“What is Success?” by Evan Czaplicki

Why HN readers recommended it

Cited in debates over Elm's direction and open source health, with some praising its points about metrics and others finding its tone toward unhappy users hard to watch.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Elm Europe

Topic

open source project success

Format

talk

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

2

HN mentions in dataset

8

Recommendation years in dataset

2018–2023

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Why is the pace of releases an important metric for using a programming language? Focus on code quality, and maintenance simplicity. If anything, being able to use the same version for x years and having it be consistently better than any JS library/framework I used, …

• Interesting observation by Aaron Swartz. That could happen because the barrier to entry for adding to a text blurb is much lower than that for contributing to a code base — maybe because we practice the former for a decade in school. For code, ease …

• Agreed; I think it's important to realize that a naive bias for action/productivity is not always the best thing. It's imperative to cultivate a good sense of what is worth doing, otherwise one will just produce a lot that will be irrelevant at best or …