Comment by dang
3 days ago
It is quite a putdown to tell someone else that if you wrote their program it would be 10 times shorter.
That's not in keeping with either the spirit of this site or its rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Fair: it was rude. Moderation is hard and I respect what you do. But it's also a sentiment several other comments expressed. It's the conversation we're having. Can we have any discussions of code quality without making assumptions about each others' code quality? I mean, yeah, I could probably have done better.
> "That would probably be 1000 line of Common Lisp." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974495
> "Perhaps the issue is you were used to writing 200k lines of code. Most engineers would be agast at that." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976328
Oh for sure you can talk about this, it's just a question of how you do it. I'd say the key thing is to actively guard against coming across as personal. To do that is not so easy, because most of us underestimate the provocation in our own comments and overestimate the provocation in others (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This bias is like carbon monoxide - you can't really tell it's affecting you (I don't mean you personally, of course—I mean all of us), so it needs to be consciously compensated for.
As for those other comments - I take your point! I by no means meant to pick on you specifically; I just didn't see those. It's pretty random what we do and don't see.