Comment by CorrectingYou

8 months ago

OP comes around with some of the coolest things posted in HN recently, and all he gets is extensive criticism, when it is clear that this is an early version :/

I think HN is a community where people want to post something novel or new. When someone wants to post a kudos, most likely they'll upvote someone else instead of posting yet another "awesome job" (even if it is certainly warranted). Criticism instead can be endlessly diverse since there's usually only limited number ways to get it right, but plenty to get wrong.

In the end, HN comments fall prey to this truth and you see a handful of positive comments, with the majority being criticisms or "I wish this did X". No one person is to blame. Its just the culture of technologists today.

I would be pretty appreciated if people criticize my project. That is how you grow. If people tend hide cruel truth behind applause, the world would just crumbled.

  • My observation is that most criticism is useless, because people don't understand why you did things the way you did them.

    If you explain why, they either still don't understand, or don't agree.

    If the first iPhone had been presented on HN/Reddit/Twitter, everyone would criticize the lack of physical keyboard.

    • OP is claiming amazing results, people are poking obvious holes that good single core implementations completely rip the scalability claims to shreds. Near linear scalability is not impressive if—even at the highest throughput—the computation pales by comparison to Rust on a single core.

      I do not see how the comparison to the iPhone here stands.

  • What you appreciate has little to do with whether we should assume others are thick-skinned. If someone has always been knocked down they will struggle to positively accept criticism regardless of how well meant it might be.

  • I really think I take criticism well... The problem is that people were criticizing us for not doing things that were literally done on the second paragraph. So at this point it didn't feel like productive criticism? That's like being criticized for being naked when you're full clothed. How do you even make sense of that...

    • People are more childish than they like to believe. It's a mix of jealousy and ignorant skepticism. What you're doing is incredibly interesting I look forward to seeing it develop!

      1 reply →

    • You are doing superb. Just remind your self there are people that think Elon is incompetent despite TESLA and SpaceX.

It has 905 upvotes, it has received a fair share of positivity as well. Even criticism is often positive, since it expresses interest and engagement with the ideas and approach.

Not criticizing new projects is a good social norm, because starting new and ambitious projects is good and should not be discouraged. However, criticizing projects that make misleading, unsubstantiated or false claims is also a good social norm, because it discourages people from making misleading, unsubstantiated or false claims.

The coolest things are often the most difficult to understand.

Difficult to understand is often threatening.

Criticism is a popular response to threat and is the form of reply that requires the least understanding.

Correction for you - This is patently false, OP has had three hits -- this one, and two one hundred pointers out of 100-200 submissions.

P.s. it seems rather likely the op is Victor Taelin, they mostly submit his tweets and gists.

Who are you rooting for, exactly, newcomer?

P.p.s. Victor Taelin just happens to be the most recent committer on this submission, imagine that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35363400

  • We're a bit off-topic, but there's no requirement that your account be associated with your identity, especially when the op is pretty clearly involved with the project (as opposed to if they were claiming not to be or something).

  • I have no idea what you're trying to convey, but I'm Victor Taelin. Also very cool comment on that thread, hypothesizing on whether we'd be able to ever run it on GPUs. We did it! That is what we're announcing today.