Realising the HN 'mod' policy is just an arbitrary application of individual and highly parochial (US/SV) tastes leads ineluctably to total lack of interest in contributing.
- > Hence the clarification. Hopefully it's clear now
Nope. Just that you personally rule something as tangential that I claim is not. Your personal preferences aren't present in the guidelines (I've read them). If you wish them to be so, please rewrite the guidelines.
> You made the claim
I did not. I claimed that there is such a thing as textual articles, ie. an existential claim. I didn't claim that all text, or all articles, or all textual articles, share a single format. They exist, and claiming that something entirely different (a chain of social media objects) falls under the same head is false. Claiming that two different categories of things are, in fact, different, is not 'tangential', or related only to 'formatting'.
- > you can find this explanation in the mod commentary.
If the guidelines are unclear, and arbitrarily rule non-articles in as articles, then they must be rewritten to make the fiat clear.
> Our 'legacy of textual culture' contains a huge variety of formats and representations. The notion that some single one is a representative standard, let alone has lasted for millennia is not an accurate one.
Irrelevant, as no-one made that claim. Your unevidenced insistence on your personal take on a novel tech as inarguably part of a historical tradition is just quiet shouting. I disagree, but agree it's arguable. You think it's not arguable, because it's obvious to you, and you believe what's obvious to you should be enforced.
- I wouldn't let descriptions[1] of Rust as difficult to learn put you off. I'm long out of date with it so can't make confident comparisons with the Java of 2022 (2023!), but you might enjoy exploring what Rust brings to the table. It's certainly very capable, and those who become fluent with it claim the early productivity hit is eventually overweighted by the correctness/longevity of what you produce. I haven't reached that stage but have no reason to doubt the claims.
If you do interact with the Rust community, I suggest doing so in Shiny Happy Person guise.
[1] only the Rust community considers these 'complaints'
- > The guideline is not that the form is not annoying - some people, like you, will find it annoying
I'm not arguing that the guideline can be breached when some people find it annoying. That would be silly.
I'm arguing that posting articles as trains of social media posts may not be tangential nor merely a matter of formatting. If that's the case (I agree it's 'arguable'), then complaining about them isn't in breach of the guidelines.
> This is pretty ahistorical.
Claiming that posting multiple social media objects is a mere 'formatting' alteration to our legacy of textual culture is pretty ahistorical.
- Arguable, but I don't think it's a slam dunk that replacing the multimillenial standard interface for connected text (ie. text!) with an entirely novel chain of multiple artificially separated UI widgets is either tangential or just to do with 'format'. Personally I won't read them, so at a minimum these links when unidentified merely waste my time, and presumably that of other irritated commenters here. Maybe they should be identified. My personal preference would be a large red banner with a phrase like ("Warning: this is not a real piece"). But a small less tendentious icon would also be fine!
- It is a bit boring to see repetitive complaints. I suspect they just won't go away until it's made obvious from the link whether or not its worth clicking on (for those of us who won't read social media trains). Even knowing it's Twitter or Mastodon doesn't really help, because the poster might be sensible enough to post a link to a real piece.
- Yes I always abandon these when I see they don't just contain a link to a blog post. You might have thought someone waxing about the merits of the web would have heard of hyperlinks (admittedly, I'm only assuming that's what he's doing as I'm not going to slog through a train of mastodon posts).
- > one of the foremost experts of fat metabolism.
What makes you say that? In my experience, there are no 'experts' in empirical fields who are no themselves deeply and practically engaged with actual research. Being well-read does not make you an expert. Writing blog posts and appearing on YT doesn't make you an expert. Critics are not experts. To be an expert in anything you have to get your hands dirty.
Nothing I can see from this guys publications or bio make it seems like he's an expert in human fat metabolism at all, let alone a 'foremost' one. I base this on a fairly cursory survey, so I'm happy to be corrected. But convincing corrections would absolutely require details regarding what he has contributed to the field.
- > I suspect the cause is a whole bunch of people saying that Rust is too hard,
Perhaps, though I haven't myself witnessed anyone saying it's 'too hard'. Just that people (like me and everyone I know who's tried to learn) find it 'hard'. Then we're informed it's not.
My thought about the underlying reasons was more along the lines of the Rust community's inclusion ethic. I find that entirely laudable in general. But like all ideologies it can lead to blind spots when insisted on against evidence. For example, it's even built into the (plainly false) official tagline: "A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software." If someone finds Rust difficult, this creates a strong cognitive dissonance in fierce Rust advocates (for some reason so many are), which evokes vigorous denial.
> Previous experience with a language that uses functional patterns is a huge plus
My previous two 'learn for interest' languages were Clojure and Elixir. I could do more in both after a week than after some months of Rust.
In my case it's not unfamiliarity nor abstraction, but the sheer complexity that bleeds right through the ecosystem. For example: something I experience every time I try to do anything 'real': I search for the most common/recommended relevant library, go to its docs and find them utterly incomprehensible. It then takes days to glean enough to use the new library fluently. Even reading commandline args - detailed but conceptually simple - leads to a vastly complex horror of a library (I won't name names) that takes days to decipher. It's never taken me more than an hour or two in any other language. My Rust projects slow to a stupefying crawl.
For all that, I'm persisting (or rather re-starting, as my attempt earlier this year left me thoroughly demoralised) out of a combination of some real practical uses I have for it ("hard" doesn't to me in any way mean "bad"), and stubbornnes. But I'll do so without the 'help' of the community, which I find insufferable.
- > You'll find that many in the rust community are in fact very very sympathetic to your view that it's too hard to learn.
I have not found that. The very comment I'm responding to above is a correction, telling me "it's not hard", not saying on the writer's part that they didn't find it hard, and least of all with any curiosity towards any dev claiming that they find Rust hard, because that view is considered in the Rust commmunity plainly incorrect. This is what I have found, consistently in 2022. I plan to continue with Rust in 2023, but I'll probably largely go it alone.
- But I've never heard a C++ programmer deny that it's a large and difficult language.
I personally never really had a problem with ownership model - probably because what I was doing fell into the simple buckets. Rust's difficulty goes well beyond ownership. I just thought the Rust user forum thread I quoted was a gently funny example of the Rust community's denial: "Rust's not hard, but to get a decent mental model of the borrow checker you need to read the standard library, or if not here's 10000 words on how I think of it". I'm not presenting it as "proof" that Rust is hard - the fact that I couldn't do anything practical with it after more troublesome attempts than with any other language is plenty enough for me to know that. Neither do I think difficulty is 'bad'. Denying it can be though.
- > > Rust is harder than any other mainstream language to do that in.
> I’d argue C and C++ are both harder. It’s hard to even get these to build once you move past trivia examples (including libraries etc).
Agree I overstated that. What I mean is that, out of the difficult to learn languages, Rust is the only one whose community for opaque reasons denies the difficulty.
> Some of us just didn’t find it that hard.
Why the difference I don't know. So far everyone I know who has learned it has dropped out because they just couldn't get practical traction with it. My guess is that most people who say they don't find it hard are either longstanding C/C++ programmers, and/or are learning at work where they have immediate help & scaffolding.
What is odd is that rather than responding to difficulties with a curious "Oh, I didn't find it hard, I wonder where the difference lay", Rust advocates tend to come back with an aggressive 'proof' that Rust is factually not hard to learn (with implications we can all guess at). No other programming community frequently does this in my experience (and I have brushed against many). That community attitude itself must have causes that are worth thinking about.
- > It's not hard,
Yep, that's the standard Rust aficionado flat insistence: "You're finding it hard. You're just wrong". Yet with more learning time than I've put into any other language I've learned, I have been unable to use Rust for real (ie. beyond beginner toys). A quick count of langs I've used professionally comes to about 10; I've learned many more to play with, much more successfully than with Rust, in much less time than I've spent with Rust. This reflects the experience of everyone I know who's tried it out (I'm the last man standing, having another crack at it this year).
The cultural peculiarity of this is that, in a field that generally lauds effort and intelligence, Rust advocates uniquely consider 'hard' or 'difficult' to be negative criticism. I don't hear this from (say) Haskell or Scala programmers. I certainly don't consider difficulty a negative - it depends on whether the payoffs are commensurate, and for Rust I think they are (I'd just quit otherwise).
As I'm 100% satisfied (no matter how often I'm unconvincingly 'corrected') that Rust is indeed harder than most programming languages to learn, I can only categorise this peculiarity as denial. Denial usually has ideological origins. I'm not entirely sure what they are in this case, though I have some ideas. These do feed into a sense that although I like the language, I don't think I like the Rust community much. I get strong religious/culty vibes from it - similar to the worst of the Linux community (for the record I also am a f/t Linux user, and I think that community has moderated considerably over time).
- > The vast majority of beginners can just learn "& means any number of readers and no writers, &mut means one writer and no readers".
But 'beginning' is never the hard part of learning any programming language, at least for a programmer. The hard part is going from having learned the basics to getting stuff done. Rust is harder than any other mainstream language to do that in. The writers in that thread can't even describe their mental model (NOT the underlying tech as you claim) of lifetimes without vast elliptical descriptions. And they can't point to any straightforward documentation.
I have learned multiple programming languages, of many different paradigms, and never had the trouble getting to the stage of writing useful software that I have had with Rust. I've witnessed the same again and again with all the people I know - all professional programmers. In fact I'm the only one I know who's stayed with it.
I find the denial of Rust's difficulty (and not even centred on the borrow checker - it's the use of just about every commmon library) just very very strange. Odd enough (and distant enough from the obvious, adn the experience of every person I've known) that I find it completely incomprehensible.
- > Lifetimes aren't hard or complicated,
Untrue - read https://users.rust-lang.org/t/what-is-a-good-mental-model-of.... Even Rust aficionados can't describe how they work without vast screeds. Or if you think the posters there are just wrong, try the RFC on which the current implementation is based: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2094-nll.html. You truly don't find that hard or complicated?
It may be the case that people can use simplified subsets of the language to ease their way. But when a Rust advocate says that in effect to understand lifetimes you have to read the standard library source (as is written in the forum thread linked above), because no current documentation is comprehensive enough to cover it, then you know the whole thing itself is pretty complex.
- > Easy is relative
In the case of programming languages, yes, it's relative to the difficulty of other PLs. I've learned many over the years, and found Rust by far the hardest (it's the only one that defeated me). And it's not the most different from others I've learned - lisps are far further from the common languages than Rust is.
> I suspect a major reason I found it easy was because I didn't try to solve lifetime problems,
Well yes anything's easy if you skip the hard bits. Learn C without using pointers.
I personally didn't find ownership & borrows the hardest part - in my case it's the great complexity of many of the commonly used libraries. Rust's complexity bleeds out into the entire ecosystem (a cultural thing).
- But it's so easy to get a handle on how the borrow checker works! Just check out this thread and all will become clear: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/what-is-a-good-mental-model-of...
Joke btw. That thread is a hilarious trainwreck - surely the final nail in the coffin for the Rust advocates who so often deny anything about Rust is difficult to learn.
I don't mean that as an anti-Rust jibe, in fact I'm planning to get back to it this year (having given up in despair last). I like much about it, and think it's tremendously practical for many purposes. But it just is a difficult language, no question.
- Depends on what country you're in. It's illegal here in Australia, but almost universally practised regardless. The law is not in reality available to most people, nor is it by and large adhered to by business except where absolutely necessary (ie. predictably enforced). Every large company I've worked for has broken the law with impunity.
There good cause for "the law" in daily reality (as opposed to "The Law" as an abstract good) not to be held in any esteem by ordinary folk.
- My "Asia" comment wasn't really a response to you - it's been a part of internal Australian debate since the 1980's. Keating crowned the 21st the "Asian Century", and claimed Australia should turn towards Asia. My point is that never really bit culturally. Australia is geographically Pacific, economically Asian, and culturally European/American Despite self-perception, there isn't really much non-derivative Australian culture beyond some small Indigenous influence, though we're probably a century behind NZ in that respect.
> I do not think skin tone should come into it
It shouldn't, but it certainly does. Little can be understood about Australia without it (well, ethnicity at least - broader than 'skin tone'). A large part of Australia's Europe-longing comes from a historical fear of China (as a kind of stand in for people of Asiatic ethnicity).
- Saying, no, but feeling, yes. Keating's "Asian Century" version of Australia never took strong cultural hold. Our nearest neighbours PNG & East Timor are ignored except by our NGOs and spies, and few visit Indonesia other than the Bali beach resorts. A brief 1990's spurt in Mandarin teaching in schools is in decline, with European languages remaining the most popular. Australia is still by far the most Eurocentric of the post-WW2 immigration nations. And it's literally the whitest, which is why it's been the destination of choice for so many South Africans since the 1990s.
This is changing to some extent with demographics (immigration from China and India, and some generational change). But surprisingly slowly and shallowly. Few Australians know much about Asia, or even the Pacific, let alone feel theirselves to be part of it.
- Clearly a matter of taste then. I much prefer the extremes, and find mild weather boring. Maybe it's having grown up in England. Much happier where I live now and I'm at frequent risk of fires and floods!
- You'd think so, but from his own account he's not. Pre Asahi he used Fedora because it was easy to get working and he found Debian too hard to install. Could just be dry Finnish humour.
- Yes, seems fair enough to me. Most people (quite reasonably) just aren't going to get the nuances differentiating cloud-based pw managers. One blog post isn't going to change that in itself, but it's fair for Agilebits to get the word out where they can. It's natural they don't want to suffer reputational damage consequent on a competitor's breach.
- Really? Or is it that you think of a reference to poor mental health as a legitimate insult?
- I've not given M** or Twitter, neither of which I have any form of relationship with at all, a moment's thought. I have a Mastodon account, and am pretty sure my assessment of its denizens reactions are about right.
- Where is this 'sanity' claim?
- More bitterly amused at how awful all social media platforms are than angry. I don't have a Twitter account and don't care about it at all. Though I do have a Mastodon account and am struck by how much it recapitulates most of Twitter's socially damaging affordances.
> The guideline is there because of the repetitive twitter complaints, I'm not making this > up as a fun messageboard hypothetical. Complaining about tweets being on twitter is a > well-established off-topic topic.
This is very obviously untrue. Almost every single thread in HN is littered with repetitive comments. Try posting anything about Linux, note-taking. Dare mention an Electron app, and if it's installed with an install.sh, then .. instant death. You'll be buried under an avalanche of near exact copies of comments that have been posted tens of thousands of times on HN.
This is manifest bad faith on the part of the mods in general or pvg in particular: an individual dislike on their part of this particular repetitive complaint, which prompted a vague guideline with plausible deniability in mind.
These aren't the kind of judiciously-applied guidelines I could willingly sign up to. Unfortunately we're not permitted to delete accounts here, so I'll remove my email address, log out, and stay out of the comments.