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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

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Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#291

Post by k_sze »

unmole wrote: post #264
pritambarhate wrote: post #225

As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India. * "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in…

> his "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how. While I don't disagree with the rest of your comment, this is not accurate. Unacademy focuses on test prep and thier anthem while sappy and gung ho, doesn't really have any references to gaming the system. Crack it is in the same vein as Cracking the Coding Interview,

Which is gaming the system, if you ask me.

Cracking coding interviews would be considered “overfitting” in statistical learning parlance. You may ace the interview, but for most people the performance at coding interviews has no correlation with performance in actual work.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#292

Post by throw0101a »

pritambarhate wrote: post #225

As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India. * "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in…

> If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.

The Ferengi from Star Trek come to mind when I read this.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi

* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi

The Rules of Acquisition are always a fun read:

* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition

In this case Rule 3 would probably apply:

> Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#293

Post by unmole »

k_sze wrote: post #291
unmole wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how. While I don't disagree with the rest of your comment, this is not accurate. Unacademy focuses on test prep and thier anthem while sappy and gung ho, doesn't really have any references to gaming the system. Crack it is in the same vein as Cracking the Coding Interview,

Which is gaming the system, if you ask me. Cracking coding interviews would be considered “overfitting” in statistical learning parlance. You may ace the interview, but for most people the performance at coding interviews has no correlation with performance in actual work.

Overfitting? Sure. But gaming the system? I disagree. Hell, I've heard of companies giving candidates the book to help them prepare for the interview. It's not ideal but this is what the system expects.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#294

Post by mcv »

saagarjha wrote: post #226
mcv wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell his video only did damage: it taught people to spam open source projects, created a lot of bad blood, probably made open source maintainers more suspicious of new contributors, and gave a large number of potential contributors a bad experience. It could have been so much better if he'd actually put in the effort to create a real, meaningful pull request. Show how to clone the project, run it, fix…

I entirely understand why this change was picked and will maintain it was a bad choice. However, I don’t think I can fault them for doing that when the alternative would take significantly more time and effort and detract from the point they were trying to make, which is the steps necessary to make a pull request and not the expected content of one. Given the results, however, I would very much appreciate it if the a…

He still could have prepared a legitimate pull request in advance. It was a terrible example, and the more I read about it, the more I think it was intentional and never had the intention to help Open Source projects in any way.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#295

Post by throw0101a »

avereveard wrote: post #285
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to that intensity, ingrained-ness? That's not how it is in the UK[0] - to anywhere near that degree I mean. edit: the UK is the only culture I'm really familiar with

well check out italy, you can substitute italian with indians and keep the entire paragraph almost word for word. I suspect it's a common theme of countries that managed to keep an identity while under a long foreign domination. when the state is the enemy for generations, the ethics and norm about law and legality become a lot more flexible.

Would this apply more to southern Italy more than north?

> Henrich anticipates a quibble about what he calls “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-...

* https://archive.is/SYP7l

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Sicily

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_southern_It...

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#296

Post by Freak_NL »

_wolfie_ wrote: post #275
fergie wrote: post #25

I have a couple of vaguely popular repos on github (~100,000 downloads a month) Generally speaking, (T-shirt farming aside), if you find a genuine typo, or small way to improve documentation, then that PR will be very much appreciated. README-typos are quite visible, yet easy for maintainers to overlook. If you are new to GitHub, please do not be discouraged, and as with editing Wikipedia- be bold. (In the large sche…

On the other hand, I was told by boost project that my one line fix for a typo was "waste of maintainer time", so it seems to vary on per-project basis :)

It's so trivial to cherry-pick or rebase and merge such a commit if you understand enough of git to use it properly with branches and stuff. If the commit message is suitably worded it saves time too.

There are software projects out there, even highly used ones, that only use Github to mirror their SVN repository (or some other yesteryear source code system). For those maintainers these PRs do take up more time than they contribute though.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#297

Post by brunoc »

unmole wrote: post #293
k_sze wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is gaming the system, if you ask me. Cracking coding interviews would be considered “overfitting” in statistical learning parlance. You may ace the interview, but for most people the performance at coding interviews has no correlation with performance in actual work.

Overfitting? Sure. But gaming the system? I disagree. Hell, I've heard of companies giving candidates the book to help them prepare for the interview. It's not ideal but this is what the system expects.

"Don't hate the player, hate the game"

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#298

Post by Freak_NL »

pferde wrote: post #258
watwut wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It is easy to tell them apart. But some people are getting over 50 of these in a day, so even if it is easy to tell, it gets annoying and requires you to deal with spam. That is the thing with spam in general - you can tell it from legitimate mail easily, but is it still annoying and requires you to deal with it.

That is why I still prefer old-style patch submissions via mailing lists - the bar is higher, so it usually weeds out exactly this kind of trash. Of course, if a company started offering free t-shirts for mailing list submissions and some foolish (but well-meaning) youtuber would publish a tutorial on how to subscribe and post to a mailing list, I have no doubts that there would be a deluge regardless of this higher…

As a drive-by contributor to plenty of projects it raises the bar uncomfortably high though. A PR I can rebase and rework based on feedback that can be given right there on the line of code it pertains to. Easy as pie with GitLab or GitHub. Really bothersome with mailing-lists, and excruciatingly painful if they don't even use a modern DVCS like git.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#299

Post by noja »

rjmunro wrote: post #283
dannyw wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Fixing up documentation is always helpful, even if it’s a one letter change! Now, updating “copyright 2018-2019” to “2020” isn’t.

The point of the date it to tell people when the material was created. In some jurisdictions / situations, copyright expires N years after it was created, so that date tells people when copyright has expired. Unfortunately, in many cases now, copyright is based on the year the author died, rather than the year the work was created, which means it is much harder to work out if something has entered the public domain.…

> Changing the date without changing the code significantly is arguably fraudulent.

In some countries the publishing date is what counts, and they define publishing for websites as when the site was viewed.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#300

Post by avighnay »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #282
avighnay wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you did rob us with unparalleled intensity over 300 years, is that ingrained? edit: I only know UK as an imperialist

Ah, sorry :) More seriously, I have heard on a TV programme, and I have NO DATA for this, that britain put more resources and/or cash into the US than it ever got out (edit: until the US became independent, which is about the 300 years the poster mentioned). Does anyone know reliable sources that can verify, refute or somehow qualify that statement? Edit: why is the parent post flagged and dead? Flagging should be us…

Glad that no offence was taken, my intent was to throw spot light on the root comment where it is easy to generalize on any human community. We all need to restrain ourselves from that urge. I don't mind it being flagged either, it does happen when perspectives are not fully understood either side.
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