What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project • Hacker News Board

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#291

Post by serf » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:10 AM UTC

Reverse misogyny. Had a man wrote a blog entry about crying due to 'boohoo comments' on the internet would get chastised out of the industry. A woman writes a blog entry about how her feelings get hurt and everyone with a set of swingers breaks down , puts on their big boy/high moral pants, and makes a grandiose apology (via published blog post, rather than private channels, because the fanbase must be informed lest we reduce our hits per month!)

Is this really a 250+ post thread about someone getting offended on the internet? Want to see an artist get offended about their work? Go check out deviant art.

Open code is inevitably peer reviewed. The development community since the mid 80s has been notorious relaxed, leisurely, casual. No suit, no tie culture. Are you really upset that you received a negative peer review in casual tongue?

Science has a similiar dilemma with peer review causing depression. Science and academia, however, do not have the same casual environment, however, and that is reflected in the peer review. Instead of "My eyes are bleeding", you receive things like "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!" ("Not only is it not right, it's not even wrong!") Is that not rude?

Don't open up your code and you won't receive harsh sentiments from those that read it. Worked for MS.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#292

Post by peterarmstrong » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:11 AM UTC

kyro wrote: post #282

peterarmstrong wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about this: this statement, right here, is a completely unfounded (i.e. you have no evidence about any of the 3 people being ASD, and the probability of all of them being ASD is really low even among geeks like us), passive-aggressive (you are attacking people with ASD but making it appear sympathetic), pseudo-intellectual (how much do you really know that you didn't read in superficial internet threads) insult…

I've worked with people with Asperger's and Autism in a clinical setting. I'm not talking out of my ass.

While you might not be, you're probably the exception. The typical interaction sequence is:

1. Someone is rude on the internet.

2. "Ooh, look, undiagnosed ASD, lol, most software devs are ASD."

3. Self-applause, occasionally followed by discussion about whether Asperger's is different than Autism or whether it's a spectrum disorder, occasionally someone mentions the new version of DSM. (Sometimes this really bothers someone, and then there's the meta-thing where people smirk and say that of course people with ASD don't like reclassification, etc, etc. It's so tiresome.)

I think this may well be a worthy successor to Godwin's law.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#293

Post by kamaal » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:12 AM UTC

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #281

tptacek wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been coding since 1993 and I have never made room in my brain for stuff like -print0. Moreover, there are times when you'll want to do this stuff from within another program. What are you going to do, shell out to a find(1) pipeline? Then people like me will be giving you shit. There's nothing wrong with rewriting sed in Javascript.

" I've been coding since 1993 and I have never made room in my brain for stuff like -print0." Seriously? find/xargs is nearly impossible to use (safely) without it.

You never need things until you begin to need them. If a way exists to solve your problems without learning arcane syntax people will take that way.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#294

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:12 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #279

MartinCron wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It makes my eyes bleed" is never fair criticism. It's vapid and meaningless and if I can implore just one person to stop saying it, I will feel like I have achieved something with my life.

Never say never. Imagine, say, a contact lens solution...

My wife actually did put in the contact lens deep cleaner into her eye instead of the regular saline drops. Her eyes didn't bleed, but we did get a tour of our neighborhood's lovely new Emergency Room.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#295

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:13 AM UTC

_ZeD_ wrote: post #275

tptacek wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been coding since 1993 and I have never made room in my brain for stuff like -print0. Moreover, there are times when you'll want to do this stuff from within another program. What are you going to do, shell out to a find(1) pipeline? Then people like me will be giving you shit. There's nothing wrong with rewriting sed in Javascript.

Please, tell me you're jocking: on your platform you cannot afford a pipe but you can launch node.js? by the way: "-print0 | xars -0" is really idiomatic, you know? Lucky you didn't have a single filename with spaces to handle...

I don't know what this even means. I'd already be running v8 runtimes. They're unavoidable. But there's no need to fork and exec (many times over) just to sweep a filesystem tree for files matching patterns.

It's the shell, by the way, that cares about "spaces in filenames". Not dicking around with shell metacharacters is just one of the many wins you get by not shelling out to accomplish basic programming tasks.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#296

Post by beering » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:13 AM UTC

orangethirty wrote: post #47

I was about to contribute to an OSS project run by one of the people making fun of the OP. Not anymore. I will not work with people who set out to humiliate others on "code quality" (whatever the fuck that means).

Does this make sense? Are there other many people that use that project? Does your contribution to it signify an endorsement of its maintainer? Have you already written the code? Is it fair to the other users of this project that you're withholding a contribution because of an idiotic remark by its maintainer? Would it be preferable to fork the project so that the maintainer can be somebody else? What if you create your own fork with your contribution and publish it? What if the other person who made fun of OP then merges your changes back into the original codebase?

I can't tell if this is an attempt at activism or an excuse to avoid doing something.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#297

Post by overgard » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:13 AM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #193

overgard wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good test of character is how one treats those that they perceive to be lower status than them. I'd say these guys fail that test.

It might be better to say that they failed last night and leave a more general judgment open. It's a good thing that people are calling this out and giving the participants cause to reflect on the problems with that kind of conversation (along with the rest of us). But I think it's also good if we don't rush to reduce people to some of their meaner moments. A lot of the participants have done a number of good things…

I was being pithy. I don't mean to suggest that they're awful people.

I think in the open source community there's an ugly culture of celebrating people that act like jerks about technical things that reasonable people could disagree on (the poster child of that probably being Linus). I don't think that's a useful culture to have around. I think the best way to get rid of that culture is to make clear that those people can go fuck themselves. Just because you can be a dick doesn't mean you should, and the community should reflect that.

I'm not the positivity police, I don't think people should be nice just for the sake of being nice, but there's no reason to go pick on someone's project just because it does something you'd rather do with another tool.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#298

Post by kamaal » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:15 AM UTC

mrb wrote: post #277

doktrin wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think you ended up really making the case for replace. The nix CLI examples are convoluted at best. I've used CLI tools for years, and it would probably take me 5-10 minutes of scanning the man pages to reproduce all but the simplest of those snippets. Granted, this boils down to the sporadic use-case, but that's the entire point. The replace examples are all clean. It would mean I would not be juggling l…

Then take the 5-10 minutes to scan the man pages. Write a simple shell script wrapper exposing a syntax as simple as "replace". And be done with it in 15 minutes top. It seems to me that writing all this js code would take a lot longer than 15 min.

I think the point everyone is trying to make here is. Should every person spend 5-10 minutes doing this?

If the problem occurs too frequently, it makes more sense to make the solution re usable. Which is exactly what 'replace' is doing here.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#299

Post by donniezazen » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:15 AM UTC

jlongster wrote: post #36

What the fuck. (And I rarely say that word.) We've got to grow up. This is 9th grade all over again. You know, those weird people that do things that you don't understand? They're the ones that grow up and make big impacts on the world. Why can't we get over our negativity? We can't stop ourselves from thinking horrible things, or even saying them out loud to people around us, but surely we can restrain ourselves fro…

Folks on internet fail to understand that there are people on the other side of terminal and some civility is warranted. All of us should discourage uncivil behavior by non-participating in a silly conversation.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#300

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 6:16 AM UTC

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #281

tptacek wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been coding since 1993 and I have never made room in my brain for stuff like -print0. Moreover, there are times when you'll want to do this stuff from within another program. What are you going to do, shell out to a find(1) pipeline? Then people like me will be giving you shit. There's nothing wrong with rewriting sed in Javascript.

" I've been coding since 1993 and I have never made room in my brain for stuff like -print0." Seriously? find/xargs is nearly impossible to use (safely) without it.

I use find|xargs pretty much exclusively for /usr/include and in my source code directories. Anything more complicated than that and I tend to be in an irb.

So you know who you're dealing with here, I used Emacs for something like 10 years before I figured out how to do regexp search/replace.

I'm pretty comfortable with my abilities as a software developer. If I was Steve, I'd be about as embarrassed about the idea that someone's "level of understanding" of find|sed|xargs was worth commenting about as I would about the rudeness. Of course, if I was Steve, I'd have apologized privately and not fed into the shitstorm, too. :)