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

harthur.wordpress.com

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

#731

Post by dblock »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #607
dblock wrote: post #560

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…

The person was ridiculed, FWIW: "...but I don't want to build my app on top of others' code who are at this level of understanding..." is insulting the person, not the project.

I have to disagree, somewhat. It's about the person's skills (or lack thereof), not about the person. An insult to the person would be "you're ugly".

I can totally see WHY someone can get offended, and I am not saying it's OK to say those things. But in my culture this would not be a problem because of what I said above.

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

#732

Post by [deleted] »

TheEmpath wrote: post #730
quasque wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"---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, ho…

[deleted]

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

#733

Post by TheEmpath »

TheEmpath wrote: post #730
quasque wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"---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, ho…

The point is that you challenged my contribution.

And I didn't filter it out.

Nor did I tell you to stop challenging me.

I adapted.

It's a simple concept.

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

#734

Post by krzyk »

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.

Or by escaping: \+ I didn't even know there is a -r option, I always escaped the plus sign (and parentheses)

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

#735

Post by iy56 »

pc86 wrote: post #559
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. 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 ha…

Of course you will feel an emotional response when your code is criticized, and a considerate critic will try to minimize that. But you'd still be the one in the wrong.

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

#736

Post by freework »

lxt wrote: post #530
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #195

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. There's a big responsibility that comes with being well-liked and nice. When someone with a good reputation and the means to broadcast it speaks negatively about someone, it matters much more than someone who is routinely rude, frequently negative, or unknown. I know that if t…

"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…

A lot of very talented and successful people are successful. Michael Jordan, Linus Torvalds, and Albert Einstein come to mind.

If Linus Torvalds applied to work at your company, would you turn him away?

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

#737

Post by jcampbell1 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #679
jcampbell1 wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> The former is about trying to change our society to make it more just, the latter is aimless introspection. On the contrary, the former is something we probably won't change [1], while the latter is almost certainly something we can change. > 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 sub…

> The entirety of my reply was a tutorial on high school level reading comprehension and a snide remark about HN (well, and a question about you)

Maybe before you spend a lot of time complaining about how other people comment, you should start by focusing on making a positive contribution yourself.

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

#738

Post by deltasquared »

I don't understand, not the critics, not the project.

Why insult something that someone obviously put a lot of care into?

The code is nicely formatted and clear. I can see how it works. Props to harthur for making something easy to read and then sharing it on Github. Both readable code and sharing should be encouraged.

I don't really get why someone would want to implement text processing utilities in node.js. It seems to be a bit heavy on the overhead.

Might someone re-implement harthur's user interface (which a bunch of people seem to like) in c, and submit it to the GNU Coreutils project?

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

#739

Post by fastball »

dos1 wrote: post #667
mturmon wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

Luckily, Cramer wasn't giving an apology. That post was not apologetic because it was an explanation of a single tweet. If you keep shitting comments that don't reflect the reality of the situation, that makes you the asshole.

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

#740

Post by davesque »

This blog makes an extremely good point. The industry we work in is very competitive and it's easy to get into the habit of making snarky comments about other people's code, even if you're actually not a jerk in real life. It's always good to remember that you should avoid doing this as often as possible.
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