Getting bought out for a ton of cash. Sadly, that's not what happened here.

The blog is useless. I read the Github discussion on the pull request and the revert. Here's what happened:

1. A pull request containing only two very minor changes to comments in the source code was made.
2. Mr. Noordhuis rejected the pull request with a terse "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."
3. A flamewar erupts about the appropriateness and neccessity of the singular "they". Mr. Noordhuis is not participating in the flamewar.
4. The pull request is forced through while the flamewar rages on.
5. Mr. Noordhuis reverts the forced landing on the grounds that it violated project policy. The revert immediately begins to accumulate a fair number of hostile comments.
6. The flamewar intensifies. Allegations are made about Mr. Noordhuis's character.
7. A joyent employee, acting in an official role and using Joyent's official blog, decided to write and publish a text about how Mr. Noordhuis is sexist and would've gotten fired from Joyent on the spot, indirectly calling Mr. Noordhuis an asshole in the process. Joyent, by not taking the text down, implicitly endorses it.
8. Mr. Noordhuis posts into the discussion to point out that the rejection/revert had been made on purely procedural grounds. He simultaneously announces that he will leave the project, which I can fully understand.

After that the flame war goes on. Some people actually point out that Joyent's behavior is highly unprofessional, which the Joyent employee disregards because "'Fired' isn't a gendered word that has larger social ramifications that careless use of pronouns does." So yes; according to Joyent, publicly calling someone so sexist that they would've been fired on the spot is less bad than using "he" in a gender-neutral role. (Bonus points for one woman in the discussion calling the whole thing a "witch burning". For the record, she was also the one person to offer a solution instead of flaming about pronouns.)

If IBM and Oracle worked remotely like that they'd be up to their ears in wrongful termination suits. And libel suits. And, depending on whether insults are an actionable offense in the relevant jurisdiction, suits about that too.

The sad thing is that early on someone offered a perfectly reasonable way of resolving the situation: Mandating the singular "they" in the project's coding guidelines and then floating changes to existing code until they can be mixed in with other refactoring commits. Of course it was completely ignored.


(For the record, I am a proponent of singular-they and I still think that the term "social justice warriors" with all its negative connotations entirely applies here. Many of the people involved completely went off the rails as soon as the pull request was rejected and immediately assumed Mr. Noordhuis to be a moustache-twirling antifeminist villain.)

Not just startups run by kids. Be wary of companies run "like startups" who want to be all kinds of agile by exclusively hiring people who have started but not finished a CS degree because those people are supposedly both experienced (because all CS students are experts in all things computer) and extremely creative (because people over 25 can't keep up). Experience is considered problematic as apparently it translates into higher salaries but not higher skill.

I work in such a hellhole (well, until I'm done with my degree) and the sheer amount of stupid mistakes we're making because nobody has any kind of experience is mindboggling and is the reason why the company has been in damage control mode since 2010. The kicker? The owner of the company is in his 50s. He's still convinced that only CS students can ever be reasonable employees in the IT world.

Not just young bosses can be stupid about hiring.

What's keeping Kickstarter from recouping the lost money from the creator? I haven't read the fine print of the deal between Kickstarter and a creator but I'd be surprised if it didn't contain a clause that allowed them to do exactly that.

Crowdfunding is a bit of a gamble. I've backed a few projects that are massively overdue. On the other hand I also backed Shadowrun Returns and Wasteland 2, both of which are here and immensely enjoyable. And a high-efficiency LED bulb I'd buy again if I needed another one. Aside from Kickstarter I bought myself into the Path of Exile closed beta and PoE became a succesful and very fun game that I spent a lot of time with.

Of course there are some wasted Euros in there. I'm not going to deny that. And I'm still waiting for a few promising-looking games, although at least I get status reports every once in a while. One semi-example for a failed Kickstarter would be Preaching to the Perverted; while the Blu-Ray version works fine and looks great, the promised digital download first turned into an iOS app (I don't own a recent iDevice) and then had to be redone from scratch because Apple wouldn't allow it on their store. If I remember correctly it's still being worked on.

You have to accept that it's always going to be hit-and-miss with crowdfunding. Sometimes you get a polished, fun product that will leave you entirely content with how much money you spent to obtain it. Sometimes you get something disappointing or the project folds due to mismanagement. In my experience the former is more common (even if time overruns are the norm), especially if it's a high-profile project. But it's still a gamble and it's up to you to decide whether you're willing to take it.

The gist of it is that a terrible and untouchable community manager managed to get several backers to a point where they felt that the only effective way to protest a community management issue was to financially hurt the developers. You can find the details online; a search for "mighty number 9 chargebacks" should bring up relevant stories. There's a dash of Gamergate towards the end but it's only tangentially related to the core issue.

I'm completely shocked that when given additional opportunity, you still won't back up your claims.

The bizarre thing is that you're accusing me of "singling out one particular issue based purely on the person implementing it," when you have literally no example of me ever doing that, ever, least of all in this discussion, where if anything I was taking Gruber's side.

Not in any way, no, I did not.

You're a liar.

I agree. I am nearly completely transparent and obvious and clear. I lack pretense or disguise.

No. It's true that the framers and most people who understand politics want the people to be ignorant about most issues in government, because otherwise, the people would be spending too much time watching government and not enough time enjoying life and being productive. Everyone should want to be ignorant about most things, especially most things government does. Otherwise you'll be miserable.

But it's not true that they want people to be ignorant, but with a delusion of lack of ignorance. You're just making things up.

There's no objective reason why it's a bad thing.

I'm a dope because you ... agreed with me? You think that little of yourself?

You're a liar.

Well, yes, people who believe what they are told -- and then profess to know those things -- without investigating it, are stupid.

Gruber was mostly right, although the word "stupid" is probably not what he meant. But the fact is that whoever believed it wasn't a tax, it wouldn't raise rates, it wouldn't force you to change plans and possibly doctors, etc., was ignorant. Not stupid, necessarily, but ignorant. That said, someone who is ignorant and thinks that he actually knows these things is kinda stupid. So all the news folks, for example, who said that what Republicans said about the ACA were lies ... they were stupid.

The fact is that almost everything the GOP said about the ACA was true. Federal funding of abortions, subsidies for illegals, massive government control defined at a later date by an administrator and not Congress, death panels, increased taxes and premiums, decreased choice ... all of it was and is true.

I'd expect an article talking about criminally prosecuting Gruber would at least make reference to some violation of the criminal code. I see no crime. Neither the author nor his interviewee mention any crime. He makes vague references to "Deceit. Fraud. Premeditated felonious theft.," but he simply gave his opinions; he didn't implement anything. The theft was by the government, not him. The fraud was perhaps aided by him, but no court has ever found that government fraud of this type is prosecutable, so prosecuting a private citizen for aiding the government in something that can't be prosecuted makes no sense.

NeXT didn't close up shop, they were bought by Apple. Then they replaced several of Apple's top execs (including the CEO) with their own and used NeXTSTEP as the foundation for the new MacOS. In essence, NeXT bought Apple for minus 400 million Dollars.