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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

This might be a little philosophical for some, but if you ever needed evidence of the awesome level of human contribution to the world of free software, then these kinds of chaotic configuration puzzles are a great example.

Take a walk around /etc and you’ll also see evidence of the diversity of contributions in the diversity of config styles.

It’s like a community center that has a completely weird set of chairs in the dining area, because every chair came from a different random donation. The design shambles is an awesome emergent property of the level of community engagement.

With apologies to ”Facebook is a chair”.

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Not shown: the unpaid volunteers who have to continually figure out who gets what chair, deal with constant complaints from people who sat in a chair they don't like and want another one, figure out how to store the chairs, figure out how to repair each individual chair with its own unique and hard-to-find materials when it breaks, figure out what to do when people start bringing in recliners and sofas that take up all the space... Did I mention you don't get paid for this? And if you ever suggest removing a broken chair, you get a thousand angry emails flaming you because people are emotionally attached to the chair despite it having exposed nails that stab up into the rear end of anyone who sits in it? And if you push back you get absurd comments like "oh the nails are only on the left side, just lean constantly on your right buttock and you won't get stabbed by the nails"

> And if you ever suggest removing a broken chair, you get a thousand angry emails flaming you because people are emotionally attached to the chair despite it having exposed nails that stab up into the rear end of anyone who sits in it? And if you push back you get absurd comments like "oh the nails are only on the left side, just lean constantly on your right buttock and you won't get stabbed by the nails"

This is one of the greatest comments I have ever seen.

The only thing missing is the exact replica of the community center that got built because some patrons prefer the daily opening and closing procedures be kept in an old hand-written notebook instead of a printed booklet.

And the part where they tear down the new community center in preparation for the next one, while the replica continues to serve it's happy patrons far into the future.

Nobody has torn down any community center. The old community center with all the old chairs are still there, forever archived in case anyone wants to keep using them. I don't think you can say the patrons are happy either, otherwise they wouldn't keep complaining about the new community center that they've professed they don't even want to visit.

Also 8/10 of these people have used this chair 3 times, grand total of 15 seconds maximum, at best. If you are lucky these occurrences were within the past 10 years. But again: don't you dare do it unless you want an essay on why that shitty chair is actually the most platonically ideal chair that ever graced Gods Earth. Until you fucked it up, that is.

I mean, when the alternative is not having a chair at all - or worse having a potty chair for toddlers and when that is brought up they are told "what are you talking about, there is a chair right there" - some people would rather try to constantly lean on the right side of the broken chair instead of standing :-P.

The alternative is for people to just put down some money and buy some normal chairs. It's quite funny how everyone gets more angry the moment you ask for a dollar to improve the things they claim they care about.

I wouldn't knock the potty chairs either, when you get old and your health starts failing, you may just end up needing one again. That's something that could happen to everyone.

> The alternative is for people to just put down some money and buy some normal chairs.

Or just let people use their chair.

> I wouldn't knock the potty chairs either, when you get old and your health starts failing, you may just end up needing one again.

Sure but old people wont fit in potty chairs for toddlers and when most people want to use a chair they do not have potty chairs in mind :-P

No one is stopping anyone from using their chair. The issue is when they leave it unattended in a community center for years and expect the volunteers there to fix it for free, and then get mad when the volunteers throw it out because it started to break and rot and they have no money to fix it and it's actively harming people who sit in it.

If someone really wants to use that chair they could very easily go and locate the broken chair in the junkyard again. But nobody actually wants to do that because when you press them, they admit they're just being nostalgic and actually it's got lots of protruding rusty nails and they'll get poked if they pick it up again.

> No one is stopping anyone from using their chair.

Throwing out the chair does indeed stop people from using it.

Indeed. It hearkens back to when Linux was punk. I remember booting it for the first time and watching the kernel say thousands of different things authored by thousands of different hands.

These days the scene is dominated by people who think "Everybody listens to boybands so we have to become a boyband too." And shame anyone who speaks up in disagreement.

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