Hacker News is depressing
This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection.On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible.On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a the biggest problem we have. Programmer-types are just not as supportive/empathetic as nearly everyone else I know. And I'm not talking about criticism, I'm talking about needless mean, shitty behavior that gets repeated and defended all too often. When the Linus/"Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!"[2] was posted to HN every single top comment was defending Linus' behavior.Linus' mission and position do not excuse his language. In defending users, he's still attacking a person.It upsets the hell out of me, and I think its a big part of why many women (and I'm sure men) prefer not to engage in programming communities. Even on StackOverflow I see people being horrible to confused newcomers, instead of steering them in the right direction.I think rooting out this kind of shitty behavior is the most important thing we can do to advance programming communities and make others feel welcome. By miles. Especially if we want to alleviate gender and general newcomer disparities.This article reminds me of one from 117 days ago, "What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project".[3]~~~~~[1] There were some remarks in the article that just left me confused, such as:> They said I thought JavaScript was a bad language. How funny, because I'm writing almost all my code these days in JavaScript. They say I'm old and out of date. Funny. They're the ones who are out of date! :-)???~~~~~[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75Some excerpts:> Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!> It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?> If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?> Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously.If you talked to your spouse like that it would be called abuse.I was horrified by the HN reactions. You can read some of them here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962912~~~~~[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767