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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

#611
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue is that it's 5-10 minutes to scan each man page every single time I want to use sed, find, xargs, etc. I quickly reach a point where I just think "Fuck it, I'm writing a Python script for this." A simple tool that only takes a couple of minutes to learn, then a five second look at the man page to refresh the syntax is very valuable, particularly if it focuses on doing the one job that people want to do most…

You completely skipped over reading his post, and thus your response makes no sense. Read the docs once, and write your weird syntax version as a shell script. Then you don't need to look it up ever again, because you are using the weird syntax you invented for yourself. It is just much simpler and easier to do it the reasonable way than to write it in javascript.

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

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we not be critical on the internet any more? You can, but why? What good is served?

Start with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism#Purpose_of_criticism

Criticism is great and necessary, but piggybacking on someone's code with your friends without resolve is no different than picking on someone in grade school. Rather, this is more akin to talking crap about someone behind their back to the whole school because she had no idea it was even happening until a colleague brought it forth.

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

#613
post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Other than "pretty colors", your statement contradicts itself. Doing the things you mentioned is being find+grep. That's the entire point of ack, to be find+grep.

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

#614
post #175

Maybe before we spend a lot of time complaining about how federal prosecutors are unsympathetic assholes, we should start by examining our own community.

I wonder if the cause is the same in both cases.

It's a lot easier to be an asshole to people in certain structured formats -- prosecution, online chat (IRC being the ideal, but even email, twitter, and blogs lead to aggression). It's harder in person, or in other formats (essays?).

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

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really. Can we not be critical on the internet any more? I think that's a vast oversimplification. I actually don't think this has ANYTHING TO DO WITH CODE. Anyone can walk into a subway restaurant, ask for a sandwich, take pictures of the people who made the sandwich, tweet their pictures laughing at how stupid they are and what a shitty job they did making your sandwich. You can do that to waiters, barstaff, clea…

I have a ton of files on github and gist, most of them are absolute crap. Honest question: Is it okay for someone else to say (without swearing or making personal jabs) in public that it is also crap? And again, to emphasize, this is a sincere question.

I don't think it's possible to answer without getting into a debate about community, morality and ethics. There's no way to distill this down to a "unit test".

Will it bother me? Maybe, depends on who it is. XxHackerPants420xX's tweet of 'Columbo is teh code suxxor' wouldn't bother me as much as pg choosing to write a personal blog post titled 'ode to Columbo's shitty github account'.

Is it okay? Meh. It isn't a community I'd want to be part of. I truly believe in the power of constructive criticism and I don't believe anyone can survive this environment by wearing their hearts on their sleeve. However, there's never justification for rudeness.

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

#618
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare the cause-and-effect of both the situations. One can send someone to jail for life and destroy their finances, reputation etc... the other can hurt someones feelings. Contending the latter should be addressed before (or even comparatively) to the former is what I take issue with.

Do you really think Paul Graham doesn't know the difference between someone being insulted on Twitter and someone being threatened with federal prison time? You don't think maybe it's you that are missing something, and not him? Because if my response to something he wrote depending on him not noticing the difference between prison and twitter, I would worry that I was missing something. No, wait, I wouldn't; I like…

He can still make a fallacious and ignorant comment while being aware of the difference.

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

#619
So, I've felt the same way about uploading my own work-in-progress code to GitHub, but I use it as an antitode to perfectionism / procrastination. It's almost a form of militant pragmatism.

I've worked at some quite successful small companies, and they all share the property that you really don't want to examine the code too closely. The sausage is inevitably somewhat disgusting on close examination.

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

#620
post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, still here. I'm just not replying to you on Twitter because lol

Don't expect you to - you read it, good enough for me to know you did :-) Thanks for letting me know. Your entire blog post is a big "The Internet disagrees with me": http://justcramer.com/2013/01/24/being-wrong-on-the-internet... You said something in 140 characters that was snarky and mean, that's actually not easy to do to be honest. And then you got called on it, and now you are getting criticized. Not nice, huh?

The internet doesn't disagree with him, a vocal minority of hyper sensitive cry babies and desperate white knights disagree with him. Very few people who don't care take the time to say "who cares?".
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