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The fact that you are pursuing this is admirable. But this whole thing sounds too much like work. Finding opportunities, convincing entrenched stakeholders, ac

The fact that you are pursuing this is admirable. But this whole thing sounds too much like work. Finding opportunities, convincing entrenched stakeholders, accommodating irrelevant feedback, pitching in meetings — this is the kind of thing that top engineers get paid a lot of money to do. For me personally open source is the time to be creative and free. So my tolerance for anything more than review is very low. And I would have quit at the first roadblock. What’s a little sad, is NPM should not be operating like a company with 1000+ employees. The “persuade us users want this” approach is only going to stop volunteers. They should be proactively identifying efforts like this and helping you bring it across the finish line.

dr-detroit 2y ago
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coliveira 2y ago
The problem is that this guy is treating open source as if it was a company where you need to direct a project to completion. Nobody in open source wants to be told what to do. Just release your work, if it is useful, the community will pick it up and everybody will benefit. You cannot force your improvement into the whole group, even if it is beneficial in your opinion.
- deleted 2y ago
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- liontwist 2y ago
  > where you need to direct a project to completion Do you want to get a change in, or not? Is this a project working with the community or not? > Just release your work What motivation exists to optimize package formats if nobody uses that package format? There are no benefits unless it’s in mainline. > Nobody in open source wants to be told what to do He’s not telling anybody to do work. He is sharing an optimization with clear tradeoffs - not a new architecture. > You cannot force your improvement into the whole group Nope, but communication is key. “put up a PR and we will let you know whether it’s something we want to pursue”. Instead they put him through several levels of gatekeepers where each one gave him incorrect feedback. “Why do we want to optimize bandwidth” is a question they should have the answer to. If this PR showed up on my project I would say “I’m worried about X,Y,Z” we will set up a test for X and Y and get back to you. Could you look into Z?
  - deleted 2y ago
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gjsman-1000 2y ago
> What’s a little sad, is NPM should not be operating like a company with 1000+ employees. The “persuade us users want this” approach is only going to stop volunteers. They should be proactively identifying efforts like this and helping you bring it across the finish line. Says who? Says an engineer? Says a product person? NPM is a company with 14 employees; with a system integrated into countless extremely niche and weird integrations they cannot control. Many of those integrations might make a professional engineer's hair catch fire - "it should never be done this way!" - but the real world is that the wrong way is the majority of the time. There's no guarantee that many of the downloads come from the official client, just as one example. The last thing they need, or I want, or any of their customers want, or their 14 employees need, is something that might break backwards compatibility in an extremely niche case, anger a major customer, cause countless support tickets, all for a tiny optimization nobody cares about. This is something I've learned here about HN that, for own mental health, I now dismiss: Engineers are obsessed with 2% optimizations here, 5% optimizations there; unchecked, it will literally turn into an OCD outlet, all for things nobody in the non-tech world even notices, let alone asks about. Just let it go.
- liontwist 2y ago
  Open source needs to operate differently than a company because people don’t have time/money/energy to deal with bullshit. Hell. Even 15 employees larping as a corporation is going to be inefficient. what you and NPM are telling us, is that they are happy to take free labor, but this is not an open source project. > Engineers are obsessed with 2% optimizations here Actually in large products these are incredible finds. But ok. They should have the leadership to know which bandwidth tradeoffs they are committed to and tell him immediately it’s not what they want, rather than sending him to various gatekeepers.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Correct; NPM is not an "open source project" in the sense of a volunteer-first development model. Neither is Linux - over 80% of commits are corporate, and have been for a decade. Neither is Blender anymore - the Blender Development Fund raking in $3M a year calls the shots. Every successful "large" open source project has outgrown the volunteer community. > Actually in large products these are incredible finds. In large products, incredible finds may be true; but breaking compatibility with just 0.1% of your customers is also an incredible disaster.
deleted 2y ago
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efitz 2y ago
I think that the reason NPM responded this way is because it was a premature optimization. If/when NPM has a problem - storage costs are too high, or transfer costs are too high, or user feedback indicates that users are unhappy with transfer sizes - then they will be ready to listen to this kind of proposal. I think their response was completely rational, especially given a potentially huge impact on compute costs and/or publication latency.
- deleted 2y ago
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- maccard 2y ago
  I disagree with it being a premature optimisation. Treating everything that you haven’t already identified personally as a problem as a premature optimisation is cargo cutting in its own way. The attitude of not caring is why npm and various tools are so slow. That said, I think NPM’s response was totally correct - explain the problem and the tradeoffs. And OP decided the tradeoffs weren’t worth it, which is totally fair.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
While NPM is open source, it's in the awkward spot of also having... probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of professional applications depend on it; it should be run like a business, because millions depend on it. ...which makes it all the weirder that security isn't any better, as in, publishing a package can be done without a review step on the npm side, for example. I find it strange that they haven't doubled down on enterprise offerings, e.g. creating hosted versions (corporate proxies), reviewed / validated / LTS / certified versions of packages, etc.
deleted 2y ago
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dr-detroit 2y ago

[dead]

coliveira 2y ago

The problem is that this guy is treating open source as if it was a company where you need to direct a project to completion. Nobody in open source wants to be told what to do. Just release your work, if it is useful, the community will pick it up and everybody will benefit. You cannot force your improvement into the whole group, even if it is beneficial in your opinion.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
liontwist 2y ago
> where you need to direct a project to completion Do you want to get a change in, or not? Is this a project working with the community or not? > Just release your work What motivation exists to optimize package formats if nobody uses that package format? There are no benefits unless it’s in mainline. > Nobody in open source wants to be told what to do He’s not telling anybody to do work. He is sharing an optimization with clear tradeoffs - not a new architecture. > You cannot force your improvement into the whole group Nope, but communication is key. “put up a PR and we will let you know whether it’s something we want to pursue”. Instead they put him through several levels of gatekeepers where each one gave him incorrect feedback. “Why do we want to optimize bandwidth” is a question they should have the answer to. If this PR showed up on my project I would say “I’m worried about X,Y,Z” we will set up a test for X and Y and get back to you. Could you look into Z?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

gjsman-1000 2y ago

> What’s a little sad, is NPM should not be operating like a company with 1000+ employees. The “persuade us users want this” approach is only going to stop volunteers. They should be proactively identifying efforts like this and helping you bring it across the finish line. Says who? Says an engineer? Says a product person? NPM is a company with 14 employees; with a system integrated into countless extremely niche and weird integrations they cannot control. Many of those integrations might make a professional engineer's hair catch fire - "it should never be done this way!" - but the real world is that the wrong way is the majority of the time. There's no guarantee that many of the downloads come from the official client, just as one example. The last thing they need, or I want, or any of their customers want, or their 14 employees need, is something that might break backwards compatibility in an extremely niche case, anger a major customer, cause countless support tickets, all for a tiny optimization nobody cares about. This is something I've learned here about HN that, for own mental health, I now dismiss: Engineers are obsessed with 2% optimizations here, 5% optimizations there; unchecked, it will literally turn into an OCD outlet, all for things nobody in the non-tech world even notices, let alone asks about. Just let it go.

liontwist 2y ago
Open source needs to operate differently than a company because people don’t have time/money/energy to deal with bullshit. Hell. Even 15 employees larping as a corporation is going to be inefficient. what you and NPM are telling us, is that they are happy to take free labor, but this is not an open source project. > Engineers are obsessed with 2% optimizations here Actually in large products these are incredible finds. But ok. They should have the leadership to know which bandwidth tradeoffs they are committed to and tell him immediately it’s not what they want, rather than sending him to various gatekeepers.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Correct; NPM is not an "open source project" in the sense of a volunteer-first development model. Neither is Linux - over 80% of commits are corporate, and have been for a decade. Neither is Blender anymore - the Blender Development Fund raking in $3M a year calls the shots. Every successful "large" open source project has outgrown the volunteer community. > Actually in large products these are incredible finds. In large products, incredible finds may be true; but breaking compatibility with just 0.1% of your customers is also an incredible disaster.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

efitz 2y ago

I think that the reason NPM responded this way is because it was a premature optimization. If/when NPM has a problem - storage costs are too high, or transfer costs are too high, or user feedback indicates that users are unhappy with transfer sizes - then they will be ready to listen to this kind of proposal. I think their response was completely rational, especially given a potentially huge impact on compute costs and/or publication latency.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
maccard 2y ago
I disagree with it being a premature optimisation. Treating everything that you haven’t already identified personally as a problem as a premature optimisation is cargo cutting in its own way. The attitude of not caring is why npm and various tools are so slow. That said, I think NPM’s response was totally correct - explain the problem and the tradeoffs. And OP decided the tradeoffs weren’t worth it, which is totally fair.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

While NPM is open source, it's in the awkward spot of also having... probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of professional applications depend on it; it should be run like a business, because millions depend on it. ...which makes it all the weirder that security isn't any better, as in, publishing a package can be done without a review step on the npm side, for example. I find it strange that they haven't doubled down on enterprise offerings, e.g. creating hosted versions (corporate proxies), reviewed / validated / LTS / certified versions of packages, etc.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]