"I can't help myself" is not a valid excuse. If you seriously cannot bother to phrase things less dismissively, then you shouldn't comment in the first place.
One of the best guidelines established for HN, is that you should always be kind. It's corny and obvious, and brings to mind the over-said platitude my mom, and a million other moms, used to say: "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
Your concession was admirable, but your explanation leads me to think that you misunderstand the role you play in the comments. You are not supposed to be a reaction bot; HN is not the journal for your unfiltered thoughts and opinions.
Despite how easy it would be, you cannot and must not simply write replies. Absolutely everything (yes, everything) written here should assume the best, and be in good faith. Authors and the community deserve that much.
This goes for other sites as well, but especially for a community that strives for intellectual growth, like Hacker News.
I don't agree that I have any responsibilities on the internet. (edit: Outside of ones I come up with.)
> One of the best guidelines established for HN, is that you should always be kind.
Kindness is subjective, I was not trying to be actively unkind. It's just that the more you attempt to appear kind across every possible metric the more difficult and time consuming it is to write something. I had already put in a lot of effort to read the article, analyse the code within it, and analyse the code behind it. You have to stop at some point, and inevitably someone out there will still find what you wrote to be unkind. I just decided to stop earlier than I would if I was writing a blog post.
> "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
This is not a useful adage to live by. If you pay someone to fix your plumbing and they make it worse, certainly this won't help you. Likewise, If people post bad advice on a website lots of people frequent and nobody challenges it, lots of people without the experience necessary to know better will read it and be influenced by it.
> You are not supposed to be a reaction bot; HN is not the journal for your unfiltered thoughts and opinions.
I think it's unkind to call what I wrote an unfiltered thought/opinion/reaction. You should respect that it:
* Takes a lot of time and experience before you can make these kinds of remarks
* Takes effort to read the post, evaluate what is written in it, write a response, and verify you are being fair and accurate.
* Takes even more effort to then read the entire script, and perform a code review.
If I had looked at the title and headlines and written "This is shit, please don't read it." then I think you would have a point but I didn't do that.
More to the point, a substantial number of people seem to have felt this was useful information and upvoted both the comments.
> Despite how easy it would be, you cannot and must not simply write replies. Absolutely everything (yes, everything) written here should assume the best, and be in good faith. Authors and the community deserve that much.
I prefaced my first comment by pointing out that the people who make the mistakes I outlined are usually well meaning. My critique was concise and could be seen as cold but it was not written in bad faith.
"I can't help myself" is not a valid excuse. If you seriously cannot bother to phrase things less dismissively, then you shouldn't comment in the first place.
One of the best guidelines established for HN, is that you should always be kind. It's corny and obvious, and brings to mind the over-said platitude my mom, and a million other moms, used to say: "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
Your concession was admirable, but your explanation leads me to think that you misunderstand the role you play in the comments. You are not supposed to be a reaction bot; HN is not the journal for your unfiltered thoughts and opinions.
Despite how easy it would be, you cannot and must not simply write replies. Absolutely everything (yes, everything) written here should assume the best, and be in good faith. Authors and the community deserve that much.
This goes for other sites as well, but especially for a community that strives for intellectual growth, like Hacker News.
Apologies if I sounded harsh.