121–130 of 248 posts
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Many HN posts about JS devolve into a "I don't like Javascript because I'm a real programmer, not a frontend" slugfest. As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology.
Oh. I thought it devolved into "Use react".
I’ve always been advised to avoid these “sub-communities” like /r/javascript and Hacker News. Maintainers say they are filled with assholes who don’t know what they are talking about, angry idiots shouting at everything and everyone, cesspools, giant piles of trash burning in the wind. Is HN really that bad? I mean, it must be, if people maintaining popular open source projects think so... But why does it feel much m…
I don't think HN is on the level of Reddit or some other communities, but there is an air of contrarianism that wafts through this place that I can imagine reads as negative to people that aren't familiar with it. It also sometimes outright vilifies certain projects.
I was commenting to a colleague the other day how amazed I was at the sheer quantity of github "issues" that I was seeing posted to a few popular open source repositories that were rants about why feature X wasn't available yet or a priority yet, or demanding that someone walk them through some installation issue because the poster couldn't understand (or didn't read) the README. None of the people that posted this s…
I agree 100%. GitHub muddles the contribution process and support process. Couple that with the irony of developing free software using a bunch of proprietary, commercial tools, and I much prefer the tried & true IRC/mailing list approach to the trendy Slack/GitHub stack. I think a large part of the problem is that the current generation of new developers is completely conditioned by Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc to…
Firstly: sourceforge was widely used and was also hosted – the architecture didn't really change.
Secondly: Github is simply the best thing that ever happened to OSS. It's a fantastic interface that allows you to:
- Immediately get a sense of the project: You know where to look and can quickly scan Stars, Issues, Checkins etc.
- Makes contributing a no-brainer: I never ever sent anyone a patch by email. With GH, it's basically more difficult NOT to contribute back.
- Makes forking easy: OSS projects often stagnate. Now, someone can fork the project, maybe update the dependencies and get it running again in half an hour or so. There's a graph right there showing you all the forks, so it's easy to figure out which one you want to trust.
- Makes discovery easy. I check the trending repositories every few days, and there's no better way to learn than to get lost reading other peoples' code.
- The whole industry of CI platforms etc. being given out for free to OSS projects was created around Github.
So I'm quite happy people are happy to "relinquish control of their data", considering I don't even know what that's supposed to mean in the context of OSS.
I don't want to distract from the main thrust of the article, which was that we should be decent to each other even with our criticism, but I think both his examples (Babel 6 and Angular 2) had something in common that lead to a lot more anxiety: they changed the essence of the software in a way that a major version bump is not enough to communicate. I'm speaking especially of Angular 2 here. It's essentially a compl…
I went to the Angular 2 docs and was thinking "this is nothing like Angular 1, looks like a completely different framework." Then I read from them "this is nothing like Angular 1, this is a completely different framework." Should they have gone with a different name? Probably. But my guess is that they kept it for 2 reasons. The first is the name recognition. The second, more important one, is that they're letting us…
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> You assume I was being paid to work on Babel. I didn't assume that. This post isn't about Babel, it's about the "JavaScript community", which you are being paid to work with. > The vast majority of open source maintainers are not paid in anyway whatsoever. I know. I'm one of them. I spend ~20 hours a week on open source on top of my full-time job. I know how stressful it can be, but I'll never complain about it bec…
I wasn't saying that people don't have a right to be frustrated or angry. I wasn't saying we shouldn't voice our criticisms as developers or that we shouldn't disagree with one another. The only argument I'm really trying to make in this article is that when someone has stepped over a line into outraged attacks on tools and authors that the community shouldn't reward them for that. Apparently this is too much to ask…
I don't have any solutions but have you seen this CGP Grey video called "This video will make you angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc which says that outraged ideas are the quickest to spread.
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The change in Babel 6 was this: $ npm install babel-cli $ babel src -d lib To this: $ npm install babel-cli babel-preset-es2015 $ echo '{ presets: ["es2015"] }' >> .babelrc $ babel src -d lib It really wasn't that big of a change. Also, we did give it a new name. It used to be 6to5, and we changed the name around the intention to make it more generic. Which Babel 6 was the culmination of. As for communicating with th…
I think the main issue with the transition of Babel 5 -> Babel 6 was a cognitive one. A few CLI one-liners don't really address this. Babel was zero-config and now it's not. I now need to understand what presets and plugins do and how to order them to get desired results when transpiling. Ultimately, it was inevitable and I think it was a very good thing! I'm really happy that Babel 6 exists. But figuring out your Ba…
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People keep assuming I have something against sharing criticism or frustration. I never said that. I explicitly said that's not what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that when someone does it in a way that is in pure unadulterated anger that the community should not reward them for it. It's unhealthy for everyone.
I don't think you understand. The critique itself, whether constructive or not, is something to learn from. Just like breaking changes in Babel 6. There is a lesson waiting to be learnt, namely, don't make breaking changes to existing software. As a matter of fact, I honestly don't understand why you take it so personally. Sometimes I do stupid things and people call me an idiot, and it's helpful to know that. Someti…
Most of the time when I see a large library make breaking changes, it's to solve a problem which can't realistically be "fixed" without breaking changes.
And even if they can provide a "shim" to allow people to use the old way of doing things, people see that the same as they see maintaining an old release. That you need to upgrade to the latest version or you'll be left behind.
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it seems like the only options left are to "never improve" or "get it right the first time". And obviously the latter isn't possible pretty much at all.
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James, I reached out to Sebastian, on multiple occasions in January to apologize. Phabricator via the chat feature, Twitter(blocked), email, etc. I can't even remember all the mediums. So if you can pass it a long that would be cool. Sure, Sad state got a little personal, but I'm not too stubborn to admit when I'm wrong. I'm sorry it affected the team so much, obviously not my intention. Just tried to use hyperbole t…
Not invested in this discussion, but it sure is refreshing to see someone change their mind in "real time" and show self awareness. I appreciate that!
you're all idiots.
I’ve always been advised to avoid these “sub-communities” like /r/javascript and Hacker News. Maintainers say they are filled with assholes who don’t know what they are talking about, angry idiots shouting at everything and everyone, cesspools, giant piles of trash burning in the wind. Is HN really that bad? I mean, it must be, if people maintaining popular open source projects think so... But why does it feel much m…
Check out this comment from one of the devs behind Homebrew from HN 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035438 (this was in response that he might be a good target to sue over putting Google Analytics in Homebrew). Yes, we need to treat our open source devs better. HN is not innocent.
You can even make a negative, frankly slightly whiny post calling hacker news a trash fire and STILL have a productive discussion here.
The human race is just chock full of assholes and if you make yourself visible by raising your head above the herd you will inevitably become the target for some of them. Each community of course should do what it can to promote a positive asshole free discussion but its still a semi free internet and assholes have email/irc/twitter accounts.
Beyond keeping it positive yourself which the author hasn't done you just have to deal with it and move on. If someone calls you terrible and you look in the mirror and know its not true then shrug it off and move on.
I think there is a lot of truth here. I can't help but feel that you just diagnosed a great deal of the internet, far beyond javascript or dev. We need better communities and better communication. I wish I knew how to make that actionable.
There is something about being behind a keyboard that makes people much nastier than they would be in real life.