Heres some foundation for “hacky” in computer science: Calling a piece of code hacky isn’t the same as saying it’s bad, the code just doesn’t have infrastructure around it. You can probably already piece together why they call hackers hackers, and hackathons hackathons — hacks just need to run once. The whole goal of hacking is to succeed once.
Most big companies started with a hacky solution. Twitter’s hack was literally input.truncate(140) in the language it was written in (Ruby). Instagram was an image filtering app. OKCupid was a questionnaire. Reddit started with posts and comments in the same database table. By contrast, not hacky code has thorough tests, runs in different environments, and generally supports a team of developers working on it. It’s in a shared repository somewhere, carefully maintained like a zen garden. When your software needs to run for two, three, or ten years… you can reuse some concept from a hacky prototype, but it can’t stay hacky. https://medium.com/@tholex/what-is-hacky-code-18308018fc33 Thinks being hacky isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it might not have been the goal at the time to flush out all the possibilities and productionize the code into a zen garden. However, we shouldn’t remove code just because its hacky either. Sam On Sep 10, 2019, at 9:14 AM, Anirudh Subramanian <anirudh2...@gmail.com<mailto:anirudh2...@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi Pedro, I don't see anything "destructive" with Chris asking for justification for you calling something "hacky". The only email in this thread where I see ad hominems and disrespectful comments is your email. On Sat, Sep 7, 2019, 10:18 PM Pedro Larroy <pedro.larroy.li...@gmail.com<mailto:pedro.larroy.li...@gmail.com>> wrote: Apache mentors should have a look at these reincident harassment and destructive behaviors which demotivate contributions and take action. It takes only one bad apple to ruin a community. The mobile solution that is known to work as of know is cross compiling with "ci/build.py -p build.android_armv8" or "build.android_armv7". The only advantage of amalgamation is to provide a smaller binary that we could accomplish with the C preprocessor. My technical contributions speak for themselves, including porting MXNet to Android and ARM and helping many users run MXNet in Jetson, Raspberry Pi and Android amongst many other topics. I have never been disrespectful to anyone. I'm entitled to my own technical opinions about amalgamation or any other piece of code whatsoever, that's no personal disrespect to anyone and perfectly valid. If you are not interested in this project anymore, do us all a favor and stop trolling and being toxic. If you want my respect, step up your technical contributions, be positive and encourage others, this including commits, I haven't seen for many months, please be positive and constructive. This scorched-earth attitude is only reflecting bad on you. I'm certainly not interested in your ad-hominems or unasked for technical advice, which to be honest, showing poor judgment and ignorance. Myself and others have come up with numbers, graphs, metrics and arguments and have been met with dismissal, trolling and sea-lioning. I have recieved your insults via public and private channels (such as linkedin) as have others. This is not ok and has to stop. If you have something personal against me or against your former employer, this is not the right place or forum. On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 3:56 PM Chris Olivier <cjolivie...@gmail.com<mailto:cjolivie...@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi Pedro, While I was not involved with amalgamation or its development in any way, can you please refrain from referring to the work of others as a "hacky solution"? This is derogatory slang and the statement was not supported with any justification for such name-calling. Someone spent a good deal of time on this solution at some point in time and I am sure it worked for its purpose at that time -- I think it was used in the original javascript port as well, actually -- and it is disrespectful to call their efforts "hacky". Please respect what came before. Thanks for understanding, -Chris On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 3:07 PM Pedro Larroy < pedro.larroy.li...@gmail.com<mailto:pedro.larroy.li...@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi I would like to propose to remove amalgamation from MXNet and CI, users have reported that they couldn't use it successfully in Android, and instead they were able to use the cross compiled docker build successfully. Any reason why we shouldn't remove this hacky solution? Pedro.
