161–170 of 697 posts
Do people use GitHub stars for something? Sometimes I star things but I have no idea what it does or why I do it.
“They’re not stars, they’re a community!” What percentage of your community actively contributes bugfixes?
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I specifically dislike the "Lessons" section, as it throws all the blame on github and doesn't mention the seemingly obvious advice: "make sure you're not on autopilot when taking potentially dangerous actions, on github or any website". Yes, GitHub probably should show the stars in the warning UI, and hopefully that will prevent some of these mistakes. But GitHub makes it pretty hard to make this mistake already - t…
I suggest you read "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'". You'd learn a lot. https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error... My view is that expecting humans to stop making mistakes is much less effective than fixing the systems that amplify those mistakes into large, irreversible impacts.
It's easy to be an armchair engineer and say "well, obviously, don't make this mistake in the future".
As a species, we will always take shortcuts. If a mental pathway doesn't need to be exercised to do something, it won't be. If we see the same popup a hundred times, we're going to ignore the contents by the 100th time because we're used to it.
But it shouldn't be possible to make this mistake if this was designed properly and in a way that made it clear that what you're about to do is actually dangerous and not "dangerous" like the other dozen times you've seen the same message.
The post is omitting that the user must type the name of the repository in full; in this case, they typed `httpie/httpie`. If one is in such a deep autopilot state, no amount of warnings will work.
Your comment is omitting that the post covered this exact point in detail: they had just done the same operating on their personal profile where you have to type [username]/[username]. [organization]/[organization] is the obvious corrolary. Anyways it's embarrassing that Github made this same mistake themselves, and yet couldn't spare the time for a massive content creator contributing to their platform
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> 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…
> I don't know what else they could have done to try to prevent it. As the author of the post suggests: Prominently spell out "This will remove 54,000 stars." vs. "This won't remove any stars (there are none yet)."
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How many years have we had to learn from people using programs to know that people make mistakes. Goodness knows how many people burned themselves using "rm". For that reason alone, "rm" is a bad tool, and should be replaced with something like trash-cli.
that would break billions of scripts and confuse the hell out of hundreds of thousands or millions of users. Especially seems unnecessary since most distros ship an alias that makes the default `rm` command run with the `-I` or `-i` command.
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How many years have we had to learn from people using programs to know that people make mistakes. Goodness knows how many people burned themselves using "rm". For that reason alone, "rm" is a bad tool, and should be replaced with something like trash-cli.
that would break billions of scripts and confuse the hell out of hundreds of thousands or millions of users. Especially seems unnecessary since most distros ship an alias that makes the default `rm` command run with the `-I` or `-i` command.
I would say that makes things even worse. Because it's just training you to rely on -i/I as a sensible default. One day, you'll encounter that one distro that doesn't have that, and it'll be the time where you really wish it were.
Starred and watched again, it's a great project, hopefully the whole audience comes back soon
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Yeah. I'm not sure what else you can do with warnings other than make the person effectively recite back the thing they're doing.
There was an explicit suggestion right there in the article what else they could do, so you don't even have to guess. Typing in the number of objects that would be deleted in addition to the name is something else. Or, they could just keep all of them in place, but hidden, and "restore" them all automatically if you made it public again. There are lots and lots of things they could do better, if they cared. But parap…
I read it, but I disagree.
Honestly I don't think it would have prevented this. If you're muscle memorying past warning signs the text on the warning sign isn't going to matter much.
My point was purely about UX, obviously there are technical solutions to this problem.