It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#311

Post by wolco » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

gpeal wrote: post #261

wolco wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In react's case you put your trust in facebook and because of the size most issues get discovered and someone has an article on how to fix before breakfast. When you include left-pad in your own project you should audit it. In the end you are the only line of defense. With react it's larger so you can trust others.

I think that's exactly the problem because of things like this: https://twitter.com/ZacSweers/status/1259176799235387393?s=1... I am the sole maintainer of airbnb/lottie-android despite the fact that I left the company almost 2 years ago and it is used by tens of thousands of companies including Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Uber, Netflix, and countless others.

Let's say this doesn't get updated I don't see a problem. It will continue to function as it is until it gets outdated and replaceed. Let's say it changes and does something evil, hopefully Google, Microsoft will catch the issue. If they don't someone will and people will stop trusting react or whatever product pulls these changes in.

Doing it yourself I would just freeze versions.

---------

In this case I find it odd for someone to keep maintanier status for a company repo they no longer work for 2 years after leaving.

I would have forked and introduced new changes in my own repo if I cared about the project. Let others follow if they desire new updates or force airbrb to assign someone to update. or better get airbrb to pay you to keep updating.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#312

Post by sanderjd » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

traverseda wrote: post #308

sanderjd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I really liked the approach of using a github username as a namespace for rubygems, it lets you publish things but with some indication that it may just be for personal use.

I'm not sure having a hard dependency on github is a good idea, I think approaches like that are giving github/microsoft too much power. Installing from a generic git URL tends to work just fine, even if it's a bit more typing.

Yeah the useful thing is namespaces, I agree it would be good to not tie it to any given platform. I remember the cargo (rust) folks discussed including some way to have a namespace. I don't remember the details but I was disappointed they decided not to go that route.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#313

Post by jonfw » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #270

ssanders82 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people with kids win at life That's a pretty insulting statement for those of us who can't have / don't want children. It's not a competition. We've chosen different paths than you. Not worse, just different.

Kids make you happy, but only when they move out as as long as they don’t break the bank. Truth is having kids is a kiss of death for your creative and professional career. E: Of course downvotes. Truth hurts. Let’s see how grey my comment gets.

It's absolutely harmful to your creative and professional career, which are shallow metrics by which to gauge your success in life.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#314

Post by LockAndLol » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:21 PM UTC

Reminds me of that rust developer who wrote a super-fast webserver... and was trashed by the rust community for not upholding their standards. When he finally had enough and said he was going to (IIRC) delete the project, suddenly people started being nice.

People never fail to impress me negatively.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#315

Post by CalRobert » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

tuesday20 wrote: post #267

CalRobert wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally. Old boss used to loudly thank my colleague for doing tickets on the weekends, and too often people seem to assume I want to spend my weekend "brushing up" on some implementation detail for a project I don't care about. Even "why doesn't he come to after work drinks?" Is hard to answer with "because my spouse is _also_ an exhausted wreck at the end of the d…

This seems more in certain cultures than others - American and Japanese from my anecdotal experience. I worked with Europeans (French especially), they don’t seem to wear long hours as a badge of honor. My American boss regularly feels proud that he puts in 12-14 hour days. In my opinion, that amount of hours makes sense if I am working on my own business or something that truly benefits humanity (like a vaccine for…

Indeed, it's why I emigrated.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#316

Post by CalRobert » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

xwdv wrote: post #245

CalRobert wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally. Old boss used to loudly thank my colleague for doing tickets on the weekends, and too often people seem to assume I want to spend my weekend "brushing up" on some implementation detail for a project I don't care about. Even "why doesn't he come to after work drinks?" Is hard to answer with "because my spouse is _also_ an exhausted wreck at the end of the d…

Do you ever just tell them that? You will get no respect until you do, in no uncertain terms. Otherwise, you will be walked all over.

Fortunately I don't work there anymore.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#317

Post by Max_aaa » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #155

yuribro wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you feel bad? The whole point of open source is they could have done it themselves, if they wanted some integration they needed and you didn't. And then they could either contribute it back, fork your project or just keep it to themselves, if the license allows it. At any rate, you already helped them...

People often act very entitled about open source I've found. You'll often get angry irate emails/issues raised demanding you help them or add a new feature or whatever. Some people are just clueless and need help, others are just dicks. It is often not worth the hassle in my opinion, but then everyone's circumstances and motivations are different and I am glad that a lot of people do think it is worth it.

I have a very simple Firefox extension that inverts the colors of sites, I wrote it as I needed something that would just give me dark themed web pages when my baby was asleep next to me. You would not believe some of the reviews and requests (ultimatums) I got.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#318

Post by nonbirithm » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

It's a matter of expectations. I believe expectations are extremely important when releasing anything creative, be it code or art or writing.

You might release something as a side project of a hobby, but people will become angry with you if it doesn't do what's advertised. This is significantly amplified if you go out of your way to tell people the project exists, in the hopes of it becoming popular and used. It can't become popular if it isn't good enough. That's the same for many different disciplines and various subjective standards of "good." In the case of software correctness is often stressed, unless it's generative art or something. So by marketing something in the hopes of it becoming popular you obligate yourself to getting it to the point where it can become popular.

So it's about not looking arrogant by saying something is true about a project when it isn't.

The problem isn't as simple as "don't mind if it's bad." Your library could end up being used in hundreds of projects. People want continued maintenance in this case. They might start filing issues against your project because of unforseen downstream bugs. But you might not feel like maintaining it anymore. Motivations change. But you'd have to be careful if you choose to hand off maintenance, because this can happen: https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

So it isn't just a case of whether or not the code itself is bad. It's also about how you market the code to others. Ward people away if it's not production-ready. Sometimes undersell and never oversell. Remove any reason for people's expectations to be out of sync with the actual quality. In the case of event-stream the old maintainer became relied upon and then made the incorrect decision of letting an untrustworthy person have access to the code.

And also make clear your motivations. The creator of uBlock Origin states he might get bored of the project and move on. Give yourself an escape hatch like this so you can excuse yourself if you believe you really can't find yourself with the will to keep working on it in the future.

As long as those expectations are very clear to anyone who uses your code, then it is okay for public code to be bad.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#319

Post by ZeikJT » Sun, May 17, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

HereBeBeasties wrote: post #292

smichel17 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is a good example; dates are actually pretty complicated.

Yes, dates are very complicated. But that doesn't stop pretty much every modern language from having good built-in support for doing this, because it's such a totally common task. JavaScript is such a mess. It doesn't even support integers, for crying out loud, let alone decent date/time/timezone handling. That moment.js is the most popular band-aid to fix this, despite it having a nasty gotcha API that mixes mutable…

Silently? Since when is comparing objects in JS with (in)equality operators the right thing to do? There's no operator overloading nor special symbol you can implement in objects to make this work seamlessly ever. Casting/stringifying or calling functions is the only way for all objects.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#320

Post by sourcaustic » Sun, May 17, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #249

CalRobert wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally. Old boss used to loudly thank my colleague for doing tickets on the weekends, and too often people seem to assume I want to spend my weekend "brushing up" on some implementation detail for a project I don't care about. Even "why doesn't he come to after work drinks?" Is hard to answer with "because my spouse is _also_ an exhausted wreck at the end of the d…

> Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally Sure, but people with kids win at life. Let the DINK make some extra money. You still have it better.

Although I appreciate the sentiment behind this very romantic comment and I understand that it is mostly addressed at kindred spirits who can relate in parenthood, I think that it's important to nuance the idea a tad bit. The world is already filled with too many people mindlessly following tradition. When in doubt about how to make themselves happier, they don't dig much before reverting to the status quo: having a kid. The promotion of the idea that we're realizing our purpose in life by procreating has undoubtedly caused a lot misery, as a substantial portion of those who experimented with parenthood failed to find what they hoped for and many children ended up suffering for it. Human beings are not just mere biological entities fulfilling some function of nature. We are blessed (or cursed) with complicated minds that make us appreciate a lot more to life than raising children.

My best friend since childhood has a kid and I can see that he lives an adventure of which he appreciate every second and I enjoy watching him live it. I don't have kids and I live different sorts of adventures and I can see that he lives them vicariously through me. It's pointless to try to make a tally. Figuring out what makes your mind "tick" the most is how you best "win at life".