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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

While this can and does suck when it happens to you, this is exactly what it takes to keep products focused so they don't die death by a thousand cuts (or feature requests). For every awesome feature embarked upon, there's an opportunity cost of bug fixes, stability updates, tech debt reductions, and other inglorious but necessary work. Aggressively de-scoping is the difficult but necessary work of keeping a product alive in a competitive marketplace. And yes, it's a marketplace even if the product is open source.

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Yep, I think it’s an unfortunate side effect of dealing with an onslaught of bug reports, many of which are user error or someone else’s problem. It’s common in any kind of user support, you start seeing the same report over and over.

I even saw something similar when I went to the ER recently. Even doctors will pickup on one thing you say and draw conclusions from that and dismiss everything else.

"Even doctors will pickup on one thing you say and draw conclusions from that and dismiss everything else."

This pattern seems really common, and is what scares me about the future in general. The 'experts' concentrate on the stuff they understand / are best to the detriment of where the actual focus needs to be. In a lot of cases, this is despite the insistence of the supposed non-expert who is the one suffering as a result.

Some of the worst cases are as a child, where you get in trouble twice. First for wasting adults time because you didn't tell them properly, and then again for pointing out that you did.

I've had this experience with doctors so often it is chilling.

Elderly relatives writhing in pain, only to have doctors say it's indigestion (it was a perforated ulcer and an uncle had previously died from a wrongly diagnosed ulcer perforating). My partner was misdiagnosed with flu when it was pneumonia which then developed into pleurisy (I'd never seen either of the latter, but was telling the doctor that's what the symptoms looked like - 15 years later he still suffers pain from the pleurisy). I had an arm paralyzed through severe pain and the consultant doctor planned an operation "to cut the nerve" - I said I thought it was a frozen shoulder and that such a procedure was unnecessary; 6 months later the paralysis began to subside and the consultant agreed it was a frozen shoulder). Another relative died of bowel cancer that was said to be back pain (she died in the hospital where she worked). I know of several people who were telling the doctor they had cancer, only to have the doctors dismiss it as trivial, with most of these people dying because of their untreated cancer. As a child I had joint pains for years that were diagnosed as "growing pains" but turned out to a hip disease (younger cousins ended up with the same condition and because I'd already had it, they were more readily diagnosed by family members).

In both directions (treating trivial as serious and treating serious as trivial) I've seen so many mistakes. I'd be much happier to see a doctor google the symptoms rather than jump to a conclusion about what is wrong.

There's a famous anecdote where junior doctors are taught the importance of observation, by senior doctors tricking them into tasting urine. It doesn't seem to be a lesson they learn. Even when their own objective test results are contra-indicative of their pre-judgement I've seen doctors scratch their heads but stick with their incorrect pre-judgement.

When doctors I know have a family member go into hospital, you should see how attentive my doctor friends get concerning what is being said and done to their relatives. Some doctors will not even allow relatives to go into hospital for non-emergency treatment at certain times of year (because of timetabling there can be very inexperienced doctors on duty at certain times of the year).

>frozen shoulder

As someone who suffered through that on _both_ shoulders I can sympathize. For me, the doctor missed it. The chiropractor I was sent to, took one look and said it was 'frozen shoulder'. I have never even heard of such a thing before. It took nearly two years to get full movement on my right shoulder. Then the left froze :-(

> coolestuk

I'm just curious. Are these experiences in the UK?

I have seen and heard of some similar things, but my experience is only with the US healthcare system.

I’m a complete outsider to PostgreSQL specifics, but: if that is the reason, then this is a case for improving messaging.

If I’d been in the patch submitter’s shoes, I wouldn’t have thought twice about writing off that community.

If I had gotten your reply, instead: 100% fair play, thank you for your consideration, and send my love to the dev team.

Messaging matters.

I somehow responded with this to the wrong post earlier:

Honestly, if someone's spending time working on a high value open source project (which PG absolutely is), I'd rather they spend less time (than I do) crafting their internet comments to sound nice and more time contributing to society. And I hope people who actually use the product feel the same way, understand why every single use case can't be carefully considered every time it comes up, and don't take it personally.

But messaging influences public perception influences inclination of future potential contributors to participate influences quality of the software. As we see here.

People like to think they can escape politics. They can’t. Any group of >1 humans will involve politics.

Learning how to be respectful and polite is like learning how to touch type: it’s a small, painful price to pay once, for a lifetime of copious reward.

The less value you provide, the more important politics are. If you aren't doing much, then you damn well better have great messaging. If you're doing a lot, and people are banging on your doors to get what you're selling or giving away, then don't waste your time being polite. Nobody cares. They just want you to do what you do.

> Nobody cares.

Except georgebarnett and jarym.

Or perhaps that was the point, that PostgreSQL isn’t doing much! :)

> I patched my own systems (wrap the calls in a loop as per standard practice) and then proceeded to run literally hundreds of thousands of PostgreSQL instances on NFS for many more years with no problems. -georgebarnett

> Actually as great as Postgres is and as generally approachable the community is - my experience was the same a few times and I read it on the mailing list happening to others: - jarym

It seems that despite things not being perfect (and they never are), these people are still having positive experiences with the product and the community overall. So, to restate, some people care enough to post about it on HN, but nobody (who continues to use PG, and there are a lot of us) cares all that much.

I disagree that this is required. You can see from Linus Torvald's backtracking on decades of abrasive behavior that it was never an important part of Linux after all, so an abrasive experience for people trying to help other open source projects is probably going to be superfluous too. You can still reject ideas without disregarding them or the person.

I’m not sure if that logic holds. Who’s to say Linux would not have been more or less successful if Linus had behaved differently? For all we know, Linux may have succeeded despite his behavior, rather than because of it.

That said, I feel that a strong and positive community around a project is always an asset. I’ve seen many more projects fail due to community interaction being bad than I have from it being good.

Are you sure you're disagreeing with the post you responded to? It sounds like you entirely agree with them, but you open as though you disagree...

I think he just got the last two phrases backwards :)

"We don't support running Postgres on NFS" isn't the same thing as "fuck you Intel ACPI team; you're dumber than a chimpanzee". Equating disagreement and criticism with Linus-isms is why the relationship between users and developers is such a mess to begin with. Being a maintainer requires you to say "no" sometimes, but it doesn't require you to be a jerk.

No, it's worse.

Linus was trying to make things work, with profanity. Postgres couldn't be bothered.

Sure, performative profanity isn't everyone's cup of tea, but milquetoast passive-aggressive dismissals of people like OP who ARE TOTALLY RIGHT aren't actually nice.

Please cite which parts of the thread you're referring to. Again, several people +1'd the idea, and reviewed the code.

> You can see from Linus Torvald's backtracking on decades of abrasive behavior that it was never an important part of Linux after all

It's ten years too soon to conclude that Torvalds backing away from abrasive behaviour didn't kill Linux.

The patch author is doing the work. Telling them “no” isn’t going to make them focus instead on the project leadership’s other priorities like it would in a corporate team.

It's not at simple as that.

The patch author does the "initial" work. But then it's up to the team to learn the patch, understand it and keep maintaining it.

Every line of code is baggage.

If there is no demand for something at the time, it makes sense for maintainers to reject that. It's up to them to maintain that patch from now on.

There is another scenario, I submitted a Pull Request to a OSS project, the authors discussed it and rejected it and then implemented it in the exact same way as I did. That was hurtful.

I can't upvote your comment for some reason, but exactly this

> crafting their internet comments to sound nice

It's not hard.

One thought. Perhaps it comes easier to you than it does to other folks. We all have different skills, and sometimes what looks like malice is really just incompetence. I find that assuming positive intent adds more value to my life than doing the opposite.

A second, separate thought. Perhaps it's not quite as easy as you think it is, and perhaps you're not as good at it as you think you are. Case in point, the comment you just made was not exactly the nicest I've read today.

IMHO it's way more complicated than it seems, because of a mix of technical, cultural and personal reasons.

- technical: E-mail is not a particularly good medium to convey emotions (in either way). For example someone with a naturally terse communication style may be perceived as harsh, while in person he's actually a very friendly bloke. And there's no way to communicate this impression back.

- cultural: Often what is quite polite in one culture may be seen as quite impolite or even rude in another. It's not just country vs. country, but even region vs. region (like for example East Coast vs. West Coast).

- personal: People in the community may know each other pretty well, in which case the communication style may be quite a bit more direct. But others may lack the context.

It's almost impossible to get it right all the time, without resorting to entirely mechanical corporate communication style. Which is not fut at all.

Of course, this does not mean there are no truly harsh / rude / WTF posts (even on PostgreSQL lists). But I'd say most of the time it's not meant that way.

>Telling them “no” isn’t going to make them focus instead on the project leadership’s other priorities like it would in a corporate team.

No one is asking them to. An open source project is not a corporation, it has no shareholders who require growth at all costs. So someone doesn't contribute to the project, if there's enough other contributors to keep it healthy then who care? No need to try and get every single potential contributor to contribute code to the project.

You can’t pay an opportunity cost on an opportunity you don’t have. Whatever the reason for rejecting the patch in this case, it is not a missed opportunity to work on bugs and tech debt as suggested by the parent.

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