Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

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I would like to know more about the mmap situation, as what I saw on the surface could warrant some concern. Being somewhat involved you would probably know better than I as I was just an observer reading the thread after-the-fact. It seemed like the biggest accusation was the plagiarism (or "collaborating" but mostly taking somebody else's code).

Did anybody besides the two parties see the code develop, or does anybody else have knowledge of this? Or is it just his word vs. hers? Do you have any suggested reading to get more perspective other than just the github thread and HN thread? (really asking. these aren't rhetorical questions)

Reading the thread, I do think there are a lot of opportunities to read in confirmation bias. For example if I start reading that thread with the idea that Justine is coming in to hijack the project and make herself the hero that it needs and deserves, and to get her initials embedded in there as a permanent tribute to her own glory, I can see that. But if I read it as her coming in with cool work that she's excited about, and had to come up with a new format and couldn't think of a name (naming things can be really hard) and just stuck in one of the first things that came to mind (or even used as a placeholder prior to discussion), I can see that as well.

I absolutely don't want the truth covered up, but I also don't want to accept as true things that aren't true, especially where the implications are toward somebody's character. I'm a big "benefit of the doubt" kind of person.

My sense is that the part about credit/collaboration was actually somewhat overblown among the detractors. What roughly happened as far as I can remember is that JT and another person worked on mmap together with about equal contribution, though the other person might have been the one to have initiated the idea (and solicited help to push it through); then at some point JT decided to make a PR to the main repository in their own name, but crediting the other collaborator as a coauthor, which may or may not have been coordinated with the other person. After that, though, in a fairly characteristic fashion, JT started fielding adulatory questions from their fans (on Github, but also on HN, Twitter and possibly other media) about the change, and quickly switched to simply referring to it as their own, with no mention of the other contributor. The other contributor expressed some misgivings about having their contribution erased, which were picked up by a growing set of people who were generally resentful about JT's conduct in the project. As far as I can tell, when confronted about it, JT at no point explicitly denied what the other person did (and I think the commit logs should all still be there in the fork), but at some point the other person just decided to stop pushing the issue due to being uncomfortable with becoming a playing ball in the fandom war between JT fans and antis.

My personal main gripe with JT really was the tone they adopted in the Github discussions, and the effect of the large numbers of drive-by supporters, who were often far less restrained in both unfounded claims about Justine's accomplishments and attacks on any critics. (At this point I'd also like to note that I consider some sibling comments to be uncomfortably hostile in a personal way, like the "hit piece" one.) I think that as a public persona, especially one who actively pursues publicity, you have some responsibility to restrain your followers - Justine, I get the sense, instead uses them as deniable proxies, as also seen with the instances where instead of straight up putting their signature on the "RAM usage reduced to 6GB" claim they instead choose to post a collage of screenshots of supporters making it.

This could all be true, but it's hard to evaluate these claims on their own. Not being involved in any way, all I can do is conclude that there is some friction in that community. It's possible that JT is toxic, it's possible that you are toxic, it's possible that neither of you is generally toxic but something about your personalities causes your interactions to become toxic, it's even possible that neither of you were toxic in any way but your impression of things after the fact is as-if Tunney had been toxic. Sometimes one has to stop and think about these things and figure out how to smooth things over, and sometimes it's not possible to smooth things over.

I didn't have any direct interactions with JT then or now - while it was hard to ignore the discussion as an onlooker, it did not touch upon any parts of the code that I was involved with. This seems to be one of the topics where everyone who is even tangentially involved is under a default suspicion of being biased in one direction or another.

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