Very cool idea - Surprised there isn't already someone doing this. Annual surveys are interesting but a bit of a slow feedback loop.
Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#62Very cool idea - Surprised there isn't already someone doing this. Annual surveys are interesting but a bit of a slow feedback loop.
Thank you!
Annual surveys are very interesting to read to see the macro trends, but as you mentioned they can't keep up with the pace of the JS ecosystem.
Furthermore, they cover the major categories (e.g. big frameworks or tooling), but cannot cover the hundreds of different categories that we use on a regular basis (HTTP request library, logging library, tooltip library, XML parsing library, etc.)
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ruby toolbox has a wonderfully simple way of crowdsourcing it -- categorizing a package is as simple as submitting a small yaml PR, e.g. https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog/pull/417/files
I didn't know that (and BTW Ruby-Toolbox is a great source of inspiration) I think the challenge with that is that there's no standardization of categories. Both GitHub and npm have the concept of "topics/keywords" that developers can choose. Problem is that every maintainer chooses slightly different keywords, so it becomes ineffective as a tool for discovery. We still haven't fully figured out what the optimal solu…
> We still haven't fully figured out what the optimal solution might be like.
Recommender system based on the kind of keywords in the description, starred project from main contributors etc
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#64Immediately went looking for how to be a reviewer or who reviewers currently are (vetted), but didn't find anything? Clicking into a package I'm invited to leave a review where I see it's tied solely to my GitHub login. Not bad, but hard to see how the reviews are approved or curated. The centralization could be nicer than having to read a bunch of blog posts to get the gist but I'd rather defer to a proven community…
You got it right! Currently the only way to create an account is through GitHub login (we're going to add more options in the future). That means in order to write a review you have to log in with GitHub. Behind the scenes, text reviews do not show immediately, we go over them and approve them manually, to verify there's not bad behavior, spam, offensive content, etc. We plan on approving each text review ourselves m…
I was going to ask how you plan to prevent fake reviews, but this mostly answers that. Curious to see where you'll go after being stretched too thin.
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You got it right! Currently the only way to create an account is through GitHub login (we're going to add more options in the future). That means in order to write a review you have to log in with GitHub. Behind the scenes, text reviews do not show immediately, we go over them and approve them manually, to verify there's not bad behavior, spam, offensive content, etc. We plan on approving each text review ourselves m…
I was going to ask how you plan to prevent fake reviews, but this mostly answers that. Curious to see where you'll go after being stretched too thin.
Yeah, preventing fake reviews is a tough challenge faced by much larger companies, like Amazon, Google and Facebook.
I don't think anyone has been able to 100% prevent those, so it's still work in progress.
I guess once we cannot do this ourselves, we're going to bring on additional team members to help with this, and once this is not enough, we'll have to use some combination of moderators (not very scalable), crowdsourcing (let users report suspicious reviews), and technology (identify and surface suspicious reviews).
We honestly don't know yet, but we know it's going to be a priority.
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the reference examples would be certificate authorities, ratings agencies, Underwriters Laboratories, ISO9000 or SCAMPI inspectors/auditors, organic/kosher/halal/GMO-free food stamp companies etc. Selling quality marks can be quite lucrative, but you'd definitely need to think about exactly what people buy. And definitely think hard about deep insurance.
Awesome, I'm honestly not deeply familiar with most of those industries (let alone maybe credit rating agencies), but this is definitely a model that we need to explore. Thanks!
The parent comment said it well. This could be a good backup model to work with that could serve as a pivot if it turns out that most developers, like myself, tend to be pretty good at finding a package that fits their needs, but aren't going to read through the entire package to see if it's safe or if it opens connections to some random IP address in the install script.
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#67Good Initiative
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#68Nice, now we can review someone's open source contributions they usually worked for free on.
Just because someone worked free on something does not mean it’s suddenly free of criticism. I’d say it’s healthy to criticize even these projects.
When that criticism is one describing a lacking support for someones issue then yes it is a problem. Its basically a way to coerce developers to give free support against bad reviews.
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#69I hate to be that guy, but should I switch to a browser with javascript just to see the landing page?
Frontend javascript keeps the bubble economy going
Re: Launch HN: Openbase (YC S20) – reviews and insights for open-source packages
#70Do you provide source code auditing?