

Being Wrong on the Internet - zeeg
http://justcramer.com/2013/01/24/being-wrong-on-the-internet/

======
trustfundbaby
Why write all that when you could have just said "I'm sorry"?

"Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?" in the context you posted it was a
put down. plain and simple. It was rude, and uncalled for.

Refusing to apologize and choosing instead to focus half of your post, on the
largely irrelevant issue of whether someone saw misogyny in what your tweet,
_after_ spending the other half defending your indefensible original tweet,
just strikes me as particularly arrogant and unpleasant.

The real issue here is that on twitter (in certain circles), snark is
encouraged/rewarded and looked upon as some proxy for individual brilliance,
except this time, you hurt an actual person.

So this one time, chalk it up as an L, say you're sorry and move on with your
life, because this post doesn't make you look thoughtful, or smart or decent,
just the opposite actually.

Cheers.

~~~
twentysix
I think you should have stopped after the first sentence. Everything after
that is condescending and written in exactly the opposite manner you want OP
to behave.

At least he just sarcastically criticized a piece of code without any personal
attacks unlike your post.

~~~
amirmc
What personal attack? I don't read anything as condescending either.

I do, however, find the OP slightly condescending. His main concern seems to
be responding to a comment about misogyny (as if that's the meat of the
discussion) and otherwise saying "Oh, it's so hard to communicate in 140 chars
- you should cut me a break." [1]

The OP passed judgement on some code he found on the internet and decided to
publicly ridicule it. Sure, that's his call. Just as it is for everyone else
who wants to explain that's it's wrong. It won't be the last time this happens
on the internet.

[1] That's 73 chars in case anyone's counting.

------
retube
> Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole.

Give me a break. These guys were acting all superior and they got busted.
These attempts at justifying what they said just make them seem like double
ass-holes. Just admit you were being horrible or stand by your comment and
tell everyone to get lost.

------
ghc
These Ruby guys (aside from Corey Haines) are displaying some real lack of
emotional maturity here. These are the sorts of apologies I'd expect from a
teenager.

If this is what I can expect from the community after _why's disappearance,
I'm going to steer clear of Ruby. Matz being a good guy is not enough to make
up for some of a community's most visible figures acting like entitled jerks.

~~~
Argorak
I'd really like to point that this is the Rails community. There's a lot more
hidden beyond all this, where people do behave like Matz shows. Projects like
vagrant spring to mind.

~~~
bbwharris
This is not a "rails community" issue. These are individual members. Rails is
software that works for a lot of people. The "community" doesn't tweet.

Most of us just want to write code.

~~~
Argorak
Steve Klabnik is a Ruby Hero and one of the most present Rails commiters and
evangelists. Yes, the community doesn't tweet, but its elected champions do.

The parents post shows precisly the effect of personal behaviour to the
communitys image. Hiding behind the group is harmful for it.

------
simonbarker87
I guess with the benefit of hindsight another way to approach this would have
been to have written a short blog post on what the issues are with the open
source project in a constructive way, send out the same tweet but instead link
to the blog post rather than the GitHub page.

That way the Tweet would have got just the same amount of clicks and (initial)
shares but the blog post it linked to would have put the thoughts in context
and would have avoided the risk of this tweet (who's main criticism in
isolation is that it is overly offhand) being mixed in with all the other
actually unpleasant tweets.

But, as always, the world could have been perfect in hindsght

------
RyanZAG
I don't think the tweet "Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?" is really
malicious or a problem. It seems to have just been picked up as part of the
other twitter comments that really were malicious and a problem. If the other
tweets didn't exist, I doubt anybody would have had a problem with that one.

Not reinventing the wheel is a valid opinion, although in this case there are
valid arguments why reinventing it (windows, learning, preference) is a valid
thing to do.

~~~
thisone
it's snark for snarks sake.

He could easily have said, "I don't understand why this was written. sed and
grep are good as they are"

and still have been within the twitter char count.

~~~
zeeg
Not sure I could have fit the link :)

Realistically though, I could have. I didn't. It doesn't really matter why. I
didn't follow what others said, so maybe it was a lot worse, but I do agree
that what I said could not have escalated into what this is.

~~~
thisone
abbreviate as necessary ;)

------
DanBC
Klabnik's law:

> Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole.

Postel's law:

> Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send

Disappointing that he wrote this[1] in 1980 and we're still getting it wrong.

[1] the original form of this, at least, in RFC 760.

~~~
randallsquared
If everyone is liberal in what they accept, there's no pressure on anyone to
be conservative in what they send, so that eventually withers.

------
mkhattab
Here's Linus' opinion on Github pull requests
[https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674)

I wonder how critical the HN community would have been if the exchange was
with a female programmer? If you read the exchange, you'll see other
commenters defending Linus' blunt responses. Linus was harsher than David or
Steve, he called the pull requester a moron.

~~~
shocks
Linus didn't say "This is shitty code, no.". Linus said "I don't accept GitHub
pull requests for these (logical) reasons. Please use the official route to
send me a pull request."

This is a completely different thing to what happened here.

~~~
lewispollard
I think it's referring to the later posts in the thread, such as:

"Btw, Joseph, you're a quality example of why I detest the github interface.
For some reason, github has attracted people who have zero taste, don't care
about commit logs, and can't be bothered.

The fact that I have higher standards then makes people like you make snarky
comments, thinking that you are cool.

You're a moron.

Linus"

------
trapezor
Twitter has the power of the written word multiplied by the internet, mixed
with the brevity and uninhibitedness of a dance disco conversation.

------
hayksaakian
And there I was thinking HN was above this gossipy type discussion.

------
LatvjuAvs
Everyone got nice publicity. Many people will have a thought or two about
interacting with each other. Someone will look in mirror.

Small steps in humanity sometimes needs to be pulled out with ugly chain.

Everyone learned something. Everyone wins.

Even wars are just a profit drivers.

