Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We lost 54k GitHub stars

httpie.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 697 posts

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#91

Post by metaltyphoon »

vaishnavsm wrote: post #70

I really like this post. While the author clearly feels bad about the fact that they've lost his community and that GitHub didn't restore it (which is honestly what any of us would've felt under similar circumstances), they're also focusing towards the future and using their personal experience as a parable all of us can learn from. Lesson 1 on UI design I think is really important. I often think scary popup boxes ar…

> I'm not really sure how you'd do a "cascading soft delete" without making some kind of manual cascading logic?

Perhaps the delete action is not accomplished right away and a column is checked. Then after a X amount of months a worker process goes around actually deleting things?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#92

Post by Brian_K_White »

paxys wrote: post #9

"It's their fault, they only showed 5 warning banners. A 6th one would have totally stopped me from doing this." If a "type your repository name to confirm" box still doesn't make you double check that you picked the right repository, what else can they even do?

The article spent significant space describing exactly what, and why.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#93

Post by Dylan16807 »

calcifer wrote: post #81
Dylan16807 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I think the respectful solution is to show it as "you starred X, it's private now, you can unstar if you like" (make sure if the name changes privately then the new name isn't shown). Such a solution is not only good in the case of mistakes like this, it also doesn't gaslight the person that starred a repo only for it to disappear from their list.

> it also doesn't gaslight the person that starred a repo only for it to disappear from their list. It's honestly hilarious how the definition of 'gaslight' has expanded so dramatically in the past few years that it now means 'anything that confuses me'. For future reference, here's what it actually means [1]: > Psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to q…

Removing something from my personal bookmark list, with no notification, does in fact lead me to question the validity of my own memories.

That fits just fine with simpler definitions like "To mislead someone such that they doubt their own memory, perceptions, or sanity."

It's an expansion from the original context but I don't think it's an unreasonable expansion.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#94

Post by FabHK »

polote wrote: post #2

That's crazy that a manual error by someone, for whatever reason, end up being an article blaming Github for all sort of reasons. And never accepting that the thing that really failed here is the user who performed the action.

With that mindset, planes would still fall out of the sky every month. Because basically 90% of plane crashes used to be "pilot error". If you then say, well, it was pilot error, bad pilot, can't do anything about it, that's the way it is, pilot should've not made an error... well, then we wouldn't have reached the amazing aviation safety we have now.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#95

Post by superasn »

dmitriid wrote: post #83
capableweb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That comparison spot the difference pic is really scary. I had to check it 2 times myself before I could spot that the last line is different. That's not the only difference. The other difference is that you also have to type the full repository name, including the organization name. If they wanted to delete the correct repository, they would have to type httpie/.github, but instead they typed httpie/httpie. It's u…

> The other difference is that you also have to type the full repository name, including the organization name. No, you don't have to type it, and I doubt anyone types it. You copy that line and paste it. Often it's done on autopilot, especially when in a rush.

I always just select the text and drag drop it in the text box with mouse.

In famous words of Mr. Larry wall, 3 great virtues of every programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#96

Post by nybble41 »

akerl_ wrote: post #45
Dylan16807 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood. If you remove the content, that's fine. If you make the link itself disappear from where I saved it, that's gaslighting.

Neither one of these is gaslighting.

Sure, to really count as "gaslighting" there has to be a deliberate attempt to make someone doubt their own sanity. I think we can rule out malicious intent in this case. However, when you save a link to something and then later come back to find the service acting like the link never even existed, as opposed to telling you that it was removed, that can feel pretty similar even if it's not intentional.

A user's list of starred repos shouldn't be silently abridged just because one of the repos was removed or made private. A placeholder should be left indicating that the repo was once starred but is currently unavailable.

This is something I always found annoying about Google Play Music also; when they removed a track from their service it would just silently disappear without a trace from your playlists, so unless you saved a copy of the list somewhere and compared them you might not even know to look for it elsewhere. You're just left vaguely wondering why that song never comes up in the shuffle any more. YT Music is a bit better about this—they generally leave a grayed-out placeholder. Sometimes the metadata is lacking but you can at least see where it was and know that a track was removed.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#97

Post by Brian_K_White »

pharrington wrote: post #79
sbarre wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you RTFA he did actually read the dialog box (which is where he found out that it would delete the stars) he just didn't notice the 1 line in a 30+ line generic modal. He accepts responsibility for what he did, but points out the very real opportunity to improve the UI/UX of a very destructive operation with real contextual data about what is about to be destroyed.

You can only confirm the dialog box by typing in that line you're saying he didn't notice.

Reads article and somehow misses it's entire thoroughly examined point, chides author for not paying attention.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#98

Post by OJFord »

Oof. Nice write-up, and it'll probably work. I.e. I'd wager that 'no we won't do for you (even in exchange for cash) what we previously did for ourselves' decision is going to get reversed.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#99

Post by brightball »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #91
vaishnavsm wrote: post #70

I really like this post. While the author clearly feels bad about the fact that they've lost his community and that GitHub didn't restore it (which is honestly what any of us would've felt under similar circumstances), they're also focusing towards the future and using their personal experience as a parable all of us can learn from. Lesson 1 on UI design I think is really important. I often think scary popup boxes ar…

> I'm not really sure how you'd do a "cascading soft delete" without making some kind of manual cascading logic? Perhaps the delete action is not accomplished right away and a column is checked. Then after a X amount of months a worker process goes around actually deleting things?

The complicated thing is that every query has to look for the column.

Ideally, moving the entire serialized record to an archive table keeps things as clean as possible.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#100

Post by robonerd »

pessimizer wrote: post #88
robonerd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Irreversible If the watchers still care to watch, they can choose to watch again.

That's not a reversal. If I burned your diary, you could write a new one, but nobody would call that a reversal.

They didn't burn a diary. They burnt the list of people who subscribed to updates to a diary. If those people still care about the diary, they can resubscribe to those updates.
Post reply on HN