[MarkMarine]

I’m not saying it’s too much to ask for, but also, when you’re doing distributed in memory graph mining (which means you’ve got an application with a big enough graph that you need to do this, and the technical expertise to need the algorithms in this open source package) maybe it’s expected that you can read the bazel files and bazel docs yourself and figure it out.

Or just write a make file and cut all the bazel build optimization out.

They don’t put instructions on how to start a F1 car inside the cockpit, you don’t hop into a fighter jet and look for the push to start easy button, it’s expected that when you’re at that level you bring expertise.

[PaulHoule]

Yeah, and somebody who is that smart can probably pack their data structures efficiently and find an approximation to do the job on a macbook pro that people with too many resources need a 1000 machine cluster to do. And get the coding and the computation done in the time that the C++ compiler is still chewing on the headers of the bloated library. (At times I’ve been that guy.)

But seriously, there is such a thing as industrialization. Google is notorious though for hiring 180 IQ people and getting them to perform at a 35 IQ level because there the documentation makes no sense, a procedure which should be done in one step really takes 300, fighting with C++, etc. They can afford to do it because it is just so profitable to help that guy who shows up on every. single. video. roll. who says “you can’t lose weight by exercising”, “you can’t lose weight by cutting carbs” who links to some video that drones on hours and hours and signs you up for some subscription you can never cancel to sell scam supplements.

Shame on them.

BTW, with high-complexity software there is enough question that you got it working right that you expect a significant process of testing that it works for your application. For instance if you got a hydrocode for simulating the explosion of a nuclear weapon you would not take for granted that you had built it properly and were using it properly until you'd done a lot of validation work. A system like that isn't a product unless it comes with that validation suite. The same is true for automated trading software (gonna hook it up straight to the market without validation? hope you have $100M to burn!)

... now there was that time a really famous CS professor e-mailed me a short C program that was said to do something remarkable that crashed before it even got into main() which did teach me a thing about C but that's not what a professional programmer does.

[MarkMarine]

I agree with all of this.

Its just frustrating that all the comments about an interesting library seem to be customer service complaints from people who never need to reach for this library. I was hoping for a real discussion, something I could learn from.

[PaulHoule]

Really though an open source product has not really been released until there is documentation walking through setting it up and doing some simple thing with it. As it is I am really not so sure what it is, what kind of hardware it can run on, etc. Do you really think it got 117 Github stars from people who were qualified to evaluate it?

(I’d consider myself qualified to evaluate it.. If I put two weeks into futzing with it.)

Every open source release I’ve done that’s been successful has involved me spending almost as much time in documentation, packaging and fit-and-finish work as I did getting working it well enough for me. It’s why I dread the thought of an open source YOShInOn as much as I get asked for it.

Sometimes though it is just a bitch. I have some image curation projects and was thinking of setting up some “booru” software and found there wasn’t much out there that was easy to install because there are so many moving parts and figured I’d go for the motherf4r of them all because at least the docker compose here is finite

https://github.com/danbooru/danbooru

even if it means downloading 345TB of images over my DSL connection.