Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013)

https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/

by endorphine • 4 years ago

335 325 4 years ago

harthur.wordpress.com

bawolff• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

lelanthran2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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_wot4• 4 years ago

He did acknowledge it later: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/trolling-is-a-art

maverwa3• 4 years ago

I also buy his "Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole" claim.

Its really hard to make a complex argument in 140 characters (as it was back in 2013), even if he wanted to. The short format really invites these "just a few word" opinion pieces. I think its easy to see how this, given the right ingredients, can trigger a misunderstanding or at least an incomplete understanding.

Text lacks a lot of context humans usually communicate via voice and facial expressions. Lowering the information even more by restricting the amount of text can make it hard to convey the intent.

I am not saying "his tweet was fine, just misunderstood" here btw. I do not know his indent when writing this tweet. And I think its on the author to make sure their message can reasonably be understood as intended.

But I also see how something like this can happen without malintent on the authors side.

maxbond6• 4 years ago

To be fair though, this was a decade ago, and he also published an apology; personally when I see people treating others badly, in a way I've treated others badly, it bothers me more than it otherwise would've, so it's entirely possible experiences like this are why a.) bothers him.

pinkcan2• 4 years ago

"rewrite in Rust for no good reason"

`sudo` just had an array-out-of-bounds CVE https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2022-4399...

lelanthran2• 4 years ago

`sudo` just had an array-out-of-bounds CVE https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2022-4399...

So? Sudo is so notorious for being a mess that the BSD people made their own - doas.

Rewriting sudo is "for no reason" when doas already exists. You're effectively rewriting doas.

fock2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Twitter in particular seems to reward snark and negativity more than anything else.

maxbond6• 4 years ago

People can get vicious in Show HN threads, as well.

Kiro2• 4 years ago

It's a problem with all social media. As soon as subreddit becomes big enough all the most upvoted comments will be low effort snark. If there's a way to find a negative angle bashing someone/something it will be there. It's also happening on HN for certain topics (big tech etc).

hexmiles• 4 years ago

I noted something similar with colleague and friends. I really seem to bring out the worst in people, I'm not sure what it is.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend that it is always really considerate and nuanced in every conversation (and other social network), except, Twitter where it becomes kinda vicious, or it managed always express an opinion in the most polarizing way possible. I didn't seem to realized it until I show some of the tweet it posted.

Lutger• 4 years ago

I never really understood the toxicity around open source. It was my first interaction around something I published when I was still learning things - being burned to the ground. I don't think I published anything ever since that experience, some 15 years ago. To me, it is just not fun giving your work away like this.

All the code since then was paid for, handsomely, and almost nobody complained about it.

Roark66• 4 years ago

Exactly, also imagine how much more difficult a decision to open source their product must be fo a business?

I think this toxicity as you called is really harming OS.

rurban• 4 years ago

he is a she.

it's the js variant of the perl 'replace' script floating around and packaged. just with javascript regexp syntax. so I would find it useful for js folks.

fock2• 4 years ago

I'm sorry for reinforcing my bias publicly, unfortunately to late to edit. Thank you.

otherme123• 4 years ago

Modern bioinformatics are based on sharing shitty scripts 20-30 years ago. Sometimes you have this good but complex interface piece of software (e.g. https://evolution.genetics.washington.edu/phylip.html) that newbies find impossible to use, so someone in the middle creates a dirty script that does a very specific thing in a single command, in a way that you just replace the input and output filenames.

I can name a number of really bad pieces of software that are widely used because nobody has time/funds to do it properly. Lots of those programs are made by pre-doc students that are learning the basics, and as soon as they get competent at coding, they are absorbed by the private sector.

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

Yeah, the adage "nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution" exists for a reason. A lot of industries that use software but aren't actually tech themselves tend towards this kind of result. E.g.: If one guy figures out how to script some medical imaging task, he'll just share that with other people who then rely on the same script. I've seen it in academics as well, especially around things like image processing.

TrackerFF• 4 years ago

Lots of extremely opinionated people in tech, nothing new. Probably the same type of people that will tear apart completely fine code, because they need to assert authority at all costs.

Best you can do is to either completely ignore them, or tell them to grow the f##k up and behave like adults.

adql2• 4 years ago

It does have like 700+ stars and 91 forks; question how many of them are "ironical" but definitely doesn't look like "someone digged out a piece of old code and decided to have a joke"

mkl95• 4 years 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.

kristopolous• 4 years 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.

Kiro2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Meta Tetris - game screen is a representation of your available RAM, if game's over, computer freezes. Interesting idea

Teknoman1176• 4 years ago

Today I visualized the buddy allocator as memory Tetris.

dusted3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Trufa2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

pencilguin• 4 years ago

In other news, I am once again reminded why I am happy not to have a Twitter account.

drumhead• 4 years 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.

blueflow2• 4 years 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.

teekert2• 4 years 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.

frgtmnm3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

nonrandomstring2• 4 years ago

Most people are kind IRL.

There's a few reasons:

  They are affected by physical proximity, eye contact, body language,
  tone of voice, even smell.

  They lack the courage to be hostile to strangers who may possibly
  retaliate with physical force.

  Deeply entrenched socialisation and group norms operate mostly
  on the inter-personal, face-to-face level.

These controls are so strong that people are quite unable to dehumanise others when face to face. See Andrew Kimbrall's 2000 Schumacher lecture [1] (in particular the story of the pilot shot down in Vietnam).

Mass communications technology really requires we relearn our entire stack of socialisation skills using different signals and different brain faculties. Nobody is taught that. Nobody today has time for that.

[1] https://archive.org/details/cold_evil_kimbrell

specialist4• 4 years ago

And then there is twitter.

You may recall the advice about waiting til next morning to hit send on that scathing email reply. You might not feel so dramatic after a cooldown period.

My working theory on why Twitter is so noxious is that it captures (then broadcasts) people's impulsiveness reaction.

I keep thinking of Marshal McLuhan's The Medium is the Message. What would he say about Twitter?

I've never grokked McLuhan's distinction between "hot" and "cold" mediums. (Makes sense; being one of the first to discuss this stuff, he had to invent a vocabulary.)

My current guess involves feedback loops and channel bandwidth. "Hot" is reactive, "cold" is deliberative. But it's not just the immediacy of the medium, it's also the interactions (feedback loops).

Face to face, there is very high bandwidth (included by not limited to backchannel, body language, facial expressions, context, etc) along with rapid feedback. So we have the information needed to keep communication from going off the rails.

Alas, Twitter's very constrained bandwidth, while maintaining the rapid feedback loop, doesn't permit any sort collaborative moderating effort.

In other words, Twitter is custom built for kneejerk clapbacks.

For contrast, I keep thinking of John Carmack's journaling via a .plan file (and the finger protocol). Twas a precursor to blogging and RSS feeds. Why didn't that medium incite virality, outrage, and pogroms? .plan files are also low band width, right? I think it's because the feedback loops simply didn't exist.

cnity3• 4 years ago

My theory about Twitter is that the UI makes it feel like you are interacting in a really small group (by constraining how much you can see at any one time), when in reality you are broadcasting to an audience of possibly many thousands. This produces speech and behaviour people would use with only close friends, but to a huge audience.

If you were just with one other programming friend, you might make reference to a repo you'd seen and say something like "yeah that approach is totally batshit", but you wouldn't say the same thing to the author in a public forum in front of many people. I think Twitter tricks our minds into behaving like the former but actually in the latter. So it's easy to forget that you may as well be directly insulting the author.

Semaphor• 4 years ago

800 comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767

propagandist• 4 years 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

fergie• 4 years 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.

DeathArrow3• 4 years 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.

DeathArrow3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

DeathArrow3• 4 years ago

It's no policy. It's just the way the world works.

csande173• 4 years ago

I can't help but feel like I'm missing context here. The project (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?

blueflow2• 4 years ago

Would the bad code quality justify the snarkiness on Twitter?

csande173• 4 years 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!

dusted3• 4 years 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.

politelemon• 4 years ago

I went through the code, some of the tweets, and I'm trying to figure out what they are thinking. The best guess I can come up with, is if someone were to make their own tool similar to the ubiquitous "curl" or "wget", there would be a kneejerk reaction from some people (lol it's curl but worse), while most people would be happy to simply ignore it, and a few would be curious about it.

The problem with Twitter is that it gives an equal platform to everyone's opinions even if it is without merit or reasonable discourse.

robertlagrant4• 4 years ago

The problem with Twitter is that it gives an equal platform to everyone's opinions even if it is without merit or reasonable discourse.

Isn't that the problem with communication in general? Wouldn't, say, HN have the same issue?

dan-robertson2• 4 years ago

I would guess a mix of ‘reinventing the wheel’ complaints (except sed kinda sucks for the common task and it’s annoying having n different regexp syntaxes) and ‘nodejs for everything’ complaints. But it doesn’t really make sense to me.

IshKebab4• 4 years ago

Yeah the existing wheels suck so I don't blame them for reinventing it. Often it is easier to write a proper program to do exactly what you want than to figure out the arcane `sed | xargs` command from the 70s that nobody has ever bothered to make vaguely usable.

Here's a program I wrote to count matches in a very large file. I wonder how long it would take to work out the equivalent bash command.

  use aho_corasick::AhoCorasick;
  use std::fs::File;
  use std::io::BufReader;
  fn main() {
    let args = std::env::args().collect::<Vec<_>>();
    if args.len() != 3 {
        eprintln!("Usage: ./count_occurances 'pattern' <filename>");
        return;
    }
    let f = File::open(&args[2]).expect("Error opening input file");
    let reader = BufReader::new(f);
    let patterns = &[&args[1]];
    let ac = AhoCorasick::new(patterns);
    let count = ac.stream_find_iter(reader).count();
    println!("{}", count);
  }

sgentle• 4 years ago

If you're a real Linux user, you can build such a system yourself quite trivially by combining xargs, sed and grep. You see, nodejs is the pumpkin spice latte of languages. I, a sophisticate, insist upon the fine single malt whiskey of Perl, paired with a delectable shell script charcuterie. Anything less is the fare of unsophisticated lusers, who are often (purely coincidentally) women or other outgroups.

machinawhite• 4 years ago

A real Linux user can build their own xargs, sed and grep in an arbitrary environment, be it node, windows scripting host or the python interpreter in some washing machines firmware

acdha4• 4 years ago

… and the subtle errors in my simple example were, of course, left as an exercise for the student so you’d learn how to fix them.

imtringued• 4 years ago

I once used cygwin to accidentally create files with binary data as their file name that couldn't be deleted in the windows file explorer. I wrote another cygwin program that deleted these files.

The only difference between me and the author of this blog post is that I didn't upload my program to the internet where people could ridicule it for its simplicity.

jonnycomputer2• 4 years ago

Was this supposed to be a command line tool used in a Linux environment, where grep, sed, etc. are already available? Doesn't excuse their behavior, not at all, but I can see exactly how that might provoke their derision. The mistake was quite worse than I thought. But it is foolish to be provoked by the foolishness or ignorance of others. They could have remained silent, or could have reached out constructively (e.g. by introducing them to those widely distributed set of really powerful command line tools).

Or is there some JavaScript additional functionality that I'm missing?

remram• 4 years ago

Node is not a Linux-only platform. It's easy to imagine reasons you might need this tool in your software project, that works on all the platforms your project does.

pinkcan2• 4 years ago

for proper context you'd have to look at the repo has it was when the tweets went out

https://github.com/harthur/replace/tree/431b1e183a4bd43046af...

but it doesn't matter as those tweets are trash, specially coming from other OSS devs

forgotpwd162• 4 years ago

Even looking at the repo back then still cannot see why people will mock the author.

untech• 4 years ago

Maybe the reason is that is a command-line utility written in JS? This is quite normal today, but in 2013 it might be shocking for some people.

I think there’s still some hate towards JS now, and in 2013 it definitely was much more rampant.

Also funny to think that this project probably received so much hate because of being ahead of its time.

csande173• 4 years ago

The whole command-line tools in JS trend was, I think, in full swing in 2013. I mean even in the 2013 version that another commenter linked, they're relying on the built-in NPM support for installing command-line tools and the existing popular NPM packages for command-line parsing and output.

And if people were trying to fight that trend (which to be fair is a bad trend; I refuse to run software from the NPM ecosystem to this day), this is a weird example to pick because the point of the tool is to use JavaScript's regular expression syntax.

bdhcuidbebe• 4 years ago

by 2013 we already had piles of js tooling

anyone remember babel, webpack, browserify, gulp, grunt?

tex0• 4 years ago

Same here. In fact I've built a very similar tool because sed/awk/grep/find didn't quite cut it and it did help a me lot to get sh* done.

j_mo• 4 years ago

You also can't see any replies for the tweets that are still up (one of the three in the screenshot was deleted) so there's no context. I guess Twitter has some data retention policy going on for 9yr old tweets? Or they never actually got any attention in the first place

ksherlock• 4 years ago

The third is a reply to the first so clearly it did get some attention.

Merad• 4 years ago

I can't help but feel like I'm missing context here.

I think the main context is simply that people suck sometimes. I'm not a huge fan of writing scripts or command line tools with node, but I've done it before, even in projects where js wasn't the primary language. It's a useful tool. Yes, the functionality overlaps with sed and grep, but speaking for myself I can never remember how to do anything more complex than the basic `grep text_goes_here`. If I found myself needing to do a lot of command line find and replace operations I certainly might make a little tool like this.

jasonlotito2• 4 years ago

Someone made a childish and unprofessional critique of the code, and followed it up with a thoughtful and professional response.

It's odd that people are okay with a childish and unprofessional critique of code, but not a fairly civil and well thought-out critique of the "code review."

Teknoman1176• 4 years 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.

scrollaway2• 4 years ago

Your parents sound pretty cool.

PostOnce• 4 years 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!

Teknoman1176• 4 years ago

I went to be a guest speaker at the high school I went to a few weeks ago.

I was honestly surprised that the teachers were surprised I loved answering the students' questions. Like, why else am I here? Maybe they can identify with me more because I'm only 12-15 years into their future rather than mid to late career like their parents.

I kinda did my 20-ish minute ramble on what studying CS looks like, what learning programming practice looks like, and getting into the tech industry after school. I tried to leave a bunch of places for them to probe and I was so happy that they did. Couldn't even get close to answering all their questions in the remaining 35 minutes.

auggierose• 4 years ago

Actually, I didn't go to people and ask for help. Instead, I was sitting in front of a computer for half a year, wondering why my source files I typed off some programming magazine would not run. I settled on batch programming for a while, because those .bat files DID run! Well, I figured it out after a while, but there never was a live human in the loop.

Obviously this guys response is not nice, but I CAN understand wanting to restrict the quality of contributors I get. Trying out things is great, but do it on your time, not mine. Luckily, in real life for most projects, the number of contributors is so small that quality moderation is not a problem.

I definitely don't like replacing proper technical design and documentation by social channels. Recently I tried to use a promising framework with very little documentation of its concepts, and their answer was to seek help in their Discord channels. I quickly ran into weird problems and bugs with the framework; I wasn't surprised.

alias_neo5• 4 years ago

Your parents deserve credit here for that great response.

My parents mostly encouraged me mostly by providing the tools and leaving me to it; I spent some of my early years (pre-teen) reverse engineering/cracking (education only, never released), then an inordinate amount of time playing the Discworld MUD.

Once I got bored of BASIC my dad bought me some books on C++ and took me to a college course on PC building with him; though initially the college were reluctant to let a child take the course (I was 12). He'd often take me to work and answer all of my questions about what he was doing; PLC/panel-building at the time, with some very cool fibre optic tech and DIN rail mounted devices of all kinds; I'd help make wiring looms and labelling.

He and I would build a new ("family") PC every year until I got my first job after uni and could pay for my own damn computer;

He just uses laptops now and hasn't built or used a desktop since the last one we built together with my first pay-packet over a decade ago.

Teknoman1176• 4 years ago

I was lucky. During the "core" years of my childhood (8-12), my dad worked from home. This is also when I started getting into computing. He always arranged his days so that he was off work by the time we kids came home from school. My desk was in his office, and in the summers he'd always answer my questions or at least point me in the right direction if I asked him something when he wasn't on a call. He always seemed to have this superpower of being able to switch his full focus instantly. Mom was a full-time mom until I was 15, when financial conditions ('08) meant they both needed to work. She has a masters in math education, so there was always at least one well educated person I could annoy at any time.

I remember when dad first gave me the ability to use the internet by myself (2001, iirc). He told me how it was an unprecedented way of accessing information and learning, something he felt would have put him years ahead of where he was if he had it when he was in college. I discovered so many niche communities for the things I was interested in (LEGO Mindstorms, AVR, Rokenbok, model trains, etc.). I kinda yearn for the days when the internet wasn't the advertisement ridden and siloed hellscape it is today.

raverbashing• 4 years ago

Your parents deserve credit here for that great response.

Well, half a great response

No way I would tell my kids to take up with some a-hole online that is more interested in trolling than anything else

Zolomon• 4 years ago

Heya from a fellow Discworld player! What was your character’s name if I may ask?

_joel• 4 years ago

Damn that mirrors my experience with my dad pretty much (bar Uni)! He'd also take delight in renting out my support services (mainly as a proud parent but also so I could make some pocket money) by fixing his mates machines, which were usually a piece of cake. Helped me get a career in IT.

specialist4• 4 years ago

"children" need to stay out of programming

Before I could drive, my father would taxi me to computer user group meetings and such.

I've always talked too much, asked stupid questions. One time, a guy dismissed my question about tablet input devices, something like "You're too young to know about that kind of thing."

It was one of the few times I've seen my father get genuinely pissed off.

pfortuny• 4 years ago

“There is no stupid question” is something any teacher should get ingrained in the minds of the students.

Of course once the student STUDIES.

Teknoman1176• 4 years ago

My dad did the same for me. Starting at about age 10 he'd bring me to Chibots meetings - a robotics club near where we were living at the time.

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

Ageism never died on the internet I guess. I think people underestimate how many young people are online these days.

KingMob• 4 years ago

Well, sure, if you're an eldritch horror, everyone seems young...

pjc50• 4 years ago

I remember the first time I got "flamed": describing TinyCC as "terrible" for its limitations, on the FidoNet C programming board. I was maybe .. 14? Certainly the 2400 baud modem era.

(Fidonet was an early federated message board system)

(TinyCC was not Fabrice's project of the same name but an earlier freeware compiler that only supported the "tiny" memory model, and was therefore limited to 64kb code and 64kb data.)

wazoox• 4 years ago

Ah yes. I remember a long time ago I had corrected some out-of-tree Linux driver to support a newer Linux release and sent the changes to the ML, only to be chastised for not posting properly formatted patches... Mmh... OK?

wildcow• 4 years ago

As a grownup i would like to say sorry to younger you on behalf of other grownups. And to the younger you: go be whatever you want! Infact: if there is a teenager reading this right now that have been asshatted by a grownup about coding, don't take in a single word of the asshat: go be brilliant in you if-ststements and create new wonderful stuff. Please do.

the_only_law• 4 years ago

I wouldn’t be too surprised if the other people wasn’t even an adult themselves. I’ve seen plenty of young programmers that have been doing it for a few years treat other newer younger programmers with contempt.

dotnet00• 4 years ago

Meanwhile teenage-me (~13) had a ton of absurd questions and a habit of starting and 'announcing' projects I could obviously never finish (I was just teaching myself BASIC at the time and asking about making things like antiviruses). I didn't even really have an understanding of licenses etc so I eventually pissed off a bunch of people on the forum for the specific dialect I was learning. I imagine dealing with enough people like young me (curious but too much effort to babysit) might cause people to have negative associations of young teens in programming.

My parents didn't really care for my interest in computers, thinking that I was wasting time and sacrificing school on 'games'. Although they at least humored me on getting books on more modern languages like C# so I managed to improve. For a bit I even held an immature grudge on the guy who got mad at me which motivated me to get better. Nowadays it's all just a funny memory though.

ericmcer• 4 years ago

Do people really forget that they once did not have an ability they currently have. It is strange to be unable to associate your past ignorance with other peoples current ones.

A lot of online communities have pretty inclusive rulesets also, even posting on some reddit forums you will quickly get treated like a pariah for violating some obscure syntax rule.

gambiting• 4 years ago

The number 1 mistake was searching Twitter and caring about any of these posts.

mk89• 4 years ago

Sometimes you might stumble upon your stuff indirectly, like you see this popup in your timeline, or similar.

Trufa2• 4 years ago

What a nice apology

http://blog.coreyhaines.com/2013/01/im-sorry.html

scrollaway2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

maxbond6• 4 years 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.

neilv• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

langsoul-com• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Why can't people just ignore stuff they don't like and leave people alone. :-(

WesolyKubeczek3• 4 years ago

Because THE ENGAGEMENT and ALL THE LIKES

lifeisstillgood• 4 years 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.

hsn9156• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

flumpcakes4• 4 years ago

I had a similar response and it led to a some self reflection:

At first I thought the sobbing line was hyperbole, then I thought "why would someone admit that?" then I saw the author had a feminine first name and thought "why is it OK for a woman to admit to crying about this?" then I thought "why would a man not admit to crying about this?" then I remembered that I'm emotionally stunted and society still thinks it is acceptable to demonise men who have emotions.

poszlem2• 4 years ago

You will most likely be downvoted for writing this, but you are absolutely right. Prepare for all sorts of name calling (including one commenter already claiming your take is pathetic) as you violated a moral taboo (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html).

This is one of those stories that would 100% have a different ending if the author was a man.

alkonaut• 4 years 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• 4 years 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 .

asnelt• 4 years 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

It's packaged for Debian, Arch and openSUSE: https://repology.org/project/rrep/packages

psychphysic2• 4 years 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.

flumpcakes4• 4 years 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.

psychphysic2• 4 years 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_...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/rclslb/the_core_team_...

WesolyKubeczek3• 4 years 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?

Rich_Morin• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

acdha4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

adql2• 4 years ago

Repeat after me: "my code isn't me, it's a snapshot of my skill and deadlines at the time"

einpoklum2• 4 years 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.

WesolyKubeczek3• 4 years 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.

einpoklum2• 4 years ago

With 280 characters, you can very well say "I noticed [project]. While [some mitigation of snarkiness], [snark]".

sho_hn2• 4 years 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_hn2• 4 years 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-...

"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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

nicgrev103• 4 years 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.

helaoban2• 4 years 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....

Now somebody tell me I'm an idiot and recommend a commonly used program for the aforementioned problem please.

nixpulvis• 4 years ago

I've been happy with `rename` when I need it.

mkl• 4 years 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.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 4 years 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-...

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• 4 years 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.

jonnycomputer2• 4 years ago

Perhaps they realized that people would be shitting on them a decade later on one of the most popular platforms for programmers?

godshatter• 4 years 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.

mannykannot4• 4 years ago

While I agree with your comments with regard to the forums that exist for this purpose, this does not appear to have been one of them.

It is not clear to me why your concerns for the three people who were called out here should not also apply, and with more justification, to the person they ridiculed in the first place.

If calling them out gave encouragement to other people who have been discouraged by similar responses, it did some objective good. I prefer happy endings across the board.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 4 years ago

It is not clear to me why your concerns for the three people who were called out here should not also apply, and with more justification, to the person they ridiculed in the first place.

Yes and no. Her posting probably multiplied the damage these folks did to themselves, but it probably didn’t really damage her, that much. Maybe, the opposite. I don't know if the bullying she suffered was the reason that she doesn't do open source any more. It doesn't seem to have stopped her.

Online venues (in that case, Twitter) seem to have exacerbated the propensity for human cruelty, by abstracting the consequences (but, as this thread shows, that “abstraction” is really kind of an illusion).

Most participants on HN probably fit the “geek” archetype, in one form or another, and I’ll bet most of us have been the target of relentless bullying.

It’s kind of heartbreaking, to see us then turn around, and repeat that behavior onto others.

I know, that for myself, I can be a fairly hard taskmaster. I have definite opinions on many matters. I know that some of my opinions are minority opinions.

I’ve learned to keep my opinions focused on myself, or on folks that I work with directly. Even doing that, can draw attacks. It’s up to me, how I respond to these attacks. It’s quite possible for me to make things worse. I have learned some humbling lessons.

Kindness and encouragement are not “virtue signaling.” They are also not displays of naïveté or weakness. Many of the folks that participate here, become successful, by leveraging the weakness of others, to their own advantages. That’s not always a bad thing, but it is very much a “live by the sword, die by the sword” thing.

I choose not to live in a world of conflict, rancor, misanthropy, and anger. I know that means I probably won’t be a captain of industry, but that’s never been a goal, and that’s all right.

I have, however, been bullied to a degree that many people here might find shocking. It has a lot to do with the environments in which I was raised.

In my case, instead of making me a bully, it has helped me to become a lot more compassionate.

But that was not a straightforward path. I was, temporarily, a bully (a particularly nasty one). I’m really glad that I was able to grow past it, before doing myself permanent harm.

RF_Savage• 4 years ago

No good deed goes unpunished.

dools• 4 years 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

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?

forgotpwd162• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

stavros2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Commonly known as nonconstructive criticism from people bored by the lack of their own imaginations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg

1337shadow• 4 years ago

A lot of Open Source maintainers are dicks which they compensate for with pointless virtue signaling.

recursivedoubts2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Ouch!

recursivedoubts2• 4 years ago

"Do you wanna know how I got these scars?"

bsnnkv• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I really like your project! I just wish I had more opportunities to use it.

hcarvalhoalves• 4 years ago

Ignore Twitter, it’s mostly a cesspool of vanity and hate.

makach• 4 years 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_3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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_3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Attrecomet2• 4 years 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 :)

ki_3• 4 years ago

If they are just insults, u can just ignore them right? I mean.. you're an adult.

sporritt• 4 years 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

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/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• 4 years 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.

moffkalast2• 4 years 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.

acdha4• 4 years 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.

moffkalast2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

throwawaaarrgh• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Twitter is workforce automation for that kind of behavior. Its designed to be like that.

anotheraccount9• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I guarantee those critical of the code have forgotten about it, but I also that Heather has not.

mkeeter• 4 years 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.

donatj• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

dilap2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I don't think Facepunch is still online. Unless there's an archive somewhere?

sharkbird2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

bachmeier• 4 years ago

Instead, a decade later suddenly random people on the internet are putting the behavior on trial.

Is it wrong of me to not see this as a problem? A group of grown men decided to use their large platforms to mock someone, and now - gasp - other people are seeing that they were assholes.

Seriously, what's the problem?

TheMode• 4 years ago

You would likely prefer to be judged on what you are doing now than what happened 9 years ago. From what I am seeing they already apologized, what do you expect this thread to do?

dilap2• 4 years ago

To me the problem is that it's natural to want to use social media in an informal, conversational way, so there will inevitably be small slip-ups of decorum. We're emotional creatures.

It seems unfair, or unhealthy, even, that those go down on your permanent record.

Even if you don't slip up in that way, the constantly looming fear that you COULD is also unpleasant.

Basically I think it's healthier for all of us if we have the ability to move on from minor transgressions, and don't have to live in fear of making a thoughtless remark or a bad joke and being tarred forever as a jerk.

Or to put it another way, I don't think Steve Klabnik is any more of a jerk than the rest of us, he just happens to have caught the attention of the eye of Sauron for a moment.

The rest of us, seeing that, will perhaps be motivated to be EXTRA careful and kind at all times, but this is basically living life under a sort of panopticon, rather than in a geniune, moment to moment way.

zwerdlds2• 4 years ago

And yet no thought is given to broadcasting a thought to thousands or millions of people simultaneously. You're right, by the way, nobody should be put on trial for minor transgressions like this, but in a humane world, they wouldn't happen either.

also, FTA, it appears they did ask for an apology, which they apparently didn't get. Another thing interactions on the internet make very hard, is that owning your transgressions when you're wrong has very little utility as the other person is easy to objectify.

bckr• 4 years ago

They did get some very sincere apologies

valtism• 4 years ago

I think that as this becomes more prevalent as a society we are collectively getting better at acknowledging that people can change, especially from things long in the past. The issue is really when people get called out for things they have done in the past which is still a reflection of how they act today (they don't apologize for it, don't see anything wrong, etc.)

I had muted Klabnick on twitter some time ago because I thought he was being an asshole, and seeing something like this helps contextualize his behavior.

6510• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Reminds me of Hacker News comments when a developer shares a project here.

JoeyBananas• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

pointless whining about nothing that matters

Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013)

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