That’s like the second most annoying thing people do around here. The most annoying thing is…

Just kidding :)

I think it is because it feels at least vaguely like contributing, but also allows the poster to show off a bit by claiming some deeper knowledge/better tool or something like that.

I dunno. The threaded nature of the conversations means that it just forms its own tangent. It might steal a little oxygen from the on-topic conversation, but it seems mostly harmless otherwise.

On good old fashioned phpBB style boards this sort of thing would never happen, because…

At least part of it is trying to save people work, I imagine. "That's a cool tool, but there's an existing, well-supported one that already solves those problem."

Of course, the problem here is that Nix may be similar to this language, but they solve different problems. So I imagine the writer is just mistaken, and it comes off as one-upsmanship.

Had the comment started with “You can find similar ideas in Nix” I think it would have been well-received. Tone and intent matter.

Fair enough regarding tone; unfortunately too late to edit (man, I wish they’d increase the time limit on that)

> can someone tell me what this is? this instinct to "one-up" posts?

Showing better solutions would be helpful. It would inform readers about an alternative that deserves consideration.

But the "use nix" and "RIIR" posts instead are just fanboyism: HN readers already know that nix and rust exist.

> can someone tell me what this is? this instinct to "one-up" posts?

That’s not at all what I said. I just said that the fundamental idea here is already available for everyone at the component level for your entire system. Unison just takes this idea down into the language. A new language that you’d have to convert 100% of your work into in order to benefit from, and then you’d STILL suffer from the same things outside that ecosystem in your software, that Nix solved.