Hacker News Reader

Comment by integraton | Hacker News Reader

> If he wasn't being such a prick in the first place, maybe people wouldn't call him one.

There we go. Posted straight from Redmond, no less.

I'm not sure where you guys get off calling another commenter "a prick" over and over again, along with other insults, for a joke pull request, given there is a long history of people (including pretty notably respectable people) creating them. I even listed some in another comment you guys can keep downvoting (because apparently my comments are worse than personally attacking other commenters): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9229987

View on HN

I was using the same wording that the other commenter used, because that's what he was. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

It's a joke PR, sure, but he was being disrespectful. He was insulting everyone who has worked on the product because he feels it's crap. He's entitled to his opinion, sure, but at the same time, he didn't have to state it the way he did. Just because it was a joke PR does not suddenly excuse him from his actions. It's not like it suddenly makes things okay.

He straight up made fun of the product, in a disrespectful way, and was called out for it by the community. You are free to disagree, sure, but there's a reason people reacted the way they did.

And furthermore, my location and the company I work for are completely irrelevant to this discussion. I'd appreciate you not bringing them in. I speak for myself, not my employer.

Joke pull requests waste the time of people who have much better things to do and demeans the immense effort it takes to drag projects to open source at large companies. Being called a prick for doing prickish things is a very light response, and in a functioning culture (one of which which software developers rarely do more than pretend to aspire to, but that's nothing new) it might even be enough to teach him to not do so again.

You know the best part, though? I've probably perturbed more electrons on why MSBuild is a horrible build system, and how its integration with Visual Studio will happily destroy many types of changes in .csproj files, than most people here. My life is worse when I have to deal with it. But despite that, I somehow manage to not cape up for jerks who hurt people. Isn't that weird?

And not one of your "pretty notably respectable people" is a person for whom I had the time of day before you alerted me to their penchant for screwing with other people for fun. A list of meaningless names to buttress the case for hurting other people is remarkably unpersuasive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com