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

331–340 of 468 posts

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#331

Post by lodovic »

saagarjha wrote: post #233
eurasiantiger wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work from home, have a separate work laptop, but connect it to the same network with your home computers, it’s all for nothing.

How so? Hopping around in your home network should not be possible by default and would be a gross overreach by any IT department, even beyond “you put data on this device and therefore we will search the entire thing”.

Indeed, my work laptop is heavily firewalled, always assumes to be on an unsafe network, and uses a vpn and zscaler. Say you are on an airport wifi - I wouldn't expect corporate IT to scan the neighboring devices. No way it's going to snoop around on my home network, that would just expose the machine.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#332

Post by blitzar »

Its great to see a corporate mail server crash thanks to accidentally sending an email to the @all mailing list

Followed by the Reply-all "Please unsubscribe me" crowd.

Followed by the Reply-all "Out of office reply" infinite loop as out of office replies respond to the out of office replies.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#333

Post by serial_dev »

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.

Totally excessive. In my opinion, people should treat this incident with the "blameless post mortem" mentality in mind.

Don't blame the individual for an innocent mistake (we don't know if he knew that it would trigger 400k notifications). He is young and might be inexperienced, so we should be forgiving.

Think about why the system is set up in a way that an untrusted contributor can trigger so many notifications with a PR that is of little value.

That is a much harder problem to solve, so that is why some people go to the easy solution ("ban him, he is an evil bad person, gross social misconduct").

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#334

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

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...

Blame the interviewers who require OSS contributions. Same with DigitalOcean and their "hacktobefest"¹, or whatever it's called. LKML is full of attempts at these. For some reason I remember a particular exchange (but it's quite typical) between Linus and some random 16 year old ESL student, who bugged Linus for days to accept his "typo fixes" (most of which weren't really typos), and Linus's replies in the manner of "lemme get right on that". From what I understand it's just something you have to deal with as a prominent OSS figure.

1: https://drewdevault.com/2020/10/01/Spamtoberfest.html

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#335

Post by sp1rit »

indrora wrote: post #160
montag wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual PR looks so poor that I can't imagine it was submitted in good faith.

The person who submitted it Is, according to their github page, a nary 18 years old. One cannot say in good faith that they were a beacon of perfect judgement at 18. Anyone who says so is either looking to buy or sell a bridge in New York.

> Is, according to their github page, a nary 18 years old.

a bit further down he actually proclaims being born 11/11/2004, making him just 17. No idea why he has 18 y/o in his user description, not that it'd make a difference tho.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#336

Post by can16358p »

pharmakom wrote: post #306
can16358p wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. My work and hobby life is completely entwined. I have one powerful machine and micromanage my time by switching between windows of work and leisure. Add the fact that I do coding as work and video editing as a hobby which both need powerful machines, and it would be very stupid, unmanageable, and inconvenient to buy two MacBooks.

Dual boot or at least have 2 users.

I constantly switch between windows and micromanage time.

That's just impossible.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#337

Post by danuker »

k8sToGo wrote: post #244
woojoo666 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's possible for somebody to unintentionally piss off hundreds of thousands of people, that's not the person's fault. It's the system's. The internet allows proliferation of information at scale and speeds that can be disasterous if left unchecked

Why do people get so easily pissed off? Can't you just ignore the email?

5 seconds times 500.000 people paid at $40/hr gives $27.7k.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#338

Post by avgcorrection »

bdn_ wrote: post #81
bityard wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a two-letter github username and get tagged accidentally all the time. Also invitations to private repos.

I am @3x and I get ~10 notifications a day of people mentioning me in PRs and issues. Whenever anyone writes the name of a file containing `@3x`, which is commonly used for hi-res assets, I get a notification. I quickly learned to turn off email notifications!

Just goes to show that you should always quote code with backticks.

Re: GitHub user sends notification to 400k users

#340

Post by Kiro »

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…

It was not a "well-meaning PR". It was pure spam and he's no innocent kid.
Post reply on HN