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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Pedantry: can we call it "guilt.css" instead? In psychological literature, guilt is defined as the "I did something bad" emotion, shame is the "I am bad" emotion. The crucial difference between them is that guilt can be fixed by making amends. That seems like exactly the mindset you want to encourage with this: guilt.css implies that you feel guilty about all the hacks you have and want to make amends, while shame.css implies that your codebase is a steaming pile of shit.

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I don't know about psychological literature, but in common usage where I'm from, "guilt" is what you feel when you know you've done something you shouldn't, whereas "shame" is what you feel when you believe others either do or will frown on something. In that context, I think "shame" is more appropriate — essentially, it's a collection of code that brings some degree of shame to the project, not code that you should feel guilty for writing. Think, "It's a shame I had to resort to this."

how about bandaids.css or kludge.css? Get out of the psychology and name the noun.

I'm calling it hax.css

At where I work, we call it chance_2_buy_lunch.scss

Every Friday, we pick 3 random lines from chance_2_buy_lunch.scss (and another 3 from chance_2_buy_lunch.coffee) and the writers of those lines have to buy lunch for the rest of the team.

I also don't know the psych lingo, but I thought right away of the anthropological distinction between cultures of shame[1] (external disapproval from other people) and guilt[2] (internal disapproval from self). On that score, either could work: shame is certainly appropriate here since devs shame each other all the time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_society

Interesting. The anthropological and psychological definitions aren't really at odds with each other. When you face primarily external disapproval, it's natural to feel "I am bad", because people's outside opinions are not something you can control. When you face internal disapproval, the natural response is "I did something bad", because you know your own reasoning, you have control over it, and you can resolve to do better next time. Same basic principle as "growth mindset vs. fixed mindset". [1]

I'd argue that if devs shame each other all the time, something about your culture is broken. Why? Because the normal response to shame is to want to hide it. You see that in the description of shame vs. guilt societies in the links you provided, where "Shame cultures are typically based on the concepts of pride and honour, and appearances are what counts, as opposed to individual conscience in guilt cultures." Shame is positively correlated with depression, addiction, violence, aggression, bullying, and all sorts of other nasty stuff; guilt is inversely correlated with all of them. [2]

[1] http://mindsetonline.com/whatisit/about/

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psN1DORYYV0#t=840

On that line, I agree, but I think the delineation is more precisely between personal and socially induced "feeling bad". I feel like "shame" connotes a social, or at least, public feeling of ostracizing or sadness.

Regardless, I would agree that guilt.css would have less of a deterrent effect (think chocolate), and illustrate the premise more effectively.

Or perhaps we could use i18 to detect whether the coder lives in a Guilt- or Shame-based culture, and dynamically load guilt.css or shame.css based on the results!

> implies that your codebase is a steaming pile of shit.

You went slightly overboard there I think.

It's possibly called shame because the style sheet is public, _it shames the author_.

I understand it differently: they are ashamed of the code (its ugly), but not feeling guilty, since there are no alternatives at the moment...

yea it's common to say guilt is feeling bad for _something you did_ while shame is feeling bad for _something you are_. But I actually like the use of shame here because it's a light hearted self-deprecating jab announcing "I'm a bad coder." I also think the externalization aspect lies in favor of shame i.e. "hide your shame!"

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