Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

harthur.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 826 posts

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

#661

Post by Kroem3r »

solox3 wrote: post #573
lxt wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Speaking as a hiring manager, if I see people behaving like assholes on Twitter or mailing lists, those people go on my do-not-hire list. Yes, we are all assholes from time to time, but for some people it's a pattern of behavior. Those are not people you want to work with, n…

There's a fine line between being critics (constructive) and being assholes (destructive). When hiring, be sure to differentiate the two.

My experience and belief is different: It's clear and obvious where the line is. People who provide constructive criticism in such a way that you can tolerate repeated critiques are strikingly different than people who are assholes under cover of providing constructive criticism.

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

#662

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

The point didn't seem to be delivering useful criticism, it seemed to be mockery of the code. I guess you can brand anyone who does that with the world Asshole in scarlet, but do you never mock anything? I'd personally reserve the label for people that either deliberately hurt others or don't care about feelings at all.

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

#663

Post by jcampbell1 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #586
jcampbell1 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death, prison, and felony convictions are not the same as public ridicule and hurt feelings. Only a nazi would equate such things. What?

HN's collective reading comprehension seems to have dipped lately. Fortunately, pg is usually concise enough that we can use this as an exercise: "Maybe before..." "before" merely implies order. It does not mean "instead of". It means, "this first, then that." "...federal prosecutors are unsympathetic assholes..." The subject here is not jail sentences or felony convictions or legal antics. The subject here is sympat…

I was mainly making a joke, but the content of the statement was a problem. Let's consider the relative merits and priorities of "spending time complaining about federal prosecutors" vs. "examining our own community". The former is about trying to change our society to make it more just, the latter is aimless introspection.

The comment was a bit of a troll and not insightful so I trolled back. If this were not pg's website, I am certain you wouldn't be defending the statement because it lacks substance.

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

#664

Post by andyl »

"Then I sob harder. I can’t help but think of potential future employers that are no longer potential."

As an employer, I expect there to be criticism associated with a person's code. Criticism isn't a black mark.

But sobbing in reaction to criticism? Getting all upset about mild criticism from a-hole strangers on twitter? That's a black mark.

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

#665

Post by mosselman »

This seems like a totally reasonable way to deal with criticism.

Also, "I can’t help but think of potential future employers that are no longer potential." because some guy called Steve Klabnik and his wannabe follower Corey Haines who wants to suck up to him say your code sucks?

Don't take yourself so seriously please.

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

#666

Post by hosh »

chaostheory wrote: post #590
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…

> Code is never personal. Whatever I say about your code has nothing to do with you. Maybe this is fine for psychopaths, economists, or machines that can eventually understand the criticism one day, but for normal people it doesn't apply. Someone's code is like someone's child. It's great and I'd say necessary to use constructive criticism, but I just don't see the need to bully and make fun of people.

I am working on a team that is smarter than me. And I noticed, they don't attach a huge amount of their identity on their code. Taking myself out of it improved my skills.

Having said that though, when you ridicule someone, you've made it personal. When someone ridicules someone else, there's a high chance that they secretly feel ridiculed by others (Jungian shadows).

I forgot who observed this: adult males will kill off younger competition, unless they are teaching. One of the core values of the Open Source community is sharing and teaching. I suppose, if you stick around in opinionated software long enough, then you start moving away from that core value.

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

#667

Post by dos1 »

mturmon wrote: post #651
dos1 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't merely say the project "wasn't good", he implied it in a snarky, very unconstructive way. Here's his quote from twitter: > Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse? http://github.com/harthur/replace In the world I live in, that's called being an asshole. Look, I'm not saying these guys should apologize (in fact, if this is how they apologize it's probably best they don't), I'm simply stating that they're dicks…

> "that's called being an asshole" There's a difference between "being an asshole" and "sometimes acting like an asshole". We all do the second thing sometimes. A snarky comment and a bad apology may be an instance of the second thing. But they don't imply the first. Compare another toxic noun, "racist". There's a difference between "being a racist" and "making a racist comment". If people could apologize for the lat…

> A snarky comment and a bad apology may be an instance of the second thing. But they don't imply the first.

Sorry chief, I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. The snarky comment can be forgiven. (although I've since read other tweets/posts from David Cramer and it appears as though he really is that abrasive all the time)

By contrast, a bad apology is a clear indication of someone's true nature. If the apology is backhanded or otherwise poor, it implies a lot. If you issue an apology but don't really feel sorry, then you're just doing it to placate others, and you really are a jerk.

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

#668

Post by hosh »

columbo wrote: post #583
donohoe wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to say it but I think his post is fair and to the point. You don't have to like what he said but he puts it in context and within the realm of Twitter - a 140 limited space of communication. His original tweet was "Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?". Really. Can we not be critical on the internet any more? And here is EVERYONE saying worse things about him in the comments!? Go look in the mirror people. I'l…

> 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…

Exactly.

It's one thing to be critical. It's another to ridicule. Being critical is rational and objective. Ridiculing is a form of contempt, an emotion. When you ridicule, you are not taking apart what you criticize, you are trying to take apart the other person. Those skilled at this will often do it in such a way to make it sound as if they are being rational, objective, and focus only the work, when in fact, they are projecting emotions of contempt and cutting someone apart. The way our society is structured, you can "get away" with something like that because there's a fallacy ... that what you can somehow separate the criticism and feedback you give from the feelings that you experience (or suppress).

Well. You can't. Emotions arise and pass: they are real, they are experienced, and they affect behavior.

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

#670

Post by potatolicious »

nollidge wrote: post #636
potatolicious wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You don't have to like that he said but he puts it in context and within the realm of Twitter - a 140 limited space of communication." This is part of why I dislike Twitter - the 140-char restriction supposedly makes you to the point and concise, but in reality it just encourages snark and imprecision. It's a world of sound bites, and "Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse" sounds wittier and has more jazz than "I…

I don't disagree with your larger point, but as an official member of the Twitter Defense Squadron (got a badge and everything): > the 140-char restriction supposedly makes you to the point and concise, but in reality it just encourages snark and imprecision. This is, of course, a false dichotomy. It does both, depending on the author, and the author's mood. The solution to this problem is to not follow jerks on Twit…

> "The solution to this problem is to not follow jerks on Twitter."

See my other post further down the thread. One of the prevailing attitudes I'm seeing in this thread is the notion that jerks/assholes are somehow exceptional. We're all more than capable of being terrible to each other, given the right context and the right triggers. Pretending that jerks are somehow a different class of people from "the rest of us" is folly.

No one is solely defined as "jerk" - most people have valuable things to contribute, the question is if the system is set up in a way that encourages good behavior.

I don't doubt there are many people who are able to tweet within 140 chars without behaving badly towards others. That's not the part under doubt, the question is if people behaving badly are in large part doing so because of forced brevity. We can make jerks contribute positive things if we set up the system correctly, we can also make more non-jerks into jerks by setting them up badly.

> "140 characters forces only minimalism"

This is a claim often trotted about, but I just don't see this. Looking at my Twitter feed it seems to encourage abbreviations, bad spelling, incomplete sentences, and truncated thoughts. Twitter proponents act like the internet was a giant cesspool of wordiness, and that Twitter was somehow the savior - I don't remember this internet when everyone was writing run-on sentences and long essays about their day.

Post reply on HN