That’s one reason Apache shouldn’t have used essentially the same name as a well-known VM released more than 20 years prior.

This feels like willful ignorance.

Can you really read the blog without realizing that there is a possibility this isn’t referring to Apache beam?

Nearly every personal blog post submitted here written for people that use a less-mainstream tool/environment/language draws aggressively obtuse comments by people mad that the author didn’t anticipate their lack of knowledge.

There have been math and CS paper submissions where people complained that the papers lacked a complete course on set theory or some CS theory concept the paper relied on. It's a weird thing to do, but apparently popular.

I think it’s an insecurity response— lashing out to distract themselves from feeling needlessly embarrassed for encountering something new or getting confused about something.

I hope you're not accusing the original commenter here of "lashing out" for wanting one definition at the start.

I was speaking more generally, but sure, I think the behavior fits. BEAM has a lot more surface area than Apache Beam does here — just do a site search for beam and see how far you have to go to see the Apache project. It’s ridiculous to expect the author of a blog post targeted at people interested in BEAM to disambiguate between them. Additionally, it’s a BEAM conference talk converted to a blog post and it says so right at the beginning of the article with a link to the conference. Thirdly, whoever submitted the link expecting a technical crowd to put in a modicum of effort to figure things out from context is completely reasonable. And how arbitrary is expecting the line to be drawn at your level of need? Shouldn’t project managers be able to read the article without having to look up VM meaning Virtual Machine? Or that functional programming isn’t any programming that uses a function? So yeah, I do not think it’s valid to criticize an author of a blog post aimed at people who already understand the subject for not putting a 1000’ overview at the top.

A criticism asking for one sentence that the author then went and added is pretty well short of lashing out in my book. And by itself is very weak evidence of insecurity. Shrug.

Semantics. Shrug.

Erlang isn't even that obscure.

Who would look at something called The BEAM Book with a link to [1] and think that it refers to a book with a completely different title?

[1] https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/

Because of you ask a person who works on Beam about “the Beam book” thats the one they are going to recommend. Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? There are many books like that, “the SRE book” is actually Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, etc.

> Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”?

I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. This is why the WWW was invented, someone uses hypertext to create a link to something related to a reference. You click on the link, and you learn about what it is.

This keeps web pages from having to all include a full encyclopedia and dictionary and translations in 100 languages in every page. You use the technology of last century to create and integrate into a web of related content, where the links (ideally, but not always) contain additional related and informative content without the need to copy the contents of every page into every other page.

You are coming across as wilful, petulant and ignorant; hence stop digging the hole you are in. Don't argue for argument's sake.

We are not here to makeup for your shortcomings nor spoon-feed you knowledge in various domains.

People share whatever they want and if it is something i don't know anything about, i just do a quick Google search (eg. "what is BEAM in computer science") which immediately tells me what it is (especially the AI overview from Gemini at the beginning). You didn't even do this trivial step but are arguing that people should have anticipated your ignorance and handheld you; not going to happen ever.

Everything on HN can be categorized as one of; 1) Pointers to stuff(useful/useless/junk knowledge) 2) Opinions (clueless/beginner/intermediate/expert) 3) News. That's it; what you do with it is up to you.

That would be true if the society was already perfectly fair and neutral (which some people believe).

However, there is racism and sexism in the world (it's systemic, in a sense it's not about one person not liking another personally, but biases propagated throughout the society). To counter that, you need to recognize it, and it will be necessary to treat some people differently.

For example, women may not feel safe being a small minority at a gathering full of men. If you do nothing, many potentially interested women will not show up. You could conclude that it's just the way things are and women are simply not interested enough in the topic, or you could acknowledge the gender-specific issue and do something about it. But this isn't a problem affecting everyone equally, so it would require treating women specially.

People ARE treated differently based on race and gender. For example, women are severely underrepresented in the tech industry.

You can either look into why that is and attempt to address underlying issues, or you can pretend people are sexist for doing something that doesn't directly benefit you.

The way how you respond and means of addressing the issue very much matters. It's possible to have equitable objectives, but using discriminatory means. For example, just declaring quota and filling to order will fulfill the objective, but will be very discriminatory in practice.

Equity vs. Equality. Google it, “my dude”.

I do think a lot of these people who claim reverse racism just have no idea what the word “equity” even means.