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Comment by ObjectiveSub | Hacker News Reader

"Also be aware that this page is large and is meant to provide a lot of important information. It is not for the tl;dr; (too long, didn't read) set of people with minimal attention span. It contains lots of that scary thing called "text" and "information". It is assumed that you can make use of the education you have been provided with that allows you to read and comprehend what has been written."

I rolled my eyes at that one. This is an example of the pretentiousness and snark directed at users that people complain about in open-source projects; especially Linux-related ones.

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I have a habit of looking through comments before I go to the linked website. This is because of two reasons: first, I don't trust titles and want to know a bit better what is on that site and second, unfortunately, reading comments is often more entertaining and provides much more content ('text') than the site itself (I enjoy reading large amounts of text... I know, I'm weird).

There are direct quotes in comments sometimes and, sometimes, after reading them, I don't want to visit the site anymore.

This is not the case.

Whoever wrote what you're quoting made me feel like he wrote it especially for me. He managed to describe one of the worst problems that, in my opinion, Internet has and he promised that this problem won't be present on his site.

I'm grateful for this quote. Thanks to this visiting the site suddenly become my priority and I feel that I won't be disappointed.

And this reply is a great example of the entitled "the authors must coddle my particular insecurities and do what I want with their volunteer time" bull crap that turns so many people who want to just write themselves some software away from keeping their project up to date.

I don't think that is a good excuse for being rude. Sure it's their project they can do what they want. But if they have any desire of attracting users that is not the way to do it.

Indeed. Lets take pride in not making stuff accessible.

To define accessible, you must first define your target audience. Is it so horrible that someone is developing software for linux and isn't targeting some mythical 'computer illiterate grandmother' user?

Not at all, which wasn't my point at all.

However, having an abstract if you are going to present lots of information is definitely always good style. The scientific community require them on all papers - to help people decide if they should bother spending time to dig into the material or not. Not to make the material accessible for grandmothers.

That is exactly what a good tl;dr provides.

EDIT: Fix borked sentence.

And I think in the case of a complex piece of work like E17, that a simple 'what has changed since E16' list somewhere might help people who have already understood the Enlightenment way of working to get up to speed.

like books

They have no obligation to give you a tl;dr summary. Expecting users to be educated and be able to consume information is a reasonable expectation in a civilization.

> It contains lots of that scary thing called "text" and "information"

"Nice try kid, but it's not actually 'text' unless you typed it on a proper Model M."

It is also an example of the stuff that these particular unpaid volunteers, working on their own project for fun for years on end, wanted to write.

Open source projects are not always about marketing, adoption and being friendly to everyone. Heck, this particular project didn't even have a stable release for over 10 years...

Heck, this particular project didn't even have a stable release for over 10 years...

...meaning the self-absorbed wank is even less justified. And I'm a fan of E.

The E17 developers are mainly paid by companies like Samsung.

Samsung is backing the development of the EFL libraries behind E17 for the Tizen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen) initiative. Possibly a hedge against Android.

Also note that E17/EFL is supporting Wayland (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html) - forward looking indeed.

Obviously as unpaid volunteers they're not obligated on any level to be polite, neutral, and professional. But that's not the whole point.

There are two ways to deviate from a neutral, professional presentation. You can be snarky, mean, or just plain evil (negative), or you can be silly, colorful, and nice (positive). Each of them breeds more emotions of the same kind - excepting those who would wish for a professional presentation, regardless. I want to live in a world where everyone would wish only to breed positive emotions, or none at all.

There's always Apple stuff...

I was going to read through your comment, but it was too long. Is this an example of the pretentiousness and snark that people complain about on HN?

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