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Comment by protonfish | Hacker News Reader

Even more informative could be mentioning what problem it is intended to solve.

Thank you. No one ever describes why anything was written in the first place. And they almost never go out of their way to list the pros/cons of their system. Although I've never even used it, I loved that the BoltDB project mentions other key/value DBs and why you'd pick one over the other, right there in the readme.

Any mention of alternatives is anathema to open source READMEs. This is why the "awesome list of " directories wind up being so useful.

Edit: Useful as in "knowing is half the battle". Being able to make an informed choice is worth something, even if it takes extra effort to filter back down.

Maybe I'm just unlucky but the vast majority of all 'awesome lists' that I've seen are just massive dumps of links, of extremely varying quality (I mean the links themselves), which isn't that helpful.

You're not unlucky, but there are some gems out there. For someone like you who is experienced in the area and can tell garbage from good stuff, it's worth digging around to find the gems.

This doesn't help someone who is completely new to the list topic though. Even worse they're probably going to get bad information.

Maybe an Awesome list of Awesome lists could help

I'm pretty sure there is one already.

That's also a thing that I try to do for my own projects. For example, the frontpage of http://holocm.org has two lists that are literally titled "This is not for you if..." and "This might be for you if..."

A million times yes!

So many times something is created to solve a particular problem, and for those who have experienced that problem the need for the solution is obvious. But for those of us who come along later it's not so obvious why I would want to use X.

I've thought many times that the number one thing that should be explained in any documentation, article about a technology, etc. is what problems this solves and give examples of the problems and how this is a solution to those problems.

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