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Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

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Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#111

Post by coldtrait »

etewiah wrote: post #40

I'd love to resurrect my open source real estate website builder: https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder I was quite active with updating it a few years ago but haven't had the time to work on it recently. On another project of mine I have been using aider and co-pilot and realised I could bring property_web_builder back to life with these tools. It would motivate me massively to do this if at least one or t…

I'm just at a beginner level with Ruby on Rails, but I am interested in working on it.

Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#112

Post by bitfl0wer »

Polyphony is an in-development chat service, meant to be a direct competitor to and replacement for Discord. Polyphony offers a subset of Discords v9 HTTP API, excluding some of the more bloated features while keeping the fun yet functional experience. Self-hosting and federation are key features of Polyphony and thus are supposed to have a mass-market ready user experience associated with them. For this reason, we are also building polyproto - a new, „boring“, extendable identity and message federation protocol, with polyproto-chat being the general purpose Discord/Matrix-like chat platform protocol for interoperability between different services.

Here is a list of things that we could use some help with: * The core polyproto HTTP API routes need to be streamlined - as in, trying to achieve a similar thing on two different routes should be done in a similar way (https://docs.polyphony.chat/APIs/core/). No code experience needed, just some knowledge on HTTP REST API best practices, if possible. * There are some unfinished polyproto HTTP API routes, which need to be designed snd documented (https://docs.polyphony.chat/APIs/core/). * No code experience needed, just some knowledge on HTTP REST API best practices, if possible. * The entirety of the polyproto HTTP API documentation should be translated into TypeSpec definitions (https://typespec.io). TypeSpec is a modern way to describe APIs, and TypeSpec definitions compile down to OpenAPI 3.0 for easy codegen in all sorts of different programming languages. No prior experience with TypeSpec is required - I am also currently in the process of learning it, and it seems to be quite simple and mostly ergonomic.

* The polyproto Rust crate (https://github.com/polyphony-chat/polyproto-rs) could use general optimizations and most importantly internal refactors to allow for wasm-bindgen to create a JavaScript/TypeScript library directly from our Rust code via an FFI, as the Rust codebase should ideally act as a single source of truth to keep implementations in different languages from exerting different behaviors. This would ideally require knowledge of FFIs/ABIs or an interest in learning about these topics. * In addition to the previous point, C-Bindings from the Rust library would also be extremely useful to easily make polyproto available in other programming languages via the C-ABI and FFIs.

Find us at https://github.com/polyphony-chat and/or join our development Discord at https://discord.gg/4DPuQStJ4s. Yes, we are aware of the irony :)

Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#113

Post by rty32 »

em-bee wrote: post #96
rty32 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 100% agree but would almost say the same thing. As someone who made small contributions to several projects and left comments under many GitHub issues, things that I see: * Heavy users are more likely to report bugs and end up contributing to the project * If many people run into the same issue, more likely someone will create among them will write a fix, or at least suggest a workaround * A "healthy" project --…

you can find people that expect certain amount of experience with a particular language what then should they be doing different? to contribute code to a software project you need to know or learn the language the project is written in. there is no way around that. does it bother you that they don't want patches created with chatGPT? did you miss the controversy around that? can you assert that the code you submit is…

They can do all of that, of course. My point is that their condescending attitude is going to lose potential contributors like me, when most open source projects embrace a much more welcoming environment. Maybe they are doing fine, I don't know. But I have worked on enough open source projects to know that it is not the best position they can be in.

Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#114

Post by rty32 »

kilimanjaro3 wrote: post #72
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #2

OneBusAway A suite of real-time public transit projects that are used by millions of people every day. OneBusAway helps people find out when and where their bus will arrive, and provides them with a trip planner, too. OBA is used by transit riders everywhere from Seattle to New York City; Adelaide, Australia to Buenos Aires, Argentina. In addition to developers, we would also benefit greatly from product management a…

I need years of experience in your tech stack to contribute to your opensource project? Is this common?

It is absolutely not common.

It is reasonable to expect contributors to have a certain amount of programming experience, but I rarely see any open source projects ask for requirements in a very specific area like a job posting. Many open source projects -- I am not talking about React or VSCode -- would be happy to see people creating pull requests at all, and are willing to provide pointers or hints for people who have experience but may not be so proficient in a specific language. Most of the projects work well that way.

Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#115

Post by fithisux »

pizlonator wrote: post #80
ranger_danger wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are use-after-free and such bugs detected at compile time? There are still some cases that scan-build, cppcheck and other static analysis tools do not find.

They’re deterministically detected at runtime. Any use of a pointer to an object that got freed will trap with a filc safety error, which terminates program execution and prints a backtrace. I don’t think it’s possible to catch all use after frees at compile time precisely. Like, you could have a checker that catches all errors but also rejects valid programs or you can have a checker that accepts all valid programs…

can you imagine a program termination in the middle of a surgical operation?

It is harmless for less critical jobs though, like image viewing.

Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#116

Post by pizlonator »

fithisux wrote: post #115
pizlonator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re deterministically detected at runtime. Any use of a pointer to an object that got freed will trap with a filc safety error, which terminates program execution and prints a backtrace. I don’t think it’s possible to catch all use after frees at compile time precisely. Like, you could have a checker that catches all errors but also rejects valid programs or you can have a checker that accepts all valid programs…

can you imagine a program termination in the middle of a surgical operation? It is harmless for less critical jobs though, like image viewing.

Memory safe languages aren’t about proving everything at compile time. Some version of a panic is going to be there, at a minimum for array bounds checking.

In Fil-C, if you don’t like the use after free panic, then just don’t call free and let the GC free your objects.

And if you’re doing safety critical stuff (I’m assuming that’s what you’re getting at) then the game is to prove that the system will be safe in the sense of not hurting people, not in the sense of memory safety. And that proof burden is much higher than the proof burden for memory safety.

Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#117

Post by mdaniel »

zaphodias wrote: post #94
snthpy wrote: post #91

https://github.com/PRQL/prql PRQL - the Pipelined Relational Query Language, pronounced "Prequel". PRQL is a modern language for transforming data — a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement. Like SQL, it's readable, explicit and declarative. Unlike SQL, it forms a logical pipeline of transformations, and supports abstractions such as variables and functions. It can be used with any database that uses SQL, since…

hey there, honestly I haven't tried prql yet but I think I already saw it on HN before. What would you expect from a language integration? I'd like to work on something in Go, which doesn't make it easy to have Rust bindings. One nice challenge for me would be to rewrite the compiler in pure Go, but maybe it's too complex of a task bringing little value to the project overall :) What other tools do you need? E.g. wha…

> I think I already saw it on HN before.

Bunches of times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&query=prql&sort=b...

e.g. 9 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39428609

Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#118

Post by mdaniel »

jmakov wrote: post #68

ray.io, onprem clister up does't work at all...

I'm guessing this comment is some kind of "if you know, you know." Likely starting from https://docs.ray.io/en/latest/cluster/vms/user-guides/launch... and then trawling through one of these I guess https://github.com/ray-project/ray/issues?q=is%3Aissue+prem+...

Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#119

Post by whamlastxmas »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #104
whamlastxmas wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I’ve been on sabbatical and wanting to not get rusty, so I like the idea of contributing to OSS in a way that feels rewarding and desired

Well sure, but the question is whether you actually did it, not whether you liked the idea of it.

I made my own OSS project if it counts? lol

Re: Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

#120

Post by timka »

levkk wrote: post #53

Come build the next full stack web framework for your favorite programming language! https://github.com/levkk/rwf All aspects of project are open to contributors. Beginner friendly. Learn Rust/web tech if you're not familiar with how the sausage is made.

You say beginner friendly. How does rwf look like compared to Pavex[1] in this regard?

[1] https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/pavex

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