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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone knows how to program. If a programmer asks for a feature, tell a programmer to write it, if someone who is interested in programming help them write a feature, but if enough people officially request a feature it's better to just help the lot of them.

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I wrote a simple RSS package in 2003. I still get support emails about it. I don't even remember how the code works.

I wrote some introductory Python code 10+ years ago, for one of my classes. I put it online. I now get random college students emailing me personally to ask for help doing their homework.

I distribute some of my software for free. I've since had people demand (yes, demand) essentially hours of free support time to debug their hardware configuration for them because they don't know enough to do it themselves.

When do I get to decide what is "better" for me, rather than do things which are "better" for others?

When I was in college (15 years ago) I did a course on ancient Hellenistic religious groups. Part of that was to either write a 20-page term paper (on a topic assigned by the professor), or produce a smaller set of Web pages on the topic.

Being lazy, I spent a weekend teaching myself HTML, and did the Web option. It was linked from the course page on the college's site.

Ten years later I was still getting random emails from people who saw it, noted the .edu domain, and assumed I was an academic expert on Hermetic cults. Thankfully, a reorganization of the college's site and course pages seems to have killed it off for good.

Do you (or archive.org) has that stuff archived? This sounds to be a cool thing. I'd like to read it if possible. (And I promise I won't mistake you for an academic expert ;) )

Thats equivalent to saying "if enough people have strong feelings about how you should spend your free time, you should listen to them". Would you really support that in any context that didn't involve "open source"?

Depends on how you interpret putting code online, and how it is done. If I started/declared a running club, there maybe expectations on how I spend my time - I initiated the expectation.

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