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Comment by nesquena | Hacker News Reader

What a great idea to go around calling other people stupid for creating personal open-source projects that they enjoy using, mocking their competence and treating them as if they should go away because they aren't as good as you. What a productive use of a developer's time.

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Even stranger is the fact that harther isn't exactly a novice programmer: apparently, she's part of Mozilla [1], and wrote brain.js [2], a neural network library in JavaScript with almost 1,400 stars on GitHub.

[1] https://twitter.com/harthvader

[2] https://github.com/harthur/brain

brain looks pretty cool and I also noticed she not only works at mozilla but also regularly speaks at conferences. Weird how judging a person's competence based on looking at a single for fun open source project may not be a great idea.

which is doubly embarrassing for the people insulting her because odds are anyone taking the time chastising someone's hacky duct tape script as if it were a Real Thing Worth Talking About probably has no comprehension of real algorithmic work, real computer science, like that needed to implement neural nets.

To be fair implementing a simple neural network is probably about par for the course as a sophomore CS undergrad project.

The basic algorithms you need can be found via google.

In my (extremely limited) experience the much more difficult part is using them to successfully solve real world problems.

Sure. My point is anyone who really seriously gets on their high horse about how great they are by looking at a simple little script that is essentially background noise for professional engineers are probably pretty far removed from even a sophomore CS undergrad level of sophistication.

Certainly, although in my experience smart , sophisticated people are by no means under-represented in the "asshole" population.

IMO the problem comes when you have people who's entire ego is based on being smart. In the past they probably had their egos massaged by getting the highest test scores in class etc and "winning" in that sense. Since the world does not work like that anymore they feel that they have to "win" at github instead.

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