I love curl.
We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
521–530 of 653 posts
Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indian here (~15+ years in tech). I've seen this behavior a lot, and unfortunately, I did some of this myself earlier in my career. Based on my own experience, here are a few reasons (could be a lot more): 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as…
In my experience working with developers from India, there are two ways: 1. You have no authority and they ignore you. 2. You have authority and they become yes-men. Real dialogue: - Is it done? - Yes! But not yet.
The sweet spot is being authoritative without being overbearing. When leadership feels supportive rather than controlling, people engage honestly... and that balance comes from experience.
Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
#523Why is cURL specifically receiving so many slop contributions? Or is this a recent phenomenon for every open-source project, and cURL are the ones most spoken of? First time commenting on HN!
It’s not just them, but curl is one of the most popular open source projects in existence and it’s used in areas where security is a significant concern. The security industry has a lot of emphasis on someone’s portfolio for hiring, which isn’t bad (it beats “what frat were you in?”) but it means that there are a ton of early career people thinking that the path to a better job is getting credited for CVEs on major projects.
That’s a bad combination with LLMs which are almost perfect for letting the user think they’re being more productive than they actually are because the output sounds authoritative. You don’t have to be acting in bad faith to submit a slop report, just being inexperienced and over-confident will work if you don’t have enough experience in the area to reason about the security of the entire system.
Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
I contribute regularly to some major open source projects and it’s happening here too. So many issues that aren’t issues. Constant “fixing” of documentation that doesn’t need to be fixed. Bug reports that aren’t bugs, followed by a bad PR “fixing” the “bug.” Or YOLOing an LLM PR to change major behavior that users are relying on. And I click and the authors are always brand new, with only vibe coded or examples proje…
GitHub PM here. From what we've seen, you're right about the motivation; I've also seen plenty of job ads where "significant contribution to open source" is something that's called out explicitly as a valid substitute for professional experience in the area. While that's always well-intentioned and creates many benefits for the OSS community, the flip side is that it can also lead to the kind of problems you're seein…
Thanks a lot for taking this seriously. I regularly contribute but am not a “maintainer” so can’t really turn off PRs or anything, nor do I think that’s the right thing in this case. But some signal to spot these accounts at a glance before I go through and try to repro their issue or spend time engaging would be cool. Or immediate signal on “new accounts” (on HN usernames are green for like 30 days), or “account age vs PR velocity” would be interesting to me. Old accounts with regular PRs or Issues are not a prob, but the new accounts that just spam low quality issues and PRs are maddening.
Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moderate an airline subreddit, and it's interesting that many of the lazy or entitled-sounding questions (e.g. "can I get compensation for this?") come from people flying to/from Indian cities.
Honestly that's just the massive population talking. There really isn't a "Hindi web" for India unlike for the Chinese, so we all come to roost in the WWW. Hence you'll get bad questions like these but you'll also get YouTube videos on obscure engineering and science topics, which I think is a fair deal. The Chinese web is on similar lines, although there is a lot more country bashing, especially against Indians and…
India is maybe 10% of the English speakers on earth.
It's not the population size that's talking.
Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
#526I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…
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Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
#527Creating crap vuln reports or PRs on popular OSS projects has been an issue long before LLMs. Remember Hacktoberfest? Students would often abuse it since there’s no adult in the room to teach them how to behave. I guess this is one hard way to f around and find out. But this is by no means condoning this sort of behavior. Point is, LLMs made the situation more dire: it’s cheap to generate code, whereas reviewing stil…
It's never fine to be rude. Moving off github into a more niche platform was the best choice I have ever made to curb such zero-effort issue and feature requests. It raises the barrier just enough. On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping. I participated in projects where the approach is to start a discussion on a forum first, and I get the same feeling you have as a tech gu…
> On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping
Seems like a completely appropriate way to handle things if you're still on Github. You said yourself the spam drove you off.
They could let people who are proven not to be spammers open PRs directly.
Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
#528I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…
I was going to comment something similar. I was reading some GitHub comments earlier and the AI tone and structure in the comments posted by some users made me feel really uneasy for some reason. I know a Brazilian who puts lots of emails through ChatGPT because they aren't confident in their English, but this seemed to be AI generating the majority of the content of the message too.
That person should stop. I give a lot of leeway to anyway who ends with "(English is not my first language, sorry for mistakes)" or if they also post it in their original language (if I'm confused I can machine translate parts of it if the confusion isn't obvious, which it actually always has been for any continental language IME).
Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only on surface. The difference is the LLM doesn't know it doesn't know. An LLM provides the best solition it has regardless of whether that solution is in any way fit for purpose.
If you inspect the Chain of Thought summaries, the LLM often knows full well what it is doing.
That's not knowing. That's just parotting in smaller chunks.
Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
#530I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…
> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I cal…
> Is this cultural?
Its incentives. If you’re an Indian student in India, unless you go to a prestigious university, your prospects of landing a job, let alone a good one are very small. Even tech companies that claim to be meritocratic elsewhere, rarely screen resumes beyond the top universities in India. The only other real prospect is to get your resume to stand out. Open source contributions, research papers etc are some ways to do that. And the talented ones make contributions, while the rest just try to fake it in the hopes to make it (it obviously doesn’t work).
There are similar incentives if you want your college application to stand out if you’re trying to go abroad for higher education. And if you’re already outside India, those incentives extend to job applications outside India. If you’re an international student looking for a job, even if you have work experience at known multinational companies, if it’s in India, the experience doesn’t count.
It’s all about incentives and responding to them.