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

#791

Post by rehack » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 2:52 PM UTC

Okay, I upvoted this story for the sake of 'missing kindness', in general on the Internet.

But after having understood, the whole story. What replace does is that, basically it is a good small utility for the author of the post to replace some content from a lot of files, also recursively going through directories. And the author happened to make it depend on nodejs.

In defense of these folks, who made nasty comments: they appeared to have made so, in the context of this nodeJS-based-replace, attempting to replace the sed/awk/grep and unix scripting.

To any long time unix user, any quick hack to replace the said commands, does indeed appear to be falling short. And also a bit of a why would you need to do such a thing?.

Honestly, they should have been just empathetic enough to understand a non-unix user, hacking a quick utility, with the tools she is familiar with (nodeJS and javascript) to come up with something useful for self and friends.

edit: rephrase

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

#792

Post by papsosouid » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 3:02 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #781

papsosouid wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?".

They care that you care? Why can't they not care that you care? Or is it the fact that they don't care that you care? Yet in that case then how can those who take the time to say "who cares?" say they don't care when they seem to care enough to ask who cares? This is all very confusing.

Why is you confusing yourself posted as a response to me? You can mutter random nonsense to yourself offline, I don't need to be involved.

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

#793

Post by marklittlewood » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 4:30 PM UTC

XKCD has the answer. http://xkcd.com/1053/

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

#794

Post by egypturnash » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 4:36 PM UTC

So here is a thing I've learnt as an artist: never offer unsolicited critique of other people's work. It makes you look like an asshole.

If someone WANTS crit, I will ask them if they really, really want it, and give them the caveat that I am probably going to rip them a new one. For my best artist buddies, I don't bother with the preface. They know how to detach themselves from their art.

And sometimes, yeah, I come across something so amazingly badly made that it becomes a thing of wonder. When I want to share that, I don't do it in public. I use private, limited channels. Email, private forum, locked Twitter account, whatever. Come to think of it I really tend to just say "holy cow look at this" rather than being super specific.

Tearing other people's stuff down in public makes you look like an asshole, period. Especially when you are tearing down the work of people less skilled and/or well-known. It also makes you look pretty insecure.

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

#795

Post by sageikosa » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #565

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…

It shouldn't matter if it's unconstructive. He's not talking to the author of the code. I still don't see how being snarky, or god forbid considering being snarky, makes you an asshole. It's just some code; he's not insulting anybody.

What a stupid comment! My eyes bleed! (But the author is probably a decent chap).

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

#796

Post by ripter » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 5:08 PM UTC

rektide wrote: post #757

ripter wrote: post #703

This guy needs to stop being a pansy and grow some balls. Oh noes! Someone on the internet doesn't like my work! My world is over! What are you, a little girl? Nine, maybe ten years old. I'm seeing pigtails and a frilly skirt. Get over it dude. It's impossible to make everyone happy. haters are going to hate. No need to make a big deal about it.

What are you, a little neckbearded basement dweller? There's probably little ten year olds girls ballerinas that could kick your wimpy ass. Just, heads up, it was a girl that got wrecked on, and your comment is offensively sexist and, disregarding the situation, just generally inappropriately so.

I didn't realize it was a girl until after I made the post.

We should all feel sorry for her. Women are special creatures that must be protected and sheltered at all costs. How dare some men say anything bad about her.

Oh wait, they didn't say anything bad about her. They didn't even say anything bad about her code. They disliked her project. She even said most of the comments where positive. This is nothing more than attention whoring.

And you fell for it because she's a girl.

If you put something out there, people are going to hate and criticize it. Doesn't matter if you are a boy, girl, or three toed sloth. Just because she's a girl doesn't mean we should pay attention to someone who whines when a few people hate on the project. Nor does it make those haters terrible people. You don't hear Douglas Crockford crying every time someone criticizes him. And you don't get this upset at the developers who do criticize him.

It's sexist to treat her different because she's a girl. Everyone is criticized.

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

#797

Post by _ea1k » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 5:21 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #783

ruswick wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did not attempt to apologize, he defended his position. He wasn't being underhanded or antagonistic, he was attempting an objective justification. Nothing in there resembled passive-agression or "dickishness."

He admitted he was nasty in his blog, but he was proud of it. Enough said.

I don't see where he said he was proud of it.

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

#798

Post by burntsushi » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 5:49 PM UTC

scott_w wrote: post #780

papsosouid wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't misread it at all. I just completely disagree that it's 10 minutes to work out how they all work. And that's every time you want to use them, because few people use them often enough to learn the tools properly.

You said:

> 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."

Which means you could put in a one time investment, write a wrapper shell script, and be done.

And if you insist on disagreeing still, then that's fine, but the this whole point was brought about in response to:

> I've used CLI tools for years, and it would probably take me 5-10 minutes of scanning the man pages to reproduce all but the simplest of those snippets.

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

#799

Post by mrb » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 6:29 PM UTC

scott_w wrote: post #780

papsosouid wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't misread it at all. I just completely disagree that it's 10 minutes to work out how they all work. And that's every time you want to use them, because few people use them often enough to learn the tools properly.

You keep saying that you have to research how they work every time. But we tell you: no, you only have to write the wrapper shell script once. It is a one-time effort. Just like harthur put a one-time effort in writing "replace". You wouldn't have to remember find/sed every time, just like harthur doesn't have to re-write "replace" every time.

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

#800

Post by msbarnett » Fri, Jan 25, 2013, 6:31 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #785

dos1 wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 2010 he said he had arsehole like tendencies. That's some time ago, I think it's a stretch to say that it makes him one. I've agreed with you right up to this point!

Well, he engaged in 'arsehole like tendencies' two days ago. When an alcoholic is on the wagon for a long time and then falls off again, they're still an alcoholic.