"Terraform, Schemaless, Riak, Cassandra, Hadoop, Redis, Twemproxy, Celery, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Docker, Mesos, Aurora, HAProxy, Hyperbahn, Ringpop, TChannel, Nginx, Thrift, Protobuf, Phabricator, OpenGrok, Packer, Vagrant, Boto, Unison, Jenkins, Clusto, Puppet, Grafana, Storm, Spark, React, SVG, Canvas 2D, Gufaru, DropWizard"
How are you going to discuss all that in a substantive manner? All anyone can do in the limited time frame of a HN discussion is draw parallels to previous job experiences or previous user experiences.
My own experiences are more aligned with the sentiment expressed in the "dismissal" comment.
There are a zillion ways to make the same kind of argument thoughtfully. Talking about one's own concrete experiences helps. So does not acting like you know everything about somebody else's situation.
Bloat is a problem, and so (in my view) is the kitchen-sink software culture of hauling in libraries and frameworks without thought for overall complexity. But we need to be able to talk about this at a higher level than other-people-are-idiots-compared-to-me. A much higher level.
The dismissal comes from years of reading such articles and then chipping away at the veneer to see what's really underneath and being disappointed every time and then working on such things and experiencing first hand how the bloat comes about.
I get irritated at having to repeat the same things over and over, too, but the internet is basically stateless and so (sadly) is the software business. And like everyone, I get peevish when people say/do wrong things and act like they know what they don't. The longer one has been around, the more occasions one has to secrete bile. But it's a humor one must metabolize internally and not release into the community—hard work and not fun at first, but far more rewarding in its effects, and maybe our only chance at creating an actually functional culture.
> I guess it'd be wasted on you because you're pretty convinced you already solved these problems in the 70s, so why am i wasting my breath
With that your comment does more harm than good: it poisons the atmosphere and detracts from your substantive contribution.
You're definitely not "wasting your breath" even if you fail to persuade the other person not to be snarkily dismissive, because the real audience for a comment like yours is everybody else: i.e. the rest of us who are curious about how (in this case) Uber operates and why things might be the way they are. That audience needs to see both good information about the challenges involved (as opposed to this-has-been-trivial-since-the-70s) and a good example of how to patiently respond to a trivializing comment with a thoughtful one. It's bad if, instead, you give us a reason to wince and an example of replying to a dismissive comment with a rude one.