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Comment by dustinmoris | Hacker News Reader

Did someone really just write a blog post on not downgrading an account without knowing what you're doing? Yes, you should not do that. You also shouldn't buy something without knowing what you're paying for, shouldn't vote for something you don't know what it is, you shouldn't eat stuff which might be poisonous but don't know for sure, you shouldn't cross a street without looking, gosh you certainly shouldn't drive a car with closed eyes not knowing where you're driving. Let's remind everyone of these things regularly, as this stuff is apparently not obvious anymore in 2019.

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The OP clearly says, "It’s my fault for not reading the fine print more carefully."

They then further go on to say, "... when upgrading back to a Pro account, any branch protection rules you had before were permanently deleted when you downgraded to the free tier. They will all have to be recreated from scratch."

That is useful information, to me. People write blog posts about all types of things that are obvious to some and useful to others. Why be so nasty about this short post that seems to be useful to a lot of people? I guess that's 2019 for ya.

It's easy to ask snarky questions. That doesn't mean it's helpful or witty.

I admit that my rather sarcastic comment was a bit snarky. I am genuinely surprised though that people find this newsworthy. It's pretty obvious that if you're going to downgrade anything you'll lose something, no? I also find it very surprising that the OP was so astound that the lost triggers had to be re-configured if he was to upgrade again. Maybe it's just me, but this really felt pretty standard and extremely obvious, which is maybe why I wrote this rather snarky comment. Still wrong of me, so I take that feedback.

Amazing. I expected you to double-down and reply aggressively defensive, but that was a sincere, thoughtful reply. Thank you. Maybe 2019 isn't so bad after all. ;)

And I agree it's a fairly obvious risk if you stop and think about it, but it's not necessarily true that losing access to a feature, which is a reversible state, also permanently deletes all configuration data associated with that feature.

Your comment was direct, but fair, so it wasn't difficult to agree with you ;)

Regarding the branch protection feature, I can see it both ways, but I think overall I would have not expected them to be re-instantiated when upgrading to a higher tier again. Branches could have changed since then. I could have added more branches, deleted a branch which previously had the protection, then maybe created a new branch under the same name, etc.

Unless it's an immediate "I accidentally downgraded, revert all changes back again" action I think it's easier for GitHub to just let the user re-create what makes the most sense for them at the point of re-joining the higher tier. But like with most user features it's debatable...

GitHub is likely among the most widely used tools for HN users. Posting on HN, news that is relevant to such a majority of users on this platform, is a rather perfect use of HN as a dissemination platform. I read through GitHub's tiered service documentation after reading this article, and I couldn't find reference to branch controls being permanently deleted; so the OP was giving us very valuable experiential information, that was unattainable from GitHub. I really can't think of a better use for HN.

> shouldn't vote for something you don't know what it is

Isn't the whole point of democracy "a large enough volume of ignorance will average out to something sensible"? :P

No, it isn’t. The hope is that the ignorance averages out and the informed and motivated voters are the decisive factors. In practice democracy works better than if that model was correct because while voters have preferences that they will happily profess that reliably lead to bad outcomes they reliably vote out parties that are in power when things go badly. Politicians have an incentive to do things that will get them re-elected so gross economic mismanagement is not the order of the day, mostly.

> they reliably vote out parties that are in power when things go badly.

That's not at all the case, and even to the extent it is it is frustrated in separation of powers systems like the US, where the faction voted out will often be the one least responsible for the problems, since three are multiple factions in power at any given time a day the ignorance leads to blaming the wrong one.

What I wrote was too strong, you’re right. If there’s a huge fuckup the part[y|ies] in power are very likely to be voted out, the smaller the mess the less likely they are to be voted out, and that’s complicated by the tendency to want to throw the bums out when the incumbent government has been in power a long time. I agree entirely that fixed legislative terms and term limits are stupid ideas, along with separating the legislature and the executive. Parliamentary systems are better than presidential ones.

>Isn't the whole point of democracy "a large enough volume of ignorance will average out to something sensible"? :P

I hope not. A much stronger argument is that government should be by consent of its citizens. Otherwise, you get democracy-is-bad-because-people-vote-wrongly arguments (e.g. women vote too left-wing or white people vote too right-wing).

> Isn't the whole point of democracy "a large enough volume of ignorance will average out to something sensible"?

No, which is why the avdocates of liberal democracy from the very beginning have also argued that an an informed populace is critical to it.

It is the point that “self interest averaged out over the whole population equals public interest”, though, but greed and ignorance aren't the same thing.

But isn't that a new behavior? Before I subscribed 1-2 year ago I read small characters pretty carefully, and in my memories in such case the behavior was to lock the previously private repo in a read-only state. Switching back to pro would then have restored full functionalities and setting on theses privates repos.

Automatically making it public seems like a new behavior, could someone confirm/infirm my memories?

my guess is that the righteous anger you felt while writing this post will be converted to regret down the road, possibly years later.

its never been "obvious" in any point in history

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