> Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently, 
    > each operating a small software factory.
    >
    > [...] together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster
    > rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49037608

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

It's both heartwarming, and bitterly sad, to see so many other posters confirm he was one of the good ones.

It's something like:

(A) To the public (e.g. prospects, customers, investors): "This is a good thing and we're going to be an even better bet!"

(B) To the remaining team: "This is tough and I feel your pain and will do better."

(C) To the laid off: "It's not you, it's me, thank you and good luck."

It's hard if not impossible to handle all three of these authentically, concisely, and in the same message. Which is why you can almost immediately find something not to like..

Nobody would argue that it's categorically safe/good/smart to blindly pipe a script into your shell; and for the record, I agree. I would also readily agree that habituating users to doing this probably creates new, more general risks especially among how less-technical users interact with their CLI.

However, the realities of the "real world" make it popular for a reason, in light of those negatives; tons of scaled projects continue to offer a 1-liner. So we have to ask, why? They'd probably say that's because it (a) improves project adoption, and (b) reduces "install broken" tickets.

You have to address the non-technical merits and goals to get behavior to change here, and sadly, I don't think anyone has done that.

But who cares about me? I'm not currently maintaining one of these (though I did once). My suggestion to bring your argument to an active project was genuine: try it! I'd be delighted to see you bring about the change you want.

[PS: The commenter I replied to originally used the term "bad faith", which they've since edited]

Rather than argue with those of us who are pointing out messy realities, this commenter might be better served filing a bug against any number of the projects that offer installation this way, asking them to remove it, and see if it lands any better.

Technical purity/superiority isn’t the only factor, or even the most important one, driving projects to offer quick installers like this.

Indeed, plenty of these scripts often act as a "what OS and packager do we have" mux. Just look at the source of this one, for example.

When you support an open source project at scale and/or with less savvy users, you come to see the benefit of "here, just f'ing slam this into your shell and we'll figure it out" installers. I know I have.

(pi.sh also documents other install methods, like `npm`, on their homepage)

If trust and security is the issue, unfortunately "better" ideas like hashpipe [1] never achieved critical mass

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9318286

Then I imagined the real-but-unknowable chance it was all set up by some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible, getting excited by a much bigger world at reach — and remembered my own expensive mistakes with long-distance BBSes & the like.

I sorta hope for that, anyway. Curiosity is a beautiful thing.

[1] https://majorcontext.com/moat/

    > How could it be better?

Personally I'd rather it not exist. Roku would be more pleasant to develop on had they chosen a more popular, existing language as the basis (e.g. Python). Then the task of developing for the platform ~mostly reduces from "learn a new language and a new framework" to just the latter.

I suppose it hasn't inhibited their success, of course.

    [1] https://github.com/rokucommunity/brighterscript

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277059

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Interestingly `bun upgrade` catches "GitHubIsDown" as a specific case:

    $ bun upgrade
    Bun v1.2.20 is out! You're on v1.2.18
    Downloading [38003/21788202] Bun upgrade failed with error: GitHubIsDown
    
    Please upgrade manually:
      curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

I tried to re-license a previously-released project (like from GPL to MIT or similar) and they wouldn't budge. I had written all the code.

In the end, I decided that them suing (or firing) me to assert their ownership of $VALUELESS_PROJECT, so they could then license it back, was ridiculously unlikely, said fuck it, and did it. And I was right.

(And god I hope you’re not a state-of-the-art summarization LLM.)

    > How it Works
    > 
    > Party Squasher uses the presence of mobile phones
    > as a proxy for the presence of people.  You start by
    > connecting our small sensor to your property’s internet
    > router. [...]

My quick-and-dirty idea was to stand up a Discourse forum with categories for each make, threads for each model (or possibly model + model year range pairs).

If anyone wants to collaborate / provide some extra motivation, hit me up..