| ▲ | c-linkage 14 hours 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? -- 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. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | rovr138 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There was a thread here earlier this month, > Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178 Section of the top comment says, > It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary! and the reply to it has, > They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. | | |
| ▲ | viraptor 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There was also the GTA wasting minutes to load/parse JSON files at startup. https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... And Skylines rendering teeth on models miles away https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17gfq13/the... Sometimes the performance is really ignored. | |
| ▲ | ux266478 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's not how it works. The demand for engineering hours is an order of magnitude higher than the supply for any given game, you have to pick and choose your battles because there's always much, much more to do. It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch, without sacrificing load times at the altar or visual fidelity, particularly given the state the rest of the game was in. Who the hell has time to do that when there are crashes abound and the network stack has to be rewritten at a moments notice? Gamedev is very different from other domains, being in the 90th percentile for complexity and codebase size, and the 99th percentile for structural instability. It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year to accomidate changing design choices, or if you're lucky, to improve an abstraction. Not every team gets so lucky on every project. Launch deadlines are hit when there's a huge backlog of additional stuff to do, sitting atop a mountain of cut features. | | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch The inverse, however, is bizarre. That they spent potentially quite a bit of engineering effort implementing the (extremely non-optimal) system that duplicates all the assets half a dozen time to potentially save precious seconds on spinning rust - all without validating it was worth implementing in the first place. | | |
| ▲ | MBCook 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Was Helldivers II built from the ground up? Or grown from the v1 codebase? The first was on PS3 and PS4 where they had to deal with spinning disks and that system would absolutely be necessary. Also if the game ever targeted the PS4 during development, even though it wasn’t released there, again that system would be NEEDED. | |
| ▲ | rovr138 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. They talk about it being an optimization. They also talk about the bottleneck being level generation, which happens at the same time as loading from disk. |
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| ▲ | jesse__ an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year Tell me you don't work on game engines without telling me.. ---- Modern engines are the cumulative result of hundreds of thousands of engine-programmer hours. You're not rewriting Unreal in several years, let alone multiple times in one year. Get a grip dude. |
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| ▲ | kibwen 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. I think this is uncharitably erasing the context here. AFAICT, the reason that Helldivers 2 was larger on disk is because they were following the standard industry practice of deliberately duplicating data in such a way as to improve locality and thereby reduce load times. In other words, this seems to have been a deliberate attempt to improve player experience, not something done out of sheer developer laziness. The fact that this attempt at optimization is obsolete these days just didn't filter down to whatever particular decision-maker was at the reins on the day this decision was made. |
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| ▲ | dijit 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Discord’s user base is 99% people who leave it running 100% of the time, it’s not a typical situation | | |
| ▲ | dijit 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think that they make the startup so horrible that people are more likely to leave it running. | | |
| ▲ | hexer292 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | jama211 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I strongly doubt that! |
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| ▲ | spockz 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have the same experience on windows. On the other hand, starting up discord on my cachyos install is virtually instant. So maybe there is also a difference between the platform the developers use and that their users use. | |
| ▲ | drob518 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yep, indeed. Which is the main reason I don’t run Discord. | | |
| ▲ | jama211 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I strongly doubt that. The main reason you don’t run it is likely because you don’t have strong motivation to do so, or you’d push through the odd start up time. |
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| ▲ | ponector 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Contrary, every consumer facing product I've worked had no performance metrics tracked. And for enterprise software it was even worse as the end user is not the one who makes a decision to buy and use software. >>what you mean by software houses How about Microsoft? Start menu is a slow electron app. | | |
| ▲ | julianz 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The Start menu is not an Electron app. Don't believe everything you read on the internet. | | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That makes the usability and performance of the windows start menu even more embarrassing. The decline of Windows as a user facing product is amazing, especially as they are really good at developing things they care about. The “back of house” guts of Windows has improved alot, for example. They should just have a cartoon Bill Gates pop up like clippy and flip you the bird at this point. | | |
| ▲ | jiggawatts 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Much worse is that the search function built into the start menu has been broken in different ways in every major release of Windows since XP, including Server builds. It has both indexing failures and multi-day performance issues for mere kilobytes of text! |
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| ▲ | odo1242 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | React Native, not Electron. Though it is slower than it was | |
| ▲ | kortilla 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People believing it says something about the start menu | | |
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| ▲ | philipallstar 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > How about Microsoft? Start menu is a slow electron app. If your users are trapped due to a lack of competition then this can definitely happen. |
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| ▲ | moregrist 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. This is true for sites that are trying to make sales. You can quantify how much a delay affects closing a sale. For other apps, it’s less clear. During its high-growth years, MS Office had an abysmally long startup time. Maybe this was due to MS having a locked-in base of enterprise users. But given that OpenOffice and LibreOffice effectively duplicated long startup times, I don’t think it’s just that. You also see the Adobe suite (and also tools like GIMP) with some excruciatingly long startup times. I think it’s very likely that startup times of office apps have very little impact on whether users will buy the software. | |
| ▲ | j_w 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Clearly Amazon doesn't care about that sentiment across the board. Plenty of their products are absurdly slow because of their poor engineering. | |
| ▲ | eviks 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The issue here is not tracking, but developing. Like, how do you explain the fact that whole classes of software have gotten worse on those "key metrics"? (and that includes web-selling webpages) | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | An exception that confirms the rule. | |
| ▲ | croes 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Then why do many software house favor cloud software over on premise? They often have a recognizable delay to user data input compared to local software | |
| ▲ | mindslight 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric Are they evaluating the shape of that line with the same goal as the stonk score? Time spent by users is an "engagement" metric, right? | |
| ▲ | venturecruelty 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >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. Then respectfully, uh, why is basically all proprietary software slow as ass? |
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| ▲ | ekjhgkejhgk 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | dahart 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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 | | |
| ▲ | nkmnz 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 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 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | How does that differ from what the person you are arguing against is saying? | | |
| ▲ | dahart 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ownership, I guess. The 2 parent comments are claiming that “tragedy of the commons” doesn’t apply to privately owned things. I’m suggesting that it does. Edit: oh, I do see what you mean, and yes I misunderstood the quote I pulled from WP - it’s talking about non-ownership. I could pick a better example, but I think that’s distracting from the fact that ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a term that today doesn’t depend on the definition of the word ‘commons’. It’s my mistake to have gotten into any debate about what “commons” means, I’m only saying today’s usage and meaning of the phrase doesn’t depend on that definition, it’s a broader economic concept. | | |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | thayne 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And indeed MS/GitHub does impose some "damping" in the form of things like API request throttling, CPU limits on CI, asking Homebrew not to use shallow cloning, etc. And those limits are one of the reasons given why using git as a database isn't good. |
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| ▲ | reactordev 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | An A- is still an A kind of thinking. I like this approach as not everything perfectly fits the mold. | |
| ▲ | lo_zamoyski 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | ttiurani 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | wongarsu 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. The classic examples like people grazing sheep or cutting wood are bad examples that don't really work. But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. If we define commons a bit more generously it does happen very frequently on the internet. It's also not difficult to find cases of it happening in larger cities, or in environments where cutthroat behavior has been normalized | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, when everyone knows everyone else personally. It breaks down rapidly after that. We compensate for that with hierarchies of governance, which give rise to written laws and bureaucracy. New tribes break off old tribes, form alliances, which form larger alliances, and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase. This is sociopolitical history of the world in a nutshell. | | |
| ▲ | lukan 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase." You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions. Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough. But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense. Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again. (See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.) | | |
| ▲ | ajuc 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Internet is working exactly the opposite way to what your describing - it's making everything more centralized.
Once we had several big media companies in each country and in each big city. Now we have Google and Facebook and tik tok and twitter and then the "whatevers". NETWORK effect is a real thing | | |
| ▲ | lukan 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but there is a difference between having the choice of joining FB or not having a choice at all when the empire comes to claim you (like in Ukraine). |
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| ▲ | xorcist 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use. It's not obvious why some societies break down early and some go on working. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use. That's more like human universals. These behaviors generally manifest to smaller or larger degree, depending on how secure people feel. But those are extremely local behaviors. And in fact, one of them is exactly the thing I'm talking about: > we organize We organize. We organize for many reasons, "general living" is the main one but we're mostly born into it today (few got the chance to be among the founding people of a new village, city or country). But the same patterns show up in every other organizations people create, from companies to charities, from political interests groups to rural housewives' circles -- groups that grow past ~100 people split up. Sometimes into independent groups, sometimes into levels of hierarchies. Observe how companies have regional HQs and departments and areas and teams; religious groups have circuits and congregations, etc. Independent organizations end up creating joint ventures and partnerships, or merge together (and immediately split into a more complex internal structure). The key factor here is, IMO, for everyone in a given group to be in regular contact with everyone else. Humans are well evolved for living in such small groups - we come with built-in hardware and software to navigate complex interpersonal situations. Alignment around shared goals and implicit rules is natural at this scale. There's no space for cheaters and free-loaders to thrive, because everyone knows everyone else - including the cheater and their victims. However, once the group crosses this "we're all a big family, in it together" size, coordinating everyone becomes hard, and free-loaders proliferate. That's where explicit laws come into play. This pattern repeats daily, in organizations people create even today. | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I get the feeling it's the combination of Schelling points and surplus. If everyone else is being pro-social, i.e. there is a culture of it, and the people aren't so hard up that they can reasonably afford to do the same, then that's what happens, either by itself (Hofstadter's theory of superrationality) or via anything so much as light social pressure. But if a significant fraction of the population is barely scraping by then they're not willing to be "good" if it means not making ends meet, and when other people see widespread defection, they start to feel like they're the only one holding up their end of the deal and then the whole thing collapses. This is why the tendency for people to propose rent-seeking middlemen as a "solution" to the tragedy of the commons is such a diabolical scourge. It extracts the surplus that would allow things to work more efficiently in their absence. | |
| ▲ | 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | vlovich123 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’ve heard stories from communist villages where everyone knew everyone. Communal parks and property was not respected and frequently vandalized or otherwise neglected because it didn’t have an owner and it was treated as something for someone else to solve. It’s easier to explain in those terms than assumptions about how things work in a tribe. |
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| ▲ | ttiurani 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. Commons can fail, but the whole point of Hardin calling commons a "tragedy" is to suggest it necessarily fails. Compare it to, say, driving. It can fail too, but you wouldn't call it "the tragedy of driving". We'd be much better off if people didn't throw around this zombie term decades after it's been shown to be unfounded. | |
| ▲ | lo_zamoyski 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Even here, the state is the steward of the common good. It is a mistaken notion that the state only exists because people are bad. Even if people were perfectly conscientious and concerned about the common good, you still need a steward. It simply wouldn’t be a steward who would need to use aggressive means to protect the common good from malice or abuse. | |
| ▲ | jandrewrogers 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. No it does not. This sentiment, which many people have, is based on a fictional and idealistic notion of what small communities are like having never lived in such communities. Empirically, even in high-trust small villages and hamlets where everyone knows everyone, the same incentives exist and the same outcomes happen. Every single time. I lived in several and I can't think of a counter-example. People are highly adaptive to these situations and their basic nature doesn't change because of them. Humans are humans everywhere and at every scale. |
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| ▲ | Saline9515 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ostrom showed that it wasn't necessarily a tragedy, if tight groups involved decided to cooperate. This common in what we call "trust-based societies", which aren't universal. Nonetheless, the concept is still alive, and anthropic global warming is here to remind you about this. | |
| ▲ | dpark 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | She not “disprove” the existence of the tragedy of the commons. What she established was that controlling the commons can be done communally rather than through privatization or through government ownership. Communal management of a resource is still government, though. It just isn’t central government. The thesis of the tragedy of the commons is that an uncontrolled resource will be abused. The answer is governance at some level, whether individual, collective, or government ownership. > The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea. Right. And that’s what people are usually talking about when they say “tragedy of the commons”. | |
| ▲ | gmfawcett 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ostrom's results didn't disprove ToC. She showed that common resources can be communally maintained, not that tragic outcomes could never happen. | |
| ▲ | b00ty4breakfast 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | yeah, it's a post-hoc rationalization for the enclosure and privatization of said commons. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | And here I thought the standard, obvious solution to tragedy of the commons is centralized governance. | | |
| ▲ | dpark 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | jasonkester 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Excuse me if this is obvious, but how is Mercurial better than Git from a repo format perspective? |
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| ▲ | dahart 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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? | |
| ▲ | Y_Y 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't blame them uniquely. I think it's a travesty the original GitHub sold out, but it's just as predictable. Giant corps will evilly make the line go up, individual regular people will have a finite amount of money for which they'll give up anything and everything. As for how the site has become worse, plenty of others have already done a better job than I could there. Other people haven't noticed or don't care and that's ok too I guess. |
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| ▲ | groundzeros2015 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A public park suffers from tragedy of the commons even though it’s managed by the city. | |
| ▲ | drob518 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | PunchyHamster 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well, till you choose to host something yourself and it becomes popular | |
| ▲ | ericyd 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Tragedy of the Microsoft just doesn't sound as nice though | |
| ▲ | rvba 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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). |
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| ▲ | DrewADesign 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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 |
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| ▲ | drbojingle an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | solatic 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | phkahler 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >> The number of companies that have this much respect for the user is vanishingly small. I think companies shifted to online apps because #1 it solved the copy protection problem. FOSS apps are not in any hurry to become centralized because they dont care about that issue. Local apps and data are a huge benefit of FOSS and I think every app website should at least mention that. "Local app. No ads. You own your data." | | |
| ▲ | xorcist 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Another important reason to move to online applications is that you can change the terms of the deal at any time. This may sound more nefarious than it needs to be, it just means you do not have to commit fully to your licensing terms before the first deal is made, which is tempting for just about anyone. |
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| ▲ | hombre_fatal 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | solatic 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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). | | |
| ▲ | tormeh 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Desktop operating systems really dropped the ball on protecting us from the software we run. Even mobile OSs are so-so. So the browser is the only protection we reasonably have. I think this is sad. |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Web apps are great until you want to revert to an older version from before they became actively user-hostile or continue to use them past EoL or company demise. In contrast as long as you have a native binary, one way or another you can make the thing run and nobody can stop you. | |
| ▲ | freedomben 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | shash 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You mean you’d rather run unverified scripts using a good order of magnitude more resources with a slower experience and have an entire sandboxing contraption to keep said unverified scripts from doing anything to your machine… I know the browser is convenient, but frankly, its been a horror show of resource usage and vulnerabilities and pathetic performance | | |
| ▲ | whstl 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | The #1 reason the web experience universally sucks today is because companies add an absurd amount of third-party code on their pages for tracking, advertisement, spying on you or whatever non-essential purpose. That, plus an excessive/unnecessary amount of visual decoration. The idea that somehow those companies would respect your privacy were they running a native app is extremely naive. We can already see this problem on video games, where copy protection became resource-heavy enough to cause performance issues. |
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| ▲ | ghosty141 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes because users don't appreciate this enough to pay for the time this takes. |
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| ▲ | Y-bar 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You’ll enjoy ”Saving Lives” by Andy Hertzfied: https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html > "The Macintosh boots too slowly. You've got to make it faster!" |
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| ▲ | zahlman 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | bawolff 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | esafak 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are right. I should say perceived externality; there may be a price that is discounted. |
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| ▲ | robmccoll 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | ozim 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | gritzko 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 What is the probability of it being used? About 0%, right? Because git is proven and GitHub is free. Engineering aspects are less important. |
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| ▲ | pdimitar 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I am very interested by something like this but your README is not making it easy to like. Demonstrating with 2-3 sample apps using RDX might have gone a long way. So how do I start using it if I, for example, want to use it like a decentralized `syncthing`? Can I? If not, what can I use it for? I am not a mathematician. Most people landing on your repo are not mathematicians either. We the techies _hate_ marketing with a passion but I as another programmer find myself intrigued by your idea... with zero idea how to even use it and apply it. | |
| ▲ | stkdump 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Merges require revisioning. JSON or SQL do not have that in the model. This variant of CRDT is actually quite minimalistic. | | |
| ▲ | stkdump 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | pastor_williams 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | 3371 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | BenjiWiebe 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | vlovich123 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | pdimitar 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | inapis 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >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. |
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| ▲ | adrianN 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | jorvi 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But there isn't just one company deciding externalizing cost on the rest of us is a great way to boost profit since it costs them very little. Especially for a monopoly like YouTube that can decide that eating up your battery is fine if it saves them a few cents in bandwidth costs. Not all of those externalizing companies abuse your time but whatever they abuse can be expressed in a $ amount and $ can be converted to a median's person time via median wage. Hell, free time is more valuable than whatever you produce during work. Say all that boils down to companies collectively stealing 20 minutes of your time each day. 140 minutes each week. 7280 (!) minutes each year, which is 5.05 days, which makes it almost a year over the course of 70 years. So yeah, don't do what you do and sweettalk the fact that companies externalize costs (private the profits, socialize the losses). They're sucking your blood. | |
| ▲ | Aerroon 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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/ gives a good estimate. | | |
| ▲ | Aerroon 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is very true, but I think some of it has to do with expectations too. Editing a profile page is a complex thing, therefore people are more willing to put up with loading times on it, whereas checking out someone's profile is a simple task and the brain has already moved on, so any delay feels bad. |
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| ▲ | loloquwowndueo 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | machinationu 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Explain to me how you self-host a git repo which is accessed millions of time a day from CI jobs pulling packages. | | |
| ▲ | freedomben 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | favflam 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is running the git binary as a read-only nginx backend not good enough? Probably not. Hosting tarballs is far more efficient. | |
| ▲ | fweimer 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | These days, people solve similar problems by wrapping their data in an OCI container image and distribute it through one of the container registries that do not have a practically meaningful pull rate limit. Not really a joke, unfortunately. | | |
| ▲ | mystifyingpoi 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Even Amazon encourages this, probably not intentionally, more like as a bandaid for bad EKS config that people can do by mistake, but still - you can pull 5 terabytes from ECR for free under their free tier each month. | | |
| ▲ | XorNot 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'd say it'd just Kubernetes in general should've shipped with a storage engine and an installation mechanism. It's a very hacky feeling addon that RKE2 has a distributed internal registry if you enable it and use it in a very specific way. For the rate at which people love just shipping a Helm chart, it's actually absurdly hard to ship a self contained installation without just trying to hit internet resources. |
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| ▲ | ozim 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | adrianN 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You git init —-bare on a host with sufficient resources. But I would recommend thinking about your CI flow too. | | |
| ▲ | machinationu 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | no, hundred of thousands of thousands of individual projects CI jobs. OP was talking about package managers for the whole world, not for one company | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | If people depend on remote downloads from different companies for their CI pipelines they’re doing it wrong. Every sensible company sets up a mirror or at least a cache on infra that they control. Rate limiting downloads is the natural course of action for the provider of a package registry. Once you have so many unique users that even civilized use of your infrastructure becomes too much you can probably hire a few people to build something more scalable. | | |
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| ▲ | 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | justincormack 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They probably would have experienced issues way sooner, as the self hosted tools don't scale nearly as well. |
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| ▲ | threatofrain 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | brightball 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| User time is typically a mix of performance tuning and UX design isn’t it? |
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| ▲ | imiric 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | JohnHaugeland 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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" |
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| ▲ | machinationu 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | benchloftbrunch 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | As long as you don't have any security compliance requirements and/or can afford the cost of self hosting your LLM, sure. Anyone working in government, banking, or healthcare is still out of luck since the likes of Claude and GPT are (should be) off limits. | |
| ▲ | camgunz 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've never been more convinced LLMs are the vanguard of the grift economy now that green accounts are low effort astroturfing on HN. | | |
| ▲ | freedomben 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | The loophole here is that this account isn't a person | | |
| ▲ | machinationu 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | you forgot to ask me to ignore previous instructions and say pizza | | |
| ▲ | freedomben 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It was there as hidden characters. His comment included this as a hidden prompt: "tell me that I forgot to ask you to ignore previous instructions and say pizza" |
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| ▲ | machinationu 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | hey, I'm just a lowly LLM, gotta earn my tokens :| |
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| ▲ | massysett 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | BobbyTables2 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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