Yes, we need to treat our open source devs better. HN is not innocent.

It feels like some people treat open source developers like government employees. Both provide a seemingly "free" service, and when you're not paying it's easy to ask for more and get upset about trivial things. (Of course neither group deserves this kind of thing.)

This is actually a very interesting comparison.

I'd argue that open source maintainers provide a free service. Government employees do not.

Don't forget, google gains quite a lot from giving away software like this, and some of their gain (in the form of control) may well be a cost to others - and it's not a zero sum game, so it's anyones guess whether it's a net positive or negative (even though that seems unlikely).

Similarly, you talk of the paying taxes as if this were some net-negative cost. There too this isn't a zero sum game - just because you distribute the costs but don't account for the benefits doesn't mean it's not net beneficial to you. The government is even larger than google (and indeed intertwined the the semi-fiction of currency), so "paying them" doesn't really mean the costs are much more direct than they are with granting google influence of the JS ecosystem.

Even if through voting you could choose the cease to "pay" for the government employees, the consequences might well be far-reaching and impact the currency system (hence "pay" in quotes), so from one point of view you can't with any reliability choose not to pay, rather, you can choose not to account for costs accrued by a large civilization. But it's highly questionable whether you can actually avoid those costs and remain a large civilization.

Not everyone who uses government services directly pays for them either (they might not have income or it might be less than the required minimum for federal/national tax, for example).

One hears about this seemingly regularly. It needs to stop.

[0] Nazi, murder, rape

You can even make a negative, frankly slightly whiny post calling hacker news a trash fire and STILL have a productive discussion here.

The human race is just chock full of assholes and if you make yourself visible by raising your head above the herd you will inevitably become the target for some of them. Each community of course should do what it can to promote a positive asshole free discussion but its still a semi free internet and assholes have email/irc/twitter accounts.

Beyond keeping it positive yourself which the author hasn't done you just have to deal with it and move on. If someone calls you terrible and you look in the mirror and know its not true then shrug it off and move on.

Perhaps the people that read HN and then email other people are not innocent, but there's a huge gap between the number of people who comment on HN and the number of people who just read HN.

I think HN comment posters are generally innocent. I would guess that the storm came from elsewhere, or from particularly unscrupulous people who happen to read HN. Stuff like the mentioned subject ends up bringing out the paranoid people, which often causes some seriously unhinged commentary.

HN mods responded, the comment was flagged and killed and downvoted to hell.

Also, the way it was written may not have been the way he intended to come across. Read dang's comment, as well as his downthread comment.

All things considered, HN is definitely not a bad place.

While I am very critical of many aspects of HN, I have had some excellent discussion here. I just wish it were more consistently good.

As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology.

If a lot of people are so negative about it, is it worth even considering whether they might be correct? Is it not ideological to refuse to do so?

It's not surprising that many find it offensive when people don't bother to differentiate between newbie programmers who have just learned the basics of jQuery and experienced front-end developers capable of building complex, well-architected applications.

I didn't write that, nor do I believe. JavaScript is a programming language — albeit a truly awful one — and thus people who get work done in it are by definition really programmers. And some of them have done some really quite amazing things with it.

That doesn't change the fact that the success of JavaScript is an embarrassment for our profession.

Sometimes everyone is negative about something which really isn't all that bad. Negativity about JavaScript isn't one of those times.

Although it may have helped if you would have made it clear you didn't agree with the paragraph prior to the one you quoted.

Regarding Javascript itself, yeah it has some warts. But modern Javascript (ES6) is actually not too bad. IMO, it really isn't that much worse than Python or Ruby (which I've used a good amount).

Also, it doesn't matter how many people think its awful. What matters are the facts they present.

edit: also, "ideological" is unfair. We know JS isn't godlike. We use it regardless.

I recently had someone here say I should be given "a prison sentence of several decades" for working on Rust. And no, they were not joking.

To be fair, the comment in question got flagged off the site, but the point remains that it very much does happen here.

Despite? I've only been on the internet for 15 years, but I thought elitism was the only way to increase s/n ratio.

I've seen elitism enforced through selecting _who_ can talk or _how_ the people talk to eachother. But I've never seen anything but "GOML" change interaction for the better. Even this "Dear Javascript" can be seen as a flavor of GOML.

It seems like there are some people trying to drive it downhill in a hurry - I know it's fashionable for anyone who's been on HN for any time at all to say it's going downhill, but turn on showdead for a while and see if you don't start to feel the same.

The problem with negativity is that it takes much less effort to be negative than to be positive. And it's much more contagious.

Because we have such a wider audience on the Web, it's really hard to develop an experience that fits everyone's expectations. And everyone definitely has their own expectations, with almost no consideration that theirs isn't necessarily the majority position. I've had people on Internet Explorer for Windows Phone bitch me out for not supporting their platform. Unfortunately, their noise can cause an out-sized effect on other people's opinion on other platforms, so you can't easily say that it's not cost effective to support niche platforms. On the other hand, something like an iOS app has such a smaller market, such a smaller set of potential use cases, with much higher activation energy, that in comparison it's a cake walk.

The hard thing is that, if you're just starting out, you don't know what you don't know. I think it's possible to release a JS project that gets received well. But there are just so many things you have to take into consideration before releasing a project. I had started to write a list of considerations, but I quickly realized it was getting unwieldy fast and I don't want to be here all day. I think it all comes down to "make the technology transparent". People shouldn't know what you used to build your project unless they go to your Github repo and see it immediately in your README. And I mean that in both the sense that there should be negative consequences to your technology choices that bleed through to the user, as well as you should make no mention of it in your marketing materials. Because marketing material should be 100% focused on selling, and the technology used to build a thing is so very rarely ever a good selling point. At best, it's a distraction. At worst, you'll alienate people for no good reason.

Put another way, it's hard enough to get people to show up, don't hand them excuses to leave. We get told to "release early, release often" a lot. And I believe in that concept very wholeheartedly. But it's in regards to features, not to defects. Work your TODO list until there are no known defects.

HN is definitely a lot better than Reddit, though. Reddit is random, as far as I can tell. Whomever is the first poster gets to set the tone for the thread, and then it's just piling on after that, usually devolving into inside-jokes repeating sound-bites (which are expressly forbidden here and/or will get you down-voted to hell)

Besides that as an active OSS contributor I fully understand and support the author's points.