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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

No kidding. Someone raises reasonable points, and the engineer responds with:

"Like I suggested before, you should stop by our offices @ 88 Stevenson for lunch some day, and you can chat with our best and brightest about this (and other things) until the cows come home. Then you can save yourself a lot of back and forth, and nerdraging about computers."

Aphyr spending his time finding bugs and unspecified behavior in their software is dismissed as "nerdraging". And instead of discussing it openly, he should spend a day and go to "88 Stevenson", wherever that is...

I'm going to assume he means Stevenson Avenue, Polmont, Falkirk, Stirlingshire, United Kingdom -- since that's the first Google result I got for "Stevenson" as an address.

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> I'm going to assume he means Stevenson Avenue, Polmont, Falkirk, Stirlingshire, United Kingdom -- since that's the first Google result I got for "Stevenson" as an address.

Perfect point!

Of course, somebody can't imagine the people exist who aren't in the same city as he is.

https://mesosphere.com/contact/

"88 Stevenson St, San Francisco, CA 94105"

And it's often forgotten that Google is not the same for everybody, customizing their result based on their own heuristics of who is asking and from where he's asking.

But maybe the author of that post actually knows the person he communicates to is actually in the same city? I don't know.

It means San Francisco, they're both there.

Sorry, I forgot the sarcasm tags.

The point was that it's not the kind of reply you should make in a public issue tracker. It comes off as: "We're only interested in talking to people who are in San Francisco and are cool enough to hang out with us."

> "We're only interested in talking to people who are in San Francisco and are cool enough to hang out with us."

I read it less as that and more "you are embarrassing us by discussing our product's flaws in public. please bring this behind closed doors"

Which was precisely what was meant by it in my reading. Unsurprising really given the way many people act right now in SV.

>Unsurprising really given the way many people act right now in SV.

Except he's in SF.

Hmm...no, it's not like that. I have a lot of meetings with a lot of people, it's part of my day job. He's just one of our many users, with whom I like to engage directly.

I had a rant to one of your other comments that I deleted as probably being non-productive, but this is the second comment of a similar vein that I've seen from you, so I'll actually reply this time.

Aphyr tests distributed systems to destruction. He seems to be really good at it. You've had an account here for nearly three years, and you write distributed software; it's fairly shocking to me that you're not familiar with his work. You should browse https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen for a bit, to get a feel for what he does.

As an anecdotal aside, I tend to use aphyr's interactions with a development team as a bit of an indicator about the team's quality. A team that acknowledges the problems that he's finding and hurries to address them is probably a good one. A team that outright denies that the problems exist is a pretty poor one. Your responses to #513 (especially the nerd raging bit) aren't encouraging.

By excluding all of the other users (most of whom aren't in SF, or even in USA) from the conversation? And you can't see why people believe you were trying to bury the item and/or get him to sign an NDA because he was "visiting your offices"?

You may want to step back, take a deep breath, and read this from the point of view a potential user of your software and see how it might be an attempt to Davidson the discussion, keeping the report of a bug quiet? It certainly doesn't give me the impression of transparency.

Really don't think you handled this one well m8.

Just to play devil's advocate-

There's an 88 Stevenson in SoMa in San Francisco, so that's pretty canonical.

Also, you have to give Air credit for being civil, facilitating discussion, and taking responsibility for the issues.

> that's pretty canonical

Only for somebody living there. As I point out in the parallel post (which is possibly too gray to be seen) Google is almost certainly really giving Stevenson in UK as the answer for people who search from there.

You mean someone like Aphyr, the person he was talking to? :)

He works in SF, as do we. It makes sense, given the context.

I like face to face discussions. It would have been nice to talk to him about what he's building, and what he's trying to accomplish. Google hangouts would have worked, too.

I think what he's trying to accomplish is running the same kinds of tests on Chronos that he's famously run on almost every other important open source distributed system, and that his writeup gives you probably the most important info you need on how to make your stuff more amenable to that kind of adversarial automated testing.

> It would have been nice to talk to him about what he's building, and what he's trying to accomplish.

I'm pretty sure he is merely (!) building tests that demonstrate defects in distributed systems software.

I wonder if you think that makes the issues he files against your software somehow less valid.

Written communication can be a lot more work, but it is also a lot healthier for your opensource community. Its turns into something that is googleable for new people trying to understand the rationale behind decisions. It is more accessible for people in your community that are not native english speakers or who do not feel comfortable speaking the language while still being able to read and write it.

It makes sense, given the context

It seems the context is "if it isn't tested, it is broken". One might surmise that the kind of testing he did on your software is a kind that you did't do.

I would disagree with face-to-face being a useful way to confront a painful bug report.

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