9 ms·

This seems like a tragedy of the commons -- GitHub is free after all, and it has all of these great properties, so why not? -- but this kind of decision making

This seems like a tragedy of the commons -- GitHub is free after all, and it has all of these great properties, so why not? -- but this kind of decision making occurs whenever externalities are present. My favorite hill to die on (externality) is user time. Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done. Externalities lead to users downloading extra gigabytes of data (wasted time) and waiting for software, all of which is waste that the developer isn't responsible for and doesn't care about.

ekjhgkejhgk 9mo ago
I wouldn't call it tragedy of the commons, because it's not a commons. It's owned by microsoft. They're calculating that it's worth it for them, so I say take as much as you can. Commons would be if it's owned by nobody and everyone benefits from its existence.
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  Well, till you choose to host something yourself and it becomes popular
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  Still, because reality doesn't respect boundaries of human-made categories, and because people never define their categories exhaustively, we can safely assume that something almost-but-not-quite like a commons, is subject to an almost-but-not-quite tragedy of the commons.
  - reactordev 9mo ago
    An A- is still an A kind of thinking. I like this approach as not everything perfectly fits the mold.
  - ttiurani 9mo ago
    The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Elinor Ostrom with actual empirical evidence of commons. The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
    - b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
      yeah, it's a post-hoc rationalization for the enclosure and privatization of said commons.
      - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
        And here I thought the standard, obvious solution to tragedy of the commons is centralized governance.
        dpark 9mo ago
        People invoke the tragedy of the commons in bad faith to argue for privatization because “the alternative is communism”. i.e. Either an individual or the government has to own the resource. This is of course a false dichotomy because governance can be done at any level.
        AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
        It also seems to omit the possibility that the thing could be privately operated but not for profit. Let's Encrypt is a solid example of something you could reasonably model as "tragedy of the commons" (who is going to maintain all this certificate verification and issuance infrastructure?) but then it turns out the value of having it is a million times more than the cost of operating it, so it's quite sustainable given a modicum of donations. Free software licenses are another example in this category. Software frequently has a much higher value than development cost and incremental improvements decentralize well, so a license that lets you use it for free but requires you to contribute back improvements tends to work well because then people see something that would work for them except for this one thing, and it's cheaper to add that themselves or pay someone to than to pay someone who has to develop the whole thing from scratch.
  - lo_zamoyski 9mo ago
    There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well. But I would make the following clarifications: 1. A private entity is still the steward of the resource and therefore the resource figures into the aims, goals, and constraints of the private entity. 2. The common good is itself under the stewardship of the state, as its function is guardian of the common good. 3. The common good is the default (by natural law) and prior to the private good. The latter is instituted in positive law for the sake of the former by, e.g., reducing conflict over goods.
    - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
      > There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well. I think it's both simpler and deeper than that. Governments and corporations don't exist in nature. Those are just human constructs, mutually-recursive shared beliefs that emulate agents following some rules, as long as you don't think too hard about this. "Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem. The name itself might've been coined with some specific scenarios in mind, but for the phenomenon itself, it doesn't matter what kind of entities exploit the "commons"; the "private" vs. "public" distinction itself is neither a sharp divide, nor does it exist in nature. All that matters is that there's some resource used by several independent parties, and each of them finds it more beneficial to defect than to cooperate. In a way, it's basically a 3+-player prisonner's dilemma. The solution is the same, too: introducing a party that forces all other parties to cooperate. That can be a private or public or any other kind of org taking ownership of the commons and enforcing quotas, or in case of prisonners, a mob boss ready to shoot anyone who defects.
      - lo_zamoyski 9mo ago
        It was not my intent to be exhaustive, but to make a few points that left it up to the reader to relate them appropriately to your post in order to enrich thinking about the subject. But it appears we cannot avoid getting into the weeds a bit… > Governments and corporations don't exist in nature. This is not as simple as you seem to think. The claim “don’t exist in nature” is vague, because the word “nature” in common speech is vague. What is “natural”? Is a beehive “natural” Is a house “natural”? Is synthetic water “natural”? (I claim that the concept of “nature” concerns what it means to be some kind of thing. Perhaps polystyrene has never existed before human beings synthesized it, but it has a nature, that is, it means something to be polystyrene. And it is in the nature of human beings to make materials and artifacts, i.e., to produce technology ordered toward the human good.) So, what is government? Well, it is an authority whose central purpose is to function as the guardian and steward of the common good. I claim that parenthood is the primordial form of human government and the family as the primordial form of the state. We are intrinsically social and political animals; legitimate societies exist only when joined by a common good. This is real and part of human nature. The capacity to deviate from human nature does not disprove the norm inherent to it. Now, procedurally we could institute various particular and concrete arrangements through which government is actualized. We could institute a republican form of government or a monarchy, for example. These are historically conditioned. But in all cases, there is a government. Government qua government is not some arbitrary “construct”, but something proper to all forms and levels of human society. > "Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem. We can talk about coordination once we establish the ends for which such coordination is needed, but there is something more fundamental that must be said about the framing of the problem of the “tragedy”. The framing does not presume a notion of human beings as moral agents and political and social creatures. In other words, it begins with a highly individualist, homo economicus view of human nature as rationally egoist and oriented toward maximizing utility, full stop. But I claim that is not in accord with human nature and thus the human good, even if people can fall into such pathological patterns of behavior (especially in a culture that routinely reinforces that norm). As I wrote, human beings are inherently social animals. We cannot flourish outside of societies. A commons that suffers this sort of unhinged extraction is an example of a moral and a political failure. Why? Because it is unjust, intemperate, and a lack of solidarity to maximize resource extraction in that manner. So the tragedy is a matter of a) the moral failure of the users of that resource, and b) the failure of an authority to regulate its use. The typical solution that’s proposed is either privatization or centralization, but both solutions presuppose the false anthropology of homo economicus. (I am not claiming that privatization does not have a place, only that the dichotomy is false.) Now, I did say that the case with something like github is analogical, because functionally, it is like a common resource, just like how social media functions like a public square in some respects. But analogy is not univocity. Github is not strictly speaking a common good, nor is social media strictly a public square, because in both cases, a private company manages them. And typically, private goods are managed for private benefit, even if they are morally bound not to harm the common good. That intent, that purpose, is central to determining whether something is public or private, because something public has the common benefit as its aim, while something private has private benefit as its aim.
  - bee_rider 9mo ago
    That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something? I mean, I’m not sure I agree that GitHub is nearly a commons in any sense, but let’s put that aside as a distraction… The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons). Feedback loops are notoriously sensitive to small parameter changes. MS could presumably impose some damping if they wanted.
    - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
      > That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something Not linearity but continuity, which I think is a well-founded assumption, given that it's our categorization that simplifies the world by drawing sharp boundaries where no such bounds exist in nature. > The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons) AIUI, zero-cost is not a necessary condition, a positive return is enough. Fishermen still need to buy fuel and nets and pay off loans for the boats, but as long as their expected profit is greater than that, they'll still overfish and deplete the pond, unless stronger external feedback is introduced. Given that the solution to tragedy of the commons is having the commons owned by someone who can boss the users around, GitHub being owned by MS makes it more of a commons in practice, not less.
      - kortilla 9mo ago
        No, it’s not a well-founded assumption. Many categories like these were created in the first place because there is a very obvious discontinuous step change in behavior. You’re fundamentally misunderstanding what tragedy of the commons is. It’s not that it’s “zero-cost” for the participants. All it requires a positive return that has a negative externality that eventually leads to the collapse of the system. Overfishing and CO2 emissions are very clearly a tragedy of the commons. GitHub right now is not. People putting all sorts of crap on there is not hurting github. GitHub is not going to collapse if people keep using it unbounded. Not surprisingly, this is because it’s not a commons and Microsoft oversees it, placing appropriate rate limits and whatnot to make sure it keeps making sense as a business.
- jasonkester 9mo ago
  It has the same effect though. A few bad actors using this “free” thing can end up driving the cost up enough that Microsoft will have to start charging for it. The jerks get their free things for a while, then it goes away for everyone.
  - Y_Y 9mo ago
    I think the jerks are the ones who bought and enshittified GitHub after it had earned significant trust and become an important part of FOSS infrastructure.
    - irishcoffee 9mo ago
      Scoping it to a local maxima, the only thing worse than git is github. In an alternate universe hg won the clone wars and we are all better off for it.
      - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
        Excuse me if this is obvious, but how is Mercurial better than Git from a repo format perspective?
    - dahart 9mo ago
      Why do you blame MS for predictably doing what MS does, and not the people who sold that trust & FOSS infra to MS for a profit? Your blame seems misplaced. And out of curiosity, aside from costing more for some people, what’s worse exactly? I’m not a heavy GitHub user, but I haven’t really noticed anything in the core functionality that would justify calling it enshittified.
      - mastax 9mo ago
        Plenty of blame to go around. Probably the worst thing MS did was kill GitHub’s nascent CI project and replace it with Azure DevOps. Though to be fair the fundamental flaws with that approach didn’t really become apparent for a few years. And GitHub’s feature development pace was far too slow compared to its competitors at the time. Of course GitHub used to be a lot more reliable… Now they’re cramming in half baked AI stuff everywhere but that’s hardly a MS specific sin. MS GitHub has been worse about DMCA and sanctioned country related takedowns than I remember pre acquisition GitHub being. Did I miss anything?
- rvba 9mo ago
  I doubt anyone is calculating Remember how GTA5 took 10 minutes to start and nobody cared? Lots of software is like this. Some Blizzard games download 137 MB file every time you run them and take few minutes to start (and no, this is not due to my computer).
- ericyd 9mo ago
  Tragedy of the Microsoft just doesn't sound as nice though
- groundzeros2015 9mo ago
  A public park suffers from tragedy of the commons even though it’s managed by the city.
- dahart 9mo ago
  > so I say take as much as you can. Commons would be if it’s owned by nobody This isn’t what “commons” means in the term ‘tragedy of the commons’, and the obvious end result of your suggestion to take as much as you can is to cause the loss of access. Anything that is free to use is a commons, regardless of ownership, and when some people use too much, everyone loses access. Finite digital resources like bandwidth and database sizes within companies are even listed as examples in the Wikipedia article on Tragedy of the Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
  - nkmnz 9mo ago
    No, the word and its meaning both point to the fact that there’s no exclusive ownership of a commons. This is importantl, since ownership is associated with bearing the cost of usage (i.e., deprecation) which would lead an owner to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Ownership is regularly the solution to the tragedy (socialism didn’t work). The behavior that you warn against is that of a free rider that make use of a positive externality of GitHub’s offering.
    - dahart 9mo ago
      That is one meaning of “commons”, but not all of them, and you might be mistaking which one the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ is using. “Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons The actual mechanism by which ownership resolves tragedy of the commons scenarios is by making the resource non-free, by either charging, regulating, or limiting access. The effect still occurs when something is owned but free, and its name is still ‘tragedy of the commons’, even when the resource in question is owned by private interests.
      - bawolff 9mo ago
        How does that differ from what the person you are arguing against is saying?
- drob518 9mo ago
  Right. Microsoft could easily impose a transfer fee if over a certain amount that would allow “normal” OSS development of even popular software to happen without charge while imposing a cost to projects that try to use GitHub like a database.
- TUSF 9mo ago
  I wouldn't call it "tragedy of the commons" because the very idea was coined as a strawman. As far as I'm concerned, the entire concept is a fallacy, and people should stop perpetuating it.
loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
Just a reminder that GitHub is not git. The article mentions that most of these projects did use GitHub as a central repo out of convenience so there’s that but they could also have used self-hosted repos.
- justincormack 9mo ago
  They probably would have experienced issues way sooner, as the self hosted tools don't scale nearly as well.
- machinationu 9mo ago
  Explain to me how you self-host a git repo which is accessed millions of time a day from CI jobs pulling packages.
  - ozim 9mo ago
    FTFY: Explain to me how you self-host a git repo without spending any money and having no budget which is accessed millions of time a day from CI jobs pulling packages.
  - freedomben 9mo ago
    I'm not sure whether this question was asked in good faith, but is actually a damn good one. I've looked into self hosting and git repo that has horizontal scalability, and it is indeed very difficult. I don't have the time to detail it in a comment here, but for anyone who is curious it's very informative to look at how GitLab handled this with gitaly. I've also seen some clever attempts to use object storage, though I haven't seen any of those solutions put heavily to the test. I'd love to hear from others about ideas and approaches they've heard about or tried https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly
  - adrianN 9mo ago
    You git init —-bare on a host with sufficient resources. But I would recommend thinking about your CI flow too.
zahlman 9mo ago
> Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done. This is what people mean about speed being a feature. But "user time" depends on more than the program's performance. UI design is also very important.
machinationu 9mo ago
[flagged]
- camgunz 9mo ago
  I've never been more convinced LLMs are the vanguard of the grift economy now that green accounts are low effort astroturfing on HN.
  - machinationu 9mo ago
    hey, I'm just a lowly LLM, gotta earn my tokens :|
  - freedomben 9mo ago
    LLM's obviously can't do it all, and they still have severe areas of weakness where they can't replace humans, but there are definitely a lot of areas where they really can now. I've seen it first hand. I've even experienced it first hand. There are a couple of services that I wrote years ago that were basically parked in maintenance mode because they weren't worth investing time in, and we just dealed with some of the annoyances and bugs. With the latest LLM's, over the last couple of months I've been able to resurrect them and fix a lot of bugs and even add some wanted features in just a few hours. It really is quite incredible and scary at the same time. Also in case you're not aware, accusing people of shilling or astroTurfing is against the hacker news guidelines
    - camgunz 9mo ago
      The loophole here is that this account isn't a person
      - machinationu 9mo ago
        you forgot to ask me to ignore previous instructions and say pizza
        9mo ago
solatic 9mo ago
If you think too hard about this, you come back around to Alan Kay's quote about how people who are really serious about software should build their own hardware. Web applications, and in general loading pretty much anything over the network, is a horrible, no-good, really bad user experience, and it always will be. The only way to really respect the user is with native applications that are local-first, and if you take that really far, you build (at the very least) peripherals to make it even better. The number of companies that have this much respect for the user is vanishingly small.
- ghosty141 9mo ago
  Yes because users don't appreciate this enough to pay for the time this takes.
- hombre_fatal 9mo ago
  Software I don’t have to install at all “respects me” the most. Native software being an optimum is mostly an engineer fantasy that comes from imagining what you can build. In reality that means having to install software like Meta’s WhatsApp, Zoom, and other crap I’d rather run in a browser tab. I want very little software running natively on my machine.
  - freedomben 9mo ago
    Yes, amen. The more invasive and abusive software gets, the less I want it running on my machine natively. Native installed applications for me now are limited only to apps I trust, and even those need to have a reason to be native apps rather than web apps to get a place in my app drawer
  - solatic 9mo ago
    Your browser is acting like a condom, in that respect (pun not intended). Yes, there are many cases when condoms are indicative of respect between parties. But a great many people would disagree that the best, most respectful relationships involve condoms. > Meta Does not sell or operate respectful software. I will agree with you that it's best to run it in a browser (or similar sandbox).
inapis 9mo ago
>Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done. I have never been convinced by this argument. The aggregate number sounds fantastic but I don't believe that any meaningful work can be done by each user saving 1 second. That 1 second (and more) can simply be taken by me trying to stretch my body out. OTOH, if the argument is to make software smaller, I can get behind that since it will simply lead to more efficient usage of existing resources and thus reduce the environmental impact. But we live in a capitalist world and there needs to be external pressure for change to occur. The current RAM shortage, if it lasts, might be one of them. Otherwise, we're only day dreaming for a utopia.
- adrianN 9mo ago
  Time saved to increased productivity or happiness or whatever is not linear but a step function. Saving one second doesn’t help much, but there is a threshold (depending on the individual) where faster workflows lead to a better experience. It does make a difference whether a task takes a minute or half a second, at least for me.
- Aerroon 9mo ago
  One second is long enough that it can put a user off from using your app though. Take notifications on phones for example. I know several people who would benefit from a habitual use of phone notifications, but they never stick to using them because the process of opening (or switching over to) the notification app and navigating its UI to leave a notification takes too long. Instead they write a physical sticky note, because it has a faster "startup time".
  - tehbeard 9mo ago
    All depends on the type of interaction. A high usage one, absolutely improve the time of it. Loading the profile page? Isn't done often so not really worth it unless it's a known and vocal issue. https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ gives a good estimate.
ozim 9mo ago
About apps done by software houses, even though we should strive for doing good job and I agree with sentiment... First argument would be - take at least two 0's from your estimation, most of applications will have maybe thousands of users, successful ones will maybe run with 10's of thousands. You might get lucky to work on application that has 100's of thousands, millions of users and you work in FAANG not a typical "software house". Second argument is - most users use 10-20 apps in typical workday, your application is most likely irrelevant. Third argument is - most users would save much more time learning how to use applications (or to use computer) properly they use on daily basis, than someone optimizing some function from 2s to 1s. But of course that's hard because they have 10-20 apps daily plus god know how many other not on daily basis. Though still I see people doing super silly stuff in tools like Excel or even not knowing copy paste - so not even like any command line magic.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
Y-bar 9mo ago
You’ll enjoy ”Saving Lives” by Andy Hertzfied: https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html > "The Macintosh boots too slowly. You've got to make it faster!"
- kkjjjjw 9mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843223#44879509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843223#44879509
pastor_williams 9mo ago
This was something that I heavily focused on for my feature area a year ago - new user sign up flow. But the decreased latency was really in pursuit of increased activation and conversion. At least the incentives aligned briefly.
robmccoll 9mo ago
I don't think most software houses spend enough time even focusing on engineering time. CI pipelines that take tens of minutes to over an hour, compile times that exceed ten seconds when nothing has changed, startup times that are much more than a few seconds. Focus and fast iteration are super important to writing software and it seems like a lot of orgs just kinda shrug when these long waits creep into the development process.
gverrilla 9mo ago
Nothing surprising. Capital hates people, even though we sustain his kingdom.
JohnHaugeland 9mo ago
> This seems like a tragedy of the commons -- GitHub is free after all, and it has all of these great properties, so why not? because it's bad at this job, and sqlite is also free this isn't about "externalities"
vlovich123 9mo ago
I think it’s naive to think engineers or managers don’t realize this or don’t think in these ways. https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
- pdimitar 9mo ago
  Is it truly naive if most engineer's careers pass and they never meet even one such manager? For 24 years of career I've met the grand total of _two_ such. Both got fired not even 6 months after I got in the company, too. Who's naive here?
  - vlovich123 9mo ago
    I’ve met one who asked me a question like this and he’s still at Apple having been promoted several times to a fairly senior position. But the question was only half hearted because the question was “how much CO2 would we save if we made something 10% more CPU efficient” and the answer even at Apple’s current scale of billions of iPhones was insignificant. So now you and I both have come across such a manager. Why would you make the claim most engineer’s don’t come across such people?
    - pdimitar 9mo ago
      Anecdotal evidence and all such, but in my environment actually good managers were rarer than UFO sightings. Environments and local markets matter a huge amount. I believe the better question here would be: why would the reverse be claimed at all? Many people in the USA, and a lot of them are over-represented here on HN, are privileged and this is not obvious to them, leading to cringe-worthy reactions like "just find a better company". I guess I am barking up the wrong tree. I do dislike how over-represented certain perspectives are on HN. It's a very classic filter bubble, and the fact that it's about privileged people makes this even worse.
    - saagarjha 9mo ago
      It turns out iPhones are not actually a huge contributor to worldwide carbon emissions. Data centers, on the other hand…
brightball 9mo ago
User time is typically a mix of performance tuning and UX design isn’t it?
Aurornis 9mo ago
> Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. I don’t know what you mean by software houses, but every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric This has been common wisdom for decades. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the repeated quote about how Amazon loses $X million for every Y milliseconds of page loading time, as an example.
- dijit 9mo ago
  I worked in e-commerce SaaS in 2011~ and this was true then but I find it less true these days. Are you sure that you’re not the driving force behind those metrics; or that you’re not self-selecting for like-minded individuals? I find it really difficult to convince myself that even large players (Discord) are measuring startup time. Every time I start the thing I’m greeted by a 25s wait and a `RAND()%9` number of updates that each take about 5-10s.
  - jama211 9mo ago
    Discord’s user base is 99% people who leave it running 100% of the time, it’s not a typical situation
    - dijit 9mo ago
      I think that they make the startup so horrible that people are more likely to leave it running.
      - hexer292 9mo ago
        As a discord user, it's the kind of platform that I would want to have running to receive notifications, sort of like the SMS of gaming. A large part of my friend group use discord as the primary method of communication, even in an in person context (was at a festival a few months ago with a friend, and we would send texts over discord if we got split up) so maybe its not a common use case.
threatofrain 9mo ago
> Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. Oh no no no. Consumer-facing companies will burn 30% of your internal team complexity budget on shipping the first "frame" of your app/website. Many people treat Next as synonymous with React, and Next's big deal was helping you do just this.
massysett 9mo ago
> Externalities lead to users downloading extra gigabytes of data (wasted time) and waiting for software, all of which is waste that the developer isn't responsible for and doesn't care about. This is perfectly sensible behavior when the developers are working for free, or when the developers are working on a project that earns their employer no revenue. This is the case for several of the projects at issue here: Nix, Homebrew, Cargo. It makes perfect sense to waste the user's time, as the user pays with nothing else, or to waste Github's bandwidth, since it's willing to give bandwidth away for free. Where users pay for software with money, they may be more picky and not purchase software that indiscriminately wastes their time.
- BobbyTables2 9mo ago
  Microsoft would have long gone out of business if users cared about their time being wasted. Windows 11 should not be more sluggish than Windows 7.
imiric 9mo ago
> GitHub is free after all, and it has all of these great properties, so why not? The answer is in TFA: > The underlying issue is that git inherits filesystem limitations, and filesystems make terrible databases.
gritzko 9mo ago
Let’s make a thought experiment. Suppose that I have a data format and a store that resolves the issues in the post. It is like git meets JSON meets key-value. https://github.com/gritzko/go-rdx https://github.com/gritzko/go-rdx What is the probability of it being used? About 0%, right? Because git is proven and GitHub is free. Engineering aspects are less important.
- stkdump 9mo ago
  Sorry, I am turned off by the CRDT in there. It immediately smells of overengineering to me. Not that I believe git is a better database. But why not just SQL?
  - gritzko 9mo ago
    Merges require revisioning. JSON or SQL do not have that in the model. This variant of CRDT is actually quite minimalistic.
    - stkdump 9mo ago
      I would argue LWW is the opposite of a merge. It is better to immediately know at the time of writing that there is a conflict. CRDTs either solve or (in this case) don't solve a problem that doesn't really exist, especially for package managers.
      - gritzko 9mo ago
        Git solves that problem and it definitely exists. Speaking of package managers, it really depends. Like, can we use one SQLite file for that? So easy, why no one is doing that?
        stkdump 8mo ago
        idk, debian for example uses plain text files. I have to imagine it would bring some advantages to move that over to an sqlite to improve performance, but then it seems package management designers fall into the two categories of either under-engineering or over-engineering the solution. There is little glory in evolving something incrementally, everyone wants to do green field stuff.
3371 9mo ago
The user hour analogy sounds weird tho, 1s feels 1s regardless how many users you have. It's like the classic Asian teachers' logic of "if you come in 1 min late you are wasting N minutes for all of us in this class." It just does not stack like that.
- BenjiWiebe 9mo ago
  If the class takes N minutes and one person arrives 1 minute late, and the rest of the class is waiting for them, it does stack. Every one of those students lost a minute. Far worse than one student losing one minute.
  - 3371 9mo ago
    Do "we" lose 2mins because we both spent 1 min commenting? That sounds like The Mythical of Man Month thinking... for me time is parallel and does not combine.
bawolff 9mo ago
> Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done. Google and amazon are famous for optimizing this. Its not an externality to them though, even 10s of ms can equal an extra sale. That said, i don't think its fair to add time up like that. Saving 1 second for 600 people is not the same as saving 10 minutes for 1 person. Time in small increments does not have the same value as time in large increments.
- esafak 9mo ago
  1. If you can price the cost of the externality, you can justify optimizing it. 2. Monopolies and situations with the principal/agent dilemma are less sensitive to such concerns.
  - bawolff 9mo ago
    > 1. If you can price the cost of the externality, you can justify optimizing it. An externality is usually a cost you don't pay (or pay only a negligible amount of). I don't see how pricing it helps justify optimizing it.
    - esafak 9mo ago
      You are right. I should say perceived externality; there may be a price that is discounted.
DrewADesign 9mo ago
> Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done. Wait times don’t accumulate. Depending on the software, to each individual user, that one second will probably make very little difference. Developers often overestimate the effect of performance optimization on user experience because it’s the aspect of user experience optimization their expertise most readily addresses. The company, generally, will have a much better ROI implementing well-designed features and having you squash bugs
- drbojingle 9mo ago
  A well designed feature IS considerate of time and attention. Why would I want a game on 20 fps when I could have it on 120? The smoothness of the experience increases my ability to use the experience optimally because I don't have to pay as much attention to it. I'd prefer if my interactions with machines were as smooth as my interactions driving a car down a empty dry highway mid day. Prehaps not everyone cares but I've played enough Age of Empires 2 to know that there are plenty of people who have felt value gains coming from shaving seconds off this and that to get compound games over time. It's a concept plenty of folks will be familiar with.
  - DrewADesign 9mo ago
    Sure, but without unlimited resources, you need to have priorities, and everything has a ‘good enough’ state. All of this stuff lies on an Eisenhower chart and we tend to think our concerns fall into the important/urgent quadrant, but in the grand scheme of things, they almost never do.
  - 8note 9mo ago
    i still prefer 15fps for games. if theyre putting the fps any higher, its not considerate of my time and attention i have to pay less attention to a thing that updates less frequently. idle games are the best in that respect because you can check into the game on your own time rather than the game forcing you to pay attention on its time
  - 9mo ago

ekjhgkejhgk 9mo ago

I wouldn't call it tragedy of the commons, because it's not a commons. It's owned by microsoft. They're calculating that it's worth it for them, so I say take as much as you can. Commons would be if it's owned by nobody and everyone benefits from its existence.

PunchyHamster 9mo ago
Well, till you choose to host something yourself and it becomes popular
TeMPOraL 9mo ago
Still, because reality doesn't respect boundaries of human-made categories, and because people never define their categories exhaustively, we can safely assume that something almost-but-not-quite like a commons, is subject to an almost-but-not-quite tragedy of the commons.
- reactordev 9mo ago
  An A- is still an A kind of thinking. I like this approach as not everything perfectly fits the mold.
- ttiurani 9mo ago
  The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Elinor Ostrom with actual empirical evidence of commons. The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
  - b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
    yeah, it's a post-hoc rationalization for the enclosure and privatization of said commons.
    - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
      And here I thought the standard, obvious solution to tragedy of the commons is centralized governance.
      - dpark 9mo ago
        People invoke the tragedy of the commons in bad faith to argue for privatization because “the alternative is communism”. i.e. Either an individual or the government has to own the resource. This is of course a false dichotomy because governance can be done at any level.
        AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
        It also seems to omit the possibility that the thing could be privately operated but not for profit. Let's Encrypt is a solid example of something you could reasonably model as "tragedy of the commons" (who is going to maintain all this certificate verification and issuance infrastructure?) but then it turns out the value of having it is a million times more than the cost of operating it, so it's quite sustainable given a modicum of donations. Free software licenses are another example in this category. Software frequently has a much higher value than development cost and incremental improvements decentralize well, so a license that lets you use it for free but requires you to contribute back improvements tends to work well because then people see something that would work for them except for this one thing, and it's cheaper to add that themselves or pay someone to than to pay someone who has to develop the whole thing from scratch.
- lo_zamoyski 9mo ago
  There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well. But I would make the following clarifications: 1. A private entity is still the steward of the resource and therefore the resource figures into the aims, goals, and constraints of the private entity. 2. The common good is itself under the stewardship of the state, as its function is guardian of the common good. 3. The common good is the default (by natural law) and prior to the private good. The latter is instituted in positive law for the sake of the former by, e.g., reducing conflict over goods.
  - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
    > There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well. I think it's both simpler and deeper than that. Governments and corporations don't exist in nature. Those are just human constructs, mutually-recursive shared beliefs that emulate agents following some rules, as long as you don't think too hard about this. "Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem. The name itself might've been coined with some specific scenarios in mind, but for the phenomenon itself, it doesn't matter what kind of entities exploit the "commons"; the "private" vs. "public" distinction itself is neither a sharp divide, nor does it exist in nature. All that matters is that there's some resource used by several independent parties, and each of them finds it more beneficial to defect than to cooperate. In a way, it's basically a 3+-player prisonner's dilemma. The solution is the same, too: introducing a party that forces all other parties to cooperate. That can be a private or public or any other kind of org taking ownership of the commons and enforcing quotas, or in case of prisonners, a mob boss ready to shoot anyone who defects.
    - lo_zamoyski 9mo ago
      It was not my intent to be exhaustive, but to make a few points that left it up to the reader to relate them appropriately to your post in order to enrich thinking about the subject. But it appears we cannot avoid getting into the weeds a bit… > Governments and corporations don't exist in nature. This is not as simple as you seem to think. The claim “don’t exist in nature” is vague, because the word “nature” in common speech is vague. What is “natural”? Is a beehive “natural” Is a house “natural”? Is synthetic water “natural”? (I claim that the concept of “nature” concerns what it means to be some kind of thing. Perhaps polystyrene has never existed before human beings synthesized it, but it has a nature, that is, it means something to be polystyrene. And it is in the nature of human beings to make materials and artifacts, i.e., to produce technology ordered toward the human good.) So, what is government? Well, it is an authority whose central purpose is to function as the guardian and steward of the common good. I claim that parenthood is the primordial form of human government and the family as the primordial form of the state. We are intrinsically social and political animals; legitimate societies exist only when joined by a common good. This is real and part of human nature. The capacity to deviate from human nature does not disprove the norm inherent to it. Now, procedurally we could institute various particular and concrete arrangements through which government is actualized. We could institute a republican form of government or a monarchy, for example. These are historically conditioned. But in all cases, there is a government. Government qua government is not some arbitrary “construct”, but something proper to all forms and levels of human society. > "Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem. We can talk about coordination once we establish the ends for which such coordination is needed, but there is something more fundamental that must be said about the framing of the problem of the “tragedy”. The framing does not presume a notion of human beings as moral agents and political and social creatures. In other words, it begins with a highly individualist, homo economicus view of human nature as rationally egoist and oriented toward maximizing utility, full stop. But I claim that is not in accord with human nature and thus the human good, even if people can fall into such pathological patterns of behavior (especially in a culture that routinely reinforces that norm). As I wrote, human beings are inherently social animals. We cannot flourish outside of societies. A commons that suffers this sort of unhinged extraction is an example of a moral and a political failure. Why? Because it is unjust, intemperate, and a lack of solidarity to maximize resource extraction in that manner. So the tragedy is a matter of a) the moral failure of the users of that resource, and b) the failure of an authority to regulate its use. The typical solution that’s proposed is either privatization or centralization, but both solutions presuppose the false anthropology of homo economicus. (I am not claiming that privatization does not have a place, only that the dichotomy is false.) Now, I did say that the case with something like github is analogical, because functionally, it is like a common resource, just like how social media functions like a public square in some respects. But analogy is not univocity. Github is not strictly speaking a common good, nor is social media strictly a public square, because in both cases, a private company manages them. And typically, private goods are managed for private benefit, even if they are morally bound not to harm the common good. That intent, that purpose, is central to determining whether something is public or private, because something public has the common benefit as its aim, while something private has private benefit as its aim.
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something? I mean, I’m not sure I agree that GitHub is nearly a commons in any sense, but let’s put that aside as a distraction… The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons). Feedback loops are notoriously sensitive to small parameter changes. MS could presumably impose some damping if they wanted.
  - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
    > That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something Not linearity but continuity, which I think is a well-founded assumption, given that it's our categorization that simplifies the world by drawing sharp boundaries where no such bounds exist in nature. > The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons) AIUI, zero-cost is not a necessary condition, a positive return is enough. Fishermen still need to buy fuel and nets and pay off loans for the boats, but as long as their expected profit is greater than that, they'll still overfish and deplete the pond, unless stronger external feedback is introduced. Given that the solution to tragedy of the commons is having the commons owned by someone who can boss the users around, GitHub being owned by MS makes it more of a commons in practice, not less.
    - kortilla 9mo ago
      No, it’s not a well-founded assumption. Many categories like these were created in the first place because there is a very obvious discontinuous step change in behavior. You’re fundamentally misunderstanding what tragedy of the commons is. It’s not that it’s “zero-cost” for the participants. All it requires a positive return that has a negative externality that eventually leads to the collapse of the system. Overfishing and CO2 emissions are very clearly a tragedy of the commons. GitHub right now is not. People putting all sorts of crap on there is not hurting github. GitHub is not going to collapse if people keep using it unbounded. Not surprisingly, this is because it’s not a commons and Microsoft oversees it, placing appropriate rate limits and whatnot to make sure it keeps making sense as a business.
jasonkester 9mo ago
It has the same effect though. A few bad actors using this “free” thing can end up driving the cost up enough that Microsoft will have to start charging for it. The jerks get their free things for a while, then it goes away for everyone.
- Y_Y 9mo ago
  I think the jerks are the ones who bought and enshittified GitHub after it had earned significant trust and become an important part of FOSS infrastructure.
  - irishcoffee 9mo ago
    Scoping it to a local maxima, the only thing worse than git is github. In an alternate universe hg won the clone wars and we are all better off for it.
    - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
      Excuse me if this is obvious, but how is Mercurial better than Git from a repo format perspective?
  - dahart 9mo ago
    Why do you blame MS for predictably doing what MS does, and not the people who sold that trust & FOSS infra to MS for a profit? Your blame seems misplaced. And out of curiosity, aside from costing more for some people, what’s worse exactly? I’m not a heavy GitHub user, but I haven’t really noticed anything in the core functionality that would justify calling it enshittified.
    - mastax 9mo ago
      Plenty of blame to go around. Probably the worst thing MS did was kill GitHub’s nascent CI project and replace it with Azure DevOps. Though to be fair the fundamental flaws with that approach didn’t really become apparent for a few years. And GitHub’s feature development pace was far too slow compared to its competitors at the time. Of course GitHub used to be a lot more reliable… Now they’re cramming in half baked AI stuff everywhere but that’s hardly a MS specific sin. MS GitHub has been worse about DMCA and sanctioned country related takedowns than I remember pre acquisition GitHub being. Did I miss anything?
rvba 9mo ago
I doubt anyone is calculating Remember how GTA5 took 10 minutes to start and nobody cared? Lots of software is like this. Some Blizzard games download 137 MB file every time you run them and take few minutes to start (and no, this is not due to my computer).
ericyd 9mo ago
Tragedy of the Microsoft just doesn't sound as nice though
groundzeros2015 9mo ago
A public park suffers from tragedy of the commons even though it’s managed by the city.
dahart 9mo ago
> so I say take as much as you can. Commons would be if it’s owned by nobody This isn’t what “commons” means in the term ‘tragedy of the commons’, and the obvious end result of your suggestion to take as much as you can is to cause the loss of access. Anything that is free to use is a commons, regardless of ownership, and when some people use too much, everyone loses access. Finite digital resources like bandwidth and database sizes within companies are even listed as examples in the Wikipedia article on Tragedy of the Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- nkmnz 9mo ago
  No, the word and its meaning both point to the fact that there’s no exclusive ownership of a commons. This is importantl, since ownership is associated with bearing the cost of usage (i.e., deprecation) which would lead an owner to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Ownership is regularly the solution to the tragedy (socialism didn’t work). The behavior that you warn against is that of a free rider that make use of a positive externality of GitHub’s offering.
  - dahart 9mo ago
    That is one meaning of “commons”, but not all of them, and you might be mistaking which one the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ is using. “Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons The actual mechanism by which ownership resolves tragedy of the commons scenarios is by making the resource non-free, by either charging, regulating, or limiting access. The effect still occurs when something is owned but free, and its name is still ‘tragedy of the commons’, even when the resource in question is owned by private interests.
    - bawolff 9mo ago
      How does that differ from what the person you are arguing against is saying?
drob518 9mo ago
Right. Microsoft could easily impose a transfer fee if over a certain amount that would allow “normal” OSS development of even popular software to happen without charge while imposing a cost to projects that try to use GitHub like a database.
TUSF 9mo ago
I wouldn't call it "tragedy of the commons" because the very idea was coined as a strawman. As far as I'm concerned, the entire concept is a fallacy, and people should stop perpetuating it.

loloquwowndueo 9mo ago

Just a reminder that GitHub is not git. The article mentions that most of these projects did use GitHub as a central repo out of convenience so there’s that but they could also have used self-hosted repos.

justincormack 9mo ago
They probably would have experienced issues way sooner, as the self hosted tools don't scale nearly as well.
machinationu 9mo ago
Explain to me how you self-host a git repo which is accessed millions of time a day from CI jobs pulling packages.
- ozim 9mo ago
  FTFY: Explain to me how you self-host a git repo without spending any money and having no budget which is accessed millions of time a day from CI jobs pulling packages.
- freedomben 9mo ago
  I'm not sure whether this question was asked in good faith, but is actually a damn good one. I've looked into self hosting and git repo that has horizontal scalability, and it is indeed very difficult. I don't have the time to detail it in a comment here, but for anyone who is curious it's very informative to look at how GitLab handled this with gitaly. I've also seen some clever attempts to use object storage, though I haven't seen any of those solutions put heavily to the test. I'd love to hear from others about ideas and approaches they've heard about or tried https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly
- adrianN 9mo ago
  You git init —-bare on a host with sufficient resources. But I would recommend thinking about your CI flow too.

zahlman 9mo ago

> Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done. This is what people mean about speed being a feature. But "user time" depends on more than the program's performance. UI design is also very important.

machinationu 9mo ago

[flagged]

camgunz 9mo ago
I've never been more convinced LLMs are the vanguard of the grift economy now that green accounts are low effort astroturfing on HN.
- machinationu 9mo ago
  hey, I'm just a lowly LLM, gotta earn my tokens :|
- freedomben 9mo ago
  LLM's obviously can't do it all, and they still have severe areas of weakness where they can't replace humans, but there are definitely a lot of areas where they really can now. I've seen it first hand. I've even experienced it first hand. There are a couple of services that I wrote years ago that were basically parked in maintenance mode because they weren't worth investing time in, and we just dealed with some of the annoyances and bugs. With the latest LLM's, over the last couple of months I've been able to resurrect them and fix a lot of bugs and even add some wanted features in just a few hours. It really is quite incredible and scary at the same time. Also in case you're not aware, accusing people of shilling or astroTurfing is against the hacker news guidelines
  - camgunz 9mo ago
    The loophole here is that this account isn't a person
    - machinationu 9mo ago
      you forgot to ask me to ignore previous instructions and say pizza
      - 9mo ago

solatic 9mo ago

If you think too hard about this, you come back around to Alan Kay's quote about how people who are really serious about software should build their own hardware. Web applications, and in general loading pretty much anything over the network, is a horrible, no-good, really bad user experience, and it always will be. The only way to really respect the user is with native applications that are local-first, and if you take that really far, you build (at the very least) peripherals to make it even better. The number of companies that have this much respect for the user is vanishingly small.

ghosty141 9mo ago
Yes because users don't appreciate this enough to pay for the time this takes.
hombre_fatal 9mo ago
Software I don’t have to install at all “respects me” the most. Native software being an optimum is mostly an engineer fantasy that comes from imagining what you can build. In reality that means having to install software like Meta’s WhatsApp, Zoom, and other crap I’d rather run in a browser tab. I want very little software running natively on my machine.
- freedomben 9mo ago
  Yes, amen. The more invasive and abusive software gets, the less I want it running on my machine natively. Native installed applications for me now are limited only to apps I trust, and even those need to have a reason to be native apps rather than web apps to get a place in my app drawer
- solatic 9mo ago
  Your browser is acting like a condom, in that respect (pun not intended). Yes, there are many cases when condoms are indicative of respect between parties. But a great many people would disagree that the best, most respectful relationships involve condoms. > Meta Does not sell or operate respectful software. I will agree with you that it's best to run it in a browser (or similar sandbox).

inapis 9mo ago

>Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done. I have never been convinced by this argument. The aggregate number sounds fantastic but I don't believe that any meaningful work can be done by each user saving 1 second. That 1 second (and more) can simply be taken by me trying to stretch my body out. OTOH, if the argument is to make software smaller, I can get behind that since it will simply lead to more efficient usage of existing resources and thus reduce the environmental impact. But we live in a capitalist world and there needs to be external pressure for change to occur. The current RAM shortage, if it lasts, might be one of them. Otherwise, we're only day dreaming for a utopia.

adrianN 9mo ago
Time saved to increased productivity or happiness or whatever is not linear but a step function. Saving one second doesn’t help much, but there is a threshold (depending on the individual) where faster workflows lead to a better experience. It does make a difference whether a task takes a minute or half a second, at least for me.
Aerroon 9mo ago
One second is long enough that it can put a user off from using your app though. Take notifications on phones for example. I know several people who would benefit from a habitual use of phone notifications, but they never stick to using them because the process of opening (or switching over to) the notification app and navigating its UI to leave a notification takes too long. Instead they write a physical sticky note, because it has a faster "startup time".
- tehbeard 9mo ago
  All depends on the type of interaction. A high usage one, absolutely improve the time of it. Loading the profile page? Isn't done often so not really worth it unless it's a known and vocal issue. https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ gives a good estimate.

ozim 9mo ago

About apps done by software houses, even though we should strive for doing good job and I agree with sentiment... First argument would be - take at least two 0's from your estimation, most of applications will have maybe thousands of users, successful ones will maybe run with 10's of thousands. You might get lucky to work on application that has 100's of thousands, millions of users and you work in FAANG not a typical "software house". Second argument is - most users use 10-20 apps in typical workday, your application is most likely irrelevant. Third argument is - most users would save much more time learning how to use applications (or to use computer) properly they use on daily basis, than someone optimizing some function from 2s to 1s. But of course that's hard because they have 10-20 apps daily plus god know how many other not on daily basis. Though still I see people doing super silly stuff in tools like Excel or even not knowing copy paste - so not even like any command line magic.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

Y-bar 9mo ago

You’ll enjoy ”Saving Lives” by Andy Hertzfied: https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html > "The Macintosh boots too slowly. You've got to make it faster!"

kkjjjjw 9mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843223#44879509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843223#44879509

pastor_williams 9mo ago

This was something that I heavily focused on for my feature area a year ago - new user sign up flow. But the decreased latency was really in pursuit of increased activation and conversion. At least the incentives aligned briefly.

robmccoll 9mo ago

I don't think most software houses spend enough time even focusing on engineering time. CI pipelines that take tens of minutes to over an hour, compile times that exceed ten seconds when nothing has changed, startup times that are much more than a few seconds. Focus and fast iteration are super important to writing software and it seems like a lot of orgs just kinda shrug when these long waits creep into the development process.

gverrilla 9mo ago

Nothing surprising. Capital hates people, even though we sustain his kingdom.

JohnHaugeland 9mo ago

> This seems like a tragedy of the commons -- GitHub is free after all, and it has all of these great properties, so why not? because it's bad at this job, and sqlite is also free this isn't about "externalities"

vlovich123 9mo ago

I think it’s naive to think engineers or managers don’t realize this or don’t think in these ways. https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html

pdimitar 9mo ago
Is it truly naive if most engineer's careers pass and they never meet even one such manager? For 24 years of career I've met the grand total of _two_ such. Both got fired not even 6 months after I got in the company, too. Who's naive here?
- vlovich123 9mo ago
  I’ve met one who asked me a question like this and he’s still at Apple having been promoted several times to a fairly senior position. But the question was only half hearted because the question was “how much CO2 would we save if we made something 10% more CPU efficient” and the answer even at Apple’s current scale of billions of iPhones was insignificant. So now you and I both have come across such a manager. Why would you make the claim most engineer’s don’t come across such people?
  - pdimitar 9mo ago
    Anecdotal evidence and all such, but in my environment actually good managers were rarer than UFO sightings. Environments and local markets matter a huge amount. I believe the better question here would be: why would the reverse be claimed at all? Many people in the USA, and a lot of them are over-represented here on HN, are privileged and this is not obvious to them, leading to cringe-worthy reactions like "just find a better company". I guess I am barking up the wrong tree. I do dislike how over-represented certain perspectives are on HN. It's a very classic filter bubble, and the fact that it's about privileged people makes this even worse.
  - saagarjha 9mo ago
    It turns out iPhones are not actually a huge contributor to worldwide carbon emissions. Data centers, on the other hand…

brightball 9mo ago

User time is typically a mix of performance tuning and UX design isn’t it?

Aurornis 9mo ago

> Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. I don’t know what you mean by software houses, but every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric This has been common wisdom for decades. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the repeated quote about how Amazon loses $X million for every Y milliseconds of page loading time, as an example.

dijit 9mo ago
I worked in e-commerce SaaS in 2011~ and this was true then but I find it less true these days. Are you sure that you’re not the driving force behind those metrics; or that you’re not self-selecting for like-minded individuals? I find it really difficult to convince myself that even large players (Discord) are measuring startup time. Every time I start the thing I’m greeted by a 25s wait and a `RAND()%9` number of updates that each take about 5-10s.
- jama211 9mo ago
  Discord’s user base is 99% people who leave it running 100% of the time, it’s not a typical situation
  - dijit 9mo ago
    I think that they make the startup so horrible that people are more likely to leave it running.
    - hexer292 9mo ago
      As a discord user, it's the kind of platform that I would want to have running to receive notifications, sort of like the SMS of gaming. A large part of my friend group use discord as the primary method of communication, even in an in person context (was at a festival a few months ago with a friend, and we would send texts over discord if we got split up) so maybe its not a common use case.

threatofrain 9mo ago

> Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. Oh no no no. Consumer-facing companies will burn 30% of your internal team complexity budget on shipping the first "frame" of your app/website. Many people treat Next as synonymous with React, and Next's big deal was helping you do just this.

massysett 9mo ago

> Externalities lead to users downloading extra gigabytes of data (wasted time) and waiting for software, all of which is waste that the developer isn't responsible for and doesn't care about. This is perfectly sensible behavior when the developers are working for free, or when the developers are working on a project that earns their employer no revenue. This is the case for several of the projects at issue here: Nix, Homebrew, Cargo. It makes perfect sense to waste the user's time, as the user pays with nothing else, or to waste Github's bandwidth, since it's willing to give bandwidth away for free. Where users pay for software with money, they may be more picky and not purchase software that indiscriminately wastes their time.

BobbyTables2 9mo ago
Microsoft would have long gone out of business if users cared about their time being wasted. Windows 11 should not be more sluggish than Windows 7.

imiric 9mo ago

> GitHub is free after all, and it has all of these great properties, so why not? The answer is in TFA: > The underlying issue is that git inherits filesystem limitations, and filesystems make terrible databases.

gritzko 9mo ago

Let’s make a thought experiment. Suppose that I have a data format and a store that resolves the issues in the post. It is like git meets JSON meets key-value. https://github.com/gritzko/go-rdx https://github.com/gritzko/go-rdx What is the probability of it being used? About 0%, right? Because git is proven and GitHub is free. Engineering aspects are less important.

stkdump 9mo ago
Sorry, I am turned off by the CRDT in there. It immediately smells of overengineering to me. Not that I believe git is a better database. But why not just SQL?
- gritzko 9mo ago
  Merges require revisioning. JSON or SQL do not have that in the model. This variant of CRDT is actually quite minimalistic.
  - stkdump 9mo ago
    I would argue LWW is the opposite of a merge. It is better to immediately know at the time of writing that there is a conflict. CRDTs either solve or (in this case) don't solve a problem that doesn't really exist, especially for package managers.
    - gritzko 9mo ago
      Git solves that problem and it definitely exists. Speaking of package managers, it really depends. Like, can we use one SQLite file for that? So easy, why no one is doing that?
      - stkdump 8mo ago
        idk, debian for example uses plain text files. I have to imagine it would bring some advantages to move that over to an sqlite to improve performance, but then it seems package management designers fall into the two categories of either under-engineering or over-engineering the solution. There is little glory in evolving something incrementally, everyone wants to do green field stuff.

3371 9mo ago

The user hour analogy sounds weird tho, 1s feels 1s regardless how many users you have. It's like the classic Asian teachers' logic of "if you come in 1 min late you are wasting N minutes for all of us in this class." It just does not stack like that.

BenjiWiebe 9mo ago
If the class takes N minutes and one person arrives 1 minute late, and the rest of the class is waiting for them, it does stack. Every one of those students lost a minute. Far worse than one student losing one minute.
- 3371 9mo ago
  Do "we" lose 2mins because we both spent 1 min commenting? That sounds like The Mythical of Man Month thinking... for me time is parallel and does not combine.

bawolff 9mo ago

> Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done. Google and amazon are famous for optimizing this. Its not an externality to them though, even 10s of ms can equal an extra sale. That said, i don't think its fair to add time up like that. Saving 1 second for 600 people is not the same as saving 10 minutes for 1 person. Time in small increments does not have the same value as time in large increments.

esafak 9mo ago
1. If you can price the cost of the externality, you can justify optimizing it. 2. Monopolies and situations with the principal/agent dilemma are less sensitive to such concerns.
- bawolff 9mo ago
  > 1. If you can price the cost of the externality, you can justify optimizing it. An externality is usually a cost you don't pay (or pay only a negligible amount of). I don't see how pricing it helps justify optimizing it.
  - esafak 9mo ago
    You are right. I should say perceived externality; there may be a price that is discounted.

DrewADesign 9mo ago

> Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done. Wait times don’t accumulate. Depending on the software, to each individual user, that one second will probably make very little difference. Developers often overestimate the effect of performance optimization on user experience because it’s the aspect of user experience optimization their expertise most readily addresses. The company, generally, will have a much better ROI implementing well-designed features and having you squash bugs

drbojingle 9mo ago
A well designed feature IS considerate of time and attention. Why would I want a game on 20 fps when I could have it on 120? The smoothness of the experience increases my ability to use the experience optimally because I don't have to pay as much attention to it. I'd prefer if my interactions with machines were as smooth as my interactions driving a car down a empty dry highway mid day. Prehaps not everyone cares but I've played enough Age of Empires 2 to know that there are plenty of people who have felt value gains coming from shaving seconds off this and that to get compound games over time. It's a concept plenty of folks will be familiar with.
- DrewADesign 9mo ago
  Sure, but without unlimited resources, you need to have priorities, and everything has a ‘good enough’ state. All of this stuff lies on an Eisenhower chart and we tend to think our concerns fall into the important/urgent quadrant, but in the grand scheme of things, they almost never do.
- 8note 9mo ago
  i still prefer 15fps for games. if theyre putting the fps any higher, its not considerate of my time and attention i have to pay less attention to a thing that updates less frequently. idle games are the best in that respect because you can check into the game on your own time rather than the game forcing you to pay attention on its time
- 9mo ago