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Here's the other apology, http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node Heather, don't take it personal
by cachvico 14y ago
Here's the other apology, http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node
Heather, don't take it personally - your code is fine! JavaScript, on the other hand, is a wounded warrior by now..
- brazzy 14y agoMy takeaway: "Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole."
- timinman 14y agoIt's certainly not Twitter's fault. Lately, the open source community's underbelly has been exposed. "But open source is right and we are the good guys?!", or... "But I know those guys and they are usually really cool!" We want to categorize people as being bad or good, and it messes with our brain when we think we may have to re-categorize. It's more useful to realize that we all have a capacity to do both good and harm. It's also more useful to judge ourselves than others. Recognizing the need to change is the beginning. I know that I need Outside help to maximize the good and minimize the bad that I am capable of.
- brazzy 14y agoYes, it's partially Twitter's fault. Enforced brevity in a popularity contest setting encourages smartassery and discourages (or makes impossible) nuanced expression.
- anu_gupta 14y agoTwitter isn't coming up to anyone, twisting their arm and telling them to be a dick. Lots of people manage to use Twitter without coming across like assholes. If one feels that 140 characters isn't sufficient to correctly represent one's nuanced thoughts, then don't tweet.
- SimHacker 14y agoAnd that's why I don't tweet!
- brazzy 14y agoThat's a main reason why I don't. But I gather that in some circles the social pressure to tweet is not much short of arm twisting. I doubt you could find many twitter accounts (barring commercial PR stuff) whose history is entirely free of rudeness.
- mpyne 14y ago> Lately, the open source community's There is no "open source hivemind" so please don't disparage the millions of open source coders who will never make the frontpage of HN by lumping the entire conglomerate into one community.
- timinman 14y agoSorry, I didn't mean to disparage open source or people creating open source software - I love it!. The point I was trying to make was that even people with good ideals are fallible.
- yb66 14y agoMy takeaway: "Most people are arseholes. Twitter makes it so much harder to hide."
- blablabla123 14y agoI once saw a BBC documentation about "why do car drivers easily get angry at each other?" This is really interesting, maybe you want to think for a minute yourself before I reveal the reason. When I watched the documentation to the end I was surprised, but when I think about it now I'm not surprised anymore: Car driving involves no eye contact, in fact you hardly ever see the face of the other person. People behave differently and more nicely when they look into each other's face. One illustrative example were Laughter Clubs. People go there to laugh. So when a new member joins, all others stand around him, start to laugh and look him in the eye. No matter if the laughter starts artificially, only few moments later the person in the middle cannot stop laughing... ;) Back to the topic: Twitter is probably the most impersonal way to communicate. E-Mailing with my tax consultant is more personal. I cannot tell how often I realized that misunderstandings were created with E-Mails (which have arbitrary length.) Or even text messages which are limited to ~500 characters; but Twitter? 140 character stubs to talk to complete strangers?
- archangel_one 14y agoText messages are normally limited to 160 English characters, or fewer from other languages. I thought that was actually where the Twitter limit came from originally.
- dos1 14y agoNo, Steve Klabnik being an asshole makes it so hard for him to not accidentally be an asshole. Look at this quote: > nothing's _wrong_ with it, but I don't want to build my app on top of others' code who are at this level of understanding What a prick!
- calinet6 14y agoYeah... criticizing code is one thing (perfectly acceptable IMHO), but turning it personal made him into an asshole. Note that of course there's an element of "uncomfortable truth" to this—evaluating programmers' ability is probably a good thing, and he's right to a degree. We all know amazing and experienced programmers who write libraries that are like diamonds in the rough compared to other coders' work, but 1) you have to be tactful; you don't put people down for their code no matter what, because 2) you have to help them get there, and negativity is not how you do that.
- spooneybarger 14y agothat quote is from where?
- dos1 14y agohttps://twitter.com/harthvader/status/293829635823792128 https://twitter.com/harthvader/status/293829635823792128
- muratmutlu 14y agoOut of curiosity, do you think there would there have been blog post apologies if the harthur post was written by a guy?
- kimmel 14y agoNo. The hot button topic right now in open source is "increasing diversity" which means more attention is being focused on this.
- jasonm23 14y agoI think it's the public ridicule aspect which is new, thanks to everyone using twitter like it's their backyard, and forgetting it's a mouthpiece to the entire earth.
- hef19898 14y agoIt took me up too now to realise it wasn't written by a guy, so.
- scott_s 14y agoYes. I didn't realize the post was written by a woman until I read comments here.
- fatjokes 14y agoI wish he would replace his home page. I have to wait ~5 seconds to see the navigation for no reason other than the stupid terminal animation, and there's no obvious way of skipping it.
- Evbn 14y agoPlease don't bully him like that. Have you learned nothing from this incident?