[sidstling]

I think they are highly overrated and underrated at the same time. I think that useful opinions based on the practical experience of making stuff work, are extremely undervalued.

A lot of opinions aren’t bought by experience though. Opinions on the best x, are largely useless in my eyes, and easy to come by. You’ll see it in almost any HN discussion on a specific tech these days. I mean, when is the last time you saw a HN thread about JavaScript where half of it wasn’t a debate on why JS is good/shit and how WASM is the next Jesus?

I wouldn’t call all of those opinions undervalued, because they have no real use and serve no purpose. X is typically terrible and unproductive, but it’s also lovable and very productive. With almost everything there are pros and cons, and the only truly valuable opinions on anything are from people who make it work or crashed trying and then succeeded by doing something else.

I think this world needs a whole lot of “talk is cheap, show me the code”, but once someone actually does the work, I think we should learn from their experience. I think HN has been great at sharing the useful opinions, at least so far.

This was a semi-useless opinion by the way.

[qwerty456127]

> useful opinions based on the practical experience of making stuff work

A kind of opinions from people who are far from being established experts in a particular area are called "a fresh look" and may occasionally happen to be useful too as well as opinions of people who are more of generalists and theorists than specialists and practics. Opinions from skilled experts may occasionally happen to be a way too biased.

> Opinions on the best x are largely useless... half of it wasn’t a debate on why JS is good/shit and how WASM is the next Jesus?

If they uncover a lot about why and do it concisely I would not consider them useless.

That's my opinion :-)

[mmt]

> "a fresh look" and may occasionally happen to be useful

The use of three words to hedge the usefulness aspect, somewhat contradicts the original assertion of opinions being undervalued.

I happen to agree that a fresh look, in the form of an opinion from a non-expert, can be extremely valuable, especially since I'm acutely aware that I'm certain to be biased on any topic where I have expertise from experience. However, that value seems to be proportional to how well-informed it is.

That is, if the opinion is based on insufficient knowledge (that can be obtained other than by experience, such as with a Web search), it can easily result in a subtle form of talking past each other that doesn't reveal itself until after a long back-and-forth. Sadly, that mostly just reveals fundamental gaps in knowledge, rather than any fresh perspective.