5 ms·

When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core

When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn't contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again. Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well, comparatively.

rideontime 1y ago
And people wonder why Codes of Conduct became popular...
- jchw 1y ago
  So, I definitely believe this story 100%: when I was on the anglosphere Internet in 200x, there was a lot of elitism and hazing rituals of sorts, among other things. It was a very real and unfortunate thing that coincided the otherwise excellent experiences (IMO) of being online at that time. Still, I really don't think most people need to be told not to tell other people to kill themselves, and in many places where I hung out when I was younger I strongly believe you would have been tempbanned for "flaming". I was a forum moderator and I can tell you I would not have hesitated. But you said the magic words, so it bears addressing; I think we all get the picture that the Code of Conduct drama usually doesn't have much to do with the actual rules that are contained within, which really aren't that controversial on their face, but rather the way in which power is moved from stakeholders within a project to other people by virtue of initiatives like establishing Code of Conducts and the governance structures that enforce them. And, I think most people will probably not get upset over the idea that telling someone else to go kill themselves might get you suspended from a discussion forum... Rather, the drama comes in when you see the reach of a project or organization's CoC start to extend outward past what people actually want to stop (toxic, unproductive communication) and past the edges of the project (and into policing the rest of the Internet.) Two notable examples I'd cite are Python with Tim Peters (who as far as anyone can tell genuinely didn't do anything wrong) and Freedesktop.org with Vaxry (who can be a bit immature, but is primarily accused of not moderating the Hyprland Discord... Which is a fair complaint about the Hyprland Discord, but not a very good reason for him to be banned from Freedesktop.org.) Of course, truthfully, there is no 100% winning answer here; if the stakeholders who have control over a project by virtue of being the original developers don't want to cede any control to people for CoC enforcement, they don't really have to (although in reality, external pressures to implement one might make it an untenable position to hold.) In that case, you have to rely on those people to hold themselves accountable to reasonable conduct, and nobody's perfect. It's kind of like when police departments conduct internal investigations and find no problems; even if you're pretty pro-police, you must feel somewhat skeptical that they actually were reasonably impartial in conducting said investigation. But, I generally side with The Evil I Know, which is that the project authors and biggest stakeholders should generally maintain most of the power and control in an open source project including the ultimate decisions regarding moderation. In cases where developers have proven particularly egregious with their conduct, forking has proven to be effective enough as a mitigation strategy, and the fact that it comes at a cost is a sort of feature, as it's better if a power shift like that isn't easy; while I can't guarantee that the original authors and maintainers of a project will act reasonably and impartially, I can at least say that I expect them to have the project's best interests at heart, whereas the kinds of people that go around looking for established projects and organizations to join roles that have authority tend to not be the kinds of people you usually want in those roles. Having it be difficult means you need people who genuinely care about the project rather than the types of people who just kind of seek power. (And I am sorry, but there are fuckloads of those people among us and they are absolutely dirty enough to hide under the guise of anything to get a modicum of control. Running an online community for any appreciable amount of time opens your eyes to this IMO.) All of this to say, it reflects poorly on the state of the Internet at the time and KDE's mailing lists that the situation happened and was possibly not rectified in a way that is satisfactory (it sure doesn't sound like it.) The correct thing to do is obviously to issue a ban, and you don't need a rule book of any kind to figure that out. I think when people push for these things during major incidents, it's misguided at best, because usually the core problem was not that a "don't tell people to kill each other" rule didn't exist, but that people actually would've needed such a rule to decide the behavior was unacceptable in the first place. This isn't some complex gray area case. I don't think people are acting in bad faith when they suggest it as an option after a drama incident, but I still think it's the wrong knee jerk 99% of the time. (The most favorable thing I can say is that I think a CoC might possibly have value in very large projects like Linux or Kubernetes, but so far the execution has always felt like it leaves something to be desired. Seeing people occasionally openly threaten to contact the CoC committees over effectively technical disagreements leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
- astrange 1y ago
  Having a long memory about this, the reason Lisp died out even though it was supposedly the best programming environment ever, is that Lisp programmers (called "Lisp weenies" at the time) were so unbelievably emotionally abusive that nobody believed them about it or wanted to interact with them. You couldn't ask them for help with anything without them calling you a moron who should kill yourself. (The main example of these people was a guy named Erik Naggum, but a few still exist somewhere out there and I met one on a programming reddit yesterday. You can spot them because they won't stop telling you how great Lisp Machines are, can't explain why nobody uses them, and for some reason they insist on calling JavaScript "ECMAScript".) That said, I also remember that codes of conduct were popularized about a decade ago by someone who was then fired from GitHub for harassing junior programmers (she claimed this was "mentoring" and seemed mentally incapable of noticing something could be wrong with her behavior.) So it seemed like an obvious case of reputation laundering at the time.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > Having a long memory about this, the reason Lisp died out even though it was supposedly the best programming environment ever, is that Lisp programmers (called "Lisp weenies" at the time) were so unbelievably emotionally abusive that nobody believed them about it or wanted to interact with them. Agreed. > You couldn't ask them for help with anything without them calling you a moron who should kill yourself. Never got that, though. I hung out on comp.lang.lisp back in the day. I recall once, writing a small utility to read a file in /etc/ and do $SOMETHING based on the settings therein. I asked about the best way to read ini/config files; did not mention /etc. I got flamed for not storing my configs in s-expr and simply using the builtin reader ... needless to say I was never going to switch all the files in /etc to s-expressions.
  - fastasucan 1y ago
    A read on Erik Naggum: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
- stn_za 1y ago
  COCs never became popular though, business types enforced them and hackers fought against and lost
  - thrance 1y ago
    Not hackers, more like mentally ill trolls that fought for the right to say racial slurs on github issues.
    - stn_za 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - thrance 1y ago
        What was a better time? When injunctions to suicide were socially acceptable?
      - DonHopkins 1y ago
        [dead]
        stn_za 1y ago
        huh?
- account42 1y ago
  Because people blindly believe anecdotes without context are representative of anything?
- singpolyma3 1y ago
  Your daily reminder that a code of conduct is only as valuable as the moderation team behind it.
collingreen 1y ago
I'm sorry that happened. That is monstrously bad behavior.
- Joel_Mckay 1y ago
  [flagged]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
anitil 1y ago
Wow I would never have expected such poor behaviour, that's awful.
grepfru_it 1y ago
Oh wow old war wounds from teenage days opened up. My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the FreeBSD mailing list thinking I was going to change the world. Man, instead I come back to everyone chewing me a new one, calling my friend too dumb to use FreeBSD, and other things that was not rooted in reality. I didn’t even try to defend my patch, I had spent so much time evangelizing FreeBSD up to that point that it really made me question my support of the project. Anyway fast forward like 5 years, I was telling the story to coworkers when I decided to look up the su source. shocked-pikachu someone took my patch and applied it (without attribution). I have since moved on from FreeBSD entirely and my open sourced works have never been so negatively picked apart again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- RobRivera 1y ago
  Just wow
- iJohnDoe 1y ago
  God that is the absolute worst. Those type of examples make my blood boil. Unfortunately, it happens all too often in life, especially in business.
- seabass-labrax 1y ago
  You still hold the copyright to your patch, and the governance of FreeBSD is so much better now. I know a former FreeBSD core team member who I'm sure would love to see you get finally credit for your work :) I'd be more than happy to put you in touch - email address in my profile if you're interested.
  - astrange 1y ago
    FreeBSD does seem better directed than it used to be, but if you follow the handbook it still recommends setting up computers like individual special snowflakes instead of properly managed cattle. Like, if your installation has useful services running on it, it should not also have a customized kernel and it probably shouldn't have a C compiler installed at all. What it should have is backups and a way to stage/test/revert config changes instead of just making them on prod. It… does not do this. IME if you bring this up you'll just get a hundred complaints from people saying "I built a system to do this out of poudriere and duct tape so it's fine". I guess because the people who know about declarative programming all use Docker.
abrookewood 1y ago
Dude, whoever wrote that to you was a piece of shit. Forget about them - almost guaranteed that someone who behaves like that has way bigger problems in their life & doesn't deserve your time or attention. You were a 14 y.o kid who produced something and took the time to release it. That takes dedication and guts. Well done.
timClicks 1y ago
This reminds me of when I provided some impressions of Erlang as a newcomer to their mailing list. One of my suggestions was that they include hash tables, rather than rely on records (linked lists with named key). Got flamed as ignorant, and I've never emailed that mailing list again. A while later, they ended up adding hash tables to the language.
- sharmi 1y ago
  [dead]
bruce511 1y ago
This is of course a terrible reply to receive, I'm sorry you got that. But I also find the psychology behind this sort of reply interesting, because there's lots of factors that lead to this sort of extreme. Firstly, we don't know the age of the replier, but my guess would be someone also young, or at least immature. Telling people to kill themselves is not something adults typically do in any context.) So it suggests another junior, desperate to prove their own standing, and needing to compete against others rather than collaborate. I've seen this kind of response in one adult (abusive to other forum members) but he clearly had quite severe mental health issues (and the user was banned.) In youngsters it is usually extinguished with firm moderator guidance. With adult responders, frustration and tedium play a role. Personally I'm more generous with replies in the morning than the evening. At times I almost "fake" patience (when I'm getting impatient) with people who are simply not thinking, and who aren't listening. Overall it is very imbalanced. The asker is asking 1 question. The replier may answer tens or hundreds in a day. So it's hard to answer each one as if it's original, as if it matters, as if you've not heard it a million times before (especially if it's right there in the FAQ.) Part of answering well, and the quality of any forum, is in participants answering well, even if the question is trivial. We all were newbies once. Asking stupid questions is how we grew from there. Answering stupid questions is how we pay it forward.
- aaronbrethorst 1y ago
  Meanwhile, here's Linus at the age of 42: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/linus-to-opensuse-devs-kill-yourself-now.30414/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/linus-to-opensuse-devs-ki...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aachen 1y ago
    TLDR seems to be like "whatever moron made this is mentally disabled". Not quite the KYS that is popular with the youth (in a game played by mostly teenage boys, we kept needing to moderate and escalate ban durations for a lot of players) but not particularly great to put it mildly indeed
xlii 1y ago
Ehh. When people reminisce about "the old internet" they tend to forget how hostile it was. Being devils advocate it wasn't common for young people to engage in the activity but harsh and unfair critic was happening often. It still exists today, but in much smaller scale than back then.
rcakebread 1y ago
In the early days of the PERL Usenet group, I asked my first question and used the word "newbie" to describe my skill level. I got an automated reply scolding me for using the word "newbie".
jononor 1y ago
Sorry to hear that. Props to you for keep on going!
inferiorhuman 1y ago
A bit of morbid curiosity has me wondering who that was. Back when I contributed some stuff to KDE I pulled a bunch of petulant kid shit (although what you described is not and was never my style). My recollection is that it was a pretty diverse and accepting group of freaks and geeks that would likely get shunned these days as the pendulum swings right… including a certain Tool aficionado that comments on HN occasionally. Telling someone to kill themselves is wildly inappropriate and shouldn't have happened to you.
jraph 1y ago
I hope this person managed to change, or that KDE has managed to get rid of them. I expect KDE to be better than this.
stn_za 1y ago
Sigh, good old days
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- thrance 1y ago
  When you could tell teens to kill thmeselves over nothing? That's what you're musing over? Get some help.
  - stn_za 1y ago
    [flagged]

rideontime 1y ago

And people wonder why Codes of Conduct became popular...

jchw 1y ago
So, I definitely believe this story 100%: when I was on the anglosphere Internet in 200x, there was a lot of elitism and hazing rituals of sorts, among other things. It was a very real and unfortunate thing that coincided the otherwise excellent experiences (IMO) of being online at that time. Still, I really don't think most people need to be told not to tell other people to kill themselves, and in many places where I hung out when I was younger I strongly believe you would have been tempbanned for "flaming". I was a forum moderator and I can tell you I would not have hesitated. But you said the magic words, so it bears addressing; I think we all get the picture that the Code of Conduct drama usually doesn't have much to do with the actual rules that are contained within, which really aren't that controversial on their face, but rather the way in which power is moved from stakeholders within a project to other people by virtue of initiatives like establishing Code of Conducts and the governance structures that enforce them. And, I think most people will probably not get upset over the idea that telling someone else to go kill themselves might get you suspended from a discussion forum... Rather, the drama comes in when you see the reach of a project or organization's CoC start to extend outward past what people actually want to stop (toxic, unproductive communication) and past the edges of the project (and into policing the rest of the Internet.) Two notable examples I'd cite are Python with Tim Peters (who as far as anyone can tell genuinely didn't do anything wrong) and Freedesktop.org with Vaxry (who can be a bit immature, but is primarily accused of not moderating the Hyprland Discord... Which is a fair complaint about the Hyprland Discord, but not a very good reason for him to be banned from Freedesktop.org.) Of course, truthfully, there is no 100% winning answer here; if the stakeholders who have control over a project by virtue of being the original developers don't want to cede any control to people for CoC enforcement, they don't really have to (although in reality, external pressures to implement one might make it an untenable position to hold.) In that case, you have to rely on those people to hold themselves accountable to reasonable conduct, and nobody's perfect. It's kind of like when police departments conduct internal investigations and find no problems; even if you're pretty pro-police, you must feel somewhat skeptical that they actually were reasonably impartial in conducting said investigation. But, I generally side with The Evil I Know, which is that the project authors and biggest stakeholders should generally maintain most of the power and control in an open source project including the ultimate decisions regarding moderation. In cases where developers have proven particularly egregious with their conduct, forking has proven to be effective enough as a mitigation strategy, and the fact that it comes at a cost is a sort of feature, as it's better if a power shift like that isn't easy; while I can't guarantee that the original authors and maintainers of a project will act reasonably and impartially, I can at least say that I expect them to have the project's best interests at heart, whereas the kinds of people that go around looking for established projects and organizations to join roles that have authority tend to not be the kinds of people you usually want in those roles. Having it be difficult means you need people who genuinely care about the project rather than the types of people who just kind of seek power. (And I am sorry, but there are fuckloads of those people among us and they are absolutely dirty enough to hide under the guise of anything to get a modicum of control. Running an online community for any appreciable amount of time opens your eyes to this IMO.) All of this to say, it reflects poorly on the state of the Internet at the time and KDE's mailing lists that the situation happened and was possibly not rectified in a way that is satisfactory (it sure doesn't sound like it.) The correct thing to do is obviously to issue a ban, and you don't need a rule book of any kind to figure that out. I think when people push for these things during major incidents, it's misguided at best, because usually the core problem was not that a "don't tell people to kill each other" rule didn't exist, but that people actually would've needed such a rule to decide the behavior was unacceptable in the first place. This isn't some complex gray area case. I don't think people are acting in bad faith when they suggest it as an option after a drama incident, but I still think it's the wrong knee jerk 99% of the time. (The most favorable thing I can say is that I think a CoC might possibly have value in very large projects like Linux or Kubernetes, but so far the execution has always felt like it leaves something to be desired. Seeing people occasionally openly threaten to contact the CoC committees over effectively technical disagreements leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
astrange 1y ago
Having a long memory about this, the reason Lisp died out even though it was supposedly the best programming environment ever, is that Lisp programmers (called "Lisp weenies" at the time) were so unbelievably emotionally abusive that nobody believed them about it or wanted to interact with them. You couldn't ask them for help with anything without them calling you a moron who should kill yourself. (The main example of these people was a guy named Erik Naggum, but a few still exist somewhere out there and I met one on a programming reddit yesterday. You can spot them because they won't stop telling you how great Lisp Machines are, can't explain why nobody uses them, and for some reason they insist on calling JavaScript "ECMAScript".) That said, I also remember that codes of conduct were popularized about a decade ago by someone who was then fired from GitHub for harassing junior programmers (she claimed this was "mentoring" and seemed mentally incapable of noticing something could be wrong with her behavior.) So it seemed like an obvious case of reputation laundering at the time.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > Having a long memory about this, the reason Lisp died out even though it was supposedly the best programming environment ever, is that Lisp programmers (called "Lisp weenies" at the time) were so unbelievably emotionally abusive that nobody believed them about it or wanted to interact with them. Agreed. > You couldn't ask them for help with anything without them calling you a moron who should kill yourself. Never got that, though. I hung out on comp.lang.lisp back in the day. I recall once, writing a small utility to read a file in /etc/ and do $SOMETHING based on the settings therein. I asked about the best way to read ini/config files; did not mention /etc. I got flamed for not storing my configs in s-expr and simply using the builtin reader ... needless to say I was never going to switch all the files in /etc to s-expressions.
- fastasucan 1y ago
  A read on Erik Naggum: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
stn_za 1y ago
COCs never became popular though, business types enforced them and hackers fought against and lost
- thrance 1y ago
  Not hackers, more like mentally ill trolls that fought for the right to say racial slurs on github issues.
  - stn_za 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - thrance 1y ago
      What was a better time? When injunctions to suicide were socially acceptable?
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      [dead]
      - stn_za 1y ago
        huh?
account42 1y ago
Because people blindly believe anecdotes without context are representative of anything?
singpolyma3 1y ago
Your daily reminder that a code of conduct is only as valuable as the moderation team behind it.

collingreen 1y ago

I'm sorry that happened. That is monstrously bad behavior.

Joel_Mckay 1y ago
[flagged]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

anitil 1y ago

Wow I would never have expected such poor behaviour, that's awful.

grepfru_it 1y ago

Oh wow old war wounds from teenage days opened up. My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the FreeBSD mailing list thinking I was going to change the world. Man, instead I come back to everyone chewing me a new one, calling my friend too dumb to use FreeBSD, and other things that was not rooted in reality. I didn’t even try to defend my patch, I had spent so much time evangelizing FreeBSD up to that point that it really made me question my support of the project. Anyway fast forward like 5 years, I was telling the story to coworkers when I decided to look up the su source. shocked-pikachu someone took my patch and applied it (without attribution). I have since moved on from FreeBSD entirely and my open sourced works have never been so negatively picked apart again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

RobRivera 1y ago
Just wow
iJohnDoe 1y ago
God that is the absolute worst. Those type of examples make my blood boil. Unfortunately, it happens all too often in life, especially in business.
seabass-labrax 1y ago
You still hold the copyright to your patch, and the governance of FreeBSD is so much better now. I know a former FreeBSD core team member who I'm sure would love to see you get finally credit for your work :) I'd be more than happy to put you in touch - email address in my profile if you're interested.
- astrange 1y ago
  FreeBSD does seem better directed than it used to be, but if you follow the handbook it still recommends setting up computers like individual special snowflakes instead of properly managed cattle. Like, if your installation has useful services running on it, it should not also have a customized kernel and it probably shouldn't have a C compiler installed at all. What it should have is backups and a way to stage/test/revert config changes instead of just making them on prod. It… does not do this. IME if you bring this up you'll just get a hundred complaints from people saying "I built a system to do this out of poudriere and duct tape so it's fine". I guess because the people who know about declarative programming all use Docker.

abrookewood 1y ago

Dude, whoever wrote that to you was a piece of shit. Forget about them - almost guaranteed that someone who behaves like that has way bigger problems in their life & doesn't deserve your time or attention. You were a 14 y.o kid who produced something and took the time to release it. That takes dedication and guts. Well done.

timClicks 1y ago

This reminds me of when I provided some impressions of Erlang as a newcomer to their mailing list. One of my suggestions was that they include hash tables, rather than rely on records (linked lists with named key). Got flamed as ignorant, and I've never emailed that mailing list again. A while later, they ended up adding hash tables to the language.

sharmi 1y ago
[dead]

bruce511 1y ago

This is of course a terrible reply to receive, I'm sorry you got that. But I also find the psychology behind this sort of reply interesting, because there's lots of factors that lead to this sort of extreme. Firstly, we don't know the age of the replier, but my guess would be someone also young, or at least immature. Telling people to kill themselves is not something adults typically do in any context.) So it suggests another junior, desperate to prove their own standing, and needing to compete against others rather than collaborate. I've seen this kind of response in one adult (abusive to other forum members) but he clearly had quite severe mental health issues (and the user was banned.) In youngsters it is usually extinguished with firm moderator guidance. With adult responders, frustration and tedium play a role. Personally I'm more generous with replies in the morning than the evening. At times I almost "fake" patience (when I'm getting impatient) with people who are simply not thinking, and who aren't listening. Overall it is very imbalanced. The asker is asking 1 question. The replier may answer tens or hundreds in a day. So it's hard to answer each one as if it's original, as if it matters, as if you've not heard it a million times before (especially if it's right there in the FAQ.) Part of answering well, and the quality of any forum, is in participants answering well, even if the question is trivial. We all were newbies once. Asking stupid questions is how we grew from there. Answering stupid questions is how we pay it forward.

aaronbrethorst 1y ago
Meanwhile, here's Linus at the age of 42: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/linus-to-opensuse-devs-kill-yourself-now.30414/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/linus-to-opensuse-devs-ki...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Aachen 1y ago
  TLDR seems to be like "whatever moron made this is mentally disabled". Not quite the KYS that is popular with the youth (in a game played by mostly teenage boys, we kept needing to moderate and escalate ban durations for a lot of players) but not particularly great to put it mildly indeed

xlii 1y ago

Ehh. When people reminisce about "the old internet" they tend to forget how hostile it was. Being devils advocate it wasn't common for young people to engage in the activity but harsh and unfair critic was happening often. It still exists today, but in much smaller scale than back then.

rcakebread 1y ago

In the early days of the PERL Usenet group, I asked my first question and used the word "newbie" to describe my skill level. I got an automated reply scolding me for using the word "newbie".

jononor 1y ago

Sorry to hear that. Props to you for keep on going!

inferiorhuman 1y ago

A bit of morbid curiosity has me wondering who that was. Back when I contributed some stuff to KDE I pulled a bunch of petulant kid shit (although what you described is not and was never my style). My recollection is that it was a pretty diverse and accepting group of freaks and geeks that would likely get shunned these days as the pendulum swings right… including a certain Tool aficionado that comments on HN occasionally. Telling someone to kill themselves is wildly inappropriate and shouldn't have happened to you.

jraph 1y ago

I hope this person managed to change, or that KDE has managed to get rid of them. I expect KDE to be better than this.

stn_za 1y ago

Sigh, good old days

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
thrance 1y ago
When you could tell teens to kill thmeselves over nothing? That's what you're musing over? Get some help.
- stn_za 1y ago
  [flagged]