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ObHumility Note: I am Australian, and I suck at geography so much that, had I been born a woman, if I tried this challenge then a man watching me would say "gee, women suck at geography!" (Link for anyone not getting the reference: http://xkcd.com/385/)

OK, weird. Nobody else has linked to it as far as I can see. Right, it falls to me then, as the official designated representative of nobody in particular:

http://xkcd.com/850/

That's typical, always blaming the paper. The world needs to be skinnier, dammit!

I mainly came here to see how long it would take for someone to link to the XKCD cartoon, because it's quicker than thinking of a keyword to find it myself.

Here's why Glass users are assholes, and why that won't always be true: because "iPod" is a verb.

"To iPod" is to change a particular technology so much that you create a permanent mark in everyone's calendar. Before Apple invented the first iPod, music players were clunky and irritating, and it was like nobody in the business knew the first thing about user interface design. After the iPod, music players were iPods, clones of iPods, or nothing. And carrying music around with you is so ubiquitous that the commuters on the bus who don't have earbuds in their ears look weird.

Glass hasn't been iPodded yet. That means it's intrusive, ugly, and it threatens people -- a bit like the way people felt uncomfortable sitting on the bus with someone who had headphones on. It's rude, it's anti-social, and it's a clear sign that someone is maladjusted.

But one day, someone -- almost certainly not Google -- will create a wearable camera/HUD/computer that is to Google Glass what the iPod is to the Sony Walkman. And after that, it will be normal for people to be documenting their whole lives, and the hostility will disappear quite quickly.

But that day is not today. Today, if you use Glass in public, you are an asshole. Accept it peacefully and look forward to the iPodding.

The only solution is to throw money at it until it gets better, isn't it? Or to wait it out. I remember when the word "Slashdot" became a verb, back when "Reddit" was a joke about a frog and a library book and DOS was what Windows ran on. The problem hasn't improved, as far as I know. So no biggie; it's not your fault. Ride it out and you'll be fine. Meanwhile, I'm mostly commenting so I can find your article again later and get to actually read it!

Lesson N+1: Hacker News can break your blog's webserver. That's one you only learn through experience.

[ETA: which is sad, because I want to read it!]

Heh - good point! And then there's the "redacted" bits in government PDF that turned out to be nothing more than "Kennedy assassination carried out as requested by Agent F. Castro" followed by "rectangle(colour = black, position = last 9 characters of line)". All you need to do is edit the PDF and you get all the documents you could want. I love it when faith in technology fails in informative ways...

How about:

PHP: getting Perl and CGI to work on my web server is too damn hard.

Or perhaps:

PHP: I can never remember the difference between %, @ and $.

I suspect the kindest thing one can say about Forth is:

Forth: all the other languages were written by somebody else.

As they say: if you've seen one version of Forth, you've seen... one version of Forth. And also: standards are a good thing, everyone should have one!

The camel was rather overloaded with straw by that stage. I had asked the question two or three times over a long period, and received approximately the same response each time.

I didn't just develop my contempt for the community all in one go. I had to WORK at it!

Call me a snob, but I couldn't bear to let a computer correct my spelling for me. I love the squiggly underline of the spellcheck (irony note: spellcheck is not in my dictionary) but I want that as a passive feature, not an active one. What ship-brained ducking count ever thought that was a good idea?

My experience is otherwise. I've found the IRC groups for Python and PHP to be quite friendly. The one for Wordpress suffers a bit from "I don't know you, so I presume you're an idiot" but not to the same degree as the Emacs or Lisp ones. I think there's some interaction between IRC and Lisp that causes this sort of sociopathic behaviour in a small but loud subset of the community -- and the rest don't do enough to discourage it, which makes them all complicit.

A cynic's TL;DR:

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime. And if you really hate the man, get RMS to design him a fishing rod.

Well, not self-absorbed.

I was asking all the right questions -- is this possible, what hooks should I consider, what should I take into account to make sure that the stuff I add doesn't stamp all over other stuff. I'm a programmer with thirty years experience and twenty years with Emacs; I know this stuff.

Basically, they shut me down. The thing I was asking was contrary to the whole philosophy of Emacs. I had, they assured me, no right to ask it. I was an idiot for having the problem that I was seeking to solve. And nobody, they told me, had ever had the problem ever in all of history.

Were they right? Well, no, not even slightly. They were horribly, evilly wrong. But even if they had been right, their response was wrong. Their argument was "if you have this problem that can be fixed by a change to Emacs, change yourself". This, in the most extensible editor on the planet. It was like being told that my car's tendency to pull sharply to the left when passing another car was normal and expected and I should take care not to pass other cars.

I'm a recovering Emacser, happy enough with less powerful but more modern text editors. It wasn't the program or the UI that finally did me in, but the community: I had a problem with how Emacs worked, I wanted to figure out a solution, so I asked on #emacs on Freenode and got nothing but abuse. I realised there's something about Emacs that attracts the sort of users I don't want to associate with: people who are smug, self-absorbed and utterly without empathy. Did I want to be one of them? No, I did not. Did I want to have to rely on them for help in my work and play? No, I did not. So I found a text editor that has sufficient extensibility and I installed that, and uninstalled all the emacsen on all my machines. And I felt a lot better afterward.

To the tune of Tomorrow Belongs To Me from Cabaret:

    *This Subnet Belongs To Me*

    The ‘Net is a creature of patches and parts,
    As free as the hawk on the breeze,
    With billions of voices and hands and hearts,
    Ruled only by RFCs.

        O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5,
        Your paragraphs murmer to me!
        No protocol yet keeps the ‘Net alive
        As well as this RFC.

    When mailing, recall that the ‘Net’s not secure;
    Let copyright laws be your guide;
    Ignore any chains; let your quotes stay pure;
    Flame not; use a sig; don’t chide.

    Check every address; mark your messages “long”;
    Use smileys and caps sparingly;
    Don’t send an attachment; kneejerks are wrong;
    So speaketh this RFC.

        O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5,
        Your sections are wise as can be!
        A luser or guru will surely thrive
        By trusting this RFC.

    When chatting, be patient and always assume
    That talk is as cheap as the dirt;
    When posting to news, don’t send spam, or Boom!
    Some hax0r will make you hurt!

    The guidlines exist both for wisemen and fools,
    They’re meant to be read carefully;
    For can you imagine what chaos rules
    Without such an RFC?

        O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5,
        Our last and best hope, patently
        The ‘Net is a queen-less and smoke-filled hive
        Without such a thing
        Without such a thing
        Without such an RFC!

One could argue that it's not news, so it's not ironic.

So much awesome cluelessness in the replies on that post. "It's definitely safe to use your real name," says WHAMM (White Heterosexual Able-bodied Middle-class Male) #1 confidently. "Nobody ever suffers from real-world social and legal consequences as a result of what they do online. No gay teenager from a small town has ever been bashed to death by homophobes after he got outed for his online activities. No woman on the run from an abusive husband ever got tracked down and 'punished' as a result of profile details on the internet. No activist fighting an oppressive regime ever got 'disappeared' after the authorities tracked them down using a web forum profile. It's all perfectly safe. Don't inconvenience us!"

Interesting. Shows OK in Firefox on Linux. Shows as a rectangle in Chrome on my Samsung Android phone with Chrome, and completely blank in the built-in browser on the same phone. I wonder why they're handling fonts so differently when in theory the font should be downloading.

Post something, Wanda. Stop complaining that the people who are doing what you're not doing are more successful at it.

It really is. This gives me the warm fuzzies. If every free/open source project were like this (ok, ok, like this appears to be) then we would be rolling in riches. I can't count the number of times I've seen a bug in some software and thought "I bet I could solve that!" And I probably could, because I'm not a bad programmer. But the barrier to entry is like the north face of the Eiger sometimes. This turns it into an on-ramp with friendly road signs and a cafe halfway up that serves really good coffee. Bravo, Mozilla!

The browser ponies make it all worthwhile.

I was hating hipsters before it was cool.

I don't honestly believe it's possible for someone to ask questions like that without a malicious purpose, so I shall refrain from engaging you henceforth. I pray that the women in your life, if you have any, can see what you are -- but I'm fairly sure it's obvious, so I'm not worried.

They were doing what they were told, and would therefore get whatever benefits obedience brings.

Whereas the women now had:

- a bunch of male scientists leering at them [1];

- some photos in the hands of those scientists that could be embarrassing;

- the possibility of those photos being stolen and distributed;

- a strong sense that they have no right to privacy or dignity in the highly male-dominated Ivy League world.

That last one would count as an educational bonus, at least.

[1] I'm only guessing that the scientists were male here, but I think it's a safe bet. Even nowadays, but more so then.

That women, far from having extra privilege in this area, felt extremely threatened at being made to be naked, knowing that this level of vulnerability had no upside for them. Whereas men had no particular concern, because their photos would not likely be misused.

Frankly, the suggestion that women have more power in this sort of situation is so wrong-headed that I honestly can't imagine how anyone familiar with Western culture could come up with it.

A substantials number of HN readers are under 18?

Now I really feel old.

Or you could see it entirely the other way. In fact, I'm rather surprised that you saw it as you do. I guess it takes all sorts to make a world.