6 ms·

It sounds funny, but it's not. I once issued a bug to them that didn't have enough information about how to reproduce... and I was lambasted on Reddit and event

by jb1991 9mo ago

It sounds funny, but it's not. I once issued a bug to them that didn't have enough information about how to reproduce... and I was lambasted on Reddit and eventually just deleted my account there it was so terrifying. Some dev teams do not mess around. In fact I've shied off most social media since and no longer issue bug reports to any company, I was scarred deep over the treatment.

TheDong 9mo ago
I've read their reports before. When there's not enough information to reproduce, they do a good job of asking for more information first, and I've never seen a reasonable good-faith report elicit anything overt. If you failed to give them proper reproduction information when asked, then yeah, you were wasting their time and they should rightfully close your issue. I've never seen anyone on the curl team undeservedly "lambast" someone, and for a project that has a quite good reputation, I think the burden of proof is on you. Can you link to these supposedly terrifying comments?
- msephton 9mo ago
  It says in the curl file that they will ridicule time-wasters in public and here is one pression confirming that it happened to them, yet somehow that's not enough? Come on.
  - TingPing 9mo ago
    We don’t need anecdotes, every single bug is public. Just looking now I see respectful responses to genuine reports. This document is clearly in response to AI slop and spam.
    - perching_aix 9mo ago
      I skimmed the "slop" collection they maintain that was posted here yesterday, and even under those HackerOne submissions, Daniel was perfectly reasonable and respectful. It is entirely possible I merely chanced upon his highlights, but this announcement to me really just signifies a final straw breaking than anything else. His historical conduct is all public and speaks for itself. I wish I had the patience and perseverance he does, and I wish he didn't need it.
  - nullc 9mo ago
    When people don't provide a citation online when discussing some specific instance like this-- which could be provided with a couple clicks and would radically improve their argument a reasonable assumption is that the citation would undermine their argument.
  - latexr 9mo ago
    If you follow cURL’s development, what you’ll see is the main contributors tend to be extremely patient, helpful, and thankful of contributions. Sometimes too patient. If you look at the HackerOne slop reports cURL got, you’ll see Daniel accommodating people outright wasting their time. So if you follow what’s been happening, you know the types of reports this message is talking about. What they consider time-wasters are slop reports where the reporter didn’t do any effort to even test the “bug” and then keeps pasting whatever the LLM says in replies and lying about using them. In other words, for a legitimate report it’s hard to believe that was the reaction. I would expect them to be patient with a human contributor which really put in the work. It’s particularly hard to believe the maintainers would even waste their time to lambast someone on Reddit. Doesn’t seem like their style. Maybe the person in this thread is exaggerating, maybe they misinterpreted it, or maybe it did happen. But it seems so out-of-character that some proof would be warranted, especially since it’s a single report.
Retr0id 9mo ago
What was the bug?
- xandrius 9mo ago
  Yeo without any sort of context, it's just like throwing a stone and then running away.
  - Sammi 9mo ago
    Yeah I had to downvote because of this. If you don't bring receipts then it's just slander.
    - giraffe_lady 9mo ago
      Gotta let the legal team know about that I hadn't heard they changed it.
- ambicapter 9mo ago
  Wouldn’t it be ironic if GP never answered this request for simple follow-up.
  - joshlemer 9mo ago
    Not really. They said in their comment they deleted their whole account and everything. They probably don't want to continue to be ridiculed and to link the identity of that account with this one.
    - hitekker 9mo ago
      It's not "funny" ironic but still ironic, given jb1991's ambiguous accusation around his past ambiguity, with no follow-up information to clarify.
- burnt-resistor 9mo ago
  It sounds like a karma farm victim fish story.
amiga386 9mo ago
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 details of each issue to find whether it's genuine-bug or user-error. So that's why you should try to give reproduction instructions as best you can, and be up-front if they're incomplete, or you only saw it happen once. If the maintainer responds harshly, or even if you get commentary from others, remember they are (or should be) criticising the bug report, not you. Try not to take it personally. And even if they decide to close it, or not investigate further, you've still done the world a favour by adding genuine details about something you saw. The bug report is still searchable when closed. Other people who get the same problem as you are likely to find it, and it might spur them to reproducing the bug where you couldn't, and re-opening or re-reporting the bug and driving it forward to completion.
- ectospheno 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - moregrist 9mo ago
    You're also free to not use their free software. You're paying exactly $0 for support for this software. So any support (eg: bug fixes) you get are a gift. That means that if you (1) use their software, (2) don't provide a good bug reports to help them fix their bugs, and (3) complain about how it's not your job to fix them then... you, my dear person, are acting like an entitled ass. It's not hand-holding to provide a good bug report, it's essential to make the bug report actionable. curl is so widely-used that bugs often come from a combination of the software and the environment (OS, libraries, etc). Without enough details to reproduce a bug, then the bug is often impossible to track down. This means: recreate the environment, the actions that led to the bug, and create the bug itself.
  - dd82 9mo ago
    ahhh, the old "I expect everyone to read my mind about extremely nuanced and specific things, and those who can't are idiots" mentality at play
phyzome 9mo ago
That surprises me -- from what I've seen, Daniel is actually remarkably tolerant of incomplete/unclear reports. (Too tolerant.) But I imagine that could depend on the day. (Now, if you used AI to generate the report, well... that's different. Especially if you didn't disclose it up front.)
- MBCook 9mo ago
  On the flip side I’ve been following him for a while on Mastodon. I’ve basically watched the AI crap cycle go from “this is a weird report, oh it’s fake” to “all the reports are trash, it’s so hard to find real humans in the flood” through his posts. I suspect I would’ve stepped down long ago. I feel so bad for the open source maintainers who are just being assaulted with nonsense.
flerchin 9mo ago
Share the issue or reddit thread.
perching_aix 9mo ago
How does Reddit come up in this? The only official community spaces they maintain are: - their GitHub projects (Issues, Pull Requests, Discussions) - their mailing lists - their HackerOne page If you were harassed on Reddit that is still shitty of course, but it's not gonna be on the project's dev team: > Some dev teams do not mess around. Unless some of the devs have verifiable, pseudo-official presence there at least.
on_the_train 9mo ago
He rubs me the wrong way, too. Curl is overhyped and a pain to work with. And he's getting high on the "success" while crying about not being paid for something he offers for free. I think Americans have a nice phrase about having cake and eating it, too.
- latexr 9mo ago
  Not only is cURL not overhyped, it’s absolutely false that Daniel “[cries] about not being paid for something he offers for free”. He does get paid for cURL support. https://daniel.haxx.se/job.html https://daniel.haxx.se/job.html He does criticise rich companies who don’t do anything to support cURL and demand preferential support, but that’s not the same thing (and does warrant criticism).
  - neoromantique 9mo ago
    Daniel is also not an american
    - ranger_danger 9mo ago
      Why does that matter?
      - neoromantique 9mo ago
        it doesn't I just read the gp comment wrong, my bad
thinkingtoilet 9mo ago
[flagged]
- perching_aix 9mo ago
  > (...) that's a you thing. You have to be tougher than that. They really don't, lol If a community is full of assholes, unwilling to change, walk away! Don't contribute to what you don't want to support. It's just like voting with your wallet. All contingent on whether you can actually afford to do so though, as usual, but I have a hard time believing that interacting on Reddit would be so essential, especially these days.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    With this said, this is one place personal blogs work well. You can post the problems you find there, and if you're half decent it will be picked up and put in search engines for people that have similar problems. You at that point don't have to defend yourself, at least directly, to the community.
  - smsm42 9mo ago
    One guy says "I was lambasted on Reddit", no link, no proof, no hearing the other side, no any substantiation anything actually happened even. Immediate conclusion: "community is full of assholes, unwilling to change". This escalated quickly, didn't it?
    - latexr 9mo ago
      The person you’re replying to isn’t suggesting cURL is that community. See another comment on this thread which makes that clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46720626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46720626 Rather they seem to be arguing “if there is a community that is like that (whatever that community is)…”.
    - perching_aix 9mo ago
      I see @latexr pretty much addressed this, but see this other comment of mine also (and note the timestamps!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719667 I was speaking in general terms. No such conclusions were drawn.
giraffe_lady 9mo ago
Please ignore everyone else and do not share any more information about this experience or yourself. These people do not have your best interests in mind and will not mind, or are intending to, make this experience even worse for you.
zahlman 9mo ago
There's a strange irony in the replies here, where people apparently lack the necessary information to reproduce your experience.

by jb1991 9mo ago

TheDong 9mo ago

I've read their reports before. When there's not enough information to reproduce, they do a good job of asking for more information first, and I've never seen a reasonable good-faith report elicit anything overt. If you failed to give them proper reproduction information when asked, then yeah, you were wasting their time and they should rightfully close your issue. I've never seen anyone on the curl team undeservedly "lambast" someone, and for a project that has a quite good reputation, I think the burden of proof is on you. Can you link to these supposedly terrifying comments?

msephton 9mo ago
It says in the curl file that they will ridicule time-wasters in public and here is one pression confirming that it happened to them, yet somehow that's not enough? Come on.
- TingPing 9mo ago
  We don’t need anecdotes, every single bug is public. Just looking now I see respectful responses to genuine reports. This document is clearly in response to AI slop and spam.
  - perching_aix 9mo ago
    I skimmed the "slop" collection they maintain that was posted here yesterday, and even under those HackerOne submissions, Daniel was perfectly reasonable and respectful. It is entirely possible I merely chanced upon his highlights, but this announcement to me really just signifies a final straw breaking than anything else. His historical conduct is all public and speaks for itself. I wish I had the patience and perseverance he does, and I wish he didn't need it.
- nullc 9mo ago
  When people don't provide a citation online when discussing some specific instance like this-- which could be provided with a couple clicks and would radically improve their argument a reasonable assumption is that the citation would undermine their argument.
- latexr 9mo ago
  If you follow cURL’s development, what you’ll see is the main contributors tend to be extremely patient, helpful, and thankful of contributions. Sometimes too patient. If you look at the HackerOne slop reports cURL got, you’ll see Daniel accommodating people outright wasting their time. So if you follow what’s been happening, you know the types of reports this message is talking about. What they consider time-wasters are slop reports where the reporter didn’t do any effort to even test the “bug” and then keeps pasting whatever the LLM says in replies and lying about using them. In other words, for a legitimate report it’s hard to believe that was the reaction. I would expect them to be patient with a human contributor which really put in the work. It’s particularly hard to believe the maintainers would even waste their time to lambast someone on Reddit. Doesn’t seem like their style. Maybe the person in this thread is exaggerating, maybe they misinterpreted it, or maybe it did happen. But it seems so out-of-character that some proof would be warranted, especially since it’s a single report.

Retr0id 9mo ago

What was the bug?

xandrius 9mo ago
Yeo without any sort of context, it's just like throwing a stone and then running away.
- Sammi 9mo ago
  Yeah I had to downvote because of this. If you don't bring receipts then it's just slander.
  - giraffe_lady 9mo ago
    Gotta let the legal team know about that I hadn't heard they changed it.
ambicapter 9mo ago
Wouldn’t it be ironic if GP never answered this request for simple follow-up.
- joshlemer 9mo ago
  Not really. They said in their comment they deleted their whole account and everything. They probably don't want to continue to be ridiculed and to link the identity of that account with this one.
  - hitekker 9mo ago
    It's not "funny" ironic but still ironic, given jb1991's ambiguous accusation around his past ambiguity, with no follow-up information to clarify.
burnt-resistor 9mo ago
It sounds like a karma farm victim fish story.

amiga386 9mo ago

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 details of each issue to find whether it's genuine-bug or user-error. So that's why you should try to give reproduction instructions as best you can, and be up-front if they're incomplete, or you only saw it happen once. If the maintainer responds harshly, or even if you get commentary from others, remember they are (or should be) criticising the bug report, not you. Try not to take it personally. And even if they decide to close it, or not investigate further, you've still done the world a favour by adding genuine details about something you saw. The bug report is still searchable when closed. Other people who get the same problem as you are likely to find it, and it might spur them to reproducing the bug where you couldn't, and re-opening or re-reporting the bug and driving it forward to completion.

ectospheno 9mo ago
[flagged]
- moregrist 9mo ago
  You're also free to not use their free software. You're paying exactly $0 for support for this software. So any support (eg: bug fixes) you get are a gift. That means that if you (1) use their software, (2) don't provide a good bug reports to help them fix their bugs, and (3) complain about how it's not your job to fix them then... you, my dear person, are acting like an entitled ass. It's not hand-holding to provide a good bug report, it's essential to make the bug report actionable. curl is so widely-used that bugs often come from a combination of the software and the environment (OS, libraries, etc). Without enough details to reproduce a bug, then the bug is often impossible to track down. This means: recreate the environment, the actions that led to the bug, and create the bug itself.
- dd82 9mo ago
  ahhh, the old "I expect everyone to read my mind about extremely nuanced and specific things, and those who can't are idiots" mentality at play

phyzome 9mo ago

That surprises me -- from what I've seen, Daniel is actually remarkably tolerant of incomplete/unclear reports. (Too tolerant.) But I imagine that could depend on the day. (Now, if you used AI to generate the report, well... that's different. Especially if you didn't disclose it up front.)

MBCook 9mo ago
On the flip side I’ve been following him for a while on Mastodon. I’ve basically watched the AI crap cycle go from “this is a weird report, oh it’s fake” to “all the reports are trash, it’s so hard to find real humans in the flood” through his posts. I suspect I would’ve stepped down long ago. I feel so bad for the open source maintainers who are just being assaulted with nonsense.

flerchin 9mo ago

Share the issue or reddit thread.

perching_aix 9mo ago

How does Reddit come up in this? The only official community spaces they maintain are: - their GitHub projects (Issues, Pull Requests, Discussions) - their mailing lists - their HackerOne page If you were harassed on Reddit that is still shitty of course, but it's not gonna be on the project's dev team: > Some dev teams do not mess around. Unless some of the devs have verifiable, pseudo-official presence there at least.

on_the_train 9mo ago

He rubs me the wrong way, too. Curl is overhyped and a pain to work with. And he's getting high on the "success" while crying about not being paid for something he offers for free. I think Americans have a nice phrase about having cake and eating it, too.

latexr 9mo ago
Not only is cURL not overhyped, it’s absolutely false that Daniel “[cries] about not being paid for something he offers for free”. He does get paid for cURL support. https://daniel.haxx.se/job.html https://daniel.haxx.se/job.html He does criticise rich companies who don’t do anything to support cURL and demand preferential support, but that’s not the same thing (and does warrant criticism).
- neoromantique 9mo ago
  Daniel is also not an american
  - ranger_danger 9mo ago
    Why does that matter?
    - neoromantique 9mo ago
      it doesn't I just read the gp comment wrong, my bad

thinkingtoilet 9mo ago

[flagged]

perching_aix 9mo ago
> (...) that's a you thing. You have to be tougher than that. They really don't, lol If a community is full of assholes, unwilling to change, walk away! Don't contribute to what you don't want to support. It's just like voting with your wallet. All contingent on whether you can actually afford to do so though, as usual, but I have a hard time believing that interacting on Reddit would be so essential, especially these days.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  With this said, this is one place personal blogs work well. You can post the problems you find there, and if you're half decent it will be picked up and put in search engines for people that have similar problems. You at that point don't have to defend yourself, at least directly, to the community.
- smsm42 9mo ago
  One guy says "I was lambasted on Reddit", no link, no proof, no hearing the other side, no any substantiation anything actually happened even. Immediate conclusion: "community is full of assholes, unwilling to change". This escalated quickly, didn't it?
  - latexr 9mo ago
    The person you’re replying to isn’t suggesting cURL is that community. See another comment on this thread which makes that clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46720626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46720626 Rather they seem to be arguing “if there is a community that is like that (whatever that community is)…”.
  - perching_aix 9mo ago
    I see @latexr pretty much addressed this, but see this other comment of mine also (and note the timestamps!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719667 I was speaking in general terms. No such conclusions were drawn.

giraffe_lady 9mo ago

Please ignore everyone else and do not share any more information about this experience or yourself. These people do not have your best interests in mind and will not mind, or are intending to, make this experience even worse for you.

zahlman 9mo ago

There's a strange irony in the replies here, where people apparently lack the necessary information to reproduce your experience.