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

#551

Post by mpyne » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:00 PM UTC

petdance wrote: post #307

kamaal wrote: 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.

> I think the point everyone is trying to make here is. Should every person spend 5-10 minutes doing this? Exactly. People tell me "Nobody needs ack, you just write wrappers around find+grep" and I say "You could, but I published it and now people don't have to."

I use ack, but that's because it searches for the right file types, ignores source control directories automatically, and has pretty colors, not because it's find+grep.

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

#552

Post by thinklarge » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:03 PM UTC

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…

Very nicely done. It was cool that you outlined this in a lesson format and pointed to how things could have been done differently and attempted to show the perspective of the commenter. Talk about constructive input.

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

#553

Post by babs474 » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:04 PM UTC

peterarmstrong wrote: post #271

kyro wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, I blame it on the assumption that Aspergers must run rampant and is severely underdiagnosed in the dev community.

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…

Ugh, this is exactly the 'asperger pride' mentality I mention in a thread below.

You are trying to make it politically incorrect to talk about the problem of aspergers in the dev community. The parent is a bully? really? A bully? come on.

Maybe these specific people have aspergers or not, but the problem of a high concentration of socially inept people in the technology world causing strife amongst each other is a real problem.

This is a problem and it should be talked about.

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

#554

Post by mpyne » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:06 PM UTC

readme wrote: post #265

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…

There's another reason to reinvent the wheel: $ replace "Foo" "Bar" is common sense and easy to understand. Not to mention that sed -i is a GNU extension. I haven't used replace but it seems like a pretty innocent piece of helpful code for someone who likes JS.

I actually had something similar myself, a shell function called findRE, the entire purpose of which was to automate searching a given path recursively for a given regex.

However I used it so infrequently that whenever the need would arise, I would invariably screw up the order of the 2 (only 2!) arguments. I could have added support for --help, --usage or similar, but that seemed like overkill.

I eventually just learned how to "properly" use find and grep (both of which I was already using anyways, which helped me remember the command line for each).

With that said I do agree that I'd never use shell script or Unix userland on purpose when writing scripts that are intended to be portable across different Unices (or even Windows), that's the kind of thing I'd reserve for personal use on my own userland. Hell, even on one machine you never know with some distributions what kind of shell you'll login to by default...

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

#555

Post by potatolicious » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:06 PM UTC

recycleme wrote: post #538

ahi wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-1 in my regard for being a jerk. +2 for a sincere apology. A reminder that owning up to a mistake can make that mistake go away and then some.

People make mistakes all the time. If it's someone you know in person then you should probably give an apology (or vice-versa, depending on the situation). Someone has to own up because if it doesn't happen, you can end up with an ill workplace/relationship/whatever. But the internet can be a strange place. How do you apologize to strangers? With blogs? I mean, these pieces are going around being viewed by hundreds o…

Email, Google+, Facebook, Twitter? There are many ways to apologize to someone without making a public spectacle of it.

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

#556

Post by jasonm23 » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:07 PM UTC

muratmutlu wrote: post #515

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..

Out of curiosity, do you think there would there have been blog post apologies if the harthur post was written by a guy?

I think it's the public ridicule aspect which is new, thanks to everyone using twitter like it's their backyard, and forgetting it's a mouthpiece to the entire earth.

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

#557

Post by calinet6 » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:07 PM UTC

earlyresort wrote: post #548

calinet6 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bound to be an unpopular opinion, but why exactly does anyone have to apologize? He's absolutely right. Criticism comes from every corner, especially in the software world. Your code stands for itself. Simple as that. And I tell this to almost every programmer I work with at some point or another. If they have an emotional response to a code review, or criticism of any kind—"Code is never personal. Whatever I…

While I understand the point you're making, as long as there is a way to deliver criticism while being an asshole and a way to deliver criticism without being an asshole, people who choose the former route are assholes. I also agree that assholes certainly don't have to apologize, as long as you agree that we're free to carry on considering them assholes.

> as long as you agree that we're free to carry on considering them assholes.

My father always told me, "It's a damn shame that it's legal to be an asshole in this damn country." But yes, it is, and yes, you absolutely are. I am a strong proponent of calling out assholes when they're being assholes; myself included.

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

#558

Post by eyko » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:08 PM UTC

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #354

lloeki wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing wrong with rewriting sed in [X] Indeed, especially since there's sed and sed . The examples given use -i, but no luck with BSD sed, where you will use -i~ at best. Also, lack of -e before the expression may make things blow up at times. And the sed regex does not support stuff like +, so many times I end up replacing sed -i~ -e with perl -pi -e or ruby. Besides, sometimes your looping logic is not i…

> And the sed regex does not support stuff like + Are you talking about BSD sed here, because GNU sed does support + with the -r flag.

And nobody seems to have mentioned the fact that to run this script you'll need to install node and npm (although you can argue that node comes with npm, but anyway…). You might as well just install GNU sed in BSD if that's the problem. Also, I believe GNU sed is much faster than any javascript script.

Moreover, if you want to use this as part of your node app, then it's a good reason to reimplement some of sed's functionality.

I still don't see why you'd laugh or ridicule someone else for doing something like this, and sharing it (if anything at all, it serves as a good tutorial on file manipulation with javascript/node IO.

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

#559

Post by pc86 » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:08 PM UTC

calinet6 wrote: post #535

nollidge wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's David Cramer's notpology: http://justcramer.com/2013/01/24/being-wrong-on-the-internet...

This is bound to be an unpopular opinion, but why exactly does anyone have to apologize? He's absolutely right. Criticism comes from every corner, especially in the software world. Your code stands for itself. Simple as that. And I tell this to almost every programmer I work with at some point or another. If they have an emotional response to a code review, or criticism of any kind—"Code is never personal. Whatever I…

> Code is never personal. Whatever I say about your code has nothing to do with you.

I've heard this repeated ad nauseum (not just in this thread) and I think it's total crap. You cannot tell me that if you spend dozens of hours writing something then someone comes along and goes line by line telling you how what you wrote is an abomination that you're not going to have an emotional response.

If that's the case it has to go the other way as well. Just finish writing a new process that will save the company $30k a month? Doesn't matter. If your code doesn't have anything to do with you then it's not an accomplishment to write good code (I don't believe this).

Just to be clear, I do think code is personal but I do think people should welcome any constructive feedback, particularly the negative. Yes I feel a twinge in my ego any time someone criticizes my code, even minor stuff; but guess what? When they look at it next time they won't be able to make the same criticism, because I will have fixed it.

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

#560

Post by dblock » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:08 PM UTC

Maybe it's cultural, but what was ridiculed was the project, not the person. Russians, for example, make a clear distinction between the two, so what the tweets said didn't shock me somehow.

I can totally understand how one can take it personally and I definitely think the apologies were necessary. Even though I am Russian, I would certainly apologize profusely if I had offended anybody for whatever reason and would be sincerely sorry.