I didn’t like the tone of this. Building a company is hard. Building an VC-backed open source product is really, really hard.
I know on HN we don’t always love CEOs, and that’s okay… the ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But Ryan Dahl isn’t doing that; he’s a tinkerer and a builder.
I dunno, I just don’t like this vibe of “what have you done for me recently” in this post, especially given he skipped over the company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I really felt at home with.
Agreed about the article tone. I'm a Deno lifer over here, and will definitely not try to cover up the mistakes they've made along the way or the trouble their deploy product has had over the past few months. Ryan Dahl is obviously polarizing as a personality for many people, always has been since he decided to "hate almost all software" or even before that when he created Node.js.
I don't use Fresh. Serverless is kind of a weird offering that forces developers to do a lot of work to adjust their programs to running all over the place. I even wish Deno had never supported NPM because that ruined their differentiator.
I'm going to keep using Deno and I hope they use this opportunity to refocus on their core product offering so that I can move back to using it from this VPS that is hosting all of my Deno servers right now.
I'm planning on using Deno long term too and have also made some contributions to their standard library. But I completely disagree with you on NPM support. I think that gap early on contributed to bun's success. I almost quit using it because of how difficult it was to use react with Deno. Now it's pretty easy to use react and other npm packages with Deno. Before that, a lot of the most popular packages were just forks of npm packages adapted for Deno, but not as well maintained since less people were using them. Then deduping dependencies was just harder when they were all urls. If your package had a dependency using a different version url, you'd need an import map just to remap them all to using the same version. I'm pretty happy with the current deno.json with jsr and npm compatibility.
As someone who has mostly just tinkered with this stuff (while using Node extensively at work) I see two truths:
- Deno initially seemed like something a number of us were clamouring for: a restart of the server JS ecosystem. ES modules from the start, more sensibly thought out and browser compatible APIs, etc etc
- that restart is incompatible with the business goals of a VC funded startup. They needed NPM compatibility but that destroyed the chances of a restart happening.
I’m just sticking with Node. I know Deno and Bun are faster and have a few good features (though Node has been cribbing from them extensively as time has gone on). I just don’t trust a VC backed runtime to keep velocity in the long term.
Personally I've moved to bun. Its basically identical to node out of the box - almost all nodejs projects just work. But its usually faster. And it can run typescript files directly. And it has a JS bundler & minifier built in. And it can --watch for changes.
I hope nodejs copies these features. They're great.
bun is not bad, but for me consistently slower than pnpm for dependency management, and unfortunately I hit a very strange async runtime bug with it, so ended up just going with node
Yes, the technical problem is fundamental. But if Deno managed to be a truly great runtime that solved a lot of people’s gripes with Node and made ES modules etc the price of admission for using it there would have been momentum to create a new module ecosystem.
But once you add that NPM compatibility layer the incentives shift, it just isn’t worth anyone’s while to create new, modern modules when the old ones work well enough.
It all feels similar to the Python 2 vs 3 dilemma. They went the other way and hey, it was a years long quagmire. But the ecosystem came out of it in a much better place in the end.
It wasn't worth recreating packages everytime you needed something that Deno had. If you ended up needing something and there was already something on npm for it, it was easier to just switch back to using node than to adapt/maintain a fork or alternative to an npm package. I think the lack of npm compatibility earlier on led to a lot of churn. Deno would probably be dead if they never improved the npm compatibility, especially considering the rise of bun promising performance improvements like Deno, but with better node compatibility at the time.
Agreed. It is very easy to criticise if you've never been in the hot seat, and if you've never had to make tough decisions like this. As far as I can tell this person has never run a business with actual employees.
If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would be criticising that too.
Just an historic curiosity: Nero setting Rome on fire is just a legend. At the time, there was a fire every other day due to wooden houses and poor to nonexistent safety. I even heard somewhere that Nero actively tried to help some people escaping from the fire by opening his residence's doors. So the comparison with Nero could still be correct, but for another reason: someone being wrongly blamed.
True! Love to Ryan from my heart. He came around the corner with Node just in the right moment when ActionScript3 started to die and I seamlessly could continue my career and building things. Still to today.. Things with Deno are very ambitious and hard to establish in this space. The blog post is embarrassing.
Is there a good example of an Open Source project that was born out of VC money? Not a failed attempt of hockey-stick growth that open-sources its code upon shutting down commercial operation, but a genuinely healthy FOSS project that started as a VC-funded company, and still is going strong?
In my opinion, FOSS and VC have opposite goals and attitudes: openness, organic growth, staying free vs moat, meteoric growth fueled by marketing, turning a huge profit. I don't see how they could be compatible in the long term, unless the FOSS project is a gateway drug into a proprietary ecosystem.
Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.
Accountability starts and stops at the top. Many CEOs (CxOs) get called out. Personally, I want to write something similar about Bluesky leadership, who have fumbled hard multiple times since peaking, and have now "raised funding" from Bain Capital (private equity).
its so strange to see so many people who will never be handed 5 million dollars to write a vm jumping in front of criticism for one guy that did. sorry but when you become a public figure in this way you should expect to be subjected to a different sort of public scrutiny than, say, a rank and file employee who they pay.
i will begin to care about a CEOs feelings when they put the wellbeing of their employees before their own. not saying that the Deno CEO has done anything on the order of the raw aggression we see from other CEOs in our industry but, as they say, if you cant take the heat stay out of the kitchen.
These things are easy to say but just because someone has the title CEO doesn't mean they're automatically void of human feelings. I'm sure you understand there's a big gap between a Ryan Dahl and a Satya Nadella, despite them sharing the same job title.
Well the people who get laid off also have feelings, not sure why we should care more about the ceo's feelings so much that we shouldn't criticize them
I'm not saying that we should care more for the CEO, but that we should have empathy for someone who is, ultimately, an engineer who built something and gave it away for free, watched everyone else around him get rich off the back of his hard work, and then tried to do something worthwhile again and still chose to give it away for free. There's a lot of immoral CEOs out there, I'm yet to see evidence that Dahl is one of them.
Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating? I'm not saying that he should be free from criticism, but that we should try and have some empathy for people who try things even if they fail, particularly when they've offered their services to the community for free for the last 5+ years (much longer when considering node.js)
> Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating?
I'm trying to understand why you carve an exception for this one individual.
When I worked in restaurants, the owner and I had a very interesting conversation after hours, and with beers, about his thoughts and feelings being responsible for the well being and livelihood of everyone that worked there. It was a positive moment, I thought I had a great boss, I work my ass off for him.
A year later I found he was trimming hours off of my paycheck. I quit on the spot. Months later I heard he did the same to the waitstaff tips and it wasn't much longer before it all fell apart.
People can appear very different publicly than privately, and they can change over time.
The reverse is true: asshole bosses who do right by workers quietly. Sometimes they're public assholes and privately terrible though. But sometimes (perhaps very rarely) they're openly caring AND do the right thing behind curtains.
I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here. Humanity is complex and varied.
This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down.
We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...
How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do.
> We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...
> How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
According to the article, Deno raised over $25 million from venture capital. Unless you're disputing that, it seems a bit disingenuous to criticize corporations but call this an "open source effort"
The OSI is owned and operated by the hyperscalers, who benefit from this in-fighting and license purity bullshit.
Is the only open source free labor? Some people think so.
Are open core and fair source licenses invalid? Yeah - let's make everything BSD/MIT so managed versions can go live inside AWS and GCP and make those companies billions, while the original authors see limited or no upside.
The fact is - open source needs salients to attack the hyperscalers. It needs to pay its engineers. It needs to expand and grow. One of the ways to do that is building a business around it. Another way is building an open core plus services that drive revenue to sustain and grow the business.
Having VC money doesn't invalidate what's being done. It helps the experiment evolve faster.
Nobody's here complaining about Google and Microsoft and Amazon, yet that's where 99.9% of our ire should be directed. And yet we're pouring venom on this small and valiant effort.
We dump on Redis and Elastic while they're being torn to shreds and eaten by trillion dollar giants.
This entire conversation has become perverted to the point we're no longer talking about what matters: freedom to operate independently of the giants that control the world.
Instead we're complaining about people taking a risk, trying to actually do something impactful that matters.
I will agree with the sentiment that a lot of these companies even pivot from open source because its quite hard to make money from open source in general, and yes the point of hyperscalers taking the same code and selling it as their own service at cheaper rates/ more integratability with other suite of products is also another point.
I'm pretty confused about what your point is at this point. No one can throw rocks at an open source effort, except for ones that cross a certain threshold of capital? I don't buy the argument that it's impossible for any company smaller than Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. to be a bad actor who deserves to be called out. I don't know enough about Deno to make my own judgment on whether they're a bad actor or not, but I don't find your arguments here to be particularly compelling that trying to criticize them is unfair.
The hyper scalers are built on running and offering managed versions of open source software (Linux, reddis, postgres, elastic, java, python, JavaScript/node, docker, kubernetes,etc)
That's cute to think that they're unrelated, but open source is fundamentally about freedom.
The walls around us are constantly being built up and caving in. Hyperscalers are trying to own more and more of the commons.
The web is becoming atrophied, search is a sales funnel, communication is taxed, we're about to be asked to use ID to use the Internet, ... everything is being stolen from us.
Open source is just a family of licenses. Nobody is "open source". There is no single entity nor there is a single unified community with shared values behind it. There are just many many projects/applications developped by entitites completely different in nature from the single hobbyist developer to the giant hyperscalers you mention with pretty much everything inbetween with vastly different goals, sizes, profesionalism, funding. And there are many different reasons to choose an open source license, some do it to attract contributions, others for the freedom it offers to the users and developpers, some want to force the license to stay the same, others do not mind if forks are proprietary, some companies will just do that for the optics/marketing and have more featureful version of their product sold under a proprietary license, etc, etc. You can't just put them all under a single "open source" banner and pretend "they" (whoever they are) need to fight against anyone else.
I'm just annoyed that decimation would be a 10% layoff; standard if even weak-sauce these days. Too many people use "kill one in ten" to mean "kill them all, let God sort it out."
Be careful to check whether you're in a glass house before throwing stones - "layoff" used to mean a temporary release from employment for seasonal labour before it meant a permanent one (https://www.etymonline.com/word/layoff). "Standard" as an adjective also used to mean "being held to a standard of excellence" rather than "normal" or "average". It's ok for words to change meaning over time.
Semantic drift has always happened and will always happen in languages.
Decimation has been commonly used as a synonym for absolute destruction for a long time, being annoyed by it is wasted energy, better to let it go and accept the new meaning.
I “get” technology so I understand how you got here.
But this is the wrong take. I expect to go to a restaurant and not die from the food… and I want nothing to do with the inner workings of the kitchen. I just want to know any restaurant I go into will be safe. Society has made restaurants safe, either because of government pressure or it’s good for business.
How is that not a fair ask for technology, too? We all have things we know well, and then there’s reasons we’re alive that we don’t even know exist because someone took care of it.
It’s unreasonable to only allow people to participate in society once they understand every nuance.
Your analogy doesn't work here. Going to a restaurant is like using an app store. Installing apks is like cooking at home. Nothing stops you from cooking a meal that will get you sick.
Now imagine that every restaurant in your city is owned by one of two megacorporations and they really don't want you to have a microwave at home, let alone a stove. They expect that you will get all your food from them. This is where it's going with apps right now.
It works fine for the point that they were making.
Which is that the fact that restaurants have to certify for food safety training and pass regular inspection is perfectly reasonable, and allows those who aren't experts in those areas, or want to continually inspect kitchens to dine out in confidence & conveinience. (or at least vastly reduced risk).
There should be some equivalent, safe, experience in the technology space. Especially given how powerful a tool of liberation it is.
Of course, who controls that, and the ability to turn off those safeguards is important for many many other reasons and... also a question of liberty. And so I think it is a difficult conflict to resolve elegantly.
You could torture the analogy more and say that this is more like saying "it is possible to make bad food and kill yourself at home, so we require everyone to go to a restaurant."
Well, I mean, do you know many houses burn down because someone fell asleep while frying a pork chop? We should just get rid of kitchens at home because it's just not safe.
Oil fires cause immense damage to property and life! I don’t know why stoves are allowed in homes at all. Worse yet, they don’t implement any age verification, so a child can just turn on the burner! It’s crazy!
I thought that was because they emit pollution into the room that was actually (not theoretical) linked to substantially higher risk of the occupants of the home getting asthma?
Because no amount of safeguards put up by the restaurant is going to protect you from getting sick of you decide to empty a bottle of bleach into your meal.
If you want to cook at home, there's no waiting list. There's no popup you have to confirm three times. You buy a stove, which likely lasts you half your life, a fridge, some dishes, pots, pans and so on.
I think it's fine to give people an easy mode. Not everyone cares about cooking (or tech). I just wish companies weren't trying to take the advanced features from the rest of us who do care.
I think it is different for some people because they are passionate and interested in tech.
I'd imagine someone who is passionate about cooking wouldn't be delighted if you cloudn't buy any ingredients in a store.
I see the value in precooked food and black-box working technology. But for me myself, as an enthusiast: I like being able to tinker and control my technology.
So the solution being proposed by multiple companies, is that the restaurant is now responsible to check your age and gender before they bring you something from the kitchen. Also, now you cannot tell the kitchen to use your toaster as some toasters are built to burn the restaurant down or poison the food.
It still doesn't make sense, we need a better plan.
you expect a restaurant to be safe but there is no guarantee that it is. Many people have had food poisoning and I am sure some have died. It is obvious you don't "get" technology at all. You don't even "get" restaurants.
And I expect to be able to open a restauraunt without surrendering my identity and private information to a huge monopolistic company.
And I expect to buy food without that food being sanctioned by a huge, monopolistic company. Especially if said company has shown itself to be completely subservient to an overbearing, increasingly fascist government.
For me, it's the blur between who makes decisions. I don't love our government making decisions about who lives or dies, but I much prefer decisions to be made by a/ a human b/ one who isn't beholden to shareholders.
"You're attacking the person who's protecting you – idiot. [..] You may hate this, but there's one person protecting your rights to be a conspiracy theorist that actually has a seat at the table, and that person is me. [..] You may not want to hear that truth, but it's fucking true."
The way Alex Karp views himself is scary; he gives himself (and his company) carte blanche when it comes to morality. He's basically become the Jack Nicholson character from A Few Good Men.
Yes, America needs technology to succeed. But it can't be unchecked.
You're misreading the hesitation about going into places like Iran.
It's not because we think the regime is/was good, but rather because of the completely predictable next 10-50 years of shit we're going to experience as a result.
Regime change is hard and oftentimes has the opposite effect of what you want. For example, see the current Iran regime.
I had this happen yesterday to me, and Claude itself was able to recover it via the other conversations... I just had to tell it that it did the work and to find it in its other conversations.
I considered doing that, but my 80+ files were scattered in over 20 large conversations, It would've been too annoying to keep track of which file was extracted, and probably would have exhausted the context window of a chat in no-time.
soon were gonna be the ones adding random typos and grammer errors just to blend in. i skip apostrophes and mispell words on purpose already. its strange how fast sloppy writing starts feeling natural
I don't know if worse grammar could make a difference aside from removing false negatives (ie. nowadays people with good grammar are questioned if they are LLM's or not) but this itself doesn't mean that worse grammar itself means its written by a human. (This paragraph is written by me, a human, Hi :D)
Honestly, first paragraph sounds more human and sincere for sure.
Also adding better "context" into the discussion, than the usual claims/punchlines of marketing-speak.
Maybe it's not exactly the grammar itself but also overall structuring of the idea/thought into the process. The regular output sounds much more like marketing-piece or news-coverage than an individual anyway. I think, people wanna discuss things with people, not with a news-editor.
> I think, people wanna discuss things with people, not with a news-editor.
If I understand you correctly, then Yes I completely agree, but my worry is that this can also be "emulated" as shown by my comment by Models already available to us. My question is, technically there's nothing to stop new accounts from using say Kimi and to have a system prompt meant to not sound AI and I feel like it can be effective.
If that's the case, doesn't that raise the question of what we can detect as AI or not (which was my point), the grand parent comment suggests that they use intentionally bad human writing sometimes to not be detected as AI but what I am saying is that AI can do that thing too, so is intentionally bad writing itself a good indicator of being human?
And a bigger question is if bad writing isn't an indicator, then what is?
Or if there can even be an good indicator (if say the bot is cautious)? If there isn't, can we be sure if the comments we read are AI or not
Essentially the dead-internet-theory. I feel like most websites have bots but we know that they are bots and they still don't care but we are also in this misguided trust that if we see some comments which don't feel like obvious bots, then they must be humans.
My question is, what if that can be wrong? It feels to me definitely possible with current Tech/Models like say Kimi for example, Doesn't this lead to some big trust issues within the fabric of internet itself?
Personally, I don't feel like the whole website's AI but there are chances of some sneaky action happening at distance type of new accounts for sure which can be LLM's and we can be none the wiser.
All the same time that real accounts are gonna get questioned if they are LLM or not if they are new (my account is almost 2 years old fwiw and I got questioned by people esentially if this account is AI or not)
But what this does do however, is make people definitely lose a bit of trust between each other and definitely a little cautious towards each message that they read.
(This comment's a little too conspiratorial for my liking but I can't help but shake this feeling sometimes)
It just is all so weird for me sometimes, Idk but I guess that there's still an intuition between whose human and not and actually the HN link/article iteslf shows that most people who deploy AI on HN in newer accounts use standard models without much care which is the reason why em-dashes get detected and maybe are good detector for sometime/some-people and this could make the original OP's comment of intentionally having bad grammar to sound more human make sense too because em-dashes do have more probability of sounding AI than not :/
It's just this very weird situation and I am not sure how to explain where depending on from whatever situation you look at, you can be right.
You can try to hurt your grammar to sound more human and that would still be right
and you can try to be the way you are because you think that models can already have intentionally bad grammar too/capable of it and to have bad grammar isn't a benchmark itself for AI/not so you are gonna keep using good grammar and you are gonna be right too.
It's sort of like a paradox and I don't have any answers :/ Perhaps my suggestion right now feels to me to not overthink about it.
Because if both situations are right, then do whatever imo. Just be human yourself and then you can back down this statement with well truth that you are human even if you get called AI.
So I guess, TLDR: Speak good grammar or not intentionally, just write human and that's enough or that should be enough I guess.
Hey Chase! Congrats on everything you, Grace, Thomas and the rest of the team built. I know it wasn't always what you expected it to be from the inside, but from the outside nobody saw that. They just saw something amazing. Your Startup School talk is my favorite ever, and I'm lucky I got to work with you all those years ago. You built something incredible, and helped a lot of people.
It wasn't until I read your comment that I was able to pinpoint why the mental exhaustion feels familiar. It's the same kind (though not degree) of exhaustion as formal methods / proofs.
Except without the reward of an intellectual high afterwards.
I feel this too. I suspect its a byproduct of all the context switching I find myself doing when I'm using an LLM to help write software. Within a 10 minute window, I'll read code, debug a problem, prompt, discuss the design, test something, do some design work myself and so on.
When I'm just programming, I spend a lot more time working through a single idea, or a single function. Its much less tiring.
In my experience it's because you switch from writing code to reviewing code someone else wrote. Which is massively more difficult than writing code yourself.
Interesting, I feel the opposite. I always tend to associate askers and extroverts, and feel us introverts are tired all the time because of all the guessing going on during human interactions.
But of course, your opposite takeaway also makes sense!
I found this 10+ years ago, and it was one of the most important things I ever read. As a consummate Guesser, it reframed my perspective completely. I started to be much happier and understanding with Askers.
I also realized how frustrating, as a Guesser, I could be to Askers, and shifted more toward being clear about what I want or need.
My family is almost 100% Asker. When I got to college, I drove Guessers nuts. They thought I was so selfish and would blow up at me (from my perspective) out of nowhere.
"No" is always a perfectly fine and polite answer from my perspective
Guessers don't believe Askers are asking in bad faith at all. If Guessers did believe that, it would be way easier for them to say no to Askers. It's precisely because the Guesser believes in the sincerity of the request that it becomes painful to deny it.
Indeed. It's the immediate assumption that since you're asking me, it must be important to you - otherwise you wouldn't be asking in the first place.
I want to be the kind of person that helps others where it matters, and here you are, asking, thus proving it matters. Refusing becomes really uncomfortable, so I'd rather go out of my way to make it possible for me to agree, or failing that, to help your underlying need as much as I can.
I realize now this is a form of typical mind fallacy - I wouldn't ask you for something if it wasn't really fucking important or I had any other option available, therefore I naturally assume that your act of asking already proves the request is very important to you.
That's the really painful part. They ask you for something, you say 'yes' thinking it's important for the person, only to learn that it wasn't that important at all. It's like giving something that you don't want to give to someone that doesn't need it. Really annoying.
So how would you recommend communicating desires that are less strong than "important"?
I try to include the priority level of my requests inside the question itself, personally. As in, "Hey do you think you could xyz if it's not too much trouble? Not a high priority for me, but it would be convenient is all." Do you recommend something like that?
Having said that, I have become a lot better at being direct these past few years, so I'd likely just say "I'm not able to, sorry. I can recommend some good hotels though".
Default No is fine, just go with it. That’s a huge ask. It was a 2 week stay, that’s a hell no unless you’re my nuclear family then maybe we can discuss it. Even then, there’s some family I don’t want as overnight guests and I usually put up in a nearby hotel when they visit.
No reason to feel guilty saying no when the ask is that large. I feel bad sometimes saying no to small things. Because it’s trivial on the surface and I don’t have a good reason for saying no except I just don’t want to do it. In any case, I like treating no as my default answer to everything then I have to be convinced to say yes (even if it’s a quick internal negotiation with myself).
If you’re consistent, the most abusive askers learn not to ask. The ones that ask with expectations of a yes, the ones that try to make you feel bad for saying no, those people go away. And that’s my ideal position, I’m only being asked for reasonable things so actually end up saying yes more often than I say no.
The askers who make you feel bad don't go away. They go up your org chart or get replaced by similar if your company culture tolerates it. You're the one who goes away or settles.
You are responsible for your feelings and setting your boundaries.
Learning how to set boundaries is something most people learn as they mature. Yeah, not easy. I have especially noticed recently that some of my friends who are mums have learnt how to claim their own needs only after their kids have left home. Some people give too much.
Do you expect others to adivinate what your personal boundaries are?
Do you get frustrated when friends or family make the wrong assumptions?
If you have arseholes in your life that actually make you feel bad, then it is even more important to learn how set boundaries with them. If they don't respect the boundaries you set, or create conflict, then that is often very difficult to resolve.
I struggle with conflict avoiders because they have needs however they often act passive. Yet their hidden expectations remain, and their response if you fail to meet their expectations is often poor. One friend in particular also often guesses wrong to my detriment, instead of asking a simple question.
Do mind readers want others to read minds?
I strongly dislike passive people that blame others for their poor communications.
> I strongly dislike passive people that blame others for their poor communications.
Same. I struggle with the construct specifically because I think I am both an asker and a guesser. I do agree it exists however I can’t bucket myself into either side. The approach I choose to utilize at any given time is a contextual calculation. Do I have a strong opinion? Do I have a sufficient status to assert myself? Do I not care and just want to appease the other person? Do I intentionally want to stroke their ego?
But, choose an approach and use it as a tool. Miscalculations occur leading to outcomes I may not predict or prefer sometimes but that’s just a learning experience for me. I might adjust my internal algorithm for making that calculation in the future. I might decide I just don’t like interacting with that person, and that’s fine too. But I don’t blame anyone or expect them to change for me.
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I don't know where this is coming from as I didn't make these claims.
That said, your comment is disturbing.
It's a obnoxious to "strongly dislike" (read: hate) people who don't have resilient self-esteem. It lacks compassion. And if someone's bullying you, getting platitudes about "responsible for your feelings" and "boundaries" is useless.
Strongly dislike can also mean you just prefer to avoid those people or limit your interactions. It doesn’t mean hate.
If you want people like this to stop avoiding you, it’s an internal adjustment that needs to be made. That’s the responsibility for yourself part. Ignoring you is not hurting the other person one bit, actually they are benefiting from it as they skip dealing with your personality they dislike. It’s not to say they are biased against you, if you were more compatible they may change their stance without thinking about it. That wouldn’t happen if they hated you.
Hate is a strong dislike but that doesn’t mean a strong dislike is hate.
It could mean anything more. Especially given the medium we’re using to communicate, where they chose those words instead of just saying hate. This medium is concise and those words were chosen over the word hate. I think it’s most likely they were chosen to reference to the huge grey area of stuff they could have meant but they didn’t want to explain due to their desire for to keep concise text communications which is what we’re all engaging with online. If we had to explain why we chose every word we chose this mode of communication would be useless.
It's not mind reading. It's basic empathy and respect. Expecting others to understand the norms of social behavior is not smart, but it is perfectly normal. Realizing that many people lack the ability to empathize or socialize politely and dealing with that is an unfortunate consequence of modern society making travel so easy. We're all mixed up and people from totally different cultures need to learn to deal with each other.
If someone goes on to say, "well you ruined my vacation" or something like that, they weren't asking at all, they were demanding and now they're bullying you about having boundaries to try to tear your boundaries down.
People who go out of their way to try to trample your explicitly stated boundaries are abusing you.
So say no, and if they don't take it well, create distance or tell them off. Avoiding conflict in this case is fully to your own detriment.
If, on the other hand, they do take it well, then guess what? They're an asker and are just fully exploring their options and it's no big deal to them that you said no.
Thank you for reposting this, OP. I have been (w)racking my brain trying to find this article and used HN search dozens of times. I couldn't remember what the title was, or the specific terms "ask" and "guess", so it was impossible to find.
This is one of the chief cultural differences between Southern and Northern culture.
Southerners (not transplants) will "ask" without imposition: they "ask" when giving, and "guess" when receiving.
Any inversion of these norms is an affront to "Southern hospitality" and will be met with the equivalent "Bless Your Heart".
Ask what you can do for someone, never what you can have. Assume someone will do right by you (you should never have to ask), and if they don't - people say not so nice things about those folks.
I need to articulate this better when it's not 4 AM, but it's an almost perfect descriptor of the cultural differences.
I know on HN we don’t always love CEOs, and that’s okay… the ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But Ryan Dahl isn’t doing that; he’s a tinkerer and a builder.
I dunno, I just don’t like this vibe of “what have you done for me recently” in this post, especially given he skipped over the company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I really felt at home with.
Comparing him to Nero is gross.
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