11–20 of 190 posts
useless without pointer to the actual behavior.
Anonymous examples would help make the point, but outright pointers to the behavior described is not a not too distant cousin of "hah check out this jerk"
If people are acting like assholes, they deserved to be called out.
A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or…
You could at least dismiss them in a friendly/neutral way. "Sorry, can't accept this: check out procedure X in the docs."
A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or…
He's not talking about lowering the bar to entry, he's just saying you don't need to humiliate others when they are just trying to help you. You could at least dismiss them in a friendly/neutral way. "Sorry, can't accept this: check out procedure X in the docs."
Part of the "bar to entry" is that mindset. You don't get a pat on the back and warm encouragement for submitting crap code. You get told your code is crap with the expectation you'll improve before wasting the reviewer's time again.
Call me crazy, but I happen to love this environment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anonymous examples would help make the point, but outright pointers to the behavior described is not a not too distant cousin of "hah check out this jerk"
When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? If people are acting like assholes, they deserved to be called out.
Let me quote a recent example from IRC:
> XXXXX interesting how the number of new github issues went down since i started ignoring them :)
> XXXXX could be coincidence, but i suspect having a few open tickets discourages the more frivolous requests we usually got there"
Nice attitude there! After reading several such comments and some diatribe on github (following a bug report), I really had difficulties justifying the use of the software developed by this guy, especially after having been warned about this earlier by a co-worker ("the project is fine, XXXXX is the only problem with it") and not taking it seriously because I thought he was exaggerating (I'm not really into personality cult etc.).
A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or…
Maybe the code is of high quality, but they usually end up stale and defunct from lack of contribution.
A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or…
A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or…
Derision of stupidity is probably one of the worst characteristics of hacker culture, because “stupidity” tends to be shorthand for “disagreement with my point of view”.
I have trouble making a cogent argument around the derision of stupidity because derision should be self-evidently bad. It should automatically file under “why would I want to do this to my own personality”. Derision and bullying are indistinguishable from each other, and the thought that a group as oft-socially-maligned as hackers (at least until the last 6 years or so) defaults to derision seems more a sign of imitating things we were subjected to than reasoned thought.
“If you go up to a group of people who are used to doing things according to procedure X and you blithely ignore it, you really should not be surprised when your efforts are met with derision at best and hostility at worst.”
What does blithely ignore mean? Say this is the first open source project I've ever contributed to, so I don't know what the norms are in terms of where to even look for guidelines. Or I contributed 30 minutes of my time because that's all I had, and I devoted them to this. Or I'm learning to program, and I chose to try to help your project.
I will posit that anyone who is trying to contribute to your project is doing you a kindness. They may be doing it in a poor way, and you are within your rights to point that out. But how you point it out is what we're talking about. You an politely point out that the project doesn't accept pull requests. You can politely point out that tickets can't be opened until there's been a discussion on the mailing list. Etc. You can even be curt.
Derision is not curtness. It is not impatience. It is explicit, intentional putting-down of someone because they aren't as good at something as you are or think they should be. And it is a poison. Unfortunately, if you take it frequently enough, it becomes habit. It becomes second nature. And you stop noticing it's poisonous. And so, unfortunately, it is an oft-enjoyed poison in intellectual circles. It doesn't help anything. It doesn't help you understand the world or other people. It doesn't really save you that much time. It simply makes you feel better about yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? If people are acting like assholes, they deserved to be called out.
Singling out individuals/incidents would support the author's epistemic authority but would undermine their moral authority on the topic
I've never seen an opensource leader make fun of an honest attempt at contribution. What I have seen is a lot of ignoring and rejecting attempts. Miguel de Icaza had a blog post on this I think. The problem with large opensource projects is that they have a lot to do, and simply don't have time to thoroughly follow up on all the small contributions that are ridden with naieve errors and plain formatting issues. Not t…
Perhaps I'm being naive, but doesn't fostering relationships with contributors promote more contributions? Or is it considered far too rare that a (somewhat) mentored contributor will continue to contribute?