[dead]
Publishing your work increases your luck
51–60 of 131 posts
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR". There's alre…
"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"
That's what we do in closed source corporate code.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#53Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#54> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interest…
Absolutely. I say that being an OSS maintainer is a job, which can easily become a full time job, where the pay is often non-existent. If you have a separate full time job, you now have to choose:
1. Work two jobs until you burn out.
2. Quit your paying job and hope you have you don't go broke.
3. Scale back or quit maintaining OSS projects.
I think companies, governments, and societies could do a better job funding this work. But since this is a "tragedy of the commons" problem, I'm not holding my breath that this will happen before the public experiences a lot more pain from failures.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#55> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interest…
You can always sell it out for exploits? The price for oss wage is (incident -1 $)
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR". There's alre…
"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"
"Pikaboo maintainer is who last touched it. Patch is wellcome!"
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"
That's what we do in closed source corporate code.
"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?"
"I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history."
"Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what we do in closed source corporate code.
"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?" "I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history." "Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."
I like this, turning software maintenance into a long-running game of tag.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#59I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.
If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls. But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delet…
I once spoke in favor of remote work (around 2020) and someone here on HN told me to get cancer and die, before it was flagged enough times to get out of the way.
On YouTube, I also sometimes get mean comments, though at least there the automatic moderation catches them so they don't show up publicly and I can shadowban the offenders off the channel easily. None of the content is even controversial, YouTube just attracts a lot of angry people that feel entitled to speak what's on their mind.
I wouldn't publish in an environment where blocking or banning people is difficult. They're not entitled for me to engage with their hateful drivel. My blog also doesn't have comments. At the end of the day, I will say what I want to say.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#60Sounds like Fallout mechanics
A long time ago, I was having a discussion with my clan leader about luck in video games. He said that the better you are, the more lucky you are. Luck and skill go hand in hand. That's always resonated with me.
You make your own luck. “80% of success is showing up”