Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

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This comment hits all of the boxes for everything that is wrong with Hacker News.

"First, false statement. Since you know false assumption, I would false conclusion. And of course, this means false conclusion. I'd like to see analysis done on what you did them on."

"Second, the arguments seem a little cherry-picked. "Quote from article about W and Z" is cute. But modern systems have a lot of Z, and Obviously You Didn't Consider This."

"Finally, we're already having serious problems getting Thing the Author Almost Always Rags on for Sucking to upgrade when a security vulnerability is found. Requiring recompilation of all transitive users who the author doesn't care about and who the author has already told are wrong is not likely to win any update speed contests for a use-case the author thinks is invalid. If it's completely automated then the perceived invalid use case would still be viable, but any rocks in the process will leave people with perceived invalid use case endlessly vulnerable. See Notoriously Bad Ecosystem That Isn't Relevant to the Article, etc."

I prefer that comment to your reply. By a lot. It attempted to apply reason. You only mocked the form the arguments took. I am firmly of the opinion that content is more important than form.

That comment did make a major mistake. Arch Linux is not a source distribution. But the mistake notwithstanding, it was otherwise well-reasoned. Your response was not.

You can mock the point that there is still a benefit in sharing a library a few times, and the article ignored the few libraries that get shared a lot. But said point remains true.

You may think that Android isn't relevant to the article's point. But the tradeoffs between static and dynamic linking are true across operating systems. The challenges that Android has had because of static linking are therefore worth paying attention to. Refusing to look for parallels to inform your intuition from is simply refusal to learn.

the article ignored the few libraries that get shared a lot

The author didn't ignore this, because it's pretty much false. Every package people insisted was relevant, he shot down before he published the article. Example:

https://cmpwn.com/@sir/104406644780241359

Hitchen's razor.

> Of the 2188 packages I have installed, 70 of them depend on OpenSSL.

This must not be counting packages which depend on openssl by a chain of dependencies, some number of which contain binaries or libraries which link libssl. On my desktop Arch system of 1448 packages, 42 depend directly on openssl and 672 depend on it directly or indirectly. (pactree -ur openssl | wc -l, then subtract one for openssl itself)

I know it's a popular Hacker News trope, but when done well I actually appreciate comments of the style "the author does a comparison and has some results, but do also keep in mind xyz that is non-obvious". I know there is a problem with people who go through articles and try to pick things that could affect the results and treat that as invalidating them, but more often than not simple comparisons like these do have more to say about them than what is presented and I don't want to discourage those.

This one in particular was done terribly, and is imitating ones in the same style. I don't dislike the act of disagreement, nor even disagreements in this vein, I dislike the act of being confident, and further condescending ("is cute"), while making so many obvious mistakes that could be corrected with even a speck of knowledge about what you're talking about.

Actually, this is a very serious topic, and TFA is wrong in a number of ways. HN commenters being able to say so is everything that's right with HN. My own commentary on TFA is all over the comments on this HN post. I put more effort and detail into my comments on this post than GP, but GP is not wrong.

Commenting that a comment is exemplary of all that's wrong with HN is... popular, I'll grant you that, but it grates, and it's not really right. It's a "shut up" argument. Just downvote what you don't like, upvote what you do like, and reply with detailed commentary where you have something important to say. No need to disparage commenters.

HN commenters being able to say so is everything that's right with HN.

This would be correct, if the objection were right. But the commentator was objectively incorrect, in a way that could have been avoided with something as small as a web search, and the comment had the audacity to do so in a condescending way. I didn't knock anyone who had a genuine objection to the post, I replied to an incredibly low-effort and low-quality comment pointing out that it was low-effort and low-quality.

Commenting that a comment is exemplary of all that's wrong with HN is... popular, I'll grant you that, but it grates, and it's not really right.

This is the first one I've ever made, and I post pretty frequently. I don't think it's wrong whatsoever, and I'm standing by it.

It's a "shut up" argument.

It absolutely is a "shut up" argument. Comments should not be written when they can't get the simplest of facts straight, and authors of them should think before they post.

No need to disparage commenters.

I didn't, I disparaged their comment. I don't think doing so was wrong, either, because the comment was practically equivalent to replying to a well-considered post with a PNG of a meme.

I saw nothing wrong with u/dwheeler's comment. I've addressed issues with static linking in more detail up and down this thread, so perhaps you won't tell me to "shut up", but really, it seems all you've got is "shut up". Maybe I could say something clever about comments like yours being representative of all that's wrong with HN, except I don't believe that -- no, I'm glad you get to say "shut up" -unpleasant though it is-, and I'm glad u/dwheeler can express skepticism without going into as much detail as you'd like even though you'll be there telling him to "shut up".

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