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Craft software that makes people feel something

rapha.land

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Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#111

Post by Yokohiii »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #89
Yokohiii wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sponsors can have quite a bit more entitlement then the average github dude. But well, maybe if you lock it down for sponsors the stress level is overall lower.

> Sponsors can have quite a bit more entitlement then the average github dude. Is this some sort of unwritten agreement? When I was setting up my sponsor page, I explored the sponsor pages of other users for ideas. I don't think there were many sponsorship tiers with special features. Some people offered advertising space on the README, others offered access to an exclusive Discord channel, most just thanked the spon…

Oh my mistake I was thinking of individual donations, which may be implied as some premium service. I think a company/org sponsor should be more professional. In theory you can just cancel a sponsor if it doesn't fit. You can turn your back on on donations, but you somehow owe the donators forever.

Edit: https://pocketbase.io/faq/

Look at the bottom, just an example how sponsors/donors may affect you.

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#112

Post by lutharvaughn »

mmooss wrote: post #52

> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream This is how many artists have worked. They make something for themself, and one day they show it to someone else ... or they just get the urge to share it more widely, often without the hope that anyone will really be interested. Or they keep it for themself. I think Tolkien is in that group, for example. But don't get the wrong idea…

If you are actually making it for yourself then it shouldn’t matter. I think sometimes people tell themselves they are doing it for them, but then they start thinking “well what would so and so think”. I know I’ve done it, but once I started actually making things for me, I could feel the difference.

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#113

Post by mirashii »

hnlmorg wrote: post #65
mirashii wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, and I think to great overall harm, GitHub does not let you disable many of the collaboration features. I was just having a discussion today with someone who would be fine open sourcing their code, but is uninterested in any contributions, questions, or community interaction. Since GitHub won’t allow that, their options are to host it somewhere themselves where nobody will see it, or just don’t publish…

Odds are, you’re not going to get any contributions even if you do want them. So they could just upload regardless. And if the README explicitly says the project isn’t open to contributors nor feature requests, then you’re even less likely to see that (and have a very valid reason to politely close any issues on the unlikely scenario that someone might create one). The vast majority of stuff on GitHub goes unnoticed…

> Odds are, you’re not going to get any contributions even if you do want them. So they could just upload regardless.

This is not my personal experience nor the experience of a number of folks that I know personally. I think it's pretty hard to generalize about this.

> The vast majority of stuff on GitHub goes unnoticed by the vast majority of people. And only a very small minority of people ever interact with the few projects they do pull from GH.

So what? It's probably not going to impact you, so it's okay and we just have to deal with it? I reject that logic entirely.

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#114

Post by jesse__ »

mmooss wrote: post #105
jesse__ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, I should have been more specific. They created programming environments that are entirely their own. Although Jon has created several games which include fictional geographic worlds.

Still, it seems like the same thing to me, just in a different medium. Though the public has a much easier time understanding maps than programming environments.

Agreed

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#115

Post by [deleted] »

socalgal2 wrote: post #93
jesse__ wrote: post #39

> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream This is a habit I picked up from two people I respect greatly as programmers; Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow. Those guys both built their own little lands; Jon went as far as building a new language, a 3D game engine in that language, and has multiple game titles in-flight in the engine. I have a handful of projects that are simila…

Blow hasn't shipped anything in 10 years. I think Casey as well

[deleted]

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#116

Post by jesse__ »

socalgal2 wrote: post #93
jesse__ wrote: post #39

> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream This is a habit I picked up from two people I respect greatly as programmers; Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow. Those guys both built their own little lands; Jon went as far as building a new language, a 3D game engine in that language, and has multiple game titles in-flight in the engine. I have a handful of projects that are simila…

Blow hasn't shipped anything in 10 years. I think Casey as well

I'd consider JAI shipped, it's just not publicly available. There are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of developers in the beta at this point. Next time you build a new programming language, 3D game engine, and ship a game, lemme know how long it takes.

Casey's done both Handmade Hero, and Performance Aware Programming. Some of the best programming educational content available, in my opinion.

Also .. so what?

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#117

Post by pvtmert »

This was one of the best & heartfelt blog posts I have read on the HN so far.

I can relate because of 2 things; 1. I also played a lot of legos during my childhood & loved it. 2. I have a similar "preference" on configurations & shell-profile. (ie. overall setup)

At work, I am the only person who has a personal configuration & automation package (ie. dotfiles) at my director's level organization. (Maybe there is another one or two at most)

Not only that, I also have a nearly complete automation to provision a new machine, virtual or otherwise using the same code. (usually maintained by make && make install)

I update things regularly. It has bunch of "utility" scripts. As it being a $FAANG company, once in a while, here and there, people stumble on scripts/solutions/docs (also markdown). There were even occasional CRs (code-reviews / pull-requests) I received.

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#118

Post by godelski » 

  > Craft software that makes people feel something
Meta, Google, and all of FAANG already did that. They crafted software that made people feel hate, anger, depression, but sometimes joy. It's nice to get those cute animal posts when doom scrolling. It's a nice break from "you're all going to die", "everyone is dumb except you", and "you're powerless".

Joking aside, I do very much agree with the OP. But I also wanted to note how things can get perverted. Few people are actually evil and most evil people get there slowly. What's that old cliché that everyone forgets? "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". The point is to constantly check that you're on the right path and realize that most evil is caused in the pursuit of good because good is difficult to do.

But also I wanted to share a Knuth quote

  | In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That’s what really advances the field
  - Donald Knuth
I am fully with him on this. It is the same reason Bell Labs had so much success.

  How do you manage a bunch of geniuses?[0]. You don't.
You let experts explore. They already know the best ways forward. Many will fail, but that's okay. In CS one of the biggest problems we have is that we try to optimize everything, but we're also really bad at math. If you want to optimize search over a large solution space with a highly parallelized processor you create a distribution. It's good to have that mean but you need the tails too and that's what we lose. You tighten the distribution when you need focus on a specific direction but then relax it to go back to exploration. But what we do, is we like railroads. We like to try to carry all the groceries from the car in one trip. We like to go fast, but don't really care where. We love to misquote Knuth about premature optimization to justify our laziness and ignore his quotes about being detail oriented and refining solutions.

I think progress has slowed down. And I think it's because we stopped exploring. We're afraid to do anything radical, and that's a shame

[0] Knuth has another quote about programmers not being geniuses lol

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#119

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #92
mmooss wrote: post #52

> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream This is how many artists have worked. They make something for themself, and one day they show it to someone else ... or they just get the urge to share it more widely, often without the hope that anyone will really be interested. Or they keep it for themself. I think Tolkien is in that group, for example. But don't get the wrong idea…

> or passed away A certain one-eared Dutchman comes to mind...

I have to assume that someone has no idea what I was talking about, and thought that I was making some kind of ethnic slur. Sheesh. What do they teach, these days? Do people think Moby Dick is some kind of STD?

For elucidation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh

He died a pauper, but his work is some of the most valuable in history.

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