Live data from Hacker News

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

harthur.wordpress.com

361–370 of 826 posts

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

#361
post #275

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...

"find -print0 | xargs -0" handles spaces in filenames perfectly correctly.

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

#362
post #334
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then write it once and share the wrapper script on github. No?

Why do you have such a strong objection to someone spending their own free time to simplify and / or mimic [insert unix tool functionality here].

It clearly serves a purpose and it's apparently useful. Most importantly, it exists, so there's no need to argue over how you think it should have been implemented.

I'm sure if you were to release your own [script / wrapper], someone would find use for it, in the same manner that some have apparently used 'replace'. I honestly fail to see the big deal here.

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

#363
post #131

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…

Corey Haines wrote a thoughtful apology here: http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/2013/01/im-sorry.html Only one of the three to do so thus far.

I just looked at his twitter feed, and he has a lot of "I made a mistake" posts. What he did was bad, but at least he is not trying to minimize it. And this thread getting to the top of Hacker News will probably teach him a lesson.

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

#364

> Steve Klabnik ‏@steveklabnik > @harthvader @zeeg nothing's _wrong_ with it, but I don't want to build my app on top of others' code who are at this level of understanding This message [1] in particular is absolutely disgusting. Someone hacked together a script that met their needs, and threw it up onto GitHub in case anyone else found it useful? Yes, let's take the opportunity to condescendingly insult their mental…

This is scary. I share a lot of bad code in various places, that I created in process of learning or just because I needed something done quickly. I always inform that this code shouldn't be used in any system "as is", but may serve for learning purposes.

I know that a lot of people do that. And I find it incredibily useful, sometimes finding a snippet of code saves me time from jumping extra hoops, just because (for example) driver misbehaves or documentation is incorrect/incomplete.

I hope this incident doesn't stop anyone from sharing their code and findings, no matter how good or "professional" they are.

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

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the hell are you talking about? every person that created something worthwile in this world has been ridiculed. for good reason. i hate the fact that people here spout that uber positivity crap. you know what, you mess up -> you get ridiculed, what do you do? you make something better. The world is not this pretty flower place where everyone can be happy and strive at the same time. there is no rich without poor, and…

I fail to see what is being wrong with being positive and happy. We should strive to make the whole world as universally happy as possible. We can improve others with constructive criticism.

Clearly you can take it too far. If somebody does something wrong, are you allowed to tell them? Even though it is going to be negative? Do you never correct your children? Do you keep people on who need to be fired?

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

#366
post #200

Heather, I agree that people are unnecessarily rude to you. Don't sob. Your code shows you are already a more capable programmer than most of the ones I interview. No one has given you a clear answer as to why your code is reinventing the wheel, so allow me to do it politely. I took every single example from your README, and show you below how everything can be reimplemented with sed -r (nice extended regex syntax, m…

>I took every single example from your README, and show you below how everything can be reimplemented with sed -r (nice extended regex syntax, mostly like js regexs), and find/xargs:

And why assume a POSIX command line?

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

#367
> I can’t help but think of potential future employers that are no longer potential.

Remember that this also applies to the potential employers of the people making these remarks. I don't think employers like these kind of toxic comments and sometimes I think Twitter actually has some use for decent people in that it acts as a honeytrap for exposing certain tendencies in not-so-decent people that would otherwise go unnoticed due to the holier-than-thou aura these people create for themselves. "Bro, look at his code! Guys! Guys! Look!"

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

#368
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my (naive) eyes, your examples act as a compelling advertisement for her library. The sed/xargs/etc. examples look increasingly like impossible-to-memorize line noise to me, while the --include, --exclude etc. options in `replace` are comprehensible and seem to follow standard command line argument practices. Again, this is from a very entry-level unix tools perspective, but there it is. It also seems to me that r…

Impossible to memorize? I wrote all these examples from memory. I tested them in a shell and had a single error (sed -ir needed to be changed to sed -ri because -i takes a glued "suffix" argument). I really don't think it is that hard to memorize the basic find/xargs options. You only have to memorize them once in your lifetime. They are a basic cornerstone of a Unix skillset. By comparison, I often forget the custom…

>Impossible to memorize? I wrote all these examples from memory.

Yes. And people can site Pi to the 10.000 digit. Doesn't make it any less useless.

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

#369

> Steve Klabnik ‏@steveklabnik > @harthvader @zeeg nothing's _wrong_ with it, but I don't want to build my app on top of others' code who are at this level of understanding This message [1] in particular is absolutely disgusting. Someone hacked together a script that met their needs, and threw it up onto GitHub in case anyone else found it useful? Yes, let's take the opportunity to condescendingly insult their mental…

> What does he even mean by saying that he doesn't "want to build my app" on top of harthur's code? Nobody asked him to I can't speak for him, but based on another comment further down ("I'll be over here in not-node"), it read like a dig at Node itself by proxy / extension. > Yes, let's take the opportunity to condescendingly insult their mental competency. Indeed. This type of behavior is almost never justified, bu…

I might be an emotionless robot or something, but I don't get the furore over this.

Everyone writes crap code sometimes (viz. github.com/007 aka craptown USA). Just because you are "exceedingly talented" or have "well-used" projects doesn't mean everything you write is rainbows and unicorns.

If your project is useful to you, then screw everyone else - why care what they think?

https://github.com/harthur/kittydar is useless but brilliant. I'll be bookmarking it for the next time I need feature detection in JS, and because it mentions HOG descriptors.

https://github.com/harthur/replace is useful but not-brilliant. I'll bookmark the 'sed' or 'awk' manpage instead.

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

#370

Then I see these people’s follower count, and I sob harder. I can’t help but think of potential future employers that are no longer potential. There's a big responsibility that comes with being well-liked and nice. When someone with a good reputation and the means to broadcast it speaks negatively about someone, it matters much more than someone who is routinely rude, frequently negative, or unknown. I know that if t…

Fair point. Once I read the names of those involved, I was a little taken aback for this very reason. Friends I respect think quite highly of Corey, for instance. Also worth noting, both [Steve and Corey] have published apologies on their own blogs. Both are worth reading.

Here's the other apology, http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node

Heather, don't take it personally - your code is fine! JavaScript, on the other hand, is a wounded warrior by now..

Post reply on HN