CoreJS: State of the project? Looks like dead. Any official fork?
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Looking at the police report, I do wonder what the punishment would be in other countries. It seems the victims were laying drunk on the ground in dark clothing at top a hill (edit: hill not mentioned in police report, but seems logical given the headlight statement), causing the headlight beams to not illuminate them. On top of that, incoming traffic blinded the driver.
This is of course according to his testimony, but I can't imagine I (or anyone else) would have been able to avoid such a situation.
Edit with source:
Citing the actual circumstances of the accident, he emphasizes that he could not notice the pedestrians in a timely manner, as they were below the light level of the headlights of the vehicle(R.G. - lay, P.A. - tried to lift it), were dressed in dark clothes, street lighting was insufficient, he(Pushkarev D.V.)was blinded by the distant light of the oncoming car. Further, the author discloses the contents of the testimony of witnesses A.A., A.Y., A.M., I.K., A.S.,focuses on the behavior of victims at a pedestrian crossing, which contradicted the requirements of p.4.6 of the Rules of the Road of the Russian Federation. It notes that the victims were in a state of alcoholic intoxication, behaved inadequately. It points out that p.14.1 traffic rules of the Russian Federation provides for the duty of the driver to pass pedestrians crossing the roadway, and not lying on it. He insists that he would have noticed the victims and was able to prevent the attack if they were moving on the crossing upright.
https://kraevoy--alt.sudrf.ru/modules.php?name=sud_delo&srv_...
Transalted by Bing.
Most countries require greater care at pedestrian crossings.
The main impediment to seeing them seems to be the headlights of oncoming cars, possibly while coming over a hill. I always slow down in exactly those circumstances (hill and oncoming headlights) for similar reasons: you just don’t know what’s over the hill, and it’s an extra few seconds of travel time. There’s no downside and only extra caution and safety for all involved.
I highly recommend driving like you say, and do so myself. The last points on my license were were over 15 years ago. But I don't think someone who was failed to be extremely careful to this level deserves 1.5 years in a harsh prison system. Maybe lose his license, but not prison.
The court report says he was going 60kph. That’s barley over 35mph, a normal speed limit for city streets. So it appears he was not speeding.
If it really was a drunk guy, literally lying down in the road, at night time (!?!), I don’t think anyone could be reasonably expected be able to respond to that in time.
We don’t know, but assuming that is actually how it played out, it doesn’t sound like the driver did anything malicious. He’s lucky he wasn’t killed himself. I don’t think it’s fair to say ” Most countries require greater care at pedestrian crossings.”
We have no idea what the road or crossing looks like. An awfully unfortunate series of events for both parties it sounds like. Very sad.
Edit: To make my main point more simply: when my kids come to me because one hurt the other through carelessness, but they’re defense is that they were reasonably cautious, I would answer them, “it wasn’t reasonably cautious because the outcome was that you hurt someone else in a way I don’t believe I would have because I would be more cautious than you were given the same circumstances.” Driving 35 MPH when it’s marked 35 MPH isn’t as cautious as is reasonable when you add in factors of nighttime, hill, and oncoming headlights (effectively high beams).
It is. But the underlying point being made by several people appears to be that they believe he _was_ driving cautiously. And that it just so happens that, even doing so, the situation was such that it was still reasonable for him to not be able to avoid the collision.
My uncle told me a story once how he stopped just in front of one, and the only reason why he saw him was because of a reflection from an incoming car didn't look right on the road surface. His intuition is quite good as he's an experienced driver. He just said he slammed on the breaks because it looked funny. I never forget that story and always make sure that I can completely see the surface I'm driving on. I'd imagine it would be the same thing quite common in Russia, or anywhere really... Especially around crossings
In Russia, pedestrians have right of way on such a crossing, and drivers are required to be able to stop so that if a pedestrian starts crossing, they can yield (is that the proper term in English road rules?) to that pedestrian - i.e. even if you can't see any people, the marked crossing is considered as a warning to drivers that there might be pedestrians crossing and they must be able to stop and yield there.
So in cases of poor road conditions (e.g. ice) and poor visibility, they would be legally required to choose a speed so that they can do so suddenly if needed. This necessity to drive slower given the street signs and conditions is also explicitly mentioned in the court ruling as part of justification of why the defendant is considered guilty.
So it's not really an analogy of a person lying on the road, because that's not a "normal" stretch of road - if someone decides to drunkenly crawl across such a pedestrian crossing, then that would be stupid and reckless and dangerous, but legally they still would have right of way and cars would required to stop and yield as if they had a red light.
Obviously every instance is circumstantial, and I didn't really read anything about the case, but if drunk people were lying down in the road, at night, in dark clothing, I don't see a crime.
Over one third of pedestrians killed in the US each year have been drinking too much to drive.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/05/drunk-...
Taking an uber is always the move.
Rehashed here: https://freakonomics.com/2011/12/28/the-perils-of-drunk-walk... Google will provide people who don't like assumptions made in Levitt's math.
Disclaimer -- I did research for Levitt and John List when I was planning to go for an Econ PhD, but on nothing related to drunk driving.
I've walked home drunk from bars more than a few times and I've never experienced any trouble using crosswalks like normal. I'm pretty certain it's much safer than driving home drunk (not that I drive to bars in the first place.)
Somebody who's not really thinking, or just stumbling around and being goofy. Lots of people including myself have said "DUDE wouldn't it be funny if we did [X incredibly stupid thing]?" while unreasonably drunk. Normally calm people start fights with people who can clearly kick their ass after a couple drinks. Probably a few think they can take on or play chicken with a car. Some people also just blink for a second and suddenly they're asleep, if they have enough drinks.
Depression may be a cause, but honest accidents and impaired thinking are definitely big reasons.
If you can't tell for sure, are you certain that you weren't drunk yourself?
And though it was the kind of town that would make you want to top yourself, i think the real reason was there was a pub on either side of the tracks.
Or at the very least, to walk cautiously after having several drinks.
No, being outside so drunk that you can't control yourself enough to correctly cross a street is not a "not a big deal".
Okay so a third of all pedestrian fatalities have been over the driving limit of alcohol, as the article points out. That sounds horrible. It sounds like you should never drink and walk, ever.
Thing is, there were only 1,547 pedestrian walking deaths in the whole 311 million person country in 2011. That same year there were 32,479 automotive fatalities. Throw in liver disease victims[1] and you’re looking at maybe a 1:60 ratio of pedestrian walking to every other kind of alcohol death.
More people actually die of “natural heat and cold” than alcohol related pedestrian accidents.
Alcohol is generally bad as we all know, and leads to all kinds of bad health outcomes, but I’d argue that pedestrian accidents are the least concern if we are to prioritize.
[1] There’s a bit of a silent fatty liver disease crisis going on, but that’s just obesity doing its thing. I’d love to see more urgent action on obesity.
So you think that he should spend 1.5 years in a Russian prison for that? A sentence that may very well ruin him psychologically for the rest of his life? And/or leave him with TB and/or Covid-19? (and here I note that American prisons are not much better, if at all).
hold on... no one ever said anything like that. not a single comment here. let's keep calm.
the whole situation still seems unreal to myself...
if you read below, someone who can actually read the court documents said the victim was not lying around, but actually helping the other person.
just too much unknown to form our own personal judgement here. that's all i was trying to say.
A good portion of my reasoning comes from my daily dealings with my kids. This case bears many strong resemblances to arguments they come to me with.
Edit to clarify: when my kids come to me with an argument because one was careless and hurt another, the defense is usually that they were acting as reasonably cautious as could be expected. My justification in grounding them (after getting the facts and eyewitness testimony) is that I would have acted more cautiously than they did given the circumstances, and would not have caused the same injury, so that their caution wasn’t really as cautious as should reasonably be expected.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41023722-the-million-dol...
I think both the US and Russia should dramatically rethink their approach to non violent crime. Both countries have ridiculously high incarceration rates.
I may be wrong, but I believe most people on HN feel the same way.
Also, to be clear, are you sympathetic to the incarceration of drug dealers and thieves but not sympathetic to the incarceration of someone who accidentally killed someone in an auto-pedestrian accident?
Didn't see this because you added it in an edit. I think we should generally avoid prison time as much as possible, for all of these cases.
I just get frustrated when I often seem to see people defending people with similar social status to themselves, but having apparently no sympathy for people of different social circumstances.
Clearly the consensus on HN is not entirely the same way, as some of the other replies to my comment show.
I am sorry for having assumed intentions that you don't have, though, more trying to comment on a general trend I've observed.
Circumstances as described possibly mitigating some aspects of this, but driving (or motorcycle riding) is an inherently and widely known dangerous activity. Situational awareness is a requisite practice.
But yes: a proper respect for circimstances and situation might have avoided the accident.
The only way you do not notice incoming shit at this speed riding a bike is because the shit literally jumps at you.
I know only too well what the "courts of law" are like in Russia. My opinion is that the guy got a wrong lawyer who either could not pass a bribe to the judge, or the other side passed a bigger bribe.
It is simply the case that things happen out of a driver's control. In the US you'd be looking at a consideration for involuntary manslaughter charge (or perhaps a lesser negligence charge) if it was found that they were speeding or impaired. Absent those circumstances, it's unlikely any charge would be brought forth. There are some other ways a similar charge could be brought in an investigation, but that's generally how it goes.
A final note on the topic of getting drunk and playing in traffic. I highly recommend you get people that do stuff like this to sign up for organ donation. I have a good friend who had a congenital heart defect that benefited from a heart transplant. This was after the donor walked into traffic blitzed on holiday. So it might be that out of the tragedy of a wasted life they might be able to save someone else's.
The correct take is jail time for non-violent crime and no jail time for programmers who (regardless of whether we believe his story) killed someone?
And I'm not. The Russian justice system convicts 99.75% of those accused. The police work may or may not have been reasonable, but the judgment is a rubber stamp.
I kinda hate driving at night. People can barely keep from getting into accidents in broad daylight imagine at night time.
a. He was driving a motorcycle and b. One of the victims was not lying on the road, but instead standing and trying to pull up the other (or so I've read)
This is the only difference.
Sold few thousands of them to Russian retailers at around 2008-2009, when I worked in a trade company in Singapore.
Previously they were used by Taiwanese taxis to record what's going on inside the car.
Russian's immediately found an inventive use for it, and instead made them to videolog what's going on in front of the car.
A child was fatally hit by a truck at a tram station after another child pushed them. The truck driver tested positive for pot and was ultimately acquitted because the court concluded that even if the driver had been perfectly fit for driving, the accident would have been unavoidable.
I can not remember but I am certain that the driver had to face additional charges for driving under influence but this is another thing.
In the U.K. 1-2 years it seems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causing_death_by_dangerous_d...
Having read the facts appeal case you linked to it does not seem unreasonable (colliding with pedestrians on a marked and signed road crossing, travelling at >30mph). In the U.K. there is definitely an expectation that you slow down before a crossing.
In this case the court applied the minimum sentence and appeal rejected the victims’s side request for a harsher sentence.
The facts in the appeal case list many factors, some of which are not in favour of the driver (one pedestrian was trying to pick up the other so they were unlikely to have been lying down on the road and oncoming vehicles were flashing lights as a warning).
I sure as hell that I'd do whatever I could legally to avoid going to a Russian (or American) prison, if what I'd done was an accident and of very doubtful criminality from the perspective of most countries. Wouldn't you?
Now he'll be stuck in a Russian prison for 2 years because of a tragic accident in which he was arguably not that negligent.
Edit: All of this is based on the facts as I have been able to find them online. I may be wrong in my interpretation.
1) he lost an appeal, meaning that his case was in the court at least two times.
2) the dead victim was not lying on the road, that’s false information. She was trying to remove other victim from the crosswalk.
Knowing the motorcycle culture in Russia I would not be sympathetic to anyone there - it has nothing to do with safety on the road.
And in terms of "culture", are there not people in Russia who just ride motorcycles as an inexpensive transportation option, and not as part of any particular culture or group? The guy in question looks like a typical geek, not a motorcycle gang member or something similar.
I do think courts in other parts of the world would have seen a lot of mitigating factors.
The person lying on the ground wasn't killed. The woman trying to drag him out of the road was. She was presumably innocent. (although she may have played a role as well, I understand she was intoxicated too, but in the moment she was trying to help her friend to safety)
Regardless, who suffered is a completely separate issue from who is responsible. Do you really want to distort the process of determining who is responsible, out of fear of "victim blaming"? It could have happened ever-so-slightly differently, and it might have been the motorcyclist who was killed. Does that automatically shift responsibility?
Well, you're mixing issues. Those are two completely separate arguments. 1) victim blaming, and 2) it's already been tried
On point 2. I don't necessarily agree that once a court has tried something, it is automatically correct and shouldn't be discussed. I'm not a lawyer, but I spent a full week in trial in San Francisco, against corrupt lawyers, representing myself, and was one of the very few that prevailed in such a situation. I have seen some awful stuff, so no, I don't trust the legal system to always produce correct results, even here.
Regardless, that wasn't my point.
For people such as yourself being so quick to cry "victim blaming" is a very good indication to me that bias in such situations is common. Again, why should you assume that because one person was harmed that the other person was responsible? Surely you recognize that there can be a clearcut cases where the victim (i.e. the one harmed or killed) was the one who caused the accident? Right?
And again, the real "victim" (the woman killed) isn't the one I am suggesting might be partially to blame.
I assume that if court decided twice that someone is guilty, this person admitted that and there’s no reason to see corruption in this case, then that person is indeed responsible. Anything else is speculation not based on facts and is an attempt to shift responsibility to a victim, seemingly because the convicted guy belongs to a certain group. So, if you want to talk about bias, look at the mirror first.
I think the other people who have responded to your use of the term "victim blaming" state my points as well as I could, so I'll leave it at that.
I'm not sure I understand the concept of "victim-blaming". If a bank robber gets hurt during a bank robbery, will you say they're a victim and shouldn't be blamed for the bank robbery?
Let's say instead someone gets ripshit drunk and drives the wrong way down a highway in a smartcar. A snowplow runs into them, can't avoid. Kills drunk driver, truck's damaged only slightly.
Who's the victim?
The trucker's still got to live knowing they killed someone. Has to pay for damage to their truck. Dead person doesn't have to deal with emotional trauma or bills, they're dead.
Where cases like this get complicated is whether the driver killing the other driver abandoned their duty of care and contributed to causing the collision. Maybe the trucker was texting, now in some states he'd share some of the burden for this collision.
> Stop spam & panic! I have rules for this repo and i have some time for fixing critical bugs and major updates.
It happened to a few maintainers I know. These companies save millions in development cost on the back of a few developers in developed countries. This is open source, I get it, but this isn't fair either.
Look at that comment:
> ....yikes. Sounds like a fork needs to happen. And github should really look to provide a 'risk' rating to projects from a maintenance PoV... a project depended on by 4.5m users with 1 maintainer should visualise as a high-risk dependency.
It's not up to GitHub to do that, it's up to the individual or the company to audit a project and its dependencies and be prepared to be able to maintain it themselves. Or pay the only developer to do exactly that.
Another comment (quoted by another guy):
> Babel maintainer here We are probably not going to fork core-js because we don't have enough resources to maintain it.
And people expect a single developer to have the resources to do exactly that? look at babel and the list of sponsors, yet they don't have the resources:
FOSS became entitlement for big companies to demand free work from third world country developers while making millions...
Then, once you're hired and they're paying you, they certainly don't want you wasting their resources (paid time, IP) contributing free software.
The entire tech industry is morphing more and more into a dumpster fire itself.
Companies using lots of OSS packages without ever giving back a dime. The argument is always that this helps developers get a job, but often enough the jobs don't allow the developers to work full time on those packages, but they are still somehow expected to continue the work in their past-time.
The guy posted the results of his call for funding, he got to $50 a month on patreon! For maintaining a package that likely 100s or 1000s of companies depend on for the work.
I firmly believe that Linux had not used GPL it would not be anywhere as big as it is today
Show me where anyone said they where entitled to his labour. It was him who felt entitled to advertise.
He can ask for all the dimes he wants, He just can't add such adverts to the codebase.
I'm curios why do you think that. If the codebase is a fruit of his efforts, why shouldn't he do as he wants with it?
I would understand that in cases where a maintainer adds malicious code - but that's not the case here. Author asks for donations, the only negative effect of it is NPM logs getting longer. I think he's well within his moral rights here.
Who decides who can, and cannot advertise? There are many ways to solicit donations - the problem here is he chose to go against convention and put those ads in a common space. Does every other contributor of JS packages not have this right to advertise?
Perhaps NPM requires specific rules against advertisement, but the moral aspect wrt is "this is why we can't have nice things", or in this case, why we need explicit rules.
Misrepresenting the argument, and name-calling, also don't help.
There is also the fact that not including ads would require less labour than including them, even if removing them requires further labour. being "entitled" to correct behaviour isn't unreasonable. IS it OK for me to spam you, because I don't owe you shit either. morality is a society/community-level contract. It doesn't matter what is owed at a labour level, quid-pro-quo is you don't put adds in npm, we all don't put ads in npm. Breaking a social convention should require community consensus.
Why should an individual contributor not be allowed to partake in that, when the people who are using his work are making money off it?
A social convention, who put you in charge of that? There are plenty of bad conventions in this world, no one should be obligated to follow them.
Despite the fact that big tech makes money selling ads - none of those companies exhibited such trashy behavior.
Asking for a piece is not the problem. If I asked you if I could marry your daughter - no problem asking that right? But if I asked you while I was banging her right in front of you that would be a bit trashy. See the difference?
Personally, I've used this piece of software - but if it didn't exist, there are many, many other options for me and I wouldn't lose one wink of sleep over it.
Not the same thing at all.
No one "put me in charge" of social convention, they are established naturally, And this one was not a bad one.
Anyway I doubt it’s fair to say the project is dead, something of this importance will be forked and maintained. It’s an annoyance for sure, though.
As Joe Biden said:
"Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value."
Whenever my projects use FOSS I always remind them exactly what a 'dependency' is. You should know and understand your dependencies and risks associated with relying on them.
You need to be willing to lock-in to a version if need be or replace it entirely. Some developers I work with that throw together one-off web applications tend to inject dozens (sometimes hundreds) of dependencies (which they like to dynamically pull from latest builds) into their projects, enough to make me dizzy looking through the list.
Typically development starts, they meet some initial goal and keep gluing more and more packages together to meet some goal/desired functionality. Then something breaks and they conveniently have other internal work that has to take priority, leaving a broken application they don't want to deal with for someone else to fix because they know it's an absolute mess they created. Rinse repeat.
Now you've established an expectation of functionality you have no clue how to maintain and did not clearly explain that to your client when you took shortcuts to glue everything together.
Also, publish creds aren't the problem. The problem seems to be that nobody else really wants to maintain it including anyone at Babel, core-js' biggest user afaict.
If nobody steps up, it should just be a reminder of how flimsy open-source can be when there are so many bus-factor-of-one nodes out there that we depend on. It's a pretty big downside of depending on the hobbytime charity of random people, especially when we (or github comment culture) are so hostile when anyone dares to seek a penny.
You could write a library that every fortune 500 company uses to save a cumulative hundreds of thousands of dollars in employee-hours over the library's lifetime, but you're the asshole if you use your library's popularity to seek work or donations. People will come out of the woodwork to scold you.
Add to that the fact that when he reached out to the community he worked hard (for free) to support, and they told him to basically FO, I doubt he's going to spend even a microsecond trying to be helpful in this situation.
This is like round 2.
How will npm/github act now?
Especially now that it's Microsoft's npm /s
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/
[2] https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-np...
That’s why forking it’s a thing. It’s certainly inconvenient but transferring the access of the original project to another party sets a very bad precedent. Maybe when the maintainer dies, but this guy is very much alive.
It is his work and he chose to give it freely to others through an OSS license. That doesn’t automatically grant anybody access to the original project. If somebody wants and needs to keep updating it then they should just fork it.
The left-pad issue is also different because in that case the original maintainer took it down which broke a bunch of packages that had dependencies on it. This project is still in the registry and it will still work as it is for the foreseeable future.
Lets say tomorrow a major security vulnerability is discovered in CoreJS. Full root access because I'm making this all up.
NPM says core-js has 19k dependents, so it would be very preferable if an X.Y.1 release could be pushed with a security only fix, to be picked up in as many projects as possible.
In that case, I think it would be extremely reasonable for NPM to decide to take action. For example, they could take the package over themselves and publish a patch release.
Or they could temporarily add maintainership to a trusted member of the community.
No solution is without problems in this scenario, but there would be good arguments for either of those serious actions.
This should be handled the way any other fork happens: people create forks, other people audit them for stability and choose which to update their dependencies to. This isn't up to NPM to decide.
Try that with macOS.
Also, good luck trying to run any Windows 16 bit application on a modern Windows 64 bit installation.
The officially supported method is to have Windows 10 (32 bit) running in HyperV. There is no 16 bit support in Windows 10 64bit builds.
> This process is an excellent way to: Adopt an "abandoned" package
Harder is taking control of the GitHub project where the bug tracker lives and people are used to sending patches.
Perhaps a less destructive change that someone with access (Github, NPM, Microsoft, etc.) could make, is to link to the new project from the readme.
Eventually when something breaks, this could be surfaced as an `npm audit` response (Core-js is no longer maintained. Switch to core-js-fork to resolve issue xyz).
It means he will be able to have internet access without any problems.
So no need to panic at all.
[0] https://kraevoy--alt.sudrf.ru/modules.php?name=sud_delo&srv_...
[1] https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%...
I think even Russia has this situation covered if you can prove on a camera that someone intentionally jumped out in front of you. It's just way less open to interpretation by the court.
So if the person lying on the road survived and the person driving the motorbike died, then it's plausible that the person lying on the road would be charged for manslaughter in order to determine the situation (I believe that in case of fatal traffic incidents involving more than one party, in Russia almost always a criminal investigation is opened) but would be found not guilty.
Check out the contributors page for this project. [1] This is not a community driven project. It's a one man show.
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