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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

> We don't expect person writing a Ruby binding for sqlite to know the theory behind database indexes and who are the acknowledged experts in that field.

We don't? More to the point, do we expect them to close a bug related to those things without educating themselves on the subject enough to make a rational decision on it?

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I don't think it's reasonable to expect they already know that. Whether they should educate themselves... that's up for discussion I guess. The maintainer here effectively says: I read the docs and don't see a reason for a change; if the docs are wrong, prove it by changing them, if there's a bug in dependency handle the issue there.

It's not the best solution, but if I ignored everything I know about this issue, I think it's a reasonable maintainer's approach.

The probability distribution function of average coder understandable-documentation decays exponentially with subject matter expertise, in most cases. Furthermore, it is often semi-rational, usually unconscious non-/for-profit "job-securitization" to lay landmines and obscure functionality to reinforce in-group, elite, "arcane knowledge" hoarding and seem "expert."

A startup founder often wants to work themselves out of a job to do more useful things, most will do all they can to insulate themselves into indispensability (a lot of technical people are super insecure, I'm proly one of them, and a lot of corporate gigs are cut-throat fiefdoms).

I think it would be entirely reasonable for the person maintaining a Ruby binding for sqlite to follow the sqlite documentation and close any bugs telling them to go against that documentation, yes.

It goes against the Linux kernel documentation, yes. As has been pointed out to them, it doesn't go against the documentation on OS X or any of the BSDs. But they engage in the same behavior on those systems.

Well, perfectly reasonable to take the intersection of capabilities rather than special-case each platform. AIUI the behaviour of /dev/urandom and /dev/random is the same on OSX and *BSD, so there's no problem with their behaviour there.

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