 Hi everyone, my name is Patti Foran. This is a station in Palin Canard, the treachery of Hacker News. If you speak French, you'll notice I spilled something wrong there. Bonus points if you can figure out what. Ooh, I've got a countdown timer. This is really cool. Today I want to talk to you a little bit about Hacker News and communities and making things. My employer had me write a blog post for them, for our blog about, you know, using message queues. And as part of it, they want me to include an image because everyone likes images. So I had to include images, like it's a message queue. I want to use ducks in a line, like queuing up. Because ducks like queuing, so I used this image here. And there's giggles, so I can see everyone's, like, figured out what I have here. Those don't really look like ducks. And I thought about this and I was like, wait, I have to call them ducks. Because you see, on the Flickr page, the artist calls them ducks. And I knew, I knew if I used this image, there was going to be that one guy on Hacker News that's like, ah, the artist says those are ducks, not geese. So you can't call them geese, those are ducks. The artist has authority. And you know, you really need to respect the artistic integrity, like the authority of the author. And I was like, okay, so I'm going to call these geese, or I'm going to call these geese ducks. What's the worst that can possibly happen? Judging by the giggles, you all know what could possibly happen. The article hit number one on Hacker News. We got a bunch of comments. My employer's really pleased, but I was personally a little bit less pleased because, as you can guess, the worst thing that could possibly happen is that all the comments I get about this are, hey, you idiot, those aren't actually ducks. So I was like, wait, this feels a little bit ironic that, you know, I tried to avoid this and instead walked right into this trap. But you would think there's paranoid for this. That's not actually the case. Like a year ago, I wrote some software, distributed hash table written in Go, actually. And I was really nervous about releasing it. And I kind of decided I was going to sneak it in under the table and release it to the Go community. And they were just going to give me feedback because distributed hash tables are really hard. Like there's a lot of math in those things. And I was an English major. So that was not like a real, that was the first time I've done anything that hard. So I was just going to kind of sneak it in under the table and let the Go community give me feedback and then maybe do more public release later. As you can guess, that also hit number one on Hacker News. And I got thousands of page views in a night. So, yeah, that also got a bunch of attention from people. So I was a little bit leery about this. But when I hit number one on Hacker News this time, I, of course, did not walk away unscathed either. Breakdown of the comments I received. 13% were, why did you choose that name? 57% were, why didn't you use Rabbit Arm Key or my other favorite technology? And then a good 30% were other. Probably like 15% were actually about it. And this confused me because a hacker is supposed to be someone that likes to make things. Like I thought that was part of my job is to enjoy making things. But people seemed really, really upset that I, like, made something, which didn't really make sense to me. I got comments like, why didn't you use something that already existed? And I was like, well, I made something and gave it to you. My bad. So, like, I kind of sat around and I was thinking about this like, okay, so how do I deal with this? So there's like this pondering, what do you do now? And I come up with a couple solutions. I'm going to kind of propose them here. But I think that's kind of the main purpose of my talk. This talk isn't really actually useful. I just want to defend it and the giggles may feel better. So one thing you can, you know, see no evil, just not read the comments. This is actually what I've done is I just no longer read hacker news comments and somehow my life does not seem any emptier than before. Which is a shock to me personally. But so, like, the way I don't read comments is that I, you know, subscribe to, you can't see it, that's a, there's RSS, which is this really cool open standard technology for subscribing to things. Hacker News supports it. Go figure. There's also a Twitter bot that you can follow and it just gives you the links. So you don't see any of the comments, which is really cool. The other thing you can do is if you actually want to read comments, you can be like the proverbial high five in the community. Like, yeah, you made something. Go you instead of, hey, you made something, what's wrong with you? So if you want to try and combat the tide, then I would really encourage giving out high fives. But, like, the most important thing is this is Neil Gaiman, who's hideous cut off. Neil Gaiman gave an awesome talk like a commencement address at a university. And the point of his talk was really just that you should continue to make good art. And making good art just means that no matter what happens, no matter what bad things happen, just continue doing what you do, because that's what makes you who you are. So continue to make things, even if people get mad at you for making things. And that's really kind of all I wanted to get across today. I do have one more slide. This is my puppy doing a velociraptor impression. So I'm going to leave you with that. Thank you very much.