5 ms·

I Fixed a 3-year-old bug in Windows Calculator and Microsoft Couldn't Care Less!

12 points by Dhikshith12 3y ago

pacifika 3y ago
Microsoft doesn’t care as it doesn’t affect business goals but I think Microsoft employees do appreciate your open source efforts. Imagine how many thousands of repos they will have and unless improving calculator becomes a goal for windows then they will be busy on other features that have more business critical bugs. At least that’s how I imagine it works over there.
sshine 3y ago
Before I put any effort into an Open Source contribution, I always check the water first: - Does the project have stale PRs? - Do they react to small fixes? (typos, broken links)
- veave 3y ago
  Do they have thousands of open issues? (I'm sitting myself on a VLC bug which I can't be arsed to report)
- Dhikshith12 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that's not a typo or a small fix, many people use scientific mode and type negative exponents and it gives this "2.6exp-2 == 0.6", it concerned me, so i tried to fix it, and opened a pr.
  - sshine 3y ago
    I agree with you. The point I'm making is: Before I put any real effort into a fix, I test if they are receptible to something that was easy for me to make, and should be easy for them to validate, e.g. a typo fix. Because what you often find out is that people are not interested in being active maintainers.
twiss 3y ago
As someone who maintains a couple of open source projects and tries to welcome external contributions, I can understand your frustration but I think complaining about getting no response after less than a week is also a bit premature. Yes, we should strive to respond as soon as possible, but you never know, it might be a very busy week for the maintainers, or they might be on vacation (it's August after all), who knows. Give them some time! Briefly glancing at the GitHub project, it has 11 open PRs and 1035 closed ones, I think those are pretty reasonable stats :)
- tylerritchie 3y ago
  I strongly agree. I'm not convinced this submission is on-topic. 5 days without a human response is not great but it's not _awful_. Neither of the tagged reviewers have public commits in the last week, they may (hopefully are) both on vacation and enjoying some of the summer. I've had open-source PRs wait for a couple months before people were able to take a look, stuff happens, people have things come up and people have competing priorities. I really want to point out the timeline here: - drive-by PR was opened Sunday 8/6 at 8AM PT - CLA was agreed to Sunday 8/6 at 8:30AM PT - two... maintainers? were pinged Sunday 8/6 at 11:11AM PT - grumpy missive about Microsoft was written Friday 8/11 and posted to HN at 10:25AM PT 4 work days without a comment on a drive-by PR seems... fine?
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  > Briefly glancing at the GitHub project, it has 11 open PRs and 1035 closed ones, I think those are pretty reasonable stats :) It's crazy to me that Microsoft's extremely asinine policy of closing real issues, because they made issue closing a metric, has directly played into real organic social media positive feelings for them.
  - yorwba 3y ago
    PRs, not issues. And 800 of those 1035 are merged.
  - joshuamorton 3y ago
    This is Pull Requests, not issues. And glancing through them, the majority of the closed ones are merged, and the majority of the unmerged ones are low effort/not real, or were closed with guidance on how to resubmit them better.
johnea 3y ago
It's been a loong time since M$ cared about user experience at all.
- esafak 3y ago
  "That doesn't matter!" https://youtu.be/UFcb-XF1RPQ?t=140 https://youtu.be/UFcb-XF1RPQ?t=140
ShamelessC 3y ago
> If you’re also getting ghosted by some Open source project, I just wanna advise you, get a life! (even to myself as I’m writing this article) and build something real and put a price on it, your time is not free, and neither is the time of the users, and you’ll really understand if your work is really valued in the free markets. > That’s why I’m building Folksable: A Home for Internet Hustlers. Is this article satire? What is happening.
- ohgodplsno 3y ago
  >This kind of grew on me from when I was 17, then I was a believer in socialism (as it’s still largely prevalent in my country in India), but adulting teaches a lot of things, and appreciating capitalism is one of those things is what I felt. It's either satire or a complete lack of any self reflection ability
  - Dhikshith12 3y ago
    lol

12 points by Dhikshith12 3y ago

Microsoft doesn’t care as it doesn’t affect business goals but I think Microsoft employees do appreciate your open source efforts. Imagine how many thousands of repos they will have and unless improving calculator becomes a goal for windows then they will be busy on other features that have more business critical bugs. At least that’s how I imagine it works over there.

sshine 3y ago

Before I put any effort into an Open Source contribution, I always check the water first: - Does the project have stale PRs? - Do they react to small fixes? (typos, broken links)

veave 3y ago
Do they have thousands of open issues? (I'm sitting myself on a VLC bug which I can't be arsed to report)
Dhikshith12 3y ago
I'm pretty sure that's not a typo or a small fix, many people use scientific mode and type negative exponents and it gives this "2.6exp-2 == 0.6", it concerned me, so i tried to fix it, and opened a pr.
- sshine 3y ago
  I agree with you. The point I'm making is: Before I put any real effort into a fix, I test if they are receptible to something that was easy for me to make, and should be easy for them to validate, e.g. a typo fix. Because what you often find out is that people are not interested in being active maintainers.

twiss 3y ago

As someone who maintains a couple of open source projects and tries to welcome external contributions, I can understand your frustration but I think complaining about getting no response after less than a week is also a bit premature. Yes, we should strive to respond as soon as possible, but you never know, it might be a very busy week for the maintainers, or they might be on vacation (it's August after all), who knows. Give them some time! Briefly glancing at the GitHub project, it has 11 open PRs and 1035 closed ones, I think those are pretty reasonable stats :)

tylerritchie 3y ago
I strongly agree. I'm not convinced this submission is on-topic. 5 days without a human response is not great but it's not _awful_. Neither of the tagged reviewers have public commits in the last week, they may (hopefully are) both on vacation and enjoying some of the summer. I've had open-source PRs wait for a couple months before people were able to take a look, stuff happens, people have things come up and people have competing priorities. I really want to point out the timeline here: - drive-by PR was opened Sunday 8/6 at 8AM PT - CLA was agreed to Sunday 8/6 at 8:30AM PT - two... maintainers? were pinged Sunday 8/6 at 11:11AM PT - grumpy missive about Microsoft was written Friday 8/11 and posted to HN at 10:25AM PT 4 work days without a comment on a drive-by PR seems... fine?
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> Briefly glancing at the GitHub project, it has 11 open PRs and 1035 closed ones, I think those are pretty reasonable stats :) It's crazy to me that Microsoft's extremely asinine policy of closing real issues, because they made issue closing a metric, has directly played into real organic social media positive feelings for them.
- yorwba 3y ago
  PRs, not issues. And 800 of those 1035 are merged.
- joshuamorton 3y ago
  This is Pull Requests, not issues. And glancing through them, the majority of the closed ones are merged, and the majority of the unmerged ones are low effort/not real, or were closed with guidance on how to resubmit them better.

johnea 3y ago

It's been a loong time since M$ cared about user experience at all.

esafak 3y ago
"That doesn't matter!" https://youtu.be/UFcb-XF1RPQ?t=140 https://youtu.be/UFcb-XF1RPQ?t=140

ShamelessC 3y ago

> If you’re also getting ghosted by some Open source project, I just wanna advise you, get a life! (even to myself as I’m writing this article) and build something real and put a price on it, your time is not free, and neither is the time of the users, and you’ll really understand if your work is really valued in the free markets. > That’s why I’m building Folksable: A Home for Internet Hustlers. Is this article satire? What is happening.

ohgodplsno 3y ago
>This kind of grew on me from when I was 17, then I was a believer in socialism (as it’s still largely prevalent in my country in India), but adulting teaches a lot of things, and appreciating capitalism is one of those things is what I felt. It's either satire or a complete lack of any self reflection ability
- Dhikshith12 3y ago
  lol