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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

371–380 of 511 posts

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#371

If everything that CodeWithHarry says is true, then I don't see how it's his fault. Also, this doesn't seem like a big deal. Just ignore the spammy emails for a while and close the pull requests.

I looked at the video and it seemed fine. Only problem is that complete rookies were watching it too.

I hang out in some rookie forums and it seems like every other day someone posts a snippet and I find that they have used foo/bar somewhere in the code without realizing it was supposed to be a placeholder. CWH made a tutorial on how to get some text from your computer into an open source repository and that is commendable, but his viewers have forgotten to do the bit where they actually produce content worth merging and that is not his fault.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#372
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?

That could describe any country. Certainly Greece, India and Brazil wouldn't make it to the top of my list of countries I'd expect to see described that way.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#373

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:/…

What is this crap comment? You are likening a nation of humans to a fictional alien species? This is not useful or insightful, and pretty offensive imo.

> You are likening a nation of humans to a fictional alien species?

If you don't like it, talk to Gene Roddenberry. In ST:TOS the Klingons (IIRC) were used as a stand in for the Soviets:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon#Conception

* https://www.history.com/news/star-trek-series-episodes-vietn...

Or you could view it as the anthropomorphization of the vice of greed or stinginess/miserliness/parsimony.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also received one pull request that I thought was spam, where the author made several nonsensical changes like changing "#Features" into "#Features:" in the README. Now it makes sense. I'll probably tell thank them for their contribution and point out a few ideas for things that would really help us, instead of merging this just for the sake of Hacktoberfest.

Yeah. Best approach I can think of would be something like: Cool, looks like you've getting the hang of creating Pull Requests on GitHub. :) The actual change here though isn't useful to us. :( Would you be ok spending some time improving [XYZ] instead? :) eg combine encouragement for the bit they got right + info on what needs work, and point them in the right direction for fixing it Some people will probably just n…

The problem is that this takes time. On one PR, sure, okay. But if you have 50 of the spammy PRs, even with Copy and Paste, this will take several minutes (maybe up to an hour, depending) of a maintainers day (and really, per day, however long Hacktoberfest goes on). That's time that they're not spending coding or updating docs in a valid way or spending with family. It would probably be tenable if there were some heuristic that was 100% certain that this was a spammy PR, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

According to a reliable source - hat logos - there is a country that might someday rejoin that elite group. ("MAGA" political hats: "Make America Great Again". There is so much to read into that in the political climate.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#376
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…

It's that argument of you let yourself get conned so it's your fault. Therefore it's ok to con people. Nigerian scammers also are in this camp.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#377
post #17

I feel like this is the ultimate tutorial syndrome. People doing exactly what the video said!

Fact is, we would have done the same after watching his video if we didn't know what PRs and FOSS contributions are. He doesn't explain what PRs are for, or what good PRs look like. He doesn't even teach how to use git for PR - all those spam are using Github's web editor. There is absolutely no clue given about the harm it would cause. For comparison, imagine a hardware DIY tutorial that never mentions any safety concerns.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#378

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:/…

I always used to wonder if the races in the star trek universe had any correlation with human ethnicities.

I wouldn't say ethnicities... The Ferengi serm to be a personified contrasting ideology against the "we don't need money anymore" of the Federation.

Not to say that people won't overlay their own prejudices over what's actually there, but i see just an explicit contrast of ideas about economies.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#379

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:/…

What is this crap comment? You are likening a nation of humans to a fictional alien species? This is not useful or insightful, and pretty offensive imo.

Most fiction tends to be based at least in some part on reality, whether the author explicitly intended it or not (allegorically or literally).

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#380
post #316
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.

Learning for test is gaming the system? Seriously?

When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.

A test is a proxy for actual performance working on some useful task. The nature of useful work is usually that it can't be represented by two hours of multiple choice questions, whiteboarding, or anecdotes about "a time you disagreed with someone"; therefore, most tests will differ from the work. Learning to pass the test is easier than learning to do the work, but if you do that the test ceases to measure your work performance.

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