Hacker News Reader

Comment by brotchie | Hacker News Reader

There exist two types of people:

1. "Hur hur, sed piped with other tools already does this, you loser, why did you waste your time?"

2. "Cool, a different take on sed written in Javascript. They've written some basic doco and made a npm package, I might try it."

Ignore #1 online and in-person, be friends with #2.

People who adhere to type 1 behaviour are alien to me. I fundamentally don't understand what their motivation is to respond with such harsh criticism. You've liberated some close source, personal tool, into the public domain. There's some group of people, perhaps in the long-tail, that will use this tool, or learn from the source code. Clearly people have expressed interest in the tool (74 stars and 5 forks).

Again, ignore #1, friend #2.

View on HN

I think you've excluded the middle here, (#1.5 perhaps) one who thinks that your code is worthless/dangerous and does not call you a loser.

It can be true that a piece of software is a poor replacement for an existing tool.

It can be true that recommending it as a replacement for that tool is dangerous.

You can make these judgements about a piece of software without an incident like this happening. What's important here, is how you behave once you've made these judgements.

Yeah I mean it's OK to make judgements and think or believe whatever you want. Maybe even tell how a friend or two how silly something seems to you while hanging out. It's a different thing to being a dick to someone publicly on the internet for trying to contribute positively to open-source.

> It can be true that recommending it as a replacement for that tool is dangerous.

Unless you're suggesting that NASA rewrite its rocket guidance subroutines in a brand-new interpreted language or something, it's probably not unequivocally "dangerous." (In that case, I would call the suggester a different word than "loser".) That's the whole point of open-source software: everyone can make their own judgments about what works better for them.

In the specific case of `replace`, if I want to know exactly what the command-line options do, exactly what order the files are being modified in, I can glance over 173 lines of javascript rather than search through the 4.3MB (uncompressed) of the sed source code. Sure, I suppose I'd have to include the Node.js source code to make it a fair comparison, but my point remains: choose the solution that makes the most sense to you.

I'm in the #1.5 category probably.

_But_ it is all about how it is written. Criticism is good when it is constructive, otherwise it is not far from just name calling, badgering and spewing of hate.

Other ways to respond could be "That's a cool idea. I like to use sed" or "checkout my python one-liner".

All those things you highlighted could be true, but that's still not a reason to offend someone.

It depends on who the author is:

* If an 8 year old wrote that, that would awesome and she would become an overnight internet celebrity.

* A Linus Torvalds wrote that -- everyone would become very worried that he is smoking something.

* Someone who is just learning to program -- it is awesome and they should be encouraged to do more of it

* A seasoned programmer -- they should still be encouraged but criticism should be more pronounced "Cool but sed usually works better, were you thinking of some specific feature?".

I agree with this mentality. Its best to just ignore the #1-types out there. Of course, that doesn't remove the sting. I don't use node, so this doesn't fit in my toolchain.

However, I wanted to commend the author on the nice simple interface. In particular, I like the highlighted output showing the changed lines in all files. This is one thing that sed -i doesn't do (although I guess you could cobble it together with sed's backup feature and diff).

Anyway, don't get discouraged by the haters!

>Again, ignore #1, friend #2.

"Forget the insults you receive and remember the compliments. And if you figure out how to do that, let me know"

I guess the point of the #1 is they may be trying to hit you with a clue. sometmes not in a most efficient way, hurted feeling stay in the way of learning.

Perhaps, but comments like "I cannot even make this stuff up" and "eyes bleeding!" are not constructive criticism, just pointless mockery.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com