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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

Infinisil has over 600 commits in the Nixpkgs repo alone, and is also active in other codebases in the ecosystem.

This comment on Discourse has a lot of likes in part because people in the community recognize his username from his contributions even if they haven't worked with him.

He's not some random passerby throwing out an opinion about a project he has no stake in. He's a longtime, highly active contributor in the Nix ecosystem who cares about projects he's involved in and other efforts related to them.

You don't have to agree with his take but this is disrespectful and lame.

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> Infinisil has over 600 commits in the Nixpkgs repo alone, and is also active in other codebases in the ecosystem.

> people in the community recognize his username from his contributions

> He's a longtime, highly active contributor in the Nix ecosystem who cares about projects he's involved in and other efforts related to them.

> You don't have to agree with his take but this is disrespectful and lame.

Without doubling down on my viewpoint that you already think is lame and disrespectful, you don't think any of these achievements are probably mildly unhealthy/obsession level?

Open-source can be deeply rewarding and some people really pour themselves into it. I think assessing one's level of investment falls to each contributor themselves, and I wouldn't condescend to tell a stranger that they've made the wrong decision about that.

That said, a lot of people in the Nix community go above and beyond what could reasonably be asked of them by others, and it probably does put them at risk of problems including burnout. I'd be interested in research into emotional well-being and F/OSS involvement in general, because it could be really valuable in informing strategies for building F/OSS sustainably and even personal advice for staying balanced.

At the individual level, though, concern about this kind of thing is best left to people who don't need to look at metrics related to VCS activity to tell if someone is taking a hobby (or job) too far— trusted, close relations: family members, old friends, life partners, dear neighbors, etc.

> trusted, close relations: family members, old friends, life partners, dear neighbors, etc.

Can we reasonably assume that somebody who pours themselves into open-source to the point of being visibly emotionally upset over the fact that somebody else made a package/service that goes in a direction you don't agree with most likely means you're sacrificing time otherwise spent in exactly what you mentioned: maintaining/having relationships with family members, old friends, life partners, etc.

How can you maintain a healthy social life + fitness life + professional career life if the bulk of your free time is spent caring so passionately about open source you're willing to argue/dedicate a ton of your free time to it?

I'm willing to bet people who operate at this level don't take care of themselves in at least one other area, whether it be non-PC-related relationships, fitness, social life, etc.

Hello, the person you're speaking about here. I appreciate all the concern but I'm actually doing very good! While working on Nix was originally a hobby for me, I am now getting paid to do it, so it doesn't have to eat up any of my free time. I have healthy relationships with my family and friends, seeing people every weekend. And even if I'm not very good at it, I practice playing an instrument for about an hour every day and take lessons weekly!

I also want to mention that I usually don't argue much about issues. Most of my time is spent on making concrete improvements to the ecosystem :)

Hello Infinisil! Your contributions to Nix are very appreciated. I am sorry you had to defend yourself against baseless speculation like above.

I apologize that I overestimated how much time/effort it would take to contribute at the level you do to the point where I baselessly assumed other elements of your life were out of whack as a sacrifice. Thank you for all you do for the open source community.

Argue a ton of your free time? Infinisil's post was about the same length as the one you just wrote, and considering you are engaging in more of an argument in this thread than he did in the posted thread, you better look yourself in the mirror. I think you owe Infinisil an apology.

> I think you owe Infinisil an apology.

You are right, done.

Well done!

As an outsider I’m super confused reading this discourse. There are a few people I consider O.G. Nix hackers in there.

edolstra isn’t some rando either, he’s behind (if I understand correctly) the original Nix paper all the way back in 2004: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf

Yeah, Eelco is the original author of Nix and continues to to maintain it.

I think all you're missing is my point. ;)

My point is not that it's automatically a huge deal whether Infinisil (or anyone) disapproves of this or that development in the community. But that nobody deserves to be dismissed with a backhanded I-hope-my-attempt-to-discredit-you-doesn't-discredit-you 'go touch grass' comment. And that I think within the Nix(OS) community there's basic neighborly recognition that is clearly missing here (on HN).

Ah! I misunderstood your comment. I thought you meant the original post(s) on discourse were disrespectful.

Totally agree that “go touch grass” is a disrespectful take.

These are a bunch of O.G. hackers who’ve invested a portion of their life into a significantly underfunded problem statement in our industry.

They deserve respect and our industry is better for them spending their time the way they did.

I’m personally very thankful these folks exist and are as passionate as they are. It gives me hope that one day I’ll work with a package manager in production that does more than just YOLO unpack an archive file into a global namespace followed by some hopefully deterministic shell scripts.

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