Comment by combatentropy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by combatentropy | Hacker News Reader

There are countless comments on Hacker News by a developer impressed with something. So this headline is wrong. What you can't do is impress all developers. But neither can you please all people. So the article's advice to "focus on impressing your users" could also lead to a very special kind of hell, about which more ink hath been spilt.

What the writer was really writing about, though, was that there is little acknowledgment of the effort that went into something, even if in the end it's not for you. Someone wrote a Python interpreter in JavaScript, and in that there is skill, even if overall you reject the effect. What the writer may be asking for is the attitude of a coach: "That was a fast throw, kid, now next time just see if you can aim it more over the plate." That is a legitimate want, and I think the forum would be better if there were more of it. But again, this isn't a deficiency endemic to developers, it's endemic to People on the Internet.

Key takeaway: seeking encouragement from anonymous or semianonymous people on the internet could be harmful.

>There are countless comments on Hacker News by a developer impressed with something. So this headline is wrong.

So, is it fair to say that you're not impressed by TFA?

The interchange of

“Common statement which is generally true”

“A single out of context example where the above statement isn’t true, or a statement asserting it is not true no more than 5% of the time.”

is so common.

Once you start seeing this sort of thing, you see it everywhere on HN and it’s impossible to stop seeing.

It’s almost like a mind trap for developers, that once we see a general idea we immediately snap into disproof mode instead of thinking about ways to more charitably interpret the argument.

I hear you man. This is indeed a pet peeve of mine -- outlier counter-examples, as if any general statement is supposed to cover 100% of the population (and if it doesn't it's invalid), and not just "most" or "many".

Still, it is very hard to make developers pay for software.

So on a different level, perhaps it is hard to impress developers.

Yeah that's the biggest issue. Many developers (myself included) seem to refuse to pay for software. At least normal users are willing to accept ads and data collection in exchange for getting a free service, but we developers don't even accept that.

I pay for all sorts of software: time tracking, malware removal, video games, adobe suite, windows 10, music production software, a handful of SaaS products.

Assuming that a majority of developers refuse to pay for software is, in my opinion, an exageration.

I feel that we are in a position where we can estimate the amount of work and the dedication that a team has put into a great product. I have paid for many of the great softwares that run on my machine because of this knowledge.

> Still, it is very hard to make developers pay for software.

I don't think this is true. There are lots of things that developers throw money at, and each developer can easily think of multiple processes that would happily through hundreds or thousands of dollars at if those processes could be automated.

However, it is hard to build software that developers will pay for.

I.e., the demand is there and it is strong, but the products that meet that demand are generally Real Engineering Problems.

it is very hard to make developers pay for software.

Have you seen the Magit kickstarter[1]?

Magit is one of Emacs' killer apps and it's known and loved by virtually all of its users, who are almost all developers..

When its maintainer opened a kickstarter to work on it for a year, it was more than fully funded by nearly 2000 backers.

So, yes, developers are willing to pay for quality software.

But, yeah, overall this is a gift economy where people take what's freely given but also give back to the community in some way.

[1] - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-th...

For every Magit, there are ten other projects that receive an unending shitstorm of criticism, and no support.

If you are one of the fortunate few who can thread that needle, congratulations, for you too can now revel in the financial security that only a moderately popular kickstarter can bring. Don’t spend it all in one place.

I personally have paid for software in the past, but I don't do it much anymore because:

A) Self-funding a startup has required me to become quite frugal

B) Giving money to competitors is almost always a mistake

Unfortunately that's the way things go. I would like to be able to afford more, but so would everyone else.

Great tools can save you an immense amount of time = money, so it should not be as black & white, even with startups in their early days.

I have also been at startups that wasted large amounts of time and capital trying to work with the wrong tools. The risk isn't worth it especially when a lot of other startups in the same ecosystem (competitors for the same VC dollars) will happily sell you an unfinished product and then shut down a year later and stop supporting it.

I have a JetBrains all products subscription and a Matlab license. I'm happy to pay because it's fantastic software worth every dollar. If JetBrains doubled their prices I'd still pay.

I do think there is a significant segment of developers who are really gung-ho about free software politics and refuse on moral grounds to pay for software ever. So that might be what you're seeing.

Or are developers more likely to pay for software, and pay more overall?

your comments is exactly what the article is about. Fault finding becomes a second nature for engineers/programmers.

Are you finding a fault in his comment? If so, are you doing it just because you are a programmer? /s

Maybe we should think of it as social debugging.

You mean like nit-picking?

> There are countless comments on Hacker News by a developer impressed with something. So this headline is wrong.

While I agree with you, I also think that technical fields promote negative assessments more than average.

An article a while back pointed out the difference with interviewing: a technical interviewer thinks about starting from some high total of points and subtracting--a management interviewer thinks about starting from some low number of points and adding.

It makes a very different experience.

And adding that people focus on negatives much more any few negative posts will be remembered later to be far more common than they actually were.

There is a pretty good subreddit for things that are done really well but, in the end, are really stupid. So there are places for this kinda stuff. A forum for just JS might actually get more out of the Python in JS project, but I come here for news on tech that I might actually use in my day to day job NOT for fun projects that have little use.

There also seems to be a lot of randomness as to what makes the front page. There are so many toy projects out there that are just as interesting and just as polished (or unpolished) as many of the toy projects that make the front page.

Personally I don't like those post, and thus I might seem overly critical. The more they show up here the less I actually spend on the site since it doesn't have the stuff I am looking for.

Yes, but the most upvoted comments are always the negative ones.

HN should start classifying comments with a negative/positive score. Then find out which users tend to upvote the negative scores or the positive scores. Start with just gathering this data. After that, it might be interesting to start changing the view order a bit.

Note I'm not saying to downplay ALL negative comments, I'm suggesting to downplay negative comments by the users that always write and upvote negative comments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com