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That's crazy that a manual error by someone, for whatever reason, end up being an article blaming Github for all sort of reasons. And never accepting that the t
by polote 4y ago
That's crazy that a manual error by someone, for whatever reason, end up being an article blaming Github for all sort of reasons. And never accepting that the thing that really failed here is the user who performed the action.
- enlyth 4y agoThey do raise a good point about the UI though, explicitly showing "you're about to nuke 55k people, are you sure?" would make the user pause.
- spiderice 4y agoI have no dog in the fight here, and no affiliation to HTTPie, but this definitely seems like a Github issue to me. You can't just give users ways to easily and accidentally shoot themselves in the foot, and then blame the user for shooting themselves in the foot.
- akerl_ 4y agoWho got shot in the foot here? The article keeps talking about killing 55 thousand people. I’m trying to grok why “unstarring the repo” is such an earthshattering thing. It’s annoying if you wanted it starred / wanted notifications, because you have to notice and redo it… but there’s no irreparable harm, no data loss. This reads like somebody was placing way too much personal mental value on “the repo for my project has a large number of stars”
- delaaxe 4y agoHave you been living under a rock? Everyone judges repos by their amount of stars. Why do you think every social media network has the concept of likes?
- munk-a 4y agoCan you just clarify if that statement was sarcastic or not? I've had a very different experience around stars - they're just a bit of fluff and pretty unimportant compared to watches.
- BHSPitMonkey 4y agoHTTPie's watches were irreversibly deleted, too.
- robonerd 4y ago> Irreversible If the watchers still care to watch, they can choose to watch again.
- pessimizer 4y agoThat's not a reversal. If I burned your diary, you could write a new one, but nobody would call that a reversal.
- robonerd 4y agoThey didn't burn a diary. They burnt the list of people who subscribed to updates to a diary. If those people still care about the diary, they can resubscribe to those updates.
- spiderice 4y agoIt's crazy to me how quickly this conversation has devolved. If Pewdiepie had all his Youtube subscribers deleted should he just say "oh well, the ones that like me will come back". No. Because that's an absurd attitude. Obviously that would forever hurt his viewership. Github is no different with stars. They matter. Period. Maybe not to you. But they matter.
- robonerd 4y ago
- robonerd 4y agoAssuming you're not being sarcastic: a company providing a metric and telling you to care about it does not oblige you to actually give a shit.
- Rapzid 4y agoI feel like a parallel universe has suddenly intersected our own.
- that_guy_iain 4y agoSo all those people got notifications and then some of them looked further at the notifications and then engaged. Now those people won't get those notifications and won't engage. Most of these people won't notice they don't get these notifications. They won't resubscribe. They're lost forever. This is kind of like losing your email list. Your comment reads like you don't understand how a community works.
- akerl_ 4y agoIf the measure of community is “people who get my emails, and wouldn’t notice if they stopped getting my emails”, then yea, I guess we just disagree about what a community is. I’m on an email list for marketing message for a hotel I stayed at last year. TIL that I’m part of their community.
- that_guy_iain 4y agoYea, over simplify it, that's always great. If you focus solely on the getting notifications part. But the core part of any community is the ability to broadcast news to them. If you remove the ability to broadcast news and falicate communication between members then the community fades. Especially, if it's remove. Not all members of a community are extremely active, some aren't that active at all if you remove the ability to let the less active people know stuff that may be of interest to them then obivously it'll damage a community.
- nkozyra 4y agoTo be fair, people very active in a project will probably realize relatively quickly. Those most likely lost to the wind forever are the ones that star a repo and forget about it. I think the problem self corrects but agree there's a short term slowdown possibility in the wake.
- MatthiasPortzel 4y agoYou don't get notifications after starring a repo, they're only a measure of how popular the repo is. The repo did legitimately lose its Watchers, but the author seems a lot more concerned about losing (and getting back) the stars.
- nkozyra 4y agoIt's very much a matter of reputation. Losing the star as a user is a pretty small inconvenience, tantamount to losing a bookmark.
- pessimizer 4y ago> there’s no irreparable harm, no data loss. There's a repo-user join table that is gone. That's literal data loss. If I delete your contacts, is that data loss? I mean, you still have your phone and all your ex-contacts still have phone numbers.
- lalopalota 4y agoI've never considered data I deleted to be lost. "Do you want to delete this?" "Yes" "Are you sure?" "Yes." .... "OMG it's all gone!?!?"
- pizza234 4y agoIt's not so easy to make this accident - one needs to type the full name of the repository. AWS does the same, for example, when deleting RDS instances, and I find it effective.
- HL33tibCe7 4y agoThis is explicitly addressed in the article, and a compelling case is made for why that safety measure was ineffective in this case, I encourage you to read the article
- nkozyra 4y agoYeah. I'm not sure what else you can do with warnings other than make the person effectively recite back the thing they're doing.
- ncmncm 4y agoThere was an explicit suggestion right there in the article what else they could do, so you don't even have to guess. Typing in the number of objects that would be deleted in addition to the name is something else. Or, they could just keep all of them in place, but hidden, and "restore" them all automatically if you made it public again. There are lots and lots of things they could do better, if they cared. But paraphrasing Eunice, of course they don't care, they're Microsoft.
- nkozyra 4y ago> There was an explicit suggestion right there in the article what else they could do, so you don't even have to guess. I read it, but I disagree. Honestly I don't think it would have prevented this. If you're muscle memorying past warning signs the text on the warning sign isn't going to matter much. My point was purely about UX, obviously there are technical solutions to this problem.
- tentacleuno 4y ago> If you're muscle memorying past warning signs the text on the warning sign isn't going to matter much. Do you have any concrete evidence for this? A lot of people keep saying this but don't provide anything factual in the way of UX studies, etc.
- Dylan16807 4y agoIt is a big failure by github that making a repo private immediately and irrevocably destroys all the stars. That's a much bigger failure than clicking the wrong button.
- munk-a 4y agoHaving read through the article I'm really not getting the same vibes of Github being wholly blamed for this mistake - they clearly call out their own user error directly in the article but offer suggestions to make it less of an issue in the future. I got the sense that a long time user had went through a hellish week of trying to restore data and is feeling bitter but mostly just wants the product to improve.
- FabHK 4y agoWith that mindset, planes would still fall out of the sky every month. Because basically 90% of plane crashes used to be "pilot error". If you then say, well, it was pilot error, bad pilot, can't do anything about it, that's the way it is, pilot should've not made an error... well, then we wouldn't have reached the amazing aviation safety we have now.
- ncmncm 4y agoLikewise, surgical deaths. The number of people dying on the operating table is in sharp decline because hospitals have lately begun to institute procedures that make mistakes non-fatal. An early one was making the "oxygen" knob on the anesthetist's gas panel not go to zero. But it appears lots of people here can't imagine why that change was made.
- munk-a 4y agoPilots and doctors are two great examples of customer pools where UI/UX actually gets a significant amount of attention because we all realize how high the stakes are. I imagine the FDA has zero tolerance for vendor software that is bundled with dark patterns that encourages doctors to promote the prescription of certain drugs over others... at the same time we have quizzes that have made it to HN multiple times[1] that reinforce the "correctness" of dark patterns. UI/UX often gets overlooked as being unimportant, and, as a backend person I can definitely sympathize, but when you're building a product that people use for important things it is important to give UI/UX the attention it deserves. 1. https://cantunsee.space/ https://cantunsee.space/
- pmw 4y ago> I imagine the FDA has zero tolerance for vendor software that is bundled with dark patterns Here's a recent case of a nurse going to prison for a medication error, where the UX of the medical cabinets is blamed in a big way: https://khn.org/news/article/radonda-vaught-fatal-drug-error-vanderbilt-hospital-responsibility/ https://khn.org/news/article/radonda-vaught-fatal-drug-error... > The case against Vaught hinges on her use of an electronic medication cabinet, a computerized device that dispenses drugs and is widely used in hospitals > > ... > > Vaught triggered an override that unlocked a much larger swath of medications > > ... > > Some experts have said cabinet overrides are a daily event at many hospitals. > > Vaught insisted in her testimony before the nursing board last year that overrides were common at Vanderbilt, and that a 2017 upgrade to the hospital’s electronic health records system was causing rampant delays at medication cabinets. Vaught said Vanderbilt instructed nurses to use overrides to circumvent delays and get medicine as needed.
- mattcwilson 4y agoWhat could the author have done with this post that would take it from being “blaming” into “giving feedback in an earnest intent to save others future pain”?
- pwdisswordfish9 4y agoDrop passive aggressive comments like the one about how they're going to stop wearing their GitHub T-Shirt because of how GitHub subjected them to the same treatment that lesser and more unworthy projects would have received. Even using words like "future pain" is pretty crazy. "We lost 54k GitHub stars"? They're imaginary internet points! Cope.
- mattcwilson 4y agoIt sounds like you are ok with the post, except for the one sentence before the epilogue?
- alecbz 4y agoAcknowledge their own agency and responsibility. Literally stop blaming with language like “GitHub deleted…”
- mattcwilson 4y agoHow would you word that sentence and remain factual about the deletion?
- alecbz 4y ago“I accidentally made a repo private, which resulted in all of its stars being removed.”
- mattcwilson 4y agoFrom the post: > Due to an unfortunate sequence of events, I accidentally made the project’s repository private for a moment. And GitHub cascade-deleted our community that took 10 years to build. This reads the same, to me, in terms of cause and effect.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoGithub UX team has a responsibility to its customers to make this error MUCH harder to make than it is
- mekster 4y agoI suppose you never take a backup because everything should be in ideal conditions. If you consider manual errors as non existent, you need to rethink your design.
- shrimpx 4y agoIt's true that this is "PEBKAC" but it's also true that this is a UX/system design failure on GitHub's part.
- bawolff 4y agoTo borrow something from safety engineering - there is no such thing as an operator error, only bad user interfaces. I definitely think this is github's fault for creating a system where an operator error is likely. OTOH stars are such a vanity metric that i can't be bothered to feel too sympathetic because who cares about stars?
- sschueller 4y agoIn a normal organization where stuff like this happens one has backups since one runs these things internally. Humans make mistakes all the time. We build systems to try to mitigate these and build them better by learning from new mistakes.