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

Left-Pad (2024)

azerkoculu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 224 posts

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#91

Post by baobabKoodaa »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #73
iLoveOncall wrote: post #49

> Left-pad was like a "death" and "re-birth" moment for me. The part of me passionate about open-source was dead, and something new took over. Now, I'm passionate about business, marketing, running companies / teams Wow, I couldn't think of a worse rebirth.

Because those things don’t align with what you value? Of course.

Do you think the world is better off with this guy going from FOSS passion to "business & marketing passion"?

I understand if your values contain something like "money for me is good", but do your values also contain something like "money for this random guy is good"?

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#92

Post by thomassmith65 »

pointlessone wrote: post #81
thomassmith65 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to dump on the author, but following the Serenity Prayer would have led to a happier outcome... grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference

He clearly could delete his packages so he did. In the left-pad incident, apparently, the community didn’t have the serenity to accept that.

Fair enough. If he considered that a victory, then good for him.

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#93

Post by baobabKoodaa »

anonymars wrote: post #90
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Instead of teasing, can you just tell us what the difference is between unpublishing N small packages versus one large package containing the same set of functionality?

Well, I sure can!

When you develop software by gluing together 1000000 small packages, you now have 1000000 points of failure.

When you develop software by... you know, writing trivial things by yourself instead of downloading a package... you have maybe 100 points of failure instead of 1000000 points of failure.

Having 100 points of failure is better than having 1000000 points of failure.

Note that in this example you are writing trivial things by yourself instead of adding a package. So we're not taking the same set of code as dependencies, slicing it into different number of slices, instead we're taking less code as dependencies.

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#95

Post by bartread »

msla wrote: post #79
k__ wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the alternative have looked like? If NPM would have prevented the depublishing, he would have made a scene and in the worst case, they would have looked bad. How they actually handled it, the library author got full freedom but also full responsibility

At a certain point, no, you can't unpublish because the world only has one arrow of time. Imagine if Torvalds decides to unpublish his code in the Linux kernel. It's easy to understand how that would work: His code would remain out there for all time because doing anything else would be a massive disruption and cause people actual problems. People don't just give others a way to hurt them like that if they know what…

> Although a lot of the ire around left-pad was programmers using a library for something so trivial, but that's a different conversation.

Very true.

Although, from 2012 onwards, up to around the time of the leftpad incident, the trend - and the pressure - was to minimise the amount of work your code was doing and to publish tiny packages that only did one thing or solved one problem, deferring to other tiny packages for anything non-core. I remember colleagues more embedded in the JS world than I was passionately arguing for this in 2012/13.

And it did make some sense: bandwidth matters, particularly on mobile devices (which became a key source of traffic during that period) so why pull in some gigantic do everything library when you only need a handful of functions[0]? Sure, minifying and pruning help but, due to JS's nature, pruning can only get you so far.

But, yes, I think leftpad was something of a teaching moment on the downsides of this approach.

[0] Of course, if you then stick 6 different tracking scripts in all your pages, it's super-easy to undo all the good you've done by minimising your bundle size, but that's a different conversation.

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#96

Post by anonymars »

throwaway290 wrote: post #40
furkansahin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're aware this happened way before the Microsoft acquisition right?

> You're aware this happened way before the Microsoft acquisition right? you phrasing implies that you would say what I said if you knew that acquisition happened later. Weird but OK. Anyway then let's just say it is a bad look for NPM and any future buyers who decided this is a worthy company

What is weird? Your phrasing implies that this happened under the stewardship of Microsoft (and is somehow related to Microsoft policies or leadership)

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#97

Post by bartread »

npn wrote: post #75
bartread wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not driven by logic, anger... I don't know that I fully buy this either, at least not the anger part. I can look back on all this with wry amusement nowadays but I remember it being pretty frustrating at the time. It sort of felt like, well, either you knew what the impact of unpublishing all your packages would be and you did it anyway, which makes you kind of antisocial, or you didn't know what the impact would b…

[flagged]

Thanks: I love comments like this. I print them out, and get them framed and wall-mounted. They make me stronger and more virile.

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#98

Post by bayindirh »

bartread wrote: post #46
nindalf wrote: post #19

> I have to admit that I don't understand half of this blog post It's because you haven't read al-Ghazali yet. (definitely the most pompous and self-important part of this post)

> Not driven by logic, anger... I don't know that I fully buy this either, at least not the anger part. I can look back on all this with wry amusement nowadays but I remember it being pretty frustrating at the time. It sort of felt like, well, either you knew what the impact of unpublishing all your packages would be and you did it anyway, which makes you kind of antisocial, or you didn't know what the impact would b…

Personally I understand both Al-Ghazali and "Not driven by logic, anger" parts very well. I have been in that position as well.

Being neutral and seeing a good way forward is not something practiced, taught or celebrated in western, esp. American culture much. One always needs to have a thrust source (mostly an emotion driven by logic, taught during being grown up (e.g.: You should be angry about it)) to make decisions.

In fact, sometimes, you just don't have a thrust source, you just feel like doing it. It feels the right thing to do, and you do it with no emotions attached.

This is a boon, in fact it's called "clarity" brought by being with yourself. Either spending time outdoors, doing some reflection work, or by meditating. I use the same methods when I face with a non-urgent but important decision. Let the way reveal itself. Putting logic and emotions aside and finding the right way is not easy, or the process is not smooth sailing, but I never arrived to a wrong place by following that path.

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#99

Post by baobabKoodaa »

yurishimo wrote: post #87
whostolemyhat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Left-pad was made at a time when tree-shaking wasn't really around, so it was good practice to only include the functions you needed to avoid making websites too heavy. If you just needed a small function then it'd be silly to include a huge utility library like Underscore.

You're missing the point. Nobody with a serious background in software development should ever need to pull in a package to pad a string or check if a number is even or odd. If someone is smart enough to use a package manager, they should be more than capable to write a function to pad a string (assuming the standard library doesn't include one already)!

While you are correct, the problem compounds when popular package developers choose to use tiny packages.

I don't need left-pad.

But maybe I need react-starter-kit.

Now, imagine that react-starter-kit has a dependency to markdown-js-blobber, which has a dependency to make-text-nice, which has a dependency to left-pad.

In this scenario I am now "pulling in a package to pad a string". If I am "smart enough to use a package manager", I should be "more than capable to write..." an alternative to react-starter-kit..?

Re: Left-Pad (2024)

#100

Post by another-dave »

rootlocus wrote: post #77
HPsquared wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

11 lines of code! Wow. I had no idea it was that small.

> Most of my open source work followed Unix philosophy, so the packages did one thing at a time. There was 350+ of them. The man page for a unix binary is at least two orders of magnitude larger. At some point, the "Unix philosophy" doesn't make sense anymore. I mean, it couldn't even rightpad.

When the metadata for the package is larger than the source code you've probably gone too small!
Post reply on HN