
Name It, and They Will Come - stablemap
https://overreacted.io/name-it-and-they-will-come/
======
coldtea
Even if you don't understand the point the author is trying to make, this part
you should be able to understand perfectly, and I find it a perfectly accurate
description of what happens 90% of the time:

= = = =

The top comment thread picks on the coding style in a README example. It turns
into an argument about indentation with over a hundred replies and a brief
history of how different programming languages approached formatting. There
are obligatory mentions of gofmt and Python. Have you tried Prettier?

Somebody mentions that open source projects shouldn’t have beautiful landing
pages because it’s misleading marketing. What if a junior developer falls for
it without fully understanding the fundamentals?

In a response, somebody argues the landing page design is boring.
Additionally, it’s broken in Firefox. Clearly, this means the project author
doesn’t care about the open web. Is the web as we know it dying? It’s time for
some game theory…

The next comment is a generic observation about the nature of abstractions,
and how they can lead to too much “boilerplate” (or, alternatively, “magic”).
The top reply explains that one shouldn’t confuse “simple” with “easy”.
Actually, Rich Hickey gave a very good talk about this. Have you watched it?

Finally, why do we need libraries at all? Some languages do well with a built-
in standard library. Is npm a mistake? The leftpad accident could happen
again. Should we build npm right into the browser? What about the standards?

Confused, you close the tab.

~~~
danmaz74
The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an
incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in
the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators.

Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really
interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page.

I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen made people -
often busy people - spend time to write very thoughtful comments, which could
then raise to the top. A positive, self reinforcing loop. Which is getting
slowly, but surely, less effective with the years.

I wish there was a simple formula to reproduce the original mechanism. But I'm
afraid there is not.

/rant

~~~
mikekchar
There once was a model railway enthusiast. He loved trains and knew just about
everything about them. He had a wonderful collection of model trains. One day
he met someone with the same love of model railways. Together they built
complex simulations and had their trains running together. They wrote software
that could schedule the trains, etc, etc. A few more people noticed and while
most people said, "Wow. These guys are the _real_ geeks" a few said, "Wow.
These guys are amazing" and joined the group. Eventually there was a small
club of highly dedicated model railway enthusiasts who knew practically
everything about model railways.

One day there was a person who like model railways, but wasn't really _that_
into it. However, he noticed the model railway club and realised right away
that _these people are amazing_. He would go to the meetings just to bask in
the glory of the incredible things that these people built. Eventually, he
couldn't keep it to himself. He told a whole bunch of his friends and they all
showed up too.

The model train club started to get bigger and the original members couldn't
be happier. When they first started most people looked down their noses at
them. Now they were downright _popular_. One day some of the members said,
"This really amazing stuff is really amazing, but I wonder if there is a way
for me to approach this without being _quite_ so geeky. I have a family and I
don't have so much time. I want my train setup to be super awesome, but I
don't really care that much about the details".

Lots of the other members were in the same boat and so they worked hard to
have a kind of "scaled down" setup that would appeal to people who didn't have
the time or energy to devote themselves completely to model railways. The club
became even more popular due to this and lots of people who really liked
trains, but weren't that interested in model railways started to show up.

Eventually several of the members started to have outings to visit train
museums and to have photo competitions on train themes. To raise money they
even made a calendar with pictures of trains. The model side of the club was a
little bit less accessible to most of the membership because the core group of
enthusiasts were interested in highly technical details that most other
members were not interested in.

Eventually, it was decided that the model railway club should change it's name
and purpose in order to be more accessible and welcoming to new members. It
would now be the train enthusiasts club. Of course model train enthusiasts
would have a place, but it would be appreciated if they refrained from having
heated discussions about highly technical and inaccessible topics like
programming train simulations and the like.

Eventually, the original model railway enthusiast stopped going to the club.
He liked the people. They were great and friendly, but he was, after all a
model railway enthusiast.

If you take something that appeals to 1% of the population and scale it to
include 20% of the population, it morphs into a thing that the 20% group
likes, not the 1% group. Can't be helped. It's just a matter of numbers. It
happens everywhere.

~~~
_hardwaregeek
This is a fantastic way of describing the CS "culture" of my school. So many
people who like talking about tech without ever bothering to learn the actual
underlying skills. And yet they're nominally CS majors...

~~~
wallace_f
And he didnt even start to talk about the people showing up because it became
lucrative.

------
Deimorz
I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just
describes the usual internet bike-shedding
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples)),
and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or
naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how
to do it, or why it would help.

~~~
coldtea
> _I honestly don 't understand what this post is trying to say._

It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead
comment like people are doing in this thread.

(It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and
weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give
more focused responses).

~~~
Deimorz
Okay, but what does that _mean_ in practice? Almost every project posted on HN
already has a name and at least a short description of why it exists or what
it's trying to do (often in the title itself). They still get bikeshedded to
hell, so obviously the name and story alone aren't enough. I see a ton of
posts where people bicker specifically _about_ the name or the story (half the
comments are "is this actually an issue?").

The linked post spends the entire time describing the problem but only 4 tiny
sentences on the solution. It's really not self-explanatory even though it
treats it like it is. Was writing it this way intended to be some kind of
meta-commentary that's just going over my head?

~~~
btown
I wish Dan (the OP) had gone into more detail on exactly _what techniques_ one
can use to tell a story, because this is exactly what he does - very well! -
as one of the most prolific voices in the React (and perhaps all of frontend)
community.

My personal take:

(1) Marketing shouldn't be an afterthought; it must be considered in the same
way one would write code. Take a page from the folks who designed a custom
website and icon for Heartbleed. To put it another way, think of "things that
would distract someone from the main message" as "bugs" in your code.
Certainly, some bugs need to be triaged before any launch. But they should all
be triaged with open eyes and respect for the user experience.

(2) Don't assume people know acronyms or even the basics of your niche. Talk
about potential use cases. Walk someone through the naive way of doing things,
a less naive way of doing things, and why your thing naturally
evolves/iterates on those. Make separate "background" pages if you want. Then
take all of that as you would an essay you're writing for a class, and reshape
it - find a thesis statement, tie everything back to it. Your launch
post/README is a persuasive essay on why your thing is good. Even the "getting
started" details are part of that persuasion - if it's easy to use, that's
part of what makes it good.

Well-written technical documentation can be a joy when you are immersed in the
excitement of the person who built it. And with any immersive experience,
there are things that can take you out of it. Immerse people quickly and keep
them there, and maybe, just maybe, they'll be curious enough to do background
research on their own and engage with you on the merits of the project with
context :)

~~~
sandinmyjoints
> To put it another way, think of "things that would distract someone from the
> main message" as "bugs" in your code.

This is the PR/communications industry. Once I understood this, and that a
main message is one sentence at most -- a short phrase is even better --
interviews of people in politics made a lot more sense!

~~~
btown
Yep, the same way we write code and think “what are the implications of this
function were called from a weird context,” so too do PR/communications folks
“engineer” statements.

------
ignoramous
Pretty much summarises comment threads here on news.yc much like this blog
post: [https://danluu.com/hn-comments/](https://danluu.com/hn-comments/)

One way to avoid the pitfall of folks resorting to talk abt 'universally
shared experiences' is to take control of the conversation: One way to do that
is to offer AMA, or ask a question yourself.

I've seen the keybase founders (esp malgorithms) and to an extent the
Cloudflare founders (esp jgrahamc) do it pretty successfully here.

An example of an independent developer (browsh) shaping the conversation to
their benefit:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552)

~~~
jgrahamc
For clarity... I wasn't a founder of Cloudflare, but I was an early employee.

I try to answer questions about Cloudflare, or comments about the company,
here when I have the time. I do the same on Twitter (and to a certain extent
on Reddit). I have code that monitors HN for mentions of "Cloudflare" and
emails me within a couple of minutes.

------
munk-a
That sort of minimalist looking webpage using a big round font for the headers
really does make it hard to absorb the gist of the post - sorry, have I
overreacted? Perhaps a less fleeting writing style could have set up a more
concrete thesis that would deliver a conclusion to their statement.

That last bit is actually quite relevant - due to law of triviality and such
there will always be bikeshedding, but the way to cut through that (in my
opinion) is to clearly set a scenario, set an agenda, open with a problem and
set the dialog up to resolve the problem. This is why I have begun (usually)
refusing any meetings without a clearly outlined agenda, and when agendaless
meetings get an agenda sometimes I'll duck out of the meeting and submit
feedback in writing _to_ the agenda. This is also why I have a bit of an issue
with this article, it is titled in such an irrelevant manner that it can't
help but generate bikeshedding around it - the title is good and catchy sure,
but I really don't understand how it relates to the actual meat of the article
(which does raise some relevant points).

If the suggestion is that naming (adding a short descriptor) to... "stuff"
makes it easier to keep discussions about that stuff on topic then please back
it up with an example, provide some justification, instead the article reaches
~95% then doing a hard right to inject a catchy quote that seems unrelated to
the rest of the verbiage.

~~~
danabramov
I love the meta-ness of this comment. Not sure if it was intentional :-)

One concrete example of naming a problem is “callback hell”. Example of
“telling a story” to explain it:
[https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html](https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html)

Once you have a few articles like this, the quality of discussions on the
topic rapidly goes up.

For React, David Nolen’s and James Long’s early posts did the same thing.

~~~
munk-a
It was, to my knowledge there isn't a great way to flag that sort of thing on
the web (short of * WINK *)... I thought the fact that I apologized for having
"overreacted" when discussing the blog post hosted on overreacted.io would be
a bit of a give away.

That callback hell story differs from the one above in that I think it
delivers a much better summary statement at the end and way forward - I have
some opinions on it's aim as I think it is eschewing power in terms of a more
comfortable expression for imperative programmers - but the article is well
sized, clear, humorous and suggests a solid remediation for the perceived
problem.

------
faizshah
My problem with open sourcing my code is I always feel like someone else must
have done it already and done it better.

On the subject of irrelevant comments: I see HN more as a place to discuss
topics relating to the OP link rather than discussing the OP link itself. A
lot of the value of HN for me comes from learning how other people see a
subject or what related ideas/libraries there are. For me as a commenter, the
threads I like are exactly the ones that a submitter might not like: threads
filled with many semi-related comments.

I do think we absolutely have a problem with overly negative and discouraging
comments on HN (and the programming community in general) though. The worst
kinds of comments are comments like the “yet another js framework...” on
someone’s show HN. You’re discouraging someone’s work on their specific
library by bringing up some larger problem you see in the industry. So I
absolutely agree that those sorts of semi-related comments belong in a
separate post on that specific issue.

~~~
jeena
About the 'someone else must have done it better already' if I can't find it
then others might have not been able to do that either, that is where my
solution could help. And even if not then just having a alternative
implementation from which others can learn is pretty neat.

------
petercooper
_We tend to discuss things that are easy to talk about._

AJAX (as it was at the time) is a prime example of what Dan's talking about, I
think. As a term that enveloped the whole idea of having JavaScript
dynamically load content from a server, it really brought developers together
in _discussing_ and experimenting, and even resulted in naming a publication
on the topic (Ajaxian). Did it matter that almost no-one was really fetching
XML (the X in AJAX)? No.

"HTML5" played a similar role for a bunch of technologies 7-8 years ago, even
including technologies that were nothing to do with the HTML5 spec (such as
WebGL). Or DHTML 15-18 years ago.

We now see something similar with "serverless" which a lot of people criticize
as a pointless term _except_ it _is_ bringing together discussion around a
group of related concepts and is valuable in that role alone.

Other such terms that are ultimately ambiguous under close scrutiny but which
allow discussion and communities to organize around them: IaaS, SaaS, NoSQL,
devops..

~~~
Theodores
Ajaxian - I can remember that. For a while it was a must read. Like 'Byte' in
a generation before or 'Scientific American' a generation before that,
'Ajaxian' enabled you to learn about the future in a way where you felt quite
privileged to be in on the story.

HTML5 also came with some publications that made you feel inspired. HTML5Rocks
existed once. HTML5Doctor limps on with no content and someone paying the
hosting much like Ajaxian does.

As per the model railway example given in this thread these are the leftovers
from the original geeks that created the scene.

HTML5 became all about how you could embed video without a Flash player. The
geeks thought it was all about semantic markup. But for the people that see
words as just shapes on a page the 'video without Flash' bit was all they
could relate to.

Absolutely nobody apart from a few HN people are using HTML5. That is no
exaggeration. Go to any of those billion dollar web companies, check out the
code and it is just Div Soup.

Go onto Wordpress. It is all Div Soup. There are no themes that use HTML5
beyond chucking in a 'header' and 'footer' tag here and there. Yet a third of
the web is supposed to be powered by Wordpress.

Go onto a website builder service like Wix. Same story, yet more Div Soup.

We never got the XML bit of AJAX. It ended up 'AJAJ' if anything as it is just
some JSON object that is what gets worked with.

With HTML5 we never got the semantic elements apart from the 'video' one. We
got rounded buttons from CSS3 though.

I think the whole semantic thing was a mistake. The likes of Google have AI
robots that can see pages and work out what is going on. So if you have a
visually well designed page their robot is fine with that. Unless you are
writing a page for the government's site on special needs then to hell with
accessibility. That is how it seems.

The geeks that enthused about semantic HTML5 elements left the party a long
time ago. The people who think HTML5 means you don't need flash took over and
thought that was all there was to it.

The denial is an important thing though. People can keep working as they were
before but believe they have new skills, adapted and changed.

------
atlassubbed
I've always liked Dan Abramov's posts. He is very real, if that makes sense.
This one really helps me mentally. Showing new work the world is hard, and
people will always have something negative to say. There's also the issue of
timing. When is it "too early" to show off a project? I always wanna post my
projects to HN but then I remember how my documentation isn't done, or how I
haven't written any tutorials or articles, and I figure I'd better wait,
otherwise people will just bounce because they didn't find anything. I think
the fraction of people who look at source code because they didn't find any
docs is very small.

------
flwralex
"By now, you’re convinced: This idea deserves to be heard."

This week my first public project got 7 git stars. The feeling is fantastic. I
don't have homepage or story, but I have a nice diagram :)

The question for me is why I'm releasing this, to feed the ego monster or
because I really beleive it's worth it? I hope it's not the first, but not
sure, tbh.

~~~
topoftheforts
It might as well be a combination of the two, but to be honest I don't think
it's an issue. If those ego boosts are what keeps you building something
useful, that's great and you probably deserve them.

It's a bit like social networks for exercise (Strava etc) - the whole thing is
just people looking to show off because they've exercised, but if that's
what's keeping them in shape, then great!

------
wwv25
Thanks for the writeup, Dan. This is how I feel about most code reviews. It's
difficult to comprehend all the code and focus on the _actual_ problem being
solved rather than naming conventions and syntax. And yes, I realize the irony
by posting a tangentially-related comment on HN.

------
pedalpete
Wow, most of the comments in this thread completely miss the point, which...
is the point. So meta.

We suffered this exact same issue for years, but it isn't only in git, readme
or marketing pages that the problem exists. When pitching or telling people
what we do, because what we are doing is new, we struggled to find the right
words and therefore, got blank stares about what we were doing.

The same thing happens with the introduction of many new products and systems.

We have gone through many iterations of how to describe our product and the
industry moves making it the next big thing. From "3d visualizations" to
"interactive 3d scenes" and currently settling in on "spatial media". Each
version gets successively better, but until you give someone a hook to hang
your product on, they don't know what to do with it. That is the shared
vocabulary.

For us, it goes like this. "The future of media is spatial,viewers expect to
be able to control their perspective in a 3d scene. We've seen this with VR,
360 video, and gaming. We are another type of spatial media. We're like drone
shot video, but the viewer is in control of their perspective, and we create
the scene without a camera."

~~~
topoftheforts
With that description I still have no idea about what you actually do. Maybe
that's not actually the pitch and you're just giving an example, or maybe not,
just wanted you to give you my feedback :)

~~~
pedalpete
Thanks, we've found this to be significantly better than what we were saying
before, it's still a work in progress.

"We're like drone shot video, but the viewer is in control of their
perspective"

Most people get that.

------
nothrabannosir
[on the subject of HN negativity raised in other posts—sorry for hijacking
this post about post hijacking!]

One problem with HN, which I would love to hear othersʼ opinion about, is: the
HN Guidelines incentivise negative colour in threads. You get 10 upvotes, and
1 critical comment: to anyone reading the entire thread now looks negative.
Noone sees the silent "+1"s, which, I feel, do add a lot of positivity and
encouragement!

I honestly don’t know what to change, or how. Hiding scores is great: it
avoids the asinine karma peacocking, endemic in most similar forums. Allowing
"+1" comments would probably be worse.

But the result is there. I think HN has a lot more positivity than we can see.
But it remains hidden in the database.

Positivity on HN is write-only. Negativity is world readable.

~~~
adventured
My take on that issue is it doesn't matter in any regard. It couldn't be any
more meaningless.

A scenario: a show HN post gets ~60 upvotes reasonably quickly and gets to the
front page. Inside the post you have ten or so comments, three of which are
negative or quasi negative (sometimes merely skeptical, sometimes overtly
harsh). Two people really liked it and said so, five comments are mostly off
topic. The negative comments are at the top in the thread (posted by members
with higher default ranking scores); the positive comments are short on
content and are near the bottom of the thread (posted by weaker ranking
members).

That setup doesn't seem like it would be great. In fact it's spectacular. The
post is going to end up with 100+ upvotes over time and it's getting a wave of
traffic to it. It's the huge number of readers that never comment, and or
never even sign up for an account, that are by far the most valuable part of
the equation. The typical negative/cynical/skeptical comments are mostly
_meaningless_ \- so long as you actually have a good product. I can't
emphasize that enough, I need a far stronger word than meaningless here. You
have a chance, with that wave of traffic, to convert people that want to
believe in what you're doing - that's where all of your focus must be, those
are the people you must not fail.

If it worked any other way in actuality, no product launch on HN would ever
succeed. They'd all be buried by skepticism. It's the unseen angelic adopters
on HN that matter more than anything else. Focus on delighting them and
everything else will flow from it.

My advice on negative comments (unless they're definitely well earned, in
which case you better act on them): put them in your mouth and eat them.
Negative HN comments are like eating plain rice cakes. In the scheme of life,
they're about the least concerning - most benign - things you're going to run
into in the list of negatives when trying to build something, launch a
product, run a business, and so on. Every other real problem with business or
a product/project is drastically harder to push down and digest. At a minimum
let the negative HN comments be a gentle introduction to how hard doing
something successfully actually is (gentle because, again, negative HN
comments are the easiest thing to mentally deal with - among negatives - that
you will ever run into).

------
Areading314
I find this to be spot on. I've frequently seen internal projects in companies
called "Data Event System" or "Progam Manipulator" or some other nonsense.
Sometimes giving a name to a project will dramatically change the way people
talk about it.

------
Smithalicious
The author's understanding is that these pepole would be discussing the
project proper if they weren't discussing other things instead. I don't think
he's right there. People love to talk and tend to flock to wherever
conversation is happening. These people were never partciularly interested in
discussing the project anyways; they were just browsing and saw an opportunity
to jump into the discussion with something they do really care about, such as
indentation styles or the nature of abstraction or what have you.

Also, the conclusion is a typical case of something that _sounds_ insightful,
but doesn't make any actual sense. I don't have even the slightest clue as to
what the author is trying to say.

------
josepot
And what happens when you tell the story and everybody just completely ignores
you?

TBH I find that a lot more frustrating than ppl missing the point on what you
were trying to say. That is exactly is what happened to me a week ago... I
will keep on trying, though :-)

------
exebook
I like it that you can change day/night mode in the top right corner of his
page. Although this should probably be the part of the browser.

------
nookv
Well if the thing you're trying to create is really new (let alone zero to
one), then it'll probably be difficult to explain concisely without ending up
with several sentences full of "trivial" details.

I think Dan's example about irrelevant comments and the reasons behind it are
clear, but the ending about naming and telling a story does not provide a good
enough solution.

Not sure if his intention was to offer any solutions at all but I wonder if
anyone anyone has found some great techniques that guides launching
"completely new" ideas to market. (if you do please let me know)

When I look at the first ride-hailing companies or other zero to one companies
it seems like they started out by:

1\. Coining a definition. 2\. Telling a story. 3\. Ignoring irrelevant
feedback. 4\. A wide spread of calculated trial and error marketing,
eventually one will do the magic.

Is there a better way?

------
talkingtab
I wonder to what extent this is determined by the platform? There is a kind of
response that occurs on HN and every other platform I know that seems
reflexive. I've tried at times and utterly failed to move from "commenting on"
to "doing something" or "further discussion" and it just does not seem to
work. Perhaps it is me but perhaps there is some other style or format that
would provide a better vehicle. I find the concept of "name it and they will
come" funny and interesting and would like to explore it more, but how?

------
ratsimihah
I feel like it doesn't apply to just software projects, but it's a phenomenon
that affects life more generally.

It's so much easier to bring our focus on and talk about what we understand
that we might just dismiss what's truly important but requires effortful
thinking.

    
    
        Universal shared experiences are easy to talk about. That includes topics like code formatting, verbosity vs magic, configuration vs convention, differences in the community cultures, scandals, tech interviews, industry gossip, macro trends and design opinions.

------
retrac98
This kind of thing is very frustrating for creators.

It’d be cool if comments could be sorted based on their relevance to the
article, post, project, or idea as a default, rather than just by time or
popularity.

------
asadlionpk
This is very accurate as of my recent experience on doing a Show HN
here[1][2]. I did get very good feedback but many of the comments were just
stupid. Still, posting here did help the project as the broader audience
doesn't care about a random's HN opinion.

1\. [https://zeroserver.io/](https://zeroserver.io/) 2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828)

~~~
willio58
Weird, I actually thought of your Show HN post while reading this. I think
this was because the response on HN seemed very negative, but then I saw the
project was trending on Github for days after the HN post.

~~~
asadlionpk
The post did help project take off. It's just a little annoying to read
negative comments when we can easily convey the same point in a constructive
way.

I still love this place and am a big lurker for a long time. I am pretty sure
if we were a bit more humane, many many lurker will actively participate,
which would be a win-win.

------
lbj
Its relevant, its concrete, I agree with everything he said. But mostly I just
got caught up in his writing-style which is incredibly enticing. Well done
man!

------
Animats
The title of the article is the best part. Naming your new thing and owning
the meaning of that name is valuable. The rest of the article is much weaker.

------
playeren
I find the authors choice of font to be sub-optimal.

------
jondubois
>> Usually, you feel like you’re creating something. But this time, it feels
like you are discovering something as if it already existed.

I can relate to this.

>> It’s not that people didn’t like the project. You know it has tradeoffs and
expected people to talk about them. But that’s not what happened.

>> Instead, the comments are largely irrelevant to your idea.

I can't relate to this part. I authored a somewhat popular open source
server/framework project (over 5k stars on GitHub now) and my main problem for
years was that there weren't enough people using or commenting on it.

The few people who were commenting on it over the years were consistently and
exclusively giving positive feedback. Someone even wrote their master degree
thesis about my project's scalability and performance. Developers started
writing many clients libraries for it (there are now clients in pretty much
every major language including more obscure ones such as Unity and one is
currently being written for Unreal Engine).

For 5 years, I was constantly searching for criticisms and problems to justify
why my project wasn't more popular (so that I could fix the problems) but
nobody offered any criticism. Instead people kept telling me that the project
was underrated and deserved more attention.

It's pretty heavily used now; it gets a lot of downloads on npm, for some
reason, it just got steady linear growth and still it doesn't get talked about
much. Now I'm thinking that maybe the problem is simply that I'm not active on
Twitter.

------
KorematsuFred
As a researcher you will notice that simple and catchy title for your paper
will give you far more citations than a paper that has more descriptive
titles.

If you are publishing a paper about new way to optimize a problem, just give
it a fancy name first.

------
qwerty456127
> Finally, it’s the launch day. You publish the project on GitHub. You tweet
> about it and submit the landing page to the popular open source news
> aggregators.

What are some popular open source news aggregators oter than HN?

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novarek
I'm not really seeing what you would gain with a story in this context. If
your project "hit the front page of a popular news aggregator" I would say is
because you already have the story.

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keyle
If you toggle the dark/bright mode enough time, your eyes will hurt. You will
come to the conclusion that only the dark mode is enjoyable and readable.

Sorry, if it's true.

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ilaksh
I would love for my project to get on the home page and be filled up with
irrelevant comments. Normally anything I try to share is completely ignored.

~~~
aliswe
I can see why. HN is not for very divergent submissions, they rarely take off
here. Your submissions are kinda not-so-familiar to the great masses so they
don't fly. People just being curious without being familiar with the subject
won't check them out because the number of upvotes haven't reached a critical
level.

Try something more populistic, and especially deriving from an established
trend, and I think you'll appeal to the mob. How about: "ReactJS rewritten in
Go in 24hrs"

That was a jest, by the way...

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jaequery
am i the only one who was expecting him to say, after he had posted his
project to HN, he would got no upvotes and sadly his project remained
invisible to the public?

because getting to front page on news site like HN/Reddit, there is some luck
factor too, kind of like winning a lottery, unless you learned to gamify it.

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foobarbecue
This made sense until the last line. If the conclusion was "focus on telling
your story well so that people understand the point of your work," I would
understand that. But he concludes with "name it, and they will come." So...
he's saying that your product needs a good name? I don't get it.

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groundCode
I’m waiting for a comment about why the author chose to Write the fictional
project in JavaScript to take the top comment spot and the language wars to
begin....

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aarong11
Your site is broken on firefox

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sonnyblarney
I'm not sure if those fonts work together, and those pinks are clashing as
well.

Also, what's with the newsletter?

And why is this on a _private_ blog, not something truly open? I can't even
pull this using git?

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hasahmed
I have an issue with the formatting

