Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by soatok 1950 days ago
> His comment was a response to your post. Your post discouraged people from writing crypto, because they aren't qualified. This is where you were gatekeeping.

Re-read the post carefully. I included examples of people unwittingly trying to gatekeep me in the past.

The negative part of that post was about scammers and crackpots who, when confronted with constructive feedback about their designs, doubled down insisting they were smarter than their critics.

Being a neophyte doesn't make you a crackpot.

From the article:

> If you’re reading this blog post and feel like learning about cryptography and cryptanalysis and feel put off by the “don’t roll your own crypto” mantra, and its implied gatekeeping, I hope it’s clear by now who that phrase was mostly intended for and why.

(i.e. "NOT YOU" was the implication of that sentence)

The post in question is a lot of things, but it's not a gatekeeping piece.

For that matter, I also previously wrote this one to resist the tendency of gatekeeping in cryptography: https://soatok.blog/2020/06/10/how-to-learn-cryptography-as-...

1 comments

You can be mostly correct about things and still be worthy of criticism (we all are, really). You're taking some mild criticism from Zed way out of context and making it out to be an act of villainy.

That's way too much drama for what's going on here. I know and don't particularly enjoy Zed very much, but honestly he's pretty neutral. He's done a lot of good in his community and has had some nuclear hot takes that have received outsized attention. If you really feel he's as toxic as you say, you shouldn't be giving him more of it.

I don't care about his opinions or takes, I care about the harm he inflicts by reinforcing the beliefs that undermine junior developers' confidence.