I love how there's an article about how some legendary game was made, and someone in the comments casually goes "oh yeah, I built that, fun times". It's great.
I once commented something to the effect of “that must have sucked” on a story about debugging a weird error on crash bandicoot and in comes the developer to tell me “yes, it did suck.”
I work at a big company and commented once that some decision was stupid and one of the top two engineers at the company dropped in to tell me I was wrong. I felt so honored. (And he's wrong.)
The person who wrote v2 of a thing got a lot of shit, because there were a lot of "cons" that could have been predicted and mitigated.
I complained about them getting shit. Making a new thing is hard, and yes, there were "cons" but there are an enormous number of "pros," and you can't always block progress trying to enumerate and mitigate all of the "cons," especially if the "cons" are social in nature (which makes them hard to predict!)
I believe the company should have let the guy build v2 and see if it works. Let him test it in a few cases. Then he can try to shift to managing roll-out, and etc. Unfortunately, v2 became hugely popular instantly (wow, a problem I wish we all had!) and then a bunch of stuff went wrong, because the roll-out itself "should have been managed better."
So, #2 engineer-in-the-company came in to my comment thread, and documented the cons. Actually linked to a slideshow which showed each con on a separate slide.
Sure.
Here's the problem, v3 was written by a TEAM of people, with backing from leadership, and the "cons" of that job are enormous and embarrassing. I mean, really bad. Years later. Unpopular, and most people haven't migrated to it.
Stop giving that one guy shit when a team of people did worse. And especially if your main problem with his work was that it was too successful too fast!
HN is wonderful for that. I once commented on an article about Brave Browser that it was an ad extortion racket, and Brendan Eich showed up to call me an asshole. Good times!
I never called you an asshole, I quipped that your handle's surname suits you. Accuracy matters, especially given that you are the source of the ass* name.
I don't personally see much of a distinction between "asshole" and "asshat" in this context, and I think the intent of your reply was pretty clear. Nor do I begrudge the comment--it comes with the territory of choosing such a username. But if you believe my characterization of that exchange to be false, my apologies. The link to the original reply was posted almost immediately after my comment, and so the context is there for all to see. I summarized it in a way that I thought would be entertaining to the audience.
If you know a good way of searching through my entire comment history I'm happy to search for it, but it was some years ago, and I post several comments a day, so it may be a tall order to manually page through my history.