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Trouble with Diaspora

blog.steveklabnik.com

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Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#131

Post by patrickaljord »

patio11 wrote: post #25
cilantro wrote: post #3

This code was released to developers as an incomplete preview. I'm not sure why people are holding it to the same standards as a finished product that's being released to end users. Seems like a pretext to talk trash.

Their product is released to end users, because the first thing every early adopter is doing with their shiny new host-you-own federated social network is sending out invites.

Invites are not implemented. They have already changed websockets many times since the release. If you have an install you're probably busy merging changes and reconfiguring your web server, flushing the database and debugging it and all people capable of maintaining such an unstable environment realize that it's for testing only, I have yet to meet anyone who's using it to store personal/production data. Stop freaking people out, only devs are playing with it, and if some people are not, this is open source, there's nothing we can do about it.

And may I add, I think it is really great that many public seeds are being deployed, this is the only and best way to test a social federated network, pre-alpha or not.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#133

Post by chegra »

Ok... I'm no clearer on what the problem is than when I started reading the article.

All I got from it was they have security problems. What exactly? where exactly?

"Really, Really, Really Bad" is really subjective. When stating a problem try to be concrete and objective and give examples. For instance, if you think someones cooking is a bit off and you are a chef, say you need a little more salt or pepper or whatever the case maybe. A chef can't simply say it is really, really, really bad, leave such comments to amateurs who don't know what exactly they are experiencing and how exactly to fix it.

If you don't really have the time to address each particular concern then give them a reference to some security books that are essential when developing something like this.

As it stands the community is no better off before than when you wrote this. You should have written an article about "10 security books that are a must read to prevent diaspora mistakes".[I would appreciate it if someone who is knowledge about this wrote something like this]

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#134

Post by dasil003 »

Maro wrote: post #48
ohyes wrote: post #39

This code was written by a bunch of undergraduate college students. This is hiring a bunch of interns (with near zero experience) to implement your product, giving them three months, and then being shocked -- SHOCKED, when the code is not professional grade quality. I was shocked when everyone and their brother was willing to shell out money to a group of completely unproven college students to produce a distributed…

If they re-write, given that they're fairly inexperienced but are probably still sitting on a pile of cash, they run into the Second System Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

"Build one to throw away" seems more applicable here. Context is everything when applying fuzzy jargon.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#135

Post by Batsu »

moron4hire wrote: post #81

This is the problem: college students are terrible programmers. There aren't enough consequences for writing bad code in college. In industry, you learn very quickly that everything you learned in college is minuscule compared to what you actually need to know to work. I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even…

I think you're working too hard on the explanation of what happened here.

I think the problem is that four undergrads were given a quarter million dollars to compete with the largest website on the internet and people expected anything but disaster.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#136

Post by jarin »

psawaya wrote: post #102
moron4hire wrote: post #81

This is the problem: college students are terrible programmers. There aren't enough consequences for writing bad code in college. In industry, you learn very quickly that everything you learned in college is minuscule compared to what you actually need to know to work. I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even…

Plenty of successful tech startups have been launched by students coming straight out of college, so I think the attitude of "sorry kids, better do your time somewhere else first" is very harmful to both students and the industry as a whole. Sure there's a lot they have to learn, but there's no reason why they won't be able to learn by doing. They clearly have all of the funding and motivation they need to get to the…

That first time someone just flat out mercilessly tells you your code is terrible is awesome.

Actually not awesome, because for the rest of your programming career you will realize that your code is terrible.

But awesome because that's when you leave the womb and start down the road to being a good programmer.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#137

Post by Volscio »

agentultra wrote: post #87
Volscio wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were these kids thinking, starting some ambitious software project from scratch without much of a clue how to do it? This is unheard of on the internet!

I don't see what point you're trying to make. My point is that their problem is other peoples' expectations. Their ambition set the bar before they'd written a single line of code. Had they been more humble and waited to ask for a handout afte they had released what they have now I don't think there would be half as many articles hitting HN about how crappy their software is. I think that they released something is g…

I think the "ambitions" you're ascribing to them are based on your own interpretation of events. They sought a little seed money (what was it? $4k?) to try to do something pretty cool. They happened to do it at just the right time and rode a wave of publicity and enthusiasm. Now people like you are saying, well they should have planned it better. Well, they should have released a more mature project before begging for handouts. Well, they should have let security experts do it.

They didn't plan this. But they're giving it a shot.

Haters gon' hate.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#138

Post by mattmanser »

I've seen 'really, really bad' code. This ain't it.

Yeas, it's made some rookie mistakes. Yes, there's a load of things they shouldn't be trusting on postback (silly things like not checking the owner of an object on 'delete' commands).

That's not bad code, that's a bad implementation. That's not knowing what to trust and what not trust cause they've never been screwed up the ass by it yet.

But bad code? No.

The implementations are problems, they need this shit pointed out to them. That is all.

Steve and Patio11 are doing some serious damage to a good project for no apparent reason apart from self promotion. I want to call them nasty names, I really, really do.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#139

Post by didip »

I was totally expecting crap like below when cloning the project:

* literal SQL without escaping (They use Mongo it turns out)

* 10,000 lines of controller action (The biggest one is Photo#create, but far from huge). PS: They use carrierwave, which is AWESOME.

* giant business logic in the views (They use haml and the code is clean).

* Not escaping user's input (OK, there are places where they forgot to put it).

Their code is far from shit. Easily improvable as they gain more developers. Aren't we too quick to judge?

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#140

Post by natrius »

chegra wrote: post #133

Ok... I'm no clearer on what the problem is than when I started reading the article. All I got from it was they have security problems. What exactly? where exactly? "Really, Really, Really Bad" is really subjective. When stating a problem try to be concrete and objective and give examples. For instance, if you think someones cooking is a bit off and you are a chef, say you need a little more salt or pepper or whateve…

The vague references to security bugs are an act of charity.
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