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Comment by bpchaps | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Assuming much?

I work as a linux admin professionally and work with four different distros on a daily basis. Simply, I don't have enough time to fix every fucking issue that happens on my operating system that prevents something from being installed. And this happens constantly. Is it incompetence when the shitty apt/yum/aur repos are broken by default where an uninstall of $ASININEPACKAGE that needs to be reinstalled later for $DUMBSHITPACKAGE? If someone has a solution that works for many, I will try that, then bitch when it doesn't work, then use the competency you think I don't have to fix it.

Jackass.

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> Jackass

It's easy to understand why someone would lash out in response to having their competence snidely negated, but it still damages the community if you do that, so please don't.

Sorry about that. I'll edit my comment. If I still have your attention, actually, would you mind deleting my account and possibly the comments? I've seen lots of comments on here saying that it's difficult to get a response for deletion, so raising it here might work better. I've been spending too much time on here. :)

Edit: can't edit that post :(

> I've seen lots of comments on here saying that it's difficult to get a response for deletion

I'm surprised. Those comments must be wrong. We respond to this at hn@ycombinator.com all the time.

HN doesn't delete accounts. We do delete specific posts that people are worried about getting in trouble from. The reason is because deleting an account and all its comments guts the threads that account participated in, which is unfair to the other commenters in the discussion. The threads are community property and we have a responsibility to preserve them. PG wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226.

Our approach tries to balance that concern with individual needs. Sometimes people post things they later regret, e.g. personal or employer info. In such cases we're happy to help by redacting or deleting the comment. But we do it on a case-by-case basis. That way people can get their specific concerns taken care of, but the community history remains largely intact.

We do intend to implement account renaming, which should resolve most remaining concerns. But it isn't done yet.

I genuinely appreciate the response and fully agree with the reasoning. I guess the posts I saw were some weird form of survivorship bias. Curious what happened there, but "shit happens" sounds pretty valid. :)

Like I said earlier, I wanted to delete my account just to remove this as a time sink, but it's a bit more than that. The minor reprimand for name calling was a minor confirmation of it, but one of the things I've seen of late is that many posts are incredibly critical of things that often don't deserve it. For example, a few of my posts about personal experiences with mental health are met with strong, undeserved, and almost angry criticisms towards my experiences. It feels overkill, and many times it validates the hostility that those with mental health issues have when discussing these issues. HN seems to be one of harshest sites I've seen on this subject. I mention the reprimanding, since that's a "hard insult", rather than the "soft insults" I've seen during mental health discussions. They both carry a similar weight, but one (for understandable reasons) sounds sharper, so is easier to handle and parse from someone who's dropping into the discussion. Maybe what I've seen is just a few bad eggs, but others have shared similar experiences - thought that may just be the converse of the bad eggs.

Is there anything that can be done to help out here? I'm not calling for any individual solution and by no means asking for censorship of any form, but it's something that's been on my mind recently, since unnecessary hyper-critcal responses feel just as damaging to a community as direct insults are. It's a stupidly difficult problem, but possibly worth mentioning. I'm sure you guys have discussed this before, though.

(Sorry for the mild rant, and this probably isn't the best place to discuss this, so please feel free to delete this and I can shoot an email instead.)

I'm not sure what to tell you. I would love to find a way to lessen that kind of harsh criticism on HN.

But you detach things that are "bad", moving them to the top-level so they get more visibility and still disemboweling any discussions they were part of.

I've seen some stupid moderation policies in my day, and this is definitely up there.

Skype has been trash for years.

Yeah, and again, that's just an example of a problem that has a large gradient of issues. An even better example might be apt and logstash, since both are considered "not shit" by many. I realize it's a large and unbearably difficult problem, but when so many devs just say, "Fuck it, it's going live" and don't maintain their repos or push the repo managers to maintain them, it's a problem. Shrugging these problems off like you're doing does nothing to solve the problem.

I'm the user and I'm feeling these effects hard and I'm speaking loudly so that some devs may hopefully listen and respect their product, not just their code.

If it were entirely easy it would have already been automated and you wouldn't have a job.

-Why would you deal with 4 different distros wouldn't it be a lot easier to learn the quirks of one or two?

-Expecting every single package on something like the aur which allows anyone to contribute to all be of optimum quality seems a bit optimistic. Why would you use arch and the aur if you want low maintenance?

-If you have constant issues you are either in the wrong profession, picked the wrong employer, or the wrong software.

-Way to be dismissive. I work with two professionally and two at home. Not that simple.

-aur is just an example, but there are many, many "live" packages on there that aren't close to production ready like they think they are. A better example might be something like skype, whose repos last time I checked fail during install without a LOT of work. There's an enormous lack of QAing in packaging out there.

-That's incredibly dismissive of you again. Mind you, linux admin work is only my job. I do data science, low latency freelance work, security and networking as a hobby, so the extent of the software I use is comparatively large compared to most.

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