When can we be done with these cheap comments? It has really become tiring to have a comment tree on every HN post for people who don't know what the article is about. As the author often didn't submit their own article it is just a complaint with no possible resolution. Instead of taking a few seconds to find out what the article is about and maybe even clarifying it for your fellow readers, you are taking that time to write a comment that only detracts from a possible conversation.
If you can't bring yourself to search for 5 seconds and find out what an article is about, maybe you just close it and move on.
The tone in which people like the parent comment is disgraceful. I’m sorry this is hacker news and hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed. It is respected and admired as a great piece of engineering to be studied by all hackers.
He wasn’t an ass about it. And the people who don’t know what BEAM is can easily google their way to more information than they’d ever be able to get from a comment here.
Edit: I will say that’s a better take. It’s at least blatant about it being the personal attack you intended it to be instead of passive aggressively couching it behind the pretense of caring about community. If you want to be shitty to people, just do it. I’d prefer honest assholes than weasely manipulators.
You're looking at where I told someone not be rude, and you're interpreting that as a personal attack from me? Because I "want to be shitty"? No.
And the mention of community is not a pretense. I want them to recognize that a lot of qualified people don't in fact already know that specific thing. (This is separate from how easy it is to google.)
Also, if you're calling out personal attacks, the way they used the word "disgraceful" is much more personal than anything I said.
> You're looking at where I told someone not be rude
That’s just it, you didn’t tell them not to be rude. You hid behind nebulous shunning of “gatekeeping”.
>I want them to recognize that a lot of qualified people don't in fact already know that specific thing
Again, you didn’t actually do that though, did you? Instead you used the term colloquially meant to signal they are creating a “hostile” environment
> Also, if you're calling out personal attacks, the way they used the word "disgraceful"
I’m distinctly not calling out personal attacks, I literally just gave you a thumbs up for doing it instead of taking the virtue signaling finger wagging approach you previously used.
> Again, you didn’t actually do that though, did you? Instead you used the term colloquially meant to signal they are creating a “hostile” environment
> nebulous
I think you have an incorrect idea of what the word gatekeeping means.
It's not nebulous. It's saying they're doing a bad thing (being rude/synonym) by applying incorrect and artificial criteria about who is in a group (which I quoted).
Both versions of my comment had the same meaning. I wasn't hiding behind anything, just using different phrasing.
And no, my word choice was not to virtue signal. The word fit the situation so I used it.
No I understand clearly, it’s a weasel word and I dislike it. You use it to mask a personal attack (calling him an “ass”), shun behavior, and avoid the actual conflict of directly addressing what was said. Its annoying passive aggressive bullshit verbiage.
Calling out “gatekeeping” is virtue signaling at its very core.
"I’m sorry this is hacker news and hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed." is being an ass to a lot of people.
Their tone was disgraceful, let me explain by giving you an example of how posts should be made.
“Hey! This looks interesting, quick search on Google didn’t explain what the BEAM is as well as I would like, can someone let me know what this is about in layman’s terms?”
This is inviting people to talk about the topic at hand. It puts the responsibility of knowing something squarely on the person who wants that information and it’s generally pleasant.
How the parent decided to phrase his desire for being spoon fed information was in fact disgraceful.
I still remember 14 years ago or so, when applied science posted his diy electron microscope build and a handful of top comments were low effort nerd snipes and criticisms.
Nothing to do about it, I don't think. Its the warty culture here.
> I was always fascinated with BEAM (Bogdan Erlang Abstract Machine, a VM for languages like Erlang and Gleam) and how it allowed easy spawning of processes that didn’t share state, allowed for sending and selectively receiving messages, and linking to each other thus enabling creation of supervision trees.
That's all it takes. When you're writing about a niche topic (and nearly everything and anything interesting is a niche topic) then explain your jargon. It's considerate, reminds people who are familiar but might have forgotten, and introduces people unfamiliar with it to what your topic is.
Sometimes people want to understand what they're reading about and not have to play a little "guess what this is about" game. Clarity is a quality of good writing.
You do have a point there. I did forget about the [-].
However, I read the comments in hopes they are interesting. If we have a culture where the "I don't know what this thing is"-type comment is popular, people will post those comments more and more. This leads other people to spend their time replying to it, instead of engaging with the content of the article. In other words, it distracts other commenters, who might otherwise have contributed something good.
Second, I think having low value comments is undesirable by itself. We could all start posting "First!" on articles, and everyone who hates that can simply minimize them. I think you can see why that would not be great. We can argue whether this is a low-value comment but I already did that in my original reply: it is not addressed to the article author (in this case they happened to show up but generally they don't) so the complaint doesn't lead to anything, and the comment complains about having to read about a concept they are not familiar with, but does the exact same thing itself.
I think its written for people who already know what the BEAM is. The BEAM is the VM for Erlang or Elixir, similar to how Java has the JVM and C# has .NET essentially.
Nearly every personal blog post submitted here written for people that use a less-mainstream tool/environment/language draws aggressively obtuse comments by people mad that the author didn’t anticipate their lack of knowledge.
There have been math and CS paper submissions where people complained that the papers lacked a complete course on set theory or some CS theory concept the paper relied on. It's a weird thing to do, but apparently popular.
I think it’s an insecurity response— lashing out to distract themselves from feeling needlessly embarrassed for encountering something new or getting confused about something.
I was speaking more generally, but sure, I think the behavior fits. BEAM has a lot more surface area than Apache Beam does here — just do a site search for beam and see how far you have to go to see the Apache project. It’s ridiculous to expect the author of a blog post targeted at people interested in BEAM to disambiguate between them. Additionally, it’s a BEAM conference talk converted to a blog post and it says so right at the beginning of the article with a link to the conference. Thirdly, whoever submitted the link expecting a technical crowd to put in a modicum of effort to figure things out from context is completely reasonable. And how arbitrary is expecting the line to be drawn at your level of need? Shouldn’t project managers be able to read the article without having to look up VM meaning Virtual Machine? Or that functional programming isn’t any programming that uses a function? So yeah, I do not think it’s valid to criticize an author of a blog post aimed at people who already understand the subject for not putting a 1000’ overview at the top.
A criticism asking for one sentence that the author then went and added is pretty well short of lashing out in my book. And by itself is very weak evidence of insecurity. Shrug.
Because of you ask a person who works on Beam about “the Beam book” thats the one they are going to recommend. Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? There are many books like that, “the SRE book” is actually Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, etc.
> Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”?
I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. This is why the WWW was invented, someone uses hypertext to create a link to something related to a reference. You click on the link, and you learn about what it is.
This keeps web pages from having to all include a full encyclopedia and dictionary and translations in 100 languages in every page. You use the technology of last century to create and integrate into a web of related content, where the links (ideally, but not always) contain additional related and informative content without the need to copy the contents of every page into every other page.
> I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page.
Now instead of putting the details in the title, you have me reading paragraphs of text and clicking links to figure out what the author is talking about. Did I understand you correctly?
You are coming across as wilful, petulant and ignorant; hence stop digging the hole you are in. Don't argue for argument's sake.
We are not here to makeup for your shortcomings nor spoon-feed you knowledge in various domains.
People share whatever they want and if it is something i don't know anything about, i just do a quick Google search (eg. "what is BEAM in computer science") which immediately tells me what it is (especially the AI overview from Gemini at the beginning). You didn't even do this trivial step but are arguing that people should have anticipated your ignorance and handheld you; not going to happen ever.
Everything on HN can be categorized as one of; 1) Pointers to stuff(useful/useless/junk knowledge) 2) Opinions (clueless/beginner/intermediate/expert) 3) News. That's it; what you do with it is up to you.
I feel like this is just an opportunity to either learn what it is or move on. That’s essentially what hn and “hacking” is, isn’t it? This post caught my eye because I was learning about BEAM just last week for the first time.
