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

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

#221

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…

Particular topic (1) is also trained in cross cultural trainings.

Another topic is: do not expect a remote dev to pickup ambient knowledge, particular if they are juniors with no life experience. And since outsourcing to India is trying to get the resources for the lowest possible price, the result is: you get them as junior / fake senior / bad senior as you think. Pay better in India, get better people.

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

#223
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 gu…

The discussion requirement is often to prevent disappointment, waste of time, and anger, when maintainers simple close PRs, because it's not the direction they want the project to go. A lot of people will take this very personally, so it's much better to have a conversation about it beforehand.

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

#225
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money for a report and a patch, with convincing test cases, might be worthwhile. Even if a machine generates them.

I've read this idea that we could make people pay for security reports a few times here on HN (and you get back the money if the report is deemed good). That feels very wrong. If I find a security issue, I'm willing to responsibly disclose it, but if you make me pay, I don't think I will bother. Punishing bad behavior to disincentivize it seems more sensible.

For a person finding bugs for a living, an up-front fee to have their report reviewed by a maintainer would amount to an investment towards receiving a bug bounty if their report is valid and valuable. Just the cost of doing business.

It would discourage drive-by reports by people who just happened to notice a bug and want to let the maintainers know, but I think for a project that's high-profile enough to be flooded by bogus bug reports, bugs that random users just happen to notice will probably also get found by professional bug hunters at some point.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've seen an interesting behavior in India. If I ask someone on the street for directions, they will always give me an answer, even if they don't know. If they don't know, they'll make something up. This was strange. I asked a lot of Indian people about it and they said that it has to do with "saving face". Saying "I don't know" is a disgraceful thing. So if someone does not know the answer, they make something up in…

sounds like an LLM :)

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

#227
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…

Explaining the plan to the individual soldier also works better when the individual soldier is expected to care at all about the overall goal. (Such as believing in the mission of defending the home country.) When the soldier only has extrinsic motivation such as money, top-down command and control and treating soldiers solely as equipment to be spent makes more "sense", in a terrible way.

Maybe that applies to software orgs too, somehow.

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

#228
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…

Army manual FM 22-100 is a very good read on this topic. The impact of giving NCOs both freedom amd guardrails is immense.

link here (ironically, on a blog that critiques it)

https://armyoe.com/army-leadership-doctrinal-manuals/

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

That's how all LLMs structure content, not just Indian/Pakistani LLMs.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've seen an interesting behavior in India. If I ask someone on the street for directions, they will always give me an answer, even if they don't know. If they don't know, they'll make something up. This was strange. I asked a lot of Indian people about it and they said that it has to do with "saving face". Saying "I don't know" is a disgraceful thing. So if someone does not know the answer, they make something up in…

> I've seen an interesting behavior in India. If I ask someone on the street for directions, they will always give me an answer, even if they don't know. If they don't know, they'll make something up.

Isn’t this the precise failure pattern that everybody shits on LLMs for?

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