...that you shouldn't feel responsible for that or anything else unless people pay you to. So, feel free to ignore NoScripters inconvenience. :)
First time I've seen your apps, though. Shooter didn't work on my Firefox. Chromata did, though. I like both it and the name you chose for it. The fractal example that loaded reminded me of drawings of a neuron. The others were trippy with one almost looking like an old snake game. Overall impression reminds me when I used to watch the visualizations of Winamp, esp tunnels and stuff, while trying to think of next solution to a programming or system problem. Your stuff might even moonlight as a decent screensaver if the CPU use is low. :)
Re: you other comment - perhaps this is just my own take on it. I have actively promoted some of my libs, so in that regard I feel a small responsibility for the resulting decisions people take on my advice. That's why I included that note at the end.
Re: noscript - yeah, it's an Angular app. Unnecessary? Sure! I used my site as a way to learn Angular a while back, that's all.
Re: my other projects. Glad you like them! I'm actually just working on a music visualization app whenever I get time. The idea is that it will be a native (electron) app, which can read any output from your sound card, and then use JS to write visualizations for it (so anyone can write their own if they like).
Opera Android: empty page with blinking cursor. That could be a reason for not fixing issues, the blank page syndrome :-) but I guess there is some technical problem going on.
And Firefox android. Am I supposed to disable my JavaScript/trackers blocking plugins? It's not worth the risk. I only do that when booking cheap flights.
If he'd used HTML, the thing designed for formatting text on the internet, his site probably wouldn't have been hugged to death. I wish people wouldn't use javascript like this.
It does for NoScript users. I told him not to worry about us, though, cuz we aren't paying him. The HTML comment up thread applies, though, because I never had these sorts of problems serving HTML/CSS for text parts out of, say, web servers instead of databases. The stuff that absolutely had to be dynamic was on dedicated pages back in the day often with static fall-backs.
These JS and database-powered sites have issues we simply didn't have on mostly HTML sites. Probably one reason static site generators are making a comeback. ;)
The thing is you can’t tell someone who work for free on their free time on a project you use for free what to do with their time. If they want to make silly JS animations on their website it’s not a problem.
He misses another way to get bugs fixed in open source software: Pay a developer to fix them. However that does raise the problem that it's hard to find a competent developer to do piecework (easy to find an incompetent developer of course). All the good open source developers are employed.
All of my published work clearly states that commercial support is available (and when other companies actively contribute, I list them too). Then again, most of my projects are work-related, not hobbies, so I don't mind developing a funding plan to keep the projects sustainable.
In some cases, however, it can also attract poor quality patches from contractors working on gigs, and make life hell for the maintainers. I personally prefer if people contract me directly (as the project/component maintainer).
Tangential anecdote: a while back I helped maintain a caching module for a CMS. I was once asked by a user to look into the performance problems of their website. They were a big media company from the Middle East. I had no idea they used my module, which was usually for small websites on cheap hosting. Their contractors had enabled every possible caching module in the world. I basically disabled a few modules, including mine, tweaked their Varnish config, and things ran smoothly afterwards.
I've responded to user requests with "I'm really busy; if you want this to be a priority my rate is $120". Those conversations almost always end with bitching (theirs) and me emailing something like "You mistook yourself for a paying customer. You aren't and I still don't work for you. Bye!" then adding their email to my delete on receipt rule.
Thought the blank page was the point he was trying to make in that a blank canvas, editor, notebook, etc is daunting when you first get started and you can easily find excuses to keep putting it off. But apparently there's a technical issue here. Or is that intentional?
It's making an ajax request for the blog post and that page is returning a 500 error because of a Database connection issue (assumed because of higher traffic).
It's not clear whether this is getting sincere upvotes despite that the page is currently failing to load or ironic upvotes because the page is currently failing to load.
In any event, he's not fixing your issue yet because he has limited free time and, apparently, has issues of his own to fix.
It wasn't really clear to me that that is supposed to be a link. It's in a position I would normally expect a headline to be and it's not underlined or accompanied by any other text indicating it might be clickable.
I thought the "thanks for the hug, HN" comment was unrelated.
EDIT: It now says "(link)" in front of it. Not sure whether that's new or I just overlooked it.
Thanks, I didn't realize the blue headline was actually a link to click. I thought the author had replaced the body of the article with a "please go away, my site is overloaded" message.
"It's not clear whether this is getting sincere upvotes despite that the page is currently failing to load or ironic upvotes because the page is currently failing to load."
I feel the pain. I maintain a couple of slightly popular repos and the issues are sometimes overwhelming, even more when I have to debug some issue in an environment I don't own (iOS) or when the issue runs deep (PhantomJS issue => testing issue => now my issue).
So the Bing cache is good and the article worth reading
This is however the money shot:
>> how many parts of your company’s product are coupled to the lifestyle and priorities of some lone, unpaid package maintainer? It’s something I have to think about too – in my day-job I build software on top of many FOSS libraries, many of which are probably maintained by people in similar circumstances to my own.
Given that my day job builds on (last count) 953 npm packages, most of which are probably different authors, not to mention servers, backend etc etc, I do really worry we are finding OSS backwards.
Good luck to the OP and his young family. And perhaps GitHub can set up a "pay me a days freelance rates work for issues fixed" feature
Since mostly an issue is nothing but.
Even if it won't get fixed (directly).
Also some people in Open Source are akward. They tell me that they have limited resources in their project and they can't fix it or won't fix it or whatever. They don't even think that I could try to fix my own issue. They better start a conversation that they have too less people and that this particular issue will be closed. They don't even care if you've done some open source contributions already (even minor one's) on another project / language.
It's like some people just don't want your help, even if they told you.
Isn't that why Github has forking? If people recognize that you'll accept more updates to your fork than the original, then maybe your will become the defacto proper one. If not, at least you fixed it for yourself and all your friends who trust you.
If you don't like that you'll then have to include the original author's future changes in yours, then, well, you're doing just what he was - not wanting to spend time managing other people's things.
Not sure what you are saying but next time make a pull request that includes good test coverage.
Even then though, if they don't have time to test it themselves in another project then they could end up breaking a lot of people's projects down the line. So they might not have the time to test and so can't even merge a PR.
Why? Everything else being equal that would just mean you'd get a completely blank page because the database connection would have died in the initial request rather than the ajax request
I agree with most of those, although I'd add a bullet point to the agreement:
- If I don't have the time or interest to support the project any longer I agree to reach out to trusted contributors and give them commit rights, or put a clear notice on the readme: "This project is not actively maintained" so users can make an informed choice
Great point. I think there always comes a time for developers of popular open source libraries where their "workload" (that is their responsibilities to their end users) becomes too much for them to deal with, even if you don't have a family.
The only sensible solution here is to bring on regular contributors as repository owners and spread the responsibility.
True, but there are problems with GitHub forking: namely that its often non-obvious which is the best fork to use, since too much prominence is given to the original project. Also if the maintainer doesn't even put a note on the readme "This is dead, use XXX fork" you have even more problems. Also maybe the original project was published to a package manager ... forking is one thing, but publishing and maintaining your fork on a package manager too?
It can take some effort to feel comfortable giving the keys of a project to someone else. In one project that I had abandoned, I encouraged others to fork and rename the project.
They can advertise it as a fork of the original project to attract stranded users, I would even have promoted it, but I think that it would have been very misleading to our users if suddenly the project changed hands. (the project was a management tool often used by non-profits, it stored personnal data and security was important. I had received a ton of very shady non-sense proposals, to this day, 10 years later, I still get the occasionnal weird message or request for support)
Forking is an approach to keep the project moving but the underlying problem is then notification & distribution. If I use one of the package managers - npm, composer, gems, etc - people only know of the original project and have its namespace somewhere in the project.
If I fork a project, resolve all the issues, and make it better, faster, etc, there's not a mechanism for those users to pick up my fork unless they actively go looking for it.
I think many of those package managers would be well-served to have a 301-like redirect saying "deprecated, but continued over in this new package"
I think this could be a valid reason - I know there are issues in some of my projects that I won't get around to because I may have lost interest in but which if someone would pay me to fix an issue or two I'd glady fix it:
"Because you are not offering me any money to fix it"
105 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadworking cached copy: https://archive.is/t9oKw
Sorry about my poor devops skills, everyone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11696969
...that you shouldn't feel responsible for that or anything else unless people pay you to. So, feel free to ignore NoScripters inconvenience. :)
First time I've seen your apps, though. Shooter didn't work on my Firefox. Chromata did, though. I like both it and the name you chose for it. The fractal example that loaded reminded me of drawings of a neuron. The others were trippy with one almost looking like an old snake game. Overall impression reminds me when I used to watch the visualizations of Winamp, esp tunnels and stuff, while trying to think of next solution to a programming or system problem. Your stuff might even moonlight as a decent screensaver if the CPU use is low. :)
Re: noscript - yeah, it's an Angular app. Unnecessary? Sure! I used my site as a way to learn Angular a while back, that's all.
Re: my other projects. Glad you like them! I'm actually just working on a music visualization app whenever I get time. The idea is that it will be a native (electron) app, which can read any output from your sound card, and then use JS to write visualizations for it (so anyone can write their own if they like).
Makes sense.
"I'm actually just working on a music visualization app whenever I get time."
Sounds neat. I look forward to seeing that one.
Anyway, thanks to Bing's cache: https://archive.is/t9oKw
This link seems to work for now.
https://archive.is/t9oKw
These JS and database-powered sites have issues we simply didn't have on mostly HTML sites. Probably one reason static site generators are making a comeback. ;)
In some cases, however, it can also attract poor quality patches from contractors working on gigs, and make life hell for the maintainers. I personally prefer if people contract me directly (as the project/component maintainer).
Tangential anecdote: a while back I helped maintain a caching module for a CMS. I was once asked by a user to look into the performance problems of their website. They were a big media company from the Middle East. I had no idea they used my module, which was usually for small websites on cheap hosting. Their contractors had enabled every possible caching module in the world. I basically disabled a few modules, including mine, tweaked their Varnish config, and things ran smoothly afterwards.
http://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/api/wp-json/posts/529 Error establishing a database connection
In any event, he's not fixing your issue yet because he has limited free time and, apparently, has issues of his own to fix.
I thought the "thanks for the hug, HN" comment was unrelated.
EDIT: It now says "(link)" in front of it. Not sure whether that's new or I just overlooked it.
Clever thought. That didn't occur to me.
This is however the money shot:
>> how many parts of your company’s product are coupled to the lifestyle and priorities of some lone, unpaid package maintainer? It’s something I have to think about too – in my day-job I build software on top of many FOSS libraries, many of which are probably maintained by people in similar circumstances to my own.
Given that my day job builds on (last count) 953 npm packages, most of which are probably different authors, not to mention servers, backend etc etc, I do really worry we are finding OSS backwards.
Good luck to the OP and his young family. And perhaps GitHub can set up a "pay me a days freelance rates work for issues fixed" feature
Since mostly an issue is nothing but. Even if it won't get fixed (directly).
Also some people in Open Source are akward. They tell me that they have limited resources in their project and they can't fix it or won't fix it or whatever. They don't even think that I could try to fix my own issue. They better start a conversation that they have too less people and that this particular issue will be closed. They don't even care if you've done some open source contributions already (even minor one's) on another project / language.
It's like some people just don't want your help, even if they told you.
If you don't like that you'll then have to include the original author's future changes in yours, then, well, you're doing just what he was - not wanting to spend time managing other people's things.
Even then though, if they don't have time to test it themselves in another project then they could end up breaking a lot of people's projects down the line. So they might not have the time to test and so can't even merge a PR.
- If I don't have the time or interest to support the project any longer I agree to reach out to trusted contributors and give them commit rights, or put a clear notice on the readme: "This project is not actively maintained" so users can make an informed choice
The only sensible solution here is to bring on regular contributors as repository owners and spread the responsibility.
They can advertise it as a fork of the original project to attract stranded users, I would even have promoted it, but I think that it would have been very misleading to our users if suddenly the project changed hands. (the project was a management tool often used by non-profits, it stored personnal data and security was important. I had received a ton of very shady non-sense proposals, to this day, 10 years later, I still get the occasionnal weird message or request for support)
If I fork a project, resolve all the issues, and make it better, faster, etc, there's not a mechanism for those users to pick up my fork unless they actively go looking for it.
I think many of those package managers would be well-served to have a 301-like redirect saying "deprecated, but continued over in this new package"
"Because you are not offering me any money to fix it"