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We lost 54k GitHub stars

httpie.io

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Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#481

Post by sriku »

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…

He did have to type "httpie/httpie" in the box to confirm, no? I'm rather surprised that that didn't snap him out of auto-pilot mode. There ought to have been a DING in the brain seeing that the repo this is being applied to was httpie/httpie?

OTOH, I haven't been in such a mode, so I really got no right to comment on this. Best wishes to the team -- that those who saw his post will restar/rewatch the repo -- and (fwiw) thanks for writing it up and making me even more paranoid (in a positive sense) about doing such destructive operations.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#482

Post by vidarh »

djur wrote: post #409
ncmncm wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just not deleting them in the first place, or not deleting them until explicitly asked to, would suffice, and would be, ultimately, less code. So, I am not buying the apologetics.

It seems to me that services that pretend to delete data but don't actually do it are usually subject to criticism on Hacker News, not praise.

The issue tend to be services who are not upfront about it. "This is potentially really damaging, so in case it's a mistake we'll just hide it for 24 hours during which you can undo" or something to that effect would be sufficient.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#483

Post by auggierose »

ranguna wrote: post #459
auggierose wrote: post #456

The real problem is: Why are GitHub stars so important if httpie is so great? Because people cannot judge for themselves if something is great or not, they always need proxies. It would be cool if we could somehow fix THAT.

Any recommendations?

Not really. Money seems to be a universal proxy. I guess we need to acknowledge that 54k GitHub stars has some sort of monetary value (Web3 anyone?), and then it would be obvious that you couldn't just delete it, because who would want to just delete money?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#484

Post by sschueller »

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.

In a normal organization where stuff like this happens one has backups since one runs these things internally.

Humans make mistakes all the time. We build systems to try to mitigate these and build them better by learning from new mistakes.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#485

Post by lucideer »

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…

> obvious advice: "make sure you're not on autopilot

That... isn't how "autopilot" (or humans in general) work(s).

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#488

Post by sjamaan »

onion2k wrote: post #438
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…

GitHub probably should show the stars in the warning UI In this particular case the stars would have been a useful clue, but in the majority of similar cases the wouldn't be any stars. It would be a useless and redundant signal.

Number of forks, maybe? Or pull requests? Although those wouldn't disappear of course...

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#489

Post by swiftcoder »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #147
rhtgrg wrote: post #128

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". I don't know. Github employees themselves have made this mistake as outlined in the post, and they were easily able to recover from it, which probably lowered the priority on chang…

Idk about "easily", but I'm sure they were motivated. If you've ever tried to restore parts of a database in a piecemeal fashion, it is usually fairly labor intensive. But you would hope there are a few gh engineers who would be motivated to do so without manager approval in the dead of night because httpie is great.

> But you would hope there are a few gh engineers who would be motivated to do so without manager approval in the dead of night because httpie is great

On the other hand, you should really, really, really hope that GitHub has internal guardrails to prevent their engineers making cowboy edits to the production databases without manager approval.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#490

Post by loa_in_ »

judge2020 wrote: post #316
jedberg wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's an easy fix. If they delete the repo, delete the stars. If they make it private, indicate it is now private in some way.

That's information disclosure; nothing about the repo after it's privated should be known, including name changes and deletion.

It was known and there are many sites scraping GH for metadata that will have it anyway
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