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

341–350 of 697 posts

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#341

Post by alasdair_ »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #111
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 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…

The problem is that this “seemingly obvious advice” is completely useless because it’s not actionable. It’s similar to saying “to avoid the mistake, just don’t make the mistake”

To make a better system for every human, you can either try changing all the humans, or you can change the system that is supposed to serve them. One is easier than the other.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#342

Post by alasdair_ »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #289

"the biggest accidental community loss in open source history" This was very much drama for very little. Sure, some might follow the project to know about updates, but if people care that much if they are using the latest version of a CLI tool then they will certainly check it out again later. Very very few people of those who followed the project cares, and close to nobody cares what percentile the project ranks as…

> Github warned about the action, and even required written confirmation to make sure it was the correct repo.

Sure, but the written warning was the same one for a completely safe action.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#343

Post by [deleted] »

react_burger38 wrote: post #328
wpietri wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This idea - fixing systems that amplify mistakes into large, irreversible impacts-- is why I am against alcohol, marijuana and other mental-state altering drugs for recreational purposes. (I'm not talking about people who really need pain relief from cancer, amphetamines for ADHD, etc.) If no one in the world drank, smoked pot, or did drugs, how much better off would we all be? 100,000 deaths come from alcohol use ev…

[deleted]

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#344

Post by adenozine »

Are y’all out here really stressing over GitHub stars?

What in the world…

Write some unit tests, put a benchmark together, show me example commands to get started, ANYTHING substantial will mean much more to potential new users than seeing how many GitHub stars you have.

Just my two cents, I think this is WAY off the mark.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#345

Post by robonerd »

spiderice wrote: post #340
robonerd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's crazy to me how quickly this conversation has devolved. If Pewdiepie had all his Youtube subscribers deleted should he just say "oh well, the ones that like me will come back". No. Because that's an absurd attitude. Obviously that would forever hurt his viewership. Github is no different with stars. They matter. Period. Maybe not to you. But they matter.

Pewdiepie's compensation is intrinsically related to his subscriber count, no? That gives him a reason to care. Is your compensation similarly related to your github star count? I sure hope not..

If I unstar your repo, I have not taken anything from you because you never owned my star in the first place. Github presents this number to you as though it were important, to give you a dopamine hit when the number goes up. Their motivation for doing this is obvious. If you fall for this trick, that's on you. You have the choice to stop caring.

And even if the premise of these metrics being important were accepted, the fact remains that the removal of people from the watchers list is not irreversible. No irreplaceable documents were destroyed. No diaries were burned. If the repository had been deleted, commit history erased, that would be comparable to a diary burning. But that's not what happened (and would probably still be reversible.)

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#346

Post by ascar »

chikipowpow wrote: post #334
alecbz wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you must be a miserable, wretched, shell of a person to possibly write something like this. It’s really sad no one ever taught you manners. Hopefully one day you learn to be happy and a better person like me. ^ this is not much better tone-wise

Quoted post unavailable.

Your point was valid. The way you framed it wasn't. You could take from that to better provide constructive rather condescending criticism.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#347

Post by joshxyz »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #27

GitHub made a cardinal UX design sin here: never use a warning when you mean undo [1]. If they had given even a five minute grace period before starting the irreversible process of removing all the watchers, this wouldn’t have happened. https://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning/

Hi newbie developer here, where do i find and learn about ux design priciples like this? Just curious, thank you thank you.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#349

Post by grog454 »

tshaddox wrote: post #132
FabHK wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)."

I'm not convinced that would have really solved the problem. One could just as easily post a screenshot of two nearly identical dialogs where the only different is that one says "This will remove 54 stars" and the other says "This will remove 54,000 stars" and the same argument could be made that "the only way to notice the difference is if you happen to notice those 3 zeros."

>I'm not convinced that would have really solved the problem.

It almost certainly would help. When you attempt to delete a world of warcraft character you are prompted with the character's level, among other info. This is the biggest difference you'll see between the delete procedure for a level 1 alt with 10,000 hr played if you've named them similarly.

Because of the relatively low character limit and the popularity of alts, this feature (delete character) gets a lot of use and misuse so it's reasonable to expect the developers to have put some thought in to it.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#350

Post by danielyaa5 »

adenozine wrote: post #344

Are y’all out here really stressing over GitHub stars? What in the world… Write some unit tests, put a benchmark together, show me example commands to get started, ANYTHING substantial will mean much more to potential new users than seeing how many GitHub stars you have. Just my two cents, I think this is WAY off the mark.

It resets watchers also and people subscribed to issues. That negatively impacts the project
Post reply on HN