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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I didn't use Twitter much, but each time I did, it was so frustrating to limit what I wanted to express in less than 280 characters, and splitting felt stupid. So I removed the less important words, replaced long words with short ones, then when it finally fit the limit, I didn't press send, just read it again, and hated it because it was oversimplified, limited my vocabulary, made generalizations without caution, etc.
I can easily see how it can turn normal people into dumb assholes, especially since there's the dopamine rewards of having tons of likes, retweets and comments, incentive to be extreme, by being extremely positive or extremely negative.
To add: I find the "Twitter makes it hard" remarks a total cop-out in this instance. One is responsible for ones conduct whether it's via Twitter, in person, or a series of smoke signals. Am I supposed to believe that a character limit is in some way an excuse for being an arsehole? Those tweets lacked _any_ attempt at nuance so to respond by saying "oh it's hard to express myself accurately with only n characters and this time I came off as a prick" is just utterly ridiculous.
There is that, but the systemic issue holds too : my rule of thumb is that if you use Twitter, then you are an an angry asshole or idiot (until proven otherwise).
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.
This sounds oversimplified. sudo is complex, and people had a simpler usecase, so they used a simpler alternative.
Some people need the complex features, and it's fine, and maybe they're fine with the risk of a difficult to audit codebase and risk of catastrophic failure, and we don't need any new alternative, so they can continue to use sudo as it is.
"The core of the problem was really that some people like to use sudo to build elaborate sysadmin infrastructures with highly refined sets of permissions and checks and balances" -- tedu https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/doas
So a rewrite of sudo is Rust could add value by allowing it to add complex features, and keeping memory safety, even if code auditing would stay complex, and small logic errors can have catastrophic outcomes.
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?
On HN unsubstantial put-downs are downvoted/flagged. On Twitter they get hearts and lols. That’s a pretty big difference.
(And yes, like another comment said, HN voting is also shit when it comes to certain topics like big tech. Fortunately the crappiest takes upvoted by mobs tend to be modded down by saner humans.)
Tomato tomato in my mind. On HN you're more likely to find nitpicky objections and backhanded compliments instead, but there's still people who will come into the thread just to tell you they think you're a bad engineer failing to solve irrelevant problems. Which, to be clear, is bullying.
Yes. HN is kind of like Stack Overflow in how vicious it can be, but like Stack Overflow, anything that looks like an actual attack gets removed. So the people learn to be vicious and a bit subtle about it. Or you get a storm of nitpicks and minor objections to something you say. People going into threads about language X to ask why anyone use a language with such obvious shortcomings.
Well, the point is that we need to realize there is always a human being on the other side of the comment / post. On Twitter that might not always be true. And these players may have been created for the sole purpose to troll / egg / incite.
I think this is kind of flipped around. On some level the difference between bot and troll is irrelevant, because I care about account behavior. Just like how at some level it is irrelevant whether the behavior is intentional or born of ignorance. Moderation is there to control behavior and content, not to control people.
The primary thing people on HN don't understand about Twitter is the personalized feed. On HN, if someone makes low-quality posts, everyone sees it until it gets downvoted into oblivion. On Twitter, if someone's making posts you don't want to see, you block or mute the account and see less of it.
What makes a post "low-quality" is inherently subjective, but HN doesn't offer any personalization. I'd characterize HN's approach as being like a little Puritan village in the 17th century, where community members get together to decide someone's fate. Twitter is like a modern city... if you don't like the neighborhood, go somewhere else. Yes, there are trolls on Twitter. But you don't have to see them on your feed. The impact of an individual troll account on Twitter is much lower than the impact of an individual troll account on HN.
My general feeling is that very few people actually understand how community management works, even in broad strokes. Certainly not me. As a result, behavior which might be a red flag on one forum may just be part of the ecosystem in another forum.
> On HN, if someone makes low-quality posts, everyone sees it until it gets downvoted into oblivion.
I very, very rarely see that in merely low-quality posts. Those that are actually downvoted enough to be hidden are hidden for good reasons. I am sure you could find a handful, but I have never seen a hidden post about which I regretted it was not visible (I’d be curious to see how many you can find). It usually is proper bullying or racist rants.
Now, stories get flagged regularly because they go against the grain, and there are several of them I wish we could have discussed. But looking at the new stories, the flagging mechanism gets rid of much more spam than unpopular posts.
Anyway, I am not really willing to buy that without some statistics.
> As a result, behavior which might be a red flag on one forum may just be part of the ecosystem in another forum.
That is certainly true. But I find HN to be on the good side in that respect. Much better than the anything goes of *chan, the constant shitposting of mainstream subreddits (though there are some subreddits I love with great communities), or the constant passive aggressiveness of ./ and el reg (at least when I frequented those; I never looked back after leaving). Ars is nice as well, but a huge troll magnet.
> On Twitter, if someone's making posts you don't want to see, you block or mute the account and see less of it.
The biggest problem with this idea is that there are tweets that you may have legitimate reasons not to want others to see. If someone is smearing you online in some way (revenge porn, lies about your actions, doxxing, stoking others to attack you, etc), then it doesn't really help you to hide these tweets from your feed, you need to have some recourse to hide them from others' feeds to actually achieve something.
Of course, this gets complicated often because it's not easy to tell apart lies about your actions from truths about your actions for example, and any mechanism you have to protect you from someone spreading false hurtful information is also a tool that someone else can use to prevent others spreading true hurtful information. Perhaps the court system is the only good way to solve it - I don't have an answer. But this problem also can't simply be ignored by hiding that person from your feed.
As someone who has gone through the inquisition, and dreaded it, it wasn't that bad. Show HN attracts criticism, yes, but it's mostly concrete and specific. Generic PR speak doesn't work, but if you address the comments in a direct, honest way, people generally understand that your stuff can't be perfect and that there are tradeoffs. A large part of Show HN has a different target user in mind than this crowd, and that's ok.
Snark OTOH, especially at an individual who is only representing themself, is just mean. Of course it happens here too, but it's rare. Reddit and Twitter are completely plagued by it – it usually gets the most engagement, whereas here it's rare and gets a chilly response.
Finally, there's one more differentiator. Twitter is people-oriented, you have a profile, usually your real name, and public follower count. Twitter is designed to be a popularity contest. Both hacker news and reddit are content-oriented. Sure, there's a username, but most people don't give a shit about who you are.
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).
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.
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.
Each day i contribute to open source, i keep thinking of putting it behind me. The amount of bullshit that comes my way, even now 5 years down the line, is really taking its toll. I love to share and make everything i do open. But the people really put a drain on my energy to even try.
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.
You don't need to apologize, as you did nothing wrong. Your usage was completely acceptable based on the context provided and knoeledge you had.
It would be incorrect now since you know she is a she.
Defaulting to he isn't bias, it's language feature of English since people didn't like using "it" to describe people, so "he" is a default singular pronoun.
> .... Did "they" get removed from the dictionary or something?
When I was growing up, it was explicitly taught in school as being incorrect grammar to use "they" for an ungendered third-person singular pronoun. At some point I decided that was a stupid policy for lots of reasons, and explicitly decided to go ahead and use it anyway. But it still feels weird.
Remember that the Cambridge and Oxford dictionaries are trying to be descriptive: that is, they're trying to see how people are actually using words. People actually use "they" as described there, and have been doing it for hundreds of years [1], and so it's in the Cambridge Dictionary.
What is taught in schools is prescriptive: They're trying to teach people "proper English" (sometimes called "prestige dialects"). So they tell you not to use "ain't", not to use double negatives ("I didn't do nothin'!"), not to say "literally" when you're speaking figuratively ("My head literally exploded!")... and not to use the singular "they" ("Can the owner of the blue car turn their lights off").
I retain the first three of those rules, in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure the Cambridge Dictionary has entries for "ain't" and "figuratively" that violate them; but I have deliberately chosen to reject the last one.
Dubious. The cited historical examples all refer to mass nouns or nouns with an implied plural. Usage with a concrete, singular person doesn't seem to be older than a few decades.
We're not talking about a case where there's a concrete singular person; we're talking about using it to describe a "person whose gender is not known". If you don't know the author's gender, using "they" has hundreds of years of precedent.
> We're not talking about a case where there's a concrete singular person; we're talking about using it to describe a "person whose gender is not known".
But that's the same thing. The crucial point being, we know it's one person.
> If you don't know the author's gender, using "they" has hundreds of years of precedent.
Citation please? The older the better. But mind, one addressee only.
> Citation please? The older the better. But mind, one addressee only.
OK, here's one from "Emma", written by Jane Austen. Emma and Mr. Knightley are discussing Harriet Smith, and Emma asks:
"Who is in love with her? Who makes you their confidant?" [1]
In this case, "their" is one specific person, a man who works for Mr. Knightley, has fallen in love with Harriet Smith, and came to ask Mr. Knightley his advice.
(Using 'they' rather than 'he' here is a bit strange, though, unless Emma was a lot more progressive than is generally thought about such matters; but hey ho.)
There are dozens of other examples, but most of those are of a generic situation, rather than a specific person whose gender is not being mentioned.
That's interesting, but obviously, it's also a case where a plurality is implied. The speaker has a group of men in mind and doesn't know which of them she's talking about. There is an uncertainty involved, but it can't be about the sex of the person, as you note yourself.
I'm pretty sure you're confused about what "plural" means. Consider all the following situations:
1. "Everybody should bring their own books to class".
2. "If anybody has left their book at home, they should ask the teacher to borrow one."
3. "Can the person who left their book at their desk please collect it at reception."
4. "Someone has written to say that they left their book at their desk."
5. "The author shows their bias here."
6. "Joanna has written to say that they left their book at their desk."
Gramatically speaking, none of these are plural. In the case of #1, there are many people involved, but it "resolves" down to individual actions, since each person has a separate book. In #2 it's an indefinite number of people -- it could be 0 or 1 or 50; but again, it "resolves" down to an individual and that person's actions. In #3-6, it's clearly one specific person, with various degrees of uncertainty about who that person might be or what that person is like. In all cases except #6, you can replace "their" with "his or her", which was the prescribed way of writing this in my grammar classes.
I'll grant you that #6, where you refer to a specific known person as "they/them/their", is new. But #5, which is what we're talking about here, 1) sounds perfectly natural to me as a native English speaker, 2) was the sort of thing the grammar classes explicitly taught against, 3) is a natural extension of 1-4.
> Gramatically speaking, none of these are plural.
But even you used a plural, by saying "books" in #1, demonstrating that even when coming up with this example, you did not "resolve" anything just because "everybody" is a singular pronoun. You used "they" not referring to the word, but to what the word logically implied, and thus this "they" is also plural.
I simply don't see this natural progression that you claim. I see distinct usages of "they" for two different types of indefiniteness: one of number, and one of sex. #1-#3 show the first type. It's old and uncontroversial. (You seem to place #3 differently, but as written, the speaker cannot know whether the owner of the book and the owner of the desk are identical, or two persons.)
But #4-#6 don't exhibit any numerical indefiniteness. Here the "they" is clearly singular. It's my understanding that this usage is novel and did not arise naturally, but is the result of a political campaign, starting about 1960. That's why I asked for older historical examples, which could disprove this theory.
> Defaulting to he isn't bias, it's language feature of English since people didn't like using "it" to describe people, so "he" is a default singular pronoun.
This is not really true—certainly not anymore, at least—and from my vantage point has not ever been true at any point in my lifetime. Some style guides did continue to prescribe "he" in this way up until recently (maybe some still do), but that has never matched the way that any human that I've interacted with actually spoke. And I really do mean any—even the most crotchety/unenlightened/uneducated ones. If you had used "he" this way (outside of formal contexts, where it may have still been prescribed), then people would have looked at you like you're a fuckin' weirdo. Because it would have been weird. Because nobody said "he" unless they were talking about a specific (albeit possibly hypothetical/imaginary) person with the attributes that actually call for the use of "he", rather than "they/them".
Not so much about bias, but it made your comment very confusing, as I kept trying to figure out whom you were referring to. The blog's name being "Heather's Paragraphs" kind of gives it away :P
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
People who write posts like the GP’s tend to be bullies wherever they can get away being one. So to answer your question: yes, but only if they can avoid getting caught by others.
People who write posts like yours tend to ascertain their moral superiority by psychoanalyzing people on the internet based on a few badly interpreted words
If you don’t like what I have to say about you, in your own words, I “suggest you make your profile private and only follow people you have a personal connection with”.
You have said nothing about me since you're talking to a simple username whose life you have no idea about. But I'm not the one here sobbing, so your reply means absolutely nothing
Yes, in a pub, which social media is the digital equivalent of. If you can't handle some mean banter (in this case even surrounded by a majority of praise) I suggest you make your profile private and only follow people you have a personal connection with
You literally said you’d tear people down in a pub when you were asked directly if you would treat someone in real life like that. There’s no speculation, and I’m not accusing you of anything, what I’m saying is based on your response.
There’s a huge amount wrong with that. It discourages participation because it means people are too scared they might make a mistake. Ridicule is designed to silence and prevent constructive dialog, and achieves nothing.
And I don’t see why conforming to society is always a great idea. Certain aspects of society needs people to conform, but most things are, when boiled down, not necessary.
I didn't literally say that and you are making things up. "Tearing down" someone has a strong and violent connotation, nothing to do with a few snarky comments.
Your definition of snark seems very off. Snark is only ever used in a passive aggressive attempt to tear down another person. It is literally “critical or mocking comments made in an indirect or sarcastic way.”
Snark is never made for the edification of the other person, nor is it ever constructive.
Banter is not something you can easily transfer into digital communication imho, as it 1) most often needs some existing relationship with the person or 2) some reassuring element of facial expression/gestures to communicate that you are in fact not being an asshole right now.
I disparage people in real life all the time, mostly when their terrible code consumes hours of my workday or days of my workweek. The difference is my comments aren't discoverable by them.
I think part of the problem is people treat Twitter as a conversational platform for their friendgroup, when it actually is a megaphone lottery.
> I disparage people in real life all the time, mostly when their terrible code consumes hours of my workday or days of my workweek. The difference is my comments aren't discoverable by them.
The real negative stuff is Docker. I don't understand how anybody uses it in production without getting a stomach ulcer.
Just for one example, when we discovered that some of the built-in logging backends were straight up dropping data if your line length got sufficiently big, strong words were exchanged about the competence of various contributors. Or when our CI builds time out because the Docker daemon fails to respond within a three-minute window to a simple `docker stop` command. And I don't want to single Docker out here - all of "modern enterprise development" is like this. It's gotten to the point where my default stance is that I refuse to use database/messagebus systems that are younger than ten years.
edit: Seriously, do you not gripe? How do you stay sane?
Hah, well, I do gripe quite a lot. But I try not to be too negative and be very mindful about that. Because, you know, being a CTO and a negative example and all that. First person shooters help tremendously as well, after work.
Yeah I try to be negative about technology more than people, but sometimes it's hard to resist. I guess I also try to slag off on people in inverse proportion to how likely they are to hear about it. The point after all is to release stress, not to hurt anybody.
Conversely, I don't mind if people talk behind my back. I barely mind if people talk in front of me! Generally if you say my code is shit I'll probably agree with you.
edit: Usually the way it works out where I work is, one person gripes, the other feels compelled to defend, and it balances out. Advantage of contrarianism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rutger Bregman's "Humankind" is actually presenting a lot of (convincing) evidence towards the hypothesis that the vast vast majority of people are in fact kind, and have been throughout most of our recent history. This is thus also evidence for the statement "Twitter is a cesspool of the worst of the worst of us", although we may ask: Is it really? Or does "the algorithm" bring out the worst and to the surface? Does Twitter repel kind people?
These are interesting, even very important questions imho.
It's an interesting question on a different level than individual
choice/behaviour.
In real life, most people shun being associated with a socially
ostracised outlaw group, deviants or extremists. Even for actual
criminals, deviants or extremists, we don't like to be labelled and
lumped in with the others - except where a group is oppressed by
obvious social-injustice, which engenders a sense of pride in
belonging.
Twitter, is, as far as I can see, widely recognised as "cesspool of
the worst of the worst of us". And I have never perceived Twitter as
some sort of oppressed minority unable to find a voice in society. Yet
people choose to remain on the platform, and some have even built
their entire identity and life around it.
I think this is because the old media sought to legitimise it. They've
worked very hard for a long time to bury the tawdry and unacceptable
side of it.
Solzhenitsyn demonstrated that the Soviet Union was built on the lies of the ordinary people. It wasn't just some rotten apples at the top of the ruling class. It was rotten to the core. The vast majority of people were lying. To others and to themselves.
I think it's really scary to ignore this, and pat ourselves on our back, and say that we're pretty kind after all. Of course I agree that in a peaceful civilization, a lot of people are pretty kind on the surface. But there's stuff lurking underneath the surface. And once we start preaching that this isn't really there, a lot of bad stuff can happen.
There's war going on right now. And it's not just Putin that is evil. There are thousands of people actively participating in this war. Shooting others. The could decide to do something else, yet they don't.
I think that one of the theses in Tolstoy's War and Peace is that these big wars aren't just the products of some bad apples at the top. He presents Napoleon as something like a puppet, driven by deeper forces that we barely understand.
We should have more respect for these deeper chaotic forces, that we barely understand.
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.
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.
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.
I've elucidated about this somewhere before, but I view this perspective as a little too cynical for my taste. I think exposure to public perceptions shapes people into more civil individuals, and this can translate to private life.
A good simple example is the way people tend to tidy their house before having guests. The cleanliness isn't "false" by most people's view.
Edit: Another perspective is that people use the company of trusted friends as a staging area for shaping their own nuanced positions. It's safer.
Again, totally agree. Cognition is social. Our social context can inhibit or boost our impulses. Starting with our inner voice all the way to global broadcast.
Agreed. Clay Shirky made a similar point in Here Comes Everybody. Or maybe it was Cognitive Surplus. (Crap, sorry, it's been a while.)
His analogy, IIRC: teens treat social media as hanging out at the food court with friends, not as public speech. To them, adults eavesdropping are the creeps, not the kids just being kids. Like, why would adults even be listening? It's just gross.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
One can provide feedback and encourage people to learn about more efficient coding practices without ridicule and comments like "my eyes are bleeding".
One certainly can, and should. However, if I have to chose, I'd rather there be room for people over-reacting than risk there not being room for polite suggestion.. I do believe that the occasionally harsh tone fosters a resilience and readiness to accept ones mistakes.
I don't like the way we're policing conversation, the bar for what's deemed acceptable is constantly raised, and while I agree with the general sentiment of "not being an asshole" I disagree with the growing tendency of virtue-signaling through condemnation and indignation in every sentence that I feel I'm being increasingly exposed to..
So, if I have to chose between grown men writing apology blog-posts for a random unthoughtful remark in a tweet, or the space where unthoughtful remarks in tweets are simply ignored.. I'll chose the latter.
> I'd rather there be room for people over-reacting
There is.
> I don't like the way we're policing conversation,
We aren't. We are having conversations about public posts.
> the bar for what's deemed acceptable is constantly raised,
That's good. I mean, I believe that the occasionally harsh tone fosters a resilience and readiness to accept ones mistakes.
Think of this as code review for words.
> So, if I have to chose between grown men writing apology blog-posts for a random unthoughtful remark in a tweet, or the space where unthoughtful remarks in tweets are simply ignored.. I'll chose the latter.
I don't get it. You choose the latter, which amounts to someone being "censored."
i.e. If I write something and no one reads it or it's ignored, does it really matter? It's not seen. It's not read.
But more importantly, you are okay with someone unprofessionally and childishly critiquing someone's code, but not the same being done with those same words?
And you are okay with someone writing something unprofessional and childish, but not those same people writing something professional and thoughtful?
I cannot fathom the leaps of logic it takes to make sense of all of this.
If you used a language that was good at X, and saw some code trying to do X in a language not suited to it, I could see "my eyes are bleeding" being a reasonable joke to make to other people who used your language and not the other. If the intent was to mock a language rather than a programmer that seems less dickish.
The brevity of Twitter means a lot of the context is missed, even now there's some debate and confusion about what they actually meant by these comments.
Should Twitter ban such comments? Reasonable people could go either way. But for the specific individual making such comments the resoundingly correct answer is they should be ashamed of themselves. And for that specific individual the free speech implications are that the more folks who speak like them the less appealing free speech looks and the more at risk free speech begins to look.
Why has Twitter been pushed by the Public to moderate and ban people? Because there are enough folks out there willing to make those kinds of comments on their platform that it starts to look like an existential risk to the company.
As to ridicule, it rarely if ever causes someone to improve. You'll be much more effective at getting better more efficient code if you instead play the role of mentor or helpful hand.
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.
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.
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);
}
No objections at all to people building simpler UIs for common tasks. The classic Unix tools are like table saws without labels or safety features - confusing and rightfully intimidating. You have to read the manual carefully to avoid chopping off digits.
... but they're also like table saws in that once you know them well and are comfortable with the usage patterns that protect you from the dangerous parts, they let you achieve things with a minimum of fuss and ceremony.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I did indeed misunderstand.
grep -o $pattern $filename | wc -l
would work in that case, I think.
I did have to think for a minute to come up with that version. It was definitely still much faster for me than writing my own matching logic would have been, but that may well be different for other people.
I didn't downvote you, but I'm guessing you're being downvoted because the answer is just "grep -c", which counts matches instead of printing them, and I discovered that in about ten seconds by googling "grep count matches". (I actually didn't know about that option, though! I'd have reflexively used "grep | wc -l" to count matched lines, because I know that wc is what you use to count things.)
Ah. Yes, that's fair, grep -c counts matching lines, not matches - which is something I've never actually run into as an issue, so I didn't know about it.
On further Googling (about a minute this time, with a few different pages) I found that 'grep -o' would do the trick (and someone beat me to it, above.)
I'd still argue that one minute of Googling would be quicker than writing a program to do the same.
The program took me about 10 minutes to write. I think that's pretty good compared to the googling and finding out that `-c` doesn't work (which I also did).
Plus it's written in a robust language. The `grep | wc` solution here looks ok, but in my experience bash hacks tend to be full of bugs, especially around quoting, whitespace, etc.
Fwiw I would first reach for grep -c but that has the wrong semantics here as it counts matching lines. I think rg -c is the same but IIRC it also has a --count-matches flag which does what you want. But I don’t think that invalidates your point; I think I got lucky and happened to know how to do this already. And it may be that your program is faster anyway (or that it adapts well if you have multiple patterns)
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.
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
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.
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?
Even if sed and grep are available their weird syntax is enough to make people write modern replacements.
I don't care if they're not 100% feature complete, the fact I can remember how to use them for my simple everday tasks (searching, finding/replacing across many files) without needing to consult a manpage or search online for answers is enough.
I used grep daily for years and _still_ it didn't feel like it made sense. I remember reading about Ack (https://beyondgrep.com/) some time in 2009-2010 , installing it and switching over entirely within about five minutes.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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."
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Incredible. I hope my children are interested in programming/IT as I am; because it's both something I'm good at an passionate about and I'd love to share that with them.
I work from home now, and have done since Covid; so I've spent (almost) every day of my children's lives at home with them. I'm currently trying to work out how best to set up the older child (3yo) with a computer to learn on; Something like a child-friendly / fun version of Monkeytype [0] to get her reading/spelling/typing as she's always shown an interest in what I'm doing on the computer.
I have a bunch of Pis and mechanical keyboards so I'm thinking I'll let her choose some sort of enclosure we can "print" (3D printing is just "printing" to her, because how could it have fewer than 3 dimensions?) and set her up nearby.
The internet really isn't what it was when I was a child (not too far from yourself), but I guess that's the price for it going mainstream.
One of my earliest and fondest memories is my father taking apart and fixing the family PC at the kitchen table while on the phone with Zeos support. Seeing your parents genuinely interested and doing these activities is priceless.
I think gcompris might be what you're looking for. It runs nicely on Raspberry Pis and there are several activities that are suitable for three year olds, as well as activities for older learners.
I'll be looking for a similar project soon. My 2yo also just knows 3d printing as printing ("blue tape... printer hot!") and we recently built the Otto DIY robot[0] together. I'm looking into building something like a modernized TRS-80 model 100[1] with bigger font and maybe a better screen angle. The robot has been great in that we could build it with minimal components and add parts to improve functionality, and I'd like to carry that spirit into our computer build as well. (Bonus points if I can get the computer to send instructions to the robot!)
I've learned a tremendous amount on the internet and I'm still learning. There's never been a better time to get information, but some of it is getting harder to find.
I don't know that trolling was what it is now; I don't remember trolls so much in those years (mid 90s-early 00s for me), and they might have just thought that this person could be reasoned with, though depending on how old my children were, I'd certainly be keeping an eye on that conversation.
> No way I would tell my kids to take up with some a-hole online
That was my first instinct as well. But thinking about it, the second interaction seems to have solidified to him that the person didn't have any actual argument against his participation, that it was just an asshat being unpleasant.
What's the inverse of rose-colored glasses? Looking at the past through the lens of today? That's kinda what this comment suggests. The internet of the 90s was much safer than the internet of today is.
This has nothing to do with internet. There were assholes long before the internet who would bully whoever looks weaker. They would do it in person, on meetings, in friends group, against students if they were teachers, against waiters and other service staff. This guy definitely seems like one.
Hi! My main was "Beholder" (Warrior), I also had Mythrandyr (Witch), an (PK) Assassin whose name I forget (his dual-wield poison-daggers were named Atrum and Lucis) and a couple of other minor character's I rarely used.
I met some incredible characters in my time playing that have had as much effect on my life as any IRL person I've met. I would love to be able to get back into it again but I don't think the experience will be the same any more, decades later.
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.
Ha, my dad did exactly the same to me; except he wouldn't let them pay me. I guess if you're gonna raise tech-literate kids, you've got to be able to call on them for favor-making. I'm sure he is (I am) owed more than a few returned favors by now.
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.
Teachers definitely need to act like there are no dumb questions.
Not because dumb questions don't exist — I've asked plenty of dumb questions (are my closed physics stack exchange questions visible anywhere?) — but because they're a necessary step to getting good.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Her emotional response was definitely not wrong nor an issue. Criticism is hard to take for anyone, but the tweets weren't even criticism, just plain mocking. What do you believe was her mistake? Sobbing about it for an emotional release, or trying to put something out in the open source world?
Not knowing how to deal with mocking ? If your response is sobbing then either your parents failed at providing kindergarten life lession or you're so insecure that a random tweet from some dude on the internet can make you cry.
To simplify :
- I'm a professional who gets shit done, some sarcastic tweet about something I didn't know is just an insight + a hint that the person making the comment is a dick. I'm aware that despite me not knowing everything I produce valuable solutions and any solution can be picked apart by some criteria.
- I'm a novice and am aware of it - someone mocking me for not knowing something doesn't make sense - I'm not supposed to be at the level to produce ideal solutions - getting things working is an achievement on it's own
- It hurt because I'm insecure about my ability. I need to work on my ability and confidence (which is why mocking people who can't do anything about it is exceptionally pathetic).
Mocking aside - working with insecure emotional people is a chore - you have to walk on eggshells to avoid breaking frail egos by pointing out their mistakes in a way that will not trigger their ego defense mechanisms and go down that spiral.
It seems that having an honest emotional response to unconstructive criticism is a fairly adult mechanism that helps with coping.
Writing a blog post calling out the behaviour also appears to be a reasonable course of action. I would consider that an “adult” response also.
And publishing open source code to a GitHub repo is not a “collosal” mistake. It’s not a mistake at all. Adults, on the other hand, generally give constructive criticism. None of these people did that. Two of the apologises, and that was an adult response.
If you haven't learned to deal with mocking in other ways than sobbing I'd argue you haven't really grown up. Like I wrote down below - this is a totally nonconfrontational situation (there is no direct risk from agressive behavior) - sort of like someone making a mean comment passing by you - if it hurts you so much you likely have confidence issues in this regard - and as much as we're trying to create safe places all over - working with these people is a chore.
And the response was non confrontational - she just pointed out that the tweets were objectionable, which they were, and that she was upset by them, which I assume she was. No suggestion she was sobbing. Everyone was free to ignore her, but tellingly did not. Even you feel the need to add your pennyworth, so perhaps you need to stop feeling the need to express your opinion at us all; I could make some assertions about your maturity to that end, but will not (because I don't think it).
Working with people that lack emotional intelligence is a chore.
The fact she was actually sobbing (assuming that wasn't a rhetorical point) does not make your response better, and was tangential to the point I was making. Too much of a chore to assume that I hadn't internalised every line but still understand the point that was being made?
It takes a fair amount of maturity and character strength to be the object of public ridicule over one's abilities, and proceed to write a calm blog post about it calling it out. I was impressed, also by the follow-up.
I'm sure the vast majority of people would have either reacted defensively and been intimidated into taking the project down, or reacted angrily (and likely still modified or taken the project down).
Imho this is the problem behind the mental health crisis for men.
> If you haven't learned to deal with mocking in other ways than sobbing I'd argue you haven't really grown up.
Communicating your emotions about something purely for what they are takes courage and is the most important thing an adult can learn. You obviously can't expect that others respect your emotions or that you are entitled to anything at all, but purely communicating them goes a long way.
"Growing up" also is a very weird concept. You have no idea as to why the blog post author sobbed or if this was even just used as a rhetorical device. Are you only grown up after you got your mental health in order? If so, that gives an average of 50+ for some people, and never for most.
Communicating emotions is orthogonal to managing them - if you let mean comments of irrelevant strangers impact you that emotionally you are going to be emotionally unstable.
Sorry, bullshit. We're social beings. You can tell yourself all you want that others and mean comments don't affect you, but I don't think that's true at all.
When I was doing my civil service (19), I was not very good at it. One day, one of the people at my workplace went off on me for something like ten minutes. I started crying. Then I apologized for crying, because I had no control over it. I didn't want them to think I was trying to manipulate them or anything; it was just something that my body decided to do without my input.
"You have larger issues" is not an actionable strategy. By all means, if you can tell me how to not break down at intense personal criticism, I will gladly stop doing so.
("Can you just not?" No, I can't. I literally don't have the capability.)
(Well, that was then. I've gotten a lot more confident since.)
Well you sort of answered it - I don't have a problem with people crying in a stressful situation - just don't like the idea that we should coddle insecure people because they have confidence issues. Also 19 is a teenager - I prefaced my comment with it being understandable for younger people building their self image/novices.
Snarky comments forget that there are people behind those projects - but there's this implicit assumption that any contribution is a good thing and it should be encouraged. Poor contributions that are not called out just are traps and time wasters for other people - as someone who had to dumpster dive on NPM in the past - no contribution is better than a poor one because poor ones waste time and create noise. It might make the author feel bad but it's better for the community.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadSo 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.
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.
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.
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.
I can easily see how it can turn normal people into dumb assholes, especially since there's the dopamine rewards of having tons of likes, retweets and comments, incentive to be extreme, by being extremely positive or extremely negative.
And to be fair, "its twitters fault" is also not what Klabnik claims (as far as I can gather from his blog post).
"Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole."
Then don't use Twitter to do it. Use something else, or just don't bother.
`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.
Some people need the complex features, and it's fine, and maybe they're fine with the risk of a difficult to audit codebase and risk of catastrophic failure, and we don't need any new alternative, so they can continue to use sudo as it is.
"The core of the problem was really that some people like to use sudo to build elaborate sysadmin infrastructures with highly refined sets of permissions and checks and balances" -- tedu https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/doas
So a rewrite of sudo is Rust could add value by allowing it to add complex features, and keeping memory safety, even if code auditing would stay complex, and small logic errors can have catastrophic outcomes.
(And yes, like another comment said, HN voting is also shit when it comes to certain topics like big tech. Fortunately the crappiest takes upvoted by mobs tend to be modded down by saner humans.)
The primary thing people on HN don't understand about Twitter is the personalized feed. On HN, if someone makes low-quality posts, everyone sees it until it gets downvoted into oblivion. On Twitter, if someone's making posts you don't want to see, you block or mute the account and see less of it.
What makes a post "low-quality" is inherently subjective, but HN doesn't offer any personalization. I'd characterize HN's approach as being like a little Puritan village in the 17th century, where community members get together to decide someone's fate. Twitter is like a modern city... if you don't like the neighborhood, go somewhere else. Yes, there are trolls on Twitter. But you don't have to see them on your feed. The impact of an individual troll account on Twitter is much lower than the impact of an individual troll account on HN.
My general feeling is that very few people actually understand how community management works, even in broad strokes. Certainly not me. As a result, behavior which might be a red flag on one forum may just be part of the ecosystem in another forum.
I very, very rarely see that in merely low-quality posts. Those that are actually downvoted enough to be hidden are hidden for good reasons. I am sure you could find a handful, but I have never seen a hidden post about which I regretted it was not visible (I’d be curious to see how many you can find). It usually is proper bullying or racist rants.
Now, stories get flagged regularly because they go against the grain, and there are several of them I wish we could have discussed. But looking at the new stories, the flagging mechanism gets rid of much more spam than unpopular posts.
Anyway, I am not really willing to buy that without some statistics.
> As a result, behavior which might be a red flag on one forum may just be part of the ecosystem in another forum.
That is certainly true. But I find HN to be on the good side in that respect. Much better than the anything goes of *chan, the constant shitposting of mainstream subreddits (though there are some subreddits I love with great communities), or the constant passive aggressiveness of ./ and el reg (at least when I frequented those; I never looked back after leaving). Ars is nice as well, but a huge troll magnet.
The biggest problem with this idea is that there are tweets that you may have legitimate reasons not to want others to see. If someone is smearing you online in some way (revenge porn, lies about your actions, doxxing, stoking others to attack you, etc), then it doesn't really help you to hide these tweets from your feed, you need to have some recourse to hide them from others' feeds to actually achieve something.
Of course, this gets complicated often because it's not easy to tell apart lies about your actions from truths about your actions for example, and any mechanism you have to protect you from someone spreading false hurtful information is also a tool that someone else can use to prevent others spreading true hurtful information. Perhaps the court system is the only good way to solve it - I don't have an answer. But this problem also can't simply be ignored by hiding that person from your feed.
Snark OTOH, especially at an individual who is only representing themself, is just mean. Of course it happens here too, but it's rare. Reddit and Twitter are completely plagued by it – it usually gets the most engagement, whereas here it's rare and gets a chilly response.
Finally, there's one more differentiator. Twitter is people-oriented, you have a profile, usually your real name, and public follower count. Twitter is designed to be a popularity contest. Both hacker news and reddit are content-oriented. Sure, there's a username, but most people don't give a shit about who you are.
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.
All the code since then was paid for, handsomely, and almost nobody complained about it.
I think this toxicity as you called is really harming OS.
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.
It would be incorrect now since you know she is a she.
Defaulting to he isn't bias, it's language feature of English since people didn't like using "it" to describe people, so "he" is a default singular pronoun.
.... Did "they" get removed from the dictionary or something?
When I was growing up, it was explicitly taught in school as being incorrect grammar to use "they" for an ungendered third-person singular pronoun. At some point I decided that was a stupid policy for lots of reasons, and explicitly decided to go ahead and use it anyway. But it still feels weird.
"used to refer to a person whose gender is not known or does not need to be mentioned"
To me that pretty much sums it up.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/they
What is taught in schools is prescriptive: They're trying to teach people "proper English" (sometimes called "prestige dialects"). So they tell you not to use "ain't", not to use double negatives ("I didn't do nothin'!"), not to say "literally" when you're speaking figuratively ("My head literally exploded!")... and not to use the singular "they" ("Can the owner of the blue car turn their lights off").
I retain the first three of those rules, in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure the Cambridge Dictionary has entries for "ain't" and "figuratively" that violate them; but I have deliberately chosen to reject the last one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Dubious. The cited historical examples all refer to mass nouns or nouns with an implied plural. Usage with a concrete, singular person doesn't seem to be older than a few decades.
But that's the same thing. The crucial point being, we know it's one person.
> If you don't know the author's gender, using "they" has hundreds of years of precedent.
Citation please? The older the better. But mind, one addressee only.
OK, here's one from "Emma", written by Jane Austen. Emma and Mr. Knightley are discussing Harriet Smith, and Emma asks:
"Who is in love with her? Who makes you their confidant?" [1]
In this case, "their" is one specific person, a man who works for Mr. Knightley, has fallen in love with Harriet Smith, and came to ask Mr. Knightley his advice.
(Using 'they' rather than 'he' here is a bit strange, though, unless Emma was a lot more progressive than is generally thought about such matters; but hey ho.)
There are dozens of other examples, but most of those are of a generic situation, rather than a specific person whose gender is not being mentioned.
[1] https://pemberley.com/janeinfo/austhlis.html
1. "Everybody should bring their own books to class".
2. "If anybody has left their book at home, they should ask the teacher to borrow one."
3. "Can the person who left their book at their desk please collect it at reception."
4. "Someone has written to say that they left their book at their desk."
5. "The author shows their bias here."
6. "Joanna has written to say that they left their book at their desk."
Gramatically speaking, none of these are plural. In the case of #1, there are many people involved, but it "resolves" down to individual actions, since each person has a separate book. In #2 it's an indefinite number of people -- it could be 0 or 1 or 50; but again, it "resolves" down to an individual and that person's actions. In #3-6, it's clearly one specific person, with various degrees of uncertainty about who that person might be or what that person is like. In all cases except #6, you can replace "their" with "his or her", which was the prescribed way of writing this in my grammar classes.
I'll grant you that #6, where you refer to a specific known person as "they/them/their", is new. But #5, which is what we're talking about here, 1) sounds perfectly natural to me as a native English speaker, 2) was the sort of thing the grammar classes explicitly taught against, 3) is a natural extension of 1-4.
But even you used a plural, by saying "books" in #1, demonstrating that even when coming up with this example, you did not "resolve" anything just because "everybody" is a singular pronoun. You used "they" not referring to the word, but to what the word logically implied, and thus this "they" is also plural.
I simply don't see this natural progression that you claim. I see distinct usages of "they" for two different types of indefiniteness: one of number, and one of sex. #1-#3 show the first type. It's old and uncontroversial. (You seem to place #3 differently, but as written, the speaker cannot know whether the owner of the book and the owner of the desk are identical, or two persons.)
But #4-#6 don't exhibit any numerical indefiniteness. Here the "they" is clearly singular. It's my understanding that this usage is novel and did not arise naturally, but is the result of a political campaign, starting about 1960. That's why I asked for older historical examples, which could disprove this theory.
This is not really true—certainly not anymore, at least—and from my vantage point has not ever been true at any point in my lifetime. Some style guides did continue to prescribe "he" in this way up until recently (maybe some still do), but that has never matched the way that any human that I've interacted with actually spoke. And I really do mean any—even the most crotchety/unenlightened/uneducated ones. If you had used "he" this way (outside of formal contexts, where it may have still been prescribed), then people would have looked at you like you're a fuckin' weirdo. Because it would have been weird. Because nobody said "he" unless they were talking about a specific (albeit possibly hypothetical/imaginary) person with the attributes that actually call for the use of "he", rather than "they/them".
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.
Best you can do is to either completely ignore them, or tell them to grow the f##k up and behave like adults.
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.
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.
So when we get a full segment we can free them all at the same time?
Sorry, couldn't resist...
We used to play the "defrag" game for hours...
Usually I just block these personalities as quickly as possible and move on.
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.
And I don’t see why conforming to society is always a great idea. Certain aspects of society needs people to conform, but most things are, when boiled down, not necessary.
The OP wrote:
“Would you treat someone in real life like that?”
You responded:
“Yes, in a pub”
Your definition of snark seems very off. Snark is only ever used in a passive aggressive attempt to tear down another person. It is literally “critical or mocking comments made in an indirect or sarcastic way.”
Snark is never made for the edification of the other person, nor is it ever constructive.
I think part of the problem is people treat Twitter as a conversational platform for their friendgroup, when it actually is a megaphone lottery.
There's so much negative stuff to unpack here ...
Just for one example, when we discovered that some of the built-in logging backends were straight up dropping data if your line length got sufficiently big, strong words were exchanged about the competence of various contributors. Or when our CI builds time out because the Docker daemon fails to respond within a three-minute window to a simple `docker stop` command. And I don't want to single Docker out here - all of "modern enterprise development" is like this. It's gotten to the point where my default stance is that I refuse to use database/messagebus systems that are younger than ten years.
edit: Seriously, do you not gripe? How do you stay sane?
Conversely, I don't mind if people talk behind my back. I barely mind if people talk in front of me! Generally if you say my code is shit I'll probably agree with you.
edit: Usually the way it works out where I work is, one person gripes, the other feels compelled to defend, and it balances out. Advantage of contrarianism.
(Important to clarify that I try to strongly avoid talking bad about people I actually have a directish work relation to.)
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.
These are interesting, even very important questions imho.
In real life, most people shun being associated with a socially ostracised outlaw group, deviants or extremists. Even for actual criminals, deviants or extremists, we don't like to be labelled and lumped in with the others - except where a group is oppressed by obvious social-injustice, which engenders a sense of pride in belonging.
Twitter, is, as far as I can see, widely recognised as "cesspool of the worst of the worst of us". And I have never perceived Twitter as some sort of oppressed minority unable to find a voice in society. Yet people choose to remain on the platform, and some have even built their entire identity and life around it.
I think this is because the old media sought to legitimise it. They've worked very hard for a long time to bury the tawdry and unacceptable side of it.
Solzhenitsyn demonstrated that the Soviet Union was built on the lies of the ordinary people. It wasn't just some rotten apples at the top of the ruling class. It was rotten to the core. The vast majority of people were lying. To others and to themselves.
I think it's really scary to ignore this, and pat ourselves on our back, and say that we're pretty kind after all. Of course I agree that in a peaceful civilization, a lot of people are pretty kind on the surface. But there's stuff lurking underneath the surface. And once we start preaching that this isn't really there, a lot of bad stuff can happen.
There's war going on right now. And it's not just Putin that is evil. There are thousands of people actively participating in this war. Shooting others. The could decide to do something else, yet they don't. I think that one of the theses in Tolstoy's War and Peace is that these big wars aren't just the products of some bad apples at the top. He presents Napoleon as something like a puppet, driven by deeper forces that we barely understand.
We should have more respect for these deeper chaotic forces, that we barely understand.
There's a few reasons:
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
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.
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.
Corollary: privately, most people really are assholes (and they just suppress it when they don't feel bold/secure enough to be open about it)?
A good simple example is the way people tend to tidy their house before having guests. The cleanliness isn't "false" by most people's view.
Edit: Another perspective is that people use the company of trusted friends as a staging area for shaping their own nuanced positions. It's safer.
His analogy, IIRC: teens treat social media as hanging out at the food court with friends, not as public speech. To them, adults eavesdropping are the creeps, not the kids just being kids. Like, why would adults even be listening? It's just gross.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody_(book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus
Even back then they were champions of mentorship and teaching people to program.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106935
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.
If you can't handle it, then keep it private or share just with a restricted group.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
I don't like the way we're policing conversation, the bar for what's deemed acceptable is constantly raised, and while I agree with the general sentiment of "not being an asshole" I disagree with the growing tendency of virtue-signaling through condemnation and indignation in every sentence that I feel I'm being increasingly exposed to..
So, if I have to chose between grown men writing apology blog-posts for a random unthoughtful remark in a tweet, or the space where unthoughtful remarks in tweets are simply ignored.. I'll chose the latter.
That's the thing. Usually the snark isn't followed by suggestion or anything useful at all
People being mean often do it for its own sake
There is.
> I don't like the way we're policing conversation,
We aren't. We are having conversations about public posts.
> the bar for what's deemed acceptable is constantly raised,
That's good. I mean, I believe that the occasionally harsh tone fosters a resilience and readiness to accept ones mistakes.
Think of this as code review for words.
> So, if I have to chose between grown men writing apology blog-posts for a random unthoughtful remark in a tweet, or the space where unthoughtful remarks in tweets are simply ignored.. I'll chose the latter.
I don't get it. You choose the latter, which amounts to someone being "censored."
i.e. If I write something and no one reads it or it's ignored, does it really matter? It's not seen. It's not read.
But more importantly, you are okay with someone unprofessionally and childishly critiquing someone's code, but not the same being done with those same words?
And you are okay with someone writing something unprofessional and childish, but not those same people writing something professional and thoughtful?
I cannot fathom the leaps of logic it takes to make sense of all of this.
The brevity of Twitter means a lot of the context is missed, even now there's some debate and confusion about what they actually meant by these comments.
Why has Twitter been pushed by the Public to moderate and ban people? Because there are enough folks out there willing to make those kinds of comments on their platform that it starts to look like an existential risk to the company.
As to ridicule, it rarely if ever causes someone to improve. You'll be much more effective at getting better more efficient code if you instead play the role of mentor or helpful hand.
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?
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.
Half a second, unless I'm missing something?
No objections at all to people building simpler UIs for common tasks. The classic Unix tools are like table saws without labels or safety features - confusing and rightfully intimidating. You have to read the manual carefully to avoid chopping off digits.
... but they're also like table saws in that once you know them well and are comfortable with the usage patterns that protect you from the dangerous parts, they let you achieve things with a minimum of fuss and ceremony.
Yes.
grep -o $pattern $filename | wc -l
would work in that case, I think.
I did have to think for a minute to come up with that version. It was definitely still much faster for me than writing my own matching logic would have been, but that may well be different for other people.
On further Googling (about a minute this time, with a few different pages) I found that 'grep -o' would do the trick (and someone beat me to it, above.)
I'd still argue that one minute of Googling would be quicker than writing a program to do the same.
Plus it's written in a robust language. The `grep | wc` solution here looks ok, but in my experience bash hacks tend to be full of bugs, especially around quoting, whitespace, etc.
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.
Or is there some JavaScript additional functionality that I'm missing?
I don't care if they're not 100% feature complete, the fact I can remember how to use them for my simple everday tasks (searching, finding/replacing across many files) without needing to consult a manpage or search online for answers is enough.
I used grep daily for years and _still_ it didn't feel like it made sense. I remember reading about Ack (https://beyondgrep.com/) some time in 2009-2010 , installing it and switching over entirely within about five minutes.
Modern sed:
https://github.com/chmln/sd
Modern grep:
https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
https://github.com/harthur/replace/tree/431b1e183a4bd43046af...
but it doesn't matter as those tweets are trash, specially coming from other OSS devs
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.
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.
anyone remember babel, webpack, browserify, gulp, grunt?
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.
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."
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I work from home now, and have done since Covid; so I've spent (almost) every day of my children's lives at home with them. I'm currently trying to work out how best to set up the older child (3yo) with a computer to learn on; Something like a child-friendly / fun version of Monkeytype [0] to get her reading/spelling/typing as she's always shown an interest in what I'm doing on the computer.
I have a bunch of Pis and mechanical keyboards so I'm thinking I'll let her choose some sort of enclosure we can "print" (3D printing is just "printing" to her, because how could it have fewer than 3 dimensions?) and set her up nearby.
The internet really isn't what it was when I was a child (not too far from yourself), but I guess that's the price for it going mainstream.
One of my earliest and fondest memories is my father taking apart and fixing the family PC at the kitchen table while on the phone with Zeos support. Seeing your parents genuinely interested and doing these activities is priceless.
I didn't have a parental example with technology, but at least they bought computers and let me play with them.
I've learned a tremendous amount on the internet and I'm still learning. There's never been a better time to get information, but some of it is getting harder to find.
0: https://www.instructables.com/Otto-Build-You-Own-Robot-in-Tw...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
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
That was my first instinct as well. But thinking about it, the second interaction seems to have solidified to him that the person didn't have any actual argument against his participation, that it was just an asshat being unpleasant.
Plus, that assessment turned out right.
I met some incredible characters in my time playing that have had as much effect on my life as any IRL person I've met. I would love to be able to get back into it again but I don't think the experience will be the same any more, decades later.
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.
Of course once the student STUDIES.
Not because dumb questions don't exist — I've asked plenty of dumb questions (are my closed physics stack exchange questions visible anywhere?) — but because they're a necessary step to getting good.
(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.)
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.
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.
To simplify :
- I'm a professional who gets shit done, some sarcastic tweet about something I didn't know is just an insight + a hint that the person making the comment is a dick. I'm aware that despite me not knowing everything I produce valuable solutions and any solution can be picked apart by some criteria.
- I'm a novice and am aware of it - someone mocking me for not knowing something doesn't make sense - I'm not supposed to be at the level to produce ideal solutions - getting things working is an achievement on it's own
- It hurt because I'm insecure about my ability. I need to work on my ability and confidence (which is why mocking people who can't do anything about it is exceptionally pathetic).
Mocking aside - working with insecure emotional people is a chore - you have to walk on eggshells to avoid breaking frail egos by pointing out their mistakes in a way that will not trigger their ego defense mechanisms and go down that spiral.
It was both. If we keep telling people that they can fall apart at the drop of a hat we end up with a lot of people who can't function in society.
Writing a blog post calling out the behaviour also appears to be a reasonable course of action. I would consider that an “adult” response also.
And publishing open source code to a GitHub repo is not a “collosal” mistake. It’s not a mistake at all. Adults, on the other hand, generally give constructive criticism. None of these people did that. Two of the apologises, and that was an adult response.
Working with people that lack emotional intelligence is a chore.
Your snark is not becoming.
I'm sure the vast majority of people would have either reacted defensively and been intimidated into taking the project down, or reacted angrily (and likely still modified or taken the project down).
> If you haven't learned to deal with mocking in other ways than sobbing I'd argue you haven't really grown up.
Communicating your emotions about something purely for what they are takes courage and is the most important thing an adult can learn. You obviously can't expect that others respect your emotions or that you are entitled to anything at all, but purely communicating them goes a long way.
"Growing up" also is a very weird concept. You have no idea as to why the blog post author sobbed or if this was even just used as a rhetorical device. Are you only grown up after you got your mental health in order? If so, that gives an average of 50+ for some people, and never for most.
"You have larger issues" is not an actionable strategy. By all means, if you can tell me how to not break down at intense personal criticism, I will gladly stop doing so.
("Can you just not?" No, I can't. I literally don't have the capability.)
(Well, that was then. I've gotten a lot more confident since.)
Snarky comments forget that there are people behind those projects - but there's this implicit assumption that any contribution is a good thing and it should be encouraged. Poor contributions that are not called out just are traps and time wasters for other people - as someone who had to dumpster dive on NPM in the past - no contribution is better than a poor one because poor ones waste time and create noise. It might make the author feel bad but it's better for the community.
http://blog.coreyhaines.com/2013/01/im-sorry.html
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.
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.
I know I need the reminder sometimes, as I think most people do, despite what I think are generally good intentions.
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.