We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports • Hacker News Board

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#181

Post by swiftcoder » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:42 PM UTC

Aerolfos wrote: post #164

ekidd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree, the time zones are killer , and this can't be ignored. I work at a company spread over most of the world, with SMEs coming and going as the globe spins. Back-and-forth iteration and consultation is a genuinely hard problem. Certain kinds of feedback cycles have a minimum latency of "overnight". Which means we need to invest heavily in good communication. But also, it means more people need to have the…

> But also, it means more people need to have the "big picture", and they need to be able to make good decisions (not just arbitrary ones). So the ideal goal is to prevent people from going off in random nonsensical directions based on miscommunication, and equip them to actually think strategically about the overall plan. Continent X might make different decisions than continent Y, but they're all talking, and enoug…

> Dunno how you apply that to an organization, but maybe sending skilled workers as a kind of non-comissioned officer could work. Who knows.

The most successful engagements I've had with contracting firms have been when we've shelled out for a team manager and a software architect (in addition to the number of straight developers we want).

The software architect builds a solid understanding of our solution space, and from then on helps translate requirements into terms their engineers are familiar with, and provides code reviews to ensure their contributions are in line with the project goals. The team manager knows how to handle the day-to-day reporting, making sure everyone is on task, escalates blockers over the fence to our engineers and managment, etc.

Without those two roles from the contracting firm's side, I find that timezones and cultural mismatches (engineering culture, that is) pretty much erase the impact of the additional engineering headcount when adding contractors.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#182

Post by opan » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:44 PM UTC

causalscience wrote: post #44

nchmy wrote: post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I cal…

I recently heard from a friend that this is due to something called "izzat". Admitting any sort of wrongdoing would reflect poorly on them and their family, to the point they would rather lie or do the wrong thing than damage their family's reputation.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#183

Post by bluGill » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:44 PM UTC

freakynit wrote: post #153

cebert wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pay in India is still severely (seriously low, with 12-14+ hour workdays, even more than the 996 culture of China) low for most people. My employer outsources some work to Indian contractors. I know how much we are paying the contracting firm, which is low. Knowing the firm takes a cut before the contractors are paid, I feel terrible for how little they are compensated. I frequently wonder if we’d get better output…

Avoid middlemen in India.. sorry for the word, but they are the biggest leechers. We hate them too here. India is filled with small one-room service-based companies(the middlemens') that hire interns, for ZERO pay, make them work 12-14 hour days under extremely "humiliating" conditions and then when it comes to giving them internship completion certificate, they demand huge sums of money just to release them... think…

The good engineers in india know their value and get it. My company has offices in india because you have to manage them yourself not use middlemen. You can train the locals to be great managers (at least some).

wages for good people in india are worse similar people in the us, but often high than in europe. But there are other problems with europe and so it can be the better deal.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#184

Post by nchmy » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

Aeglaecia wrote: post #117

nchmy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

selfishness, laziness, lack of self-awareness, lack of shame, etc are obviously universal traits. But cultures absolutely reinforce them to different degrees. Many cultures around the world are built around the sorts of behaviors we both described. Whereas other cultures have at least some (if not a lot of) resistance to it - eg publicly ridiculing when people step flagrantly out of line. This is good. My impression…

people who actually have a life generally don't spend time hanging around internet forums so it's important to consider that a disconnection from reality is involved in places like these , thru my eyes you have restated the idea of low trust vs high trust societies without building on top of the idea , which isnt downvote worthy but isnt upvote worthy either

I didn't expect up votes. I also wasn't about to write a treatise. And saying "low trust vs high trust societies" wouldn't be meaningful, nor would it actually be accurate. The issue here isn't trust - it's humility, integrity, conscientiousness, etc. Trust often comes along with such traits, but it's not the core issue.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#185

Post by account42 » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

dark-star wrote: post #179

causalscience wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I cal…

Indian students were the reason that Google's Hacktoberfest was critiziced and ultimately terminated Indian students have a long history of disrupting free/libre projects, this is nothing new

Hacktoberfest was run by Digital Ocean. You might be mixing it up with Google's summer of code.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#186

Post by dormento » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

causalscience wrote: post #44

nchmy wrote: post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I cal…

I believe it has to do with saving face.

I've worked with mixed nationality teams at a certain 4 letter austinite corporation a couple thousand moons ago. One thing in common with my Asian colleagues back then (many of which i still keep in touch with to this day), is that they would usually refrain from saying things that could rock the boat or disappoint you. If they lacked knowledge for the task at hand, they wouldn't let you know. If they were late on a delivery, they'd insist it would be ready by a certain date. This led to situations where other regional managers would have to plan contingencies to work around the issue.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#187

Post by moralestapia » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

freakynit wrote: post #126

causalscience wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I cal…

Indian here (~15+ years in tech). I've seen this behavior a lot, and unfortunately, I did some of this myself earlier in my career. Based on my own experience, here are a few reasons (could be a lot more): 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as…

Since we are talking about LLMs, what I've noticed about the Indian/Pakistani "LLM" is they follow this way of structuring thoughts:

1. They

2. Always

3. List

4. Things

... and end up with a conclusion/punchline/takeaway.

I always wanted to ask, is that due to training?

I could imagine all schools around there have a specific style, like all their assignments need to follow this general form, and then they just get used to it and it permeates to their everyday life.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#188

Post by nchmy » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

halapro wrote: post #125

normie3000 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this - it's tiring even at low volume. Goes something like: Someone creates a garbage issue. Someone else asks to be assigned. Someone from the project may say "we don't assign issues" (this step has zero effect over later steps). Someone else submits a PR. Maybe someone else will submit another PR. Maintainers then agonise how they can close issues and PR(s) without being rude or discouraging to genuine ef…

You've been getting PRs? All I've ever seen is "can you assign this issue you me" spam and then disappear. I was nice to them for years but now I just delete the comment and block the users.

Yeah, the "can you assign the issue to me" is the most common. I don't even understand where it came from - does anyone ever actually formally assign issues to anyone?

But they absolutely also create PRs even if you say "don't create a PR. You don't know what you're talking about"

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#189

Post by ffaser5gxlsll » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

rednafi wrote: post #30

Creating crap vuln reports or PRs on popular OSS projects has been an issue long before LLMs. Remember Hacktoberfest? Students would often abuse it since there’s no adult in the room to teach them how to behave. I guess this is one hard way to f around and find out. But this is by no means condoning this sort of behavior. Point is, LLMs made the situation more dire: it’s cheap to generate code, whereas reviewing stil…

It's never fine to be rude.

Moving off github into a more niche platform was the best choice I have ever made to curb such zero-effort issue and feature requests. It raises the barrier just enough.

On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping. I participated in projects where the approach is to start a discussion on a forum first, and I get the same feeling you have as a tech guy calling ISP support on the phone.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#190

Post by bluGill » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 12:48 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #174

3D30497420 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the time zones are killer, and this can't be ignored 100% agree, especially when there is minimal overlap during normal office hours. I was managing a dev team in India from the US and it was a real challenge. The company ended up moving team to the US, relocating most of my team. Despite all the people being the same, management became much easier. Since then I've done US and EU, and EU and IN, and those have all…

If you needed 8 hour overlap you were micromanaging? Was that because of the above cultural differences?

He didn't need 8 hours, but zero didn't work. The us and india are about 12 hours apart (there are 4 times zones in the us, day light savings time, and india is offset half an hour, but it rounds out to 12 hours for discussion)