I know neither you nor Andy in person. But from reading Andy online, I get the impression that he is bright, talented, and kind. From reading you, I get the impression of someone bright, talented, and immature. I value your technical contributions here, but at times fear your overall impact on the site.
Banning you from a project is not hypocritical on his part -- it's exactly what he's talking about. He feels, rightly or wrongly, that it's better to remove the source of incivility than to put up with it. You've got a lot of obvious talent and knowledge, but yes, Andy might be a good role model for civil interactions.
No, I don't care for iPads either. My fear is that HN is a wonderful but fragile community. You offer a mix of knowledge and irreverence (I'm pretty sure I vote you up here more than I vote you down), but those who see you winning attention for snide but insightful comments are more likely to copy the snideness than the insight. I like that civil public discussion is still possible here, and want to keep it that way.
"... I'm tired of people who confuse being verbally abusive with "not getting along." ... I'm tired of people who think that verbal abuse of another human is ever acceptable. ..."
It was Andy Lester who took up the slack and organised programmers for the orphaned Perl code written by the late Iain "Spoon" Truskett, fellow Aussie & Perl programmer ~ http://search.cpan.org/~spoon/ who passed away in 2004. For any negative stories you hear there are always going to be some positive ones. Further reading here ~ http://use.perl.org/~goon/journal/16893
I'm sure there's some deep context to that - could you share/link? Claiming that kind of experience juxtaposed with an article like this screams of the importance of us drawing our own conclusions rather than taking either of your words for it.
I forget. I was giving him patches for HTML::Tidy, then some whining occurred on IRC, then he "banned" me. Wish I still had the logs, but it was like 4 years ago.
The context was my asking "why didn't The Perl Foundation get any Google SoC projects?" I then implied that they don't do a whole lot, because I checked their IRS filings and noticed that they had several hundred thousand dollars sitting in a checking account. Why not put it in a savings account?
We then get to being banned from contributing to HTML::Tidy:
22:48 <@jrockway> fine, i will happily mentor someone in an area i am familar
with
22:48 <@jrockway> i have no problem with that at all
22:48 <@jrockway> next year.
22:48 <@Andy> That doesn't do much good now.
22:48 <@jrockway> what can i do this year?
22:48 <@Andy> Well, for one you can quit denigrating TPF about how useless it
is.
22:49 <@jrockway> no, i can't do that
22:49 <@jrockway> what's something real i can do
22:49 <@Andy> I'm sorry to hear that you can't do that.
22:49 <@Andy> because I think that's pretty much a requirement to help out.
22:49 <@jrockway> no, it's not
22:49 <@Andy> Nobody wants help from someone who's complaining about things.
22:49 <@jrockway> you should accept help even if people don't like you (not you
personally, i mean the TPF)
22:49 <@jrockway> fine
22:49 <@jrockway> i will continue to whine then
22:50 <@jrockway> that's good for everyone
22:50 <@Andy> I have no doubt about that.
22:50 * jrockway goes to work on perl projects
22:50 <@elliot> :/
22:50 <@Andy> Not HTML::Tidy, though.
22:50 <@jrockway> "THATS MINE DON'T TOUCH IT"
22:50 <@jrockway> so constructive
22:51 <@Andy> No, I just don't need help from someone who bashes and denigrates.
22:51 <@jrockway> that's childish, but whatever
22:53 <@Andy> Not sure how choosing to decide who to work with is childish.
22:53 <@jrockway> meritocracy
22:54 <@jrockway> i accept patches / comments from anyone
22:54 <@jrockway> if the code is good, i could care less who gives it to me
22:54 <@Andy> Open source is about more than code.
22:54 <@jrockway> to you
22:55 <@hobbs> actually its motto is "shut up and show us the code"
22:55 <@jrockway> to me it is about code and solving problems
22:55 <@jrockway> hobbs++
22:55 <@Andy> Not all problems are solved through code.
22:56 <@jrockway> to be honest i haven't run into anyone that i have personal
problems with
22:56 <@jrockway> and mst is often not very nice to me
22:56 <@chargrill> well, mst is often a jerk to a lot of people.
22:56 <@jrockway> i get over it, he's a good programmer
22:56 <@jrockway> he says the same about me
22:56 <@Andy> jrockway: There are plenty of people you have personal problems
with.
22:56 <@jrockway> i don't like that implication
22:56 <@Andy> OK.
22:57 <@jrockway> i have no problems with you, i have a problem with TPF
22:57 <@jrockway> i am not the only one
22:57 <@Andy> I wasn't talking about me.
22:58 <@jrockway> do we really need to focus on "who likes who"
22:59 <@jrockway> i mean, there's myspace for that
22:59 <@Andy> It's a key part of open source.
22:59 <@Andy> And I'd ask you to consider that.
23:01 <@jrockway> so what's the resolution to this?
23:01 <@jrockway> i still dislike TPF, and you have one fewer developer on
HTML::Tidy?
23:01 <@jrockway> that is always good
23:01 <@jrockway> big win for everyone
Incidentally, a few people created a new TPF-like entity. So I must have not been the only person in the world that didn't think they were amazingly effective or transparent.
You were the one who said he liked the new feature that comment scores are hidden because it means that your snarky comments get more upvotes. This is exactly the attitude the article complains about, so that you got banned from his projects might not actually point to a problem on his side.
Dude... look at it this way. Imagine that post was the first thing someone read upon arriving at HN. It represents the community. Do you think they'd want to stay and participate?
