8 ms·

It'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:/

It'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 ago
That'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 ago
  You'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 ago
    Ha, 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 ago
  OTOH, 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Back 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 ago
    Not using toy libraries for production systems is a lesson every young developer learns early on in their career.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      Fortunately every young developer is also schooled extensively in telling toy libraries apart from serious ones.
      - janoc 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? 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 ago
  An interesting debate: Are _users_ of FOSS "customers" ?
  - dhimes 8y ago
    I think "consumers" is the better term.
coryfklein 8y ago
OMG 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 ago
  Shades 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 ago
  Born in Greenland, that's a first I've seen.
- jypepin 8y ago
  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 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 ago
  It's hilarious because it's literally a one-liner that Rasmus provided for him.
  - sjm-lbm 8y ago
    It'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 ago
      I 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 ago
        Did you catch the part about "it makes you lose faith in the product"? ROFL
        justinator 8y ago
        I 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 ago
O_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 ago
  I 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 ago
    i 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 ago
  When 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 ago
I'm sure 'endosquid.com' is currently being by hammered by people wanting to find out who was so rude and unreasonable.
- Operyl 8y ago
  Looks like it has been dead for a bit now.
  - currysausage 8y ago
    Since 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 ago
found prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4145179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4145179
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Archive: http://archive.is/XYXoi http://archive.is/XYXoi
munificent 8y ago
I 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 ago
  Ah, now I want to contribute to open source community just because I might be able to say this to some unappreciative prick. :)

Y_Y 8y ago

That'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 ago
You'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 ago
  Ha, 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 ago
OTOH, 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Back 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 ago
  Not using toy libraries for production systems is a lesson every young developer learns early on in their career.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Fortunately every young developer is also schooled extensively in telling toy libraries apart from serious ones.
    - janoc 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? 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 ago
An interesting debate: Are _users_ of FOSS "customers" ?
- dhimes 8y ago
  I think "consumers" is the better term.

coryfklein 8y ago

OMG 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 ago
Shades 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 ago
Born in Greenland, that's a first I've seen.
jypepin 8y ago
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 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 ago
It's hilarious because it's literally a one-liner that Rasmus provided for him.
- sjm-lbm 8y ago
  It'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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Did you catch the part about "it makes you lose faith in the product"? ROFL
      - justinator 8y ago
        I 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 ago

O_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 ago
I 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 ago
  i 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 ago
When 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 ago

I'm sure 'endosquid.com' is currently being by hammered by people wanting to find out who was so rude and unreasonable.

Operyl 8y ago
Looks like it has been dead for a bit now.
- currysausage 8y ago
  Since 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 ago

found prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4145179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4145179

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

Archive: http://archive.is/XYXoi http://archive.is/XYXoi

munificent 8y ago

I 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 ago
Ah, now I want to contribute to open source community just because I might be able to say this to some unappreciative prick. :)