21 ms·

Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013)

• RF_Savage 4y ago
  No good deed goes unpunished.
• bawolff 4y ago
  The internet is full of assholes. Its an unfortunate truth. There is also unfortunately not a whole bunch that can be done about it (short of going full dystopia).
  • tluyben2 4y ago
    Things like Twitter and YouTube and many subreddits (don’t know about insta and TikTok as I don’t use these, but I guess they are similar) should be ignored if you value you sanity. So many times you encounter people who never tried anything or created anything or done anything than being drones being jealous or somehow otherwise angry at people who do do these things. Especially when they fail (of course sadly). Many people fear everything so they do nothing; people have mocked my wife and myself for so many things over the decades just because they thought it was ‘weird’; moving to another country, starting companies, quitting a job to start writing or brewing etc. It’s sad people cannot just think; good for them and leave it.
  • RamblingCTO 4y ago
    The internet also makes it very easy to be an asshole. If I were to speak to someone vis-à-vis I probably would be a lot less snarky as well. Anonymity is a b*tch sometimes. But we have to give us some time and room to grow, don't we?
  • mewse 4y ago
    I'm not sure I buy the popular "the internet is full of assholes" theory. I think it's more likely to be hanlon's razor. I suspect that a lot of people have just internalised social media as a way to casually chat with their friends, without really grokking that their comments online are quite literally potentially visible to a large percentage of the entire species, forever -- including the people being discussed. That all those rules about rudeness apply to public-space interactions that you probably think of as 'private' because the target of the conversation isn't present in the conversation yet at that precise moment. Like.. one way or another, your great-grandkids, their spouses, and their employers are all going to be able to read every single word you ever wrote on Twitter or in a HN comment or on your blog or nearly anywhere else, and all it'll take them is a random whim to look you up. A large percentage of everything you ever write/wrote online is effectively accessible forever, now, and available to anybody with an interest and an internet connection. Most of the usenet posts I wrote as a early teenager 30 years ago (written under my real name) are still easily accessible online, for example, and it certainly never occurred to me at the time that that'd be the case. I wonder whether today's kids, who've grown up with all of these forever-archives already in place, are generally more front-of-mind aware about the situation and more careful with what they write than we were back in the early days before we really understood what the internet was going to become.
• lelanthran 4y ago
  Ironic that Steve Klabnik jumped in on the ridiculing, when he a) Complains all the time about people mocking Rust, and b) supported the various "rewrite in Rust for no good reason" projects.
  • simplotek 4y ago
    > Ironic that Steve Klabnik jumped in on the ridiculing, when he a) Complains all the time about people mocking Rust, and b) supported the various "rewrite in Rust for no good reason" projects. To be fair, this tweet was close to a decade ago, and Steve Klabnik posted an apology at the time. People do make mistakes from time to time, and Twitter is prone to post unfiltered brainfarts.
    • chris_wot 4y ago
      He did acknowledge it later: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/trolling-is-a-art https://steveklabnik.com/writing/trolling-is-a-art
      • maverwa 4y ago
        This is dated "September 24, 2010", so this would be earlier, not later, right? Or is the date stamp off?
        • maxbond 4y ago
          I think you're right, the apology is here https://steveklabnik.com/writing/node https://steveklabnik.com/writing/node
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
          • chris_wot 4y ago
            Yeah, I got my timeframes screwed up. Apologies, I didn’t mean to misrepresent the man.
• fock 4y ago
  I'm not sure, what he claimed to do, but if he didn't run around praising this as the next grep: wtf is wrong with those people? I mean you have to start exploring things somewhere and why not share them?
  • imgabe 4y ago
    Twitter in particular seems to reward snark and negativity more than anything else.
    • maxbond 4y ago
      People can get vicious in Show HN threads, as well.
      • oefrha 4y ago
        On HN unsubstantial put-downs are downvoted/flagged. On Twitter they get hearts and lols. That’s a pretty big difference. (And yes, like another comment said, HN voting is also shit when it comes to certain topics like big tech. Fortunately the crappiest takes upvoted by mobs tend to be modded down by saner humans.)
        • maxbond 4y ago
          Tomato tomato in my mind. On HN you're more likely to find nitpicky objections and backhanded compliments instead, but there's still people who will come into the thread just to tell you they think you're a bad engineer failing to solve irrelevant problems. Which, to be clear, is bullying.
          • klodolph 4y ago
            Yes. HN is kind of like Stack Overflow in how vicious it can be, but like Stack Overflow, anything that looks like an actual attack gets removed. So the people learn to be vicious and a bit subtle about it. Or you get a storm of nitpicks and minor objections to something you say. People going into threads about language X to ask why anyone use a language with such obvious shortcomings.
• mkl95 4y ago
  Twitter is a cesspool of toxicity. A few years ago I was mocked by a 50k+ star project PM for contributing to their project without knowing some obscure details. Fortunately they didn't link my PR which was merged soon after anyway.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • kristopolous 4y ago
    I turn off notifications except from people I follow. Way healthier existence. People will bucket you and do pile ons on that site. I just visualize them as drunk drooling assholes about to pass out at their keyboards.
• Kiro 4y ago
  If they think that code is bad they should see my projects. This is a beautiful work of art compared to my insane spaghetti code. I honestly don't even see what's bad about it at all but maybe I'm just stupid.
  • tokamak-teapot 4y ago
    Maybe it’s non idiomatic JavaScript or something. The idea of it sounded good to me - I often used to want to find files and modify them in place and used find, grep and perl (options were -pi -e? Can’t remember!) … I should have made a script to make this easier but was always on different servers so just tried to remember how. Perhaps tools make it easier these days and this code is somehow not needed if you learn the tools - and could have been a shell alias or something. Still, the point is you shouldn’t mock other people’s work. Would you like your child’s work to be mocked by strangers? Would you like your parent’s work to be mocked by strangers? Don’t mock people’s work. It’s easy to feel the urge to do this on the Internet where it feels like the human behind something isn’t a real person, but they really are.
• Lapsa 4y ago
  I mean - ridicule ain't so bad. I wrote a Tetris game that memory leaks whatever gigabytes you throw at it. important thing is what you learn from that
  • TristanBall 4y ago
    But it leaks blocks of memory right? So when we get a full segment we can free them all at the same time? Sorry, couldn't resist...
    • qwertyforce 4y ago
      Meta Tetris - game screen is a representation of your available RAM, if game's over, computer freezes. Interesting idea
      • Teknoman117 4y ago
        In the same vein as the "doom or bad apple in task manager" on a machine with an absurd core count.
      • senko 4y ago
        Oh, we had that back in the day, or something very similar, but with disk. We used to play the "defrag" game for hours...
    • Teknoman117 4y ago
      Today I visualized the buddy allocator as memory Tetris.
  • dusted 4y ago
    Haha, I remember my first game leaking a texture on every frame! :D My first optimization was to, are you ready: Make the texture smaller!
• plaguepilled 4y ago
  Anecdotally, I find a lot of people who are eager to talk shit on other's work are not especially strong coders themselves. People who actually know what they're talking about usually don't get mad as a first reaction because they can actually articulate WHY they're mad. Usually I just block these personalities as quickly as possible and move on.
  • Trufa 4y ago
    Having learnt surfing some months ago, and having been surprised by the amount of aggressiveness/shouting/bad manners in the water, I've also noticed that the ones making the loudest noises are not the best surfers, these just seem to be doing their own thing, the shouty ones are not necessarily the bad surfers, but rarely you'll see the really good ones out there being angry at everyone.
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Beginners and low-intermediates tend to be very rules-driven in their thinking about whatever it is they're learning. Statements about programming are universally true or false, and they readily absorb notions from blogs and so on without the experience required for evaluating to which extent what is said is true (and in which contexts they are true). I'll also note a general tendency toward zealotry regarding terms that are value loaded. "Pure", "clean", "functional", "correctness". I'll posit that if in some parallel universe FP was called "beige programming" and "pure functions" had instead been dubbed "moist functions", there wouldn't be half the zealotry in this regard, even though these are properties of the signifier and not the signified.
• FortiDude 4y ago
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • RamblingCTO 4y ago
    Would you treat someone in real life like that?
    • scrollaway 4y ago
      People who write posts like the GP’s tend to be bullies wherever they can get away being one. So to answer your question: yes, but only if they can avoid getting caught by others.
      • FortiDude 4y ago
        People who write posts like yours tend to ascertain their moral superiority by psychoanalyzing people on the internet based on a few badly interpreted words
        • chris_wot 4y ago
          No, you are definitely giving off mean vibes.
        • scrollaway 4y ago
          If you don’t like what I have to say about you, in your own words, I “suggest you make your profile private and only follow people you have a personal connection with”.
          • FortiDude 4y ago
            You have said nothing about me since you're talking to a simple username whose life you have no idea about. But I'm not the one here sobbing, so your reply means absolutely nothing
• pencilguin 4y ago
  In other news, I am once again reminded why I am happy not to have a Twitter account.
• drumhead 4y ago
  It was nearly 10 years ago, so Im hoping those people have matured and changed since then. When you're younger you do and say a lot of stupid things that you look back and regret a lot. Its easy to get caught up in the moment with friends and collegues when you're still developing as a person and trying desperately to fit and impress your peers or others, so you tend to do stupid things. Experience changes you and I hope thats what happened to these people.
  • blueflow 4y ago
    If you look at a specific person, yes. But there is a constant influx of new people, and a fraction haven't made the important developments yet. So you'll always have some problem-makers in your community.
• teekert 4y ago
  I recently read Rutger Bregman's "Humankind" (original Dutch tile: Most people are kind), and it really seems to be true, I like the optimistic tone of the book and perhaps it's indeed robbing you of beautiful experiences when you are to distrustful towards others... And then there is twitter. Like a filter for the worst of the worst, I just stay away from it. Twitter helps me with that because having no account means that every encounter ends in that curse inducing black screen when you're half way into reading a tweet and the back button doesn't even work.
  • frgtmnm 4y ago
    Isn't Twitter a counterexample to the conjecture "Most people are kind"? I also don't have a Twitter account. And I'm happy too keep it that way. But bad people don't cease to exist if you stop reading their tweets. In the past 100 years, we had Auschwitz, the killing fields, the gulags in USSR, genocides in central Africa, human trafficking, child abuse, and many other crimes against humanity. I don't see how people can decide within a couple of decades that, nevertheless, "most people are kind". There is a monster hiding in all of us. And it doesn't go away by ignoring it. Instead we should acknowledge it, and tame it. Because otherwise it will burst forth unexpectedly, and a new Hitler or Stalin is born.
    • agileAlligator 4y ago
      > Isn't Twitter a counterexample to the conjecture "Most people are kind"? Not really, no. Coz the type of people on Twitter, and the type of people to actually tweet (and not just lurk) aren't exactly the sanest of humanity.
      • frgtmnm 4y ago
        Do you actually have evidence for that?
        • teekert 4y ago
          Rutger Bregman's "Humankind" is actually presenting a lot of (convincing) evidence towards the hypothesis that the vast vast majority of people are in fact kind, and have been throughout most of our recent history. This is thus also evidence for the statement "Twitter is a cesspool of the worst of the worst of us", although we may ask: Is it really? Or does "the algorithm" bring out the worst and to the surface? Does Twitter repel kind people? These are interesting, even very important questions imho.
• Semaphor 4y ago
  800 comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767
  • propagandist 4y ago
    > Funny how @coreyhaines has made hugboard.com ("giving the gift of encouragement"), @steveklabnik is a maintainer of hacketyhack, a tool for learning how to program. Even back then they were champions of mentorship and teaching people to program. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106935
    • dontbeaklabnik 4y ago
• fergie 4y ago
  "Haters gonna hate" You get used to this as soon as you get any sort of success as a creator. It says more about them that it does about you. If you are getting hate, you know you are doing something right.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  If you put something in the public, code, articles, books, music, videos you have to be prepared for everything. From the very best of the praisings to the very worst of the critiques. If you can't handle it, then keep it private or share just with a restricted group.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  If you put something in the public, code, articles, books, music, videos you have to be prepared for everything. From the very best of the praisings to the very worst of the critiques. And being open source has nothing to do with the comments. They are due to the public nature of the code. If you can't handle it, then keep it private or share just with a restricted group.
  • dale_glass 4y ago
    Okay, and what's the benefit of that? I mean, this policy selects for people with a thick skin. Why is that desirable? Because having a thick skin doesn't necessarily imply one is a good programmer, or somebody who has particularly good ideas.
    • DeathArrow 4y ago
      It's no policy. It's just the way the world works.
      • chris_wot 4y ago
        It’s really not.
• csande17 4y ago
  I can't help but feel like I'm missing context here. The project (https://github.com/harthur/replace https://github.com/harthur/replace) seems like a vaguely reasonable "grep with a simpler interface and a regex syntax I'm already familiar with" kind of utility. It's far from a central example of the dependency bloat that people usually mock about Node.js--it uses the standard library for all the actual filesystem and regex work, and just has a couple dependencies for normal things like command-line parsing and ANSI color codes. Has the project been significantly rewritten and cleaned up following these posts? Was there some absurd hype cycle for this thing that didn't deliver? Did the Internet get mad at this person for some unrelated reason? What happened here?
  • blueflow 4y ago
    Would the bad code quality justify the snarkiness on Twitter?
    • csande17 4y ago
      If the code was exceptionally bad, it might not justify the snarkiness, but it would maybe explain it at least. The current code looks fine though; I could definitely see me and my Big Tech colleagues writing something like this and getting some value out of it. Maybe people just had way higher standards in 2013, and code that seems fine now would have been farcically terrible back then. I kind of doubt it, though!
    • dusted 4y ago
      I just read the source and I don't think there's anything notworthy about it, it's not bad. It's just javascript as written in 2013.. I don't think the snark was justified in this case.. Someone writing a quick little thing because they didn't want to use sed is absolutely great! The entire idea about computers is that they're meant to be programmed.. That also means lots of overlap in functionality and it means some programs are more specific than others.. and more polished than others.. And that's just how it should be (imo). > Would the bad code quality justify the snarkiness on Twitter? I think it should, because the other extreme is that any criticism is banned, no matter how polite, and everyone gets to be a special genius snowflake who can do no wrong, and our software will degrade at an even faster rate because of it. I think think there should be more public ridicule of slow and inefficient code, especially when it comes to things like drivers, operating systems, browsers and web frameworks which play a large role in our everyday lives.. Imagine how much electricity we'd save if we were a bit more scared of the long-beards showing our dirty underwear to the world in a torrent of spite and sarcasm.
• Teknoman117 4y ago
  > I tell them to make something that they would find useful and put it out there. Can you imagine if one of these new open sourcerers took my advice and got this response, without the support I had. Can you imagine? That brought forward a repressed/unref'd memory... Way back in the late 00's, a teenage me was dipping his toes into contributing to open source projects. I don't recall the specific project and won't try to guess, but I can vividly recall this horrible response I got after posting some code for review. Some presumably older person on the mailing list discovered I was, in fact, a teenager. Went on a tirade about how "children" need to stay out of programming - on the project's mailing list. Nothing about the code, just an attack on me because of my age. I remember asking my parents what they thought. They told me I could be interested in whatever I damn well please to be, and that if I could avoid internalizing the response, reach out to this person and see whatever they had to say. Needless to say, this person didn't have anything friendly or actionable to say in a direct email either. I think that's the first time I ever bumped into an asshat online. Oh well, joke's on him. I only became more interested in computing and started a career in it.
  • bumblebritches5 4y ago
  • scrollaway 4y ago
    Your parents sound pretty cool.
  • PostOnce 4y ago
    We were all teenagers once, newbies, neophytes; we all wrote our first function at some point. It's odd how some of us forget that once we become competent -- once upon a time, we weren't. We needed a helping hand, a tip, some advice on a problem, and we went to people and asked for help and got it. I never ever fault anyone for being a newbie; I only fault them if they don't try. If anyone tries to do something, they should be commended for the attempt. A lot of people never bother to try anything at all!
    • Teknoman117 4y ago
• gambiting 4y ago
  The number 1 mistake was searching Twitter and caring about any of these posts.
  • mk89 4y ago
    Sometimes you might stumble upon your stuff indirectly, like you see this popup in your timeline, or similar.
• moonchrome 4y ago
  • kakadzhun 4y ago
    Her emotional response was definitely not wrong nor an issue. Criticism is hard to take for anyone, but the tweets weren't even criticism, just plain mocking. What do you believe was her mistake? Sobbing about it for an emotional release, or trying to put something out in the open source world?
    • moonchrome 4y ago
      Not knowing how to deal with mocking ? If your response is sobbing then either your parents failed at providing kindergarten life lession or you're so insecure that a random tweet from some dude on the internet can make you cry. To simplify : - I'm a professional who gets shit done, some sarcastic tweet about something I didn't know is just an insight + a hint that the person making the comment is a dick. I'm aware that despite me not knowing everything I produce valuable solutions and any solution can be picked apart by some criteria. - I'm a novice and am aware of it - someone mocking me for not knowing something doesn't make sense - I'm not supposed to be at the level to produce ideal solutions - getting things working is an achievement on it's own - It hurt because I'm insecure about my ability. I need to work on my ability and confidence (which is why mocking people who can't do anything about it is exceptionally pathetic). Mocking aside - working with insecure emotional people is a chore - you have to walk on eggshells to avoid breaking frail egos by pointing out their mistakes in a way that will not trigger their ego defense mechanisms and go down that spiral.
      • hoseja 4y ago
        Or you get how to exploit the evolutionary hack of men rushing to protect a sobbing woman.
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      >Her emotional response was definitely not wrong nor an issue. It was both. If we keep telling people that they can fall apart at the drop of a hat we end up with a lot of people who can't function in society.
• Trufa 4y ago
  What a nice apology http://blog.coreyhaines.com/2013/01/im-sorry.html http://blog.coreyhaines.com/2013/01/im-sorry.html
  • scrollaway 4y ago
    Yeah, two nice apologies and I’m sadly unsurprised to find out that the third person in the screenshot never published one and doubled down on their stance of being an arse…
    • googlryas 4y ago
      I look at you, David, I don’t see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared-shitless script kiddie. But you’re a genius, David. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a program of mine, you ripped my fucking life apart. You’re a co-founder, right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read a pitch deck? Does that encapsulate you? Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you that I can’t read in some fucking powerpoint. Unless you want to talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t want to do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  I wonder what it’s like working with these snark merchants? Caring about code quality is important but it’s even more important that feedback is given so that lands, and authors have the right attitude to feedback. Code review fails if people bicker or refuse to collaborate. No code is correct. It either ends up being shown to be flawed in design, inadequate for the task as we now understand it, or rotten in comparison to the wider context in which it lives, and which has now evolved. The real value of a SWE team is having the drive and relationship strength to be constantly shipping impactful diffs, without drama.
  • maxbond 4y ago
    Anecdotally I argue a lot with people online, though I try not to be snarky or rude, but I work very hard not to argue with coworkers. So I think it's possible you could work next to a snark merchant for years and not know it; behavior in one setting isn't necessarily related to behavior in another.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• neilv 4y ago
  I think this is a reminder that there's usually a person at the other end of something. I know I need the reminder sometimes, as I think most people do, despite what I think are generally good intentions.
• nix23 4y ago
  Please just stop using twitter, it's a emotion machine to generate hype/hate, if your a good human and/or techie stay away from that place, maybe you also want to stay away from github too.
  • regular 4y ago
• langsoul-com 4y ago
  This was 2013 as well. I think it's gotten significantly worse since then. People love to hate, to critise, but never ever create. It's extremely difficult to make anything, but extraordinary easy to talk smack. Just look at YouTube movie or TV critics. It boils down to argghh, snark, hate and ANGRY VOICE. Not trying to create, to offer alternatives, but just to hate and tear down. Maybe we need a community that would give valid feedback or nothing at all. No snark, no veiled snark Nada.
• kaffeeringe 4y ago
  Why can't people just ignore stuff they don't like and leave people alone. :-(
  • WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
    Because THE ENGAGEMENT and ALL THE LIKES
• lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  To me this is about inequalities of power. The original author was not some internet celebrity with millions of followers - but those who snarked her either were, or added up to have the same effect. It's a bit like me and Elon having an online fight - no matter the "truth" of the matter, he has unfair advantage. No he did not inherit that advantage. But it is still there. And I suspect one of the underlying "social media"issues is that "power" online (maybe just reach) is waaaay more unequal than IRL. Partly due to early years, partly because reach does not fully map to money, but even so people think "that's what government is for ... where is it?" And Facebook does not want to govern.
  • hsn915 4y ago
    I felt differently about it. The author of the blog is a woman. I didn't realize this at first, but as I was reading the article, something really odd was said: > I start sobbing. At first I almost could not believe what I was reading. I understand feeling discouraged and even somewhat down for being made fun of by some anonymous dude online. But to start sobbing? I thought this was a very weird / alien reaction. Then I thought, oh wait, is she a woman? So I scrolled up to the top of the page and indeed, the blog name indicates the author is a woman. As far as I can tell, it's actually a woman privilige to appeal to people based on your sadness. If you're a woman and something made you sad, you are guaranteed to get sympathy and support from many people. If something made a man cry, he would in all liklihood be ridiculed even further. At least, this is the experience of the vast majority of men. That's why, for example, "MRA" activism is not effective at all: it's a bunch of men trying to appeal to people based on their emotions. It doesn't seem to work for men.
    • Eszik 4y ago
      What a pathetic comment. My gut reaction to "I started sobbing" was "man, that's rough, I feel bad for them". No further assumption about their gender. Seems to me that you're projecting your thoughts on gender on her.
      • flumpcakes 4y ago
• alkonaut 4y ago
  I'm trying to sort out what the complaints were about. Was it that it was poorly written? I didn't look at the code, but that doesn't feel like the kind of implementation that would draw attention. Was it that it was pushed as something revolutionary? I didn't see any of that either. I have probably written a half dozen utilities just like this. But never published one. They are one-off tools that end up being two-off then more. The "Why not use grep" is a bit strange. Grep doeesn't do search/replace does it? And not all OSes have grep out of the box (On windows, I usually end up getting ripgrep, but I sure don't get a ripsed to go with it). Having a search/replace command line tool with a good regex syntax (good as in not Perl) would be fantastic. Even better if it would be a self contained executable and not requiring node - but I can see that a node tool would be useful for someone who often has node available on their machine. Was the ridicule chiefly based on that it was made in Node.js? It's my best guess, but wth? If anything deserves ridicule, it's this (which are the two most upvoted answers from stackoverflow on how to replace using grep). Does anyone look at this and say "well, this looks fine, can't see how that could be any less obscure" find /path/to/files -type f -exec sed -i 's/oldstring/new string/g' {} \; grep -rl matchstring somedir/ | xargs sed -i 's/string1/string2/g'
  • mjw1007 4y ago
    There's a traditional semi-standard utility called `rpl` for making this easy. Unfortunately the current maintainer of the active fork decided to remove the `-R` option because they think piping find(1) output into it is better. There's some discussion at https://github.com/rrthomas/rpl/issues/9 https://github.com/rrthomas/rpl/issues/9 .
    • asnelt 4y ago
      I suppose I could be ridiculed too, but there is also my `rrep` utility which still has an `-r` option: https://git.sr.ht/~asnelt/rrep https://git.sr.ht/~asnelt/rrep It's packaged for Debian, Arch and openSUSE: https://repology.org/project/rrep/packages https://repology.org/project/rrep/packages
• psychphysic 4y ago
  V funny that at least one of those names is recognisable as the guy who appears out of nowhere indignant on HN, twitter or Reddit if you criticise Rust at all.
  • flumpcakes 4y ago
    I maintain Rust has a very hostile community most of the time. It seems to me that they hide behind progressive social stances and say "see we're nice guys!" when they're just as rude and indignant than any other group. I think it goes hand-in-hand with the intellectual-superiority-claims that other code is unsafe, but our code is safe because we're Rust-people. It is a real shame, because the language itself is pretty cool.
    • psychphysic 4y ago
      I absolutely agree. Issues at Rust got to the point that about a year ago the moderation committee resigned. [0] Anecdotes suggest was over quite serious irreconcilable issues[2] The rumour mill went wild and I've no idea if we ever got clarity. It's a rabbithole with spiralling conspiracy theories. A core member seemed to delete their Twitter too. [1] Very concerningly the original resignation letter said to be sceptical (I think that's the word used) of core team response. This I think was recanted. I'm not sure what the circumstances of the recantation was but it's a very serious thing to say of course. Is it possible it was based on legal advice? In my opinion there's no smoke without fire and there is far too much controversy in and around the Rust community to call it bad luck. Something is rotten there but I guess I have no interest in finding out why. Only that I stopped going to Rust meetups at Mozilla due to the hostile atmosphere to any detractors. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/23/rust_moderation_team_quits/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/23/rust_moderation_team_... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_team_resignation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/rclslb/the_core_team_is_toxic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/rclslb/the_core_team_...
    • WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
      I don't think that the person in question has changed at his core since. This in the vast majority of cases, doesn't happen. In most cases, the troll/bully/predator only learns to hide their nature better. Posting apologies after having been called out on bullying behavior can be construed either as a genuine apology, or an attempt to hide one's own true nature. It might be the latter with the person believing in the former, too. This is why I take all that being paragons of empathy (or whatever it is they mean by this word), inclusivity, etc with a grain of salt the size of a small boulder. Why I think I shouldn't be too generous towards the person and the community he's been representing: they haven't let go of pile-ons and bashing, they just now are directing it at a different target. It seems socially acceptable to bash anything written in C and therefore "unsafe", without taking into account how nuanced this whole thing is. It's "impersonal" (hint: it's not), so it must be okay, right? Right?
• k1ll3r 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • weonk 4y ago
    What an awful comment. Sounds like your mother needs to have a stern word or two with you.
    • dang 4y ago
      "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • dang 4y ago
    We've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• Rich_Morin 4y ago
  The other day I wrote a fan letter to a developer who has been maintaining a popular and useful library for several years. In his reply, he said that this was the first fan letter he had ever received. I think we need to show Open Source developers a lot more love and a lot less snark...
  • smcl 4y ago
    There have been a few times - reading blog articles or pieces of code - where I've been tempted to write to the author to show some appreciation, but have shied away from it thinking they might take it as creepy or parasocial. It wouldn't, of course, I can write a quick "hey, I really liked this" note without coming across like a maniac, but a little voice always stops me short. I'll try to ignore it in future :)
  • jimmywetnips 4y ago
    The addition of discussion sections for repos has been really great for this. On a lot of larger projects there's appreciation threads. But any project with thousands of downloads is obviously useful enough to warrant a quick thanks
  • acdha 4y ago
    You’re definitely right. It’s only happened a few times for me and it can be a bit disheartening because you’ll definitely hear from the people who think you’re their enterprise support team or feel that clear gap on the project were suggestions for large amounts of work.
• weonk 4y ago
  Interesting to see that Steve Klabnik was one of the bullies. I always had him down as a wrong 'un, I suppose this confirms it. Though he did publicly apologise, albeit probably just to save his reputation after being called out on his bullying.
  • dontbeaklabnik 4y ago
• adql 4y ago
  Repeat after me: "my code isn't me, it's a snapshot of my skill and deadlines at the time"
• einpoklum 4y ago
  The three tweets quoted on the post are derisive of the project. They're not ad-hominem. True, they don't go into details, but those are 140-character tweets. They are excessively snarky and negative, but - I would also have a negative opinion of a sed alternative written in node.js and with a fraction of the features. On the other hand, the tweeters should have given the thing the benefit of the doubt, treated it as a newbie/personal experiment project, and just not published a tweet about it. My $.02 anyway.
  • WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
    In 280 characters, you can just have twice the amount of snark. Just look at... what the hell, look at Twitter as it is today. It's not like you can't be wholesome in 140 characters or less. People have been texting wholesome things to one another in 160 characters or less since SMS, and non-Latin-alphabet folks in 70 or less. But peer-to-peer SMS doesn't make you a self-proclaimed standup comedian complete with an audience and limelight, doesn't give you likes and retweets, and Twitter gives it all to you. This is all the difference: engagement and gamification. You see, quite often, when you criticize the project, it has the tendency to leak to the person. Even if that person's hide is exceptionally thick, it just takes the right amount of acid to eat through it.
    • einpoklum 4y ago
      With 280 characters, you can very well say "I noticed [project]. While [some mitigation of snarkiness], [snark]".
• sho_hn 4y ago
  Does anyone know what happened to the author of the tool? Her blog and her GitHub account activity cease not too long after this incident. Would be a shame if she had gotten bullied out of the craft.
  • sho_hn 4y ago
    I found a newer blog post a short moment later, but wasn't back at the keyboard in time to edit. From 2017: https://heathermoor.medium.com/what-happens-when-you-retire-from-github-979fb6b143b3 https://heathermoor.medium.com/what-happens-when-you-retire-... "There was also a moment where several well-known, established programmers publicly made fun of some of the code I posted. This was at a time where I was still junior. It took away my confidence in my coding ability for awhile. It’s ironic because I’ve found the best way to build confidence is to do hard things you didn’t think you could do. Coding up these libraries and getting them working gave me real confidence in my coding. But, once again, I didn’t need to open source them to get that benefit. I personally, despite a common mantra, regret many things I’ve done in my life. One of them is open sourcing all those side projects. I would have open sourced maybe a couple of them, and otherwise gotten experience from working on an established open source project, or my own projects in private."
• avg_dev 4y ago
  Man, I remember when that was first posted. I just burned a lot of time going back and rereading some of the comments on HN. To be honest, I got tears in my eyes reading the original blog post. People can be mean sometimes. I know a lot of people call out Twitter as particularly toxic or that it is hard to express yourself clearly in 140 chars. Personally I have a Twitter feed that is filled with positivity and reality and takes on life that educate and uplift me and give me hope for the future. (Threads, anyone?) (Sometimes the reality can be quite depressing. But I can guarantee you nobody is shitting on others like this in my feed. I know there are many problems with Twitter. But to all the people who made it possible for me to learn from so many diverse and brilliant people, a big fucking thank you for that. You have brought me immense joy and made me a more thoughtful and better educated person. I will do my best to remember that no matter what happens.) I’m finding it hard to resist posting further negativity. I think Kendrick Lamar said it best: > In the land where hurt people hurt more people, > Fuck callin’ it culture…
• snthpy 4y ago
  I'm sorry you had to go through that. Unfortunately I find it's not uncommon for anything that gets publicity. Let's call out bullies for sure and just stay strong in your belief in yourself that they only took notice because someone else appreciated it enough that they wanted to share it. I like to speak at local Python events. I know the audience and enjoy giving back to the community in terms of sharing tips and tricks that I find useful. Some of the videos are posted online. Most have tens, maybe a few hundred views. One video got picked up by a popular coding channel and reposted on their channel. Within days it has tens of thousands of views. After the initial excitement of this development, I started to read the comments and it was not pretty. "So boring", "Great topic, but you won't learn that from this Muppet.", ... It took me a while to process those. Then I turned to focus on the many more positive comments. Even if it helps just one person, that's a positive impact you had on someone which is a wonderful privilege to have been able to do. Always remember it's not the critic that counts, but the person in the arena: https://youtu.be/A311CnTjfos https://youtu.be/A311CnTjfos
• nicgrev103 4y ago
  Haters gonna hate. I feel like this has got better over the past few years but there was certainly a culture where being nasty online was acceptable. When I was a teenager I was playing around with web design and posted the finished design on a facebook group. I got the exact same response 'this made my eyes bleed'. Certainly knocked confidence but ultimately it says more about those people that their lives are so sad they have to put others down to feel better themselves. Classic bully stuff.
• helaoban 4y ago
  The best part of all that is that I would LOVE a UNIX command to quickly bulk replace filenames against a pattern instead of some multi-pipe bash loop incantation that I usually resort to (when banging out mv x y on 30+ files is really too dumb to stomach). Simple binary sans node please, but the idea is great. I mean dear god look at these examples: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9393607/find-and-replace-filename-recursively-in-a-directory https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9393607/find-and-replace.... Now somebody tell me I'm an idiot and recommend a commonly used program for the aforementioned problem please.
  • nixpulvis 4y ago
    I've been happy with `rename` when I need it.
    • mkl 4y ago
      Yes, rename sounds like exactly the tool for the job, very simple and quick. But several answers in that "dear god look at these examples" StackOverflow thread do use rename (sometimes embedded in find commands or other), so I'm not sure what OP is looking for. rename 's/foo/bar/g' * seems pretty unbeatable. If you need to choose the files more elaborately, combine it with find (I prefer xargs to -exec): find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 rename 's/foo/bar/g' -print0 and -0 use null separators so can handle filenames with spaces etc.
      • helaoban 4y ago
        Well, First: I'm looking for something like this: "rename -r . s/foo/bar/g" to recurse into subdirs. It might seem trivial, but things like find's -exec (a find idiosyncrasy) and xargs (I don't always remember how xargs -I works with extra arguments etc..) can add enough friction to the process where I just end up doing it manually with mv and it's not a fun time. I usually end up having to rename a few files (less than 20) across multiple directories (like changing a naming convention). Second: The rename command your suggesting is actually a perl script that is indirectly symlinked with /usr/bin/rename on debian-derived distributions . And there can be at least 3 versions of this perl script by different authors under different aliases. See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/229230/whats-with-all-the-renames-prename-rename-file-rename https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/229230/whats-with-a... On other distros -- well at least mine -- rename is a much dumber command with a different invocation (rename [options] expression replacement file) that is restricted to glob-style patterns (which incidentally is all I usually need anyways). Oh an you can also get this version on debian & co with the util-linux package. But why do I need that when I already have mv? Anyways, the UNIX tools have terrible UI and terrible package management and everybody knows but I felt like saying it anyways...
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  There’s entire subreddits that are dedicated to slagging people. I suspect that it goes for almost every vocation, but I’m aware of ones dedicated to programmers (having been honored, myself). Speaking only for myself, they may be absolutely correct, in their criticism (I know I’m a stuffy old coot, and use “quaint” techniques, like OOP), but I’d suggest that it’s a really bad idea to participate in these fora. This article is Exhibit A. Three people have just been called out, on the front page of HackerNews, for snarky comments they made, almost a decade ago. I can’t imagine that it’s helpful for their careers. No one wants to work with a bully. I think the author has long since moved on, as I see her GH repos have been basically abandoned, long ago, and I wish her well. That’s a big reason that I’m a stuffy old coot. Social media can last forever, so I make a point of not engaging in online pissing matches, and being as positive and encouraging as possible, even if it garners me scorn. "The only things that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've said about them." -Camille Paglia [UPDATE] I was interested in what she has had to say, and found this: https://heathermoor.medium.com/what-happens-when-you-retire-from-github-979fb6b143b3 https://heathermoor.medium.com/what-happens-when-you-retire-... It appears that she's doing fine, but not really participating so much in open source. It looks like her detractors are probably also OK. Don't you just love happy endings?
  • jeegsy 4y ago
    I find it amusing that the apologies linked in the post read like hostage notes. I can't help but imagine a gun to the heads of each of those guys as they nervously typed out the apologies.
    • jonnycomputer 4y ago
      Perhaps they realized that people would be shitting on them a decade later on one of the most popular platforms for programmers?
    • godshatter 4y ago
      It would be nice all around if people remembered that others are generally a mix of good and bad qualities, have good and bad days, and sometimes have regrets as soon as their finger has fully pressed the Enter key. Thank the gods I posted most of my stupidest stuff long ago and which is probably lost to the ages. These kinds of things shouldn't have the ability to wreck someone's career or cause them grief in other ways.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dools 4y ago
  It’s crazy that this project produced such a strong response from anyone. I remember writing this old piece of shit around the same time: https://github.com/iaindooley/pickdrop https://github.com/iaindooley/pickdrop The first version was a poor implementation in a number of ways and all I got were constructive contributions on how to improve it! Why was Heather ridiculed for her comparatively well written and documented project when I received an admittedly very small but generally positive and supportive response?
  • forgotpwd16 4y ago
    For something very simple, this is a cool idea. Two observations related to install.sh: i) /usr/local/bin/ rather /usr/bin/ is where manually--not handled by package manager--installed software is usually put, ii) chmod & cp are replaceable by a single install command. edit: And errriclee's gist seems very useful. For example can go around picking some files wanting to replace a string and then can do `run sed -i 's/old/new/' {}`.
    • jwilk 4y ago
      More comments about the install script: • #!/bin/bash is not portable. For example, on (some?) BSDs, bash is in /usr/local/bin/. • But you don't use any bash-specific features, so just #!/bin/sh would work. • Not everybody uses sudo. • How about a Makefile instead of a shell script?
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  > "Also, it was hard for me to convey this, but the snarkiness of the tweets really made it so much worse. I wish I could explain why." That's why any halfway decent person online will stick to criticizing ideas, concepts, particular constructions, etc. and make it clear they're suggesting how to improve the project rather than just launching a personal attack on an individual. There are cases where a particular pattern of behavior by an individual over time can be legitimately criticized or held up as an example of how not to behave, but that's something of an extraordinary situation, most people are pretty decent to others.
  • stavros 4y ago
    To be fair, the tweets posted weren't personal attacks, they were criticizing the code and the usefulness. Then again, maybe I'm not one to talk, I'm much more often on the sending than the receiving end, though hopefully not as much lately.
• ctrlmeta 4y ago
  There is a lesson here for commenters to Show HN too. It is not uncommon to see someone sharing their post with the HN community here, then someone posts a dismissive comment and that quickly gets upvoted to the top. This is a reminder to be kind while giving feedback. Words have great power. With great power comes great responsibility.
• cnfernandes 4y ago
  Parents must encourage curiosity. And if you are not failing, you really aren’t pushing yourself enough. I wanted to teach my kids some important life lessons so I had them interview some amazing people - Jimmy Wales, Vint Cerf, Nobel prize winners, Pulitzer winners, prime ministers etc. they’ve learnt a lot. If you are curious google Rookie Reporter . There is also. Youtube channel of the same name.
• krater23 4y ago
  The mistake was to just not ignore anything what comes from twitter. Twitter is a pile of shit that mostly produces hate, don't see a reason to don't just ignore it.
• Sirened 4y ago
  This reminds me of the time that, after having publishing my first ever piece of professional work, a competing academic privately threatened and later actually did put out a series of tweets calling me a liar and a fraud. He was wrong, of course; my benchmarks were accurate, it was just that I was using the tools for a very particular task and he was doing something quite different in his own tests, but holy shit did I cry so hard that day. It's terrifying being effectively whipped in the town square and called a fraud in front of not only some hot shot's 50k followers but also your academic and professional colleagues. I was panicking because I knew I had done good work and I didn't want someone ruining either my work or the reputation I had just started building. I ended up talking with some friends, my advisor, and some mentors and ended up calming down. I ended up just muting him on twitter and walking away from the entire thing, though I have heard he still brings it up to this day any time anyone mentions this project within earshot of him. From what I hear, it's unfortunately not uncommon for publications to go this way when performance-crowns are up for grab. I've mostly slipped off the public publishing route since I found it's not something I love, but you know some people really are assholes and, well, so it goes...
  • cvwright 4y ago
    I had a few run-ins with fellow academics that went something like what you describe. My main take away from the experiences (plural!) is that the most practical definition of “academic ethics” turns out to be “Never criticize the work of someone who is more famous than you.”
  • brickbat13 4y ago
    That reminds me too much of kataras/iris story that I starts to suspect you to be him. In this case criticism was well-deserved.
• kelahcim 4y ago
  I was engaged in exactly the same rant. For me, the outcome is I don't talk with random people anymore :) Waste of time.
• Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  Commonly known as nonconstructive criticism from people bored by the lack of their own imaginations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg
• 1337shadow 4y ago
  A lot of Open Source maintainers are dicks which they compensate for with pointless virtue signaling.
• recursivedoubts 4y ago
  When htmx was intercooler.js, I had an alert set up that let me know when anyone mentioned it on reddit. It didn't get a lot of traffic, but it was fun to see people talking about something I cared a lot about. One day I got an alert from /r/javascript, which was surprising to me, and I clicked through. The topic was "If you were going to design the worst javascript library imaginable, what would you include?" The top answer was: "I would just clone intercooler.js" :)
  • Aleksdev 4y ago
    Ouch!
    • recursivedoubts 4y ago
      "Do you wanna know how I got these scars?"
  • bsnnkv 4y ago
    I just sprinkled a little htmx on my long term passion project; if this is wrong, I never wanna be right again!
  • zach_garwood 4y ago
    I really like your project! I just wish I had more opportunities to use it.
• hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
  Ignore Twitter, it’s mostly a cesspool of vanity and hate.
• makach 4y ago
  haters going to hate. I am glad that some fire starters backtracked and apologized. that said. thanks to the op (harthur) for sharing this experience with us. since you gave us the chance to reflect, we might be able to learn from the experience and become better colleagues.
• ki_ 4y ago
  I think the fact that she got upset is very bad. If some one criticizes your project, that's good. That means, you can ask for feedback and either you learn something new or you realise the person that criticized you wasnt that smart. If you want to see someone fail their entire life, just never let them know what they are doing wrong. or.. criticize them once, so they dont have to fail again in the future. This is old news, criticism is the nice thing to do.
  • sidlls 4y ago
    Those tweets weren’t constructive criticism, they were the kind of insults petty, insecure people hurl at others to inflate their own egos and assert dominance.
    • ki_ 4y ago
      That's good. Now she knows she might be doing something wrong or can determine that these people are idiots. Either way, you learn something.
  • neilalexander 4y ago
    Nobody is disputing that offering helpful feedback is helpful but that is clearly not what happened here. None of them stood up and said "Hey, have you considered doing X instead of Y?" or "Z might be a better approach, here's my reasoning". They just took the opportunity to make it, and by extension her, into a joke. I can completely understand being upset in that case. If you are going to criticise, at the very least be constructive. Otherwise you aren't helping anyone.
  • Attrecomet 4y ago
    That's not at all what happened here. Criticism implies that there were any useful hints on what exactly is bad or should be done differently, instead of vague ridicule and insults. And BTW, excusing asshole behavior like that is not a good thing to do. She actually tweeted back both of them asking for details, a level of understanding neither tweet actually merited (but still a good strategy), and got no answer. There, now you won't even need to read TFA :)
• sporritt 4y ago
  Whenever I get negative comments about my open source endeavours, such as this from a well-known internet guy: https://twitter.com/kentcdodds/status/520671451829907457 https://twitter.com/kentcdodds/status/520671451829907457 I retweet them, and I laugh to myself about it. The other day I saw a great version of my retweet policy: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/y92iqm/this_sandwich_shop_displays_their_one_star_reviews/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/y92iqm/t... "I'm people luke cold subs, but I don't" People say dumb stuff, unfortunately. The only way to avoid it is to do nothing.
• varispeed 4y ago
  It is interesting that these people lack of self awareness and think it is okay to stroke their ego by demeaning someone else's work. > I can’t help but think of potential future employers that are no longer potential. I think that would be quite the opposite - people publicly showing these traits of bullying could find themselves struggling to find an employer. Whenever I worked, when someone expressed such an attitude, they were let go swiftly. Don't get me wrong - there is nothing wrong with criticism, but not in the way that contributes nothing and causes suffering. It must be constructive, respectful and devoid of one's ego.
• moffkalast 4y ago
  > And my code is so bad it makes people’s eyes bleed. So of course I start sobbing. Then I see these people’s follower count, and I sob harder. Ah hell, get a grip on reality. There isn't a single programmer I know that when told "your code sucks" wouldn't almost immediately reply "I know, right?". The fact is that the world is fundamentally built on eye-bleeding terrible pieces of critical shitware. Besides that, it's a field so arbitrary and opinionated that anyone can immediately find 10 things wrong even with the best code ever written. Welcome to the club, don't forget to grab your complimentary thick skin at the receptionist.
  • acdha 4y ago
    This is sadly a good example of the problem. Try putting yourself in someone else’s shoes — has anyone ever questioned your ability to work in the field? Asked if you’re in the wrong place for a job interview? Suggested you were in a CS class by mistake or to find a husband? Thought you were in a meeting to take notes? A ton of women in tech have reported having to deal with things like that for years. Now consider what it’s like having something you spent a lot of time on get this kind of pat dismissal suggesting the world would be better off if you’d never given it a gift. That’s harsh for anyone who doesn’t have loads of social capital and a massive ego, and even people who might seem to roll with it often have impacts you don’t know about. This tendency to slag people’s work is deeply engrained in the field but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be better off changing our culture.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      We definitely would be better off being nicer to each other, but in realistic terms that's not something that changes overnight. > Asked if you’re in the wrong place for a job interview? Suggested you were in a CS class by mistake or to find a husband? Thought you were in a meeting to take notes? I would imagine that's often more of a surprised blurt made without intentional ill will, even if it has vastly negative effects on the person being asked. Like seeing a male kindergarden teacher and asking which kid are they there to pick up. It's just so rare to see women in CS to the point where I didn't even realize or consider that OP is one of them.
• z29LiTp5qUC30n 4y ago
  Well the Systemd developers got sent death threats. Heck the cryptocurrency community has repeatedly sent death threats to the very people working on their root of trust. People just plain suck
• deleted 4y ago
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• bdhcuidbebe 4y ago
• throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  "At this point, all I know is that by creating this project I’ve done something very wrong." There's a flip side to this. People will be mean to us in life; we can't avoid it. But we can consider where they are coming from, and what is causing them to act mean. What are they really communicating? Maybe they don't know how to cope with conflicting feelings, and are lashing out in order to normalize their thoughts. Maybe they have not yet considered the consequence of their words, or the people receiving them. Maybe they themselves have a combination of ego and the need to feel correct and use a public forum to perform this act to puff themselves up. And maybe they're just stupid and arrogant. I spent some time with a toddler recently and her parents. Toddlers are mean!!! She told her mommy to go away, to stop talking, that she didn't like her. How cruel! But the kid didn't know what the impact of her words were. Later she was cuddling and loving on her mother, oblivious to what she had said. It's really hard for people to have a perspective outside their own, and to let that perspective lead actions, rather than acting without thinking. So when someone is mean to you, and you don't know why, try not to take it personal. Instead, have pity on this poor soul, who is probably hurting inside, and doesn't understand that lashing out isn't an acceptable way to behave.
  • 300bps 4y ago
    I read the book, “How to Practice” by the Dalai Lama several years ago. One of the main points I took from it (paraphrased) was, “If you are in the right frame of mind, your worst enemy cannot hurt you. If you are in the wrong frame of mind, your best friend visiting can be a horrible chore.” To me this was empowering. While I cannot control other’s actions, I can choose how I react to other’s actions.
• VLM 4y ago
  Twitter is workforce automation for that kind of behavior. Its designed to be like that.
• anotheraccount9 4y ago
  I've had a similar experience that really affected me. When asp.net came up, I wrote an ecommerce in vb.net; I read the specs and wrote the code with notepad. The system worked well for my customer and he was pretty happy. But when other programmers tried to pick up my code using their ide, it wasn't possible. So they unleased a flow of toxic waste in my mail. Now I only program for fun. I was young at the time, and was living in a new environment without friends or support. If I had a stronger spine that day, surely I would have continued.
  • c0wb0yc0d3r 4y ago
    I'm curious why the code couldn't be run in an ide. You don't happen to remember, do you? I cut my teeth on VB. I have only ran into 2 bugs in visual studio (personally) in the nearly 2 decades I've used it. Anyway, sorry that happened. :(
• krmboya 4y ago
  Funny seeing this pop up again after all these years.. If IIRC pg still used to post on HN those days. How time flies.. I imagine those folks on the article have long since moved on and forgotten about this incident
  • wedowhatwedo 4y ago
    I guarantee those critical of the code have forgotten about it, but I also that Heather has not.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mkeeter 4y ago
  While we're all sharing our war stories... A very well-respected developer recently told me to "take down your blog entry and this repo before you generate more embarrassment for yourself", because I didn't do a comprehensive literature review (and cite their code) before writing a blog post. (They later went back and edited their comments to turn down the vitriol, but guess which version I read immediately upon waking up?) I've been around the industry for a while and have relatively thick skin, but even so, dealing with that ruined my day. If I was new to the industry, I can't imagine how I would have reacted – but it certainly wouldn't have been positive; I could easily imagine burning out of open-source entirely given that reception.
  • disposable-712 4y ago
• donatj 4y ago
  I feel for the person. I am uncertain if their reaction about it limiting their job potential is hyperbole or not - but I assure you my friend anywhere you would actually want to work would see these people are just being rude. Over the years I have had a number of things thrown into the spotlight. While I personally find the exposure exciting, there are always people that are just weirdly viscous. The one I am still weirdly bothered by is a photo of myself with an AWS Snowball ended up on Reddit. Mid conversation people started discussing how my open mouth smile was going to gather flies. A person then commented that I looked like a lizard person. I think about that a lot for some reason. Comment was later deleted even, but never from my brain.
• ebjaas_2022 4y ago
  Software development is inherently hard, and many software developers suffer from impostor syndrome. It's easy, within software development, to start doubting your own work, because there are so infinitely many ways of solving each and every problem. You're never quite sure if your way of solving it is the best, or if it's even any good. It all floats in the air, sort of. I think that's why we're vulnerable to criticism of it.
• billsmithaustin 4y ago
  The value of your open source project is not a function of how many trolls spew vitriol about it. There will always be trolls. They’re background noise.
• subjectsigma 4y ago
  This feels like being on some sort of Bizzaro Internet. In the past people on the Internet have told me to kill myself or have physically threatened me and nobody else in the IRC channel bat a fucking eyelid. Potshots like this on the Internet are so common it is practically table stakes. Do I like it like this? No. Do I think it should be better? Yeah, in a better world. But no amount of blogging on my part would ever garner this level of sympathy. I'm confused as to why HN is collectively so concerned about this person (enough to have 245 comments on a ten year old repost) when the same or worse is happening every day. Is it the names involved?
• pyjarrett 4y ago
  I know the feeling of this post, but not at the level this person received. I did several weeks of work, a few hours a night modernizing some docs. This included reverse engineering and rewriting a Markdown target for an autogenerated documentation generator which didn't have one. There were good responses, but people also complaining and asking why I bothered doing it. Between this and Copilot scraping/training, I'm a lot more hesitant to put anything on GitHub.
• gnarbarian 4y ago
  it's okay to be laughed at for doing something silly. it's ok to laugh at something silly. you are not your code. take criticism in stride and assess it for value. you MUST be able to gracefully and graciously handle criticism in order to be a successful developer. if someone is snarky, match their energy or elevate the discussion by honestly asking for feedback and appealing to their good will. thick skin is necessary for open source development. that's ok. this is a silly project. that doesn't mean she is a bad developer we're all at different places in our journey. I think the takeaway for the developer here should be to communicate more with those around her. someone would have told her about grep and saved everyone some time.
• dilap 4y ago
  This just drives home how crazy it is to have every piece of conversation archived forever. Being a little bit of an asshole sometimes is human. If these interactions were ocurring in real life, maybe Harthur would've said, "Hey, you're being an asshole" to Klabnick et al., they would've apologized, everyone could've hugged it out and had a beer, and that would've been the end of it. Instead, a decade later suddenly random people on the internet are putting the behavior on trial. Pretty brutal!
  • friendlyHornet 4y ago
    It goes in the other direction too; when I was 13, I got into some flame wars with people from the Half-Life modding community on places like Moddb and Facepunch and, as ashamed I am to say, I was a notorious troll, until I was 14, then I became more respectful and actually became friends with lots of the people I trolled, and even met a few in real life But the things I said are still there, and I was dumb enough to use my real name, so they are stuck there forever, under my name. This was maybe 15 years ago I wonder how many rejections I got for jobs based on what HR found when they googled me
    • alexandreblin 4y ago
      I don't think Facepunch is still online. Unless there's an archive somewhere?
  • sharkbird2 4y ago
    Yes, I've been thinking a lot about this as well. I believe people deserve second chances, the opportunity to earn a form of redemption, to let the past stay in the past and be able to move forward. But with how much of our lives are being recorded in one way or another with modern technology, that gets harder and harder to do. There's a pressure today to be the perfect human being from day 1 that I don't think have existed in the same way ever before throughout history.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      Holy crap, yes. I was lucky enough to not have my every move scrutinized and evaluated as I navigated my teenage years. My offspring won't have that benefit. I sure as fuck made my share of missteps. There needs to be some sort of socially enforced cut off for 'kids being kids', but it starts with everyone not putting everything online.
• 6510 4y ago
  I wish there was a funnier way of putting it but the more famous you get the more weird people you attract and the weirder they get. It takes quite a bit of getting used (to if at all)
• t43562 4y ago
  I would like a stream editor that was easy to use. sed is powerful and it can work on huge files without loading them all into memory but the model it uses is very hard to understand IMO. It's such that you'll try almost anything before getting out the manual to work out how to achieve the smart effects that it can achieve. Then you hit the sort of "WTF" one where your problem with SED has no google-able answer. So rock-on the potentially less powerful stream editor that I can end up using more than once in a blue moon (ok barring sed 's///' which is easy enough to remember and commonly useful).
• ilikerashers 4y ago
  When I was a junior dev I applied for a position at a London based investment bank. I was more of a DBA dev and was trying to get a start in application dev. Some mega-nerd spent an hour asking me 100 things I knew nothing about. What were the different networking layers involved in connecting to an external HTTP endpoint? What is the eden space in Java? How do you optimise memory allocation? What is big O notation? The guy was basically getting a kick out of knowledge shaming and it went on for a good hour. I've no idea why he'd waste both of our time on it. I think he was eating in the background, maybe having a laugh with buddies. There are complete sociopaths/bullys out there. Expect and avoid these losers.
• ben7799 4y ago
  This goes all the way back to the 1990s at least. I had it happen to me when I was a college student. I spent a bunch of time at one point writing a linux kernel module to support an audio chip. All the code was working great, but I had never submitted before and had some indenting and formatting issues. The maintainer of that area just went to town flaming me over and over and over again on the list even though it was trivial to fix the formatting issues. Somebody else had to write that driver again later probably. I just kept a fork of the kernel that I had my code in for a while as the guy was so toxic I knew I wanted nothing to do with him ever again. Sometimes I have a theory that for a long time these people gravitated to open source projects partly because they had such toxic personality issues they couldn't function in a team environment in a company where their behavior would result in getting fired. There is so much cult of personality and self promotion in OSS.
• karmakaze 4y ago
  Maybe this isn't as much about open source culture as it is Twitter culture. I know I see lots of early learning repos on Github and wouldn't expect that kind of negativity. Usually a blog post would provide some context that such and such is a toy, learning experiment, etc to avert misguided feedback.
• silent_cal 4y ago
  Reminds me of Hacker News comments when a developer shares a project here.
• JoeyBananas 4y ago
  >At this point, all I know is that by creating this project I’ve done something very wrong. It seemed liked I’d done something fundamentally wrong, so stupid that it flabbergasts someone. So wrong that it doesn’t even need to be explained. And my code is so bad it makes people’s eyes bleed. So of course I start sobbing. Sobbing over what, Tweets? That's not behavior that I'd consider to be "normal." A grown up would look at this criticism and think "You know what? maybe my project isn't that good. Oh well, I guess I'll just learn from it and move on."
  • JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Artists? Absolutely. You better have thick skin for that kind of work. Very strange to see software engineering somewhat in the same category. I suppose though you always needed thick skin in an industry where you are likely to work alongside people much smarter than you. I at least have found it humbling.
• tylerjaywood 4y ago
  pointless whining about nothing that matters
• dontbeaklabnik 4y ago