
latch 13y ago
Took a break from HN (and others) for about 8 months at the end of 2012 and start of 2013. The HN I came back to feels very different. Everyone knows better and is eager to prove it by putting others down. Comments are no longer about the OP, but about how the OP is laughable, let me tell you how to do it. So sad.
- spoiler 13y ago
  Dear person, please lead the following statement as if it were written the most possible respect, humility and grace: Your post is laughable, because we cannot take you seriously, since you ate about 8 months behind the rest of us on terms of evolution. The way you should have done it is by slaughtering a unicorn and drinking its blood out of a hollowed rhino horn, which is also illegal to obtain, so essentially my post is completely stupid, irrelevant and misses the point by such a magnitude that the statement is in a completely different planetary system. However, I will remain ignorant of this. Oh, not to mention, I believe everyone loves reading my long, obnoxious walls of text. ^ Posts like those? :D
  - seabee 13y ago
    If all the obnoxious posts were like that we wouldn't have a problem. The problem is with bad comments that are not sufficiently incendiary for people who agree with their thesis to want to downvote them.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- kevinflo 13y ago
  I've noticed this as well and I've always felt it had to do with the fact that you cannot downvote comments. Comments systems that allow for only upvoting seem to skew towards surfacing loud comments versus reasonable comments. The silent reasonable majority (that is less inclined to comment or even vote) needs a way to help curate when things get unbalanced. Think about how you might not end up actually clicking upvote on a comment that is reasonable and that you agree with but how you most definitely would downvote the snide negative comments that top HN comments sections all too frequently.
bambax 13y ago
I had missed the first link about a Python interpreter in JS. I too find it incredible and very exciting. I'm not sure I want to manipulate the DOM in Python instead of JS/jQuery, but it could prove super cool to write web workers in Python for instance. The more you can compute in the browser the better. The client is where CPU cycles go to die, we need to change that.
- serge2k 13y ago
  I don't think it is unimpressive, but I do wonder why? It's impressive from a technical standpoint, and that is in some ways enough. But why the need to port everything to javascript? I don't use python for things I would write in javascript and unless you are prepared to port all the libraries (i.e. the thing that makes python so useful/fun/awesome) then why? I can just use JS. JS is a language with good enough features. I don't need a python that compiles/is intepreted in JS. It's less that I am not impressed, and more that I think the effort is somewhat wasted. Of course I still respect the implementer.
  - thedanfilter 13y ago
    Unless I am mistaken it would allow a person to create a web-based editor that can compile and run the python code on the same web page. This seems to be very much the direction that online programming tutorials are taking. For schools, Universities, etc, it means not having to worry about platform or installed software. As most open source projects stall due to "more important things to do", it would probably be wise to offer these people as much encouragement as we can to better the chances that someone will complete one (and want to support it in the future).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
MisterBastahrd 13y ago
I become impressed when I see utility. Anyone can mock up a poorly featured demo. Programmers tend to be a lot more receptive when someone says: We created X, and here's the successful, maintainable, real world product we used to implement it called Y than: We created X, here's a 10 line incomplete demo that isn't really useful for anything and that we didn't explain well
- spicavigo 13y ago
  Of course, expecting HNers to be intelligent enough so that the obvious utilities don't need to be spelled out will be wrong. If you don't spoon feed us, we will talk trash.
  - sltkr 13y ago
    So basically everyone that doesn't see the "obvious" utility of every pet project is an idiot? And you are saying HNers are the ones with negative attitudes?
namank 13y ago
Developers are critical thinkers. If the person hasn't evolved enough to account for the notion of being human; or if the context is such that critical thinking implies critiquing without appreciation, you get what the OP is complaining about. HN is definitely the latter since comments in this community are largely reserved for criticism while the appreciation is (usually) limited to upvotes. I want to say it's the nature of the game but that's simply not true, we take pride in being assholes. For Brython, while I was appreciated the amount of work and the complexity that went into it, I was unimpressed by the methodology.
- testbro 13y ago
  > HN is definitely the latter since comments in this community are largely reserved for criticism while the appreciation is (usually) limited to upvotes. I think this reasoning is fairly sound and possibly hints that HN may be less unfriendly than the comments alone make out. Anonymity tends to make criticism easier to lob around. I'm in academia and even super-critical reviews tend to be prefaced by apologetic "good points" before the submission gets eviscerated; even then a good reviewer will give constructive feedback. I wonder if we could borrow this approach to commenting to improve the atmosphere?
progx 13y ago
Developer != Developer. Many Developer think that they are the best developer in the world and this kind of people dont honor others work. Since i use github, i see that not everybody think like you do (in the past i agree with your statement).
quackerhacker 13y ago
I agree with this OP to a level, that it isn't limited to developers. I had a couple contractors in our house, and I swear they went at each others throats nitpicking different ways each other could do a job better. In regards to devs, I am a hacker (my criminal record proves it), but you'll always come across people who are ignorant in what they know and unwilling to be open to change or something they didn't have a hand in. ALL OF US as coders need to be open to new libraries, code bases, languages, and always willing to learn, but I think it's inherited with our skills that we look for holes, errors, and other ways to optimize...to the point that it comes off as an attack instead of criticism. If you link on HN, EXPECT criticism (constructive hopefully), and just ignore the ignorant trolls. A real coder knows how to give supportive criticism, and credit where credit is due....Not sure if this validates my opinion, but I'm easily impressed though :)
Kiro 13y ago
I find it way harder to impress users. They expect things just to magically work and don't realize how much work is required even for the most mundane feature.
jsmcgd 13y ago
I would argue that developers can be impressed. However the ones that aren't are normally quite vocal. Commentary on the internet is normally toward the extreme end of opinion and should be regarded as such. It is difficult to adjust to this though as it is in direct contrast to real life where people make deliberate efforts to moderate what they say.
philtar 13y ago
I'm impressed by the stuff I see here, all the time. I've only been using HN for a couple of months but I, too, have noticed a decline in the quality of comments. The comments used to be about how amazing the information in the link is, what's so amazing about it, how it can be used, how it can be improved concluded with brownie points for the OP. Now, all I read about is how dumb the post is. Author wrote too much/little and doesn't know what they're talking about. Just look at the comments for the 'Mistakes designers make over and over again' post that's currently on the front page. Someone should research this. Every-single-time a nice little community starts expanding rapidly all the construction is gone and all we're left with is the destruction. Reddit and HN being the most recent examples I can think of. For a throw back: Anyone remember GameFAQs of 1998? Go check it now.
- thejteam 13y ago
  I think the quality of the comments reflects the average quality of the posts. We can't talk about how amazing the information is if the submitted link is a 3 paragraph blog post. So unfortunately the average commenter becomes the type of person who comments on 3 paragraph blog posts. Now here's a cool startup idea. A ranking system that takes into account not only community upvotes, but an automated NLP assessment of the quality of writing. Useful for both the submitted posts/articles and for the comments.
  - kybernetyk 13y ago
    > but an automated NLP assessment of the quality of writing. What about non-native English speakers?
    - thejteam 13y ago
      That is the biggest flaw in the idea.
Derbasti 13y ago
I always try to make a point of showing appreciation when someone programmed something cool.
cinbun8 13y ago
Developers and engineers in general develop an ego with time. They take pride in their work and are very protective of it. They also relish the petty mistakes that others make and scoff at them - 'pfft I could have used X instead of Y to do Z. Who uses Y anymore !?'. For example, you can find this behavior when someone posts something about problem X and there is a minor grammatical mistake or an opinion that is expressed in the post that is unconventional. The comments section will zero in on that and miss the big picture.
- mratzloff 13y ago
  No, that's not a given; please don't generalize. Some developers have an ego early on and deemphasize it over time. Others have never had much of an ego. I have known several developers like this. There is no inevitable increase in ego.
jacques_chester 13y ago
I've been active here for about 2 years now. I don't think there's been the dreadful decline people are talking about; I think it's mostly nostalgia talking. I know intellectually that I basically hated highschool and spent most of it alternatively depressed or bored out of my skull, yet somehow that period of my life has taken on a rosy tint. Sometimes OPs are wrong or misguided and somebody with more experience or expertise is there to point out why. That's valuable. Often you hear from the creators of things. Folk who are at the coalface of some system, company or problem. That's valuable. So sometimes it comes with a bit of grunge and grump. I don't really care. The rest is worth it.
- clicks 13y ago
  I have similar thoughts. I've been here for a few years and I haven't observed any specific decline. I'm a little confused by the perceived offense as well: it's not good to tell someone something sucks? I would much rather hear honest thoughts about my projects ("seems like a waste of time, poor implementation anyway, maybe try $x instead?") than be given a false sense of security through unwarranted praise. Of course what is not cool is downright snippy dismissals without any substantiation, but I think those are still relatively rare. Really the most tragic thing about it all is that pointing out the "middlebrow dismissal" in a verbose comment/blogpost has become a meme unto itself. We spend so much time on meta-discussions now. So here's my idea of how to approach comments you guys feel are putting people down unfairly: neutralize the meanness by following up that very mean comment by saying something like "I don't think you're being fair, I think author of the post has made something really cool because $y". And, the $y part better be something technical, or else we're going further down into more non-substantive meta-discussion discussion.
  - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
    Having been in the industry for some time now, I've observed significant generational differences between how criticism is given and accepted. When I worked with developers raised in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, they generally wouldn't hold back when it came to criticism. If something was done wrong, or if something was a stupid idea, they'd say so very bluntly and to-the-point. They'd also be more open to receiving such criticism, and would re-evaluate their own work or ideas without a second thought. They surely wouldn't let it hurt their feelings, or anything of that sort. Developers raised in the 1950s, 1960s and the first part of the 1970s tend to be willing to give out some harsh criticism, but I've found they're often less willing to accept it from others. They won't necessarily re-consider their ideas or work when questioned. The trend is more pronounced with developers raised in the late 1970s and 1980s. I've generally observed them to be far less critical of the work of others, but also even less willing to accept criticism directed at their work or ideas. Some even consider criticism to be unacceptable. Now I've started working with some developers raised during the 1990s, and their attitude is generally one of criticism being completely unacceptable. They don't necessarily think that praise is necessary all of the time, but they can often take any sort of criticism very personally. While it may just be tied to age, experience and maturity, I'm thinking it goes beyond such things. For example, I've seen several different professional developers raised in the 1990s actually cry in the workplace when faced with valid, and actually quite muted, criticism of their work. These people were adults, over 20 years old. I'd never seen anything like it with the thousands of other developers I've worked with over the years, even ones who were of a similar age at the time, but born earlier. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's what we're seeing here, too. Old developers, who have a more accepting attitude toward criticism, are more than willing to dish it out and receive it back. But the youngest generation has a very different attitude toward it, seeing criticism as extremely offensive, and even pseudo-criminal in nature. While many of them do just try to avoid giving and receiving criticism altogether, I do find it kind of funny and hypocritical when the more outspoken ones openly criticize those who are critical of others.
manmal 13y ago
I'm easily impressed by: - Huge projects which are still understandable within minutes, - Products which handle special cases, which in turn amaze its users (when the dev has managed to get beyond her own use cases), - and devs who write more elegant code than me (clever use of patterns, readability, yadayada). It's easy to sniff at another dev's code, since nobody's perfect, and code is often a compromise of a conflict of various factors (and each conflict can be solved in various ways). But, this loop which has a workaround for a off-by-one error which is caused elsewhere - has likely been written under time pressure, and I might someday make the same mistake. I think it all boils down to dev compassion.
losethos 13y ago
My parser makes a stack machine intermediate code that gets converted to 64-bit machine code. I wrote a fucken 64-bit compiler and kernel from scratch.
dvhh 13y ago
Well since you can have hardware emulator in javascript, we surely became less impressed in what you can run in the browser. example that come in mind http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html
- Joeri 13y ago
  This is why the internet is bad for your self-image. In the whole world there are only a handful of people who could write something like jslinux. But, because of the internet, we have all seen it and consider this the reference to live up to. Well, most people cannot ever live up to fabrice bellard. I'm sure my work will never live up to his work. Does that mean all my work is automatically rubbish? In my opinion, we should compare other people's work to our own work. If we compare against the work of the very best then 99.9% of things will fall short of what they should have been.
  - nairteashop 13y ago
    This is absolutely right. "Oh you create search algorithms at Bing? Mleh. I find that Google's search algorithms are so much better." And you hear this from people who can barely use grep. I think someone's work needs to evaluated on their own merit, or with one's own work, vs. some other genius's work.
  - dvhh 13y ago
    This is why I didn't work in computer graphics and choose to be a lowly web developer instead :p
artagnon 13y ago
Appreciation and valuable feedback are two different things. What value does "this is great; let me buy you a pretty unicorn!" add to the discussion? Criticism and disagreement are central to growth. We are not here satisfy each others' egos or make each other feel loved; we're here to criticize software and make it better. Constructive criticism is our way of saying: "I have spent time reading your code, and here is how you can make it better" -- I don't have the time to read everything, so the very fact that I took the time to read your code and write about it should make you feel appreciated. That said, it is possible to go overboard and criticize something based on irrational hatred. At that point, you're just talking about trolls: it has nothing to do with developers not appreciating each others' work. Internet trolls have existed since the dawn of the internet, and there are plenty of resources on how to deal with them. How you communicate your criticism is also important: there is no need to be overtly negative. Just point out what's wrong, and how to correct it; your job is done. Here's a recent instance where I've been overtly negative: the correct response is criticism of my style, as Junio has done [1]. [1]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/225354/focus=225388 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22535...
- tracker1 13y ago
  I think it come down to the tone of any criticism. I don't mind honest criticism, or even opinion. One thing that always seems to bug me is a sense of arrogance around some people.
davewiner 13y ago
Hacker News is going through a predictable evolution. In the early days it's a wonderful community of supportive collaborators. These are the people who start unmoderated mail lists and discussion groups, at least the ones that grow to the next stage. It attracts people who want to be part of an unmoderated mail list or discussion group. It doesn't matter what the topic is, they always show up. They feel a sense of empowerment. They have arrived at the place where decisions are made, and they have an equal voice! They will express themselves. Then it becomes about governance. How will we make decisions (even though the decisions are about nothing). Then even those people leave, because the atmosphere is so poisoned by the negative people who say they hate everything and anything. The good folk who started the community are long-gone, probably dreaming about new communities where everyone gets along and is supportive and has good ideas and doesn't get in anyone's way! Only to do it again, and again...
- corresation 13y ago
  You've been saying this for literally years now. Back in 2011 you were declaring that "idiots" dominated Hacker News.
  - general_failure 13y ago
    Some call it wisdom. Some call it broken record. You decide.
  - davewiner 13y ago
    How would you know you've only been here 165 days! ;-)
- demachina 13y ago
  Yet when there was a thread on here about your product, Fargo, last week you seemed to be quite fond of Hacker News, asking people on your blog to vote it up so you could get more publicity. If you don't like Hacker News why don't you stop reading it, posting to it and pointing to it in your blog multiple times a week, glowingly when its in your favor and harshly when its not. You seem to being continuing your long running tendency to eviscerate anyone or anything which criticizes you and make out like its "their" fault and not yours. You are also reinforcing the perception among many that you want attention, even when it entails hacking people off to get it, like you are doing here.
viach 13y ago
I'm just wondering, if one day someone submit a post on HN "Bob Smith just have implemented AI-Hard in JavaScript as his weekend project, watch the demo", what would be the first comment :)
- Paradigma11 13y ago
  Why JS?
jplur 13y ago
HN comments are heavy on critique. Maybe that's a side effect of an aggregator and a culture that discourages trivial chatter. A year of keeping up with HN has been a crash course on how to build things for the internet. I don't know what my stack would look like without all the unimpressed developers picking apart the industry news. Keep it up.
Aardwolf 13y ago
I wonder if this applies to other professions? E.g. what does a master chef think about the dish by another master cook? Does an architect respect the buildings of another? What about painters, musicians or writers?
- davewiner 13y ago
  Those are great questions, and I've wondered about it myself. In movies for example, teams form for projects that last in total a couple of years, but for individuals, their work might just be a couple of months. I've often wished programming worked like that, at least commercial projects. I know a lot of programmers I'd like to try working with. But we don't do it that way. Also, there is a sense of history in most of those activities that isn't present here. A young basketball player can tell you about all his role models, going back many generations. I've seen it (thinking of Iman Schumpert on the Knicks). They listen to each others' music, eat each others' food, I'm sure there's a lot of pettiness to the discourse, but in software, it's not uncommon for people to compete with products they've never even tried. I can see that in competitive products! I think it will eventually get better. It is getting better over time. When I was starting the idea of an individual creating software was VERY radical, and there wasn't much support for it. Until I came to Calif, and met other people who believed in the idea. Nowadays, they make movies about people doing that. I would have told you 30 years ago that day would come, and people really didn't believe it. Esp programmers. :-) So it is getting better. I just wish it would get there faster.
richdougherty 13y ago
This post reminds me a bit of the momentum-sapping negativity Dave Winer describes in his old post on Stop Energy. See: http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy
k-mcgrady 13y ago
It seems a lot of people in the comments here are complaining about a decline in the value of discussions on HN. Although I've noticed this I don't think it's the fault of the people commenting. The quality of links posted to HN has declined. Rather than fact-based technical articles, useful new tools, and cool side projects there are a lot of crappy articles repeating the same things we've heard thousands of times about productivity, standing desks, work/life balance, meditation. The articles rarely present anything new, they are mostly anecdotes presented as fact. I still find great things on HN and participate in interesting discussions but sometimes when I look at the front page it seems more like a site for people interested in self-help guides.
parennoob 13y ago
Isn't that @holman's theme on your website? I don't recall him open sourcing it. (Unless it's the other way round, which I doubt.)
- holman 13y ago
  I pinged him. He stole it.
  - solox3 13y ago
    hey holman, you might want to look at the way your fonts are being rendered on linux http://i.imgur.com/wT1ue16.png http://i.imgur.com/wT1ue16.png
    - stefantalpalaru 13y ago
      On my Linux system the rendering is just fine[1] using the infinality patches for freetype[2] and subpixel rendering. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/22emWiZ.png http://i.imgur.com/22emWiZ.png [2]: http://od-eon.com/blogs/stefan/improving-the-font-rendering-on-gentoo-infinality/ http://od-eon.com/blogs/stefan/improving-the-font-rendering-...
jjuliano 13y ago
Part of getting criticized is deciding whether you accept them or not. If you try to fight a criticizing troll, you probably won't win. It's easy to get drowned by criticism, so choose your battles wisely, just like Elon Musk, he quit a political action committee because he sees that the group was too cynical. And as experience teach us that too much cynicism tends to hoards negativity.
kablamo 13y ago
HN navel gazing aside -- I think this is really good advice. Rather than trying to impress your coworkers -- try to impress your users. I think the challenge in many companies is getting enough access to your users that you can tell if they are impressed or not. I'm going to try to think this way more.
cjrd 13y ago
The same holds true in virtually every content-oriented field: try making a room full of comedians laugh.
pessimizer 13y ago
I'm impressed by stuff all the time. I think there's just a fatigue about creating an emulator for or an implementation of X in javascript.
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
Yes you can, if you are good. I went to a mountain Bike trail competition, and watched the biggest masters in the world in this. Everybody there knew how to balance over the rear wheel(manuals), over the front(endos) and jump over a meter hight any obstacle, more than 3 meters with a ramp. There it was a kid, 16 years old or so. He was not as good as the much older guys, but all of them were impressed about the guy. They knew that guy was good just looking at him. If you want to impress devs you have to be better than them, and this is very hard on technical matters. But you don't need to, because what makes a good product is not tech alone, but how this tech applies to human beings. Things like design or human interface, or understanding the market or people are also essential. Quite often the tech experts are totally ignorant in those areas(no wireless, less space than a nomad.lame)
Confusion 13y ago
Developers, in general, on average, chronically underestimate the time it takes to properly execute an idea and how many iterations and discovery of the exact needs of customers that requires. I work at a company that sells a tool for model based testing and invariably, at every customer company, there are developers that think our tool isn't worth the money, because when we explain to them how it works and they think 'I could build that'. Yes, of course they could, just like they could also build a Reddit clone in a weekend. They just don't realize (and is hard to convince otherwise), just how much work it is and how much real world experience is necessary to make it actually useful. As the article says: developers are very hard customers and fortunately (for us, but not for the industry in general) the decision makers often distrust/discount the technical opinion developers have of tools they intend to purchase. Tl;dr: developers too often say 'I can build that', when really, for practical purposes, they can't.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Humans are notoriously optimistic, and in particular, we forget about all the things we have to do in order to achieve the things we want to do. (I have been reading some research on this lately). I used to harbour the "build it in a weekend" suspicion about everything, and then I started building things. The world is a damn mess, is what it is.
  - bjz_ 13y ago
    Indeed, I don't think it's just a developer problem. Making stuff is haard, and the more you do it, the more you understand that. Maybe it's related to that thing that has mentioned on HN quite often lately, where the incompetent people are unaware of their own incompetence?
    - unimpressive 13y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-kruger_effect I'm not sure that it's Dunning Kruger so much as it is just not knowing at the outset of the project all the pitfalls you'll get into making it.
kybernetyk 13y ago
Actually I'm impressed that all these 'look what I implemented in a Turing complete language' posts got so much attention for so long.
- minopret 13y ago
  What's such a novelty about sequences of ones and zeros? And even that is really just the separation of darkness from light. We've had that since Creation.
ap22213 13y ago
I think the OP misses the fact that of a few hundreds people who may view and read an article, only a few will put forth effort to comment on it. So, there's definitely some sampling bias. And, typically people put forth effort only if they have motivating opinions, one way or the other. Adding the fact that comments like 'awesome post!' tend to create a lot of noise and get down-voted quickly, it's not surprising that many comments may seem negative. It's the unfortunate nature of online forums. Oftentimes a few negative pieces of feedback will hide substantial amounts of muted support.
toretore 13y ago
I am a developer and I have been impressed by other developers many times. That being said, I don't care much for "show off" posts like "Look everyone, I made a functional web server in Brainfuck!". If you're trying to impress other developers, it is certain that you won't. It is not a worthy goal in itself.
tszming 13y ago
My favorite quote from Steve Jobs: "Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"
hardwaresofton 13y ago
I also read that story yesterday, and I thought, "this is pretty cool, I wonder how it works. It probably compiles to JS" and clicked through and looked at the site for a bit. At the end, I thought it was a really awesome idea, but didn't comment -- I guess I should have, and this blog post makes me feel kind of guilty. I've learned my lesson -- If you like something here, or even think it's remotely interesting, say so.
gverri 13y ago
I remember a comment from PG about this matter. He too was not impressed with all the negativity lurking HN. It's not about admitting genius. It's about recognizing effort and proactivity. It's about stimulating good behavior. It's not about who's more badass.
ExpiredLink 13y ago
> Brython is designed to replace Javascript as the scripting language for the Web. Starting like this, what did you expect? Boring mannered small talk?
jamesjyu 13y ago
> So don't try. Stop! Don't tell people not to try. There's always going to be the vocal peanut gallery at HN (and anywhere online) that will do whatever they can to disparage projects. But, this doesn't make up the majority of people reading. There are millions of developers, hackers, designers, builders reading and benefiting from the projects, code, and products that people post. These are the people who get inspired or utilize the projects and blog posts about that cool new thing you made in node.js, or the neat hack you did with Ruby and realtime sockets, or that awesome new CSS technique. The minute we stop showing the things we make, the trolls win. So I say: TRY! Keep trying! Keep pushing out things that you made. Ignore the trolls and focus on the constructive feedback. HN is a beautiful thing, and it had a huge hand in pushing me to start a startup. And, yes, it was a developer product. If I didn't try, it wouldn't have existed.
wslh 13y ago
I can quickly enumerate a list of things that impressed me from other developers. If others in the HN can do the same would be a better answer to this article. - http://bellard.org/jslinux/ http://bellard.org/jslinux/ - Google: impressed from the engineering and scale side. - Demo scene - Exploiting difficult security vulnerabilities
nrivadeneira 13y ago
Just tried accessing this via the HN link but it was dead. It seems this is the new location of the post: http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/ http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/
zzzeek 13y ago
"page not found" someone have a mirror please ?
- stefantalpalaru 13y ago
  the URL was changed to http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/ http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/
arscan 13y ago
I'm getting a "Not Found" on the link. Looks like the url changed slightly to: http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/ http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/ (its not a cache, but i'll say cached here for those searching the comments for a link to the google cache)
RobSpectre 13y ago
While I can empathize with Olemis on the reception of Brython on Hacker News, I'm not sure one can infer from that exchange (or the admittedly high number of similar conversations) that developers are incapable of being impressed. This just doesn't jive with my experience at all. From the dozen Hack and Tells (http://hackandtell.org/ http://hackandtell.org/) held around the world to the hundreds of stories developers have of their first time looking at ffmpeg's source to the growing number of live Javascript console demos (great one here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jArKzo-h3R0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jArKzo-h3R0) to Dan Kaminsky's DNS bug discovery - I feel developers are very clearly capable of being impressed. It is a pretty regular thing. It is, I will say, a very, very hard thing to do. I encounter it each day in my gig serving developer communities at Twilio. I have to bring my best work to them every time I ask for their attention - anything less ends in derision or, even worse, dismissal. Developers are natural skeptics whose daily work's default state is broken. This engenders a very high velocity needed to escape that skepticism. Further, while HN certainly qualifies as a representative set, it is a specific demo of developer. There is a wide swath of developers who don't participate in this forum - poor reception here rarely means poor reception everywhere developers live. Finally, I would submit that if impressing developers is one's goal in a project, one is probably set up for disappointment from the start. Amazement is an extrinsic factor that makes a poor primary goal as many factors governing success lie outsides the code one writes or the product one is building. I always feel happiest when I fix the problems I want to solve elegantly and those solutions are widely adopted by the people primarily suffering from those problems. Whatever people think outside that scope doesn't really affect that satisfaction.
zbowling 13y ago
No... Developers are really easy to impress. Show them something that will save them time and effort to make something and they will flock around it. You give them a tool that "automagically" does something tedious they used to do and makes it easy and they will be there in a heartbeat with their wallets open. The python in javascript on the client side is a neat hack, but it's not solving any known problem for the mass of developers here. If this showed examples of performance and gained improvement over alternatives and it would sell better here. Right now though, it pushes the idea that javascript isn't good enough and we should be using something else in the browser (see DART, CoffeeScript, etc and related flame wars).
calhoun137 13y ago
There is a huge amount of value in constructive criticism, and really very little value in praise. In order to reach your full potential you must be able to handle criticism of your work. If you simply praise a person you are really not doing them any favors, in fact you might be hurting their development by creating a false sense of superiority that causes them to stop pushing themselves as hard to succeed. However, you really are doing a person a favor when you take the time to read through their work and offer constructive criticism, because then you are helping them to achieve their full potential. In fact, it's a sign of respect to give constructive criticism because the implied message is: I found your work interesting enough to spend time looking over it and thinking about; and I'm not going to treat you like a child who needs to be coddled, but rather like a peer who is capable of handling criticism.
- mathgladiator 13y ago
  > really very little value in praise Value in the $-sense, or in the emotional sense? Why can't you give constructive criticism AND praise at the same time.
  - calhoun137 13y ago
    I don't mean value in the financial sense, but rather in the sense of helping a person improve as a developer. As for mixing praise and criticism, that is appropriate for certain situations; for example when dealing with a student with low self confidence. However there is a danger in praise which I outlined in my previous comment, it really doesn't accomplish much besides stroking a person's ego, and that can have unintended negative consequences for their long term development.
ppradhan 13y ago
Hemingway explains the phenomenon succinctly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kw9spMYA-XU#t=40s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... And remember - don't be self-effacing.

265 points by cmbaus 13y ago

I am a developer and I was impressed.

This conversation reminds of the old programmer joke: How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five. One to screw in the light bulb and four to say, "I could have done that."

nullspace 13y ago
Offtopic, but a quick googling led me to this: http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~omri/Humor/lightbulb.html http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~omri/Humor/lightbulb.html Fun read!
- idoco 13y ago
  Off-Offtopic! But I loved this one: How many Prolog programmers does it take to change a light bulb? False.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - quarterto 13y ago
    How many Javascripers does it take to change a lightbulb? NaN.
  - DHowett 13y ago
    How many ed users does it take to change a light bulb? ?
- reinhardt 13y ago
  Nice, but where's the Java Enterprise (tm) solution?
bambax 13y ago
Funny! But why just five? It would work just the same with "hundreds"...
- codeka 13y ago
  Being specific is funnier than being general: http://2012.scriptfrenzy.org/node/413100 http://2012.scriptfrenzy.org/node/413100
baddox 13y ago
Surely at least one or two of them would say "Instead of wasting time with light bulbs I would have been building something people want."
- hoka 13y ago
  And the other two built a social network for the lightbulbs?
  - vidarh 13y ago
    I believe there's either products or perhaps a kickstarter for lamps where the light will change depending on whether your friends lamps are on or off.
zalew 13y ago
> How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? none. it's a hardware problem.
- Afforess 13y ago
  And the converse, How many electrical engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. It'll be fixed in a driver patch.
pledg 13y ago
I could have made this joke much more succinctly in another language.
davewiner 13y ago
What's so impressive about screwing in a lightbulb. I don't get it.
- handelaar 13y ago
  That's a bit too subtle for this place these days, colleague
  - davewiner 13y ago
    At least you got it! ;-)

ecspike 13y ago

Brython has bubbled up on HackerNews several times. It might not be "not impressed", just "not impressed anymore." Edit: Added quotation marks.

aroman 13y ago
This. I didn't say anything on the Brython post from yesterday, but I certainly wasn't very impressed having seen it at least twice before on HN and what with the dozens of foo-to-JS transcompilers that have been cropping up lately. I didn't upvote, I didn't downvote, and I didn't comment though. Maybe the lesson is "if you don't have something nice[1] to say, don't say it at all". [1] or meaningfully constructive, at least
- ecspike 13y ago
  HN Search shows separate Brython posts from 3, 4, and 5 months ago.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

akkartik 13y ago

You can't impress developers on HN. There's something about the social dynamics of large groups of developers online that causes relatively-uninteresting criticisms to dominate. But when somebody's actually trying something out, rather than just kibitzing? They're a lot friendlier. If you couldn't impress developers we'd never switch to new technologies. And yet here we are, with rack and sinatra and cucumber and node and clojure.

waterlesscloud 13y ago
That's my main problem with the tone that's coming to be more and more apparent- The criticisms just aren't interesting. It's disappointing to open a discussion thread and have the top couple of comments be some negative nitpick of something that's shallow or irrelevant. Next time you're about to post, ask yourself if it's the most interesting thing you could say about the topic. If it's not, why not think for a moment and then post what is most interesting?
PommeDeTerre 13y ago
I'm not sure that the "new technologies" you listed are very good examples. Rack, for instance, isn't really that much different from CGI, FastCGI, SCGI, NSAPI, ISAPI, Apache modules, and so forth. It's just one more way of invoking custom code to handle an HTTP request. This is something we've been doing for many years now, and it really isn't "new". The same goes for Sinatra. I remember seeing Perl and Tcl code in the 1990s that essentially did the same thing. It's pretty much the most basic and obvious way of handling such a situation. Cucumber reminds me of some internal software I dealt with at one firm back in the 1980s. Business analysts would write English-like acceptance tests, then feed them to a program that would generate PL/I code that'd automatically test different aspects of an accounting system. Clojure is perhaps the worst of the examples. It's merely a dialect of a programming language that's over 50 years old. Many of us first worked with Lisp decades ago. Even targeting the JVM doesn't make it special, given that the Java platform has been publicly available for almost 20 years, and was targeted by non-Java languages well before Clojure attempted it. While the implementations may be new, the ideas surely aren't. Having worked with equivalent technologies in the past, sometimes decades ago, many of us here just don't find them interesting or special in any way.

philwelch 13y ago

I think this underlines what Hacker News has become. At first, Hacker News was about people discussing technology, but also about building things and sharing them, and it was a very supportive community that would actually give useful feedback. Now we're more interested in being hypercritical dicks and gossiping about the tech industry.

cmccabe 13y ago

Are the examples given by the author really that worthy of respect? If you write yet another unnecessary Foo to Javascript translator, or over-complicate your code to show off how well you know the dark corners of your chosen language (both examples given by Chris), should people really be impressed? And if people aren't, should they put on a fake smile and pretend to be?

cryowaffle 13y ago
Hah, the satire (more likely irony) is so thick.
chris_wot 13y ago
Yeah, I think the article was aimed at you and your kind.
DanBC 13y ago
> should people really be impressed? And if people aren't, should they put on a fake smile and pretend to be? Offering a critique doesn't have to be fake smiles, nor does it have to be slagging off. People can ignore posts. Or people can offer calm advice about why something is suboptimal.
- VMG 13y ago
  Which was exactly what happened in the comments. I haven't read one impolite response.
spicavigo 13y ago
If you are not impressed, ignore. If you smell something fishy about the developer, call it out (Giving benefit of doubt wherever possible. For eg, the developer could have started to code a week ago, or he wrote the translator in 1 hour flat. All admirable acievements). Just don't be evil.

latch 13y ago

Took a break from HN (and others) for about 8 months at the end of 2012 and start of 2013. The HN I came back to feels very different. Everyone knows better and is eager to prove it by putting others down. Comments are no longer about the OP, but about how the OP is laughable, let me tell you how to do it. So sad.

spoiler 13y ago
Dear person, please lead the following statement as if it were written the most possible respect, humility and grace: Your post is laughable, because we cannot take you seriously, since you ate about 8 months behind the rest of us on terms of evolution. The way you should have done it is by slaughtering a unicorn and drinking its blood out of a hollowed rhino horn, which is also illegal to obtain, so essentially my post is completely stupid, irrelevant and misses the point by such a magnitude that the statement is in a completely different planetary system. However, I will remain ignorant of this. Oh, not to mention, I believe everyone loves reading my long, obnoxious walls of text. ^ Posts like those? :D
- seabee 13y ago
  If all the obnoxious posts were like that we wouldn't have a problem. The problem is with bad comments that are not sufficiently incendiary for people who agree with their thesis to want to downvote them.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kevinflo 13y ago
I've noticed this as well and I've always felt it had to do with the fact that you cannot downvote comments. Comments systems that allow for only upvoting seem to skew towards surfacing loud comments versus reasonable comments. The silent reasonable majority (that is less inclined to comment or even vote) needs a way to help curate when things get unbalanced. Think about how you might not end up actually clicking upvote on a comment that is reasonable and that you agree with but how you most definitely would downvote the snide negative comments that top HN comments sections all too frequently.

bambax 13y ago

I had missed the first link about a Python interpreter in JS. I too find it incredible and very exciting. I'm not sure I want to manipulate the DOM in Python instead of JS/jQuery, but it could prove super cool to write web workers in Python for instance. The more you can compute in the browser the better. The client is where CPU cycles go to die, we need to change that.

serge2k 13y ago
I don't think it is unimpressive, but I do wonder why? It's impressive from a technical standpoint, and that is in some ways enough. But why the need to port everything to javascript? I don't use python for things I would write in javascript and unless you are prepared to port all the libraries (i.e. the thing that makes python so useful/fun/awesome) then why? I can just use JS. JS is a language with good enough features. I don't need a python that compiles/is intepreted in JS. It's less that I am not impressed, and more that I think the effort is somewhat wasted. Of course I still respect the implementer.
- thedanfilter 13y ago
  Unless I am mistaken it would allow a person to create a web-based editor that can compile and run the python code on the same web page. This seems to be very much the direction that online programming tutorials are taking. For schools, Universities, etc, it means not having to worry about platform or installed software. As most open source projects stall due to "more important things to do", it would probably be wise to offer these people as much encouragement as we can to better the chances that someone will complete one (and want to support it in the future).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

MisterBastahrd 13y ago

I become impressed when I see utility. Anyone can mock up a poorly featured demo. Programmers tend to be a lot more receptive when someone says: We created X, and here's the successful, maintainable, real world product we used to implement it called Y than: We created X, here's a 10 line incomplete demo that isn't really useful for anything and that we didn't explain well

spicavigo 13y ago
Of course, expecting HNers to be intelligent enough so that the obvious utilities don't need to be spelled out will be wrong. If you don't spoon feed us, we will talk trash.
- sltkr 13y ago
  So basically everyone that doesn't see the "obvious" utility of every pet project is an idiot? And you are saying HNers are the ones with negative attitudes?

namank 13y ago

Developers are critical thinkers. If the person hasn't evolved enough to account for the notion of being human; or if the context is such that critical thinking implies critiquing without appreciation, you get what the OP is complaining about. HN is definitely the latter since comments in this community are largely reserved for criticism while the appreciation is (usually) limited to upvotes. I want to say it's the nature of the game but that's simply not true, we take pride in being assholes. For Brython, while I was appreciated the amount of work and the complexity that went into it, I was unimpressed by the methodology.

testbro 13y ago
> HN is definitely the latter since comments in this community are largely reserved for criticism while the appreciation is (usually) limited to upvotes. I think this reasoning is fairly sound and possibly hints that HN may be less unfriendly than the comments alone make out. Anonymity tends to make criticism easier to lob around. I'm in academia and even super-critical reviews tend to be prefaced by apologetic "good points" before the submission gets eviscerated; even then a good reviewer will give constructive feedback. I wonder if we could borrow this approach to commenting to improve the atmosphere?

progx 13y ago

Developer != Developer. Many Developer think that they are the best developer in the world and this kind of people dont honor others work. Since i use github, i see that not everybody think like you do (in the past i agree with your statement).

quackerhacker 13y ago

I agree with this OP to a level, that it isn't limited to developers. I had a couple contractors in our house, and I swear they went at each others throats nitpicking different ways each other could do a job better. In regards to devs, I am a hacker (my criminal record proves it), but you'll always come across people who are ignorant in what they know and unwilling to be open to change or something they didn't have a hand in. ALL OF US as coders need to be open to new libraries, code bases, languages, and always willing to learn, but I think it's inherited with our skills that we look for holes, errors, and other ways to optimize...to the point that it comes off as an attack instead of criticism. If you link on HN, EXPECT criticism (constructive hopefully), and just ignore the ignorant trolls. A real coder knows how to give supportive criticism, and credit where credit is due....Not sure if this validates my opinion, but I'm easily impressed though :)

Kiro 13y ago

I find it way harder to impress users. They expect things just to magically work and don't realize how much work is required even for the most mundane feature.

jsmcgd 13y ago

I would argue that developers can be impressed. However the ones that aren't are normally quite vocal. Commentary on the internet is normally toward the extreme end of opinion and should be regarded as such. It is difficult to adjust to this though as it is in direct contrast to real life where people make deliberate efforts to moderate what they say.

philtar 13y ago

I'm impressed by the stuff I see here, all the time. I've only been using HN for a couple of months but I, too, have noticed a decline in the quality of comments. The comments used to be about how amazing the information in the link is, what's so amazing about it, how it can be used, how it can be improved concluded with brownie points for the OP. Now, all I read about is how dumb the post is. Author wrote too much/little and doesn't know what they're talking about. Just look at the comments for the 'Mistakes designers make over and over again' post that's currently on the front page. Someone should research this. Every-single-time a nice little community starts expanding rapidly all the construction is gone and all we're left with is the destruction. Reddit and HN being the most recent examples I can think of. For a throw back: Anyone remember GameFAQs of 1998? Go check it now.

thejteam 13y ago
I think the quality of the comments reflects the average quality of the posts. We can't talk about how amazing the information is if the submitted link is a 3 paragraph blog post. So unfortunately the average commenter becomes the type of person who comments on 3 paragraph blog posts. Now here's a cool startup idea. A ranking system that takes into account not only community upvotes, but an automated NLP assessment of the quality of writing. Useful for both the submitted posts/articles and for the comments.
- kybernetyk 13y ago
  > but an automated NLP assessment of the quality of writing. What about non-native English speakers?
  - thejteam 13y ago
    That is the biggest flaw in the idea.

Derbasti 13y ago

I always try to make a point of showing appreciation when someone programmed something cool.

cinbun8 13y ago

Developers and engineers in general develop an ego with time. They take pride in their work and are very protective of it. They also relish the petty mistakes that others make and scoff at them - 'pfft I could have used X instead of Y to do Z. Who uses Y anymore !?'. For example, you can find this behavior when someone posts something about problem X and there is a minor grammatical mistake or an opinion that is expressed in the post that is unconventional. The comments section will zero in on that and miss the big picture.

mratzloff 13y ago
No, that's not a given; please don't generalize. Some developers have an ego early on and deemphasize it over time. Others have never had much of an ego. I have known several developers like this. There is no inevitable increase in ego.

jacques_chester 13y ago

I've been active here for about 2 years now. I don't think there's been the dreadful decline people are talking about; I think it's mostly nostalgia talking. I know intellectually that I basically hated highschool and spent most of it alternatively depressed or bored out of my skull, yet somehow that period of my life has taken on a rosy tint. Sometimes OPs are wrong or misguided and somebody with more experience or expertise is there to point out why. That's valuable. Often you hear from the creators of things. Folk who are at the coalface of some system, company or problem. That's valuable. So sometimes it comes with a bit of grunge and grump. I don't really care. The rest is worth it.

clicks 13y ago
I have similar thoughts. I've been here for a few years and I haven't observed any specific decline. I'm a little confused by the perceived offense as well: it's not good to tell someone something sucks? I would much rather hear honest thoughts about my projects ("seems like a waste of time, poor implementation anyway, maybe try $x instead?") than be given a false sense of security through unwarranted praise. Of course what is not cool is downright snippy dismissals without any substantiation, but I think those are still relatively rare. Really the most tragic thing about it all is that pointing out the "middlebrow dismissal" in a verbose comment/blogpost has become a meme unto itself. We spend so much time on meta-discussions now. So here's my idea of how to approach comments you guys feel are putting people down unfairly: neutralize the meanness by following up that very mean comment by saying something like "I don't think you're being fair, I think author of the post has made something really cool because $y". And, the $y part better be something technical, or else we're going further down into more non-substantive meta-discussion discussion.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  Having been in the industry for some time now, I've observed significant generational differences between how criticism is given and accepted. When I worked with developers raised in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, they generally wouldn't hold back when it came to criticism. If something was done wrong, or if something was a stupid idea, they'd say so very bluntly and to-the-point. They'd also be more open to receiving such criticism, and would re-evaluate their own work or ideas without a second thought. They surely wouldn't let it hurt their feelings, or anything of that sort. Developers raised in the 1950s, 1960s and the first part of the 1970s tend to be willing to give out some harsh criticism, but I've found they're often less willing to accept it from others. They won't necessarily re-consider their ideas or work when questioned. The trend is more pronounced with developers raised in the late 1970s and 1980s. I've generally observed them to be far less critical of the work of others, but also even less willing to accept criticism directed at their work or ideas. Some even consider criticism to be unacceptable. Now I've started working with some developers raised during the 1990s, and their attitude is generally one of criticism being completely unacceptable. They don't necessarily think that praise is necessary all of the time, but they can often take any sort of criticism very personally. While it may just be tied to age, experience and maturity, I'm thinking it goes beyond such things. For example, I've seen several different professional developers raised in the 1990s actually cry in the workplace when faced with valid, and actually quite muted, criticism of their work. These people were adults, over 20 years old. I'd never seen anything like it with the thousands of other developers I've worked with over the years, even ones who were of a similar age at the time, but born earlier. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's what we're seeing here, too. Old developers, who have a more accepting attitude toward criticism, are more than willing to dish it out and receive it back. But the youngest generation has a very different attitude toward it, seeing criticism as extremely offensive, and even pseudo-criminal in nature. While many of them do just try to avoid giving and receiving criticism altogether, I do find it kind of funny and hypocritical when the more outspoken ones openly criticize those who are critical of others.

manmal 13y ago

I'm easily impressed by: - Huge projects which are still understandable within minutes, - Products which handle special cases, which in turn amaze its users (when the dev has managed to get beyond her own use cases), - and devs who write more elegant code than me (clever use of patterns, readability, yadayada). It's easy to sniff at another dev's code, since nobody's perfect, and code is often a compromise of a conflict of various factors (and each conflict can be solved in various ways). But, this loop which has a workaround for a off-by-one error which is caused elsewhere - has likely been written under time pressure, and I might someday make the same mistake. I think it all boils down to dev compassion.

losethos 13y ago

My parser makes a stack machine intermediate code that gets converted to 64-bit machine code. I wrote a fucken 64-bit compiler and kernel from scratch.

dvhh 13y ago

Well since you can have hardware emulator in javascript, we surely became less impressed in what you can run in the browser. example that come in mind http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html

Joeri 13y ago
This is why the internet is bad for your self-image. In the whole world there are only a handful of people who could write something like jslinux. But, because of the internet, we have all seen it and consider this the reference to live up to. Well, most people cannot ever live up to fabrice bellard. I'm sure my work will never live up to his work. Does that mean all my work is automatically rubbish? In my opinion, we should compare other people's work to our own work. If we compare against the work of the very best then 99.9% of things will fall short of what they should have been.
- nairteashop 13y ago
  This is absolutely right. "Oh you create search algorithms at Bing? Mleh. I find that Google's search algorithms are so much better." And you hear this from people who can barely use grep. I think someone's work needs to evaluated on their own merit, or with one's own work, vs. some other genius's work.
- dvhh 13y ago
  This is why I didn't work in computer graphics and choose to be a lowly web developer instead :p

artagnon 13y ago

Appreciation and valuable feedback are two different things. What value does "this is great; let me buy you a pretty unicorn!" add to the discussion? Criticism and disagreement are central to growth. We are not here satisfy each others' egos or make each other feel loved; we're here to criticize software and make it better. Constructive criticism is our way of saying: "I have spent time reading your code, and here is how you can make it better" -- I don't have the time to read everything, so the very fact that I took the time to read your code and write about it should make you feel appreciated. That said, it is possible to go overboard and criticize something based on irrational hatred. At that point, you're just talking about trolls: it has nothing to do with developers not appreciating each others' work. Internet trolls have existed since the dawn of the internet, and there are plenty of resources on how to deal with them. How you communicate your criticism is also important: there is no need to be overtly negative. Just point out what's wrong, and how to correct it; your job is done. Here's a recent instance where I've been overtly negative: the correct response is criticism of my style, as Junio has done [1]. [1]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/225354/focus=225388 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22535...

tracker1 13y ago
I think it come down to the tone of any criticism. I don't mind honest criticism, or even opinion. One thing that always seems to bug me is a sense of arrogance around some people.

davewiner 13y ago

Hacker News is going through a predictable evolution. In the early days it's a wonderful community of supportive collaborators. These are the people who start unmoderated mail lists and discussion groups, at least the ones that grow to the next stage. It attracts people who want to be part of an unmoderated mail list or discussion group. It doesn't matter what the topic is, they always show up. They feel a sense of empowerment. They have arrived at the place where decisions are made, and they have an equal voice! They will express themselves. Then it becomes about governance. How will we make decisions (even though the decisions are about nothing). Then even those people leave, because the atmosphere is so poisoned by the negative people who say they hate everything and anything. The good folk who started the community are long-gone, probably dreaming about new communities where everyone gets along and is supportive and has good ideas and doesn't get in anyone's way! Only to do it again, and again...

corresation 13y ago
You've been saying this for literally years now. Back in 2011 you were declaring that "idiots" dominated Hacker News.
- general_failure 13y ago
  Some call it wisdom. Some call it broken record. You decide.
- davewiner 13y ago
  How would you know you've only been here 165 days! ;-)
demachina 13y ago
Yet when there was a thread on here about your product, Fargo, last week you seemed to be quite fond of Hacker News, asking people on your blog to vote it up so you could get more publicity. If you don't like Hacker News why don't you stop reading it, posting to it and pointing to it in your blog multiple times a week, glowingly when its in your favor and harshly when its not. You seem to being continuing your long running tendency to eviscerate anyone or anything which criticizes you and make out like its "their" fault and not yours. You are also reinforcing the perception among many that you want attention, even when it entails hacking people off to get it, like you are doing here.

viach 13y ago

I'm just wondering, if one day someone submit a post on HN "Bob Smith just have implemented AI-Hard in JavaScript as his weekend project, watch the demo", what would be the first comment :)

Paradigma11 13y ago
Why JS?

jplur 13y ago

HN comments are heavy on critique. Maybe that's a side effect of an aggregator and a culture that discourages trivial chatter. A year of keeping up with HN has been a crash course on how to build things for the internet. I don't know what my stack would look like without all the unimpressed developers picking apart the industry news. Keep it up.

Aardwolf 13y ago

I wonder if this applies to other professions? E.g. what does a master chef think about the dish by another master cook? Does an architect respect the buildings of another? What about painters, musicians or writers?

davewiner 13y ago
Those are great questions, and I've wondered about it myself. In movies for example, teams form for projects that last in total a couple of years, but for individuals, their work might just be a couple of months. I've often wished programming worked like that, at least commercial projects. I know a lot of programmers I'd like to try working with. But we don't do it that way. Also, there is a sense of history in most of those activities that isn't present here. A young basketball player can tell you about all his role models, going back many generations. I've seen it (thinking of Iman Schumpert on the Knicks). They listen to each others' music, eat each others' food, I'm sure there's a lot of pettiness to the discourse, but in software, it's not uncommon for people to compete with products they've never even tried. I can see that in competitive products! I think it will eventually get better. It is getting better over time. When I was starting the idea of an individual creating software was VERY radical, and there wasn't much support for it. Until I came to Calif, and met other people who believed in the idea. Nowadays, they make movies about people doing that. I would have told you 30 years ago that day would come, and people really didn't believe it. Esp programmers. :-) So it is getting better. I just wish it would get there faster.

richdougherty 13y ago

This post reminds me a bit of the momentum-sapping negativity Dave Winer describes in his old post on Stop Energy. See: http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy

k-mcgrady 13y ago

It seems a lot of people in the comments here are complaining about a decline in the value of discussions on HN. Although I've noticed this I don't think it's the fault of the people commenting. The quality of links posted to HN has declined. Rather than fact-based technical articles, useful new tools, and cool side projects there are a lot of crappy articles repeating the same things we've heard thousands of times about productivity, standing desks, work/life balance, meditation. The articles rarely present anything new, they are mostly anecdotes presented as fact. I still find great things on HN and participate in interesting discussions but sometimes when I look at the front page it seems more like a site for people interested in self-help guides.

parennoob 13y ago

Isn't that @holman's theme on your website? I don't recall him open sourcing it. (Unless it's the other way round, which I doubt.)

holman 13y ago
I pinged him. He stole it.
- solox3 13y ago
  hey holman, you might want to look at the way your fonts are being rendered on linux http://i.imgur.com/wT1ue16.png http://i.imgur.com/wT1ue16.png
  - stefantalpalaru 13y ago
    On my Linux system the rendering is just fine[1] using the infinality patches for freetype[2] and subpixel rendering. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/22emWiZ.png http://i.imgur.com/22emWiZ.png [2]: http://od-eon.com/blogs/stefan/improving-the-font-rendering-on-gentoo-infinality/ http://od-eon.com/blogs/stefan/improving-the-font-rendering-...

jjuliano 13y ago

Part of getting criticized is deciding whether you accept them or not. If you try to fight a criticizing troll, you probably won't win. It's easy to get drowned by criticism, so choose your battles wisely, just like Elon Musk, he quit a political action committee because he sees that the group was too cynical. And as experience teach us that too much cynicism tends to hoards negativity.

kablamo 13y ago

HN navel gazing aside -- I think this is really good advice. Rather than trying to impress your coworkers -- try to impress your users. I think the challenge in many companies is getting enough access to your users that you can tell if they are impressed or not. I'm going to try to think this way more.

cjrd 13y ago

The same holds true in virtually every content-oriented field: try making a room full of comedians laugh.

pessimizer 13y ago

I'm impressed by stuff all the time. I think there's just a fatigue about creating an emulator for or an implementation of X in javascript.

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

Yes you can, if you are good. I went to a mountain Bike trail competition, and watched the biggest masters in the world in this. Everybody there knew how to balance over the rear wheel(manuals), over the front(endos) and jump over a meter hight any obstacle, more than 3 meters with a ramp. There it was a kid, 16 years old or so. He was not as good as the much older guys, but all of them were impressed about the guy. They knew that guy was good just looking at him. If you want to impress devs you have to be better than them, and this is very hard on technical matters. But you don't need to, because what makes a good product is not tech alone, but how this tech applies to human beings. Things like design or human interface, or understanding the market or people are also essential. Quite often the tech experts are totally ignorant in those areas(no wireless, less space than a nomad.lame)

Confusion 13y ago

Developers, in general, on average, chronically underestimate the time it takes to properly execute an idea and how many iterations and discovery of the exact needs of customers that requires. I work at a company that sells a tool for model based testing and invariably, at every customer company, there are developers that think our tool isn't worth the money, because when we explain to them how it works and they think 'I could build that'. Yes, of course they could, just like they could also build a Reddit clone in a weekend. They just don't realize (and is hard to convince otherwise), just how much work it is and how much real world experience is necessary to make it actually useful. As the article says: developers are very hard customers and fortunately (for us, but not for the industry in general) the decision makers often distrust/discount the technical opinion developers have of tools they intend to purchase. Tl;dr: developers too often say 'I can build that', when really, for practical purposes, they can't.

jacques_chester 13y ago
Humans are notoriously optimistic, and in particular, we forget about all the things we have to do in order to achieve the things we want to do. (I have been reading some research on this lately). I used to harbour the "build it in a weekend" suspicion about everything, and then I started building things. The world is a damn mess, is what it is.
- bjz_ 13y ago
  Indeed, I don't think it's just a developer problem. Making stuff is haard, and the more you do it, the more you understand that. Maybe it's related to that thing that has mentioned on HN quite often lately, where the incompetent people are unaware of their own incompetence?
  - unimpressive 13y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-kruger_effect I'm not sure that it's Dunning Kruger so much as it is just not knowing at the outset of the project all the pitfalls you'll get into making it.

kybernetyk 13y ago

Actually I'm impressed that all these 'look what I implemented in a Turing complete language' posts got so much attention for so long.

minopret 13y ago
What's such a novelty about sequences of ones and zeros? And even that is really just the separation of darkness from light. We've had that since Creation.

ap22213 13y ago

I think the OP misses the fact that of a few hundreds people who may view and read an article, only a few will put forth effort to comment on it. So, there's definitely some sampling bias. And, typically people put forth effort only if they have motivating opinions, one way or the other. Adding the fact that comments like 'awesome post!' tend to create a lot of noise and get down-voted quickly, it's not surprising that many comments may seem negative. It's the unfortunate nature of online forums. Oftentimes a few negative pieces of feedback will hide substantial amounts of muted support.

toretore 13y ago

I am a developer and I have been impressed by other developers many times. That being said, I don't care much for "show off" posts like "Look everyone, I made a functional web server in Brainfuck!". If you're trying to impress other developers, it is certain that you won't. It is not a worthy goal in itself.

tszming 13y ago

My favorite quote from Steve Jobs: "Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"

hardwaresofton 13y ago

I also read that story yesterday, and I thought, "this is pretty cool, I wonder how it works. It probably compiles to JS" and clicked through and looked at the site for a bit. At the end, I thought it was a really awesome idea, but didn't comment -- I guess I should have, and this blog post makes me feel kind of guilty. I've learned my lesson -- If you like something here, or even think it's remotely interesting, say so.

gverri 13y ago

I remember a comment from PG about this matter. He too was not impressed with all the negativity lurking HN. It's not about admitting genius. It's about recognizing effort and proactivity. It's about stimulating good behavior. It's not about who's more badass.

ExpiredLink 13y ago

> Brython is designed to replace Javascript as the scripting language for the Web. Starting like this, what did you expect? Boring mannered small talk?

jamesjyu 13y ago

> So don't try. Stop! Don't tell people not to try. There's always going to be the vocal peanut gallery at HN (and anywhere online) that will do whatever they can to disparage projects. But, this doesn't make up the majority of people reading. There are millions of developers, hackers, designers, builders reading and benefiting from the projects, code, and products that people post. These are the people who get inspired or utilize the projects and blog posts about that cool new thing you made in node.js, or the neat hack you did with Ruby and realtime sockets, or that awesome new CSS technique. The minute we stop showing the things we make, the trolls win. So I say: TRY! Keep trying! Keep pushing out things that you made. Ignore the trolls and focus on the constructive feedback. HN is a beautiful thing, and it had a huge hand in pushing me to start a startup. And, yes, it was a developer product. If I didn't try, it wouldn't have existed.

wslh 13y ago

I can quickly enumerate a list of things that impressed me from other developers. If others in the HN can do the same would be a better answer to this article. - http://bellard.org/jslinux/ http://bellard.org/jslinux/ - Google: impressed from the engineering and scale side. - Demo scene - Exploiting difficult security vulnerabilities

nrivadeneira 13y ago

Just tried accessing this via the HN link but it was dead. It seems this is the new location of the post: http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/ http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/

zzzeek 13y ago

"page not found" someone have a mirror please ?

stefantalpalaru 13y ago
the URL was changed to http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/ http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/

arscan 13y ago

I'm getting a "Not Found" on the link. Looks like the url changed slightly to: http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/ http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/ (its not a cache, but i'll say cached here for those searching the comments for a link to the google cache)

RobSpectre 13y ago

While I can empathize with Olemis on the reception of Brython on Hacker News, I'm not sure one can infer from that exchange (or the admittedly high number of similar conversations) that developers are incapable of being impressed. This just doesn't jive with my experience at all. From the dozen Hack and Tells (http://hackandtell.org/ http://hackandtell.org/) held around the world to the hundreds of stories developers have of their first time looking at ffmpeg's source to the growing number of live Javascript console demos (great one here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jArKzo-h3R0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jArKzo-h3R0) to Dan Kaminsky's DNS bug discovery - I feel developers are very clearly capable of being impressed. It is a pretty regular thing. It is, I will say, a very, very hard thing to do. I encounter it each day in my gig serving developer communities at Twilio. I have to bring my best work to them every time I ask for their attention - anything less ends in derision or, even worse, dismissal. Developers are natural skeptics whose daily work's default state is broken. This engenders a very high velocity needed to escape that skepticism. Further, while HN certainly qualifies as a representative set, it is a specific demo of developer. There is a wide swath of developers who don't participate in this forum - poor reception here rarely means poor reception everywhere developers live. Finally, I would submit that if impressing developers is one's goal in a project, one is probably set up for disappointment from the start. Amazement is an extrinsic factor that makes a poor primary goal as many factors governing success lie outsides the code one writes or the product one is building. I always feel happiest when I fix the problems I want to solve elegantly and those solutions are widely adopted by the people primarily suffering from those problems. Whatever people think outside that scope doesn't really affect that satisfaction.

zbowling 13y ago

No... Developers are really easy to impress. Show them something that will save them time and effort to make something and they will flock around it. You give them a tool that "automagically" does something tedious they used to do and makes it easy and they will be there in a heartbeat with their wallets open. The python in javascript on the client side is a neat hack, but it's not solving any known problem for the mass of developers here. If this showed examples of performance and gained improvement over alternatives and it would sell better here. Right now though, it pushes the idea that javascript isn't good enough and we should be using something else in the browser (see DART, CoffeeScript, etc and related flame wars).

calhoun137 13y ago

There is a huge amount of value in constructive criticism, and really very little value in praise. In order to reach your full potential you must be able to handle criticism of your work. If you simply praise a person you are really not doing them any favors, in fact you might be hurting their development by creating a false sense of superiority that causes them to stop pushing themselves as hard to succeed. However, you really are doing a person a favor when you take the time to read through their work and offer constructive criticism, because then you are helping them to achieve their full potential. In fact, it's a sign of respect to give constructive criticism because the implied message is: I found your work interesting enough to spend time looking over it and thinking about; and I'm not going to treat you like a child who needs to be coddled, but rather like a peer who is capable of handling criticism.

mathgladiator 13y ago
> really very little value in praise Value in the $-sense, or in the emotional sense? Why can't you give constructive criticism AND praise at the same time.
- calhoun137 13y ago
  I don't mean value in the financial sense, but rather in the sense of helping a person improve as a developer. As for mixing praise and criticism, that is appropriate for certain situations; for example when dealing with a student with low self confidence. However there is a danger in praise which I outlined in my previous comment, it really doesn't accomplish much besides stroking a person's ego, and that can have unintended negative consequences for their long term development.

ppradhan 13y ago

Hemingway explains the phenomenon succinctly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kw9spMYA-XU#t=40s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... And remember - don't be self-effacing.