The Rust project has a burnout problem • Hacker News Board

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#151

Post by Uehreka » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 3:42 PM UTC

actualwitch wrote: post #114

rkangel wrote: post #10

Do other people react as strongly as I did to the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? The post is generally "well" written with good grammar and punctuation so I find it strange - it feels like a style choice. But the style choice just instinctively makes part of my brain feel like it's written by a child.

HN guidelines has this to say about contents of your comment: Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Like many invocations of the HN guidelines: “interesting” is in the eye of the beholder and the amount of discussion prompted by this comment and upvotes it garnered would seem to indicate that this stylistic choice is in fact quite interesting.

The HN mod team may find it not to their taste, but they don’t get to decide what is or isn’t generally interesting.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#152

Post by ninkendo » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

berkes wrote: post #121

ninkendo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a baffling decision for GitHub to make any product decisions based on engagement. They don’t even serve ads, what benefit do they have to an engaged user?

Engagement isn't just driving ads. It's driving engagement: The "toothbrush"-factor we called that in app-development: do you have an app that people pick up like their toothbrush: without much thought, several times a day? Engagement means people have you in their workflow, on their radar. I would love it if Github is something that I don't have to think of, that is invisible and out of my mind. I'd love it if it's…

I think I know what engagement is, but I’m wondering why you think Microsoft benefits from me being engaged with GitHub?

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#153

Post by symlinkk » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 3:47 PM UTC

jynelson wrote: post #32

gtirloni wrote: post #7

> new contributors make PRs. they make silly simple mistakes due to lack of experience; you point them out and they get fixed. this can be fun, for a time. what it’s teaching you is that you personally are responsible for catching mistakes. Every team I've worked with that was feeling exhausted about code contributions actually needed to focus on better documenting guidelines but most importantly, improve CI. Catchin…

rust's CI is quite extensive actually; there's a talk on it here: https://www.pietroalbini.org/blog/shipping-a-compiler-every-... CI is good. more tests are good. but there's a limit to how much they can catch. here is an example: there is an internal type checking API called [`resolve_vars_if_possible`]( https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/nightly-rustc/rustc_infer/... ). this needs to be called on the output of almos…

Just tell that verbatim to ChatGPT and it will catch it for you.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#154

Post by kevincox » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 3:47 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #57

rkangel wrote: post #10

Do other people react as strongly as I did to the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? The post is generally "well" written with good grammar and punctuation so I find it strange - it feels like a style choice. But the style choice just instinctively makes part of my brain feel like it's written by a child.

My brain tends to self-correct what it's reading these kinds of posts, and considering the author of the post has replied to the comments here in the same style, I see two options for the style. It's either done for speed, or the shift key is mapped to something else, making typing one-off capitals harder. That might equally be a stylistic choice, but I my gut says it's not.

I also didn't notice until I saw this comment. But to be fair I did skim the article.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#155

Post by humanrebar » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 3:48 PM UTC

gray_-_wolf wrote: post #101

markphip wrote: post #3

This is a good description of what life is like working on almost any significant open source project. The only thing not included was the comments from overly entitled users that saps whatever morale and energy you have left. Probably best he did not include that though as that is what all discussion would be about. I am not sure what to do about the burnout problem. The way he described it is very on point though.…

> I think they also encourage drive-by contributions I realize I am in minority, but for me, if project uses a mailing list I am more likely to do a drive-by contribution (compared to no contribution at all). Just doing git send-email is much easier compared to figuring out how to create whatever pull request is called in whatever forge the specific project is using.

I'm the opposite. There's no clear notion of status, remaining concerns, priority, etc. in an email thread.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#156

Post by aftbit » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 3:50 PM UTC

rkangel wrote: post #10

Do other people react as strongly as I did to the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? The post is generally "well" written with good grammar and punctuation so I find it strange - it feels like a style choice. But the style choice just instinctively makes part of my brain feel like it's written by a child.

Wow a lot of people have very strong feelings about this. Parent comment is fine but some of the replies are quite out there, calling this "arrogant" and "dumb". Let me provide my own opinion.

IMO content over style. Nobody owes you adherence to a particular set of rules, nor do they owe you their thoughts at all. If the writer's style is a bridge too far for you, kindly just close the tab, don't complain about it. Certainly don't use hateful words to describe them.

Remember, the same English teachers who taught you to capitalize also taught you that there is no singular "they" and that you should use "he/she" instead.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#157

Post by aftbit » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 3:52 PM UTC

nightowl_games wrote: post #73

I'm a game dev at a small studio. I have a discord full of gamers who all want me to do something or at least pay attention to them. Every time I release something new, someone hates it. It was hard for a bit, but I've been doing this for years. Honestly you just gotta tune out the noise and prioritize what you want. Open source project is a bit harder because you have to collaborate more than I have to collaborate w…

Relevant XKCD as always:

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#158

Post by bArray » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 3:58 PM UTC

la_oveja wrote: post #16

bArray wrote: post #9

I see a trend in blogging to stop using capital letters - it makes it much harder to read. It's not even like they don't know how they work: > rotate responsibilities. don’t have the same person assigned to the majority of PRs.

i take it as an aesthetic move, like using weird monospace fonts... adds the writers personality to it

It's not that unique or quirky when a considerable number of people are doing it. There are also other things like emojis, memes, etc, but all lowercase makes it simply harder to read.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#159

Post by herdcall » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 4:09 PM UTC

Not sure if this is Rust specific though; if anything Rust is easier to review because the compiler takes care of a large class of problems like use-after-free or race conditions. You let the compiler do the "review" on your behalf on most common issues and mainly focus on logic errors, which makes life much easier IMO for the reviewer.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#160

Post by estebank » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 4:09 PM UTC

sevagh wrote: post #98

layer8 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes across as saying "fuck you" to your readers.

[flagged]

If you think that the project makes "fuck you" decisions at every turn, I invite you to peruse our issue tracker and PR queue.

The burnout problems are because people care too much about making things better, and that is a neverending queue of tasks that seems to get longer and longer.

Someone looking at the tools and documentation and thinking "these people don't care about their users", just makes it evident to me that no matter how much tears, blood and sweat we put on improving things there will be people who think you're either not doing anything or that you're actively harmful to the project. So what's the point then?