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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

361–370 of 511 posts

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#361
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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:/…

General opinion for decades has been the Ferengi are specifically anti-Semitic stereotypes rather than generic Mediterranean-area stereotypes.

As a Jew, I always just considered them space goblins...

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#362
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…

Post modernism embraces this though, and it is rampant in the West post Kant/Nietzsche. When you create your own truth and morals, you are going to disagree with people about stuff like this :)

Does it really embrace it, or does it explain why it's a thing?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically the PRs are titled something like "Improve docs" and the change is to add "an amazing project" somewhere in the README.md. Here's a search that finds a lot: https://github.com/search?q=in%3Atitle+improve+created%3A%3E...

This search makes the same mistake I mentioned above - you think it finds a lot because you're sorting by "relevant" and sampling. Sort by newest and you'll see that the vast majority of these PR's are legitimate: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=in%3Atitle+improve+create...

The results I got show 4 spam PRs out of 10 on the first page. Same on the second and third pages. 60% is not a vast majority legitimate and 40% spam is not inconsequential when it's 86k PRs.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#364
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…

Post modernism embraces this though, and it is rampant in the West post Kant/Nietzsche. When you create your own truth and morals, you are going to disagree with people about stuff like this :)

I'd hardly call this embracing this thought.

The hundred dollars you get is nothing when you destroy the environment.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#365
post #327

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…

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

http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

> 4. Naughtiness

> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

Everyone breaking a rule will say that they're doing this. They'll claim they're just bending the rules. Even when they're engaged in massive law breaking behaviour they'll claim that those laws don't really matter and that the ends justify the means.

Hacktoberfest highlights the problem with this paragraph of Graham's. Hundreds of thousand of people being "naughty", hacking the system, cause problems for other people.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#366
post #159
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…

The pull request I have seen were changing "how to install" into "how to easily install" and such. They were not fixing typos or even making sentences better. They were just meaningless changes.

No way man, there are very meaningful changes like this one https://github.com/devraj-kumar/BLOG-/pull/13/commits/1b26bf...

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CodeWithHarry is not a bad guy, I don't want to cancel or shame him I say, cancel him. And all his fans. CC's think they're hot shit because they can produce a video and upload it to youtube, forgetting entirely that it is the content of the video that gives it any worth. We hate on moronic Medium posts idiotic PR releases, and other low-effort media, why should this be any different? If he deputizes his audience t…

Disagree. It is a problem with hype and code being more centralized. Yes, an annoying for many, but to say this ruined anything is probably exaggerated.

I mean, you could fairly objectively make the judgement that this one video had a net-negative impact on the productivity of humanity.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#368
Another thing that sucks about this: will this deter people with legitimate improvements to documentation from contributing, for fear of being seen as a spammer? Docs are great, and hard to do, real docs improvements would actually be a serious contribution....

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#369
post #306

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…

"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…

I think you are conflating systemic corruption with culture. It's unfair to blame culture as the sole instigator of said corruption.

You can tell it's not cultural by the way Greeks abroad are not known for "gaming the system".

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more very Indian thing perhaps also is we like to gladly flog ourselves and jump at the chance of discrediting our people. We will start with "As an Indian" but end with "They" instead of "We"

I'm frankly kind of sick of the constant denigration and apologies being written slavishly to foreigners on behalf of all Indians by Indians. As an Indian, I accept there's a lot of cultural problems and crap in the country but to the degree that people will prostrate before the Western elite reminds me of our colonial days. Like, literally everything in that paragraph could be written about literally any part of the…

It's something you'll see in pretty much every disfavored group: people will attempt to push themselves up by pushing the others down. They'll say "I'm not like other X", reinforcing the idea that X actually does whatever bad things you imagine they do, and deserves to be looked down on.

They usually don't even recognize that that's what they're implying. They merely want to set themselves up as worthwhile and ask not to be pre-judged. But collectively, you get "crab mentality" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality).

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