Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 511 posts

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#341

Post by emilfihlman »

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.

How about Finland? That's not the general attitude here.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#342

Post by exabrial »

Unfortunately his actions will be used by racists for years to come to justify hate and discrimination.

I'm hoping github can quickly step up and ban all accounts that submit spam PRs, to protect the integrity of open source but to also protect people from themselves.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#343

Post by fetbaffe »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #242
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…

I wouldn't say it's an Indian only phenomenon, plenty of that everywhere

Sure, but you always have to ask, to what degree?

If it is more prevalent than in other societies then you can definitely call it a phenomenon.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#344

Post by yowlingcat »

neom wrote: post #37
Google234 wrote: post #12

The shitoberfest Twitter account is hilarious. https://mobile.twitter.com/shitoberfest

You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest, I don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of it's existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did a…

> as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS

Don't let your sunken cost and in-group bias distract you from seeing the unfortunate externalities of decisions here. You're separating intent from effect when that is the exact problem. DO created a program which incentivized spam that puts long-term strain on a community which it derives revenue from long-term, just for short term benefit.

If you or anyone else who designed that program doesn't understand that and take action until a /satirical twitter account/ has to pop up, that's really bad. I don't think you should try and make excuses for it. You should try to understand why the incentive broke and caused unintended side effects first before you go criticizing others.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#345

Post by easton »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #50
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.

As a mailserver owner, spam is the first thing that comes to my mind when someone says digitalocean. Malicious bots would be 2nd. I've never learned why DO is a malicious traffic leader. Maybe they're competing with OVH to be the next MCColo.

It’s because they made a rather cheap Linux VPS that is extremely easy to get up. It’s 4 clicks on DO (login with GitHub, click new droplet, click $5, click create), vs 15 clicks on Azure or AWS (where you have to create a bespoke account, go through the silly billing configuration, etc) where they expect you're running all of this past your procurement people and that they’ll want to configure stuff too.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#346

Post by easton »

higerordermap wrote: post #23

This is not only kind of spam going on here. A twitter user mentioned that some youtubers are themselves creating assignment aggregation type repos, and encouraging their viewers to contribute some copy paste code to those repos and they approve the pull request. That's insane. I feel ashamed to say I am an Indian.

Why? They accept pull requests to your own repo. I was merging some stuff to a fork to create a PR and later logged into hacktoberfest to check my progress, when I realized that I already had four pull requests because two of them I had approved myself for myself.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#347

Post by cotelletta »

exabrial wrote: post #333
swiley wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pathological behavior being part of a culture isn't an excuse for it. If everyone acted this way open source couldn't exist.

I know your comment is in good faith because the core of what you're saying is correct, and I'm certainly not accusing you of anything... Instead of 'part of the culture' though I would phrase it as 'correlated with the culture' to avoid accidentally giving supremacists ammunition. The point being, you have to rise above your circumstances. Just because everyone you grew up with is doing something gravely immoral doe…

Your attempt at couching your comment in disclaimers is hilarious. You don't just give supremacists ammunition, you make everyone laugh at the absurdity.

"Part of the culture" is bad... And "correlated with the culture" is good. But "exude pathological behavior" is where you end.

Have you figured out yet that language policing is just tiptoeing around the things you're not supposed to notice?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#348

Post by easton »

SahAssar wrote: post #166
emidoots wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them will because Hacktoberfest relies on project maintainers to flag the PR as `invalid` within a certain window and close it, AFAIK. Though I imagine with all the outrage over this that will definitely be changing.

Wow, that's weird. IIRC the first year the PRs had to be merged for them to count.

They said that they didn’t want you to not get credit because you worked for hours on a PR only for it to be not accepted because the maintainers didn’t like it for some reason. Even if that reason was that it wasn’t any work at all. But I think they want people to mark real-bad PRs as spam so they can not count them.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#349

Post by Thorentis »

farias0 wrote: post #322
_dbdw wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gaming the system" is also a cultural thing in Greece. In fact, it's so expected that you are perceived to be either out of the loop or a fool for not going the extra mile. I broke friendships with people who claimed that "it's all subjective at the end of the day" whenever I was raising ethical/moral concerns. Imagine not being able to provide a reasonable argument to justify your actions, beyond of "because I'm al…

The exactly same goes for Brazil. Am I seeing a pattern here, i.e. countries that are supposed to be great but really aren't?

Which countries mentioned so far are popularly regarded as "great"?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#350

Post by galkk »

thorwarasdasd wrote: post #161
asicsp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm college student (graduating in about 8 months) and I'll highlight that there's a very massive guidance problem here. Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. Hey, I'd like to help if possible. I'd probably not have the time to mentor, but I can help with learning resources. All my books are free to read online ( https://github.com/learnbyexample/s…

This is exactly the kind of spam we’re talking about. And I saw the repositories.

Man, they're awful :(

I looked into Python and regex

Post reply on HN