Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The fate of "small" open source

nolanlawson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 238 posts

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#121

Post by Waterluvian »

AI offering the solution for a small problem that probably doesn’t deserve yet another dependency suggests to me that there’s a middle ground that we’ve failed to sufficiently cover: how to socialize code snippets that you’re meant to just inline into your project. Stack Overflow is probably the closest we’ve gotten to a generalized solution and it doesn’t exactly feel like a good one.

I came across this once before in the form of a react hooks library that had no dependency to install. It was just a website and when you found the hook you wanted you were meant to paste it into your project.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#123

Post by SchemaLoad »

josephg wrote: post #108
SchemaLoad wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best outcome was things like jquery and then lodash where a whole collection of small util functions get rolled in to one package.

Oh god, without tree shaking, lodash is such a blight. I've seen so many tiny packages pull in lodash for some little utility method so many times. 400 bytes of source code becomes 70kb in an instant, all because someone doesn't know how to filter items in an array. And I've also seen plenty of projects which somehow include multiple copies of lodash in their dependency tree. Its such a common junior move. Ugh. Exper…

I agree the JS standard library includes most of the stuff you need these days, rendering jquery and half of lodash irrelevant now. But there's still a lot of useful utilities in lodash, and potentially a new project could curate a collection of new, still relevant utilities.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#124

Post by lmm »

cortesoft wrote: post #51
BrenBarn wrote: post #32

> Sure, you could use blob-util, but then you’d be taking on an extra dependency, with unknown performance, maintenance, and supply-chain risks. Use of an AI to write your code is also a form of dependency. When the LLM spits out code and you just dump it in your project with limited vetting, that's not really that different from vendoring a dependency. It has a different set of risks, but it still has risks.

Part of the benefit over a dependency is that the code added will (hopefully) be narrowly tailored to your specific need, rather than the generic implementation from a library that likely has support for unused features. Not including the unused features both makes the code you are adding easier to read and understand, but it also may be more efficient for your specific use case, since you don't have to take into acc…

> Part of the benefit over a dependency is that the code added will (hopefully) be narrowly tailored to your specific need, rather than the generic implementation from a library that likely has support for unused features.

In decent ecosystems there should be low or zero overhead to that.

> Not including the unused features both makes the code you are adding easier to read and understand, but it also may be more efficient for your specific use case, since you don't have to take into account all the other possible use cases you don't care about.

Maybe. I find generic code is often easier to read than specialised custom implementations, because there is necessarily a proper separation of concerns in the generic version.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#125

Post by NewsaHackO »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #101
NewsaHackO wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One instance of definite benefit of AI is AI summary web search. Searching for answers to simple questions and not having to cut though SEO slop is such an improvement

Hard disagree. AI summaries are useless for the same reason AI summaries from Google and DDG are useless: it's almost always missing the context. The AI page summaries typically take the form of "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" instead of "here's what the page actually says". Just give me the fucking contents. If I wanted AI slop I'd ask my fucking doorknob.

I think you have some of your wires crossed, asking Google for "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question (also asking Google to reprint copyrighted material us also a non starter). Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#126

Post by [deleted] »

llbbdd wrote: post #119
ef2k wrote: post #92

> I’m still trying to figure out what kinds of open source are worth writing in this new era Is there any upside to opensourcing anything anymore? Anything published today becomes training data for the next model, with no attribution to the original work. If the goal is to experiment, share ideas, or let others learn from the work, maybe the better default now is "source available", instead of FOSS in the classic sen…

I keep seeing this attitude and I don't really understand it at all; there's no upside to publishing open source work because it might be utilized by more people, is that correct? Or is it the attribution? There are many many libraries I have used and continue to use and I don't know the author's internet handle or Christian name. Does that matter? Why? I have written a lot of code that my name is no longer attached…

[deleted]

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#127

Post by NewsaHackO »

cml123 wrote: post #67
NewsaHackO wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One instance of definite benefit of AI is AI summary web search. Searching for answers to simple questions and not having to cut though SEO slop is such an improvement

I don't think searching for answers to simple questions was a problem until Google nerfed their own search engine.

Pretty sure Google attempting to curb SEO tactics is what led to whatever nerfing you are talking about.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#128

Post by [deleted] »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #99

I don't buy the education angle. If you're not learning to code, then you want efficient code, so the comments are wasted bytes (ok, not a huge expense, but still). If you are learning to code, or just want to understand how this code works, then asking an LLM is going to get a lot better result. LLMs are fantastic tutors. Endlessly patient, go down any rabbit hole with you, will continue explaining a concept until y…

[deleted]

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#129

Post by josephg »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #123
josephg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god, without tree shaking, lodash is such a blight. I've seen so many tiny packages pull in lodash for some little utility method so many times. 400 bytes of source code becomes 70kb in an instant, all because someone doesn't know how to filter items in an array. And I've also seen plenty of projects which somehow include multiple copies of lodash in their dependency tree. Its such a common junior move. Ugh. Exper…

I agree the JS standard library includes most of the stuff you need these days, rendering jquery and half of lodash irrelevant now. But there's still a lot of useful utilities in lodash, and potentially a new project could curate a collection of new, still relevant utilities.

Can you give some examples? I’ve written js / ts for 10-15 years and I’ve never reached for lodash in my life.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#130

Post by epicureanideal »

josephg wrote: post #129
SchemaLoad wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the JS standard library includes most of the stuff you need these days, rendering jquery and half of lodash irrelevant now. But there's still a lot of useful utilities in lodash, and potentially a new project could curate a collection of new, still relevant utilities.

Can you give some examples? I’ve written js / ts for 10-15 years and I’ve never reached for lodash in my life.

_.any, some, every, keyBy.
Post reply on HN