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

351–360 of 697 posts

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#351

Post by dns_snek »

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…

> If no one in the world drank, smoked pot, or did drugs, how much better off would we all be?

Perhaps that's true for your definition of "better off", which is perfectly fine, but it isn't universal. Even though I don't do drugs, I don't think it should be anyone's business to police what other people do with their minds and their bodies on their own time, as long as they don't pose a threat to anyone else.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#352

Post by organsnyder »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #258
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’ve adopted a pattern of: If they click ok: Asking again to be sure you want to destroy masses of data But even that fails if there is a language barrier.

> But even that fails if there is a language barrier.

Surely GitHub is localized? (and if not, why the hell not?)

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#353

Post by mdoms »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#354

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

>There’s a confirmation box. It’s designed to stop users in a situation like mine from doing something stupid. It tells you that “You will permanently lose all stars and watchers of this repository.” That’s pretty scary.

>The problem is that the box looks exactly the same for repos with no commits and stars and for repos with a decade-long history and 55k stargazers and watchers. And it says “Warning: this is a potentially destructive action.”

>To paraphrase, the box tells you “You’re about to demolish a house. If there are any people inside, they will all die”.

>But it doesn’t include anything specific to break you out of your auto-pilot mode if you’ve confused the address and think you’re looking at an empty house.

just admit that you fucked up and don't look for someone else to blame. people would respect you more for it

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#355

Post by MichaelBurge »

wpietri wrote: post #123
cmeacham98 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The penalty for sin is death.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#356

Post by krick »

> The tone of our decade-long mutually-beneficial relationship is set by GitHub’s Terms of Service. Thinking there was more to it was naive.

I really want to support that kind of sentiment. In fact, I want to support it every time I get a chance. That's just how I am. I enjoy people hating on Microsoft and such. I may even provoke it when it's not entirely justified.

But to be fair, making a twitter post about "some random project we host fucked up a bit, let's help them to get followers back" does seem to qualify as something "more to it". I'm pretty sure they weren't legally obliged to do that as well. And I'm pretty sure ads on github's official twitter aren't cheap either.

(But I do find that "not legally obliged" tone extremely insulting in any kind of relationships too. I myself also tend to get all "oh, so that's how you want to talk?" over that. I guess, I hate lawyers as much as I hate Microsoft. After all, they are essentially the same thing.)

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#357

Post by 8note »

throwaway0x7E6 wrote: post #354

>There’s a confirmation box. It’s designed to stop users in a situation like mine from doing something stupid. It tells you that “You will permanently lose all stars and watchers of this repository.” That’s pretty scary. >The problem is that the box looks exactly the same for repos with no commits and stars and for repos with a decade-long history and 55k stargazers and watchers. And it says “Warning: this is a poten…

Admiring that you screwed up is one thing, but action items coming out of it should prevent somebody else from screwing up in a similar way.

One typical way is to add a confusing confirmation box, where saying yes leaves things as is, but "I want to demolish the house" is in a different location that the typical yes/no buttons

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#358

Post by smusamashah »

joshxyz wrote: post #347
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.

"Design of everyday things" is a great book to start.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#359

Post by adenozine »

danielyaa5 wrote: post #350
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

Ah, I didn’t know that.

Well! I’m the fool, it seems. That actually sounds terrible and rather substantial. You’d think there’d be an Undo for that.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#360

Post by mrmuagi »

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.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN