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Comment by jlongster | Hacker News Reader

What the fuck. (And I rarely say that word.)

We've got to grow up. This is 9th grade all over again. You know, those weird people that do things that you don't understand? They're the ones that grow up and make big impacts on the world.

Why can't we get over our negativity? We can't stop ourselves from thinking horrible things, or even saying them out loud to people around us, but surely we can restrain ourselves from publicly humiliating someone in front of thousands (or more) people. And for what purpose? To say "funny" things like "our eyes are bleeding!". Seriously?

I really will never understand why people can't simply be more positive. If I ever start a company the #1 thing I will look for in others is positivity. I wouldn't stand for this crap.

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>> If I ever start a company the #1 thing I will look for in others is positivity. I wouldn't stand for this crap.

What's conspicuously lacking here is not positivity per se, it's the absence of civility & decency. Those are two very different sets of attributes.

Lack of an outright positive demeanor won't sink a team. Lacking civility and decency, however, will stick a severe wrench in any project.

edit : On a personal note, reading this was unpleasant and embarrassing. I'm sorry the OP had to go through this.

edit 2 : retracting the following statement after reading apologies published by those involved - "I'm glad I now know who not to interact with in the community"

I guess you're right. Civility also sounds less cheesy than positivity! I find that teams can be balanced with people positive and negative, and it's how you handle negativity that's important, which is what you point out.

Corey Haines wrote a thoughtful apology here: http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/2013/01/im-sorry.html

Only one of the three to do so thus far.

Classy. None of the "I am sorry if you were offended bullshit" just a sincere "I messed up". Take note, just about everyone else.

I agree. Everyone makes mistakes at some point and that apology seems to be the best possible way to deal with it IMHO.

Super relieved to see that - I was seriously disappointed to see Corey's name in amongst the mob. That's how an apology should be written.

Steve Klabnik has now also posted an apology http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node

And unfortunately it is exactly the "I am sorry if you were offended" type.

I don't think it is. I think its the 3rd kind: "I didnt say what I thought you said, but I can see how I hurt you and I'm sorry". Assuming that's true - which I think is a reasonable assumption based on how he teaches and his blog post from last year about being nice - it would seem wrong for him to post a full out apology.

no it's definitely a "I'm sorry for offending you, but seriously fuck you for using node."

He definitely said that in the later tweets. Maybe you're right - its definitely less of an apology than his comments merited.

David Cramer just doesn't get it:

https://twitter.com/zeeg/status/294307568019464192

https://twitter.com/zeeg/status/294306974248607745

All that despite confessing that he doesn't understand why the project was written:

https://twitter.com/zeeg/status/293829856381255681

Clearly. He also wrote:

"Are you mad that the Internet disagrees with you? Maybe get off the Internet?"

https://twitter.com/zeeg/status/294305445521268736

He's now gotten off the Internet because he's upset. Ironic.

Nope, still here.

I'm just not replying to you on Twitter because lol

Don't expect you to - you read it, good enough for me to know you did :-) Thanks for letting me know.

Your entire blog post is a big "The Internet disagrees with me":

http://justcramer.com/2013/01/24/being-wrong-on-the-internet...

You said something in 140 characters that was snarky and mean, that's actually not easy to do to be honest. And then you got called on it, and now you are getting criticized. Not nice, huh?

Actually, you know something... I correct myself. It is easier than I realised. I'm not sure that would be a skill I'd be proud of...

The internet doesn't disagree with him, a vocal minority of hyper sensitive cry babies and desperate white knights disagree with him. Very few people who don't care take the time to say "who cares?".

They care that you care? Why can't they not care that you care? Or is it the fact that they don't care that you care? Yet in that case then how can those who take the time to say "who cares?" say they don't care when they seem to care enough to ask who cares?

This is all very confusing.

Why is you confusing yourself posted as a response to me? You can mutter random nonsense to yourself offline, I don't need to be involved.

I take it from your response that you are the few who cares enough to say "who cares"? You sound a bit sensitive...

All you should take from my response is that I don't know why you replied with random nonsense.

A bit hyper-sensitive are we? That's the end of the thread from me though, my absurdist questions should have told you everything you need to know about my opinion of your horrid attitudes. Have a nice day: I fart in your general direction.

I just looked at his twitter feed, and he has a lot of "I made a mistake" posts. What he did was bad, but at least he is not trying to minimize it. And this thread getting to the top of Hacker News will probably teach him a lesson.

I somehow feel the "Twitter culture" itself is partially to blame. A setting that rewards short, sharp, witty remarks that skirt over the surface is just few small steps away from endorsing sarcastic, bitter, passive-aggressive or even over-the-top spurts.

It's no wonder that no one who made those stingy tweets did respond to author's replies and questions. They didn't want to start a discussion in the first place.

Fortunately, the pendulum can also swing the other way here, as they are people who readily jump to defend against harassment.

I like his earlier writing too, on dealing with "open source assholes": http://harthur.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/dealing-with-not-dea...

(her)

Yep, my bad. The 'arthur' part of the url must've messed my brain up.

A good test of character is how one treats those that they perceive to be lower status than them.

I'd say these guys fail that test.

It might be better to say that they failed last night and leave a more general judgment open.

It's a good thing that people are calling this out and giving the participants cause to reflect on the problems with that kind of conversation (along with the rest of us). But I think it's also good if we don't rush to reduce people to some of their meaner moments. A lot of the participants have done a number of good things in the past, and they may well apologize and make this the exception rather than the rule.

And some of them have:

- http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node

- http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/2013/01/im-sorry.html

I was being pithy. I don't mean to suggest that they're awful people.

I think in the open source community there's an ugly culture of celebrating people that act like jerks about technical things that reasonable people could disagree on (the poster child of that probably being Linus). I don't think that's a useful culture to have around. I think the best way to get rid of that culture is to make clear that those people can go fuck themselves. Just because you can be a dick doesn't mean you should, and the community should reflect that.

I'm not the positivity police, I don't think people should be nice just for the sake of being nice, but there's no reason to go pick on someone's project just because it does something you'd rather do with another tool.

So you ascribe personal, leveled, directed malevolence directly against Heather Arthur and her replacer library to their actions? You don't think it had anything to do with just doing it for kicks, anything to do with how people see Node?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a strong undercurrent of misogyny involved here, motivating their incivility and rudeness.

It's the reverse - a lack of civility among those alpha-nerd types leads to the general acceptance of misogyny (and racism, for that matter) among them.

They both feed into each other.

Perhaps you are correct. While I completely agree that what happened to her was completely uncalled for regardless of her gender. I find that sometimes myself I am slightly harsher in criticism of my male colleagues and friends. Perhaps dcramer and steveklabnik didn't realize they were addressing the project of a female programmer? Nonetheless, their rudeness is still wrong especially in the public sphere.

I'm quite skeptical of this. It's not like her gender is immediately obvious from the GitHub repo, and it seems obvious that if these guys recognized the screen name they wouldn't have been foolish enough to make these comments about an engineer at Mozilla.

I seriously doubt it was misogyny as much as it's just online disinhibition. Twitter is especially notorious because the very format forces you to be curt.

Accusing everybody criticizing a woman of sexism is certainly not helping. They almost certainly didn't know she is a woman. Moreover Steve Klabnik at least is a widely known ally (http://confreaks.com/videos/1089-madisonruby2012-anti-opress...)

"Accusing everybody criticizing a woman of sexism is certainly not helping."

It's not that they're criticizing a woman, it's ~how~ they go about it.

It is fundamentally impossible to provide enough evidence or preemptive apologies to find redemption once someone starts playing the Identity Victim card. Don't even bother.

I don't want to be the one to say it, but it hasn't yet been mentioned in this thread.

If the author was named Henry instead of Heather, this wouldn't make front page or have a comment thread full of white knights.

That doesn't make the critics right in their aggressiveness, and people overall should be nicer.

You have absolutely no way of knowing that this post would not make the front page if the 'H' was for Henry.

That sentiment is a huge pet peeve of mine. Forget the gender of harthur, and look at what's left: someone writes a tool that's useful for them, and thought it would be useful for others (and, based on other comments, clearly it's agreed that it is for some). At least three people publicly take a shit all over said tool because, you know, lolol. Those three people have now been called out, and rightly so.

I don't think those three have been called out because Heather is a woman. I think they've been called out because others can see themselves in Heather's place. I know if I published something I wrote, just a small convenient script I had lying around, I wouldn't feel too good to see it attacked in public. Genuine sympathy can be extended to anyone.

"have a comment thread full of white knights"

You're seriously suggesting that anyone here who decries the rude behaviour described in the blog post, is doing so just to impress the protagonist of this drama with their chivalry? What an absurd notion.

Using the phrase "white knights" as a gender-based insult for people sticking up to bully-behavior is pretty unnecessary and reflects poorly on you. There's no need to bully the bullied further because you feel some sort of nonexistent imbalance.

"If the author was named Henry instead of Heather"

I'm going to have to strongly disagree, I honestly didn't know the author was a girl until I saw the name, well after I had read comments and was intrigued overall with the topic. I think the jump to misogyny or gender bias is a bit premature, but I can't really offer up much evidence other then my own perceptions and interpretations of what I've read.

Simply put, the topic is really interesting in itself and hasn't really been discussed much on HN in this specific way, unless I've missed some previous threads. I think add the fact that the negative comments were from some decently well known people, which all responded to it as well, and I think you have all the explanation you need for it being a popular post outside of any sort of need to resort to guys going to to a girls defence explanation.

If the author was named Henry, the probability that this post would have been written would be far lower. For better or for worse.

The majority of HN readers seem to have assumed that the author is male. I assumed the same thing for most of it, before getting suspicious at the non-joking use of "sobbing". I wouldn't be surprised if these Twitter posters made the same assumption.

The thing that bothers me is that some people changed their tone after they found out she was a woman and after they read her post. This speaks volumes more than the original comments. If anything it seems there's an implication that somehow women are unable to cope with jackasses as well as men.

Would it have even made HN at all if she was a man and wrote the same way? I doubt it, but if it did, and she was a he, he would have been pounded to the ground in the comments.

Of course, all of this could have been avoided if people act the way they're expected face-to-face. None of these people considered the "person" who wrote the code. And none of them considered "not useful for me" != "not useful". If it was, why are there so many tools out there besides UNIX?

BTW... Twitter's short form is a lame cop out IMO. You can be curt and still not be condescending. Allegedly "smart" people could have been cogent without being asses.

I just wanted to point out that (hopefully) these Twitter guys were posting because they truly disliked the project, rather than out of misogyny as the GP speculates.

It bothers me too when people here and elsewhere assume every single negative comment or piece of criticism directed at a woman is due to misogyny, and that somehow women should be "no criticism zones" or something. I really like when people maintain gender anonymity online, because it keeps comments and feedback at a gender-blind level.

At this point, I blame it on the assumption that Aspergers must run rampant and is severely underdiagnosed in the dev community.

I understand your point, but "makes my eyes bleed" is not a typical comment from a neuro-atypical person.

The neuro-typical can be assholes too.

Neuro-typical people can be assholes, but they tend to understand that they are being an asshole when they act asshole-ish.

I think a big problem in the dev community is a lot of asshole behavior out there from people who don't intend to, or even _understand_ that they are being an asshole.

Regardless of intent, this asshole behavior has consequences on neuro-typical and atypical people alike.

I think nerdy/geeky/dev/asberger/whatever people need to be more mindful of how they interact with people. Unfortunately the recent asberger pride movement doesn't help.

> Unfortunately the recent asberger pride movement doesn't help.

The word is "Asperger's". 'Asperger pride' is an attempt to reduce the hateful ignorant bigotry that the neuro-atypical face every day. The kind of ignorance that leads to early death, reduced job opportunities, reduced educational opportunities etc.

Thanks for the correction, I got lazy there.

I think the problem with 'Asperger pride' is it tends to focus on how neuro-typical people have wronged people on the spectrum. A lot of times the painful truth is that person with aspergers is at least partially culpable for the negative outcome of their social interactions.

This becomes a major problem when you work in a place where almost everyone is on the autistic spectrum. There are no oppressive neuro-typical people, yet stubborn asshole behavior skyrockets because all the nerds are being dicks to each other.

I don't know your workmates, but if I had to hazard a guess I would suggest that this is probably more a function of being in a highly male dominated environment rather than your co-workers actually having autistic traits.

If somebody is being a dick because they are hunting for a specific reaction from the other person that is not really Asperger behaviour.

"I understand your point, but "makes my eyes bleed" is not a typical comment from a neuro-atypical person."

Why not, out of curiosity?

Over-literal interpretation of analogy and metaphor can be a problem.

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-Raining-Cats-Dogs-Expressions/dp...)

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Asperger-Dictionary-Everyday-Express...)

I think it's autism that must run rampant and that it's underdiagnosed partly because people have called it Asperger's which doesn't seem as serious. With the new version of the DSM this won't happen as often.

There is a huge gulf between Asperger's and full blown autism.

People with Aspergers are "normal" people in the sense that they are generally capable of looking after themselves, communicating and working normal jobs etc

People will full Autism have severely limited communication skills (often no spoken or written language skills at all beyond repeating a handful of phrases) and require a significant amount of assistance in most areas of life. They will often live with full time carers.

I thought Asperger's was being removed from the new DSM, so it's all autism now?

Not sure of the new terminology but these are 2 conditions that vary not just quantitatively but qualitatively.

The term Autism as it is used today suggests severely delayed language development. This is not a symptom of Asperger's and sufferers of the latter can often develop advanced language skills.

There are still people that fall under the high-functioning category that have a hard time taking care of themselves and holding down jobs. Just because you check some boxes doesn't mean you check them all, and I'm glad the DSM is removing a term that tries to generalize a subset.

I agree, but the level of care required for an "aspie" vs that for somebody with severe autism is night and day.

OK, everyone, enough with this. Really.

Think about this: this statement, right here, is a completely unfounded (i.e. you have no evidence about any of the 3 people being ASD, and the probability of all of them being ASD is really low even among geeks like us), passive-aggressive (you are attacking people with ASD but making it appear sympathetic), pseudo-intellectual (how much do you really know that you didn't read in superficial internet threads) insult (oh yes it is) toward people with ASD. Ironically, presumably from a neurotypical, who by implication is supposed to be more sensitive than the alternative.

Congratulations. You bully in a thread about bullying being bad.

I've worked with people with Asperger's and Autism in a clinical setting. I'm not talking out of my ass.

While you might not be, you're probably the exception. The typical interaction sequence is:

1. Someone is rude on the internet.

2. "Ooh, look, undiagnosed ASD, lol, most software devs are ASD."

3. Self-applause, occasionally followed by discussion about whether Asperger's is different than Autism or whether it's a spectrum disorder, occasionally someone mentions the new version of DSM. (Sometimes this really bothers someone, and then there's the meta-thing where people smirk and say that of course people with ASD don't like reclassification, etc, etc. It's so tiresome.)

I think this may well be a worthy successor to Godwin's law.

It's not just rudeness that triggers this response -- it's when someone displays a severe doesn't get it moment. The most significant moment on HN I've had of this is when someone tried to argue that sexism can't exist in tech because there's a Wikipedia page that lists 50 women with significant contributions to the field.

That sort of thing makes me wonder, if after 20-40 years of being part of our society, that is your understanding of one of the major grievances held by people out there, then there is a missing connection. You don't have to agree with the sentiment or conclusion, but if you can't even understand the complaint then you are either woefully sheltered or perhaps it's time to consider cognitive deficiencies.

And this sort of failure mode happens all the fucking time in this community.

This is exactly it.

Time and time again you see large groups of people in this community exhibiting behaviors that show that they are unaware of normal social and societal conventions, and an inability to relate and sympathize/empathize with others.

No, you see that. I see different social groups having different social conventions. The fact that you can't imagine how someone in a different social group could possibly not follow the social standards you deem correct speaks only of you, not of them.

+! on succeeding Goodwin's law with tiresome and prejudicial accusations of autism spectrum disorders (often by people who really don't understand how offensive and insulting they're being

The fondness of this community to use words like retard and retarded as insults and use implications of special needs issues as forms of abuse is disappointing given the overall level of smarts of the community. But at least that's obviously offensive. The folks trotting out autism spectrum disorders don't even seem to realize they're being just as problematic and perpetuating unhelpful stereotypes.

Thanks for writing this. As someone who has ASD (and who thinks he is not an asshole) it always makes me cringe when someone connects being a douchebag on the internet with it. Prejudices like that makes it very hard to tell people about it when some automatically assume you're an asshole for having ASD. All kinds of people behave bad on the internet for various reasons because they can and they are emotionally detached from the people they are writing about. ASD has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Ugh, this is exactly the 'asperger pride' mentality I mention in a thread below.

You are trying to make it politically incorrect to talk about the problem of aspergers in the dev community. The parent is a bully? really? A bully? come on.

Maybe these specific people have aspergers or not, but the problem of a high concentration of socially inept people in the technology world causing strife amongst each other is a real problem.

This is a problem and it should be talked about.

No one taught middle school kids how to deal with emotions.

That's because the adults around them don't know how to deal with them.

We are educated in a math & science heavy society. That's good. However, it puts the focus on evidence. Emotions don't leave much of a trace unless you act on it. So we use behavior resulting from emotion as evidence of reality and ignore the experience of reality.

Then we say, "be real" and cut off an entire spectrum of reality -- that of experiencing emotions.

These are the makings of the shadow side, the Jungian shadows. When you disown or suppress experiences, then they get stronger.

So yes. We have not grown up because we don't know how. Or at least, no one told you how.

You cannot "get over" negativity. That's a form of rejecting something you don't want to feel. The only way out is to accept the experience of it as is, without rationalizing it and without acting on it. That's probably the hardest thing you will ever do in your life, but the most important if you want to grow as a person.

There are several methods by which one can do this. One of them, called vipassana, was taught to some prisoners with great results (http://www.dhammabrothers.com/). However, you don't need to be a criminal to use this.

Serious question to you and any offended people here: what do you think of sites like The Daily WTF? Is it an anathema to any civilized person and the owners should be ashamed of themselves and apologize? After all there are real people behind every TDWTF story and if - god forbid - someday they stumble upon it they may recognize themselves and their feelings will be hurt!

Or is the whole point here that Github accounts are not (necessarily at least, as in this case) anonymous and as long as no individual is identified personally we can all share a chuckle at their crappy code?

Folks on internet fail to understand that there are people on the other side of terminal and some civility is warranted. All of us should discourage uncivil behavior by non-participating in a silly conversation.

> If I ever start a company the #1 thing I will look for in others is positivity.

Good luck with ever hearing about any problem before it's too late to fix it then...

Now hold on... you can, in fact, raise issues in a positive way.

"Hey Larry, after I spoke yesterday I checked and we've got corruption on our RAID array... I think I can work towards resolving it, but if not then we need to come up with a mitigation plan."

vs.

"Larry, we've got corruption on our RAID array. I told you yesterday and you didn't work fast enough on my suggestions, so now we're all screwed. I can't believe your stupidity!"

Sure you can, but I suspect that if positivity is the #1 priority, you're pretty likely to see issues ignored or hand-waved away.

No more so than if you were extremely negative and played the blame game. Ignoring issues is not what I'd call positive though. That's just delusion.

Being positive in the face of unrealistic deadlines is exactly that, delusion, and it's a pretty damn common and popular one in a large percentage of all software projects.

Look, I'm not saying that a positive attitude is bad, just that it definitely shouldn't be your #1 priority as proposed in the first comment I was replying to.

Fair points :-)

the hell are you talking about?

every person that created something worthwile in this world has been ridiculed. for good reason. i hate the fact that people here spout that uber positivity crap.

you know what, you mess up -> you get ridiculed, what do you do? you make something better.

The world is not this pretty flower place where everyone can be happy and strive at the same time. there is no rich without poor, and there is no great without bad.

please everyone be happy is a stupid argument to make. it actually makes people NOT improve.

it has nothing to do with elitism developer community. it's the same everywhere. you don't get patted on the back for doing something mediocore at best, well that is, unless you're an mba.

I fail to see what is being wrong with being positive and happy. We should strive to make the whole world as universally happy as possible.

We can improve others with constructive criticism.

Clearly you can take it too far. If somebody does something wrong, are you allowed to tell them? Even though it is going to be negative? Do you never correct your children? Do you keep people on who need to be fired?

There's a rather large difference in saying "what you've done is not only useless, it's so stupid it's making physically ill" and providing constructive criticism

It's the shit sandwich approach, say something good, say something critical, say something good.

Tearing someone down, just because you can is not productive. I wonder if these same tweeters would have said the same thing to this persons face, and then turned their backs and walked away.

So explain to me how she messed up. Because I don't see any messing up on her part. I see a number of assholes (and some generally good folks who did mess up) unable to get out of their own headspace and into someone else, but that's about it.

And there is a large gulf between "patting on the back" and being an asshole.

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