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We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

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Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#541

Post by wrs »

mnw21cam wrote: post #248
spicyusername wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

has nothing to do with open source long time ago Sourceforge is almost 30 years old. GitHub almost 20. How long does something have to be done a certain way for it to be "to do with"? I would say we're now two generations deep of software engineers who came up with open source software commonly being mediated through public issue trackers. That isn't to say it needs to stay that way, just that I think a lot of people…

Thanks for making me feel old.

I'll just say that I once installed Emacs from a 9-track magtape that someone mailed to me.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#542

Post by cortesoft »

ectospheno wrote: post #356
amiga386 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is sad, sorry to hear it. But at the same time, sometimes you have to really persevere to get a bug fixed. Consider the perspective of the maintainer of a popular project: to them, you're one person in a big queue of people all reporting problems. Most issues turn out to be "I need free technical support, which you don't offer, so I'll phrase it in the form of a bug", and it saps their time to look into the deta…

[flagged]

It’s literally not their job, either.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#543

Post by littlecranky67 »

nicpottier wrote: post #362
littlecranky67 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is cultural - the whole "not losing face" thing. In a project, I once was squad lead - I was onsite, my squad members were in Bangalore of course. Same experience as you. Once I wanted to talk about a piece of code that we need to improve and refactor, and I was acting in good faith calling the dev that commited that code. When I braught up the code on my screen to start a pair programming, he immediately denied h…

Pretty sure the right move as soon as he said "I didn't write that" was to just say. "It isn't important who wrote it, we all make mistakes, let's see together how we could have done better."

Today, I would maybe agree and have grown wiser. But software engineering is 50% failure management. And admitting failure should be normal for every level, I am very open and outspoken that I (just as every other guy) makes errors all day. We literally have error management system in place because of that - Bugtrackers, Test pyramid, QA departments etc. It is simple not helpful if people not take accountability and grow on their mistakes.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#544

Post by grayhatter »

anArbitraryOne wrote: post #177

Nice. But it deters people like me who aren't totally confident in sending reports, trading false positives for false negatives

> Nice. But it deters people like me who aren't totally confident in sending reports, trading false positives for false negatives

There's no such thing as a reasonable "false positive" on a security report. There is such a thing as a false positive on a bug report. (A real bug, that happens to have no security impact, is still a true positive, just without a security risk)

If you can make it crash, or behave incorrectly, or have some repeatable, weird behavior; but you have no idea how you could exploit that for an articulable advantage, or access to the system you shouldn't have. What you have is a bug, not a security issue. You can, and should submit a bug report.

Then, critically; "if you waste our time" seems to be an important part of the statement.

If you don't know, you suspect it's a security bug because you shouldn't be able to do this, and it is leaking information that you think is suspicious, and you can easily demonstrate that you can make it happen on demand. And you report that bug, and make it easy for them to understand and either confirm the security, or reject because [reason]. You haven't wasted anyone's time and this wouldn't apply to your bug.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#545

Post by direwolf20 »

boca_honey wrote: post #539
snowmobile wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid. What's stopping any open source maintainer from charging for their work?

Irrelevance. The moment you paywall a project, it’s a death sentence. Unless you have a unique and highly sought-after product (top 1%), someone else will just make a free alternative.

Some projects were successful at charging for custom work and special support — sqlite for instance.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#546

Post by wtallis »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #475
otikik wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "we will ban and publicly shame you if you waste our time" is a very clear and adult boundary.

It could be a childish overreaction. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46718635 As always it depends on the circumstances, but should default to quietly closing with WONTFIX. Others have said Daniel is typically helpful and respectful so there we go.

What you linked to is not really evidence, just an unsubstantiated allegation. Over the top public shaming is something that should be pretty easy to provide direct evidence of. When Linus Torvalds does it, it gets repeatedly brought up in forums like this for many years.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#547

Post by ghostly_s »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #465
mixedbit wrote: post #156

Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to…

I don’t agree with this newer idea that has arisen that FOSS authors are “victims.” It’s up to you to set boundaries (or prices) and communicate them, like an adult. If one is still rude and entitled then ban them from the repo, or let people fork, but not before looking in the mirror first and reflecting at your own behavior. (I’m trying to imagine folks painting xfree86 maintainers as victims back in the day when x…

Afaict github allows you to disable 'Issues' per repo, yet few do. I presume that means they are okay engaging with issues on some level, but I find it odd almost none post a policy/expectations around them.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#548

Post by boca_honey »

direwolf20 wrote: post #545
boca_honey wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrelevance. The moment you paywall a project, it’s a death sentence. Unless you have a unique and highly sought-after product (top 1%), someone else will just make a free alternative.

Some projects were successful at charging for custom work and special support — sqlite for instance.

Exactly, that's an example of a top 1% project. It even has a detailed Wikipedia article in 35 languages. That model won't fly with small to medium-sized, regular projects.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#549

Post by banannaise »

freakynit wrote: post #126
causalscience wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

I've found that this is also true of American engineers, particularly those fresh out of college. So many people have internalized that open curiosity will yield no result at best and direct punishment at worst.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#550

Post by hypeatei »

zkmon wrote: post #118

There's going to be avalanches of code everywhere. You can no longer expect some human to know what some code does or maintain it.

Which is exactly what the AI companies want. An unmaintainable mountain of code that you need their cloud-based, paywalled LLMs to handle for you.
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