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

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

#501

Post by anu_gupta »

brazzy wrote: post #475
timinman wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly not Twitter's fault. Lately, the open source community's underbelly has been exposed. "But open source is right and we are the good guys?!", or... "But I know those guys and they are usually really cool!" We want to categorize people as being bad or good, and it messes with our brain when we think we may have to re-categorize. It's more useful to realize that we all have a capacity to do both good and…

Yes, it's partially Twitter's fault. Enforced brevity in a popularity contest setting encourages smartassery and discourages (or makes impossible) nuanced expression.

Twitter isn't coming up to anyone, twisting their arm and telling them to be a dick. Lots of people manage to use Twitter without coming across like assholes.

If one feels that 140 characters isn't sufficient to correctly represent one's nuanced thoughts, then don't tweet.

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

#502

Post by huhtenberg »

brazzy wrote: post #497
huhtenberg wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify - apologies to other people . There's no such thing as accidental one-off snobbery.

Sure you're not falling victim to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error ?

> I cannot even make this stuff up:

You are clearly well versed in this subject. So, how would you attribute this remark?

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

#503

Post by webreac »

shaurz wrote: post #480
webreac wrote: post #404

At my office, I would be very angry if I encounter your tool. That would mean that the guy who has brought it was too lazy to learn the proper way and makes me waste my time learning how to use a useless tool. Your tool has no advantage over standard unix tools, it is just limited to a reduced number of use cases. This kind of tools does not favour improvement of skills or good practice. I think this is the cause of…

The so-called standard unix tools are just historical artefacts, there's nothing particularly special about them other than they were the first. sed is an arcane language which in my personal opinion is not worth learning (maybe it was for you), and for all but the most trivial tasks it's probably a better idea to use a proper language like Python. After all, the whole reason for Perl's existence was that sed/awk/sh…

I am a perl lover. I fully adhere to the idea that perl (or python or ruby or javascript) should be used instead of sed/awk/sh/grep/find each time we need to go beyond the basic usage of these commands.

I have never said that everybody should know the arcane parts of sed (http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sed). The unix tools work best when they are combined together (with pipes). The basic usage of sed is very useful to combine unix commands. Knowing the basics of standard unix tools has always been a time saver for me. Here is an example of a command that I may need in some unusual cases:

for i in $(awk '/PWP/{print $1}' machines) ; do

echo $i; rsh $i df . ; done

In my case, it does not worth being a script, because I may not have the same need before a month or two. Without unix tools, this would be a pain in the ass.

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

#504

Post by blablabla123 »

brazzy wrote: post #377
cachvico wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

My takeaway: "Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole."

I once saw a BBC documentation about "why do car drivers easily get angry at each other?"

This is really interesting, maybe you want to think for a minute yourself before I reveal the reason. When I watched the documentation to the end I was surprised, but when I think about it now I'm not surprised anymore:

Car driving involves no eye contact, in fact you hardly ever see the face of the other person. People behave differently and more nicely when they look into each other's face. One illustrative example were Laughter Clubs. People go there to laugh. So when a new member joins, all others stand around him, start to laugh and look him in the eye. No matter if the laughter starts artificially, only few moments later the person in the middle cannot stop laughing... ;)

Back to the topic: Twitter is probably the most impersonal way to communicate. E-Mailing with my tax consultant is more personal. I cannot tell how often I realized that misunderstandings were created with E-Mails (which have arbitrary length.) Or even text messages which are limited to ~500 characters; but Twitter? 140 character stubs to talk to complete strangers?

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

#505

Post by kyro »

paisawalla wrote: post #498
peterarmstrong wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not just rudeness that triggers this response -- it's when someone displays a severe doesn't get it moment. The most significant moment on HN I've had of this is when someone tried to argue that sexism can't exist in tech because there's a Wikipedia page that lists 50 women with significant contributions to the field. That sort of thing makes me wonder, if after 20-40 years of being part of our society, that is…

This is exactly it.

Time and time again you see large groups of people in this community exhibiting behaviors that show that they are unaware of normal social and societal conventions, and an inability to relate and sympathize/empathize with others.

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

#506

Post by SimHacker »

anu_gupta wrote: post #501
brazzy wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's partially Twitter's fault. Enforced brevity in a popularity contest setting encourages smartassery and discourages (or makes impossible) nuanced expression.

Twitter isn't coming up to anyone, twisting their arm and telling them to be a dick. Lots of people manage to use Twitter without coming across like assholes. If one feels that 140 characters isn't sufficient to correctly represent one's nuanced thoughts, then don't tweet.

And that's why I don't tweet!

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

#507

Post by Tyr42 »

mrb wrote: 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…

Replace looks better to me. I can figure out the command line options from just looking at them, and it does what I expect. I like it.

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

#509

Post by DannoHung »

Who else here really doesn't enjoy using sed, awk, grep, and xargs?

I try to use ack whenever I can avoid grep or find, personally. I wish there were better replacements for the other tools and that they were widely available (possibly as portable libraries).

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

#510

Post by pretoriusB »

redbad wrote: post #454
pretoriusB wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The arguments to common UNIX commandline tools like sed or xargs are without doubt going to be longer-lived than the arguments to your helper script, likely even longer than the language your helper script was written in, and maybe even longer than the idioms and philosophies you had in mind when you were building your tool(s). Calling the basic operation of these cornerstones "useless" speaks more about your disposi…

>The arguments to common UNIX commandline tools like sed or xargs are without doubt going to be longer-lived than the arguments to your helper script, likely even longer than the language your helper script was written in, and maybe even longer than the idioms and philosophies you had in mind when you were building your tool(s).

Yes. Sad isn't it?

It's not as if they were perfect when the were designed.

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