javaJake

From my experience, this behavior is common when volunteers answer questions. Personally, I think this behavior that the author is seeing is because volunteer work is thankless and tiring (even with karma) and when you've seen a hundred questions and answered 20 of them the same way, it's easy to fall into the trap of feeling lazy or angry, and get aggressive either way.

This is the behavior I quickly learned to expect and brace myself against whenever I asked a question on IRC in the 2000's. I'd be mocked, the reasons behind my questions would be probed, and eventually I'd get an answer. I realized that If I asked an extremely specific question and, if someone probed, immediately provided full background, the mocking and probing would end, and I'd either get a shrug, or an answer.

This is not intended to excuse the behavior. I have just stopped being surprised when I see it.

When I used this library, I was impressed with how their design not only kept their own code clean, but made it incredibly intuitive and fun to write clean code on top of their API. Coworkers also looked at that code years later and went out of their way to give positive reviews of Lua.

#4 has introduced an interesting problem in the MMO space. By allowing scripting in WoW, players were penalized either because they couldn't keep up, or the general community would demand they run parsers to tell that they couldn't keep up. The vanilla experience was no longer good enough. FFXIV decided to ban any client customization in an attempt to avoid these kinds of toxic situations:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/5uxmx8/yoships_offic...

I only have anecdotal evidence in the form of friends making money on consistently-profitable online trades in a variety of marketplaces. It seems intuitive to believe that, wherever there is a market, there is a possibility of bartering as a living.

Really interesting thoughts coming from the groff mailing list:

"Because of poverty owing to neglect -- that is, necessity being the mother of invention -- the author of the article I linked to decided he'd like color in his man pages. Where did he turn? A style sheet in the groff framework, perhaps? Any kind of improvement to the semantic-display connection? No, he reached about as far down as possible, and tweaked the control sequences emitted to the emulator. Because he could. Because, in a way, he had to, insofar as that strange bit of arcania gave him the most leverage.

"So, yes, he's still working with a text terminal, after a fashion. But the programmability of that text terminal is an accident of history, its feature set long since made obsolete -- not useless, but out-moded -- by graphical displays and GUIs. That he reached for that particular tool is a measure of how far we have come, and how far we have not."

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2016-08/msg00034.ht...

Thread root: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2016-08/msg00013.ht...

I also am a Christian and was surprised not to see more of these responses on HN.

I think if you're looking for the meaning of life, religions are easily worth the research.

I think the reality is that religion is looked down upon because it's "old" and existed before modern scientific methods existed. Nevertheless, it still provides some of the most consistent answers to the meaning of life that we have available, and they've been trusted, followed, and researched for far longer than any of the other ideas.

Google Wave used operational transformation in their protocol[1]. I've always assumed that the lessons learned on Wave got reused in the Google Docs rewrite.

[1] http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transfor...

Incredible read. Thank you for sharing that post.

I think you are definitely catching on to what is going on. Microsoft is only hanging around because of the monopoly it has in its grip. As soon as Windows drops in usage (which, by the way, is happening) Microsoft will drop in ranks.