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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

#721

Post by jeltz »

fatbird wrote: post #325
dmix wrote: 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.

If empathy were a limited resource that demanded to be spent only in descending order of the seriousness of the potential injury, then you might have a point.

It is a limited resource, but you are right about that there is no clear order.

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

#722

Post by slohr »

This topic is so hot in the community it's hard resisting the urge to weigh in. That being said I don't think I can add much to the particular direction the current conversation is going.

But given that I gave in to the urge to comment I do want to say this: Good job Heather! Keep up the coding and continue to have fun doing what you're doing. Solve the problems you see fit to be solved.

My guess is that you have a pretty good support network and you'll brush this whole thing off soon enough. However the next time you are one key-stroke away from submitting another project to GitHub, and you are given pause due to this whole fiasco, I say charge forward and submit. I look forward to seeing your contribution to the community. Just as I look forward to any contribution from anyone across the globe.

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

#723

Post by TheEmpath »

manicdee wrote: post #15
arcatek wrote: post #2

I'm curious : what is the use case for this utility ? If I look at the README, it says : > Modifies files when matches are found Just like sed's -i option (except that -i allows you to specify a backup extension just in case) > Recursive search on directories with -r I usually use find with sed, so it's not so much a problem (and it actually allows to filter the files by extension, exclude directories, etc, which is…

The tool is simpler than sed because it misses a lot of stuff that sed actually does. That's what you and the people mocking this project have missed. Well, there's also the old idea of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it." Or the idea of constructive criticism. Or the idea of contributing useful patches to the project. So yes, there is something you and the armchair experts missed: software doesn't…

"the people behind the software might have some emotional investment in their work."

If you are coding to relieve an unresolved emotional tension that just has no other outlet instead of solving an actual problem, you are in the wrong industry. Go be the first Jackson Pollock programmer.

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

#724

Post by eksith »

jff wrote: post #649
quasque wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a strong undercurrent of misogyny involved here, motivating their incivility and rudeness.

The majority of HN readers seem to have assumed that the author is male. I assumed the same thing for most of it, before getting suspicious at the non-joking use of "sobbing". I wouldn't be surprised if these Twitter posters made the same assumption.

The thing that bothers me is that some people changed their tone after they found out she was a woman and after they read her post. This speaks volumes more than the original comments. If anything it seems there's an implication that somehow women are unable to cope with jackasses as well as men.

Would it have even made HN at all if she was a man and wrote the same way? I doubt it, but if it did, and she was a he, he would have been pounded to the ground in the comments.

Of course, all of this could have been avoided if people act the way they're expected face-to-face. None of these people considered the "person" who wrote the code. And none of them considered "not useful for me" != "not useful". If it was, why are there so many tools out there besides UNIX?

BTW... Twitter's short form is a lame cop out IMO. You can be curt and still not be condescending. Allegedly "smart" people could have been cogent without being asses.

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

#725

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

Domenic_S wrote: post #269
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear hear! I've had a sed book on my shelf for years and I've used it more than once, but 99% of the time I end up giving up on sed and using a GUI-based tool instead of trying to concoct the cryptic lines given above as examples. I absolutely would rather use the clean interface of replace, written in JavaScript or anything else, than to memorize that steaming pile of cruft.

Two reasons why it's better to memorize the cruft: 1. You can pipe find/sed/grep/cut/awk/whatever to other utils. Today you might be replacing, tomorrow you might be analyzing text logs, and the more core utils you learn the more things you can do with them. 2. When you're ssh'd into another box that doesn't have that spiffy replace utility, now you don't know how to do an inline replace.

I know the core basics of find/sed/grep and I've even used awk on occasion (though I typically have to Google for that one), and occasionally I use them when I'm ssh'ed into a box.

But as soon as I want to do something more sophisticated, I again reach for the tools I know better.

No I can't use my GUI tool on a box I'm ssh'ed into, but I can push my changes to a git repository and pull them to be local, where I can do complex things really quickly and without having to memorize tons of obscure options and corner cases.

In a case where that's not as feasible (hundreds of megabytes of log files, say), and what I need is beyond my find/sed/grep skills, I usually drop into my language-of-choice and produce a tool that is much easier to use for my purposes. Honestly I haven't touched awk in a long time because the pain is so much greater in awk to accomplish what I can in my own more familiar toolset.

I get that those tools work fine for any old-school Unix hacker, and the combination is quite powerful in its own right. I don't have the desire to BE an old-school Unix hacker, though, and my tool-set is quite powerful enough to accomplish what I need without going through that particular hazing ritual, thank you.

My need for tools like this happens rarely enough that even if it would be faster once I'd learned the tools to type out the appropriate command line, the amortized time to GET to that skill level in those tools would be far more than the time it takes me to just use my "less optimal" tools.

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

#726

Post by dos1 »

awj wrote: post #719
dos1 wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you begrudge me my opinion when the only facts I have corroborate it? http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2010-09-24-trolling-is-a-... This post was from 2010 where he admits he's a jerk and can't help it. I think that pretty clearly is a victory for my thesis.

...did you link to the right post? The one I'm reading says he is aware that he is capable of this kind of behavior and has taken steps to mitigate it. If anything it hurts your I'm-right-in-declaring-this-guy-an-irredeemable-asshole thesis.

Dude, I don't know what to say to you. You're going to argue for the sake of it, even though you're objectively wrong. Maybe you can shed some light on why people do that?

The man HIMSELF admits he is intrinsically an asshole, and that even when he uses his real identity he can't help himself. Yes, he's trying to be better. But an alcoholic trying to fight the bottle is still an alcoholic.

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

#727

Post by scott_s »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #654
nollidge wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, but saying "this code makes my eyes bleed" is very obviously meant to demean the human being who wrote the code, not the code itself.

I honestly don't see that. It insults their coding ability, or at least their focus when coding that particular thing, but disparaging a single skill that a person has is not being demeaning to that person. At least in my mind.

I think most people would find it demeaning to hear it said about their code.

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

#728

Post by scott_s »

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?

Yes. I didn't realize the post was written by a woman until I read comments here.

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

#729

Post by quasque »

TheEmpath wrote: post #710

1.) Open Source is a meritocracy intentionally designed to counter the never-ending threat of software homogenization that profit motives lure us into embracing, not a soapbox for fleeting quandaries about morality and "social change" (whatever the hell that means for the week). Apples and oranges. Mountains and molehills. 2.) Open Source is not some cool kid's club where people who understand what a semi-colon can d…

"---IT IS NOT YOUR PLACE TO CONTROL OR FILTER THOSE RESPONSES---"

One could equally well argue that it's not your place to control or filter criticisms of those responses. You're essentially positing that the majority of people here are out of line for saying "don't be a dick". That seems contradictory to me.

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

#730

Post by TheEmpath »

quasque wrote: post #729
TheEmpath wrote: post #710

1.) Open Source is a meritocracy intentionally designed to counter the never-ending threat of software homogenization that profit motives lure us into embracing, not a soapbox for fleeting quandaries about morality and "social change" (whatever the hell that means for the week). Apples and oranges. Mountains and molehills. 2.) Open Source is not some cool kid's club where people who understand what a semi-colon can d…

"---IT IS NOT YOUR PLACE TO CONTROL OR FILTER THOSE RESPONSES---" One could equally well argue that it's not your place to control or filter criticisms of those responses. You're essentially positing that the majority of people here are out of line for saying "don't be a dick". That seems contradictory to me.

Childish usage of a primitive understanding of dialectics isn't going to deter me. You'll have to do better than that.

This is me ADAPTING to your response. Not filtering it out. Not telling you to never again say those big, mean, nasty words to me. Not running the internet to summon white knights to my ever beck and call because I want to win some points that don't matter anywhere.

This is me, leading by example, how to ADAPT to your response.

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