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> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. Leading a large open source project must be terrible
by bla2 8y ago
> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a
PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.
Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(
- sjm-lbm 8y agoIt's PHP and not Python, but every time I read something like this from a major open source figure, I always think of this old PHP mailing list thread: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696
- Y_Y 8y agoThat's a good read. I feel like the "customer is always right" mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support. Also reminds me of that dev (who I can't seem to search up) who had their email printed as part of a open-source software license in a car manual and would get ridiculous email from people who had car trouble.
- JdeBP 8y ago* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16393228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16393228 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16763618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16763618
- ranko 8y agoYou're probably thinking of Daniel Stenberg of curl fame: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/
- luhn 8y agoHa, hadn't seen that one before. I did enjoy this related post about him hacking someone's Instagram. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19/subject-urgent-warning/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19/subject-urgent-warnin...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- krylon 8y agoOTOH, way back, when I had a TV receiver card by Hauppage, and a new Linux kernel broke something, I posted a description of my troubles on Usenet, and within 24 hours, the person who had written the Video4Linux subsystem replied asking for more details (which I gladly provided), and a few days later, the bug was fixed. That, I think, was the most awesome "customer support" experience of my life. I did make a point of being polite about it, however, which I consider a ground rule for dealing with people, especially if I want something from them. But it was so awesome to post to a random usenet group about a driver problem and have the person who wrote the driver personally approach you for details. You don't get that with Windows, for sure. ;-)
- kwhitefoot 8y agoI had the same experience. Suddenly Emacs Gnus reader stopped working, about 11:00 on a Friday morning. I posted the bug and had a reply from Lars Ingebrigtsen with an explanation and a workaround by 13:00. I think it was fixed by the beginning of the following week. My experience of trying to get help from Microsoft on the other hand is, well let's just say not quite so impressive; they kept me on hold for 45 minutes once and never did solve my problem.
- undseg 8y agoBack in the days Microsoft would have amazing customer support. And I'm talking about "API customers", many times I've seen them go out of their way to fix third party programs not working correctly by adapting their platform, it was a very efficient process. I guess that doesn't work as well at their current scale, or they care less because they're not building up market share.
- marris 8y ago> go out of their way to fix third party programs not working correctly by adapting their platform, it was a very efficient process This kind of thing probably doesn't even scale with itself, since there are only so many acrobatics your code can go through before no one can even understand why it's doing something, let alone add new workarounds. So the first K broken programs get special treatment, and the others face a much higher bar to get the same treatment.
- Alex3917 8y ago> "customer is always right" mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support. It goes both ways. All too often people promote their new library on HN and Reddit, wait until a bunch of people are using it as a dependency, and then abandon it without even telling anyone whether or not it’s abandoned.
- jstarfish 8y agoNot using toy libraries for production systems is a lesson every young developer learns early on in their career.
- jacquesm 8y agoFortunately every young developer is also schooled extensively in telling toy libraries apart from serious ones.
- janoc 8y agoAnd why isn't the young developer being mentored by someone more senior before introducing a new dependency into a business critical system? Why is what amounts to a clear project management failure the problem of some open source developer who has published their personal pet project? If dependencies aren't reviewed before being used, how does such organization handle software license compliance (whether OSS or proprietary), for example? A clear cut case of trying to shift blame for own failings onto an unpaid volunteer that has helped to save the commercial developer time and money, IMO.
- jacquesm 8y ago> And why isn't the young developer being mentored by someone more senior before introducing a new dependency into a business critical system? Some critical assumptions: - a more senior dev is available - has time - understand the system well enough to judge the impact - is actually a better developer than the junior (in spite of being older / in the game longer) > Why is what amounts to a clear project management failure the problem of some open source developer who has published their personal pet project? It isn't, that was the point. > If dependencies aren't reviewed before being used, how does such organization handle software license compliance (whether OSS or proprietary), for example? Some critical assumptions: - organizations keep a close eye on developers incorporating code under various licenses - the people keeping an eye on that are qualified to make the calls - the resources to keep an eye on this are available > A clear cut case of trying to shift blame for own failings onto an unpaid volunteer that has helped to save the commercial developer time and money, IMO. Sure. But that doesn't mean these things don't happen just about everywhere, many times per day. It is rare to find a company where all of the assumptions labelled above are true all the time. And that's where the problem lies. It's a clear case of there being no difference between theory and practice in theory but in practice there is, and rather a lot of it. Everybody knows in theory how software should be developed, but in practice hardly anybody actually does it that way. They're either out of time, options or qualifications (or all three) and they will do the job anyway. That doesn't excuse it, but it does help you to understand it.
- bsg75 8y agoAn interesting debate: Are _users_ of FOSS "customers" ?
- dhimes 8y agoI think "consumers" is the better term.
- coryfklein 8y agoOMG there are some real gems in that thread. > Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to. - rasmus@php.net > After carefully reviewing this bug report with our board of directors on 4chan, we have come to the conclusion that your "rusty C skills" should be enough to fix the issue. I would therefore like to remind you that rasmus@php.net is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_lerdorf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_lerdorf
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- robaato 8y agoShades of: It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope. Pope John XXIII
- spease 8y ago“But, Doctor, I am Pagliacci!”
- hlmencken 8y agoBorn in Greenland, that's a first I've seen.
- jypepin 8y agoAfter carefully reviewing this bug report with our board of directors on 4chan, we have come to the conclusion that your "rusty C skills" should be enough to fix the issue. I would therefore like to remind you that rasmus@php.net is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_lerdorf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_lerdorf ahahaha
- raverbashing 8y ago"This is going to cause us MONTHS or fixing code for no real benefit since this behavior change is arbitrary and seemingly, was made for no reason" Yeah, tough. Fix your code That's the attitude some maintainers need in cutting unreasonable requests.
- ashelmire 8y agoIt's hilarious because it's literally a one-liner that Rasmus provided for him.
- sjm-lbm 8y agoIt's more hilarious because his response to that (basically, "this is tax software so there will be a lot of QA when we make that change") is at least sort of legitimate, but only because his accounting software evidently only works due to undefined corner cases in the underlying platform, and that's just ... wow.
- justinator 8y agoI was on the side of the person giving the - I think fairly legit., bug until I came to, "tax software in php" and then I realized there's nothing really black and white in this world.
- ScottBurson 8y agoDid you catch the part about "it makes you lose faith in the product"? ROFL
- justinator 8y agoI caught the part about, "we have unitialized variables being passed everywhere which should be numbers" and that code, well, smells. I think the PHP team changing the return value of a function without putting anything in a changelog is a Very Bad Idea and a dev. should be pretty upset about that. Saying that the main dev. is doing this work as a charitable thing is fairly misleading as well. Buuuuut, I also think passing an unitialized value like that is already a bug in this context given the type of software being created. I'd rather see, "NULL" found wherever than know that it was magically changed to 0 (like they would prefer). I know the dev. said that this is just a formatting thing, but I'll wager they're using formatted numbers for some sort of calculation (inadvertently or not). Whatever is going on, I hope there was a huge code review and a massive QA effort ( which I also doubt happened), because this is a textbook example of tech debt and the loan shark has come a-knockin'.
- vxNsr 8y agoO_o I wonder how many times I've spoken to someone and didn't realize who it was/how important they were because of the anonymity of the internet.
- freehunter 8y agoI know I've gotten into heated arguments on here or on Reddit with very well-known figures in the tech world without realizing who they are until after the fact. Luckily I don't think I've every argued with a developer about their own product before... that I know of.
- swyx 8y agoi have a great solution: speak to everyone like they are a human being with feelings :)
- TimTheTinker 8y ago* slow clap * “A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.” —Proverbs
- fpgaminer 8y agoWhen I was much younger I started building a ray casting engine. I was having trouble wrapping my brain around how to render the floors so ... I emailed Ken Silverman. It escapes me now _why_ I emailed him. I certainly had no idea the gravity of who he was (for those also unaware, he is perhaps most famous for creating the Build engine used in games like Duke Nukem 3D). I believe I was under the false assumption at the time that the Build engine was a raycaster (I hadn't played Duke Nukem), and I probably found a personal page of his about the Build engine while trying to solve my problem. Either way, young me emailed Ken Silverman like it was nothing. He responded! He corrected me about the Build engine, but also proceeded to help describe how to render floors in a raycasting engine. It still took me awhile more to get the hang of the math, and I believe a few more emails back and forth with him. I feel bad now, knowing now who he was. But I appreciated his help immensely. I think I wrote 3 or 4 more ray casting and tracing engines back then. Some were rudimentary, one was a raycaster but allowed arbitrary 2D level geometry (and even used some tricks to put "holes" in walls to cheat windows and have multiple heights). One was for a code golf competition. And one was _super_ efficient; the math and levels were set up such that 90% of the logic was just binary math rather then having to do the usual multiplications, divisions, and square roots. They're a lot of fun to make and I learned a lot. Ken, if you ever stumble on this comment, thank you!
- ErikAugust 8y agoI'm sure 'endosquid.com' is currently being by hammered by people wanting to find out who was so rude and unreasonable.
- Operyl 8y agoLooks like it has been dead for a bit now.
- currysausage 8y agoSince 2010, it seems: https://web.archive.org/web/*/endosquid.com https://web.archive.org/web/*/endosquid.com Guess they went out of business before they could typecast all these nasty empty strings.
- swyx 8y agofound prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4145179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4145179
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoArchive: http://archive.is/XYXoi http://archive.is/XYXoi
- munificent 8y agoI have yet to encounter any user so hostile in my open source projects, thankfully. But when the time arises, the line I have prepared is: I'm really sorry you ran into this issue. To make things better, I've given you a full refund.
- kamyarg 8y agoAh, now I want to contribute to open source community just because I might be able to say this to some unappreciative prick. :)
- symmitchry 8y agoI'm a little confused though, by his feelings here. Why did he feel the need to "fight so hard for a PEP" if it was so controversial, and everyone was outraged? I do understand people's points about "the age of outrage" and "internet 2018" but still: the PEP wasn't generally accepted as being a fantastic improvement, so why did he feel the need to fight so hard for it?
- jnwatson 8y agoIt was controversial syntax, inline assignment-as-expression. There's always a tension between "keep it simple stupid" and "let's make it better", especially when a large user demographic of Python are non-professional-programmers. Interestingly, C++ is going through the same process, with lots of great ideas being proposed, but the sum total of them being an even more complicated language (on top of what is probably the most complicated language already). Python has been successful, IMHO, because Guido has made several brave, controversial calls. Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions.
- coldtea 8y ago>Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions. Async maybe. Python 3 breakage? Did you forgot the /s tag?
- cbhl 8y agoI think there are people on both sides of this fence. Google is still largely Python 2, but my impression is that Facebook actually managed to make the transition to Python 3 after putting in the right presubmit checks.
- steveklabnik 8y agoFor the discussion about Facebook, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417201 It seems Python 3 is now dominant but not total, according to TFA.
- technologia 8y agoOn a related note, we've always had the constant outrage, its the internet that allowed it to become more apparent.
- nemild 8y agoIn 2018, we can finally use our advances in data science and social network design to precisely target outrage and make it maximally engaging.
- technologia 8y agoNot to dismiss your point, but outrage on the internet is like a car wreck, its terrible that it happened but everyone on the road still wants to check it out and put their 2 cents in.
- robbrit 8y agoSeems like this thread is a few steps away from outrage about outrage :)
- technologia 8y agolol, if my migraine was still raging on then it probably would have been because of me :P
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- draw_down 8y agoI say if you go around calling yourself Benevolent Dictator for Life, you're kinda signing up for that. Not that I think it's justified for people to act in certain ways, but I don't think you should find it very surprising if you appoint yourself DFL, B or otherwise.
- tw04 8y agoIt's not the outrage, it's the entitlement. People have always been outraged, the major difference I've seen is the rampant sense of entitlement. I'm not sure if it's a result of bad parenting or something else, but it's slowly becoming a major issue for the entirety of the human race.
- wild_preference 8y agoI noticed this over the years on a forum I’ve run for over 10 years. Since ads are pretty much dead for small publishers like me, the forum costs me money. But I run it out of charity. Nothing sucks the energy out of me more than lurking in my forum and seeing users complain about how little I’ve done for the forum. I don’t want to know how many weekend I’ve spent building features for the forum or arbitrating problems between users. The thing is that these posts of entitlement are a relatively knew phenomenon on my forum mostly in crescendo over the last four years. I’m pretty sensitive to it now and it’s easy to spot eveywhere. From people whining that free shit isn’t perfect on HN to gamers complaining that a modder charges for the mod instead of doing it for fun.
- mehrdadn 8y agoI think part of the explanation might be the explosion of choice [1]. For better or for worse, the more choices there are, the better people expect them to be to stand out. If you make software that solves a critical problem nobody else's does, I doubt people will feel nearly as entitled about it as about a forum or a programming language or whatever. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_c...
- chias 8y agoI'm in an almost identical situation with an online community that I've built and have continued to work on. Back in the day I could hang out there to relax -- these days it's incredibly draining for me to be around.
- rohan1024 8y agoCompletely agree with you. Heck I realized I have the same entitlement issue after running into 2-3 people who were on higher spectrum of entitlement. I was having issue with their behavior but realized I do the same sometimes. I am trying to balance it out. The sad thing is people are not even aware that they have this issue. I think social media is responsible for breeding this sense of entitlement among people.
- bsg75 8y ago> this age of constant outrage And entitlement.
- fit2rule 8y agoWhat I think would fix this, is better developer metrics and statistics. If every post to the python-dev list was automatically tagged with some sort of metric for that persons contributions to the project, it would go a long way to identifying, and triaging, the most violent vitriol. Something like code contributions, amount of churn, speed of implementation, level of correctness, etc. Trouble is, I don't really see any quick "just insert batteries" method of adding such metrics to an open-source programming community - perhaps someone knows of a great system of reports for measuring developer productivity through a repo or something? I guess it would also have to accommodate dev-ops and marketing efforts by developers, too. Hmm .. maybe this is a startup idea in the making ..
- robertk 8y agoOutrageous. I’m offended, because I see open source as a great force for change, and I find your remarks belittling.
- robertk 8y agoDenizens... please. I was clearly facetious. Too deadpan.