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LDAPjs decomissioned by maintainer over hateful email

116 points by julkali 2y ago

arkarrow 2y ago
[flagged]
zzo38computer 2y ago
It is your own choice if you wish to continue the maintenance or not (and, even if you wish to maintain the project, you can decide to not accept email messages). If it is FOSS, then other people can maintain their own version if they want to do, anyways (this is why FOSS is important; it is due to things like this). However, whoever wrote the email message did not decomission the project; it is whoever maintain the project that did so, due to receiving such email message. I think that might be unnecessary to decomission the project just due to one message like that, but it is their choice to maintain or not maintain it, or to decomission it. (Anyways, if you receive too many messages like that then you might be too stressed to work on the project properly.) Although, still they should not have written such a email message, because it is no good. It does contain an actual comment about the program (although I am not familiar with the program to know whether or not the complaint is legitimate), but that is a very bad way of writing it. (Other comments also mention that stuff like this may be used to attack the project to make a version with malware if the original maintainer won't then someone else will and will add malware. It is a legitimate concern, which should be considered seriously, but one that can be handled whether or not this maintainer decides to maintain this project or not.)
deleted 2y ago
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arkarrow 2y ago
[flagged]
- arkarrow 2y ago
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brianwawok 2y ago
Diego!
phpnode 2y ago
People can be pretty weird. I once received death threats over a technical blog post I’d written nearly a decade earlier, because the reader was upset that I hadn’t updated it. (The date was clearly labelled at the top of the post)
- bowmessage 2y ago
  Yeah, personally I take this as a known fact of life on the internet. I'm surprised the maintainer let it get to them so much. Like many popular creators today are learning, we all must "stop reading the comments", lest we never put anything out there ever again, for fear of critical feedback.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    > I'm surprised the maintainer let it get to them so much. There's always a last straw.
    - bowmessage 2y ago
      Jia Tan will be happy to take over the project.
- altairprime 2y ago
  Consider substituting 'criminal' (or 'felonious', etc) for "weird" in future tellings of this story. Death threats are generally regarded as a crime by police and judicial systems, and 'weird' tacitly excuses the crime committed upon you. A death threat is not in the same category as weird, and does not deserve a framing-pardon from us.
- lopatin 2y ago
  Sounds like a first hand account of PHP driving people literally crazy
  - phpnode 2y ago
    It was about JavaScript!
selykg 2y ago
Man... the world sure makes me depressed some days. Today I've hit the limit of stupid on the internet, time to go home and go for a walk and not think about how absolutely awful some people can be. Not that I've ever had a need for this project, but, Diego, you're a terrible human being.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Though I’m pretty sure “Diego Schmiego” is a fake name.
acedTrex 2y ago
Gotta have a thick skin to deal with the general public, developer community or not
- emsal 2y ago
  Many public figures have social media and PR teams to help deal with stuff like this, you really expect that every individual out there should just grow a thick skin as culture is continually encouraging us to have more and more of a public presence? This is the kind of thinking that gives a free pass to entrenched patterns of discrimination and targeted hate speech. It's very possible that emails like this wouldn't just be a spew of random insults but targeted towards a person's very specific triggers, and in that case a thick skin cannot stop a bullet.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    > This is the kind of thinking that gives a free pass to entrenched patterns of discrimination and targeted hate speech What do you suggest? This is basically unpolicable in a world with anonymous ways of getting people to see text.
    - emsal 2y ago
      You might be correct but it still stands that nothing is added to the discourse by just telling people to grow a thick skin. It's a repulsive attitude and I had to call that out.
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        > It's a repulsive attitude It's actionable constructive advice.
        emsal 2y ago
        I think the "repulsive attitude" I'm referring to is shouting "Just grow a thick skin!" to someone who is saying that they're suffering from abuse. In some cases, the suffering is so acute and so deep ("bullets") that it's not necessarily actionable on the part of the person suffering; rather, it's a call for help that others may respond to.
mrkramer 2y ago
That mail looks like it was written by some LLM....I wouldn't take it seriously.
- drbawb 2y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you had said this before my most recent hire I would have agreed - but my junior writes stuff that looks like this or worse. I'm always reviewing stuff with weird capitalization, punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. that makes me raise an eyebrow on a regular basis. Their code looks just as weird despite having the help of a heavy-weight IDE in their corner. We're constantly cleaning up hanging indents, unnecessary newlines, mismatched indents, commented out code, etc. (That's with a college education, a Grammarly license, and no small amount of coaching on my part!) I have a sample size of 1, so I can't ascribe too much to "these damn kids," but it seriously strikes me as having learned written language primarily from texting & instant messaging. Whereas I grew up roughly by transitioning from: reading books -> writing mails to pen pals-> writing e-mails -> web chats -> T9 texting -> modern IMEs. In other words I initially learned to write with long-form content and learned to condense it down later. These days I think people are just learning straight from the condensed version. The other reason I don't think it's an LLM is simpler: most commercial LLMs wouldn't be "aligned" to be that rude, and the smaller LLMs I've seen wouldn't be able to inject relevant code snippets from a relatively unpopular library into the output. I would not be surprised if this person misused the library, got called out for it in code-review (calling the iterator multiple times is a huge code-smell), and now they are soothing their ego by shifting blame onto the library author for making "such a bad API."
  - mrkramer 2y ago
    Individual who sent that mail has trollish name, trollish email account and s/he is talking gibberish. My conclusion was, give it a pass and move on. >I would not be surprised if this person misused the library, got called out for it in code-review (calling the iterator multiple times is a huge code-smell), and now they are soothing their ego by shifting blame onto the library author for making "such a bad API." It could be that but then again it's his or her fault not the maintainer's. At the end of the day, s/he has some serious anger control issues if that's true. >The other reason I don't think it's an LLM is simpler: most commercial LLMs wouldn't be "aligned" to be that rude, and the smaller LLMs I've seen wouldn't be able to inject relevant code snippets from a relatively unpopular library into the output. You can modify some open source LLM to talk trash, meaning teach it to hate and disrespect.
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
I'd say name and shame such asinine correspondence, but somehow I doubt "Diego Jewstein" is the irate individual's real name.
davesque 2y ago
Honestly seems like you could also easily just laugh it off. People on the internet are weird and gross. But I guess it sounds like he was already kind of over the project anyway.
cenobyte 2y ago
[flagged]
- ziddoap 2y ago
  What an enlightened suggestion, thanks for that contribution. I am positive that most people have never heard this wonderful piece of advice.
  - ggreer 2y ago
    You can't control what other people say to you. You can only control how you react. If obvious trolls like this upset you, then you are guaranteed to be miserable. Worse, if you publish troll emails like this and say that's why you got upset, then you are guaranteed to get many more troll emails. I'm guessing the maintainer has some other stuff going on in his life and this was the straw that broke the camel's back. I hope he overcomes whatever he's going through and winds up more resilient and more content.
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      Even if you agree with the sentiment of the statement, "get over it" is a shitty platitude pretending to be advice.
      - megadal 2y ago
        Is "don't feed the troll" better? This behavior is unacceptable but I'm really leaning towards the belief that sensationalizing this will only make it more likely.. This is about as big of a recognition a single troll could get in OSS with no code contributed.
        ziddoap 2y ago
        >Is "don't feed the troll" better? As advice? No... Maybe slightly? At least it is sort of actionable I guess. I agree with most everything else you said, and it invites further conversation on whether this is exactly what the troll wanted (recognition, feeling powerful for ousting the maintainer, etc.). The original comment I replied to, a one-liner with the most overused platitude possible, did not invite any further conversation and contributed nothing which is why I sarcastically called it out.
codazoda 2y ago
Based on the name and email address this email address was probably setup just to troll people.
- fred_is_fred 2y ago
  In general I agree but the code reference he made was VERY specific. This was clearly someone actually using the project.
p0w3n3d 2y ago
Rule 1: don't read email from strangers. Rule 2: don't read any comments under your article/video/whatever. People are full of hate and tend to dehumanise other people over internet, while they would be (possibly) nice to them in person. Something is in the internet that people's hate is magnified...
- eternauta3k 2y ago
  Maybe run a sentiment analysis so the nice emails get to you...
- Fauntleroy 2y ago
  It's a great example of the barking dog effect. Put up a barrier between people that they know can't be crossed, and they'll just let loose the wildest aggression possible. The second that barrier is gone, they're back to "normal". It's frightening seeing people's impulses revealed while the barrier is up.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- Thorrez 2y ago
  Doesn't a lot of open source collaboration take place over email?
hyperhello 2y ago
It sounds like he took on the project as a lark, and then dropped it for an equally spontaneous reason. This is okay.
- mbanzi 2y ago
  have you read the actual email.. ? It's pretty bad. I've co-founded a very succesfull open source project and I can assure you a lot of people treat maintainers like crap. One guy sent me a few mails with veiled death threats because I banned him from the forum (He was harassing users and the community decide to boot him...)
debacle 2y ago
[flagged]
carimura 2y ago
sad to see but sounds like it was just a reminder to archive the project anyways. trolls make up a fair portion of the interweb and with llm's on the rise that'll probably just get worse. put on that armor!
j2kun 2y ago
Having posts like this occasionally on the front page of HN is a good and necessary regular reminder to the community: the people who write and maintain OSS projects are humans. Treat them with respect, and challenge bad actors when you encounter them.
- chaostheory 2y ago
  Some might be sponsored, but most of them also do not get compensation for their work. They’re mainly doing it for the public good.
- duxup 2y ago
  I hope so. I also worry that "hey reminder that" really doesn't do much on the internet, except maybe give the troll their moment in the spotlight. Granted, as I say in my other comment, I don't have an magical solutions to this kind of thing :(
  - emsal 2y ago
    "hey reminder that" does make a difference, but that difference is invisible because it's exclusively in the form of incidents that did not happen. Remember that everyone reading the comment is a human too and some will be receptive. Good is good.
    - duxup 2y ago
      Unfortunately, I'm too analytical to just believe that without some evidence.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  Given the amount of people in this thread (and similar threads over time) saying "just thicken up your skin" (i.e. it is the maintainers fault for being sensitive, not the trolls fault for being a dick), I doubt it.
  - zzo38computer 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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verandaguy 2y ago
I empathize with the author (on more than one level, an LDAP agent in Javascript sounds like more trouble than it's worth and his suggestion to use Go makes sense), and while this kind of email is inexcusable, it's ultimately a risk of being on the internet. To be clear, I don't want to sound callous or say that this is, in the long term, the cost of doing business in open source (it absolutely should not be); but if you're a person with a publicly-routable email (say, via git commiter or author metadata), on a long enough timeline, someone awful's liable to find it and use it maliciously. My opinion (admittedly, not having been on the receiving end of something this pointlessly awful) is that it's better not to fold to these kinds of attacks. These people are basically schoolyard bullies, and usually attention-seekers. Validating their attempts only encourages more behaviour like this. I hope the former maintainer is doing well, and I hope this message doesn't come off as disrespectful or harmful. If it does, I'm very open to hearing about alternative approaches.
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  About LDAP and what programming language should be used, I am not familiar enough with that program to answer the question. I agree with you that it is generally better to not to fold to these kinds of attacks. However, the README.md does mention other reason why they would not really want to maintain it for sure anyways. Furthermore, the maintainer can make their own decision about what to do with it (whether or not other people agree with it). And, since it is FOSS, it is not much of the problem if the maintainer decides to stop maintaining it, since FOSS is possible to fork the project and other people to work on it too, anyways. This is not an excuse for writing such a bad email message, but nevertheless someone might do so and therefore you will have to decide how to deal with it. (I think it is best to ignore it, but of course everything will influence anyone)
- acomjean 2y ago
  It sounds like they had a foot out the door on this project anyway. You make a point that we shouldn't just cave to any Jerk that comes along and used your code, which makes some sense. There is a silent user majority that appreciates these projects (or doesn't think enough about them). I'd advocate saying thanks, but if everyone did that might be a time suck for the developer, so maybe use the "star" if on github, or contribute if that is an option.
duxup 2y ago
Maintainer can do what they like, I respect that. I do worry that trolls who really don't care if they quit maintaining this software have outsized influence on things and the outcome of a decision like this. And the decision MIGHT only impact everyone but the troll, and maybe even encourage such bad behavior. Recall an actress who noted how much abuse she received over the internet for how she looked. She announced she wasn't going to do something (it was something related to her clothing) as a response. It was presented as almost a punishment, but I couldn't help but wonder who was driving the bus / decisions in that situation. Still, I respect the maintainers choice and I have no magic solutions for this.
Exuma 2y ago
[flagged]
- olliej 2y ago
  So your advice is “accept all abuse while providing a free service to others”? Sounds like you’re on team “maintainers should be required to support me for free despite me being an asshole”
  - Exuma 2y ago
    that is probably the absolute farthest thing from what I'm saying. In the end, you have 2 choices: 1. try to control other people 2. control yourself There is literally no other options. Theres no "middle ground." Any advice/comments/etc boil down to ONE of these two choices. The entire first choice is moot, because given 10 million years, you will never be able to control other people's behavior. No amount of good advice, helpful HN comments, 1000 word blog posts, will never, ever, 100% remove all threads of possibility of getting teased/whatever. I would not categorize this choice as "wrong" (which implies bad), but merely "moot" (neutral). Therefore, that only leaves option 2. Discussing anything to do with what people "should" do is, quite literally, a waste of time. This idea CAN coexist simultaneously with the idea that I treat people well. Why? Because being nice is option #2... its something I control about myself. I CAN control how I treat other people, just as I can control my reaction to other people. I don't condone/not condone the person email, because I don't even look at things like that. I look at things in terms of what I'm capable of controlling (or, that is the goal, anyway. sometimes life can be tricky!). If i were to look at things in terms of what other people "should" be doing, then I am destined for a lifetime of disappointment and emotional turmoil. There is no other way.
    - olliej 2y ago
      There's absolutely an alternative, and that's what this person has done: stop providing free labor to others. There's no reason to put yourself in, or stay in, an environment where you are apparently expected to be subject to abuse. Saying the only option is "control yourself", when what that means is "suck it up and don't let abuse get to you" is BS. We keep getting people handwringing over the work load and treatment of maintainers or individual developers, but then comments like this that are just saying "so what? they should just get over it". This is a 100% serious question here - what is a maintainer allowed to do? There are three options: 1. Accept the abuse and continue to try to maintain the project while being subjected to that abuse. 2. Shutdown the project. 3. Hand the project over to someone else. You appear to be advocating for (1) as the only option. Most of the comments in this thread say the (2) is just not reasonable and that the maintainer should accept abuse as a fact of life (e.g. being more explicit that (1) is the only option). The final option is what the maintainer of xz did, and they then got blamed for an exploit that was introduced when they were definitionally no longer involved in the project. Certainly in such a world I would never sign up to be a maintainer of any project, and if anyone asked I would advise them not to as well. The rules seem to be that once you are a project maintainer you are required to accept abuse, and you are never allowed to stop, no matter how much abuse is sent your way. This maintainer did what is in my opinion the only reasonable option: they said "I am unwilling to put up with this BS and so I'm ceasing maintenance of the project". We've already established through xz that you can't hand off a project in response to abuse, as that makes you responsible for it if the replacement installs malware, and demanding people accept permanent abuse is immoral and selfish.
tombert 2y ago
That's a pretty nasty email; I initially thought this was some kind of bizarre targeted spam, until they started talking about the coding stuff and it made me realize "nope, a human wrote this". I don't think I've ever received anything this horrible ever; when I was attempting to make videos on early (~2008) YouTube as a teenager, I definitely got a lot of death threats though, so much so that someone made a whole-ass video threatening to kick my ass because they thought I said something bad about people in wheelchairs (I did not, I genuinely have no idea how they even came to that conclusion). The internet is simultaneously the best and worst invention that humans have ever made. It allows people to be their true selves, for all that entails.
lolinder 2y ago
I feel the same way about this being on the front page of HN as I do about school shootings being a guaranteed front-page event in national news: It's tragic that things like this happen, but posting and discussing the troll's (fake) name, their tirade, and the terrible impact that they had on a maintainer is not going to make things easier for maintainers. On the contrary, it's just going to give copycat trolls inspiration and something to aspire to, a sort of "victory" end game. The author of that email doesn't care about LDAP, they don't care about JavaScript libraries, they're just a troll. Rule #1 of the internet is "don't feed the trolls".
- duxup 2y ago
  I recall some folks did interviews with mass shooters in jail. They came up with a list of things they knew mass shooters DID NOT like in the media after a shooting, and things they did like. They sent some suggestions to news organizations and some have adopted them. They're not hiding information, but they are altering exactly how they covey it. Some of the suggestions were IIRC: 1. Limit how often you say the shooters name, don't give details about any manifestos / letters and etc from the shooter. 2. Avoid playing lots of video / audio of screaming / chaos. 3. Tell stories about the victims, give their names often, tell their story. 4. Tell stories about people supporting each other, the community responding and coming together. Honestly, it makes for better news too IMO.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  So you mean this incident couldn't have been avoided by simply reminding the troll to be nice?
akeck 2y ago
I hope this doesn't become a more widely used repo attack vector: Abuse repo maintainers until one or more fold. Fork the repo and become the New Maintainer That Saves The Day. At a later time, insert attack code.
nickzelei 2y ago
I relied on this project heavily at a past organization when the original maintainer was just leaving it to wither. They worked at Joyent if I remember and assuredly their work on that was decommissioned. I remember when James took it over, it was rejoiced to finally have some PRs landing again! I haven’t thought about ldapjs in a long time, and it’s sad to see this stuff happen. Hope you’re well otherwise James!
deleted 2y ago
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neighborlynook 2y ago
This smells similiar to the XZ thing -- demoralize / beret the maintainer and get them to step down
kalkr 2y ago
As the maintainer he gets to call the shots, so this response is perfectly fair. It's easy for me to say "I wouldn't have reacted like this", especially since I'm kind of numb to this type of shit-slinging, but I haven't had such visceral anger directed towards my hard work, so I really don't know.
probably_jesus 2y ago
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cue_the_strings 2y ago
It's the internet, strange that the author didn't face abuse like this before. He doesn't seem too young to have experienced such abuse online growing up. I wish I could say that everyone should be exposed to some aimless and unfair adversity while growing up, it helped me grow some thicker skin. But I've met people who really can't handle it, and exposing them to even a bit of it would be unethical, it wouldn't help them in any way. Some people are really sensitive, on the edge of mental stability, with crumbling self respect, or whatever other issues. Abuse like this does affect them significantly. Such people are the perfect victims for these immature trolls, and I really don't see a way to help them. I remember hanging out on forums as a teen, and there was this script kiddie who would hound users on some local forums and IRC servers, both plainly insulting and/or threathning them, and trying to 'hack' them. He was annoying, but I was so used to these edgy insults and such that I never took them seriously (just a bit of roughhousing among teens)... Yet he was really successful in pissing people off and made a significant number of them leave. He was banned many times, but would just re-join with new account(s) (the joys of dynamic IPs every time you dial in). Took him years to quit. If you're offended by things like this to be affected significantly (we're all affected a bit), don't be fooled, you're worse off than people who aren't. It's not your fault by any means. But finding a way to care less about things like this, if possible, will improve your wellbeing. You can ignore and / or react (which might make it worse), but there's not much you can do against assholes without ushering in censorship, surveillance, or making everythign worse otherwise. You can't fix other people, but you can at least try fixing yourself.
- dmbche 2y ago
  You know, not everything is an opportunity to better yourself. It's perfectly valid to leave when boudaries are crossed - it's weird that you argue the person should "work on themselves" and keep getting deaths threaths over maintaining random stuff.
  - cue_the_strings 2y ago
    Of course it is valid to leave, especially if it's prolonged abuse, but it's a two-edged sword. If you have some bored idiot on the other side, you leaving might encourage them to abuse you even more. If you yield further, then you've allowed yourself to be shut out from the public Internet, depriving yourself of the satisfaction of contributing to projects. My point is that you need to try to be rational in these (emotional) situations, and think about the consequences of your decisions. Sometimes the best solution will affect you more than the abuser, which feels really unfair, but the alternatives are simply worse.
miki123211 2y ago
If you're selling proprietary software and are worried about an OSS competitor, forget FUD, legal battles and patent challenges. Just send a few of these emails to the primary maintainer, and the OSS competitor will be no more. /s
skull723 2y ago
Lol. The guy expected a good API in a JavaScript library that handles LDAP. Both of these have a terrible handling to begin with.
xyst 2y ago
I would consider this “mild” compared to the xbox/playstation/pc gaming lobbies. But I can respect doing it. Let someone else care about it, maybe they fork it. Maybe it just sits archived.
lupusreal 2y ago
Wew, that email was a real treat. It reminded me of the good old days on slashdot. I wish I could get troll messages this good.

116 points by julkali 2y ago

[flagged]

It is your own choice if you wish to continue the maintenance or not (and, even if you wish to maintain the project, you can decide to not accept email messages). If it is FOSS, then other people can maintain their own version if they want to do, anyways (this is why FOSS is important; it is due to things like this). However, whoever wrote the email message did not decomission the project; it is whoever maintain the project that did so, due to receiving such email message. I think that might be unnecessary to decomission the project just due to one message like that, but it is their choice to maintain or not maintain it, or to decomission it. (Anyways, if you receive too many messages like that then you might be too stressed to work on the project properly.) Although, still they should not have written such a email message, because it is no good. It does contain an actual comment about the program (although I am not familiar with the program to know whether or not the complaint is legitimate), but that is a very bad way of writing it. (Other comments also mention that stuff like this may be used to attack the project to make a version with malware if the original maintainer won't then someone else will and will add malware. It is a legitimate concern, which should be considered seriously, but one that can be handled whether or not this maintainer decides to maintain this project or not.)

deleted 2y ago

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arkarrow 2y ago

[flagged]

arkarrow 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
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brianwawok 2y ago

Diego!

phpnode 2y ago

People can be pretty weird. I once received death threats over a technical blog post I’d written nearly a decade earlier, because the reader was upset that I hadn’t updated it. (The date was clearly labelled at the top of the post)

bowmessage 2y ago
Yeah, personally I take this as a known fact of life on the internet. I'm surprised the maintainer let it get to them so much. Like many popular creators today are learning, we all must "stop reading the comments", lest we never put anything out there ever again, for fear of critical feedback.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > I'm surprised the maintainer let it get to them so much. There's always a last straw.
  - bowmessage 2y ago
    Jia Tan will be happy to take over the project.
altairprime 2y ago
Consider substituting 'criminal' (or 'felonious', etc) for "weird" in future tellings of this story. Death threats are generally regarded as a crime by police and judicial systems, and 'weird' tacitly excuses the crime committed upon you. A death threat is not in the same category as weird, and does not deserve a framing-pardon from us.
lopatin 2y ago
Sounds like a first hand account of PHP driving people literally crazy
- phpnode 2y ago
  It was about JavaScript!

selykg 2y ago

Man... the world sure makes me depressed some days. Today I've hit the limit of stupid on the internet, time to go home and go for a walk and not think about how absolutely awful some people can be. Not that I've ever had a need for this project, but, Diego, you're a terrible human being.

bee_rider 2y ago
Though I’m pretty sure “Diego Schmiego” is a fake name.

acedTrex 2y ago

Gotta have a thick skin to deal with the general public, developer community or not

emsal 2y ago
Many public figures have social media and PR teams to help deal with stuff like this, you really expect that every individual out there should just grow a thick skin as culture is continually encouraging us to have more and more of a public presence? This is the kind of thinking that gives a free pass to entrenched patterns of discrimination and targeted hate speech. It's very possible that emails like this wouldn't just be a spew of random insults but targeted towards a person's very specific triggers, and in that case a thick skin cannot stop a bullet.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  > This is the kind of thinking that gives a free pass to entrenched patterns of discrimination and targeted hate speech What do you suggest? This is basically unpolicable in a world with anonymous ways of getting people to see text.
  - emsal 2y ago
    You might be correct but it still stands that nothing is added to the discourse by just telling people to grow a thick skin. It's a repulsive attitude and I had to call that out.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      > It's a repulsive attitude It's actionable constructive advice.
      - emsal 2y ago
        I think the "repulsive attitude" I'm referring to is shouting "Just grow a thick skin!" to someone who is saying that they're suffering from abuse. In some cases, the suffering is so acute and so deep ("bullets") that it's not necessarily actionable on the part of the person suffering; rather, it's a call for help that others may respond to.

mrkramer 2y ago

That mail looks like it was written by some LLM....I wouldn't take it seriously.

drbawb 2y ago
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you had said this before my most recent hire I would have agreed - but my junior writes stuff that looks like this or worse. I'm always reviewing stuff with weird capitalization, punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. that makes me raise an eyebrow on a regular basis. Their code looks just as weird despite having the help of a heavy-weight IDE in their corner. We're constantly cleaning up hanging indents, unnecessary newlines, mismatched indents, commented out code, etc. (That's with a college education, a Grammarly license, and no small amount of coaching on my part!) I have a sample size of 1, so I can't ascribe too much to "these damn kids," but it seriously strikes me as having learned written language primarily from texting & instant messaging. Whereas I grew up roughly by transitioning from: reading books -> writing mails to pen pals-> writing e-mails -> web chats -> T9 texting -> modern IMEs. In other words I initially learned to write with long-form content and learned to condense it down later. These days I think people are just learning straight from the condensed version. The other reason I don't think it's an LLM is simpler: most commercial LLMs wouldn't be "aligned" to be that rude, and the smaller LLMs I've seen wouldn't be able to inject relevant code snippets from a relatively unpopular library into the output. I would not be surprised if this person misused the library, got called out for it in code-review (calling the iterator multiple times is a huge code-smell), and now they are soothing their ego by shifting blame onto the library author for making "such a bad API."
- mrkramer 2y ago
  Individual who sent that mail has trollish name, trollish email account and s/he is talking gibberish. My conclusion was, give it a pass and move on. >I would not be surprised if this person misused the library, got called out for it in code-review (calling the iterator multiple times is a huge code-smell), and now they are soothing their ego by shifting blame onto the library author for making "such a bad API." It could be that but then again it's his or her fault not the maintainer's. At the end of the day, s/he has some serious anger control issues if that's true. >The other reason I don't think it's an LLM is simpler: most commercial LLMs wouldn't be "aligned" to be that rude, and the smaller LLMs I've seen wouldn't be able to inject relevant code snippets from a relatively unpopular library into the output. You can modify some open source LLM to talk trash, meaning teach it to hate and disrespect.

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

I'd say name and shame such asinine correspondence, but somehow I doubt "Diego Jewstein" is the irate individual's real name.

davesque 2y ago

Honestly seems like you could also easily just laugh it off. People on the internet are weird and gross. But I guess it sounds like he was already kind of over the project anyway.

cenobyte 2y ago

[flagged]

ziddoap 2y ago
What an enlightened suggestion, thanks for that contribution. I am positive that most people have never heard this wonderful piece of advice.
- ggreer 2y ago
  You can't control what other people say to you. You can only control how you react. If obvious trolls like this upset you, then you are guaranteed to be miserable. Worse, if you publish troll emails like this and say that's why you got upset, then you are guaranteed to get many more troll emails. I'm guessing the maintainer has some other stuff going on in his life and this was the straw that broke the camel's back. I hope he overcomes whatever he's going through and winds up more resilient and more content.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    Even if you agree with the sentiment of the statement, "get over it" is a shitty platitude pretending to be advice.
    - megadal 2y ago
      Is "don't feed the troll" better? This behavior is unacceptable but I'm really leaning towards the belief that sensationalizing this will only make it more likely.. This is about as big of a recognition a single troll could get in OSS with no code contributed.
      - ziddoap 2y ago
        >Is "don't feed the troll" better? As advice? No... Maybe slightly? At least it is sort of actionable I guess. I agree with most everything else you said, and it invites further conversation on whether this is exactly what the troll wanted (recognition, feeling powerful for ousting the maintainer, etc.). The original comment I replied to, a one-liner with the most overused platitude possible, did not invite any further conversation and contributed nothing which is why I sarcastically called it out.

codazoda 2y ago

Based on the name and email address this email address was probably setup just to troll people.

fred_is_fred 2y ago
In general I agree but the code reference he made was VERY specific. This was clearly someone actually using the project.

p0w3n3d 2y ago

Rule 1: don't read email from strangers. Rule 2: don't read any comments under your article/video/whatever. People are full of hate and tend to dehumanise other people over internet, while they would be (possibly) nice to them in person. Something is in the internet that people's hate is magnified...

eternauta3k 2y ago
Maybe run a sentiment analysis so the nice emails get to you...
Fauntleroy 2y ago
It's a great example of the barking dog effect. Put up a barrier between people that they know can't be crossed, and they'll just let loose the wildest aggression possible. The second that barrier is gone, they're back to "normal". It's frightening seeing people's impulses revealed while the barrier is up.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Thorrez 2y ago
Doesn't a lot of open source collaboration take place over email?

hyperhello 2y ago

It sounds like he took on the project as a lark, and then dropped it for an equally spontaneous reason. This is okay.

mbanzi 2y ago
have you read the actual email.. ? It's pretty bad. I've co-founded a very succesfull open source project and I can assure you a lot of people treat maintainers like crap. One guy sent me a few mails with veiled death threats because I banned him from the forum (He was harassing users and the community decide to boot him...)

debacle 2y ago

[flagged]

carimura 2y ago

sad to see but sounds like it was just a reminder to archive the project anyways. trolls make up a fair portion of the interweb and with llm's on the rise that'll probably just get worse. put on that armor!

j2kun 2y ago

Having posts like this occasionally on the front page of HN is a good and necessary regular reminder to the community: the people who write and maintain OSS projects are humans. Treat them with respect, and challenge bad actors when you encounter them.

chaostheory 2y ago
Some might be sponsored, but most of them also do not get compensation for their work. They’re mainly doing it for the public good.
duxup 2y ago
I hope so. I also worry that "hey reminder that" really doesn't do much on the internet, except maybe give the troll their moment in the spotlight. Granted, as I say in my other comment, I don't have an magical solutions to this kind of thing :(
- emsal 2y ago
  "hey reminder that" does make a difference, but that difference is invisible because it's exclusively in the form of incidents that did not happen. Remember that everyone reading the comment is a human too and some will be receptive. Good is good.
  - duxup 2y ago
    Unfortunately, I'm too analytical to just believe that without some evidence.
ziddoap 2y ago
Given the amount of people in this thread (and similar threads over time) saying "just thicken up your skin" (i.e. it is the maintainers fault for being sensitive, not the trolls fault for being a dick), I doubt it.
- zzo38computer 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

verandaguy 2y ago

I empathize with the author (on more than one level, an LDAP agent in Javascript sounds like more trouble than it's worth and his suggestion to use Go makes sense), and while this kind of email is inexcusable, it's ultimately a risk of being on the internet. To be clear, I don't want to sound callous or say that this is, in the long term, the cost of doing business in open source (it absolutely should not be); but if you're a person with a publicly-routable email (say, via git commiter or author metadata), on a long enough timeline, someone awful's liable to find it and use it maliciously. My opinion (admittedly, not having been on the receiving end of something this pointlessly awful) is that it's better not to fold to these kinds of attacks. These people are basically schoolyard bullies, and usually attention-seekers. Validating their attempts only encourages more behaviour like this. I hope the former maintainer is doing well, and I hope this message doesn't come off as disrespectful or harmful. If it does, I'm very open to hearing about alternative approaches.

zzo38computer 2y ago
About LDAP and what programming language should be used, I am not familiar enough with that program to answer the question. I agree with you that it is generally better to not to fold to these kinds of attacks. However, the README.md does mention other reason why they would not really want to maintain it for sure anyways. Furthermore, the maintainer can make their own decision about what to do with it (whether or not other people agree with it). And, since it is FOSS, it is not much of the problem if the maintainer decides to stop maintaining it, since FOSS is possible to fork the project and other people to work on it too, anyways. This is not an excuse for writing such a bad email message, but nevertheless someone might do so and therefore you will have to decide how to deal with it. (I think it is best to ignore it, but of course everything will influence anyone)
acomjean 2y ago
It sounds like they had a foot out the door on this project anyway. You make a point that we shouldn't just cave to any Jerk that comes along and used your code, which makes some sense. There is a silent user majority that appreciates these projects (or doesn't think enough about them). I'd advocate saying thanks, but if everyone did that might be a time suck for the developer, so maybe use the "star" if on github, or contribute if that is an option.

duxup 2y ago

Maintainer can do what they like, I respect that. I do worry that trolls who really don't care if they quit maintaining this software have outsized influence on things and the outcome of a decision like this. And the decision MIGHT only impact everyone but the troll, and maybe even encourage such bad behavior. Recall an actress who noted how much abuse she received over the internet for how she looked. She announced she wasn't going to do something (it was something related to her clothing) as a response. It was presented as almost a punishment, but I couldn't help but wonder who was driving the bus / decisions in that situation. Still, I respect the maintainers choice and I have no magic solutions for this.

Exuma 2y ago

[flagged]

olliej 2y ago
So your advice is “accept all abuse while providing a free service to others”? Sounds like you’re on team “maintainers should be required to support me for free despite me being an asshole”
- Exuma 2y ago
  that is probably the absolute farthest thing from what I'm saying. In the end, you have 2 choices: 1. try to control other people 2. control yourself There is literally no other options. Theres no "middle ground." Any advice/comments/etc boil down to ONE of these two choices. The entire first choice is moot, because given 10 million years, you will never be able to control other people's behavior. No amount of good advice, helpful HN comments, 1000 word blog posts, will never, ever, 100% remove all threads of possibility of getting teased/whatever. I would not categorize this choice as "wrong" (which implies bad), but merely "moot" (neutral). Therefore, that only leaves option 2. Discussing anything to do with what people "should" do is, quite literally, a waste of time. This idea CAN coexist simultaneously with the idea that I treat people well. Why? Because being nice is option #2... its something I control about myself. I CAN control how I treat other people, just as I can control my reaction to other people. I don't condone/not condone the person email, because I don't even look at things like that. I look at things in terms of what I'm capable of controlling (or, that is the goal, anyway. sometimes life can be tricky!). If i were to look at things in terms of what other people "should" be doing, then I am destined for a lifetime of disappointment and emotional turmoil. There is no other way.
  - olliej 2y ago
    There's absolutely an alternative, and that's what this person has done: stop providing free labor to others. There's no reason to put yourself in, or stay in, an environment where you are apparently expected to be subject to abuse. Saying the only option is "control yourself", when what that means is "suck it up and don't let abuse get to you" is BS. We keep getting people handwringing over the work load and treatment of maintainers or individual developers, but then comments like this that are just saying "so what? they should just get over it". This is a 100% serious question here - what is a maintainer allowed to do? There are three options: 1. Accept the abuse and continue to try to maintain the project while being subjected to that abuse. 2. Shutdown the project. 3. Hand the project over to someone else. You appear to be advocating for (1) as the only option. Most of the comments in this thread say the (2) is just not reasonable and that the maintainer should accept abuse as a fact of life (e.g. being more explicit that (1) is the only option). The final option is what the maintainer of xz did, and they then got blamed for an exploit that was introduced when they were definitionally no longer involved in the project. Certainly in such a world I would never sign up to be a maintainer of any project, and if anyone asked I would advise them not to as well. The rules seem to be that once you are a project maintainer you are required to accept abuse, and you are never allowed to stop, no matter how much abuse is sent your way. This maintainer did what is in my opinion the only reasonable option: they said "I am unwilling to put up with this BS and so I'm ceasing maintenance of the project". We've already established through xz that you can't hand off a project in response to abuse, as that makes you responsible for it if the replacement installs malware, and demanding people accept permanent abuse is immoral and selfish.

tombert 2y ago

That's a pretty nasty email; I initially thought this was some kind of bizarre targeted spam, until they started talking about the coding stuff and it made me realize "nope, a human wrote this". I don't think I've ever received anything this horrible ever; when I was attempting to make videos on early (~2008) YouTube as a teenager, I definitely got a lot of death threats though, so much so that someone made a whole-ass video threatening to kick my ass because they thought I said something bad about people in wheelchairs (I did not, I genuinely have no idea how they even came to that conclusion). The internet is simultaneously the best and worst invention that humans have ever made. It allows people to be their true selves, for all that entails.

lolinder 2y ago

I feel the same way about this being on the front page of HN as I do about school shootings being a guaranteed front-page event in national news: It's tragic that things like this happen, but posting and discussing the troll's (fake) name, their tirade, and the terrible impact that they had on a maintainer is not going to make things easier for maintainers. On the contrary, it's just going to give copycat trolls inspiration and something to aspire to, a sort of "victory" end game. The author of that email doesn't care about LDAP, they don't care about JavaScript libraries, they're just a troll. Rule #1 of the internet is "don't feed the trolls".

duxup 2y ago
I recall some folks did interviews with mass shooters in jail. They came up with a list of things they knew mass shooters DID NOT like in the media after a shooting, and things they did like. They sent some suggestions to news organizations and some have adopted them. They're not hiding information, but they are altering exactly how they covey it. Some of the suggestions were IIRC: 1. Limit how often you say the shooters name, don't give details about any manifestos / letters and etc from the shooter. 2. Avoid playing lots of video / audio of screaming / chaos. 3. Tell stories about the victims, give their names often, tell their story. 4. Tell stories about people supporting each other, the community responding and coming together. Honestly, it makes for better news too IMO.
lupusreal 2y ago
So you mean this incident couldn't have been avoided by simply reminding the troll to be nice?

akeck 2y ago

I hope this doesn't become a more widely used repo attack vector: Abuse repo maintainers until one or more fold. Fork the repo and become the New Maintainer That Saves The Day. At a later time, insert attack code.

nickzelei 2y ago

I relied on this project heavily at a past organization when the original maintainer was just leaving it to wither. They worked at Joyent if I remember and assuredly their work on that was decommissioned. I remember when James took it over, it was rejoiced to finally have some PRs landing again! I haven’t thought about ldapjs in a long time, and it’s sad to see this stuff happen. Hope you’re well otherwise James!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

neighborlynook 2y ago

This smells similiar to the XZ thing -- demoralize / beret the maintainer and get them to step down

kalkr 2y ago

As the maintainer he gets to call the shots, so this response is perfectly fair. It's easy for me to say "I wouldn't have reacted like this", especially since I'm kind of numb to this type of shit-slinging, but I haven't had such visceral anger directed towards my hard work, so I really don't know.

probably_jesus 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cue_the_strings 2y ago

It's the internet, strange that the author didn't face abuse like this before. He doesn't seem too young to have experienced such abuse online growing up. I wish I could say that everyone should be exposed to some aimless and unfair adversity while growing up, it helped me grow some thicker skin. But I've met people who really can't handle it, and exposing them to even a bit of it would be unethical, it wouldn't help them in any way. Some people are really sensitive, on the edge of mental stability, with crumbling self respect, or whatever other issues. Abuse like this does affect them significantly. Such people are the perfect victims for these immature trolls, and I really don't see a way to help them. I remember hanging out on forums as a teen, and there was this script kiddie who would hound users on some local forums and IRC servers, both plainly insulting and/or threathning them, and trying to 'hack' them. He was annoying, but I was so used to these edgy insults and such that I never took them seriously (just a bit of roughhousing among teens)... Yet he was really successful in pissing people off and made a significant number of them leave. He was banned many times, but would just re-join with new account(s) (the joys of dynamic IPs every time you dial in). Took him years to quit. If you're offended by things like this to be affected significantly (we're all affected a bit), don't be fooled, you're worse off than people who aren't. It's not your fault by any means. But finding a way to care less about things like this, if possible, will improve your wellbeing. You can ignore and / or react (which might make it worse), but there's not much you can do against assholes without ushering in censorship, surveillance, or making everythign worse otherwise. You can't fix other people, but you can at least try fixing yourself.

dmbche 2y ago
You know, not everything is an opportunity to better yourself. It's perfectly valid to leave when boudaries are crossed - it's weird that you argue the person should "work on themselves" and keep getting deaths threaths over maintaining random stuff.
- cue_the_strings 2y ago
  Of course it is valid to leave, especially if it's prolonged abuse, but it's a two-edged sword. If you have some bored idiot on the other side, you leaving might encourage them to abuse you even more. If you yield further, then you've allowed yourself to be shut out from the public Internet, depriving yourself of the satisfaction of contributing to projects. My point is that you need to try to be rational in these (emotional) situations, and think about the consequences of your decisions. Sometimes the best solution will affect you more than the abuser, which feels really unfair, but the alternatives are simply worse.

miki123211 2y ago

If you're selling proprietary software and are worried about an OSS competitor, forget FUD, legal battles and patent challenges. Just send a few of these emails to the primary maintainer, and the OSS competitor will be no more. /s

skull723 2y ago

Lol. The guy expected a good API in a JavaScript library that handles LDAP. Both of these have a terrible handling to begin with.

xyst 2y ago

I would consider this “mild” compared to the xbox/playstation/pc gaming lobbies. But I can respect doing it. Let someone else care about it, maybe they fork it. Maybe it just sits archived.

lupusreal 2y ago

Wew, that email was a real treat. It reminded me of the good old days on slashdot. I wish I could get troll messages this good.