Read it for entertainment purposes only and it becomes... better.

Along with the data processing framework, Doug Cutting also included a fault tolerant, replicated, distributed file system with Hadoop just because fuck you. -- I laughed!

Also, it makes fun of Ruby so another point for it.

It's unlikely this article is accurate or really serves any purpose whatsoever other than immature linkbaity sort of content, but that's fine with me because I never put it in the category of "real journalism."

The article was definitely entertaining. I definitely laughed at

"Starling is the Ruby-based messaging system that runs Twitter's backend. Yes, Twitter, the nonprofit web service known widely for its downtime, dropped its disaster-producing shitpile on the world."

I agree. It's not like Hadoop and a related project Lucene (by the same lead programmer) don't have their own share of problems at some point in time.

(For the record I like Hadoop and Lucene.) I still remember the concurrency problems Lucene had a few years back which would result in index corruption (a lot of Java programmers experienced this). This was the reason that while I was excited about Hadoop when it 1st came out I was also hesistant. It was by the same guy who didn't fix concurrency problems for his previous major project - would history repeat itself? Well Hadoop first came out it had a similar problem which caused it to fail a task in some scenarios.

All of this may have been fixed by now, but I just want to show that nothing is perfect (regardless of language) and unless you are; you really shouldn't be a jerk about other people's hard work

And yet, we immediately recognize the style of the article is uncov. And we recognize the author's name.

It may be bad writing, but that doesn't matter. It's good enough.

No, it's not. It's sufficiently bad that I won't waste my time reading more articles by that author, and I will probably take a pass on articles by the Register, since their quality standards are low enough to let that drivel on.

(Actually, I've been avoiding The Register for a few years now, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt when this appeared on hacker news. It was a mistake.)

I think you misunderstand me.

I don't think the article is great. But it -does- accomplish exactly what the author wants. People talk about it. It reaches the top of HN. And despite of our distaste of The Register... we still read it.

So when I say it's "Good enough" it just means it gets the job done. The purpose of the article is clearly attracting attention. Being ignored worse than being disliked, after all. And it does attract a lot of (negative) attention. The poor writing even contributes to the goal.

With writing (or anything), if you can't say something with a calm demeanor, it's probably not worth listening to.

Rants, raves, or a negative, cynical tone suggests an ill-conceived idea; it's likely an emotional reaction.

If you read my first post, I'm not objecting to the tone so much as the way that it's used to cover the emptiness of the article. I can appreciate a good angry rant -- I've written some myself, and I tend to enjoy Zed Shaw's rants -- but an angry rant that slams things without justification is simply childishness and poor journalism. Sorry.

Edit: Oops, I totally misread your post. Sorry about that. For some reason I thought you were justifying the tone of the article. I hear that learning to read can solve this sort of problem ;-)

I agree that a good writer can discuss something without an angry rant, but I disagree that an angry/cynical tone implies an ill-conceived idea. I'd suggest that bad writers will try to use the angry rant format to hide the poverty of their ideas, but just as often a good writer will use it well as a rhetorical device, making an otherwise dull article more amusing, and driving home the important points. But either way, the format of the writing is (or rather, should be) secondary to the content.

Edit: Clarified what I wrote a bit

I was making a general comment. Not attacking the article, or your comment in particular.

Does anyone disagree that an angry rant, as a rule of thumb, probably means an ill-conceived idea?

EDIT: If you misread my comment, that's my fault. I should have written better.

I disagree. It is often the result of a frustrating experience.

Nah, I was distracted when I read it. It's clear, I'm just stupid.

Often valuable information is conveyed in a not-so calm demeanor. The delivery may not be the best, however.

I think the idea was to be entertaining.