3.5. Ego-lessness in the Hackers Community

While prestige is important to the Hackers community, prime hackers tend to be humble and self-depracating.
This is done to give the impression that the maintainer of the project can judge other people's work, and is not too much impressed by his own work.
It is also done to give a sense of imperfection: "my project is perfect? No way! It cannot do x, y, and z". And soon patches that implement them are followed.
Similarly, hackers do not publicly criticize the competency of a peer as a programmer. They do not say: "he is a bad programmer". At most they say: "he writes bad code". (this is as opposed to the Academia where such criticism is common).
Also, no one says he is fixing "Richard Stallman's bugs" but rather "Emacs' bugs". You can say "Project X's code is wonderfully ugly" but you usually don't attribute it to its developers.