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positron26last Monday at 4:09 AM1 replyview on HN

> A lot of projects have nice, easy to read notes along with the actual code

This alone doesn't improve the quality of the source.

> Paranoid

Nothing to do with it. Please be logical. Having millions of people who can't program trust maintainers doesn't make those maintainers do better work.

The whole idea of more eyeballs is an appeal to a vision of crowdsourcing that was a new idea in the early internet. What we found out is that complacency sets in, the notes eventually don't mean anything, and most source code is not read.

This vision of more programmers spending more time reading other people's programs is wholly born from within programmer communities, from programmers talking to other programmers, forgetting that the average user will never program and not because they lack access. It's a romanticized ideal that is only even a plausible idea in a room full of programmers.

Until you focus on how the non-programmer is going to meaningfully improve the review and production of the open technologies, you will never have a scalable or equitable solution.


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beefletlast Monday at 6:04 AM

The non-programmer never going to meaningfully improve the review and production of the open technologies. The solution is to make a society where people are literate in the technology they rely on or suffer otherwise.

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