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Comment by MartinCron | Hacker News Reader

How can we as a development community rationally expect to grow the open source ecosystem and encourage people with this type of snobbery?

There's one lesson that I'm personally taking from this, after unsolicited ridicule, one sincere apology, one bullshit non-apology, and one arrogant I have nothing to apologize for! If I build a small thing to scratch my own itch (which I often do) I'm going to think twice about sharing it with the world at large. Or, more succinctly, I've become yet more of a misanthrope.

Thanks guys!

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Let's face it, there seems to be nothing anyone can share on the Internet without someone else demonstrating John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [1]. I'm not saying everyone should always just let it slide, but try not to let it get to you, either.

[1]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

I have shared literally thousands of photos on Flickr. Nobody has told me that my photos shouldn't exist of that my photos make their eyes bleed.

Can we, as a community, be at least as nice as serious amateur photographers?

Perhaps you haven't found "You Are Not A Photographer" yet. Some photography communities have a similar level of snark and calling out others, sadly.

I thought about that site, which is terrible. It feels a little different in that it seems to be fueled by insecure pro photogs who want to instill fear of hiring second-rate hacks.

Maybe I should be, but I am generally unafraid of sharing my photos.

http://Flickr.com/photos/martincron

This doesn't apply as neither Steve Klabnik nor Corey Haines are anonymous.

Missing option: grow a thicker skin and don't take everything personally.

I, for one, look forward to the day when someone stumbles across my code and finds it worthy of commentary. Good or bad, just not indifferent, please.

Do you want meaningful commentary or empty snarky ridicule?

I'm simply saying that at the moment, either of those would be more interesting than total ignorance.

Actually, this makes me think... I don't think I've ever given feedback on an open source project.

Maybe I, as someone horrified by Heather Arthur's story, have some sort of ethical obligation to provide constructive and helpful feedback to people. I'm not a great programmer, but I've been at this for long enough to have some useful opinions.

Open invitation for my fellow HN community members: point me at a repo and I'll try to say something actually helpful.

This reminds me of the recent ShowHN of criticue (http://criticue.com/).

You could do something similar (or those guys could do it) where you provide feedback on other people's repositories in exchange for feedback on your repository. Sort of a community code review process.

I actually have been hoping to get feedback on whether people think https://github.com/ChickenProp/ds-debug is/could be useful.

a wire protocol for named context patches: you'd do better not writing your own wire serialization format, and instead adopting an existing transport: websockets, stomp, and MQTT all strike me as sufficiently stupid simple & end to end enough, or anything from thrift to zmq to flume for transport would be slightly more inter-linkable than your "length/json-payload" ad-hocracy.

it's JS but you might enjoy node-webworker, which uses websockets to implement inter-Node.js message passing: your specific case is debugger being an outbound messaging port, emitting context programmatically.

I did find myself thinking "this has to be a solved problem" as I was writing the socket code. Thanks, I'll look into those.

I actually think that a strong emotional reaction to unsolicited ridicule by high-profile people is a typical human response, not a weakness that needs to be beaten out of people.

Regardless, my point is that I don't think I'm able to grow a thick enough skin to be indifferent in the face of such cruelty, so I'm not going to extend myself. Other people may feel differently, and that's great for them.

I've suffered pretty severe depression and anxiety for most of my adult life. While the idea that we should all just grow a thicker skin and 'just deal with it' is both understandable and practical given the nature of the internet - it just wont happen for me. I know myself well enough to have recognized that even a tiny drop of vitriol could have me questioning my every decision and shatter my self confidence for days or even weeks. So I simply write code and keep it to myself, and I'm sure there are plenty of others like me.

The idea of open sourcing our work is truly admirable however there are some of us out there who just can't stand the hate and Alpha-nerd jockeying, so we opt out. I don't think the world is missing out on much by my own lack of contribution but who knows how many truly brilliant yet fragile minds are self selecting out of the open source community because they just cannot cope?

please email tarballs to rektide+anongit@voodoowarez.com if you have code you have no aspirations for but wouldn't mind kicking out into the wild. i will eliminate author headers from the code and seed over p2p and make available. thank you for any sympathy you might have towards this request to let us syndicate your work.

And annonhub an anonymous github clone in 3...2...1...

she chose to read it. it's not like someone rubbed it in her face. well someone told her about it.

just like she chose to read the good things, she chose to read the bad things. SHE CHOSE.

people seem to ignore that little fact, instead they result to writing meaningless essays, on how to apply their opinion as a universal standard to life. nothx

This is the first time I have seen the "blame the victim" approach applied to public ridicule. So I guess that now I have seen everything.

ok, see you're entitled to your opinion. you think i'm an idiot, and I think you're an idiot. but that's kinda besides the point. the thing with opinions is that's a little bit like taking a dump. everyone takes one, but it kinda is a reflection of what's in your digestive system.

look through the tweets. https://twitter.com/search?q=%40harthvader&src=typd

noone personally shoved it down her throat. it's new to me that you get personal messages for someone talking about your github repo somewhere.

the blame the victim talk is like saying getting personally assaulted is the same as someone getting his car destroyed after parking your car in front of central park in new york. sure you could argue that they did it solely, because they knew the person, but this is clearly not the case here.

I don't think you're an idiot, I just think that saying it is all her fault because she chose to read the horrible things that high-profile people were broadcasting about her work is not a very good analysis of the situation.

It doesn't take long to read a tweet, and you can't exactly un-read it if you find it to be deplorable.

This is in fact exactly why I use Bitbucket private repos.

Thinking about code in terms of "good" and "bad" is not very useful. Don't worry about what developers on the internet think about the quality of your code unless they offer specific suggestions in a constructive and instructive manner. If someone offers specific and thoughtful suggestions or criticism, learn everything you can from them.

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