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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

This is kinda awesome only because lots of people can't tell if it's a joke or not. I'm reasonably confident it is, but the fact that a lot of people can't tell makes it pretty funny. And, the account that posted it is seemingly new enough to programming to maybe have no idea that it's ridiculous. So, it may even be sincere, which is less funny, but still caused me to think about it for a minute.

Also, I admire the handful of people who commented with a sincere explanation about why it's wrong. I don't have that much patience, but I'm happy that people who do exist.

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I can't tell whether or not it's a joke.

What I can clearly see is the whole reason I left working in tech: the field is stuffed full of deeply unpleasant and unkind people.

Yeah, I try to look past it, but we really are a bitter and angry community on average; anyone different, anyone less skilled, anyone who can be "othered", is treated with disdain by a lot of our peers.

It never stops being disappointing...though I also understand the feeling that leads to it. Some days I genuinely hate my projects users for being so utterly helpless and having bizarre mental models for how things work. As I've gotten older and, I think, kinder, I try to take a break when I feel like ranting or condescending at a person rather than helping. I don't always succeed, but I wish more people would try.

That's unfortunately true. I found people in research to be much more open-minded than in sw development (at the same time they were always a bit too outgoing for me :)). But not sure if it's much better in most other disciplines. Tech people seem to be pretty honest at least. Compared to the backstabbing and cutthroat cultures and hierarchies in business, law and medicine (there even literally). Elitism can also be found in basically every other field... So well. Perhaps it's just the people

Technical people, myself included, tend to be too arrogant, negative and black-white thinking. I don't associate with anyone whom dumps their emotional/work politics garbage or badmouths things/people/employers/etc.

Add some motherfucking positivity! :)

I see no comments on the PR that I'd describe as unpleasant or unkind.

Yeah, folks are mostly being kind or just continuing the joke in this thread. There's a couple of questionable ones, but nothing too awful. I've seen much worse, including in the Linux kernel community (which is kind of a mixed bag, but in my past experience reasonably nice to newbies).

It's quite funny, but I think (hope) that it's a satirical poke at JS minification...?

(... which, admittedly, would be quite strange now that I think about it. I didn't check, but I assume that there was no variable renaming in the "added line". Hmm... Regardless, I had a good laugh, so it's all good.)

The diff itself is pretty funny. But yeah I have no idea how serious this is meant to be.

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