21 ms·

GitHub removes 5 years of One Hour One Life designer's work

310 points by sharjeelsayed 7y ago

londons_explore 7y ago
From being on the other side of this kind of "big company screws little guy for no reason"... In ~80% of cases, there is more to the story than meets the eye. For example maybe a legal complaint came in, or someone was DoS attacking that repo and it put the whole GitHub service at risk.
- nraynaud 7y ago
  and so you don't send an email?
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    Maybe they did, but the mail's stuck in a spam filter or sent to an old email address... Maybe they tried to call him but he rejected the call? Only the stories that sound unreasonable get viral attention.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  That's why online services will never really be a complete alternative to using your own hardware. They might not get their computers stolen or catch fire, but they destroy your data intentionally when they decide they don't like you. The failure modes are different but still present.
  - nraynaud 7y ago
    I think there is still an argument to be made that a it's worth it for a lot of companies (in particular in the beginning). Because your pokemon game or your scooter company going offline is not really really a big deal. And then you reach a size where more things are possible like an SLA, people you can call on the phone, and the possibility to shame the provider. But it's true that each company probably need to think for themselves and their circumstances, and do at least a mental computation every six months: do I need offsite backup, a second cloud provider in cold standby, in hot standby, should I look at a colocation, should I look at square meters and ethernet crimping tools?
- x3ro 7y ago
  There's always two sides to a story. That being said, it seems like every other week now there's a story of a cloud service or provider shutting something down or removing something, without our with very little notice, and the only recourse for somebody who cannot afford an army of lawyers is calling them out on Twitter and hoping for the best. This is an alarming trend, and highlights how decentralization and, at the same time, more accountability for this sort of action from these providers is necessary (through regulation?). Sadly it seems like at least the EU is currently walking in the opposite direction, which favors large corporations and the content industry :(
  - gloflo 7y ago
    > This is an alarming trend This has always been the case, ever since BBS operators. Data on other people's machines is data on other people's machines.
    - klez 7y ago
      This is true. The only difference is that now there's more money (and people's livelihood) on the table. Or even just bigger numbers.
- trickstra 7y ago
  so in 20% of the cases it really is a big company just screwing a little guy for no reason?
  - buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
    Or there are more than 2 options I suppose
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    The remaining 20% are usually incompetence or malice on the part of the big company...
- pimmen 7y ago
  I a legal complaint came in I would have figured that you start a far more transparent, cohesive process where the one accused has some information of what's going on and feels some agency. If there's a DoS, inform the party about it.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  It could be a BS/extortionate copyright strike, as it is becoming ever more common recently
- PunchTornado 7y ago
  there's no excuse to not email the guy.
- Dayshine 7y ago
  The irony is that Jason is the "big company screws the little guy for no reason" with his own work. He licensed his work at "Do whatever you want with it, absolutely no restrictions, and no permission necessary.". Then when someone started making money off his work, he turned around and started litigation.
Animats 7y ago
Huh? It's a game. On Steam.[1] It's not a copy of anything; it's quite original. Has good reviews. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/
FullyFunctional 7y ago
That is terrible and a good reminder that using the "cloud" means that you don't really control your destiny. A quick googling around reveal a couple of options for backing up everything from github (but I'm not sure what you'd do with a backup if you got kicked out like the OP).
- jarfil 7y ago
  It's also a good reminder of why data portability is important. For the git part, you can just git push to another service, even a selfhosted one, and be up and running in no time, and GitHub does keep pages and wikis in git... but all the tickets, that's a problem, and why I don't trust GitHub to be a canonical source for development.
  - est31 7y ago
    Gitlab has a feature to copy an entire Github repo including issues and issue threads, etc. You can also enable options for it to act as a mirror or to make GitHub act as the mirror for Gitlab. I'm not sure whether there is a mode to keep the issue threads synced as well without manual intervention. That'd be full data portability.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    That is generally a good thing about cloud applications that you are forced to bundle everything. Most of the software I run on AWS could easily be transported to Google, Microsoft or some other service. Sure, there are exceptions and optimizations for specific services but overall it did increase portability of server applications quite a bit. Maybe the times were you just need that legacy windows 2000 server encapsulated with 7 firewalls and proxies are finally over. I usually prefer to host my stuff on private servers, but people unreasonably want to put as much software as possible into cloud providers. I think the reason for that is more often cocaine abuse and wanting to be hip instead of technical/financial arguments, but it is what it is.
- chaz 7y ago
  I think the reminder is just that backups are necessary, and cloud isn't a required condition. I had a bare-metal host turn off my server because they were concerned I was violating the trademark of a big company with what I was serving. That big company was my client and I had permission, but the host shot first and asked questions later (actually, I had to call them when I saw the site went down).
gridlockd 7y ago
The only lesson to be learned here, one that needs to be repeated time and time again: Don't put all your eggs into one basket.
- bsder 7y ago
  The lesson to be learned here is "Don't use GitHub." Use something that you can run your own instance of (like GitLab) and make the cloud version a shadow copy of your local one. That way if they pull the rug out from under you, you actually have some way of dealing with the issue.
- unixhero 7y ago
  Don't put all your projects in one cloud And... Use Gitlab
  - majkinetor 7y ago
    Gitlab too had incidents, remember db backup fiasco ? I know few devs that lost issues and wikis that day. Just backup your repos once a year, lets not be paranoid.
    - unixhero 7y ago
      Yeah sure. But since Gitlab is possible to run self-hosted, you can back up the entire instance from the public cloud to the self-hosted version. That's pretty great.
      - majkinetor 7y ago
        By the same logic you can have a script that does git pull locally as cron job all the time along with exporting issues (wikis are just another implicit repo). The point was that nobody does that for backup purposes in advance, and maintaining local Gitlab along with supportive infrastructure is not trivial task.
    - antisemiotic 7y ago
diminoten 7y ago
I don't understand, doesn't he have the repo locally?
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Might be annoying if he uses Github wikis, pull requests, issues, etc
Tetris1 7y ago
We need to hear 2 sides of a story. Github does not just 'delete' files. Author should contact them first and resolve any issues there is. And if github refuse that, than you can cry a river.
- benj111 7y ago
  Is it not incumbent upon Github to contact the author before deleting his account?
  - glenneroo 7y ago
    Maybe they did but it ended up in his spam filter or he unintentionally ignored it? As GP said, we need 2 sides to the story to make any judgements.
- Chazprime 7y ago
  I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the author to be provided an explanation when the repo was taken down.
abetusk 7y ago
Jason Rohrer [1] is the author of Passage [2]. His latest game, "One Hour One Life" [3], is a massively multiplayer online game where your character has only one hour of life. You start off as a baby and are dependent on others for shelter and heat before you're able to be autonomous. Eventually you die of old age but your impact on the world/server persists. I recommend anyone interested to purchase the game [4] or at least look at video stream of gameplay [5]. When I purchased the game, the source code came with it and as far as I could tell was dedicated to the public domain. This was client code so I'm not sure if the server code is released anywhere (maybe this was what was taken down at GitHub). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Rohrer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Rohrer [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_(video_game) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hour_One_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hour_One_Life [4] http://onehouronelife.com/ http://onehouronelife.com/ [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu7kXKuShks&list=PLcA1QDRup-hZXT8_lcVXaXcRyR-nJgfih https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu7kXKuShks&list=PLcA1QDRup-...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- aasasd 7y ago
  He's also idiosyncratic in the approach to the rest of his life. When he practiced ‘simple living,’ in his front yard he had (or still has?) a small wild garden with uncut grass, where he of course walked barefoot and his children played naked (iirc). He was taken to the court by neighbors on the issue of grass, and appeared there with a tome of paper citing local laws and research that says cut grass exudes harmful substances. Whereupon he was left to do as he pleases. The article on Rohrer, which included this anecdote, theorized that his court appearance proved his gardening choices to be a matter of principle and not just negligence, thus changing the perception of him by the neighbors. Meanwhile, his ‘Passage’ is in MOMA's initial videogame collection, and he's had a solo exhibition at The Davis Museum.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    It would seem that he has some idiosyncratic neighbors, then. But they are not alone, a certain amount of people are strangely obsessed by the grass of their neighbors. My kids loved the dandelions of my grass and I let them grow, but then I received regular bullying by the old lady next to our place, who had a "perfect" french style garden, and looked at us as if we were some kind of savages. I actually found this bevavior rather funny.
dlahoda 7y ago
there is fork https://gitlab.com/_zed_/OneLife https://gitlab.com/_zed_/OneLife (with keyboard as it says)
nbrempel 7y ago
Seems it’s been a busy week for these reminders not to trust centralized services. I think the the “Fediverse” will become more popular over the next few years.
- rambojazz 7y ago
  There are in fact people who are already trying to "federate" code collaboration https://nth.io/notice/7652 https://nth.io/notice/7652
  - 0815test 7y ago
    That's interesting. IIRC Linus Torvalds even came up with a tool to make "distributed/federated" code collaboration quite easy, avoiding any reliance on a single centralized host. Maybe we should start making use of it.
    - aitchnyu 7y ago
      Decentralized VCS -> centralized decentralised VCS -> federated centralized decentralised VCS and so on.
    - rambojazz 7y ago
      Is this a sarcastic comment? Because it sounds like you're comparing two completely different things. Federation addresses a completely different problem than tracking file changes. It's supposed to make it simpler to collaborate across different platforms, whether you're using the command line or a platform the likes of github, gitolite, gitlab, or a desktop IDE.
brendyn 7y ago
https://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/ "We collect and preserve software in source code form, because software embodies our technical and scientific knowledge and humanity cannot afford the risk of losing it. Software is a precious part of our cultural heritage. We curate and make accessible all the software we collect, because only by sharing it we can guarantee its preservation in the very long term. "
emilfihlman 7y ago
What's the reason? What the heck is Github doing.
zimpenfish 7y ago
FWIW, https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife appears to be there at the moment (20190605T0812+0100) (along with 22 other repositories.)
- dinglejungle 7y ago
  Yeah, seems to be back up. That link (along with https://github.com/jasonrohrer https://github.com/jasonrohrer) was 404ing when this was submitted.
notaboutdave 7y ago
Setting up your own git remote takes minutes. Github is just a pretty interface with bells and whistles. I think more people should go self hosted. It's cheaper, and none of the features are truly needed.
- ageitgey 7y ago
  > Github is just a pretty interface with bells and whistles. I think more people should go self hosted. It's cheaper, and none of the features are truly needed. Maybe none of the Github features are useful to you in how you use it, but I find Github the most productive way to work with a distributed dev team that I've ever found by a large margin. It's an amazing system for productivity of large dev teams and a dream to work with if it fits your use case. The biggest feature for me is the whole Pull Request flow with integration between filing the original issue, the code changes to fix it with inline code reviews and tracking everything through to a release all with a few clicks. And all of it is in a format you can link to in an email or drop into a chat, even referencing the specific lines of the diff you care about. It's really an amazing system that most of us take for granted. Different people have different needs. And for a lot of people, git itself is just the (excellent) engine but really they want a whole car.
- ZuLuuuuuu 7y ago
  It might not be cheaper depending on your needs. You won't get all the features GitHub provides with just a git server. You can install something like GitLab, Gogs or Gitea but then you need to do the maintenance yourself which is not minutes. Add to that the user permission system which Bitbucket like services provide out of the box (I don't know about GitHub), for example a certain team in your company can access certain repositories, interns can access other repositories etc. Add to that when you want one of your customers to have a read-only access to a repository, so you not only have to manage user permissions, but your whole IT structure needs to provide outside access to a certain part of your network, in a secure way. This is achievable but it certainly wouldn't take just minutes. Services like Github and Bitbucket provide all these features for a reasonable price, and they have dedicated sysadmins working on providing a secure service 24/7, who would do a better job than a lot of companies can do with their 1-2 person team doing sysadmin things in their free time, besides their main daily workload.
billpg 7y ago
I feel like I need more information.
- cdubzzz 7y ago
  Twitter in a nutshell.
iaeqi 7y ago
Saying "they removed my life's work" when you has a local copy of it is, at best, intellectually dishonest.
- parksy 7y ago
  Not really, that's what physically happened. Local copy may have been deleted. Developer may have just got a new laptop and traded the old one. Argue at length over having multiple redundant backups perhaps, but the simple truth is his work was deleted, and it's only by luck (or foresight) he has a local copy. That it even happened is a huge problem, whataboutism aside. My trust in the longevity and stability of the service offered by GitHub is significantly eroded by this news.
rurban 7y ago
Must have been a mistake. It's there again: https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife I also found this comment on his site: Tarr (1,819.0 hours on record) Posted 42 hours ago "Can't recommend the game to anyone who either doesn't have 15+ years of game development or doesn't know Jason personally. Game dynamics are too rich for a filthy casual like myself. If you want to make a suggestion please learn to read spaghetti code and hope the copypasta is as delicious as it is hard to untangle." Which is interesting, because Jason's C++ code is one of the very best I've ever read. I normally hate C++, but his code is beautiful and very readable. Like out of a book or tutorial. E.g. https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/gameSource/AutoUpdatePage.cpp https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/gameSourc... Also his dischord game support channel is filled with hate about him. Not only by this guy, but by many seemingly childish individuals. Looks like another gamer gate to me.
- V-2 7y ago
  I'm admittedly not proficient in C++, but I can't see what's beatiful about the code. Looking at the specific example you linked to... inconsistent formatting and "magic values" aside, what's the point of, say: if( !relaunched ) { printf( "Relaunch failed\n" ); setSignal( "relaunchFailed" ); } else { printf( "Relaunched... but did not exit?\n" ); setSignal( "relaunchFailed" ); } Instead of simply: if( !relaunched ) { printf( "Relaunch failed\n" ); } else { printf( "Relaunched... but did not exit?\n" ); } setSignal( "relaunchFailed" ); ? Such copy-pasta style redundancy does count as somewhat sloppy in my book. And do C++ books or tutorials recommend cramming over 20 KLOC in a single file? https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/gameSource/LivingLifePage.cpp https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/gameSourc... I don't have any bone to pick with the guy, whom I don't know and who I'm sure may be very talented. I only fail to see why code quality, beauty even, would be considered a forte of this particular project.
  - kabwj 7y ago
    It’s probably a mistake done after refactoring. The guy is only human you know.
narrowtux 7y ago
According to an earlier tweet [1], the reports are from users who are mad they were banned from his discord server. > Actually, it seems like this "report" to discord came on the heels of us banning a member for posting offensive content. That member then, to seek revenge, reported the entire server to Discord, and told us about it. Nice. I've experienced similar immature behaviour in the Minecraft community back when it was at its popularity peak. [1] https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1119751548542652416 https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1119751548542652416
- AgentME 7y ago
  I've helped run a forum in the past, and holy shit is it scarily easy to make stupidly-determined enemies. Even people who joined just to spam offensive content would act like they were the one victimized when banned and would do all sorts of things to "even the score". I think these people would emotionally forget that they joined looking for a fight and earned their ban in the first place, and would then ride the high of righteous indignation.
  - whatever_dude 7y ago
    Online forums for random topics used to be the last refuge of the mentally unstable. I've moderated several forums and saw this behavior first hand; a banned user would spend so much time and effort trying to stir the pot and get back at the forum's owners for their Injustice. I often wondered why would they choose to waste so much time in a niche forum rather than go do something productive. Naturally, nowadays they have online forums that _cater_ to this kinds of individual (4chan, some subreddits, etc). Nature, um.. finds a way.
  - arkades 7y ago
    This is not unique to forums. Anyone that’s owned a retail or retail-analog business (eg, medicine) has to deal with precisely this sort of crazy-ass behavior on a reasonably frequent basis. A tiny sliver of the population is effing nuts.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  And how was there no system in place to prevent one disgruntled person from taking down someone else's entire project on a whim, without evidence?
k_ 7y ago
Nat Friedman just replied to this tweet: > Sincere apologies Jason. We will investigate what happened here and learn from it. https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1136216389054881792 https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1136216389054881792
denkmoon 7y ago
<Big corporation> removes <large body of work> without notice or consultation. How often do we have these articles? Averaging once a month? Maybe more? How often does it need to happen before people realise that your $10/mo means jack shit to a multi-million dollar company, and "accidents" like this are just a cost of business to them. Solving the problem properly would cost a lot more than just letting people fall through the cracks of automation.
- SteveSmith16384 7y ago
  So what should we do? What price do we need to pay to exceed the "jack shit" threshold? Specific recommendations please.
  - dooglius 7y ago
    Do your own backups on physical drives you own of anything truly irreplaceable
    - arkades 7y ago
      Or host your backups on DigitalOcean.
      - yeldarb 7y ago
        Maybe not the best choice in light of them deleting this guy’s entire app, db, and backups the other day: https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089 https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089
        arkades 7y ago
        Yeah, I didn’t miss that. I was being snarky.
        glenneroo 7y ago
        I'm guessing GP was making a joke, considering the recent DO "scandal". BTW as was made clear by multiple HN commenters in other discussions about this incident, nothing was actually deleted, the customer's account was suspended for 30+ hours.
rusk 7y ago
well the beauty of git is that the entire repository is more than likely cloned in a few different places and is easily reproduced. Also makes it nice and easy to move elsewhere.
RickJWagner 7y ago
I suppose it's good to review all your big assumptions once in a while. OP assumed GitHub would hold his code (and make it available) forever, seemingly a good assumption. Now he's massively inconvenienced. Time for me to look around, consider all my big assumptions....
millisecond 7y ago
The frustrating thing to me is that this guy will get this solved and we’ll all move on. He’s reasonably well known and had enough Twitter juice to get attention. All the small people who end up in this situation, whatever it truly is, without those resources will remain screwed.
- uponcoffee 7y ago
  I get what you're saying, and agree to a degree. On the other hand this is like not backing up your hard drive. Having a single point of failure and expecting anything less is... Like you said, he's big enough to shout into the abyss and get a response, while others have to accept that a single point of failure is exactly that. If we changed the headline to hacker deletes '5 years worth of work', the response would be different; two-factor should have been enabled, should have used a strong password, one password per account, yubi-key, etc. The onus would have been on the developer. There are plenty of free hosting services for repos, so there's no reason IMO to not maintain a mirror.
- bspammer 7y ago
  Looks like you are right, he's already back up and running: https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1136304496882044928 https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1136304496882044928
- tdy_err 7y ago
  GitHub (CEO) claims customer support looked into this prior to any tweets FWIW
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
I'm sure he'll get it resolved. But come on people, "in the cloud" doesn't mean it is safe. If you care at all about what you're storing in the cloud, make copies to store locally and offsite.
_bxg1 7y ago
How does this keep happening, across all these different services? The very least you could do is give the account a few days' warning via email, which is totally automatable. There's no excuse for not doing that.
magashna 7y ago
5 years of work doesn't have a backup can't be that important
mitchtbaum 7y ago
I just backed up ~100 repos & ~500 issues, totaling ~100 MB of json and git tracked code. Everything's right there waiting for you. https://github.com/josegonzalez/python-github-backup https://github.com/josegonzalez/python-github-backup
srndh 7y ago
What solution exist for me to keep a complete copy of my github account offline or keep an uptodate backup? Mainly all the repos, I started and just forked.
JohnFen 7y ago
Surely they weren't keeping everything only on GitHub, and had locally stored copies, right? Right?

310 points by sharjeelsayed 7y ago

From being on the other side of this kind of "big company screws little guy for no reason"... In ~80% of cases, there is more to the story than meets the eye. For example maybe a legal complaint came in, or someone was DoS attacking that repo and it put the whole GitHub service at risk.

nraynaud 7y ago
and so you don't send an email?
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Maybe they did, but the mail's stuck in a spam filter or sent to an old email address... Maybe they tried to call him but he rejected the call? Only the stories that sound unreasonable get viral attention.
lopmotr 7y ago
That's why online services will never really be a complete alternative to using your own hardware. They might not get their computers stolen or catch fire, but they destroy your data intentionally when they decide they don't like you. The failure modes are different but still present.
- nraynaud 7y ago
  I think there is still an argument to be made that a it's worth it for a lot of companies (in particular in the beginning). Because your pokemon game or your scooter company going offline is not really really a big deal. And then you reach a size where more things are possible like an SLA, people you can call on the phone, and the possibility to shame the provider. But it's true that each company probably need to think for themselves and their circumstances, and do at least a mental computation every six months: do I need offsite backup, a second cloud provider in cold standby, in hot standby, should I look at a colocation, should I look at square meters and ethernet crimping tools?
x3ro 7y ago
There's always two sides to a story. That being said, it seems like every other week now there's a story of a cloud service or provider shutting something down or removing something, without our with very little notice, and the only recourse for somebody who cannot afford an army of lawyers is calling them out on Twitter and hoping for the best. This is an alarming trend, and highlights how decentralization and, at the same time, more accountability for this sort of action from these providers is necessary (through regulation?). Sadly it seems like at least the EU is currently walking in the opposite direction, which favors large corporations and the content industry :(
- gloflo 7y ago
  > This is an alarming trend This has always been the case, ever since BBS operators. Data on other people's machines is data on other people's machines.
  - klez 7y ago
    This is true. The only difference is that now there's more money (and people's livelihood) on the table. Or even just bigger numbers.
trickstra 7y ago
so in 20% of the cases it really is a big company just screwing a little guy for no reason?
- buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
  Or there are more than 2 options I suppose
- londons_explore 7y ago
  The remaining 20% are usually incompetence or malice on the part of the big company...
pimmen 7y ago
I a legal complaint came in I would have figured that you start a far more transparent, cohesive process where the one accused has some information of what's going on and feels some agency. If there's a DoS, inform the party about it.
raverbashing 7y ago
It could be a BS/extortionate copyright strike, as it is becoming ever more common recently
PunchTornado 7y ago
there's no excuse to not email the guy.
Dayshine 7y ago
The irony is that Jason is the "big company screws the little guy for no reason" with his own work. He licensed his work at "Do whatever you want with it, absolutely no restrictions, and no permission necessary.". Then when someone started making money off his work, he turned around and started litigation.

Animats 7y ago

Huh? It's a game. On Steam.[1] It's not a copy of anything; it's quite original. Has good reviews. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/

FullyFunctional 7y ago

That is terrible and a good reminder that using the "cloud" means that you don't really control your destiny. A quick googling around reveal a couple of options for backing up everything from github (but I'm not sure what you'd do with a backup if you got kicked out like the OP).

jarfil 7y ago
It's also a good reminder of why data portability is important. For the git part, you can just git push to another service, even a selfhosted one, and be up and running in no time, and GitHub does keep pages and wikis in git... but all the tickets, that's a problem, and why I don't trust GitHub to be a canonical source for development.
- est31 7y ago
  Gitlab has a feature to copy an entire Github repo including issues and issue threads, etc. You can also enable options for it to act as a mirror or to make GitHub act as the mirror for Gitlab. I'm not sure whether there is a mode to keep the issue threads synced as well without manual intervention. That'd be full data portability.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  That is generally a good thing about cloud applications that you are forced to bundle everything. Most of the software I run on AWS could easily be transported to Google, Microsoft or some other service. Sure, there are exceptions and optimizations for specific services but overall it did increase portability of server applications quite a bit. Maybe the times were you just need that legacy windows 2000 server encapsulated with 7 firewalls and proxies are finally over. I usually prefer to host my stuff on private servers, but people unreasonably want to put as much software as possible into cloud providers. I think the reason for that is more often cocaine abuse and wanting to be hip instead of technical/financial arguments, but it is what it is.
chaz 7y ago
I think the reminder is just that backups are necessary, and cloud isn't a required condition. I had a bare-metal host turn off my server because they were concerned I was violating the trademark of a big company with what I was serving. That big company was my client and I had permission, but the host shot first and asked questions later (actually, I had to call them when I saw the site went down).

gridlockd 7y ago

The only lesson to be learned here, one that needs to be repeated time and time again: Don't put all your eggs into one basket.

bsder 7y ago
The lesson to be learned here is "Don't use GitHub." Use something that you can run your own instance of (like GitLab) and make the cloud version a shadow copy of your local one. That way if they pull the rug out from under you, you actually have some way of dealing with the issue.
unixhero 7y ago
Don't put all your projects in one cloud And... Use Gitlab
- majkinetor 7y ago
  Gitlab too had incidents, remember db backup fiasco ? I know few devs that lost issues and wikis that day. Just backup your repos once a year, lets not be paranoid.
  - unixhero 7y ago
    Yeah sure. But since Gitlab is possible to run self-hosted, you can back up the entire instance from the public cloud to the self-hosted version. That's pretty great.
    - majkinetor 7y ago
      By the same logic you can have a script that does git pull locally as cron job all the time along with exporting issues (wikis are just another implicit repo). The point was that nobody does that for backup purposes in advance, and maintaining local Gitlab along with supportive infrastructure is not trivial task.
  - antisemiotic 7y ago

diminoten 7y ago

I don't understand, doesn't he have the repo locally?

Rebelgecko 7y ago
Might be annoying if he uses Github wikis, pull requests, issues, etc

Tetris1 7y ago

We need to hear 2 sides of a story. Github does not just 'delete' files. Author should contact them first and resolve any issues there is. And if github refuse that, than you can cry a river.

benj111 7y ago
Is it not incumbent upon Github to contact the author before deleting his account?
- glenneroo 7y ago
  Maybe they did but it ended up in his spam filter or he unintentionally ignored it? As GP said, we need 2 sides to the story to make any judgements.
Chazprime 7y ago
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the author to be provided an explanation when the repo was taken down.

abetusk 7y ago

Jason Rohrer [1] is the author of Passage [2]. His latest game, "One Hour One Life" [3], is a massively multiplayer online game where your character has only one hour of life. You start off as a baby and are dependent on others for shelter and heat before you're able to be autonomous. Eventually you die of old age but your impact on the world/server persists. I recommend anyone interested to purchase the game [4] or at least look at video stream of gameplay [5]. When I purchased the game, the source code came with it and as far as I could tell was dedicated to the public domain. This was client code so I'm not sure if the server code is released anywhere (maybe this was what was taken down at GitHub). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Rohrer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Rohrer [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_(video_game) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hour_One_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hour_One_Life [4] http://onehouronelife.com/ http://onehouronelife.com/ [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu7kXKuShks&list=PLcA1QDRup-hZXT8_lcVXaXcRyR-nJgfih https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu7kXKuShks&list=PLcA1QDRup-...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aasasd 7y ago
He's also idiosyncratic in the approach to the rest of his life. When he practiced ‘simple living,’ in his front yard he had (or still has?) a small wild garden with uncut grass, where he of course walked barefoot and his children played naked (iirc). He was taken to the court by neighbors on the issue of grass, and appeared there with a tome of paper citing local laws and research that says cut grass exudes harmful substances. Whereupon he was left to do as he pleases. The article on Rohrer, which included this anecdote, theorized that his court appearance proved his gardening choices to be a matter of principle and not just negligence, thus changing the perception of him by the neighbors. Meanwhile, his ‘Passage’ is in MOMA's initial videogame collection, and he's had a solo exhibition at The Davis Museum.
- enriquto 7y ago
  It would seem that he has some idiosyncratic neighbors, then. But they are not alone, a certain amount of people are strangely obsessed by the grass of their neighbors. My kids loved the dandelions of my grass and I let them grow, but then I received regular bullying by the old lady next to our place, who had a "perfect" french style garden, and looked at us as if we were some kind of savages. I actually found this bevavior rather funny.

dlahoda 7y ago

there is fork https://gitlab.com/_zed_/OneLife https://gitlab.com/_zed_/OneLife (with keyboard as it says)

nbrempel 7y ago

Seems it’s been a busy week for these reminders not to trust centralized services. I think the the “Fediverse” will become more popular over the next few years.

rambojazz 7y ago
There are in fact people who are already trying to "federate" code collaboration https://nth.io/notice/7652 https://nth.io/notice/7652
- 0815test 7y ago
  That's interesting. IIRC Linus Torvalds even came up with a tool to make "distributed/federated" code collaboration quite easy, avoiding any reliance on a single centralized host. Maybe we should start making use of it.
  - aitchnyu 7y ago
    Decentralized VCS -> centralized decentralised VCS -> federated centralized decentralised VCS and so on.
  - rambojazz 7y ago
    Is this a sarcastic comment? Because it sounds like you're comparing two completely different things. Federation addresses a completely different problem than tracking file changes. It's supposed to make it simpler to collaborate across different platforms, whether you're using the command line or a platform the likes of github, gitolite, gitlab, or a desktop IDE.

brendyn 7y ago

https://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/ "We collect and preserve software in source code form, because software embodies our technical and scientific knowledge and humanity cannot afford the risk of losing it. Software is a precious part of our cultural heritage. We curate and make accessible all the software we collect, because only by sharing it we can guarantee its preservation in the very long term. "

emilfihlman 7y ago

What's the reason? What the heck is Github doing.

zimpenfish 7y ago

FWIW, https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife appears to be there at the moment (20190605T0812+0100) (along with 22 other repositories.)

dinglejungle 7y ago
Yeah, seems to be back up. That link (along with https://github.com/jasonrohrer https://github.com/jasonrohrer) was 404ing when this was submitted.

notaboutdave 7y ago

Setting up your own git remote takes minutes. Github is just a pretty interface with bells and whistles. I think more people should go self hosted. It's cheaper, and none of the features are truly needed.

ageitgey 7y ago
> Github is just a pretty interface with bells and whistles. I think more people should go self hosted. It's cheaper, and none of the features are truly needed. Maybe none of the Github features are useful to you in how you use it, but I find Github the most productive way to work with a distributed dev team that I've ever found by a large margin. It's an amazing system for productivity of large dev teams and a dream to work with if it fits your use case. The biggest feature for me is the whole Pull Request flow with integration between filing the original issue, the code changes to fix it with inline code reviews and tracking everything through to a release all with a few clicks. And all of it is in a format you can link to in an email or drop into a chat, even referencing the specific lines of the diff you care about. It's really an amazing system that most of us take for granted. Different people have different needs. And for a lot of people, git itself is just the (excellent) engine but really they want a whole car.
ZuLuuuuuu 7y ago
It might not be cheaper depending on your needs. You won't get all the features GitHub provides with just a git server. You can install something like GitLab, Gogs or Gitea but then you need to do the maintenance yourself which is not minutes. Add to that the user permission system which Bitbucket like services provide out of the box (I don't know about GitHub), for example a certain team in your company can access certain repositories, interns can access other repositories etc. Add to that when you want one of your customers to have a read-only access to a repository, so you not only have to manage user permissions, but your whole IT structure needs to provide outside access to a certain part of your network, in a secure way. This is achievable but it certainly wouldn't take just minutes. Services like Github and Bitbucket provide all these features for a reasonable price, and they have dedicated sysadmins working on providing a secure service 24/7, who would do a better job than a lot of companies can do with their 1-2 person team doing sysadmin things in their free time, besides their main daily workload.

billpg 7y ago

I feel like I need more information.

cdubzzz 7y ago
Twitter in a nutshell.

iaeqi 7y ago

Saying "they removed my life's work" when you has a local copy of it is, at best, intellectually dishonest.

parksy 7y ago
Not really, that's what physically happened. Local copy may have been deleted. Developer may have just got a new laptop and traded the old one. Argue at length over having multiple redundant backups perhaps, but the simple truth is his work was deleted, and it's only by luck (or foresight) he has a local copy. That it even happened is a huge problem, whataboutism aside. My trust in the longevity and stability of the service offered by GitHub is significantly eroded by this news.

rurban 7y ago

Must have been a mistake. It's there again: https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife I also found this comment on his site: Tarr (1,819.0 hours on record) Posted 42 hours ago "Can't recommend the game to anyone who either doesn't have 15+ years of game development or doesn't know Jason personally. Game dynamics are too rich for a filthy casual like myself. If you want to make a suggestion please learn to read spaghetti code and hope the copypasta is as delicious as it is hard to untangle." Which is interesting, because Jason's C++ code is one of the very best I've ever read. I normally hate C++, but his code is beautiful and very readable. Like out of a book or tutorial. E.g. https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/gameSource/AutoUpdatePage.cpp https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/gameSourc... Also his dischord game support channel is filled with hate about him. Not only by this guy, but by many seemingly childish individuals. Looks like another gamer gate to me.

V-2 7y ago
I'm admittedly not proficient in C++, but I can't see what's beatiful about the code. Looking at the specific example you linked to... inconsistent formatting and "magic values" aside, what's the point of, say: if( !relaunched ) { printf( "Relaunch failed\n" ); setSignal( "relaunchFailed" ); } else { printf( "Relaunched... but did not exit?\n" ); setSignal( "relaunchFailed" ); } Instead of simply: if( !relaunched ) { printf( "Relaunch failed\n" ); } else { printf( "Relaunched... but did not exit?\n" ); } setSignal( "relaunchFailed" ); ? Such copy-pasta style redundancy does count as somewhat sloppy in my book. And do C++ books or tutorials recommend cramming over 20 KLOC in a single file? https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/gameSource/LivingLifePage.cpp https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/gameSourc... I don't have any bone to pick with the guy, whom I don't know and who I'm sure may be very talented. I only fail to see why code quality, beauty even, would be considered a forte of this particular project.
- kabwj 7y ago
  It’s probably a mistake done after refactoring. The guy is only human you know.

narrowtux 7y ago

According to an earlier tweet [1], the reports are from users who are mad they were banned from his discord server. > Actually, it seems like this "report" to discord came on the heels of us banning a member for posting offensive content. That member then, to seek revenge, reported the entire server to Discord, and told us about it. Nice. I've experienced similar immature behaviour in the Minecraft community back when it was at its popularity peak. [1] https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1119751548542652416 https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1119751548542652416

AgentME 7y ago
I've helped run a forum in the past, and holy shit is it scarily easy to make stupidly-determined enemies. Even people who joined just to spam offensive content would act like they were the one victimized when banned and would do all sorts of things to "even the score". I think these people would emotionally forget that they joined looking for a fight and earned their ban in the first place, and would then ride the high of righteous indignation.
- whatever_dude 7y ago
  Online forums for random topics used to be the last refuge of the mentally unstable. I've moderated several forums and saw this behavior first hand; a banned user would spend so much time and effort trying to stir the pot and get back at the forum's owners for their Injustice. I often wondered why would they choose to waste so much time in a niche forum rather than go do something productive. Naturally, nowadays they have online forums that _cater_ to this kinds of individual (4chan, some subreddits, etc). Nature, um.. finds a way.
- arkades 7y ago
  This is not unique to forums. Anyone that’s owned a retail or retail-analog business (eg, medicine) has to deal with precisely this sort of crazy-ass behavior on a reasonably frequent basis. A tiny sliver of the population is effing nuts.
_bxg1 7y ago
And how was there no system in place to prevent one disgruntled person from taking down someone else's entire project on a whim, without evidence?

k_ 7y ago

Nat Friedman just replied to this tweet: > Sincere apologies Jason. We will investigate what happened here and learn from it. https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1136216389054881792 https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1136216389054881792

denkmoon 7y ago

<Big corporation> removes <large body of work> without notice or consultation. How often do we have these articles? Averaging once a month? Maybe more? How often does it need to happen before people realise that your $10/mo means jack shit to a multi-million dollar company, and "accidents" like this are just a cost of business to them. Solving the problem properly would cost a lot more than just letting people fall through the cracks of automation.

SteveSmith16384 7y ago
So what should we do? What price do we need to pay to exceed the "jack shit" threshold? Specific recommendations please.
- dooglius 7y ago
  Do your own backups on physical drives you own of anything truly irreplaceable
  - arkades 7y ago
    Or host your backups on DigitalOcean.
    - yeldarb 7y ago
      Maybe not the best choice in light of them deleting this guy’s entire app, db, and backups the other day: https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089 https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089
      - arkades 7y ago
        Yeah, I didn’t miss that. I was being snarky.
      - glenneroo 7y ago
        I'm guessing GP was making a joke, considering the recent DO "scandal". BTW as was made clear by multiple HN commenters in other discussions about this incident, nothing was actually deleted, the customer's account was suspended for 30+ hours.

rusk 7y ago

well the beauty of git is that the entire repository is more than likely cloned in a few different places and is easily reproduced. Also makes it nice and easy to move elsewhere.

RickJWagner 7y ago

I suppose it's good to review all your big assumptions once in a while. OP assumed GitHub would hold his code (and make it available) forever, seemingly a good assumption. Now he's massively inconvenienced. Time for me to look around, consider all my big assumptions....

millisecond 7y ago

The frustrating thing to me is that this guy will get this solved and we’ll all move on. He’s reasonably well known and had enough Twitter juice to get attention. All the small people who end up in this situation, whatever it truly is, without those resources will remain screwed.

uponcoffee 7y ago
I get what you're saying, and agree to a degree. On the other hand this is like not backing up your hard drive. Having a single point of failure and expecting anything less is... Like you said, he's big enough to shout into the abyss and get a response, while others have to accept that a single point of failure is exactly that. If we changed the headline to hacker deletes '5 years worth of work', the response would be different; two-factor should have been enabled, should have used a strong password, one password per account, yubi-key, etc. The onus would have been on the developer. There are plenty of free hosting services for repos, so there's no reason IMO to not maintain a mirror.
bspammer 7y ago
Looks like you are right, he's already back up and running: https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1136304496882044928 https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1136304496882044928
tdy_err 7y ago
GitHub (CEO) claims customer support looked into this prior to any tweets FWIW

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

I'm sure he'll get it resolved. But come on people, "in the cloud" doesn't mean it is safe. If you care at all about what you're storing in the cloud, make copies to store locally and offsite.

_bxg1 7y ago

How does this keep happening, across all these different services? The very least you could do is give the account a few days' warning via email, which is totally automatable. There's no excuse for not doing that.

magashna 7y ago

5 years of work doesn't have a backup can't be that important

mitchtbaum 7y ago

I just backed up ~100 repos & ~500 issues, totaling ~100 MB of json and git tracked code. Everything's right there waiting for you. https://github.com/josegonzalez/python-github-backup https://github.com/josegonzalez/python-github-backup

srndh 7y ago

What solution exist for me to keep a complete copy of my github account offline or keep an uptodate backup? Mainly all the repos, I started and just forked.

JohnFen 7y ago

Surely they weren't keeping everything only on GitHub, and had locally stored copies, right? Right?