The post by the author (who I believe is a lobste.rs member) ends on a sad note. I don’t think just the publicity caused this crash in enthusiasm - I’m guessing the internet was the internet and people were unkind to them which I can totally see killing enthusiasm for an endeavor, especially if the spotlight was shone too early.
To the author - I hope, once this 15min of hell has passed, your motivation comes back, and you keep working on it, since there must have been interesting problems in that space you wanted to solve.
But the author is known for being rather obnoxious and rude towards other projects he disagrees with, and was even banned from lobsters for this reason. So in this case I don’t feel too bad.
He’s also made significant effort - and improvement! - on those fronts.
I have first-hand experience of interacting with him on IRC, as a paying customer requesting with questions about his products. I wish all vendors were as approachable, polite, and direct as he is.
Re. the note on his ban - I too find myself disappointed in the world (of software) at times, as do many of my friends and colleagues. I note though that few people take the step of launching our own commercial products as a means of improving it.
I too have issues dealing with my frustration and textual interactions don’t make it any easier. Without easily accessible peers to discuss things with, it falls to the online community to help people cultivate their opinions.
I am thankful that many people here have the patience.
I agree that it’s time lobsters moved on from this and stop bringing up DeVault’s past mistakes.
However, this isn’t a “rumor” or “hate”. They were simply stating a well-known fact about Drew’s aggressiveness and rudeness, one which I’ve also experienced and seen others experience. (To be fair, I’ve noticed good behavior has improved a lot over the past 12 months.)
Jeez, I really look forward to the day when lobsters can discuss Drew’s work before dragging up shit from 1 year ago.
I think it certainly is hate. These comments seem a lot like targeted harassment to me. Most of the commenters don’t seem to have first hand experience with what they are talking about. They also appear whenever drew does something good which just detracts from everything.
Ah, I am no longer as active on lobste.rs as I used to be and I missed that Drew got banned. I just searched through his history but didn’t find the smoking gun that got him banned. Anyhoo, sad all around.
There’s some context in this thread, though it doesn’t provide an exact reason.
I had a long response to his Wayland rant because I think the generalizations in that post were simply insulting at best and it drove me crazy.
He is a clever engineer, but he has a tendency to invite controversy and alienate people for no reason. After that rant of his, I lost any desire to ever engage with him again or use his products if I can help it, which may be extreme, but after numerous similar exchanges I think it’s unfortunately necessary.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: When you drag in giant issues to accuse people of being hypocritical, you're just picking a fight. Don't do this.]
This is both a red herring distracting from the actual issue and untrue. Firstly, I try to prioritize local companies and small businesses over large online retailers. Secondly, it’s possible to use a product (like an iPhone or Android device) and not completely agree with the company.
With Drew, I simply haven’t had a single good interaction with him and don’t have a compelling enough reason to look past that and use his products.
Saying you’re tired of another person’s take without giving any reason is a pretty vacuous and unnecessary comment. The button for minimizing threads is there for a reason.
Health care and related fields have a concept of the quality-adjusted life year, which is used to measure impacts of various treatments, or policies, by assigning a value to both the quantity and quality of life. There are grounds for critiquing the way the concept is used in those fields, but the idea probably ports well to our own field where we could introduce the concept of the quality-adjusted code unit. Let’s call it QALC to mirror QALY for life-years.
The gist of the argument here is that while there are some people who produce an above-average number of QALCs, if they are sufficiently “abrasive” they may well end up driving away other people who would also have produced some number of QALCs. So suppose that a is the number of QALCs produced by such a person, and l is the number lost by their driving away of other people. The argument, then, is that in many cases l > a or, more simply, that the person’s behavior causes a net loss overall, even when taking quality (or “good engineering” or whatever synonym you prefer) into account.
My own anecdotal experience of involvement in various open-source projects is that we often drastically overestimate the “abrasive” person’s QALCs and underestimate the QALCs of those who are driven away, making it almost always a net loss to tolerate such behavior.
It’s not about “refusing to respect good engineering”. It’s saying that if we can get only n QALCs from “respecting” (i.e., tolerating the behavior of this person) versus k > n QALCs from not, then “not” is the correct engineering choice because it leads to the greatest amount of QALCs.
Or expressed differently: in general, the number of mega-hyper-genius programmers whose contributions are so far beyond what any other person or group of people could ever achieve… rounds to zero, and as such we do not need to entertain claims that some particular person’s misbehavior must be tolerated on grounds of their being such a programmer.
To me the opposite of “I respect his engineering” is “I don’t respect his engineering.”
If the question is whether people like Drew should be banned from discussion, I don’t think he is really that abrasive or disrespectful. Only the admins know what they banned him for, but I haven’t seen anyone claim that it was much worse than other things people can point to.
I’m 100% OK with bad engineering decisions (within reason) if it means my life is more pleasant. If hanging out with brilliant assholes makes your life more pleasant, then by all means, go for it!
It took me 20 minutes to pay for something on my iPhone today because the app wouldn’t let me scroll down to the “submit” button, and the website wouldn’t either until I looked up how to hide the toolbar on Safari. That doesn’t make my life more pleasant.
Besides, you aren’t forced to hang out with people just because they are allowed to post.
I think this mindset is what has lead to the success of the Rust project in such a short span of time. It turns out that having a diverse community of respectful individuals invites more of them and leads to better problem solving.
Are you implying that only difficult and abrasive engineers do good work? Because I have personal experience of the opposite, not to speak of numerous historical accounts.
I like the idea of a free software search engine, because it’s an improvement over doing searches using site:github.com, which is what I often resort to. I like the idea of an ecosystem of specialized search engines.
I hope that Drew or somebody else takes this idea and turns it into a working system. I would definitely use it.
For sure. Not to mention that this sort of search is feeding into the GitHub monopoly of code forges where folks want adoption and to get their name out so stick with the closed, proprietary platform. The same for tagging on Reddit, et. al. But with all the SEO spam, naturally, these options are more fruitful than the generic search of blogs with nothing to add or sites regurgitating StackOverflow post answers.
We need something to free up search, so on principle I support these sorts of endeavors. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up back at Yahoo!-style directories at this point.
I agree. Putting a notice at the top of the page that this is an experimental work in progress. It could also say something about not sharing on social media too.
Archive.org has a copy that actually works here. By actually works, I mean it indexed a search for “test” as well as the pages that were up at the time, so you can see a bit of what it looks like. It might have only had wikipedia indexed at the time, hence his not wanting it to be public.
I think it is a shame this got out of the box before it was ready, but at the same time I would never put a testbed on the Internet writ large with just a “please don’t tell anyone.” Gate it with some form of access control, even if that’s a good old htaccess file for the specific users you are having test it.
This is a neat idea, but having used dozens of special-purpose search engines over the years, I always end up back on Google because it just works and I don’t have to decide where to go looking.
The only other search to have made its way into my daily toolbox is Wikipedia.
Video search works better in DuckDuckGo than in google, since DDG indexes more than just YouTube and monetized google partners, and since DDG shows results in a grid rather than in a linear list.
Searching for academic papers works better in Google Scholar than in Google.
General (nonspecialized) searches work better in Google than in DDG, however…
I use DuckDuckGo as my default (due to better privacy), and add a bang operator for specialized searches.
!g does a google search
!w does a wikipedia search
!gsch does a google scholar search
!r does a reddit search
!ia looks up the following URL in the Internet wayback machine (on internet archive)
!iarchive searches the internet archive for old books, movies, etc (there’s a ton of content that never shows up in google or DDG)
!git does a github search
!wa sends it to Wolfram Alpha
and so on…
The bang operators are just so convenient that it makes more sense to use DDG as my default search. And I do find that Google works way worse now than it used to back in the day. I need the bang operators for a lot of searches to be successful.
!map takes me directly into a Google Map search. This means no mouse clicking. I just type CTRL-L !map <keywords>
Although Google Map has the best searching, I find that Open Street Map often has by far the best quality maps (also better than Apple maps). Better information on walking trails, parking lots, even the street name labelling is better.
!osm does an Open Street Map search (locations and addresses only, can’t do keyword searches for businesses)
Also blog post: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-07-15-searchhut/
The post by the author (who I believe is a lobste.rs member) ends on a sad note. I don’t think just the publicity caused this crash in enthusiasm - I’m guessing the internet was the internet and people were unkind to them which I can totally see killing enthusiasm for an endeavor, especially if the spotlight was shone too early.
To the author - I hope, once this 15min of hell has passed, your motivation comes back, and you keep working on it, since there must have been interesting problems in that space you wanted to solve.
Generally I’d agree with this sentiment.
But the author is known for being rather obnoxious and rude towards other projects he disagrees with, and was even banned from lobsters for this reason. So in this case I don’t feel too bad.
He’s also made significant effort - and improvement! - on those fronts.
I have first-hand experience of interacting with him on IRC, as a paying customer requesting with questions about his products. I wish all vendors were as approachable, polite, and direct as he is.
Re. the note on his ban - I too find myself disappointed in the world (of software) at times, as do many of my friends and colleagues. I note though that few people take the step of launching our own commercial products as a means of improving it.
commercial and ethical products
They might be opinionated, but they are still free software. That’s really not typical nowadays.
I have noticed some introspection, e.g. https://drewdevault.com/2022/07/09/Fediverse-toxicity.html.
I too have issues dealing with my frustration and textual interactions don’t make it any easier. Without easily accessible peers to discuss things with, it falls to the online community to help people cultivate their opinions.
I am thankful that many people here have the patience.
Agreed; and that’s a large part of the reason I made the switch to sourcehut from GitLab.
In this case you are the one being obnoxious and rude. You don’t know the guy, don’t spread rumors and hate.
I agree that it’s time lobsters moved on from this and stop bringing up DeVault’s past mistakes.
However, this isn’t a “rumor” or “hate”. They were simply stating a well-known fact about Drew’s aggressiveness and rudeness, one which I’ve also experienced and seen others experience. (To be fair, I’ve noticed good behavior has improved a lot over the past 12 months.)
Jeez, I really look forward to the day when lobsters can discuss Drew’s work before dragging up shit from 1 year ago.
I think it certainly is hate. These comments seem a lot like targeted harassment to me. Most of the commenters don’t seem to have first hand experience with what they are talking about. They also appear whenever drew does something good which just detracts from everything.
The reasons were not made public and it’s bad form to attack someone who can’t respond.
Ah, I am no longer as active on lobste.rs as I used to be and I missed that Drew got banned. I just searched through his history but didn’t find the smoking gun that got him banned. Anyhoo, sad all around.
There’s some context in this thread, though it doesn’t provide an exact reason.
I had a long response to his Wayland rant because I think the generalizations in that post were simply insulting at best and it drove me crazy.
He is a clever engineer, but he has a tendency to invite controversy and alienate people for no reason. After that rant of his, I lost any desire to ever engage with him again or use his products if I can help it, which may be extreme, but after numerous similar exchanges I think it’s unfortunately necessary.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: When you drag in giant issues to accuse people of being hypocritical, you're just picking a fight. Don't do this.]
This is both a red herring distracting from the actual issue and untrue. Firstly, I try to prioritize local companies and small businesses over large online retailers. Secondly, it’s possible to use a product (like an iPhone or Android device) and not completely agree with the company.
With Drew, I simply haven’t had a single good interaction with him and don’t have a compelling enough reason to look past that and use his products.
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Yeah, I’m surprised and somewhat sad. He’s difficult and abrasive sometimes, but I respect his engineering.
im so tired of this sentiment
Saying you’re tired of another person’s take without giving any reason is a pretty vacuous and unnecessary comment. The button for minimizing threads is there for a reason.
I’m also tired of the sentiment that allows someone to be shitty just because they’re good at solving a problem.
Unfortunately (?) you can’t disallow someone from being shitty.
One can for certain exclude them from a group of friends that you care for.
This comment is inappropriate. I am sure that the tone and attitude here is not a fit for the community what we are aiming for on lobsters
The opposite leads to bad engineering decisions.
Health care and related fields have a concept of the quality-adjusted life year, which is used to measure impacts of various treatments, or policies, by assigning a value to both the quantity and quality of life. There are grounds for critiquing the way the concept is used in those fields, but the idea probably ports well to our own field where we could introduce the concept of the quality-adjusted code unit. Let’s call it QALC to mirror QALY for life-years.
The gist of the argument here is that while there are some people who produce an above-average number of QALCs, if they are sufficiently “abrasive” they may well end up driving away other people who would also have produced some number of QALCs. So suppose that
ais the number of QALCs produced by such a person, andlis the number lost by their driving away of other people. The argument, then, is that in many casesl > aor, more simply, that the person’s behavior causes a net loss overall, even when taking quality (or “good engineering” or whatever synonym you prefer) into account.My own anecdotal experience of involvement in various open-source projects is that we often drastically overestimate the “abrasive” person’s QALCs and underestimate the QALCs of those who are driven away, making it almost always a net loss to tolerate such behavior.
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by what metric
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I have no opinions on Drew but you are being astoundingly obnoxious.
It’s not about “refusing to respect good engineering”. It’s saying that if we can get only
nQALCs from “respecting” (i.e., tolerating the behavior of this person) versusk > nQALCs from not, then “not” is the correct engineering choice because it leads to the greatest amount of QALCs.Or expressed differently: in general, the number of mega-hyper-genius programmers whose contributions are so far beyond what any other person or group of people could ever achieve… rounds to zero, and as such we do not need to entertain claims that some particular person’s misbehavior must be tolerated on grounds of their being such a programmer.
To me the opposite of “I respect his engineering” is “I don’t respect his engineering.”
If the question is whether people like Drew should be banned from discussion, I don’t think he is really that abrasive or disrespectful. Only the admins know what they banned him for, but I haven’t seen anyone claim that it was much worse than other things people can point to.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Pruning bickering.]
I’m 100% OK with bad engineering decisions (within reason) if it means my life is more pleasant. If hanging out with brilliant assholes makes your life more pleasant, then by all means, go for it!
It took me 20 minutes to pay for something on my iPhone today because the app wouldn’t let me scroll down to the “submit” button, and the website wouldn’t either until I looked up how to hide the toolbar on Safari. That doesn’t make my life more pleasant.
Besides, you aren’t forced to hang out with people just because they are allowed to post.
By allowing them to post you allow them to hang out in your and the other users’ brains.
there is no tradeoff
we don’t have to accept abusive or toxic people in our communities
I think this mindset is what has lead to the success of the Rust project in such a short span of time. It turns out that having a diverse community of respectful individuals invites more of them and leads to better problem solving.
Are you implying that only difficult and abrasive engineers do good work? Because I have personal experience of the opposite, not to speak of numerous historical accounts.
No.
I like the idea of a free software search engine, because it’s an improvement over doing searches using
site:github.com, which is what I often resort to. I like the idea of an ecosystem of specialized search engines.I hope that Drew or somebody else takes this idea and turns it into a working system. I would definitely use it.
For sure. Not to mention that this sort of search is feeding into the GitHub monopoly of code forges where folks want adoption and to get their name out so stick with the closed, proprietary platform. The same for tagging on Reddit, et. al. But with all the SEO spam, naturally, these options are more fruitful than the generic search of blogs with nothing to add or sites regurgitating StackOverflow post answers.
We need something to free up search, so on principle I support these sorts of endeavors. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up back at Yahoo!-style directories at this point.
So an unfinished search tool went live and got shredded by the public, now the author feels betrayed.
Next time maybe add some big banner “BETA” ?I agree. Putting a notice at the top of the page that this is an experimental work in progress. It could also say something about not sharing on social media too.
Ah the archived version contains
Next is federation between these.
Archive.org has a copy that actually works here. By actually works, I mean it indexed a search for “test” as well as the pages that were up at the time, so you can see a bit of what it looks like. It might have only had wikipedia indexed at the time, hence his not wanting it to be public.
I think it is a shame this got out of the box before it was ready, but at the same time I would never put a testbed on the Internet writ large with just a “please don’t tell anyone.” Gate it with some form of access control, even if that’s a good old htaccess file for the specific users you are having test it.
Edit: Added link to the test form.
“curated set of domains” link is a 404.
As per comments on HN, this project wasn’t supposed to be announced to the public yet.
There’s a blog post now, so it’s public.
This is a neat idea, but having used dozens of special-purpose search engines over the years, I always end up back on Google because it just works and I don’t have to decide where to go looking.
The only other search to have made its way into my daily toolbox is Wikipedia.
Video search works better in DuckDuckGo than in google, since DDG indexes more than just YouTube and monetized google partners, and since DDG shows results in a grid rather than in a linear list. Searching for academic papers works better in Google Scholar than in Google. General (nonspecialized) searches work better in Google than in DDG, however… I use DuckDuckGo as my default (due to better privacy), and add a bang operator for specialized searches.
!gdoes a google search!wdoes a wikipedia search!gschdoes a google scholar search!rdoes a reddit search!ialooks up the following URL in the Internet wayback machine (on internet archive)!iarchivesearches the internet archive for old books, movies, etc (there’s a ton of content that never shows up in google or DDG)!gitdoes a github search!wasends it to Wolfram AlphaThe bang operators are just so convenient that it makes more sense to use DDG as my default search. And I do find that Google works way worse now than it used to back in the day. I need the bang operators for a lot of searches to be successful.
!sdoes a Startpage search, which is Google but without tracking.!maptakes me directly into a Google Map search. This means no mouse clicking. I just type CTRL-L !map <keywords>Although Google Map has the best searching, I find that Open Street Map often has by far the best quality maps (also better than Apple maps). Better information on walking trails, parking lots, even the street name labelling is better.
!osmdoes an Open Street Map search (locations and addresses only, can’t do keyword searches for businesses)So DDG is basically a CLI for the web.
sh-index google.com;)
It would be kinda pointless, no?
The point is to have a curated index.