In all fairness, the guy was being a dick (no pun intended) to Zed. However, Zed should have kept the insults to the troll and left Github, Powerset, Engine Yard, and the Ruby community out.
The value proposition of the Ruby community has more to do with their mindshare than their technical merit.
Compare and contrast Scientology with Psychiatry. Both communities make similar value propositions: improve mental health.
Scientology is optimized to gain and keep converts and to spread like a viral meme.
Psychiatry is optimized to achieve good treatment outcomes.
Scientology makes more money despite being a less effective form of therapy.
Virality itself is adaptive, so the Ruby community thrives and survives despite being a mediocre technology. Everything about ruby is optimized for gaining converts, attention and cohesion. Hard technical merit is less important in this case than community cohesion, growth, and publicity. Flamewars bring the ruby community publicity and this leads to growth which leads to the survival and replication of ruby.
Erlang and C++ survive on hard technical merits. They take a different evolutionary strategy that requires less propaganda / groupthink.
Just look at the life cycle of communities as if they were a species and it all makes sense.
Scientology makes more money [than the field of psychiatry].
This seems really questionable to me. If we assume 13 psychiatrists per 100K people in 2005 ( http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=523453 ), and just count Europe and the US, that's ~80K psychiatrists, and if they average 120K USD per year, that's nearly 10 billion USD. Scientology had a worldwide income of less than 400 million in 1993 ( http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jD-Xo-q... ), so it would have had to grow by 20 times to rival psychiatry circa 2005.
I think psychiatry (leaving aside everything but actual practicing psychiatrists) probably dwarfs Scientology in total income.
I don't know about the Erlang trolls, but the C++ trolls are out writing shitty internal corporate apps for Windows, leaving no source and forcing a company to use the buggy app in perpetuity.
I've been trolled by people in lots of different "communities." PHP, Postgres, Java, Perl and Lua just to name a few. IMHO if a software community doesn't have jerks and trolls, it's because nobody is using the software. Ruby has its share but I don't find it any worse than the others.
I guess he felt that others besides the troll were having a laugh at his expense, (i.e., the HN Tips guys comments, other penis-oriented repos connected to employees of aforementioned companies) and were, if only indirectly, in on the joke.
Yep, that's what people seem to gloss over when they think I just overreacted. I knew for a fact that several Ruby people considered this hilarious, and that one or more of them worked at github. In that situation, it's either I leave silently (which everyone thinks I should have done), or bring the issue up and make sure everyone knows what's going on. I prefer the latter because it at least lets others come behind me and avoid the problem.
Thankfully, they've fixed the problem now and I don't have to worry about it anymore.
You and others which may have been trolled before and did not "make a fuss". I see many here with a bully mentality, saying that one should just keep their head down and endure the trolls crap and they will go away. Except they won't.
That's a pretty lucid and well written account. I would like to know more about the connection between HackerNewsTips and Github though. Github employees have denied it here on HN.
We haven't shouted this from the rooftops primarily because we're tired of this being the story when it should have focused on the bullying and our addressing of the problem.
No other language community in the world behaves like this.