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I’ve been a part of this community for fifteen years. Despite the yearly bemoaning of HN’s quality compared to its mythical past, I’ve found that it’s the one community that has remained steadfast as a source of knowledge, cattiness, and good discussion.
Thank you @dang and @tomhow.
Here's to another year.
The grit, curiosity, and people building things have always been inspiring.
Thanks for all the discussions over the years.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Is SCRUM really as great as its evangelists claim? Let's read HN comments.
What are good use cases for UML? Let's check out HN.
Does anyone actually care about CoCoMo or CMMI? Let's read ... oh - nearly nobody's talking about it there. Maybe it won't be that relevant to the students.
Are there good cases for UML outside the raison d'être of middle managers circa 2007?
- In a nutshell: everyone should know about UML and how some relevant diagram types look. Nobody should use it religiously.
- Diagrams are great tools for communicating ideas and implementations on an abstract level, and for interactively thinking about ideas that can be drawn in some way. A diagram can also visually highlight problem areas (e.g., components with many dependencies).
- Good use cases for diagrams in SE are e.g., explaining high-level architecture to someone, thinking about and refining database schemas, documenting interaction flows, or giving an overview of class structure in automatically generated code documentation
- It is nice to have visual consistency - it makes parsing a diagram so much faster and less error-prone. UML provides sensible guidelines or inspiration on how to draw e.g., a sequence diagram or a class diagram. There is no need to re-invent the wheel.
- In most cases, knowing about the diagram types and their approximate design is enough. As probably very few people know what the different styles of arrows or boxes might mean, it is a good idea to annotate important elements with their meaning.
- For thinking/communication, drawing diagrams by hand is the best way. Excalidraw/tldraw are nice for stuff that should go into static documents.
- Documenting the state of a system with manually generated diagrams is tedious and requires constant updates. A better way is to auto-generate e.g., class diagrams using PlantUML or Mermaid.
- Nobody uses UML for designing complex systems and then auto-generating code.
We use UMLs and flow charts in miro to diagram things from both a high level (for product to understand) to intricate details.
It works great!
(but seriously, I'm interested it's just everything I've seen before had the strong scent of "we're doing this nonsense because we believe we're supposed to but don't understand why")
It's not useful for more than very abstract concepts though. If you're UMLing your entire Java app before you add another class/method/function, you're doing it wrong.
As a method of communication between projects, it works wonderfully
The more formalism it has and the more it was insisted on was always a strong signal that was was happening was a middle management cargo cult and not actually useful work.
I believe that there exist organizations that derived value from this sort of thing, I just haven't seen them.
In the old days of reddit, when it was almost lost as a community, that was called the Knights of New. A selfless system sadly ignored/killed by reddit admins and mods.
This post is a good start!
cheers to all you glorious bastards. i disagree with you on most things and quibble over pettiest crap, but know it is all in good fun. we are prolly in the weirdest point in computer history and get to see it make it through ( or not.. either is fine ). its a secret, but those annual affirtation are one of my favorite traditions.
here is to all the fun convos yet to come.
Be sure to give your parents (and other seniors in your life) a phishing and subscriptions checkup this weekend!
https://edisoncode.com/articles/holiday-phone-safety-guide-f...
I don’t remember kids being out of school for so long around Thanksgiving when I was younger. All I can hope for is eight hours of sleep after a full week of childcare. I guess I’m most thankful for teachers and schools being open.
Not sure what I would tell my young self back in the 90s first. Self driving cars, LLMs that can fix bugs I've been trying to fix for 12 years. Maybe I would start with "Linux distros where you don't have to manually compile 15 random dependencies to run a single piece of software".
Here's to another 6+ years!
> Joined 17 years ago
Also: National Day of Mourning for some Native Americans
https://muwekma.org/blog/2023/september/what-does-thanksgivi...
I hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving; here's to the next 18 years! :)
The mythical utopian HN past never existed.
To me, it's such a unique place with so many intelligent minds and great conversations. I wish I'd have found this place years ago.
That being said HN was and continues to be one of the most valuable resources for geeks on the net.
Anyway, I find HN to be a wonderful refuge from a lot of the absurdity that's "out there" and I will happily throw in my own "Thanks, guys!" to dang and tomhow. And to pg for starting this whole thing back in the day.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and here's to more years to come!
Relatable by the way. Though, not 17 years, haha, "just" 10 :')
No where but here.
Thanks to the moderators, commenters and the whole community for building and maintaining this space of the internet and adding some value to my day!
Initially, I would only click on the links and jump off HN but over the last few years I have been more interested in the comments and the discussion.
Thank you everyone one for such a great community!
I've been here 13 years and almost 3 months, meaning I'm averaging ~44 karma a month, and it's one of the few gotos I don't consider harmful.
I think most of us here would see the damage that's happened to so many communities - all of them with their eternal Septembers - and I thought the last one that would hold out because I could curate what I saw would be reddit, but no, that's gone the way of so many before it for me.
HN is an experiment in a niche community with its own broad definition of "whatever is interesting", its own values and its own quirks. It's large enough to be vibrant and diverse, but small enough to have an uncodified but recognisable culture.
If there's one change I'm going to make in the next year though, it's relating to myself. I want most of my karma next year to come from my own Show HN posts: I want to build things and share those things, not just jump in on comment threads. Let's see how that goes.
Happy holidays to all, and may the Winter to be kind to you and yours.
For non-Americans: Thanksgiving is a big national holiday in the US; celebrated on the last Thursday of November.
Its origin story is that a bunch of recent immigrants were having a rough time of it, and were helped by aboriginal Americans.
What happened after ... well, that's another story.
It's a big "family" holiday. Americans travel all over, to gather with their families at the Gorging Table.
> "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
- Mark Twain
I've lurked even longer than I've been a user... Probably about 15 years. It's been fun to watch several generations of kindred spirits join the party. For the most part, I think they assimilate, so the spirit of HN remains strong while new perspectives are added to the mix. It's still one of the best communities around.
Thanks to the mods and all of you!
Through tech cycles, heated debates, and some inevitable fads, the limitless curiosity of this community remains inspiring. Thank you mods and YC for staying true to the original hacker ethos.
And special thanks to all those that have the fire of truth and curiosity that keep alive this great community!
Thank you.
I haven't been participating as much lately because life got in the way but I'm still thankful this community exists, it remains one of the very few places I can have high level discussions with fellow inquiring minds.
Wow, 13 years already :)
Hope everyone's year finishes better than it started.
Thanks all, and have a great day.
Truly grateful to everyone in this community.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Mostly a lurker. Been here over 10 years, but created my HN account 9 years ago. HN has been an invaluable source for me over they years.
Here's to 17 more! <3
10 years past, and now working as a software engineer, at least I understand a bit more.
HN has been a wonderful source of both news and community - it connected me to my industry in ways that could only have been achieved otherwise by moving to SF or NYC.
In a way, it feels like a great continuation of my Slashdot years.
Thank you all. Without you, life would've been much simpler, but not better!
Cheers!
Happy Thanksgiving
I discovered the world around Ruby on Rails, then the modern JavaScript ecosystem (and CoffeeScript followed later by TypeScript), burned out, focused on Ruby, added Rust to my toolbox, wrote a small hobby operating system that had to have its own Lisp dialect of course. I was inspired to create so many side projects over the years, most of them open source, thanks to the influence of this community.
I also tried my hands at starting a startup obviously, multiple times, but I'm a solo dev and didn't succeed at finding a profitable niche for myself, instead I applied my knowledge to better understand the business and product sides of the startups I've been working for which made me a better engineer for sure.
This community almost made me move to the Silicon Valley, but instead I traveled the world as a digital nomad when everyone was doing it, and came back home to settle down in a forest close to my roots.
Reading you all daily I can imagine what could have been my life at the heart of the tech world, and at the same time I'm happy to read its pulse from afar.
I hope HN will still be here in 15 more years, thanks everyone!
Couldn't get green beans, so had to pivot and made Green Pea Casserole.
I'd say HN had a big part in shaping and honing my critical thinking.
Thank you for your open mindedness, smarts, stupid fun and lovable nerdiness.
I feel at home here.
One thing that makes me sad are dystopian fears. Not sure if this is warranted or not, but certainly get my dose of dread from HN. But thank you for being so sensitive and caring in this.
Happy thanksgiving.
Thank you all. Thank you for laughing at my jokes.
Happy Thanksgiving
Thanks for being around everyone.
I used to tell my father about communities that build them around a particular coffee shop with tables that have different kind of conversations ..
YC conversations are the best ( least fluff, more stuff) There is no garden without a gardener.
Thank you @dang and @tomhow .. ( before this post I had no clue who you were so thanks to @prodigycorp as well )
thanks all and happy thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Thanks HN! You make me smarter every (other) day.
Been here 17 years. Crazy to think about how much has happened since then.
I still get value. But there's too much noise I think. I also think I'm older now and I'm more adverse to "done it, seen it"
The odd "made an app to do basic thing xyz" doesn't get my attention anymore.
Also, posts related to science get a hard scrutiny. Most posts are just cross references to poorly moderated subreddits. That, or they're just posts directly from archx with no external paper references. I'm not a scientist, but I know enough to know when to ignore bullshit.
Most posts to HN are still mostly bullshit. But I know enough to occasionally see something interesting. That's may be 4 times a year at this point.
...
I also want to add more context. I've been in the Anathem ideology for about 20 years now. It has shaped my world view. Call me fra geuis.
If you want to present what you think are new ideas, be prepared to back them up. When we get the Loreites up and running, I'll refer you to them.
Use this day to eat good food, converse with relatives, and rest from the usual madness. Peace on Earth.
It’s funny what passes as humor in europe is crass for others.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sOsqXKr4l30
I’ve been more of a lurker than a poster over the years, but this place has shaped how I think about tech, work, and the future more than any other corner of the internet.
Huge thanks to @dang, @tomhow, YC, and everyone who shows up here with curiosity and good faith. The signal-to-noise ratio here is still unmatched.
Here’s to many more years of weird, smart, opinionated conversations.
And it's always been HN moderation policy that we intervene less on negative stories about YC or YC-backed companies than other stories: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Even if we didn't have that policy, “suppressing” a story on HN doesn't keep it out of the news, so it would be futile to do that.
We detached this comment from https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=46066132 and marked it off topic, because it's never ok to be a jerk about deceased people.
https://nmcsw.org/indigenous-resilience-thanksgiving-story/
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=ubiome
YC-backed uBiome is basically Theranos-lite - https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=30899352 - April 2022 (173 comments)
SF poop-testing startup, once compared to Theranos, charged in $60M fraud scheme - https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=26531087 - March 2021 (380 comments)
UBiome Offices Searched by FBI - https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=19760449 - April 2019 (56 comments)
Many more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The interesting thing is why this (false) accusation appears now, years later. I don't recall people saying it at the time, which makes sense because it was obviously untrue.
Also, how is criticizing Aaron Swartz off topic? The other commenter brought it up. No one made him commit suicide but HN has a boner for this guy like he's a victim.
HN itself clearly hasn't shied away from critical coverage of that venture.
Your other argument shows a distinct lack of empathy and a certain disregard for facts of the matter.
So I wouldn't gloss over the specific law(s) he broke, so much as I would outright celebrate that he did so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_Open_Access_Manifesto
> Through good times and rough ones, including the loss of Aaron Swartz (who I only knew of through HN), this has stayed a place for real conversation.
And the rest was just upbeat talk in general.
Unless the parent comment was edited, I don't understand why you responded:
> What Aaron Swartz did to himself was tragic, but he did decide to break the law. Something that is glossed over here.
By "here", I assume you mean "HN in general", but your comment comes off as loaded (e.g., "did to himself" sounds like a conscious attempt at asserting a framing), and the timing seems poor (i.e., that particular innocuous comment, on this particular day).
Aaron Swartz deserved, at worst, a slap on the wrist, not the kind of severe harassment in the name of the law which he got.
Today we do that, and eat turkey.
There's more to Thanksgiving than only the US.
[1] https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/how-netherl...
It's still a very common narrative that's historically been an integral part of the myth around this holiday. And it's simply a fact that the Wampanoag and other tribes of the Eastern U.S. even to this day dedicate what we call Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Day_of_Mourning_(Unit... A similar memorial gathering is held on Alcatraz Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unthanksgiving_Day
Nobody has anything to be proud of.
Nothing resembling that was widespread in precolumbian North America. The earliest similar systems I'm aware of took root in the 17th and 18th centuries, well into the early colonial period.
The continent what a slaughter show for thousands of years.
The slaves of early 17th century Iroquois were not dehumanized property like colonial era natives and Africans. This is what I meant by pointing out that the term "slavery" encompasses a vast number of radically different types of unfree servitude.
The Apache example is both not similar to Atlantic slavery, and mainly from the 18th century period where I specifically said such systems existed among North American natives.
If you're trying to make a point about the racial hierarchy within the Aztecs, the term Mexica is much more precise. If you're just referring to the slave social class within the empire itself, I can't imagine why you think it's remotely similar to colonial slavery. Aztec slaves weren't property in the sense of colonial era slavery. They had to consent to sale, only their labor was actually sellable, and it wasn't hereditary, among other differences.