The question that resonated with me was whether open source even matters anymore.
I think it does but there are weird dynamics I don’t fully understand. I’m curious about HNs thoughts.
My theories: Centralization around key projects due to AI pointing new users towards them. (At the same time this drives up the PR deluge onto these projects. Especially from newer users already heavily using llms.)
So many low effort AI-generated open source libraries that it becomes harder to tell signal from slop. More movement to the bigger projects because they are perceived as safer bets.
There are obvious tells that this was heavily curated by AI, the very thing it criticizes in the opening paras and roasts throughout as a life-destroyer.
I don’t disagree with the premise, and I appreciate the roasts of the SV pseudophilosophers (he left out Ayn Rand tho).
Oh man I wrote this exact comment before trawling far enough to find yours. It belongs at the top. That HN cannot discern the obvious is more alarming than the blatant hypocrisy of the authors. Yeesh!
This post reeks of being written by Claude. Surely you all feel it, too? Are people who write these kinds of posts lacking self awareness, integrity? Does it matter?
15 years ago GitHub was a strong signal for like-minded devs who were of the “let me code and slide pizza under the door” variety. The signal became less meaningful over time so people started optimizing for other things…stars, whatever. Brand. I think the venn diagram of front end marketing types and the explosion of js frameworks probably was the driver for this. Now with vibed out projects everywhere it’s a real task to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I still use gh because I imagine those stars are still current in some markets but maybe I’m deluding myself.
Or, Perhaps the invention of the rocket emoji most likely was the cause of this phenomenon.
The signal of quality for me is the number of contributors and the age of the repo. If I see a repo that's several years old and has many contributes over that time it's very likely a reputable project with some value. If I see a 1 month old repo with one user who has dumped the whole thing and then done nothing since, it's likely vibeslop that will be abandoned in a month.
I recently made this mistake. It was my own fault.
Went looking for a thing, saw some Reddit chatter, decided to try it out.
After all the setup and such I realized it was vibecoded and poorly designed. Just monster gaps they obviously didn’t think about and can’t realistically fix.
I should have paid closer attention. Checked the repo… couple months old, no real activity after the first week or so, basically the only project on the account, issues were all unanswered references to the nasty gap in the design.
I didn’t follow the article’s thesis. It felt written from a defensive crouch and claimed not to be punching down but it seemed to be radiating hostility the entire time. Something about vibe coding only replaces the lowest level of mechanical work involved in creative pursuits (including coding)?
I’m not a booster a doomer or a boomer but I think it’s a reasonable litmus test for LLM coding to implement 80% of an existing app or service. It’s not an accusation against anyone using LLM (I do) nor is it an excuse to take shots, it’s just a way of framing SotA capabilities.
Yeah, I had the same instinct - this feels very much like a "nice idea" but the execution falls short. I mean - busily banging on sqlite like this? Shit at that point just use Redis.
For what it's worth, Kine (software that k3s uses to replace etcd with SQL databases) implements etcd watches on SQLite through polling[1]. The reason being that SQLite does not offer NOTIFY/LISTEN like MySQL and Postgres do. Ironically, Honkey attempts implementing NOTIFY/LISTEN through polling.
k3s has been running on my home server for about three years now (using the default SQLite backend), and there doesn't seem to be excessive CPU usage despite dozens of watches existing in the simulated etcd. Of course, this doesn't say much about Honker, but it's nonetheless worth pointing out that sometimes the choice of database forces one towards a certain design.
With SQLite, you're basically funneled towards a single-writer / single-process design anyway ... in which case why not use a more traditional condvar + mutex rather than polling?
Really might be in sqlite. I've learned to never trust my intuition about performance with that thing. So many times I've gone to "optimize" something and discovered that the naive hack way I had been doing it was faster anyway. It's built for this sort of bullshit.
I had a manual fs polling thing a while back. It was ugly (low time budget, didn't wanna mess with the native watchers), just scanned the whole thing once per second. It averaged out to like 0.3% CPU.
Not elegant, but acceptable for my purposes! (Small-ish directory, and "ping me within a second or two" was realtime enough for this use case.)
i mean, technically this is once per millisecond, so this would happen 1000x more. In your case due to the kernel overhead you would likely not even be able to do it (300% CPU?).
Either way this does seem like a very large overhead due to the fact that there's just no other way to do it without a deeper kernel integration which might be outside the scope of what sqlite is trying to do.
The industrial revolution is generally understood to have started somewhere around 1760, Moby Dick took place in approximately 1830, about 10 years before what some historians mark as the end of the agrarian to Industrial shift that is generally termed the Industrial revolution
I get sort of wishy-washy from 1830 on, because lots of people put the end of the Industrial revolution as being 1900, but 1840 is a defensible and commonly held position.
I think it does but there are weird dynamics I don’t fully understand. I’m curious about HNs thoughts.
My theories: Centralization around key projects due to AI pointing new users towards them. (At the same time this drives up the PR deluge onto these projects. Especially from newer users already heavily using llms.)
So many low effort AI-generated open source libraries that it becomes harder to tell signal from slop. More movement to the bigger projects because they are perceived as safer bets.
reply