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Comment by smabie | Hacker News Reader

I love the demo scene, but the culture is kind of strange. Like I've been fooling around with the C64, and all the tools (emulators, debuggers, and etc) are hosted on source forge, or sometimes this random ftp. The author of the debugger I'm using proudly proclaims that he only works on it when he's fucked up on drugs after parties. The documentation of some tools has lewd ascii art, and etc etc.

I appreciate the anti-corporate vibe and at the same time wish they were a little more professional. Whatever you think, they're true 80s style cyberpunk hackers!

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> a little more professional

After witnessing how "professionals" act behind closed doors, the difference is merely a mirage, in order to not affect the business image.

Well, of course. A “professional” does not (cannot) behave professionally 100% of the time, the idea is that when doing work that interacts with others, that’s when you’re more professional.

I never have that requirement for any community I want to take part in to be honest. If I don't like it, I am going to look elsewhere.

What I consider unprofessional for example is banning people from your service because a mob demands it. Paypal is an example of a service for financial transactions that banned users fallen out of good faith. Here professional distance would actually make sense.

Imagine IT services giving out personal information of people they don't like, it is completely unimaginable. I think this is a real danger for large social media sites given the behavior of companies.

That's down to you having a different set of bad experiences than others. There's room for both of those things to be wrong, I think over time you get a broader and hopefully more nuanced sense for what kind of behavior is unprofessional and not beneficial to the social order of a project.

I've been working from home for a few months now... How about "suitable for casual family perusal" because screens are child-magnets.

"professional" is entirely about public image. If it's behind closed doors of course they no longer act professional. In some languages that value professionality there's even words built into the language. In Japanese there's the word "tatemae" 建て前 that translates roughly to "public position or attitude (as opposed to private thoughts)" that people hold while at work and they switch it off when leaving the work place/in private settings.

Being professional is entirely about being a good lier.

"On the one hand, I found a program that does exactly what we need. On the other hand, not-quite-dressed anime characters..."

I've had this exact conversation with coworkers before.

Which side were you on?

Which program?

"For research purposes.. of course..."

I recently explained to someone in an interview that I chose Puppet over Ansible circa 2014 because by default, Ansible used to output success or failure messages using cowsay.

Funny, that would make me want to use Ansible more.

>are hosted on source forge

Actually i like source-forge, it does not attract the twitter and facebookish folks as github seems to, aka

https://github.com/nikolas/github-drama

This github-drama repo has provided me with hours of time-wasting fun. Thanks for sharing!

Same ;)

EDIT: Maybe the best list to find future NO-GO applicants

I think it is a reference to the fact that Sourceforge used to inject spyware into published binaries.

Yes they did in the past...that's true...shady time's ;)

Quite the leap to derail the conversation into some anti-X agenda.

Ah...i see, if i like something i have to be anti against something else right? I like meat so i have to be anti vegan right?

Why not just accept that i like something but being absolutely ok with something else?

As far as I am aware, the only known bypass of a particular iOS security mitigation has a note in it from the author notifying readers that they’ll only understand it after they “hit a blunt”. Said author also enjoys referencing Kim Jong Un in their work. It’s not just the demoscene that’s like this.

Probably developers sick of all programming being so sterile and corporate. You can't even publish a foss project without people jumping at you if its not suitable for a corporate environment.

Can you articulate what the specific benefits would be if the person providing obscure free tools via esoteric channels suddenly conformed to the behavioral norms your wishing for?

https://github.com/smabie Is it your github with a creepy kid picture? Very unprofessional!

I think that's truly fantastic.

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