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How one guy ruined Hacktoberfest (2020)
- codeofdusk 4y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052
- mkl 4y agoAnd a related discussion from a few days before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- faraaz98 4y agoBack in uni, I just made 4 PRs into my own projects, apparently that was enough to get a t-shirt and stickers I don't participate in it anymore
- Srikanth 4y agoI did the same. I finished and pushed out a small static site that I still use occasionally. Haven’t participated since then, though I continue to push code and notes publicly.
- onion2k 4y agoIt'd be interesting to see if the people who made those low quality "amazing project" PRs ever went on to make more PRs, with useful contributions. Maybe the suggestion Coding With Harry made did ruin Hacktoberfest, but also maybe he actually suggested a simple way for people to get in to open source contribution and people did. Without following up we can't really tell.
- james-redwood 4y agoA similar idea worked with my son (who is still in primary school). He found it very difficult to grasp the idea of Git in general and making small PRs like this helped him to warm up to the whole thing over a few days. Every beginner has to start somewhere I suppose.
- ushakov 4y agowhat? am i the only one who thinks primary school children shouldn’t be learning git? edit: thanks for downvoting me and sorry for questioning your parenting principles
- cyanf 4y agoWhy not?
- ushakov 4y agobecause you can’t get your childhood back but you can always learn these things as adult
- namanaggarwal 4y agoI think your premise that coding is bad for kids is incorrect. Coding is not typing. It's an art of solving problems. My childhood was coding, it was(is?) something I was good at and I thoroughly enjoyed doing. My initial days were just writing random macros on Excel or coding out my maths problems on BASIC. That has what shaped my career
- ushakov 4y agoi didn’t say coding was bad for kids i myself started at 12 (actually with BASIC!) and while there’s no denial that it has helped my career at later point in life, it has completely alienated me from the rest of people my schoolmates still introduce me as “nerd” to other people (not in front of me of course) not that i care that much, but it still hurts
- intsunny 4y ago..... never underestimate people's desperation/shamelessness for free t-shirts. 8-9 years ago, at DigitalOcean's first SXSW booth, we were giving out free t-shirts that had DO's Sammy shark logo, and Linux's Tux penguin logo. The catch was people had to name the penguin on the t-shirt. The vast majority could not name Tux, and pled to get the t-shirt anyways. It was a very surreal experience.
- drno123 4y agoAmazing. I somehow thaught that Tux name was a common knowledge - even my kids know it :)
- ge96 4y agoJust found out now, no shirt for me
- DawsonBruce 4y agoSame. I thought he was named, “Nice Linus,” or something.
- saghm 4y ago"good penguin, angry man" is the new "good cop, bad cop"
- chiph 4y agoI think your question was a pretty low barrier to winning, but I guess not. That's about when SXSW became more of a circus, filled with lots of "fake it 'till you make it" types. I would overhear people practicing their pitches (usually in an elevator!) and they were all different combinations of the same phrases that were trendy that year: "We offer crowdsourced coupons via influencers to create brand awareness.." "We work with influencers in offering coupons, to crowdsource brand awareness.."
- 4y ago
- closedloop129 4y agoI think the bigger issue is that the social graph is not easily accessable. It should be possible to automatically reject pull request from new accounts that only change one line of text.
- tempodox 4y agoOne line can make all the difference between a program that works and one that doesn't.
- userbinator 4y agoThat is true, but the difference between these "drive-by PRs" that change one line and useful PRs that do, is the latter probably has a lot more description and other accompanying detail.
- donatj 4y agoI am honestly surprised how little SPAM there is on GitHub in general. Please don’t take that as a challenge! I’ve encountered a single instance. On a library I maintain, I recently had a PR and a series of comments added on all my outstanding issues made by a person advertising their for-pay SaaS alternative. Every problem someone had “Just try my SaaS with this connector instead…” I hid the comments, closed the PR asking me to link it from my README, while chastising the person a little. Looking at the user’s profile/history he had done similar to many other related libraries. I reported the profile to GitHub and the whole profile was gone with all his comments and tickets in a matter of hours. I honestly feel a little bad about that resolution, here was a person who probably put a decent chunk of time into his SaaS and just made the mistake of advertising it in an obnoxiously intrusive manner. They had legit git repos, now gone. I could have seen a younger dumber myself in their shoes, especially as I literally built the same SaaS ten years ago, using my library, and didn’t get a single person to bite.
- wccrawford 4y agoI woke up to some huge spam threads from Github this morning. Someone figured out how to notify everyone in a major repo (at least, I think that's what happened), and others piled on with nonsense comments and even some very disgusting images. Sure, it's nice how little there is, but it's definitely there.
- nmstoker 4y agoCovered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31627061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31627061
- Blackthorn 4y agoSeems like people have recently realized this is an attack vector. Starting May 31, I've received an immense amount of spam. GitHub, in their infinitesimal wisdom, make you log in to unsubscribe! Which of course I can't do on my phone. So I've taken to reporting their notifications as spam.
- phil294 4y ago
- shmde 4y ago
- mgsk 4y agoHuh? Where is the racism?
- immortaljoe 4y agoWell, if you did read the article, there is no racism at all. The YouTuber could probably be Indian because of the language used (Hindi). But totally insignificant to the post. Please stop making random accusations.
- shmde 4y agoI never accused the article for being racist, even I was disgusted when this popular ytuber encouraged spamming pr on github just for a free shirt. The intention of re-posting an article ( which already reached front page of hn ) to hn when a similar post where an indian guy messing up big time by sending 400k notifications seems kind of suspicious.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sreevisakh 4y agoIt isn't exactly suspicious. I have noticed old news being posted again when it's related/similar to a currently trending news item. Let's just assume that it's an unfortunate coincidence that the people responsible for both fiasco were Indians. However, these incidents do raise some important issues for both Github and India. This indicates that there is a prevailing situation in India that encourages young novice developers to come up with such low quality contributions to get a foot in the door in the industry.
- ubertaco 4y agoI don't think it's that suspicious. Neither article highlighted the person's ethnicity in any sort of detail (I didn't even notice the ethnicity at all in the 400k emails post). There are often multiple front page stories about mistakes or intentional problems caused by white dudes, and that's not generally seen as racism. Why should a similar coincidence with an equally-large population group be racism?
- userbinator 4y agoWhy not call this "How one company brought spam to GitHub"? I had a suspicion something like this would happen the first time I heard of Hacktoberfest. If you ask people to make PRs to win something, with very little extra condition, they will. This is pretty much the situation of "you get what you measure". I can't find the reference now, but I recall a similar thing happening when Wikipedia asked for contributions in return for a chance to win something(?) --- tons of almost-entirely-plagiarised articles appeared from Indian accounts.
- sofixa 4y agoBecause Hacktoberfest was running for years, quite successfully, and you could be reported for spammy PRs and not get the T-shirt?
- samus 4y agoThe following seem related: - Goodhart's Law, often stated as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". - the Cobra effect. When the British government placed bounties on wild cobras, people started breeding cobras. - Campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- forgingahead 4y agoThis is overblown to blame the Youtuber - his statement was sufficient, and I say this as someone who also hates shitty PRs from the very low quality "tech talent" from certain geographies. The bigger issue here is that there are literally millions of people in the developing world, often mistaken as being entirely from South Asia, but actually include most developing countries, where tech is suddenly accessible for them as a potential road out of poverty wages and up the earning ladder, but there is no quality control whatsoever for them or their learning. I don't know what the solution is, but if the internet is truly for the masses and is connecting the world, then guess what, this is part of our world as well.
- TheGigaChad 4y ago
- Havoc 4y ago>Brad Traversy Small world...busy going through one of his tutorials currently. Quality guy
- Szpadel 4y agoI'm not familiar with rules, can i open repo with hactoberfest hashtag with bot that accepts all PRs? would that help to game the system and redirect most of that spam to one place? I don't want to encourage this behavior, but let's be honest it's hard to stop now, so maybe redirecting all harm to one please would help OSS projects?
- samus 4y agoI'd be curious about how many developers actually start their Open Source journey with such a drive-by contribution, compared with how many do it only for the t-shirt. While every new productive contributor is an incredible win for an Open Source project, sifting and rejecting drive-by pull requests puts severe load on projects that mostly rely on voluntary contributions. All of this just to allocate some t-shirts. Not surprised if commercial projects will completely opt out of hacktoberfest if this continues. The simplest solution would be to eliminate the rule that started to encourage this behavior. It's sad, but this is why we can't have nice things.
- julianlam 4y agoThis is already done on an annual basis. Git repos spring up every October purely to accept PRs, no matter how trivial. They regularly make it to the top of the trending repos list. I think DO excludes them from the final count though. It doesn't stop people from trying.
- sensanaty 4y agoI genuinely like the hacktoberfest shirts, so every October I just make a new GH Repo with some text files that I make 5 PRs for, this has worked for the last 6 years lol Really not sure why people bother spamming other repos when you can just make your own
- jimnotgym 4y agoIf people want to get into hacktoberfest for no work, start your own repo, make it public and merge as many pr a you want!
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago>A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues. I was worried for a minute there, but everything looks ok on my end https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject/issues https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject/issues
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dontbenebby 4y agoWas this around the time people messed with that MIT pgp keyserver? (Blanking on a cite) I've noticed these "Youtubers" doing a lot of things because they are not part of the hacker community, but adjacent to it, while being propelled to prominence and given $$$$$ to fund their lifestyle, it really grinds my gears. Edit: found a cite! https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/67ab921ffb4084c865b3618d6955275f https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/67ab921ffb4084c865b3618d695...
- anshumankmr 4y agoI also participated in Hacktoberfest ... I think it was 2018. I fixed some bugs in my friend's code that he wrote using OpenCV and a second PR was where I added some code to implement an AVL tree that I wrote for my lab. The other three commits were just low quality stuff from what I can remember. Got a nice T shirt though.
- throwaway787544 4y agoYou have to add a pain threshold that people will only cross if they think it's worth it for the reward. If the terms included "the PR must be in good faith or constructive to the project and not merely fixing typos or other immaterial changes", people would assume they need to put in real changes, which would be more than it's worth to them for a t-shirt. I think an even better goal for Hacktoberfest would've been documentation. Translate a page into a new language, or add documentation where it doesn't exist, and you get a t-shirt. Entirely automate the docs for code, get a plushie. Write HOWTOs, get $25 free DO credit.
- ryandrake 4y ago> You have to add a pain threshold that people will only cross if they think it's worth it for the reward. If the terms included "the PR must be in good faith or constructive to the project and not merely fixing typos or other immaterial changes", people would assume they need to put in real changes, which would be more than it's worth to them for a t-shirt. You'd think, but never underestimate the pain that people will go through to get some minor profit for free. It becomes a numbers game. If you think your "immaterial" PR has a 1/10,000 chance of slipping by, you just make 10,000 immaterial PRs. There are a nontrivial number of people who will absolutely sit there and manually copy/paste 10K pull requests if they think it will get them $1-$2 worth of stuff. The smarter ones would find a way to automate it.
- nyanpasu64 4y agoIn many cases, what I find lacking is not "unannotated class list" Doxygen documentation, or contextual examples, but proper documentation of pointer lifetimes, and invariants (for example the `snd_pcm_link` docs merely say the two streams will start and stop together, but doesn't say it fails unless you're linking two hardware devices with a shared underlying clock which will are supposed to remain in sync indefinitely), and for new project contributors, architectural/implementation and control flow documentation. Unfortunately invariants often live in the original programmer's head more than the code, pointer lifetimes are often nonlocal in the codebase, and architecture/implementation and control flow is inevitably nonlocal, requiring weeks or months of efforts for a motivated non-author to learn, far beyond the patience of someone fishing for Hacktoberfest T-shirts.
- archibaldJ 4y agoSeeing this guy's low quality PR and his viewers' low quality PR that followed reminds me of GPT3. Sometimes we are all like GPT3. I think the difference is some werid meta-abstraction level mechanism to decision-making related to consciousness (in ways we do not understand) ...and sometimes people are just not thoroughly conscious so we see very little traces of this mechanism in their behaviours.
- goe1zorbey 4y ago“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
- rmason 4y agoThere was a group in Lansing pre-Covid that held a Hacktoberfest event. I didn't attend but talked with someone who did. They told me it was emphasized if you're not adding value don't do it. Hope this doesn't end up with Digital Ocean ending their support.
- karaterobot 4y ago> But he made a mistake here and he's going to have to be responsible for the outcome, which so far isn't looking great. I don't see how it's the guy's fault that people misuse this information. It's useful information, and the people making low-effort PRs are responsible for their own actions.