Comment by davesims | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davesims | Hacker News Reader

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I care deeply about _why and his contributions as well, and I still cringe thinking about how I felt the moment I realized he and his work and his wit were gone from the community forever. The Poignant Guide was my intro to Ruby and still sets the whimsical, slightly surreal tone in the back of my mind for how I think about coding to this day.

But, raganwald, upon reading and re-reading it, I didn't take one bit of "praise" from your comment. Perhaps you didn't mean to set the tone as strongly as you did, but my impression right of the bat with "Let's see now" and onward was that you were being harshly critical.

I'm sorry to see yours as the top comment, because Annie did an extraordinary amount of work and I think you've completely distracted from the essence of the article.

Not only that, I really think you've confused "stalking" with "research." Trying to reach someone for a comment about an article on them hardly qualifies as the former. This was simple journalistic persistence, entirely appropriate, and clearly she backed off "hunting a man down." Many if not most other journalists would have gone further to get the quote or create more drama, and Annie apparently got deep enough into the ethic and general tone of the Ruby community to know when enough was enough.

It was an excellent article, very sympathetic to the Ruby community, well-informed and enlightening, and I'm sorry to see that your comments here have caused others "not to read" it.

Annie Lowery did a lot of hard work -- she learned to program as part of the research for crying out loud! She deserves better recognition than this.

my impression right of the bat with "Let's see now" and onward was that you were being harshly critical.

I was being harshly critical of calling the man at work and naming him. I also wrote:

The article spends pages talking about _why and the author’s relationship with _why’s work. Great. It spends a page talking about _why’s desire for anonymity and reclusive nature. Good. It talks about _why’s “infosuicide” and notes that it happened shortly after he was “outed.” Fine.

I mentioned the things I liked and said so. What you don’t seem to like is the lack of “balance,” as if given that I spent a few paragraphs talking about the stuff I didn’t like, I should spend ten or twenty paragraphs about the stuff I liked. But my feelings about the things that I liked were just that I liked them. You have stronger feelings about the things that you liked, so you write your comment in accordance with your feelings.

I am not writing a book review for the NYT, and neither are you, that’s the beauty of the forum. I am obliged to be polite, to avoid name calling and other poisonous behaviour, but I am also obliged to—as the saying goes—sit down at the keyboard and open a vein.

Sure, not a book review for NYT, but it is the top comment on HN, which has the unfortunate consequence of being the first impression a lot of people had of an article that had a lot of hard, thoughtful work put into it.

It also caused some to actually not read the article, and that's what drew me out. Annie's work here deserved a better first impression from the HN community, and I think anyone who has an interest in _why would benefit from reading it. The anonymity thing was a sidebar at best.

I feel for you. I have felt the same way. Not so long ago, someone resubmitted an old essay of mine about coffee machines and open source.

In that essay, I called myself a small-s socialist.

What do you suppose was the top comment on the HN discussion? A long diatribe about someone’s pet subject, Libertarianism, which generated more than half of the ensuing comments.

It seems that on Hacker News, one man’s signal is another man’s noise.

Well said, thanks raganwald!

Being a writer myself, I'm sensitive (probably overly) to the amount of work that goes into a piece like that. The fact that Annie made herself learn Ruby and get deep enough into the specifics of Matz, _why, dhh and the whole Ruby mythology I think needs to be encouraged. Not a lot of writers take that amount of care and time to understand their subject the way she did. It was good journalism.

Getting off-topic (although, I think we're already there)- I have been finding HN discussions harder to navigate lately. I still miss seeing the post voting scores.

I don't remember if how the comment thread display has changed, but it's getting ridiculous. People respond to the top comment because anything lower will be ignored. This top "thread" is taking up 80% of page.

I understand that this isn't supposed to be Reddit and I'm supposed to work a little harder to digest the information, but I find it very unlikely that people are going to read this entire comment page and find the signal in the noise.

I came to HN after reading the article and I'm not finding the discussion I was hoping for.

EDIT: Maybe what HN needs is an enhancement suite like RES.

It would help me tremendously if HN offered the option to "fold" comments and children of those comments like on Reddit. I do this often to get past the meme threads and onto the real meat and potatoes. But, I think that may be outside the scope of HN's style or design of the interface.

javascript:(function()%7Bvar s=document.createElement('script');s.type='text/javascript';s.src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.1/jquery.min...;

Save it as a bookmark and run it on each page.

I'd like to use this, but it has been corrupted by URL shortening. Viewing the source doesn't fix it.

Can you re-enter this as code (indent 4 spaces).

I use a Greasemonkey script which does exactly that, and quite well - I searched for the title of the script to grab a link to it, but it looks like there may be a few different options to choose from: https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sour...

> mentioned the things I liked and said so

Great. Fine.

// See, when used as one word responses, they do not indicate actual appreciation, they are dismissive.

_why is no longer a public figure. Publishing where he works and lives is not journalism, it's public gloating over her primitive stalking skills.

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