Show HN: NotepadJs – A cross-platform love letter to Notepad

This comment breaks both the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

Please don't dismiss other people's work like this. It poisons community and disincentivizes people from sharing in the future, making HN worse for all of us.

All: if your comment begins with a snarky "Great, another", you should probably rethink whether the entire post is suitable for this site.

p.s. I don't mean to pile on what dspillett already said and am sorry if it felt that way. I just need to say something because it's so important to the future of the community here. Especially when someone is personally sharing their own work.

I don't think you are right on this one.

This is a primarily tech oriented website. When someone posts a 2 years old cross-platform project that's arguably suboptimal from many technical perspectives, and the submitter explicitly asks for feedback and criticism, I think it is fair game to actually give feedback instead of hugboxing.

Certainly—but it is not hard to do that while also respecting the guidelines. Here is one thing that https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html says about comments on Show HNs:

  When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is, but don't be gratuitously negative.

Making criticisms by starting out with "Great, another" is snarky and gratuitously negative. This is not a borderline call.

Also, "we have had better for decades" is arguably a shallow dismissal of someone's work, which https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks commenters to avoid:

  Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

If I make my own toaster as a side project, pointing out that there have been better toasters for decades is not meaningfully engaging with that work.

Better might be to inquire: what is it about the toasters that have existed for decades that wasn't satisfying you? And then I might say "well, I wanted it to have a progress bar". And you might say "Mousetoaster was released 18 years ago and more or less already had that," and then we could have an interesting conversation about it.

That's the sort of interaction we want. It still offers lots of ways to talk about what's missing from a project, or the fact that it won't work on Firefox.

I agree with you and wish I could delete my comment. I didn't realize this was a Show HN by the actual author, neither is HN a place for me to vent.

Don't worry! The only thing that matters is recalibrating going forward. If you're willing to do that, all will be well.

This whole thing is a learning process for all of us, and me most of all.

p.s. I appreciate your reply. It's not easy to be so open and most people can't or won't do it.