Author here! When I originally submitted it, it didn't get a lot of traction (it got on the front-page via the second chance pool a couple days later), and I definitely regretted not including "written in Rust" in the title. I'm acutely aware of HN's love of Rust, and the subsequent grumbling about always bringing it up that something is written in Rust, so I left it out with the false illusion that not mentioning it would make it more "pure" or something.
But I was also pretty confident that I made something useful, and, in hindsight, I don't think I should have preemptively felt bad about using some "cheap" form of marketing to get people to see it. I have really conflicting thoughts about marketing and self-promotion from my experience trying to show people my other project, plaintextsports.com [1] (live sports scores in plain text with no ads or trackers so it loads instantly! I think the HN crowd would love it!). There's a weird line between marketing and advertising and self-promotion, where one is "ok", but the other is frowned upon. It's also a tale as old as time that the better marketed but technically inferior product wins out. (AC vs DC initially, Betamax vs VHS!) How much of success is being brazen enough to ignore those norms and shamelessly promote something? Should it be considered shameful to promote it in the first place?
In this case, being written in Rust is definitely a feature, as least when comparing tools! fx [2], a similar tool that made the front-page a couple months ago runs using Node, and I'm sure jless can handle bigger files and uses less memory (though admittedly I haven't actually verified this).
You did make something useful. Don't feel bad about the title here. It's not like you're selling this as a rewrite of something that already exists with the only difference being that it's Rust. (And certainly not like the worse case of that where the selling point is "rewritten in Rust" but it actually has fewer features or is less user friendly than the original)
Content quality is key. The post "We're choosing Rust, and not Go, C++, or Node.js" got flagged a few hours ago after reaching the front page briefly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30465632 Although it reached some conclusions similar to those I might reach, it also (as another poster put it) "invited language flame wars" and contained some shoddy reasoning, which I and others did not appreciate.
I like reading posts touching on Rust which lead to thought-provoking and civil discussions — especially when the choice of Rust is germane — and I appreciate knowing that Rust is involved from the titling/marketing. Thanks for your good work!
But I was also pretty confident that I made something useful, and, in hindsight, I don't think I should have preemptively felt bad about using some "cheap" form of marketing to get people to see it. I have really conflicting thoughts about marketing and self-promotion from my experience trying to show people my other project, plaintextsports.com [1] (live sports scores in plain text with no ads or trackers so it loads instantly! I think the HN crowd would love it!). There's a weird line between marketing and advertising and self-promotion, where one is "ok", but the other is frowned upon. It's also a tale as old as time that the better marketed but technically inferior product wins out. (AC vs DC initially, Betamax vs VHS!) How much of success is being brazen enough to ignore those norms and shamelessly promote something? Should it be considered shameful to promote it in the first place?
In this case, being written in Rust is definitely a feature, as least when comparing tools! fx [2], a similar tool that made the front-page a couple months ago runs using Node, and I'm sure jless can handle bigger files and uses less memory (though admittedly I haven't actually verified this).
[1]: https://plaintextsports.com
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861043