Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38998914
Readit Newstzhenghao commented on Exploring Object File Formats maskray.me/blog/2024-01-1... · Posted by u/signa11
tzhenghao commented on The black market in GitHub stars wired.com/story/github-st... · Posted by u/bluish29
> Another giveaway is the ratio of stars to watchers / forks. I remember one project with thousands of stars but only 10 users "watching" it. They went on to raise a sizable seed round too.
Not necessarily indicative of foul play. I have two projects like this (https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync and https://github.com/ipyflow/ipyflow) and I attribute it to not having great developer documentation.
Good point. By the way, I checked out both projects above and starred them. Pretty cool!
tzhenghao commented on The black market in GitHub stars wired.com/story/github-st... · Posted by u/bluish29
Most of the comments here seem to assume buying stars is about making personal profiles more attractive to hiring.
I doubt that's the motivation here. I think this is about projects themselves wanting a high star count in order to attract users, customers and investors.
This. I've seen a couple open core startups that are less than a year old with thousands of stars on their repositories, so I decided to have a look at some of these profiles who starred the project. Most of them have weird usernames that resemble spam accounts, almost all of them cannot be pointed to some other profile on a different platform (Twitter, LinkedIn, HN etc.).
Another giveaway is the ratio of stars to watchers / forks. I remember one project with thousands of stars but only 10 users "watching" it. They went on to raise a sizable seed round too.
Hard needle to thread. I understand the risk of getting community momentum in a direction you don't want to go, but I'm also doubtful that much of the audience they want is interested in a closed source programming language. Hoping they can thread it because I think it's a good idea and Swift is pretty nice.
I think they're just playing a larger distribution game to get people locked into
Mojo then eventually pay for their Modular engine hosting services, just about the same as most open core, VC backed startups.
tzhenghao commented on What is wrong with TOML? (2019) hitchdev.com/strictyaml/w... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac
Honestly, all of these arguments feel pretty subjective to me.
This is the major problem with most comparisons of config file formats: the actual semantic domain of a config file format is extremely limited, which means the main thing left to disagree over is syntax, which is highly subjective and extremely difficult to get people to agree on.
Add too many syntactic features and a lot of people will disavow you for being too complicated. Add too few and you'll be missing someone's pet feature. Make white space significant and you'll frustrate people. Require extra characters to delineate and you'll frustrate another group.
It's worth noting that this article is primarily talking about TOML in the context of the Python ecosystem, and I think that's a healthier way to talk about config file formats: How well suited are their syntactic choices to the community they're targeting?
Yup. I've personally used both YAML and TOML for configurations, much more the latter recently and can see pros and cons for both.
> How well suited are their syntactic choices to the community they're targeting?
Also, "best" practices. One could reduce the pain of the other, but by no means is the right solution to a deeper problem at hand. For example, if one has very deep and complex nesting for configs, TOML "may be a lot nicer" compared to YAML, but that doesn't mean using TOML will make all the config parsing problems go away. It just mask away code smell. Maybe time to check if they're overcomplicating configurations in general.