alt Hacker NewsNo; top comment: "don't use it" because "I tested on <my setup>" and <it failed> - you don't see the problem?
It is OK to point out, but not to dissuade others from using, you see? Especially on a Show HN for a cool project where some good person has clearly poured their passion into it. You got to stand up for that stuff. Bring the positivity, man! Frame real issues in the correct (qualified and personal) light, not proclaiming a blanket recommendation, way to go.
I get how making such quick generalizations can serve you well as an engineer, but when people's work is involved it pays to think about it a bit more! :)
Example of respectful: I tried this, super cool, and I encourage everyone to give it a try. For my setup (details), I could only get 10 to work <more details if you want>, but that might just be me. All around super awesome project, love it!"
Example of truly awesome comment if you want to be a super star: I tried this, super cool, and I encourage everyone to give it a try. For my setup (details), I could only get 10 to work <more details if you want>, but that's probably just me! edit: Thinking about it some more, I realized it might be because my device uses an outdated lib<something> and I just updated that and I got 19 of them to work! I checked <the qr code scanning app>'s GitHub and saw they also hadn't updated this dependency. So I opened an issue, and let them know about this, here's the link: <gh issue>. All around super awesome project, love it!"
You get the idea?
Few word mantra: contribute and build, not deplete and discourage.
Replies
I see your point! But there’s an issue specific to QR codes here.
See, if you generate a code and it works for you, you generally expect it to work for other QR readers as well. If all you want to create a QR code for yourself to use (say, to deactivate an alarm with a code, or a Wi-Fi code for your guests to connect maybe, this should be fine. However, things like this will inevitably be used in production, and it would be really bad if, say, a QR code gets printed on a million copies of something and turn out to only work for some users.
I agree that we should support new projects and not choke them down with overly negative commentary. However, piling up positivity doesn’t help either: your second example doesn’t feel genuine to me, more like a spam review in app store or something. I love the sandwich approach in your first one though!
How about this: “Cool project! Some styles are really nice, I didn’t know you can make QR codes like this ever work. However, when I tried reading them with [app name] scanner app, only a few styles actually worked for me. Perhaps it works with other scanners, but this one has [99M+] downloads last month [/ active user base or something]. So if you want to use those be sure to check it works everywhere, and maybe stick to more plain styles? I also hope this gets addressed in the qrframe itself – perhaps tweaking the contrast in styles [X] and [Y] a bit would help.”
It is still way too fluffy IMO, but much more substantial. It is harder to write, of course.
In this case, the builder actually agreed with the feedback. You had no reason to call it “poosey”, in fact that’s a stupid word to even have in your vocabulary.
The problem here is that it cannot possibly work robustly. It does what it does by trampling all over the error correction codes and using out of spec pixel shapes.
This is not the sort of problem that will go away once the technology matures. It is fragile by its very nature.
It is absolutely OK to recommend against it on that basis.