Top all-time · #14572
Deirdre Saoirse Moen
Personal blog · deirdre.netculturecareer
Deirdre Saoirse Moen writes Sounds Like Weird, a personal blog at deirdre.net about culture and career. Since 2013, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-03-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Deirdre Saoirse Moen's 2014 post "Programming Sucks and Why I Quit", about her leaving software engineering over the state of code on the web. Commenters cite it only as a reference.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Sounds Like Weird
Most-linked posts?
- Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-10-05
What Hacker News says?
Markdown and/or markdown processors are known to change. Since there's no single Markdown spec, determining just how a page will render, or what will break, is a bit of a crapshoot. And since Markdown treats nonparsable markup as ... plain text, you don't even get errors or other indicators of failure. You've got to view and validate the output manually or by some other means. With formal tag-based markup languages…
Comment linking /programming-sucks-why-i-quit/
on “18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated”Submitted Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014) as a story · 41 points
HN discussion“The web is an error condition” probably refers to this article: http://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/ > One day, I walked into the break room and heard a coworker say, “The Web is an error condition,” referring to the deplorable state of code out on the Web. I think that was the end of the end for me, because it just depressed me. It depressed me not because it was untrue, but because it was so perfectly…
Comment linking /programming-sucks-why-i-quit/
on “The End of Gmane?”Submitted Programming Sucks and Why I Quit as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFirst: thanks for a point-by-point commentary. I disagree with some of your points, but also want to note that what I gave as email's weaknesses are frequently also strengths. I'll try to clarify the distinction. 1. Clients: There are cases in which functions which ought be standardised aren't. These are particularly problematic where archives of email from multiple systems are presented. References, quoting, and re…
Comment linking /programming-sucks-why-i-quit/
on “Why kernel development still uses email”Submitted Pronoun Power as a story · 2 points
HN discussion"The Web is an Error Condition" -- not an essay of its own but a comment within this one: http://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/ Honestly, I miss the days when Netscape Navigator would just halt rendering in the middle of your page, saying, “No, I will not parse any more of your shit until you fix it.”
Comment linking /programming-sucks-why-i-quit/
on “Web Fonts Collateral Damage of Ad Blockers”Actually, I deleted my github account while I was a software engineer at Apple. Here, have a photo of my Steve Jobs engraved iPad I got while working on the Safari team: http://deirdre.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/SJ-engraved-iP... Presence or absence of a github account isn't meaningful. Plenty of really great programmers have never had them, and there's plenty of crap code on github. (And the inverse is also tru…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2011/10/SJ-engraved-iPad1.jpg
on “Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)”What my experiments with various content creation and markup systems over the past 30 years have shown me is that it's far less details of presentation which are crucial, but in enforcing document structure itself . Presentation changes with technology -- I've seen and used systems with toggle-and-light outputs, true ttys (paper), glass ttys, various terminal and console outputs, the "standard" 24x80 terminal, deskt…
Comment linking /programming-sucks-why-i-quit/
on “HTML as TeX replacement”The first one is a 404. I love the irony of there being an error condition in this case of a missing redirect. https://deirdre.net/2014/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/
Comment linking /2014/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/
on “Browsers barely care what HTTP status code your web pages are served with”"The Web is an error condition": < http://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/ > See also Richard I. Cook's "How Complex Systems Fail": < https://how.complexsystems.fail/ > (Latter is an HN perennial, with 55 sumbissions presently: < https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how%20complex%20systems%20fail >. Most recent 10 months ago, so not quite ready for a re-up: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895812 >.)
Comment linking /programming-sucks-why-i-quit/
on “Browsers barely care what HTTP status code your web pages are served with”
