The TSA articles are annoying noise that undermine HN. Unless it's discussing the technology of the devices or heuristics of algorithms used to analyze it, it's pop political garbage that belongs on Reddit.
Though I'll disagree with him on one thing: HN should be more elitist, not less. HN's distinction was once that it really was where the smart technology people were. Of course once it gets that rep the hanger ons follow, and soon they're the ones stamping their feet and yapping about the TSA or even North and South Korea -- those are nice, calming, accessible topics, and it's how every community driven site, without oversight, eventually drifts to the mean.
>I know it's hard to believe, but there are people who legitimately enjoy finding the exact right word.
Absolutely. There is an appropriate time and a place for such an exercise, however, and having the cognizance of when and where is useful.
>This is like trashing someone for working on an open source project - they're just doing something they love the best they know how.
I don't think it's anything like that. The submission is about a person who had purportedly been sending out thousands of resumes with nary a bite. Their angle is not "Clearly I'm doing it wrong", but they instead resort to the tried and true "everyone but me is stupid" angle. I don't patronize that thought process because it's the hubris of failure.
While I think this story is largely fictitious, when someone argues that they're downtrodden and victimized because they sound smart -- in verbal or written form -- they're often missing the forest for the trees.
Unless you're debating esoterica of a specialized domain, the smartest people manage to communicate in a simple, effective manner(1). The person accused of using too many syllables, in contrast, tends to be someone who isn't actually terribly smart at all, and the compensation is a verbal find/replace of commonplace words with a cargo cult collection of "smart" words, because that's what they think smart people do.
When someone says "you're too smart", or "you sound too smart" or "try to dumb yourself down", most of the time they're not really saying that you're too smart. They're saying "can the act."
(1) - The best example of this, I think, was Richard Feynman. He never tried to sell the idea that he was smart -- anyone who needed to know that already knew it -- but instead managed to communicate the most incredible ideas clearly and effectively.
The TSA articles are annoying noise that undermine HN. Unless it's discussing the technology of the devices or heuristics of algorithms used to analyze it, it's pop political garbage that belongs on Reddit.
Though I'll disagree with him on one thing: HN should be more elitist, not less. HN's distinction was once that it really was where the smart technology people were. Of course once it gets that rep the hanger ons follow, and soon they're the ones stamping their feet and yapping about the TSA or even North and South Korea -- those are nice, calming, accessible topics, and it's how every community driven site, without oversight, eventually drifts to the mean.