Left-Pad (2024)

by oeitho • 1 year ago

291 176 1 year ago

skrebbel4• 1 year ago

I have to admit that I don't understand half of this blog post, feels like I'm missing some context, but I do like that the "left pad guy" does a post mortem.

That said, this seems like a weird argument to me:

but I still don't understand why NPM didn't take the time to find out if any of my modules were widely used and consider ways to handle the unpublishing without breaking anything

Sure, NPM's unpublish mechanism was a misdesign, but is he saying that he expected people at the company to manually go through this every time someone did an unpublish? That doesn't seem too reasonable IMO, NPM the company isn't curating NPM the registry. They host it as a public service.

I can't fault the author all too much here though, if he hadn't triggered "the left-pad incident" then someone else would've not too long after. NPM fixed the problem, by means of a better unpublish policy [0] and that's that.

[0] https://docs.npmjs.com/policies/unpublish#packages-published...

nicou• 1 year ago

For context, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

HPsquared• 1 year ago

11 lines of code! Wow. I had no idea it was that small.

randunel• 1 year ago

On March 18, 2016, Isaac Z. Schlueter, the chief executive officer of npm, Inc., wrote to both Kik Interactive and Koçulu, stating that the ownership of the kik package would be manually transferred to Kik Interactive. After Koçulu expressed his disappointment with npm, Inc.'s decision and stated that he no longer wished to be part of the platform, Schlueter provided him with a command to delete all 273 modules that he had registered.[9] Koçulu executed the command on March 22, 2016, removing every package he had previously released

The author simply ran the script that NPM themselves told him to, and later NPM blamed the author for their own failings.

skrebbel4• 1 year ago

Ok fair! In that case I actually agree with his stance I think. I can understand how isaacs messed this up in what must've been a stressful situation, but it's hard to blame the author for it indeed, if he was just running the commands provided.

DanielHB• 1 year ago

NPM the company isn't curating NPM the registry

They do in fact curate the registry, mainly for reporting vulnerabilities to consumers and to remove malicious packages.

diggan• 1 year ago

I'd probably call those things "maintenance" or "moderation" rather than "curation". Curation would imply they care about the quality, but in reality they just try to limit the damage of malicious packages.

JJMcJ• 1 year ago

Years ago I used Sourceforge and they had a policy you had to ask permission before deleting a project.

After left-pad, I understood why.

_thisdot• 1 year ago

Relevant discussion from the time left-pad incident happened

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349870

arturocamembert• 1 year ago

left-pad even being a package is pretty funny, no? How many bytes got pumped across CDNs, proxies, build pipelines, etc. just to write a tiny utility function? I'm all for taking advantage of existing solutions, but I can't wrap my head around needing to pad a string and thinking "oh, I bet there's a package for that"

codegladiator• 1 year ago

maximum code reuse flex, copy-paste is for losers.

wiseowise• 1 year ago

Muh Unix way.

arcastroe2• 1 year ago

The package's original implementation[1] also seems like it would have resulted in O(n^2) operation rather than desired O(n).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

hhjinks• 1 year ago

I don't see where the quadratic time complexity comes from. There's a single loop performing n operations in total, ie. O(n).

ale• 1 year ago

I remember part of the discourse being that this was a much needed wake up call to web-devs for their relentless reliance on micro packages like left-pad. Part of it was the culture of publishing packages for the sake of popularity and github stars. Part of it were also devs insisting that implementing anything that could otherwise be installed through NPM was "reinventing the wheel". Today I work with a lot of devs who still prefer using micro packages, regardless of their simplicity, because to them it means "less maintenance". Go figure.

ben0x539• 1 year ago

Really, what's the qualitative difference between reaching for a utility function that someone else already wrote within your project and reaching for a package that someone else already published within your ecosystem? They're obviously not the same thing but are they so far apart that you can't wrap your head around it wanting to treat them the same, given sufficiently advanced tooling?

amiga386• 1 year ago

The utility function just has to fit your use case, and can be easily refactored as it lives in a local context.

The package has to have a public API, meet millions of different people's use cases, and any change to the API will cause millions of man-hours of useless work... and yet if it's a poorly designed API, it might cause millions of sub-optimal programs.

Every project has a StringUtils file. But every project's StringUtils file is different.

Published packages in an ecosystem ought to be well-designed, with good performance, good APIs, good security. Packages that don't meet that bar ought to be kept out. npm is jarring because it let any old shit get published, despite there being long-standing package ecosystems in other languages with much better standards, that they could have copied from (CPAN, PyPi, RubyGems, Maven Central, NuGet Gallery, etc.)

demosthanos• 1 year ago

The number of distinct entities in your supply chain and whether those developers are on your payroll.

As a business, each additional human or company you add to your supply chain represents additional risk that you're taking on. You can go some ways towards mitigating those risks—one of the most common is to sign a contract with them rather than doing business ad hoc—but the risk doesn't go away entirely. Given that additional risk for each additional downstream supplier, it's generally safer to use code written by someone who's already on your payroll than it is to use code written by someone you've never met and have no way of vetting.

croes• 1 year ago

Isn't it similar with AI now?

How many prompts can already be solved with a simple web query?

C&P but with extra steps

nightfly• 1 year ago

I'm pretty pessimistic about AI in general, but the quality of web query results has gone done so much I've resorted to asking an AI to get the short answer or the starting point that Google would have given me just a few years ago...

panstromek• 1 year ago

The biggest reason for this is reuse between libraries - if you use 10 libraries, you don't want each of them to add its own leftpad. This is especially a problem if this happens in client code and you then send duplicate code to the browser.

lloydatkinson• 1 year ago

On the NPM side, I observed general condescending attitude towards developers, which led them make series of unreasonable decisions and ultimately blame me for all the cost.

NPM has not really learned much in the time since this event either.

aa-jv3• 1 year ago

As someone who avoids javascript and its attendant ecosystem like its the Visual Basic plague of the 21st Century, the most interesting aspect of this whole story is the fact that Koçulu disconnected from the tech scene for some time, did some amazing hiking and camping and trail discovery, and now .. 8 years later .. still feels compelled to explain himself.

Technology is a fickle muse. We nerds obsess over her and degrade ourselves in her service, but she always calls us back into the light.

As someone who was around for the Morris worm and spent weeks negating its impact, I feel that there is a fundamental issue impacting our ability to make world-changing technology with the current tools. The less we strive to understand the organizational (ethical) failings of technology, the less technology can be used to effect productive change in the realms it is being applied.

That said, I'm about a month (and a few hundred failed compiles) away from taking my own sabbatical, and I can't help but try to reason what things would be like for me, upon my return after some years, in the technological space I've carved out for my own needs, at much different scales and contexts.

Perhaps it should become somewhat standard for us technologists to take sabbaticals, more often, and more seriously, in order to give us the context we need to understand the ethical dilemma that impinges upon our technological prowess.

Koçulu, thank you for your thoughts. I may never be effected by the javascript world, but the lessons it provides from within the temple nevertheless reverberate among the outer chambers ..

shellac• 1 year ago

It's a minor thing, but:

Most of my open source work followed Unix philosophy, so the packages did one thing at a time.

Nobody has suggested that libc -- to take the most obvious example -- is against the Unix philosophy. Debates occur around whether whether commands / daemons do too much (recent poster child being systemd) or aren't composable.

0xAFFFF• 1 year ago

If anything, the left-pad debacle has shown that NPM package granularity has gone way too small, at a point where package overhead was outweighing the package simplicity benefits.

whostolemyhat• 1 year ago

Left-pad was made at a time when tree-shaking wasn't really around, so it was good practice to only include the functions you needed to avoid making websites too heavy. If you just needed a small function then it'd be silly to include a huge utility library like Underscore.

layer8• 1 year ago

What does the size or granularity have to do with the incident? If the author had combined all his 350+ packages into one (or had had a more comprehensive text-utils.js package) and pulled that instead, the issue would have been at least as severe?

I don’t think such small packages are sensible, in particular when versioned separately, but I also don’t see how the left-pad debacle has shown that.

IshKebab4• 1 year ago

The "unix philosophy" is a useless philosophy - perhaps worse than useless even - because "one thing" is not well defined, so in practice it adds nothing and just leads to arguments.

You could say that Eclipse does "one thing" - being an IDE platform - but I don't think anyone thinks that's what the Unix devs meant. Similarly I don't think they meant for people to write libraries that contain one 11-line function.

The actual advice should be something like "programs/libraries shouldn't try to do too much or too little". How do you know how much is too much or too little? Like so many programming guidelines the answer is you need taste and experience.

qsort2• 1 year ago

I feel like "do one thing and do it well" is an oversimplification:

(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".

(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.

(iii) Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

(iv) Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them

---

[1] https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1899/page/n3/mode/2up

freehorse• 1 year ago

because "one thing" is not well defined

That's what a philosophy is, gives you some general guideline and you have to use your thinking to figure out how to apply it in specific circumstances. It does not substitute that thinking neither does it prevent stupid choices, it helps guide you in a higher/strategic level. It is not responsible for people making stupid decisions.

Lerc2• 1 year ago

If you consider it from the point of view of how "clear is the scope?" Then it makes more sense.

Libc implementations have a very clear scope, clear enough that you can point to the specification. That is their 'one thing' do what that spec says.

Eclipse however, doesn't have that singular goal. You would be hard pressed to say how many of Eclipse's tentacles is a clear push towards being an ide. What should a completely finished version of Eclipse that met all it's goals look like?

Similarly the one thing could be "be a c preprocessor" or be a full "c compiler" these are both "one thing"s even while one is a subset of the other.

The intention of "do one thing, and do it well" is not to limit the scope but to show the boundary of the scope and to commit to doing everything within that boundary

By making your one thing "a full c compiler" you should be committing to doing everything that someone making a c preprocessor is doing, and to the same standard. The Unix philosophy should be considered a warning not to neglect components because you are working on a larger system.

You can't do everything, but you don't have to. If others are following the same principles then many of the parts of what you need will be done to a high standard by others.

cjs_ac• 1 year ago

The obverse to 'do one thing' is that you have to do the whole thing.

lmm6• 1 year ago

Nobody has suggested that libc -- to take the most obvious example -- is against the Unix philosophy.

Plenty of people have suggested that. I'll suggest it for you now if you like. The modern form of libc is very much against the unix philosophy; traditional Unix had a much simpler libc where many functions were just syscalls; some parts of today's libc were hived off into separate libraries like libm, and other parts like NSS and convoluted DNS resolution frameworks just didn't exist at all.

kragen• 1 year ago

The Unix philosophy tells you how to get a powerful interactive programming environment on a 16-bit minicomputer where the maximum text segment size was 64KiB. The libc I'm using on this cellphone is 1MiB, 16× bigger. So at least 90% of libc is against the Unix philosophy.

I don't see how anyone could read the Lions book or APUE, on one hand, and the pthreads manual or the ANSI C specification of setlocale(), on the other, and come to the conclusion that they represent the same philosophy. It's like thinking Ayn Rand is an exponent of the same philosophy as Epicurus; it betrays a staggering lack of sincere engagement with either one.

pstadler• 1 year ago

The version history of the kik package[0] is odd. It has been replaced with a security holding package nine years ago[1].

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/kik?activeTab=versions

manuhabitela• 1 year ago

haha, so, all of this for… nothing in the end?

Bengalilol• 1 year ago

The kik user page almost says it all. https://www.npmjs.com/~kikinteractive One person in the company thought this would be cool to be on NPM, then ... the lpad story.

bartread6• 1 year ago

I think this is the biggest irony of it: the kik package, which kik where so desperate to have, is basically sweet Fanny Adams.

Also, Kik turn out to be negligent and pretty scummy. There was some controversy with them involving crypto, but the main thing I remember about them is that Kik is rife in terms of trading pornography, including child pornography, as discussed on this Darknet Diaries episode: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/.

So, from that point of view, I quite enjoy that Azer Koçulu told them to fuck off.

serf• 1 year ago

Also, Kik turn out to be negligent and pretty scummy.

turns out?

they threatened a pre-existing naming collision with legal action and bullied the platform first into forcing the name to be theirs, and then afterwards by crying to npm until their software tests passed again.

they began scummy.

nindalf5• 1 year ago

I have to admit that I don't understand half of this blog post

It's because you haven't read al-Ghazali yet.

(definitely the most pompous and self-important part of this post)

bartread6• 1 year ago

Not driven by logic, anger...

I don't know that I fully buy this either, at least not the anger part.

I can look back on all this with wry amusement nowadays but I remember it being pretty frustrating at the time.

It sort of felt like, well, either you knew what the impact of unpublishing all your packages would be and you did it anyway, which makes you kind of antisocial, or you didn't know what the impact would be but did it anyway, which makes you kind of a hothead. And in this latest piece Azer has admitted that he didn't understand what the impact would be so... y'know... I do wonder if anger was at least a small factor.

Regardless, it's pretty clear that npm bear a lot of the responsibility for what happened. It's also something that happened a very long time ago and, as I've already implied, is just a funny story nowadays, not something I can manage any ire towards Azer over.

IggleSniggle• 1 year ago

The 3rd option is the one Azer describes in the post:

He wants to remove his stuff, but isn't sure what the right way to do it is, so he asks npm. npm provides him with a set of scripts to run to remove his stuff, and he, presuming that it's "ok" if npm told him to go ahead and run them, runs them. The impact isn't especially important to him, But since npm just gave him a set of scripts with an implicit "oh okay you want to remove your stuff, here I wrote you a script you can run to get it done," makes it more of an npm choice to handle it in this manner. npm asked him to handle it this way, so he did.

thomassmith652• 1 year ago

Not to dump on the author, but following the Serenity Prayer would have led to a happier outcome...

grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference

nkrisc2• 1 year ago

What’s anti-social is unilaterally making your code dependent on someone’s package and then getting mad at them when they choose to remove it.

This whole problem was trivially avoidable, and people get mad at him because they were too lazy to avoid it.

bayindirh5• 1 year ago

Personally I understand both Al-Ghazali and "Not driven by logic, anger" parts very well. I have been in that position as well.

Being neutral and seeing a good way forward is not something practiced, taught or celebrated in western, esp. American culture much. One always needs to have a thrust source (mostly an emotion driven by logic, taught during being grown up (e.g.: You should be angry about it)) to make decisions.

In fact, sometimes, you just don't have a thrust source, you just feel like doing it. It feels the right thing to do, and you do it with no emotions attached.

This is a boon, in fact it's called "clarity" brought by being with yourself. Either spending time outdoors, doing some reflection work, or by meditating. I use the same methods when I face with a non-urgent but important decision. Let the way reveal itself. Putting logic and emotions aside and finding the right way is not easy, or the process is not smooth sailing, but I never arrived to a wrong place by following that path.

toledocavani• 1 year ago

Who is al-Ghazali? I searched and found the Iraqi phisolopher, but couldn't understand how he is related

tkiolp43• 1 year ago

We westerns do the know much about the Socrates from the eastern side of the world. I can only imagine people from there know who al-Ghazali was just like we know who Sartre was.

So, im gonna try and read something by al-Ghazali.

akoculu5• 1 year ago

When was the last time you were threatened (“we’ll will bang on your door and take down your accounts”) by a company like Kik and you defended the principles and values you believed until the end?

I’m quite familiar with both western and eastern traditions, don’t know any better source than Ghazali’s “the alchemy of happiness” about how people make decisions.

It’s kind of ironic to see people being triggered by just the mention of it though — just reflects what your heart tends to reject impulsively. I wish you curiosity.

P.S Here’s the full quote, it entertainingly describes the ignorance here:

“first, they didn't look at the dates of the emails. They don't understand the timeline.

second, they can't relate to standing your ground in a high pressure situation involving threats.

and third, they haven't read Al-Ghazali yet, don't quite understand how (free) people make decisions”

nindalf5• 1 year ago

[flagged]

olalonde2• 1 year ago

It seems what you really meant was:

And third, they haven't read Al-Ghazali, don't quite understand how I make decisions.

Not everyone makes decision guided by the heart. Many people lean more on reason and logic.

oftenwrong2• 1 year ago

Given that this post is meant to explain your perspective at the time, I think it would make sense to explain it at least a little. At the very least, I am curious. What does Al-Ghazali have to say about making decisions that influenced you? I have not read Al-Ghazali yet.

aa-jv3• 1 year ago

(definitely the most pompous and self-important part of this post)

What compels you to say this? Would you be more satisfied if he'd suggested the reader acquaint themselves with Thomas Aquinas or Augustine of Hippo? Are you familiar with al-Ghazali, the scholar, or is he new to you?

You have, rather literally, proven the philosophers point - while remaining, it seems, ignorant of it.

Or perhaps, you mean to imply that /u/akoculu was doing a good deed not because he cared, but to show off?

The irony is, al-Ghazali asked his readers to question their pomp and self-importance, and to do good deeds because they truly cared, not because it would result in social acknowledgement by the mass collective, whose motives should always be questioned, effectively.

Perhaps, then, your position is more of a reflection of your own condition? One would hope your disdain is borne on an actual understanding of al-Ghazali's position, vis a vis self-doubt ... or rather, one would hope your current position is based on an ignorance of his works, actually.

One should never feel so compelled to deny the enlightenment of others, especially if by doing so, you resort to personally-motivated obscurantism in response.

dang• 1 year ago

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Edit out swipes."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44245579.

junon3• 1 year ago

Maintainer of a few top-10 npm packages here. This makes complete sense.

Somewhere along the way NPM stopped being cooperative with the community. It cemented itself with the Microsoft acquisition, but was obvious quite a bit before that.

There were so many cracks with how npm functioned, they weren't cooperating well with the community / mainline Node team, their push to commercial viability was really off-putting and forced, and many of the team members had a somewhat rough reputation.

Indeed I visited the offices in Oakland (if I recall correctly), and had an... interesting set of interactions there, not particularly positive, that I'll keep to myself.

The unpublish hole was well known at the time. Everyone blamed left-pad for breaking the internet, as it were, but nobody seemed to come down on npm for the sheer mismanagement of it all.

If memory serves they forcefully reinstated the package against the maintainer's wishes, which is a divorcement from the people they claimed to serve at best, and legally dubious at worst. Shortly after this they stopped caring much at all about abuse on their platform at all (core.js advertisement spam, anyone?) and haven't really worked with the community on standards, compatibility, etc. after that.

The npm@5 release was a disaster. The introduction of package lock files couldn't have gone worse, and as I remember it it was a push to get it out alongside the next Node.js major release (I got the feeling the Node team didn't wait for npm to be ready, which I think is a good thing given npm is a for-profit, or at least acts like one).

The community outreach during that time of what seemed like endless major, catastrophic bugs and the shaming of the community for putting pressure on them, the pious attitude, was only further proof that npm was no longer an agent of FOSS. I can't remember if left-pad came before or after that but in my head it was all one long drawn out declination of the ecosystem.

The packages on npm are a meme now; small packages that do trivial tasks, and everyone likes to make fun of it. Maybe it wasn't the best thing, in hindsight. But context is crucial; npm was the first incredibly accessible package manager for an emergent popular technology, almost entirely community managed, with a good system for querying and tight integration with Github's "social coding" spirit.

It existed very early in the Node lifetime, back before even ES5 was available (we still used `var` and `prototype`!), before JavaScript best practices really existed. Before Node.js was given to the community by Joyent. Before even the Io.js fork and the exit from the long stagnation that was Node 0.10/0.12.

Nobody knew the best way to do things.

I can completely understand the author. From a security perspective I'm really thankful left-pad happened, even if it wasn't the reasoning of the author; it made people acutely aware of what relying on corporate interests divested from the communities they claim to serve, bring to the table in terms of risk. It started many conversations about supply chain security, redundancy, etc. That's a hard thing to do, and it's made the industry a bit better in the long run.

Good followup, neat to read this after so long.

dontlaugh2• 1 year ago

It wasn’t the first package manager for a programming language and plenty of us pointed out the folly of packages that small.

Npm (and JS in general) is a victim of fashion, primarily.

jmillikin2• 1 year ago

I think that statement is parsed as "npm was the first incredibly accessible package manager for [server-side JavaScript, which at the time was] an emergent popular technology,"

junon3• 1 year ago

That isn't what I was claiming. I was drawing attention to it being super early on in an ecosystem, in an industry where lots of the "package manager best practices" are now formed based on Node's small-package qualms.

imtringued• 1 year ago

Azer Koçulu has never been a scourge to the NPM ecosystem. Nobody forced anyone to use left-pad. The reason it got included in so many projects is due to messy transitive dependencies.

Jon Schlinkert on the other hand is going out of his way to produce these micro libraries and then include them in his widely used legitimate projects (handlebars-helpers) with zero willingness to simply integrate them into the projects that actually use them. Here is the deal: Do you want to be trolled? Then use handlebars-helpers, if not, then stop using the damn library.

dkersten• 1 year ago

On top of that, he only ran the script that NPM themselves provided him. Yes, the micro-package situation was absurd, but Azer Koçulu did nothing wrong. NPM did by forcibly taking his package, and then by providing him with scripts that were clearly unsafe to run. That Azer Koçulu got any blame for this is ridiculous.

Jon Schlinkert is a typical marketing A-hole. He should be banned from NPM and Github IMHO.

throwaway2904• 1 year ago

NPM (well Microsoft) forcibly took guy's package to give the name to this company: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45568276

Since then the name is basically squatted?

Whether you use left-pad or not is up to you... but this Kik story is just a bad look for Microsoft all around.

furkansahin• 1 year ago

You're aware this happened way before the Microsoft acquisition right?

throwaway2904• 1 year ago

You're aware this happened way before the Microsoft acquisition right?

you phrasing implies that you would say what I said if you knew that acquisition happened later. Weird but OK.

Anyway then let's just say it is a bad look for NPM and any future buyers who decided this is a worthy company

majorbugger• 1 year ago

Why Java can have reliable utility libraries such as Apache Commons and Google Guava, but JS somehow cannot?

q3k• 1 year ago

<snip, i got my history wrong>

jmillikin2• 1 year ago

Arguably the root problem was lack of user namespacing; the incident would have been less likely to happen in the first place if the packages in question were named "~akoculu/left-pad" and "~akoculu/kik".

qsort2• 1 year ago

In decreasing order of importance: culture, a good standard library, and tooling that pushes you to be deliberate about your dependencies rather than dumping 300 stupid packages inside every project.

madeofpalk• 1 year ago

Javascript does. lodash is/was pretty common. Most of the stuff as been absorbed into the standard library now.

Lodash has had pad/padStart/padEnd since 2016, 3 months before left-pad incident. https://lodash.info/doc/pad

merb• 1 year ago

Google guava is more like lodash than like leftpad

lmm6• 1 year ago

Maven is incredibly well designed (and ironically gets nothing but hate for it), it's probably the hidden reason Java is so successful.

Why does Maven exist, without the commercial compromises of NPM? Probably because Java has the well-funded, well-supported, but non-profit and community-oriented Apache foundation, which is something extremely rare and precious (and probably at least partly a lucky result of Java's complicated legal history).

(JS has plenty of great utility libraries. The problem is that its package management is excessively centralised and not managed terribly well)

oftenwrong2• 1 year ago

The operators of Maven Central deserve a lot of credit for their good stewardship. Unlike the NPM registry, Maven Central does not permit anyone to unpublish packages. Unlike the NPM registry, Maven Central requires verification of domain or forge account ownership to claim a namespace. These are good practices, and anyone seeking to create a central package registry would do well to at least consider this. Maven Central is currently operated by SonaType, but it has changed hands a few times. This article covers its history: https://www.sonatype.com/blog/the-history-of-maven-central-a...

Additionally, it is standard practice in the Java world, which is more "corporate" or "enterprise-y", for better and for worse, to have organisations operate their own internal package registries / mirrors. Even if you unpublished a major package from Maven Central, many organisations would be completely unaffected because they retain archived copies of all of their dependencies.

dagw2• 1 year ago

It used to. Jquery and Underscore basically filled that role for years.

iLoveOncall4• 1 year ago

Left-pad was like a "death" and "re-birth" moment for me. The part of me passionate about open-source was dead, and something new took over. Now, I'm passionate about business, marketing, running companies / teams

Wow, I couldn't think of a worse rebirth.

tkiolp43• 1 year ago

Because those things don’t align with what you value? Of course.

iLoveOncall4• 1 year ago

Yes, I think a passion about marketing can only result in net-negative for humanity.

It's not that I don't value those things, it's that I think they're actively harmful (at least some of them), and that being passionate about them shows very toxic personality traits.

baobabKoodaa4• 1 year ago

Do you think the world is better off with this guy going from FOSS passion to "business & marketing passion"?

I understand if your values contain something like "money for me is good", but do your values also contain something like "money for this random guy is good"?

heroku2• 1 year ago

I owned the heroku user name on npm and gave it to official heroku website upon request.

chromehearts• 1 year ago

That's so cool actually! Did you ask for any compensation? Short "iconic" usernames are kinda rare

heroku2• 1 year ago

my compensation is the story I can tell people like this.

incrudible• 1 year ago

It was good that this happened. Name squatting is a real problem and when in doubt, err on the side of least surprise. Not having usage statistics was a real problem. Being able to just unpublish was a real problem. Infrastructure relying on trivial 10-liners by opinionated individuals was (and still is) a real problem. Nobody in this situation is truly at fault, because nobody owes anyone anything, yet everyone can learn something from it.

lvl155• 1 year ago

I remember this incident and it is one of many reasons I was turned off by the entire JS ecosystem.

tkiolp43• 1 year ago

How come this is related to JS only? Like, if I own a python/rust/go/whatever public package named XYZ and later a company named XYZ forces me to release the package because of trademark issues, and I cannot do but obey, all my packages may run the same luck, so anybody relying on them would be screwed.

I don’t see how the size of the package matters here.

another-dave2• 1 year ago

To your point, in JVM the convention is to package based on domain name so you don't have this type of issue.

But I think the GP's point is that the cultural in other ecosystems didn't lean as heavily into "there's a package for that®" as JS does

vb-8448• 1 year ago

I think the issue is that JS force you to have hundreds, or even thousands, dependencies. Python and other language have a richer std library and more "general purpose" packages, so the total number of dependencies is lower.

Sankozi• 1 year ago

Unix philosophy is "do one thing, do it well". Left-Pad forgot about the second part.

For me it was surprising that so many projects used this naive implementation. Nonnaive implementation is faster and much smaller.

shagie• 1 year ago

I'm going to preface this with "I'm not sure if the culture is still there, nor do I develop JavaScript" ... so I'm writing about something I remember reading.

People are after the "number of downloads" metric on npm for various reasons. Left-pad has 1.4 million weekly downloads https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad Is-even has 160k weekly downloads https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even

Sometimes people will include it as a dependency as a joke in their useful library. Other times the people who write these put it in useful libraries that they contribute to so that use of the useful boosts their numbers. I'm forgetting where it is now, but it was one of the big foundational libraries in React that used one of those and there was resistance to replacing (I believe) an include and use of is-even because they were a very strict adherent to the "never write code you can include" which meant that everything using it included it.

One such story: Why has there been nearly 3 million installs of is-odd - npm in the last 7 days? - https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/886zji/why_has...

efilife2• 1 year ago

what would that nonnaive implementation look like?

praptak• 1 year ago

To me it is very strange how many companies do not internally mirror every single dependency of their builds. You should be able to do a clean build fully offline (and not count on luck with the download caches).

hu3• 1 year ago

Yep.

I vendor dependencies on the projects I work.

Predictable, offline builds. Storage is cheap.

1718627440• 1 year ago

Include them as git submodule and you have that for free.

andruby• 1 year ago

Thank you for writing this akoculu.

I remember the incident and what stuck me most is how, for me, this was a clear example of a community (Javascript) that depended too much on dependencies (pun somewhat intended)

I don't know why so many people put so much blame on you. You unpublished a package with 11 lines of code [0]. I don't think you fully understood the frustration it would cause. And you mentioned that in the post.

NPM didn't show usage stats, and there was almost no activity on Github. As a user, it was impossible to know the impact of unpublishing packages

The root cause imo isn't akoculu unpublishing the package. In my opinion that lies more in the over-reliance on dependencies, the npm policies and maybe also build systems not caching/vendoring code.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident#Backgrou...

jeroenhd• 1 year ago

I never got why people were so mad at the guy behind left-pad. The entire incident showcases the sheer lunacy behind common web frameworks, and the power and control they sacrificed for the ease of use of external dependencies. If your day is ruined because some random guy you've never heard of on the other side of the world got an angry letter from lawyers, maybe take a look at the house of cards your product is based on rather than lay down blame.

left-pad will happen again. Maybe not on NPM, but on crates.io/pypi/Google's go proxy. All it takes is for a developer to join the ICC and piss of Trump and suddenly the code is impossible to find on any of the standard repositories. Even Go will have issues because despite the Github references, all the standard go traffic still goes through Google. Or even worse, someone fights back against a recent invasion and uploads a virus that wipes the drive of whatever locale they're targeting.

lpln3452• 1 year ago

A closer look at the sequence of events makes it clear that the failures weren’t due to the package author.

He fulfilled his responsibilities as a author.

Left-Pad (2024)

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