gosu

For what it's worth, your post made me realize how much of a polite hater I was being in my post above.

People online have tended to be more abrasive to total programming novices than to people who have more advanced questions. I don't think it would be that bad for you. But another thing is that, for large and old communities where the developers aren't hanging around, people on IRC aren't necessarily going to be experts who know more than you. Those people have better stuff to do, by virtue of their skill.

I personally think that I've picked up very useful "learning skills" because I have my own social reasons for answering technical questions without outside help. So maybe your exhaustion might also be a benefit for this reason.

I qualify as a Linus defender, but I disagree with your "he's the boss and it's up to his contributors to leave" idea. The whole point of these discussions is to use reason to encourage problematic people to change themselves, rather than cutting those people off entirely, as you suggest.

I agree that people should be talking more about this. As an older student who hangs out on IRC a lot, I see two phenomena:

- People get initiated into programmer culture pretty young, before they learn to stop being pretentious. They really like how meritocratic programmer culture is, but they get carried away with it the same way that people who say "gays should go to hell" or "the weak have no place in society" get carried away. And maybe some people never grow out of it because we've reached asshole critical mass and they find themselves surrounded by like-minded people; and because they're rewarded for technical merit even when they behave badly. The result is your typical Dickensian villainy.

- The meanest IRC channel that I know of, #C, is full of people who are honestly not very smart. Every time that I've patiently and kindly tried to teach someone - while the rest of the channel was busy being huge dicks to that person - I've regretted it because the person just wasn't able to absorb and synthesize information. I'd argue that you can't give a $5 dollars to every beggar, and some people should be firmly kept out of the community until they get better, so as to avoid harming the community in the long run. It's a tough situation, and handling it well is tough even for mature people. Being rude isn't an unreasonable tool if your goal is specifically to scare people away (and hopefully towards a more productive endeavor for them).

The point is that there are imperfect people on both sides of our social boundaries. But note that this is a very specific point, and rarely justifies the vitriol that comes out of people in #C.

You're right. Everything is relative and you can do whatever you want, exactly as the poster whom you've responded to but completely ignored pointed out. The point is that he's calling on people to either match his values, or else risk losing his favor and those of the communities he mentioned. You may not care much, but the evidence of the downvotes on your comment suggests that the HN community agrees with him and not you. So you may find that your message of exclusion ironically helps to effect your own exclusion from a community that you apparently care about, since you're posting here.

>feminizing men

The thing with edgy, weird opinions like that is that it's unlikely that you hold them because you're wiser than prevailing wisdom. Apparently, Real Men antagonise strangers over the internet.

I use xmonad with a custom tiling and dzen setup that arranges my workspaces on a 3x3 grid and shows a little indicator of where I am on the grid in the way that gnome-panel used to do it (before "the accident"). All workspace navigation and window manipulation is customized, and I can fly around my desktop with ease. It took a lot of work to get running, but I wouldn't change a thing about my setup. It makes a huge difference when programming.

On a related note, has anyone been suffering from slow startup times with xmonad lately? I'm not sure if it's xmonad, or some other part of my setup, or a misconfiguration.

> infinitely large workspace.

I've never considered this. As many terminals as the eye can fit, with a living rainforest as a backdrop. If it doesn't seriously hurt the eyes to do it for programming-session durations, then I'd gladly pay good money for that.

And yes, the ARI comparisons are not lost on me.

My wants are not being acknowledged. I want to see my wants on the list.

It's reasonable not to support it, and it might not be your fault, but you should know that I can't interact with the site at all with Conkeror running on Xulrunner 19.0.2.

Why does the Segway qualify as a great invention? I had always thought of it as worse in every way compared to a bicycle or scooter for able-bodied people.

It doesn't matter at all, but the expression is "in the throes of death", not "in death throws".

I seriously don't understand why you're supposed to feel bad about posting 4 pictures of yourself and making a joke photo. It didn't seem that wanky to me, so it's surprising that it was able to inspire this many people to forget about human courtesy and throw childish insults on the interwebs.

I was wondering if maybe these people know you and there's some kind of subtext here or something.

Not sure where all this hate is coming from. "meathead frat boy"?

While you give good advice, I'm going to call you out on the humblebrag here. I imagine that OP might feel kind of bad to hear about the troubles of a deans list student who had trouble becoming a published technical author.

I get what you're saying and why it has to be said, but I want to add that I think it's reasonable to work for reasons other than buying leisure.

In particular, I believe that it's important for me to be useful to society, and I also consider my work to be personal, like an art. As a result, my happiness is tied to how well I think I'm working. I don't think that's crazy.

To be fair, that's a Java issue and not an Ubuntu issue. It came up for me with xmonad on another distribution entirely.

I interpret your sentence as follows: in the "hypothetical" case that this comes to pass, then you, as someone who had paid money, would feel ripped off. When you say "would" here, I don't think that it makes your "as someone who..." clause hypothetical. The way that I'd say this is:

If I were someone who paid, then I'd feel ripped off.

>if you can't handle the consequences then you're not fit for life

This is pretty harsh. If you applied similar harshness to your own actions, do you think you'd approve?

That's definitely good advice at the end, but I think that the professor's response is pretty disproportionate.

Presumably, it was a much ruder interruption to the class to stop everything and publicly humiliate a student whom he felt disrespected by. And it's extremely rude to take a personal email and forward it to the entire class (who presumably would be able to recognize the student).

Maybe the intent was to "smack some sense" into a student for their own benefit, but that's really presuming a lot about a person from a handful of data points.

Also, how likely is this to be BS?

Taking you literally, I'd say that a wall is clunkier than a headset. But being reasonable, I'd say that those approaches are pretty different and neither is obviously better. Why do you favor projections?

I find this dramatic rhetoric off-putting. OP seemed honest and nuanced. There might be a valid point to be made that his feelings are toxic to society, in some subtle way, but I'll just echo the other people here in saying that he comes off as constructive while you appear to be saying things that sound clever to you.

I think the standard counter to this is that, if it can be reasonably assumed that you're not welcome to do it and if you're not being entrapped, then the ease with which a crime is committed should have no bearing on the severity of the crime. Stealing someone's car doesn't become moral if the person leaves the car unlocked and running, even if it "only" involves opening a car door and driving a car. I don't see why computer systems should be different.

However, breaking into someone's car in order to roll up their windows and leave them a note telling them not to do it is perfectly good in my book. So I think it's better when people focus more on the severity of the actual crime committed, rather than on the ease of committing it.

I felt the same, until I put it in my backpack while on and the video card died. That particular model has a known defect in the soldering on the video vard (NVIDIA's fault), so be careful with how you use it.

Fun fact: apparently, people have fixed theirs by putting the motherboard in an oven to resolder it.

To add to the list, I recall MAX featuring a similar kind of simultaneous turn-based thing. Players could both move during the same turn, but only had so many action points per turn, so you couldn't really get too far ahead just with good micro or quick thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanized_Assault_%26_Explorat...

Meanwhile, network folks have been drawing clouds since 1980.

I'm surprised that you powered through it.

I wouldn't trust anything from a person who expresses themselves via malformed haiku.

I was just trying to give interesting details, not so much to excuse or accuse. I just meant that, from the tone of discussion and my general impression of the people, that's how I assume that they wound up there. I imagine that it also has to do with amateur porn (not all of which is obviously released with consent) and reality TV making voyeurism a familiar thing.

I guess I mostly think of them as dumb and immoral, but I do think that it's evil to have those kinds of interactions with people. I don't understand why people consented to holding up signs that said "pwned by...." - to me, that looks like bullying.

Actually, I guess I do kind of understand. I got prank called regularly on high school, and that felt pretty terrible. But I tried to along with it in the hope of defusing it amicably, and it took me a long time to admit that I was a victim and go to a third party to make it stop (the equivalent here would be to reinstall windows).

I went and read the forum in question. It's full of nontechnical people who are obviously teenagers. It reminds me a lot of video game forums I used to visit, with gaudy image signatures and all, except here the competition is to collect (and trade) the best "slaves" and spy on them. My guess is that these people started out with video game cheats and, without anything better to do or anyone to stop them, it spiralled into this.

One interesting tidbit is that people seem to often post stories of interactions with their "slaves". It usually involves them trying to seem powerful and scary, but at the same time there's an undertone of wanting to connect with the people that they spy on. For instance, after one guy intentionally outs himself by posting on his "slave's" facebook profile, he chats with her and keeps trying to convince her (in a threatening way) to skype him so that he can show her how to install an antivirus. There are also a lot of interactions of the "put a shoe on your head and hold this sign and I'll stop hacking you" variety.

Edit: Also, don't miss that bit at the end about the RAT software author quitting in part because of the Syrian government's use of his software against rebels. Scary stuff.

I agree. I think there's some kind of Pavlovian thing going on here because I have cyan and purple syntax highlighting for the "funnest" elements of my code.

Like others here, I learned simply by doing and fumbling my way around until I was comfortable.

That said, I think the most important thing for you to learn is how to get help. Learn how to find man(ual) pages, and how to interpret the very precise language and syntax that programmer-authors like to use. Then try reading the man pages of the systems that you want to learn - like 'man bash'. Also, some tools have nicer pages accessible via the 'info' command, so try 'info emacs'.

That'll generally be the best way to learn how to use any tool. The only trick past that is to learn which tools exist, and google/stackoverflow will usually suggest appropriate tools when you tell it precisely which problem you want to solve.