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Comment by 2h | Hacker News Reader

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Drew is not a jerk, and I have not seen him type jerk-like comments in quite a while.

Why is Drew a jerk?

He can have some very strong opinions which he has acknowledged in his most recent blog post and that can rub people the wrong way. But all my personal interactions with him (not that there have been many) have been pleasant.

If he’s pleasant how he can be a jerk at the same time. Because of the strong opinions you don’t agree with?

Of course people can be pleasant one day and a jerk the next. This seems so obvious to me I don't even know how to explain it.

It was far more than just "strong opinions you don’t agree with". I saw that he apologized for some of that, and my interactions were some years ago, so I'm not inclined to cite specific examples here – there's no need to drag up people's past sins if they're trying to move beyond that. But he really has been a right jerk at times in the past – to me personally, and to others – and from what I've seen it seems Drew today would agree with at least some of that too.

We all have our flaws; it's part of the human condition. What I always found far more objectionable is the exact opposite: people willing to make excuses for him because they agreed with his views. Your comment is a good example of that. I'm a simply guy: if I see someone being a jerk then I will think you're a jerk, whether I agree or disagree with you or not (that said, I have to admit I too have been biased here, and probably will be in the future as well, but at least I'm trying, and open to criticism and reflection on this).

I don't know the person under discussion other than seeing him occasionally mentioned on this site, so I have no basis for an opinion about him, but speaking generally, being a jerk doesn't mean some has to treat _everyone_ poorly; sometimes being a jerk to only some people is still enough to qualify someone as a jerk. As a made up example, a boss who plays favorites by letting their cronies get away with being lazy or not following rules but makes trouble for anyone outside their inner who slips up even slightly is a jerk, even though they don't act like one to their favored few (who would probably protest vigorously at the suggestion that their boss is a jerk).

In this day and age many people can't handle strong opinions.

In my experience Drew is a lovely person both online and offline so to each their own I guess.

People can be complex and multi faceted. You can be both - and some one elses opinion can include both.

I never said he is a jerk, just why some might state he is. There seems to be another comment replying to you giving more justification. Also just because I've personally found someone as pleasant doesn't mean that they can't appear to be a jerk to others. I have friends who think I'm absolutely wonderful, there are other people who don't like me at all. Part of that is differences in personalities/conditions under which we met/etc, and I don't have nearly as much of the public exposure as Drew has here.

Adherence to principles does not make a person a jerk.

If anything there should be more people like this if the world is going to be a better place.

I don't know. I'm inclined to believe the world would be a better place if people thought less about their principles and more about the situation at hand. I've had bad experiences with people who do things "as a matter of principle" or insisting "it's the principle of the thing". That has usually signaled behavior that is only justifiable by some abstraction, but otherwise makes no sense.

This case, for example, where SourceHut was going to make a change which would inflict inconvenience on it's users when they had a clear way to avoid it, but didn't want to because it was really Google's fault. Possibly it did some good, but from reading the whole thing, it looks like the end result is SourceHut finally agreeing to have the refresh turned off, like they could have done initially, while the Go team actually had already been working on a fix. A lot of drama, with questionable benefits is not unusual for people who do things for the principle.

>while the Go team actually had already been working on a fix

This is the part with which I take issue. Maybe they were working on addressing the issue, but maybe they were not. Given the acknowledged DDoSing of hosts by Google, more communication or prioritization would have been appropriate.

From the outside (admittedly my only limited perspective), Drew's actions resulted in positive change for all source hosts. Heck, it is even probably less load on Google's servers.

Since -reuse was added in August and originally planned much earlier, it's unclear what Drew actually did, if anything, to speed this up.

In the meantime, he has opted to... only solve the problem (if such a problem exists) for only SourceHut.

I think the main thing is communication: it's now communicated they're actually working on the problem, and have been for a while. That was pretty unclear before.

A few years ago we had some serious issues in our production servers; shortly before it had all been converted to k8s by one sysops guy, and while I could do some things with it, I was (and remain) far from an expert, so I contacted the guy who set it all up to ask for help. He proceeded with some explanations and then ... just disappeared. Crickets. I had no idea if he was working on it or not. I didn't have time to sit down with a cup of coffee to carefully read documentation and try things out – our fucking production servers are down! I had no idea if he was looking in to it, doing something else, went grocery shopping, was having a wank, or what. No one in the team could contact him.

It was very frustrating (the joys of remote work...) Just a simple "I'm looking in to it" would have sufficed. I didn't need any details, you can tell me those later, just tell me you're working on it.

This situation is kind of similar: there wasn't any real indication it was being worked on at all, or even that people were considering working on it. There was some discussion, and then just ... nothing. It turned out it was being worked on – but that really wasn't obvious. It seemed like the issue was essentially ignored. It wasn't, but that's how it appeared.

A lot of frustration could have been avoided by communicating a little bit better. These sort of things often fall by the wayside, because none of us are telepathic (AFAIK anyway) and people misjudge "oh, I thought that was obvious for you" all the time.

did you read the update in the article? The Go team contact him directly and in private, as well as accepted responsibility for the situation regarding all small sites, not just SourceHut. So his actions did have an impact.

This is indeed the main difference. The reason that agreed that the plan was suitable was the combination of the ongoing work on incorporating -reuse with the Go module mirror and the Go teams decision to accept responsibility for the traffic and to exercise their discretion in moderating it for each affected third-party without requiring them to explicitly reach out to Google to opt out. Russ also graciously elaborated on the engineering thought-process going on within the Go team the implications of disabling the refresh on third-parties, which had not been done prior to our communications in the past couple of weeks.

There's still work to be done, but so long as work is moving forward and the Go team is communicative and pro-active about addressing the problem, then our concerns were satisfied, and I'm glad that we were able to address the issue.

I did read it. I also read Go 1.19's release notes when they came out. I also read rsc's reply to the original post. I cannot figure out how Drew went back in time to add -reuse to Go 1.19 and proxy improvements to the Go team's schedule prior to the Go team contacting him in private.

I think the context you're missing is that Drew caused a stink about this already back in 2021, the blacklisting was just the last iteration of the saga. So I'm not sure if his posting caused the Google team to rethink their stance, but it certainly caused quite a bit of bad publicity for Google.

> Drew went back in time to add -reuse to Go 1.19 and proxy improvements to the Go team's schedule

where did anyone say that?

You did, when you wrote the words "Because of his actions", is I think what they're saying.

Yes. As far as I can tell, the only relevant action sr.ht did was to open #44577 originally. Everything else since then appears to be sound and fury.

well, he could have done nothing, and where would we be? if you say "exactly where we are now", I think you are being dishonest with how the situation played out.

No, he didn't write the code or make the schedule, but he stood up and said "this is not right", and took steps to protect his and other small sites.

To be clearer: I think what's being said upthread is: Go was making this change anyways.

(I have no idea if that's true.)

Go didn't just add the reuse flag, they broke the 1.19 feature freeze to get it pushed through and even mentioned Drew's original issue in that request. Drew rejected this temporary solution loudly for many years on principle only to take the temporary solution as the permanent solution was on the verge of becoming reality.

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