
Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? (1999) - shockwavecs
http://bikeshed.org/
======
AstroJetson
One of those terms that has lasted a very long time. That and yak shaving are
something we are all familiar with. Good to see the roots of them every now
and again.

(Yak shaving origin is here
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving)

Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a
problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later,
solves the real problem you're working on.

ie: Wash the car (goal) -> broken hose, need to go to hardware store to get
new one -> car won't start -> need ride to get new battery -> can't ask
neighbor since I have their lawn mower -> took the blade off to sharpen ->
which is now why I'm in the basement looking for the grinding wheel.

~~~
telesilla
I am hesitant to post this due to ads, but this is exactly illustrating your
comment

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gp98t](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gp98t)

[Hal fixes the kitchen lightbulb]

~~~
leoc
Yak shaves with circular dependencies are the worst:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElLpKewnxp4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElLpKewnxp4)

Come to think of it, this is also how bug-reporting interactions tend to go.
And I wasn't expecting to hear Harry Belafonte doing an Irish accent!

------
suchow
Here is a well-considered riposte from Brett Glass:

[https://www.quora.com/Hacker-Culture-Who-was-Brett-Glass-
nam...](https://www.quora.com/Hacker-Culture-Who-was-Brett-Glass-named-in-the-
original-bikeshed-email/answer/Brett-Glass?srid=hhL7)

~~~
brandmeyer
Not actually a riposte, more of an example of how an "in group" can lay claim
to a term and change its meaning. In the original context, bikeshedding was
the practice of the core maintainers micro-managing a change in what seems to
be a dominance display. Mr. Glass's description is that the "in group" started
using the term to denigrate outside engineers' small-but-useful improvements,
in what also seems to be a dominance display.

~~~
tedunangst
Like many other negative terms, it's only bikeshedding when "they" do it.

"Here's an idiotic patch."

No, this is a bad idea. It leaks memory like a sieve.

"OMG, stop bikeshedding!"

~~~
CodeMage
It would be interesting to see whether it really happened like that, but I'm
sadly not interested enough to invest that much energy. I did try digging more
into why PHK picked on Brett Glass specifically in his e-mail and I turned
away from that endeavor in disgust after only 10 minutes. (For those who want
to try themselves, go Google "brett glass politeness" as a starting point)

It's actually very hard to get to the bottom of these things. Back when
computers were the sole domain of us geeks and nerds, the culture of downright
rudeness was a lot more widespread and tolerated than nowadays. The usual
excuse was "content over form", meaning that if I say your patch is stupid
because it leaks memory like a sieve, the important thing is that your patch
leaks memory, not how you feel about my tone. Which is a reasonable
justification when applied to a stupid patch, but turns into a bad excuse when
people start calling each other names.

Some of that culture lives on to this very day: we've all read more than one
rant by Linus Torvalds where he cusses out someone who tried to submit
something stupid to the kernel. Once you get over the fact that the language
is uncalled for and that the same message could have been delivered with equal
force without cussing, you can actually try to ascertain whether the message
itself was deserved or not. In Linus's case, it usually seems deserved.

Which brings me back to Brett Glass, who was indeed called names by PHK and
others on the lists. Was that okay? I've already established that I don't
think it was, but the real question is whether he "deserved" it, in the sense
of whether he really was pissing off everyone on the list with bad ideas and
whether there really were people calling for banning him or not.

Like I already said, I don't know the answer, because I really do have better
things to do today than wade through vitriol from the 90's. However, if you
want to discuss Brett Glass, that's really the question you should be asking.
Just because his post on Quora sounds reasonable and polite when compared to
nerd-rage that was commonplace on the mailing lists -- the same kind of nerd-
rage that would brand anyone as a "colossal douchebag" if used on public
forums today -- it doesn't mean his claims were true.

For my part, I would reserve my judgment. On the one hand, it's quite common
for an entrenched group to exhibit behavior Glass accused them of. On the
other hand, we're dealing with someone who's opposing the Net Neutrality for
his personal gain. It's most likely that both sides were at fault, as it
usually happens in sordid reality we live in.

~~~
tedunangst
I meant more generally, not referring to a specific incident.

Recently, as the term 'bikeshedding' has gained popularity, I'd say for every
instance of bikeshedding I see, there's two occasions in which somebody tries
to ram a bad patch through deflecting all criticism with accusations of
bikeshedding.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I agree. The term is showing up in article titles and such way more than
usual. I hadnt heard it for maybe a year then suddenly every week or few days.
Some fad going on...

------
kukx
In case you missed it - when you refresh, the bikeshed changes color.

~~~
JoshTriplett
You can also use a color as a subdomain:
[http://blue.bikeshed.com/](http://blue.bikeshed.com/) .

I've seen someone in a thread point to bikeshed.com, and someone else follow
up with a joking "I think you mean preferredcolor.bikeshed.com".

~~~
andrewstuart2
Or any hex code it would seem:
[http://ff00f0.bikeshed.com/](http://ff00f0.bikeshed.com/)

------
Kenji
_You composed this email at a rate of more than N.NN cps It is generally not
possible to think and type at a rate faster than A.AA cps, and therefore you
reply is likely to incoherent, badly thought out and /or emotional._

I triggered more than one "CAPTCHA" that worked like this on websites. This is
an anti-pattern. Don't do this, it's incredibly annoying. There are people who
think and type faster than you expect. It all depends on the case and various
factors.

~~~
splatcollision
Or, for example, the incredibly common use case of pasting in text from
elsewhere - which mimics an incredibly prolific typing speed!

~~~
grkvlt
Hopefully it doesn't - there should not be a series of keypress events caused
by a paste!

------
nathancahill
Correct URL is [http://honeydew.bikeshed.org/](http://honeydew.bikeshed.org/).
Can the mods please update the link?

~~~
kyberias
No, I'm pretty sure it's
[http://azure.bikeshed.org/](http://azure.bikeshed.org/).

~~~
DonHopkins
[http://bisque.bikeshed.com/](http://bisque.bikeshed.com/) reminds me of
TCL/Tk in the early days.

~~~
jharger
Nooo! [http://brown.bikeshed.org/](http://brown.bikeshed.org/) has a _red_
background. So today I learned that the standard web "brown" is actually a
reddish color.

~~~
DonHopkins
I think they made all the X11 colors suck on purpose because they were afraid
of being sued by Pantone.

------
greenyoda
Discussion of bikeshedding two weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12403557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12403557)

------
kazinator
Ironically, the color of an actual bike shed matters. If you paint it dark, it
will be hotter inside when the sun shines on it compared to it being light
colored. On the other hand, bright colors that stand out against the
surroundings attract unnecessary attention to the existence of the bike shed.
Ideally we want it to be inconspicuous and to convey the idea that it contains
nothing of value.

Obviously, the correct coating for a bike shed to meet these requirements is
in fact a cladding: of externally facing mirror panels. Except that if they
are ordinary glass mirrors, there is the obvious vandalism that may be
inflicted when some rascals do actually bespy the nigh invisible structure.

~~~
shockwavecs
irony galore >.<

------
gravypod
I feel very differently about this. Arguments come from people looking for a
reason and finding one they don't like.

What an argument attempts to do is change the outcome by providing a logical
explanation for an outcome.

Many things classify as being a good reason but may also be easily out weighed
by other concerns.

For instance the color of a bike shed is of no concern unless the color is
dangerous in a specific location. If you are building a bike shed at an
apiarist's house the color of the shed does matter as some colors effect bees
differently. [0]

If your house is near a forest and you need to find your shed painting it in
camouflage is probably not a good idea.

I feel everything should be argued until you can be sure you've considered all
view points and can come to the best (in your use-case) decision. This is the
case from everything ranging between colors of sheds to technical discussion.

As long as there is a valid reason behind it, it is fine.

[0] - [http://resteasypestcontrol.com/bees-and-wasps-facts-which-
co...](http://resteasypestcontrol.com/bees-and-wasps-facts-which-colors-will-
attract-them/)

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is very misguided. There is, fundamentally, always somewhere around an
infinite amount of possible work that can be done. The most important thing in
actually getting anything of value done is making sure that you get the right
work done. Because if you get sucked into one or another effort sink (of which
there are an endless variety) then you won't get anything of substance done.

This is even more important in business, because while you're faffing about
sinking precious effort (which is, remember, hard currency of the greatest
value) into meaningless tasks the competition is getting ahead of you, and
stomping on your face in the market, relegating you to insolvency and the
dustbin of history.

~~~
gravypod
I'm not saying don't do anything and sit around all day arguing. What I am
saying is don't be mad, or ignore people, that come up and say "you could do X
a different way and it would be objectively better for your use case"

~~~
mwfunk
I think if someone gets mad or ignores someone because they claim that the
other person is bikeshedding based on a single comment or suggestion, that's
most likely a misuse of the term bikeshedding.

Bikeshedding is when an entire discussion gets bogged down or derailed by
people who would rather talk about something that's not super relevant, than
say nothing and let other people talk about a topic that's important but they
personally have no expertise in. They would rather sidetrack a conversation so
that they could be more involved, than sit back and let other people talk
about the original topic.

This makes sense for social situations (where what you're talking about is
usually far less important than keeping everyone engaged), but makes no sense
for situations where the communication really is about solving problems. You
can really see this tension on more developer-focused open source mailing
lists, where often a small number of people are working really hard on
evolving some critical software, but their discussions get drowned out or
derailed by precocious teenagers/overconfident CS undergrads/bored retirees
who are just killing time on the list as a hobby, and who expend lots of
energy trying to get everyone to talk about how terrible the variable naming
convention is (or the source file directory structure, or source file naming
conventions, or how much they hate this or that open source Internet celebrity
person, or what's the deal with airplane food...)

I can totally imagine someone who would dismiss as bikeshedding any comment
that they didn't feel like talking about, but that person would be misusing
the concept of bikeshedding (and probably being super rude on top of that, as
it's an accusation against the presumed bikeshedder as well as a dismissal of
what they're saying).

~~~
gravypod
> I think if someone gets mad or ignores someone because they claim that the
> other person is bikeshedding based on a single comment or suggestion, that's
> most likely a misuse of the term bikeshedding.

I just see this as a way to justify that behavior. If it's not the indented
use for the term then I agree some things are stupid but things that people
I've worked with have cared about have came from real world concerns they have
about technical choices. Maybe I'm just lucky?

> but their discussions get drowned out or derailed by precocious
> teenagers/overconfident CS undergrads/bored retirees who are just killing
> time on the list as a hobby

I think most of this can be sifted out easily. Why is X objectively better for
the project as a hole? I've had project's where people have said "change this!
change that!"

For instance I was asked for one project, my StarmadeWrapper project, to look
for a server in a different path then the one I had been checking. For
instance I was checking "./StarMade/" for the .jar and they wanted me to check
"./starmade" for the .jar. I said that it wasn't needed because it would break
already setup servers and that it was already possible by editing the config
file. They couldn't provide a reason for that to be done so I ignored the
people suggesting this. This was a compatibility breaking change that could
already be done on the side of the end user and fixed what amounted to making
the end user run "mv ./StarMade ./starmade -r".

This is in stark contrast to something else I was asked. Someone wanted me to
make a maven .pom file for my project. At this point this person was
contributing to the project and he made his case that "it would make it easy
to import the project". I told them if you want it implement it since hell, it
was a single file!

These are the filters I apply to suggestions:

    
    
       - Does this make sense in a technical light
       - Does the person who is asking for this have the ability to write it by themselves
       - Will it break compatibility 
       - Is it better then what I do currently
    

The second change was technically sound, this person was a maintainer, it
wasn't going to break anything, and it provided an easy way to work on the
project. The first situation was none of these things.

------
IfOnlyYouKnew
It's one of these terms that proves too much to be useful, like "mansplaining"
or "leaky abstraction". Its used as a one-word dismissal of an idea without
expediting even the least amount of energy on it.

------
gregschlom
And so what happened to the proposal of making sleep(1) accept fractional
arguments?

~~~
nkassis
He mentions it ended up in the tree part way into the email:

"I bow my head in respect to the original proposer because he stuck to his
guns through this carpet blanking from the peanut gallery, and the change is
in our tree today. I would have turned my back and walked away after less than
a handful of messages in that thread. "

------
TheCapn
Huh, so that's where the /bikeshed in Google Hangouts Chat comes from. I've
known about the easteregg for a while but never looked into the naming origins

------
huangc10
omg. I didn't know the bike shed changes color. I read it in green background
and now every white background I look at is pink 0_0 why...

