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Comment by natpalmer1776 | Hacker News Reader

Your comment was a very interesting read up until that last paragraph. Seems a bit harsh despite your many valid* points.

Edit: Made typo on mobile.

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Perhaps it was too harsh. I could have expressed that they are projecting the problems of their local milieu too broadly more kindly.

He's not wrong. Look further down thread, you can find people pointing out examples of domains where there is a dearth of software, and a definite need to keep writing it. All due respect to the expertise shown in articles posted on HN (it's part of the reason I keep coming back), but the Dunning-Kruger effect hits hard. As Einstein put it, "the horizon of many people is a circle with a radius of zero. They call this their point of view."

This isn't about whether @madhadron's point in that paragraph was wrong, it's about civility. The usage of "ghetto" was gratuitous.

I'm really sorry, but have you looked at all the pictures in the author's story? I came up with the same association and took madhadron's remark to be about those pictures, not the author.

If your first reflex is to be 2nd hand offended, maybe you should relax a little and try to not to see hostility everywhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, I've looked at all the pictures in the author's story. And it never occurred to me to assume those are pictures of a ghetto the author lives in, as implied by the words "the real solution to the author's angst is to go study the field more broadly and get out of whatever ghetto they are living in" (emphasis mine).

But after I read your comment, I went back to the story and did a Google image search for a few (but not all) of those pictures. And guess what? They all come from other sources.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's not like I was looking for hostility. I was reading the comment and nodding along and then the hostility came out of nowhere and smacked me in the face.

Obviously OP was speaking of a figurative coding ghetto, not their literal physical surroundings.

"Code ghetto" is actually a term I've heard bandied about before, usually used to denigrate an ecosystem someone doesn't like, but in this case I think it's wholly appropriate terminology[0], and I don't think the offense taken at it is justified.

[0] This comes up top of Google for me: https://www.laurencegellert.com/2012/12/software-ghettos-a-f...

I feel that "code ghetto" conveys the myopic POV of the article perfectly.

God stop it with the Dunning–Kruger bollocks already. In my experience, people who refer to it are themselves rather shallow in their analysis of _any_ phenomenon at hand. It seems the thought form here is that anything even remotely falling out of your (very broad, apparently, huh) horizon is bound to be ridiculed and discarded by you as unintelligent nonsense. You're reading a poem, man. It's very clear from the reading that the author does not imply we have to stop writing _all_ software completely, might as well go back to the woods, etc. The poem deals with a very particular brand of software, or rather, software development in its own right; and it dissects the subject beautifully. Don't ever attribute anything you simply don't understand to stupidity. Now having read your comment I must say it's you who comes off as obnoxious, especially with them Kruger and Einstein references.

Watch it.

I'll stop using Dunning-Kruger when it becomes irrelevant. And no, I don't consider myself any less prone to it than other people, that's when I've found it most useful. And Dunning-Kruger is not "attributing stupidity" (talk about a shallow take), it's actually most insidious among those who are experts in one field, hence they've spent so much time there they have zero experience in other specialized domains (again, something I've recognized as one of my biggest weaknesses; thanks Dunning-Kruger!)

In my experience, people who get offended by Dunning-Kruger don't even realize they are prime examples of it.

I assumed it was just a tongue-in-cheek joke because of all the pictures with trash in them.

[0] This comes up top of Google for me: https://www.laurencegellert.com/2012/12/software-ghettos-a-f... and I feel that it conveys the meaning, even if you disagree with the particular ecosystems being denigrated.

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