Actix project postmortem • Hacker News Board

Re: Actix project postmortem

#221

Post by teddyh » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

telmo wrote: post #212

teddyh wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other popular free software licenses (namely the GLP) have very similar clauses. What the license says and what image the project presents can be very different. Pointing to the license and reasoning that nobody has legally promised anything contractually is not very useful. > Expecting labour from someone without paying them is the very definition of entitlement. That’s a very mercenary view of the world. What abo…

> What the license says and what image the project presents can be very different. Pointing to the license and reasoning that nobody has legally promised anything contractually is not very useful. It is quite useful, because the license is the legal document that comes included with the software, and that specifies what things you agree to if you use the software. And it explicitly specifies that you cannot assume an…

> Open source authors promised us nothing and owe us nothing

There is such a thing as an implicit promise. A project which presents itself as active and maintained by a community does implicitly promise a certain level of attention by its maintainers.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#222

Post by fenwick67 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

forgottenpass wrote: post #184

fenwick67 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason lots of people on HN push stoicism as a virtue. Not all of us are 100% unaffected by dealing with jerks, and we like to get ourselves out of toxic environments that make us unhappy. Is that so bad?

The value in stoicism is that it lets people transcend limitations they have control over. It's a tool and comes in many packages (e.g.: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference."). Lots of "people on HN push stoicism" because a great many people in all walks of life share life lessons that can be categorized as stoic. >Not…

Stoicism is fine, I don't have a problem with it, but I have a problem with people chiming in with attitude advice in face of a non-attitude problem.

Saying someone should be more stoic, especially with a "like me", in the face of a problem, is like telling somebody "deal with it" or "lighten up". At best it's not constructive, at worst it's bragging and putting someone down.

And it deflects the actual problem. The problem here was "too many people were jerks" not "you are too sensitive".

Re: Actix project postmortem

#223

Post by fenwick67 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

Similar burnout happened with Ecstatic, a very popular Node.js static file serving library.

https://github.com/jfhbrook/node-ecstatic/issues/259

Re: Actix project postmortem

#224

Post by qwerty456127 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #168

qwerty456127 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Both should but that would be naïve to expect the others to do. I write "people should" putting myself in place of the protagonist. Going to the woods don't make drama of the mosquitoes biting you.

Is the reverse true? Should we make no hay of the fact that someone who was tired of being bit chose to leave the woods?

I absolutely don't judge him and I do understand. I just feel like it could be great (for themselves and for everybody) if whoever is smart enough (and he certainly is) would consciously work on their emotional intelligence. Sadly, such an idea doesn't even come to the field of attention of most of the people so perhaps me suggesting that may help somebody. As for the jerks around there will always be enough and we can hardly expect them to improve. I've met too many in my past and once I've got too tired of them I've started to study emotional inteligence, mindfulness, applied psychology etc to become emotionally immune to them (and to many other things) and to communicate to them constructively. I just believe in him (and other people like him) and don't really believe in them (most of them) at this point (perhaps they could be different if they were taught a right way) - that's why I say what he should do, not what them should.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#225

Post by shadowgovt » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #224

shadowgovt wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the reverse true? Should we make no hay of the fact that someone who was tired of being bit chose to leave the woods?

I absolutely don't judge him and I do understand. I just feel like it could be great (for themselves and for everybody) if whoever is smart enough (and he certainly is) would consciously work on their emotional intelligence. Sadly, such an idea doesn't even come to the field of attention of most of the people so perhaps me suggesting that may help somebody. As for the jerks around there will always be enough and we c…

> As for the jerks around there will always be enough and we can hardly expect them to improve

This is why many community systems have ban tools.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#226

Post by howeyc » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:32 PM UTC

CDSlice wrote: post #215

jmiskovic wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree with your last sentence. Think of actix-web as a gift to the world (and judging by its popularity, a very nice gift). Being verbally abused by vocal majority of freeloaders would drive anyone furious. I think I understand your perspective, though. It would benefit the community to have projects of great importance properly maintained. How to ensure it? Well, by paying people to do it, not necess…

Obviously being vocally abused is not OK no matter what the victim has done. This is a big problem and I think Steve's article that is currently on the top page of HN gives a good overview of that part of the situation. My problem with viewing all open source as a gift to the world, take it or leave it, is that when people create open source packages, market them as being ready for production use and as the best opti…

I strongly disagree, with extreme passion.

They could have marketed it as the greatest gift to humanity for all I care. It's your responsibility to handle your use of code. Sure, you may find issue's in your dependencies, and you're welcome to submit a bug or provide a fix, but if you expect anything more than the code as it is, it's still your problem how to deal with it.

The entitlement is astounding. A person providing free code doesn't owe you anything or "need to take responsibility" or whatever else you may want.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#227

Post by stjohnswarts » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

logophobia wrote: post #31

teddyuk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maintainer can choose whatever style they damn well please, if you don't like it don't use it. What is hard about this?

It's not coding style, it's refusing to investigate use-after-free vulnerabilities in code because it's "boring". Noone should care if a maintainer uses tabs or spaces, or has weird variable naming, but if "coding-style" leads to security issues (due to hand-rolling unsafe memory-primitives), then it is an actual issue, especially if it's for a popular web-framework. Don't like it, don't use it doesn't really apply t…

"Don't like it, don't use it" applies in all situations where the code is free to you and you didn't enter into a contract to "correct" those things that you don't like. People were always free to fork the code and fix what they don't like.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#228

Post by blub » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

logophobia wrote: post #191

beatgammit wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> somewhat self-inflicted Let's not start victim-blaming please. Yes, the maintainer could have made his reasons for making the project more clear, and the maintainer could have been more clear on the intended use of the project (not for production, personal project to see how fast Rust can be, etc). There are a lot of things the maintainer could have done. However, that doesn't mean there wasn't a problem. There was…

> However, that doesn't mean there wasn't a problem. There was a ton of negativity around "unsafe" when the author first released the code, and it has kind of become a meme at this point. If a project consistently uses code in an unsafe way, is it really worth spending your time vetting it for your production use case? There are plenty of web severs out there, pick one that aligns with your goals. Should people wait…

If personal info or CC data gets leaked, the company which used this library/framework will be found legally liable. Using random code from github is not a valid product development strategy.

The author can write their entire code in an unsafe block for all they care. The buck stops with those that use the framework and that is made quite clear in the license.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#229

Post by stjohnswarts » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

dsego wrote: post #18

teddyuk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maintainer can choose whatever style they damn well please, if you don't like it don't use it. What is hard about this?

Is it a community run project or not? The website seems to imply that the community is welcome to participate: "We're a welcoming community so don't be afraid to engage."

There's a difference between engaging and putting up with raging users

Re: Actix project postmortem

#230

Post by stjohnswarts » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

stefan_ wrote: post #43

3jckd wrote: post #4

Asking for a friend - could someone explain what happened there? The README doc is quite vague - it is more of a personal justification than a rationale (to me).

It seems like the overarching issue is that Rust is a house of cards. They added unsafe like Java has null. My favorite part is that you can declare a crate to forbid unsafe, but that then doesn't have to hold for it's dependencies. The obvious implementation is for unsafe to be infectious like const. You have unsafe code, your crate is unsafe. You depend on an unsafe crate, your crate becomes unsafe.

This is a poor comment. You clearly don't understand how unsafe is to be used. No code (of significant size) that you run will be bug free ever. So you might as well start from that assumption and realize you are trying to minimize the amount of unsafe code and bugs; you will never remove all of them no matter what the language.