Cerebro App – Open-source productivity booster with a brain

This is the internet.

And this is a (mainly) hacker community -who are not known for their politeness-, and good engineering matters for hackers. (as it should) I think that this is the perfect medium for rudeness.

The whole reason people post their projects here is to get criticism of any kind. If one is disheartened because of a rude comment, one needs to grow up.

One needs to learn how to deal with comments; learn to decide on which ones to take seriously and which ones to not..

The good thing about the internet is that most of us are anonymous here. So you can not judge my comments based on my identity (or my history, e.g. what i have done). Nor you can punch me in the face for being rude or something. The thing you get in exchange is honesty (hopefully).

This is healthy. Let's embrace it, and keep politeness and politics for face-to-face meetings.

In spirit i agree with you.

In practice the problem here is, to use a really crude analogy:

The Cerebro developers rented an empty mall for super cheap, then opened a single restaurant in it. Some people won't mind driving all the way there and walking through the entire thing to get to the restaurant, other people will.

The advice then in that situation is to one of these:

1. Demolish the parts of the mall that aren't used, piece by piece, while trying to not knock over the restaurant situated on the third floor, so other people can build their houses on the now free space, closer to the restaurant.

2. Abandon it and build a new restaurant in the middle of the city.

Everyone recognizes that both of these are very expensive solutions and unlikely to ever be implemented, so you end up with two kind of people.

1. Those who shrug and walk away saying nothing.

2. Those who go, with various amounts of emphasis: "Aw, i wish you hadn't done that."

There is no happy middle ground possible here, sadly.

For instance, I am currently learning data science from the ground up (i.e. reading the fundamental mathematical literature) and doing it outside of a university program. It is disheartening to post a question, to say Cross Validated, and have a few critical commenters almost laugh the motivation out of me. So, I can emphasize.

However, on the other hand, as a software practitioner, I am often on the other side of the fence. In this field in particular it seems like there are often amateurs who decide to jump in with an arrogant disrespect for the existing community knowledge and practices. I think it's because software is very cool now (like statistics, etc.). And, in software it's easy to find some code and libraries and 'wire them together' in crude ways.

Note, I am not implying that this is the case here! I haven't even looked at the software nor read most of the comments. But, since I often see this happening, I know that such comments are expected. I'm only commenting on your perspective.

I am not against autodidacts. In fact, I am one myself. And, I encourage it. But, all autodidacts should expect and embrace criticism from the community. It sucks to take it, because often commenters are often overly harsh and blunt. But, in defense of them, every community will be like this, to some degree. And, it's expected. Many of these practitioners have spent their life doing it, and they have some right to be critical, don't they?