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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

"Many (open source) hackers are proud if they achieve large amounts of code, because they believe the more lines of code they’ve written, the more progress they have made"

Citation needed.

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Yeah, it's a bit flaky; but it's more like a conflation of two different cultures by the term "hacker" than a malicious slam.

I've never seen an open source developer that cared about line count except in a negative sense.

Can't imagine one. People like that don't do open source.

No need, let me explain. Back in the day men had hair in their chests, programmers wrote their own alloc()/dealloc(), and managers believed waterfall would solve all problems, production used to measured by line count. That notion still goes on many heads out there.

Now, if you still want a citation here's one... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Cessna_ci...

Bullshit. Back in the day men killed each other and then ate corpses. But don't try to base any article on the premise that people still practice cannibalism widely, do you?

With good reason, too. The primitive societies you're talking about (and, for the most part, the ideologies that drove them) are dead, so to write articles about them would be daft. OTOH, many PHBs and their various ideologies are still very alive (i.e. [0]), so it would make sense to write an article about them.

[0]: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/154733/my-bos...

Still you have to actualy back up your claims. Remembering some ancient history is not sufficient.

I think we didn't have computers in the era you're referring to. I was talking about the seventies. I gave you clues about that when I talked about the memory management functions and waterfall.

Anyway, you seem to have some anger management issues and this is not the place to sort it out. You should look for help.

Many open source developers (I imagine more than 25% but probably less than 50%) are from countries like China, Poland, Brazil or Russia. We didn't have computers in seventies. We didn't hear about waterfall except from the books blaming it. We never counted our lines as a metric. It's not in our culture, which is rather young.

So it could rather be about cannibals.

You seem think that by assaulting me you get free out of a stupid statement. Guess why, you don't.

Assault is a loaded word to describe a honest observation based on a needless graphic picture you painted. You might not need help to sort out your anger issues. But you certainly need some work on your politeness skills. Here's a tip on the importance of that, politenes is appreciated as much as rudeness is abhorred.

Now onto your claims about open source developers from Brazil, Russia, India, Poland, and China. I'm going to ignore the fact you only backed it up with your imagination, and focus on the interesting part, your assumption. You assumed that all these fellow programmers didn't have access to books, older programmers, nor even computers, in the seventies. Despite of the fact that programmers from these countries have been consistently shipping great software for decades. What really staggers me is that you assume on behalf of all these people that they lack culture, just to prove your point.

Do humanity a favor, and go read a book [0]. Or at least try to leave home so you can talk to people, and finally work on your poor social skills.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

Why should I be polite to someone who doesn't support his claims with any facts? And I'm still waiting for any. I still didn't see any not based on ancient history.

You don't help your point by stating that some people had access to computers in non-first world countries. Sometimes they built those computers before programming those. You also have to prove they had exposure to line-counting culture, which you didn't yet. Note: you can quote books, but not just refer to those.

A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary.[1] Unlike hallucinations, delusions are always pathological (the result of an illness or illness process).[1] As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, confabulation, dogma, illusion, or other effects of perception. [0]

You're delusional. Get help.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion

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