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Sure, in the spirit of open source, why not? It's a hobby, and it scratches an itch. I very much enjoy deconstructing things more than putting them together. W

by eterm 1mo ago

Sure, in the spirit of open source, why not? It's a hobby, and it scratches an itch. I very much enjoy deconstructing things more than putting them together. We also live in a world where a package written by someone learning to code ended up critically underpinning the entire ecosystem and is downloaded 500 million times a month. Ignoring the eco-terror aspect of that for now, it means there's an awful lot of code out there which is finding itself under constant attack by a fleet of hostile AI. I don't personally believe that the solution to that is "more AI", which firstly just overwhelms maintainers and secondly surrenders our human agency to a giant machine, with a hope that the "good" side can out-spend the bad. Nor do I think the solution is to abandon the open internet and retreat behind corporate walls into curated spaces, "benevolently" protected by giant companies. Which means holding on to the open internet requires a human approach, and any signal to help amplify the work there is a benefit.

order-matters 1mo ago
>We also live in a world where a package written by someone learning to code ended up critically underpinning the entire ecosystem and is downloaded 500 million times a month whoa what? which one is that?
- hnuncommon 1mo ago
  Check is-even and is-odd npm packages. https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even
  - vel0city 1mo ago
    That's still quite a ways away from 500M+ downloads a month, more like ~4M downloads a month. Still a huge number of downloads, don't get me wrong!
    - eterm 1mo ago
      You're right, I was reading the stats for "is-number" and mixing them up for "is-even": https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-number https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-number 170M downloads / week. Same author, similar vintage. Arguably a necessary package, but that just further indicates how messed up javascript was.
      - vel0city 1mo ago
        So nuts. > Arguably a necessary package Arguably a somewhat important part of a standard library!
        eterm 1mo ago
        A large part of the problems of Javascript are corollaries of lacking of a good standard library, and the relatively long time it took and is still taking to fix that. It wasn't really until ES2015 that a better standard library really started to take shape, and, thanks to IE11, it was a very long time before that didn't need poly-filling. In a sane world, you'd just parse whatever you're after and then check for NaN or null. You can't do that. Pop open your favourite javascript runtime and type: Number.parseInt("123Garbage")
- eterm 1mo ago
  As another commenter said, it's "is-even": https://github.com/i-voted-for-trump/is-even https://github.com/i-voted-for-trump/is-even From that page: > I created this in 2014, when I was learning how to program. I've nothing against Jon Schlinkert, it's not his fault the way we build software is more than messed up, where our build systems are so brittle that, "Throw out the universe and rebuild it from scratch" became not just acceptable, but the main way to get build systems to work reliably.

by eterm 1mo ago

order-matters 1mo ago

>We also live in a world where a package written by someone learning to code ended up critically underpinning the entire ecosystem and is downloaded 500 million times a month whoa what? which one is that?

hnuncommon 1mo ago
Check is-even and is-odd npm packages. https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even
- vel0city 1mo ago
  That's still quite a ways away from 500M+ downloads a month, more like ~4M downloads a month. Still a huge number of downloads, don't get me wrong!
  - eterm 1mo ago
    You're right, I was reading the stats for "is-number" and mixing them up for "is-even": https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-number https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-number 170M downloads / week. Same author, similar vintage. Arguably a necessary package, but that just further indicates how messed up javascript was.
    - vel0city 1mo ago
      So nuts. > Arguably a necessary package Arguably a somewhat important part of a standard library!
      - eterm 1mo ago
        A large part of the problems of Javascript are corollaries of lacking of a good standard library, and the relatively long time it took and is still taking to fix that. It wasn't really until ES2015 that a better standard library really started to take shape, and, thanks to IE11, it was a very long time before that didn't need poly-filling. In a sane world, you'd just parse whatever you're after and then check for NaN or null. You can't do that. Pop open your favourite javascript runtime and type: Number.parseInt("123Garbage")
eterm 1mo ago
As another commenter said, it's "is-even": https://github.com/i-voted-for-trump/is-even https://github.com/i-voted-for-trump/is-even From that page: > I created this in 2014, when I was learning how to program. I've nothing against Jon Schlinkert, it's not his fault the way we build software is more than messed up, where our build systems are so brittle that, "Throw out the universe and rebuild it from scratch" became not just acceptable, but the main way to get build systems to work reliably.