Don't Read the Comments

The Culture

Hacker News is a link aggregator run by Y Combinator where technically sophisticated people share interesting articles, startup news, and ask questions. The comments are generally more substantive than other sites. "More substantive" means the corrections are sourced, the pedantry is thorough, and the person explaining why your approach is suboptimal has a biography that suggests they have never personally experienced the constraints you are working under.

The site skews heavily toward founders, early-stage startup employees, and people who are between jobs and have a lot of time to write long comments. This demographic has strong opinions about engineering decisions made by companies they have never worked at, under constraints they have not experienced, by teams they have not managed, for users they have never spoken to.