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

GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 468 posts

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#311

Post by monkpit »

spockz wrote: post #293
richardw wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happened in my wife’s company of around 40k people. Mail to all, replies to stop replying, many hours to stop the firestorm. Then next timezone 8 hours out started replying. I don’t know why they didn’t just kill permissions to the mailing list.

Outlook has this amazing feature to ignore email threads: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ignore-all-email-...

They also have Reply Storm Protection in Exchange now:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/re...

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#312

Post by dan-robertson »

brundolf wrote: post #159
thrownawayalre wrote: post #124

Innocent mistake. The kid is barely 18. The emotion and stress resulting from mistakenly sending a notification to 400,000 is likely overwhelming. Now his real name is going to stay at the center of the internet for a while thanks to being 1st on HN. I would definitely not have coped well with that much internet attention at his age. Some Github replies are more immature than the initial action and I hope he does not…

Some have speculated based on the changes that it was not a well-meaning PR, that it was just an attempt to game the system (similar to what hordes of people do on Hacktoberfest). Of course it's hard to know

Does it actually matter? Like even if the PR is bad / the request to merge was demanding, I don’t think that justifies the response, which I guess was roughly the expected response to a the PR times 400k (plus network effects). I’m not convinced that the people responding can use the same excuse for their immaturity but maybe they should not be expected to be mature given the trivial requirements for becoming members of that org.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#313

Post by Pako »

silisili wrote: post #298
progval wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like a typical PR from young programmers who are learning English, which is consistent with the rest of the profile.

I don't quite get the mindset here. I'm (slowly and lazily) learning a new language, and can't imagine going into some native speaker's repo and trying to correct it...

This kinda looks like an attempt to get a commit into a bigger open source repository. It'd look nice on a resume to say you "contributed to Unreal Engine on GitHub".

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#314

Post by dan-robertson »

heyitsguay wrote: post #113
cmckn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a thundering herd e-mail at Amazon about 10 years ago that I’ve heard stories about. It went on for days. There’s a funny internal talk with lots of data about it, maybe it’s on YouTube by now…

When i worked at the NIH, a couple times an entire institute was accidentally cc'd instead of bcc'd on an email, and for weeks after the chain would continue, consisting only of people writing "please stop responding to this chain". I don't know what you do for that...

The people responding with “please stop” should bcc the institute so that if someone replies to them the institute won’t be copied in?

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#315

Post by matsemann »

al_borland wrote: post #280
faustomorales wrote: post #82

Seems like an innocent enough mistake. Remind me of when I once helped organize a volunteer hackathon with people from different companies. We created a Slack organization just for the occasion. At the end of the event, I was supposed to ask all attendees to delete all the data we had given them before they went home. The message I posted to #general (the channel everyone in a Slack organization is required to be in)…

Free Code Camp had a bug in their email notification system several years back. I suspect they weren’t incrementing the index in their loop… Since I was the first person in the email list, I got an email for every person in their list. I had to shut my phone off, as the notifications were going out of control and couldn’t keep up. Fun fact, Gmail caps threads at 100 messages. So I had a full page of 100 email long th…

I did that exact bug once. But I didn't just get one email for each subscriber, since the index didn't increase the loop never terminated. Took me some time to actually kill the process (PHP script running at some provider back in the day). Got over a 100k emails to my Gmail, so much that my account crashed and it took a few days before I managed to log in again (got an error saying something went wrong when opening gmail in the browser). So at least then it was very possible to ddos someone's mailbox.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#316

Post by School-Cotton »

blensor wrote: post #217
faustomorales wrote: post #82

Seems like an innocent enough mistake. Remind me of when I once helped organize a volunteer hackathon with people from different companies. We created a Slack organization just for the occasion. At the end of the event, I was supposed to ask all attendees to delete all the data we had given them before they went home. The message I posted to #general (the channel everyone in a Slack organization is required to be in)…

The real problem was that so many people felt the urge to reply to that PR making it so much worse than a single ping. I can live with the random message that has nothing to do with me, but having to delete an endless stream of messages because so many people felt the need to reply already knowing that it would go out to everyone is really annoying

The worst is that it becomes clear eventually that people are responding just to troll.

The casual vandalism of hundreds of thousands of people’s time and attention is absolutely mind-boggling to me. I saw similar things at large (50k+ employees) companies when some reply-all chain got started — people who clearly knew better, replying just for the lulz.

If it were up to me, I would have fired them immediately. Nobody has the right to conscript other people into their personal sense of humor.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#317

Post by dan-robertson »

gnufied wrote: post #60
smcleod wrote: post #18

Anyone could have done this by mistake, all it'd take is being a bit tired and @ing the wrong group. The question is - why doesn't the platform warn you that you're going to send notifications to a large number of people in the same way that many email clients do?

Yeah not sure why calls for getting the poster banned from Github - https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/24#issuecomment-114... . Seems bit excessive, murphy's law applies. Also the poster is essentially a kid. I would hold my judgement before flaming him fwiw.

Why even make a judgement when you could just not flame either way?

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#318

Post by pavo-etc »

idontpost wrote: post #236
wolverine876 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I got the email. And about 20+ responses to that email. > Every person who replies to that issue triggers another 400k emails. Personally, my email client is crashing. Your email client only received 20 messages; why is it crashing? The very long To: header?

Drunk Microsoft programmer who developed Outlook

Attempted to reach the Ballmer peak but went too far

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#320

Post by flohofwoe »

thrownawayalre wrote: post #124

Innocent mistake. The kid is barely 18. The emotion and stress resulting from mistakenly sending a notification to 400,000 is likely overwhelming. Now his real name is going to stay at the center of the internet for a while thanks to being 1st on HN. I would definitely not have coped well with that much internet attention at his age. Some Github replies are more immature than the initial action and I hope he does not…

> The kid is barely 18. The emotion and stress resulting from mistakenly sending...

Look at the actual contents of the PR. This wasn't an attempt to contribute anything remotely meaningful. It's not quite vandalism yet either, but only because it didn't do any harm.

Post reply on HN