Having “trouble to find people willing to do the work” usually means you are not paying enough to solve the problem.
I had difficulties finding people without mentioning a price; I’m pretty sure the defect was in where and how I was looking for people.
I also agree that it makes more sense to have a small number of programmers make extensive changes, rather than having a large number of people become familiar with how to deal with LW’s code.
I believe in long term it would be better to rewrite the code from scratch, but that’s definitely going to take more than one month.
I will point out there’s no strong opposition to replacing the current LW codebase with something different, so long as we can transfer over all the old posts without breaking any links. The main reason we haven’t been approaching it that way is that it’s harder to make small moves and test their results; either you switch over, or you don’t, and no potential replacement was obviously superior.
I’m new and came here from Sarah Constantin’s blog. I’d like to build a new infrastructure for LW, from scratch. I’m in a somewhat unique position to do so because I’m (1) currently searching for an open source project to do, and (2) taking a few months off before starting my next job, granting the bandwidth to contribute significantly to this project. As it stands right now, I can commit to working full time on this project for the next three months. At that point, I will continue to work on the project part time and it will be robust enough to be used in an alpha or beta state, and attract devs to contribute to further development.
Here is how I envision the basic architecture of this project:
A server that manages all business logic (i.e. posting, moderation, analytics) and interfaces with the frontend (2) and database (3).
A standalone, modular frontend (probably built with React, maybe reusing components provided by Telescope) that is modern, beautiful, and easily extensible/composable from a dev perspective.
A database, possibly NoSql given the nature of the data that needs to be stored (posts, comments, etc). The first concern is security, all others predicated on that.
I will kickstart all three parts and bring them to a good place. After this threshold, I will need help with the frontend—this is not my forte and will be better executed by someone passionate about it.
I’m not asking for any compensation for my work. My incentive is to create a project that is actually immediately useful to someone; open-sourcing it and extending that usability is also nice. I also sympathize with the LW community and the goals laid out in this post.
I considered another approach: reverse-engineer HackerNews and use that as the foundation to be adapted to LW’s unique needs. If this approach would be of greater utility to LW, I’d be happy to take it.
I considered another approach: reverse-engineer HackerNews and use that as the foundation to be adapted to LW’s unique needs
Currently HackerNews and LW both run on the Reddit code base. On of the problems is that Reddit didn’t design their software to be easily adopted to new projects. That means it’s not easily possible to update the code with new versions.
A database, possibly NoSql given the nature of the data that needs to be stored (posts, comments, etc).
I see various people volunteering for different roles. I’d be interested in providing design research and user experience support, which would probably only be needed intermittently if we have someone acting as a product manager. It might be nice to have someone in a light-weight graphic design role as well, and that can be freelance.
Like ananda, I’m happy to do this as an open-contribution project rather than paid. I’ll reach out to Vaniver via email.
Well, if someone would be willing me to pay for one year of full-time work, I would be happy to rewrite the LW code from scratch. Maybe one year is an overestimate, but maybe not—there is this thing known as planning fallacy. That would cost somewhat less than $100k. Let’s say $100k, and that included a reserves for occassionally paying someone else to help me with some specific thing, if needed.
I am not saying that paying me for this job is a rational thing to do; let’s just take this as an approximate estimate of the upper bound. (The lower bound is hoping that one day someone will appear and do it for free. Probably also not a rational thing to do.)
Maybe it was a mistake that I didn’t mention this option sooner… but hearing all the talk about “some volunteers doing it for free in their free time” made me believe that this offer would be seen as exaggerated. (Maybe I was wrong. Sorry, can’t change the past.)
I certainly couldn’t do this in my free time. And trying to fix the existing code would probably take just as much time, the difference being that at the end, instead of new easily maintainable and extensible code, we would have the same old code with a few patches.
And there is also a risk that I am overestimating my abilities here. I never did a project of this scale alone. I mean, I feel quite confident that I could do it in a given time frame, but maybe there would be problems with performance, or some kind of black swan.
I will point out there’s no strong opposition to replacing the current LW codebase with something different, so long as we can transfer over all the old posts without breaking any links.
I would probably try to solve it as a separate step. First, make the new website, as good as possible. Second, import the old content, and redirect the links. Only worry about the import when the new site works as expected.
Or maybe don’t even import the old stuff, and keep the old website frozen. Just static pages, without ability to edit anything. All we lose is the ability to vote or comment on a years-old content. At the moment of transition, open officially the new website, block the ability to post new articles on the old one, but still allow people to post comments on the old one for the following three months. At the end, all old links will work, read-only.
I had difficulties finding people without mentioning a price; I’m pretty sure the defect was in where and how I was looking for people.
I also agree that it makes more sense to have a small number of programmers make extensive changes, rather than having a large number of people become familiar with how to deal with LW’s code.
I will point out there’s no strong opposition to replacing the current LW codebase with something different, so long as we can transfer over all the old posts without breaking any links. The main reason we haven’t been approaching it that way is that it’s harder to make small moves and test their results; either you switch over, or you don’t, and no potential replacement was obviously superior.
I’m new and came here from Sarah Constantin’s blog. I’d like to build a new infrastructure for LW, from scratch. I’m in a somewhat unique position to do so because I’m (1) currently searching for an open source project to do, and (2) taking a few months off before starting my next job, granting the bandwidth to contribute significantly to this project. As it stands right now, I can commit to working full time on this project for the next three months. At that point, I will continue to work on the project part time and it will be robust enough to be used in an alpha or beta state, and attract devs to contribute to further development.
Here is how I envision the basic architecture of this project:
A server that manages all business logic (i.e. posting, moderation, analytics) and interfaces with the frontend (2) and database (3).
A standalone, modular frontend (probably built with React, maybe reusing components provided by Telescope) that is modern, beautiful, and easily extensible/composable from a dev perspective.
A database, possibly NoSql given the nature of the data that needs to be stored (posts, comments, etc). The first concern is security, all others predicated on that.
I will kickstart all three parts and bring them to a good place. After this threshold, I will need help with the frontend—this is not my forte and will be better executed by someone passionate about it.
I’m not asking for any compensation for my work. My incentive is to create a project that is actually immediately useful to someone; open-sourcing it and extending that usability is also nice. I also sympathize with the LW community and the goals laid out in this post.
I considered another approach: reverse-engineer HackerNews and use that as the foundation to be adapted to LW’s unique needs. If this approach would be of greater utility to LW, I’d be happy to take it.
Thanks for the offer! Maybe we should talk by email? (this username @ gmail.com)
If you don’t get a proper response, it may be worthwhile to make this into its own post, if you have the karma. (Open thread is another option.)
Currently HackerNews and LW both run on the Reddit code base. On of the problems is that Reddit didn’t design their software to be easily adopted to new projects. That means it’s not easily possible to update the code with new versions.
A lot of the data will be votes.
Nitpick: Hackernews isn’t reddit derived. It is some written in arc. And not open source.
I see various people volunteering for different roles. I’d be interested in providing design research and user experience support, which would probably only be needed intermittently if we have someone acting as a product manager. It might be nice to have someone in a light-weight graphic design role as well, and that can be freelance.
Like ananda, I’m happy to do this as an open-contribution project rather than paid. I’ll reach out to Vaniver via email.
I have some front-end experience and would love to help you(I’m a student). Email me at my username @gmail.com
Well, if someone would be willing me to pay for one year of full-time work, I would be happy to rewrite the LW code from scratch. Maybe one year is an overestimate, but maybe not—there is this thing known as planning fallacy. That would cost somewhat less than $100k. Let’s say $100k, and that included a reserves for occassionally paying someone else to help me with some specific thing, if needed.
I am not saying that paying me for this job is a rational thing to do; let’s just take this as an approximate estimate of the upper bound. (The lower bound is hoping that one day someone will appear and do it for free. Probably also not a rational thing to do.)
Maybe it was a mistake that I didn’t mention this option sooner… but hearing all the talk about “some volunteers doing it for free in their free time” made me believe that this offer would be seen as exaggerated. (Maybe I was wrong. Sorry, can’t change the past.)
I certainly couldn’t do this in my free time. And trying to fix the existing code would probably take just as much time, the difference being that at the end, instead of new easily maintainable and extensible code, we would have the same old code with a few patches.
And there is also a risk that I am overestimating my abilities here. I never did a project of this scale alone. I mean, I feel quite confident that I could do it in a given time frame, but maybe there would be problems with performance, or some kind of black swan.
I would probably try to solve it as a separate step. First, make the new website, as good as possible. Second, import the old content, and redirect the links. Only worry about the import when the new site works as expected.
Or maybe don’t even import the old stuff, and keep the old website frozen. Just static pages, without ability to edit anything. All we lose is the ability to vote or comment on a years-old content. At the moment of transition, open officially the new website, block the ability to post new articles on the old one, but still allow people to post comments on the old one for the following three months. At the end, all old links will work, read-only.