One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020 • Hacker News Board

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#471

Post by botyrbjt » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 12:24 AM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #214

susam wrote: post #62

I received two pull requests for two projects on GitHub last night. I am the author of one and the maintainer of the other. At first, the pull requests did not make sense at all. One of them made minor changes to a README, e.g., changing "this book" to "the book". It was not fixing a typo or incorrect grammar. It was merely choosing a word different from the one I had chosen. In fact, I preferred "this book", so the…

But this is not spam. It's based on morons trying to make it in the software world without any basis that they should be there. They're doing this so that they can put "I have x amount of accepted pullrequests on github" and fool an employer to hire them. To become shit team members or outsourced to become shit offshore team members*. I have seen these kinds in many a project. Real world experience. Real talk.

This has become a pet peeve of mine ever since a former co-worker told me his scheme of setting up a cronjob to add a single commit with a timestamp to a project on his Github profile on a daily basis, so future employers would think he was a 10xer or something to that effect

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#472

Post by 908B64B197 » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 12:41 AM UTC

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…

> Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. In my college, sophomores teach freshmen about Google's Summer of Code, open source and events like hacktoberfest. These endeavours are headed by the one or two guys among the students who happen to get into GSoC/ICPC or (in majority of the cases) have a good competitive coding profile

In my mind the problem lies with the college, they should be teaching their students how to contribute meaningfully. Spamming behaviors will only hurt the reputations of everyone from that college.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#473

Post by chillee » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 1:40 AM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #363

chillee wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't match my experience. I looked at the first and 5th page from my link. No spam PRs.

https://i.imgur.com/VgOteKy.png

https://i.imgur.com/aAZ8xbo.jpg

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#474

Post by marcinzm » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 2:05 AM UTC

chillee wrote: post #473

marcinzm wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't match my experience. I looked at the first and 5th page from my link. No spam PRs. https://i.imgur.com/VgOteKy.png https://i.imgur.com/aAZ8xbo.jpg

Presumably the spam onslaught is slowing down with time from the video being posted so looking at the most recent results will give an ever fewer percentage of spam. If you look at page 100 of the results (for example, currently 18 hours old) there's a lot more spam.

For example: https://imgur.com/a/vxCHvcO

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#475

Post by BoiledCabbage » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 2:38 AM UTC

gavinray wrote: post #433

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can't very well spark a fire that burns down a whole city and then turn around and say you can't blame the sparks because they're not really dangerous, it's only a conflagration that's really dangerous. Capitalism is the system that enables the kind of people you call twisted and unethical to do their twisted and unethical things and "amass hugely disproportional wealth". And also the system that everyone e…

> And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves. Or, am I wrong? I feel like most (capitalist) people don't actively spend their existence in a driven pursuit of excessive wealth with the intention/moral imperative to fuck everyone else over to get there or stay at "the top". Or at…

> Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.

And this here is I believe the crux of the issue. As you say absolute liberty requires absolute capitalism. And absolute capitalism by design incentives a number of negative societal behaviors. And companies forced to compete with those that perform those negative behaviors have to chose to either adopt them as well or go out of business - pushing them to adopt those behaviors.

So the conclusion is absolute liberty causes negative behavior. The idealistic view is absolute liberty is the primary virtue of society. Or in my opinion the more accurate view, is that liberty like many other essential virtues must be balanced with other factors in society.

My interpretation of you perspective is that absolute liberty is essential, anything less is hypocrisy - and the way you manage those views is by downplaying the negative impacts of what capitalism incentivises.

And note, I'm not saying capitalism is wrong (I absolutely believe is the best approach for economic efficiency) simply that it, just like liberty cannot be absolute. It must be balanced with negative impacts on society.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#476

Post by cyphar » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 3:04 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #466

cyphar wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages aren't mathematics, you can't losslessly translate between them. All translations are at least to some degree "an interpretation of the underlying meaning". As someone who was raised bilingual, I always struggle when asked to translate a specific phrase between languages because literal translations are often less useful or accurate than the "interpreted" translation. I would be very suspicious of anyone wh…

I have huge respect for the difficult job of translators and there is a definitive distinction between a paraphrase and a quote. I personal know professional translators and a key aspect of that role that they like to talk about is how they are proud to avoid making personal interpretation of the underlying meaning and instead relay as exact as possible what has been said and how it was said so that the client can in…

Yes, skilled professional translators who are native-level in both languages are possibly the closest to a perfect translation you can find and arguably they are one of the reasons that international diplomacy is at all workable (though they are still imperfect, purely because languages represent concepts with different nuances, and translating the nuance of any given phrase could require distilling an entire lifetime of cultural experience into a few sentences). That being said, I doubt you'll find one on HN who is going to bother to translate a Hindi video about how to create spam PRs, so you'll have to make do with a native speaker (who isn't a professional translator) has said -- hence my comment.

And my follow-up comment about being suspicious was about the vast majority of people who do translations (especially online), and I would go so far as to argue that some degree of suspicion should also be applied when newspapers use translations as though they are direct quotations. But I wasn't (generally speaking) talking about professional translators.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#477

Post by machinelabo » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 3:43 AM UTC

aniforprez wrote: post #301

avighnay wrote: post #270

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…

I disagree. As an Indian, our pride is one of the biggest problems. Not achieving much but taking a lot of credit for it. We even take pride in Indians that leave for abroad and do exceptionally well - CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, MasterCard are not Indians in terms of their citizenship. They're of Indian ethnicity.

To the foreigners (especially Americans) - I cannot make this up. When I was in 6th standard, we had a teacher that said without flinching, or perhaps completely deluded that - 90% of NASA employees are Indians. We knew this is bullshit even when in the 90's when there was no internet.

Currently, we've got the Indian media tied up with taking pride in the fact that Kamala Harris is Indian.

It's frankly embarrassing how much undeserved pride we constantly seek.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#478

Post by raverbashing » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 6:35 AM UTC

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.

That's a ridiculous generalization

I didn't see lots of Italians creating a PR just to get a T-Shirt

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#479

Post by msla » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 6:45 AM UTC

pferde wrote: post #271

msla wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Misaligned incentives always cause trouble, scapegoats not withstanding. Yes. Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. Stepping on a soapbox, I think a certain kind of economics thinking should be introduced to students at a reasonably young age, no later than secondary education, that thinking being "Incentive Analysis" where students are taught to think through where various people's and groups' incentives a…

Check your faulty logic there. The statement "if A, then B", does not imply "if not A, then not B". There's nothing wrong with accuracy of "If you aren't paying, you're the product".

It isn't my faulty logic.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#480

Post by belorn » Sat, Oct 03, 2020, 8:08 AM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #476

belorn wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have huge respect for the difficult job of translators and there is a definitive distinction between a paraphrase and a quote. I personal know professional translators and a key aspect of that role that they like to talk about is how they are proud to avoid making personal interpretation of the underlying meaning and instead relay as exact as possible what has been said and how it was said so that the client can in…

Yes, skilled professional translators who are native-level in both languages are possibly the closest to a perfect translation you can find and arguably they are one of the reasons that international diplomacy is at all workable (though they are still imperfect, purely because languages represent concepts with different nuances, and translating the nuance of any given phrase could require distilling an entire lifetim…

I don't think that I will get a professional translation but sometimes HN do surprise me, and I generally consider it worth a shot to ask for it when I see two people making quotes with quotations marks about the same translation.

I fully agree that translation should make one suspicious, especially those involving politics. When news in my native language has translations from English (second language) that sounds just a bit too much on the nose it usually prompt me to go and read the original source. Almost every time i find that the original statements involve a lot of contextual nuances.