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Comment by victork2 | Hacker News Reader

That's quite a bold statement. "hate", really?

I personally don't like their posts on HN, I don't even bother reading them anymore. The first few I read where totally devoid of any kind of useful information for me and for most people that are a little bit technical. For the non-technical posts they are merely interesting like "Look at our desks", I found them to be the equivalent of feminine magazine articles for geeks.

However this is only my opinion, and this is not a popular opinion. If you criticize them, invariably you are going to get downvoted. And if there's hate here, how come there's systematically sitting on the top 5 position every time one of their article shows up?

I have found that the criticisms found here are very polite and constructive. This show nothing but good things about HN if people can civilly disagree on a subject.

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There's disagree-ing, and then there's talking in circles. As you point out - if they're being voted up, then surely they have a place. I'm just tired of seeing the "is this relevant" discussion on every single one. I find it no different than having someone go "by a Windows PC" on every Apple post, and vice versa.

I agree hate is a strong word, and I used it only a short-hand description of what I meant. I'm not overly sure which other words would be more accurate.

I get you. But here's the catch, and that's also valid for HN: Is crowd validation always the best measurement of the quality of an article? I agree there are a lot of running in circle conversations on HN. Like "Apache is slow, use Node.js", or its contrary "Node.js is bad, use {insert something else}". On HN there's a great deal of know-it-all attitude and most of the posts could be summarized by "Your choices of X is stupid, I chose Y and it's better, therefore, ' Why X is bad and you should use Y' blog posts ".

Anyway, 37signals could be the Kim Kardashian of Software Engineering, very popular and very successful, lots of people following the Gossip. Popularity does not imply quality, that's why civil disagree-ing is useful, we need safe guardians of the quality, even if they seem obnoxious when they criticize what we like.

PS: 37signals is NOT, in my opinion, the Kim Kardashian of Software Engineering.

The only people who know whether they are mere celebrities are those who have seen their code.

I think the "Look at our desks" post is more than interesting. It is very useful to visualize how a XXI century company looks like. In fact, I am using it next week in a seminar about business models and will compare it to the office in Billy Wilder's "The Apartment".

So maybe not technical, but definitely not "merely interesting"

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