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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

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Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#121

Post by higerordermap »

random_visitor wrote: post #57

Some people are giving him the benefit of doubt because you don't understand hindi. Please don't. This person really did encourage his 600k+ subscribers to spam the PRs in no uncertain words. He explained how developers with swag clothing and brand stickers look cool and get respect. He told people "it won't improve you much as a developer. But hey, free t-shirt swag, and there's a well defined path to get it. I requ…

> capable folks are outnumbered by the enthusiastic kids, who, despite their best intentions shouldn't be guiding others right now.

I am also an Indian student and can confirm this is very true.

There are so many people posting 20 line tensorflow 'projects', often copied code, for the "swag" of it.

Even competitive coding is gamed a lot. You can't judge people on competitive coding profiles.

> Much of this can be attributed to us having 1/6 of world's population (more if you just count English speaking populance), but that doesn't excuse people's bad behaviour.

This is mostly better attributed to the rat race mentality that is so common among Indians. Everything wrong with education in India stems from this. The rote learning based education, high competition for entering CS degrees despite lack of interest, low quality work in indian outsourcing firms, and company politics to become manager ASAP.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#122

Post by samatman »

jdminhbg wrote: post #6
gruez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

T-shirts are worth significantly more (relatively) in poorer parts of the world. It might be worth 0.5hr of average wage in the us but be worth 5hr of average wage in India.

I thought of that, but if you’re wealthy enough to watch YouTube and submit PRs on GitHub, is that really that much of a reward?

I think you have this backward.

If you had to work for three months to afford your phone, would you be more likely to spend fifteen minutes to get a free shirt, or less?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#124

Post by asicsp »

tzs wrote: post #73
SirSavary wrote: post #2

It's convenient that Digital Ocean has a scapegoat for 2020 but his video doesn't explain the previous years of spammy pull requests.

Was it much of a problem before this year? Looking back at all prior HN stories with "hacktoberfest" in the title or with "hacktoberfest" and "spam" in the comments, I can't find any that talk about it being a big problem before this year. I found one maintainer who said they got a non-negligible number of garbage pull requests for it, but they still said Hacktoberfest was cool. There was also one post about a filter…

One of my repos got spam PRs for last two years. So I archived the repo this time before October as a proactive measure. I got spam PRs in other months too, but October was the worst.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#125

Post by TheDong »

chillee wrote: post #40

I agree that the spam is problematic, but I feel the need to call out his "data collection". As evidence that CodeWithHarry is the cause, he says > A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues. and > A search for "improve docs" shows 319,251 issues. ??? Improve docs has been a common beginner level PR since the beginning of time. Do you really think that 319k spam issues have been filed in the last day…

Github allows you to search by dates (newer than, date ranges, etc), so for example, you can add the query "created:>=2020-09-30" (the date the youtube video was uploaded) to get a more accurate list.

From this search, it looks like it's definitely on the order of hundreds:

https://github.com/search?p=5&q=amazing+project+created%3A%3...

I opened a few at random to spot-check, and they all seemed like garbage to me. Like this one, ugh https://github.com/mongodb/docs/pull/4402/files

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#127

Post by henricao »

Not fair to say he ruined it. Even if he promoted people creating spam PRs. He exposed the weak foundations for this campaign and hopefully now they will fix it. DO said, it has been 7 years handling spams and they haven't fix the issue. Now it is so visible, that they can't ignore it anymore.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#128

Post by detaro »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #105
saagarjha wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Just look at my username; you don’t get more Indian-sounding than that. The way forward is to submit high-quality pull requests, not spam them to get a free T-shirt, and certainly not to give up and let people ruin it for you. I personally guarantee you that it’ll work out.

> Just look at my username; you don’t get more Indian-sounding than that. I know, right! Incidentally, a past draft of my advice was going to refer to you and 'manishearth on the Rust core team as "good" examples to emulate. All this talk about "Shitoberfest" and such is driving me up the wall though. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I feel like we are not welcome, but I guess a lot of people in this thread are saying…

> "Shitoberfest" and such is driving me up the wall though.

People are complaining about actual spam that in no way improves their repo, and are angry at DO and GitHub for not being prepared for that. This has nothing to do with actual contributions and the people making them.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#129

Post by MikeTheGreat »

random_visitor wrote: post #92
bdhess wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why the protagonist being Indian is something that would be strongly remembered. I’d guess anyone whose audience has more time than money could’ve hatched a scheme like this, regardless of nationality.

I mentioned this because I've seen people bash Indians for ruining sites like Quora and Medium with lot of bad quality content. Spam job offers, freelancing sites with bloated profiles, sending unsolicited messages and resume to people in LinkedIn and AngelList. Much of this comes from us having 1/6 of world's population, but that doesn't excuse a big group from their misdeeds. I personally believe that there's a nee…

I'm almost afraid to ask this, so please assume good intent and bear with me - I promise this is a genuine question :)

Different cultures definitely consider different things to be acceptable / polite / etc in the same situation (e.g., do you take your shoes off when entering another person's house?). I've heard that there's groups of Indians (possibly the descendants of certain castes?) that place a high value on entrepreneurship and that "go get'em" attitude you often see in motivated sales / business people.

I wonder if that's a factor the behavior you observed - if there's a cultural pressure to assertively put themselves out there and actively look for jobs in these ways.

So with that said - I'm interested in other people's takes and happy to accept constructive criticism :)

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#130

Post by xmprt »

sam1r wrote: post #55

I don’t get what the big deal of this is. 1-50 PRs with insignificant changes. Simple fix, simple scripting of prs.all().forEach( if pr.MinorChanges, then close w/ comment). Minor changes are just taking the number of diff files, and checking if it’s less than > 1. That’s just one way to do it. Feels like enough venting has been done, but why bring up the problem when you can come forth with a solution. Or at least p…

A lot of minor changes are important though and blanket closing all diffs with minor changes will take out legitimate changes with it. Also, it's so easy to get around this by just making diffs with two files changed. Or making a diff that copy pastes the same line 100 times.
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