The people who publish easy stuff are typically new developers/entrepreneurs, simply people with less practice. There aren't all that many amazing, experienced developers with deep toolkits and skills. Better to commend people for trying and critique their work for what it is, than bemoan the lack of depth.
This sort of comment slings mud at the efforts of the young and inexperienced, when we should be trying to form a welcoming community that helps them grow. Our duty is to be supportive and help comb through the chafe to help find the diamond tech, content, and comments. That's the point of being here.
I agree, but there's another factor besides inexperience: time constraint. Many people have day jobs. Any projects that they do for fun or interest have to fit into their spare time. There's a limit to how ambitious such projects can be, and we definitely don't want to exclude them.
I think it's critical for HN to welcome a wide spectrum of original work. We want to see major technical achievements, of course. But we also want to see the minor one-offs. The bar for sharing your work on HN should be low.
The relationship between major work and minor one-offs is mysterious. Things that start off playful and trivial can develop in unexpected ways. Or maybe a success at something trivial inspires someone to a more ambitious next effort. If we want to have a culture of people sharing things they've made—which we do—we need to accept that most won't seem very impressive.
A good example is 2048. That game and its many variations weren't necessarily technically impressive. But the way in which a whole bunch of people riffed on each other's work for a few weeks—that was one of the most creative things ever to happen spontaneously on HN. If the game itself had been less trivial, I doubt that would have happened. The barrier to entry would have felt too high, so people without much time or experience wouldn't have gone for it. But because it was so simple, making one's own variation felt doable, and lots of people did.
The people who publish easy stuff are typically new developers/entrepreneurs, simply people with less practice. There aren't all that many amazing, experienced developers with deep toolkits and skills. Better to commend people for trying and critique their work for what it is, than bemoan the lack of depth.
This sort of comment slings mud at the efforts of the young and inexperienced, when we should be trying to form a welcoming community that helps them grow. Our duty is to be supportive and help comb through the chafe to help find the diamond tech, content, and comments. That's the point of being here.