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by gorjusborg 1037 days ago
> They get no citations and eventually have to leave academia.

You're welcome?

Seriously though, adding the citation nag to software is two wrongs not making a right.

As a software user, it isn't my fault academia hasn't figured out how to reward software contribution. If they can't figure it out, finding a greener pasture makes a lot of sense.
1 comments
thomasahle 1037 days ago
> As a software user, it isn't my fault academia hasn't figured out how to reward software contribution.

If you're not writing papers, the citation notification isn't for you. Can't you just mute it and continue using the software without worries?

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gorjusborg 1037 days ago
> Can't you just mute it and continue using the software without worries?

It _seems_ like a reasonable thing to ask, it's a minor inconvenience, really, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is that the behavior doesn't fit the unix philosophy. Tools are meant to do one thing, and do it well. They get composed in pipelines to get jobs done. In these pipelines, the communication medium is text, via stdin/stdout/stderr. If a tool is unpredictable in what it puts out via text, it can make the whole pipeline unpredictable, or at least more complicated.

If it _was_ okay, we should welcome everyone putting nag features in these simple cli tools, right? Well, I'd be on board with that as long as I can blanket disable all of them. If not, let's just leave our political/professional/begging messaging outside our computing tools. Okay?

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