We lost 54k GitHub stars
httpie.io
httpie.io
While the author clearly feels bad about the fact that they've lost his community and that GitHub didn't restore it (which is honestly what any of us would've felt under similar circumstances), they're also focusing towards the future and using their personal experience as a parable all of us can learn from.
Lesson 1 on UI design I think is really important. I often think scary popup boxes are enough to get people to think about what they're doing, but this example clearly demonstrates that what's important is to use design not to scare (alone?), but to convey the information which makes a dangerous action dangerous as well. I also really like the fact that when the action isn't dangerous, the distractions ("Type this repo's name", etc) just go away. It's super intuitive, and (for a newbie designer like me) really helps build an intuition for various design principles put in action.
Lesson 2, which was to use soft deletes, is something I have more thoughts about. I assume that the cascading done on GitHub would be done on a FK constraint, but I'm not really sure how you'd do a "cascading soft delete" without making some kind of manual cascading logic? If anyone's aware of a standard way to accomplish this, please do let me know. Of course, the best way may just be to simplify the model so they aren't needed at all haha.
As designers and developers we've been given a chance to sharpen our toolkit. Thanks, HTTPie! You've gained a new star :)
Edit: Changed GitHub couldn't restore to GitHub didn't restore, as pointed out by @ncmncm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033758#31034195)
Perhaps the delete action is not accomplished right away and a column is checked. Then after a X amount of months a worker process goes around actually deleting things?
Ideally, moving the entire serialized record to an archive table keeps things as clean as possible.
If it is needful to be able to delete stars, make a separate button for that. But it is hard to imagine such a need.
This logic should be purely in the DB model or very close to it. In any case the internal API should never ever list private repos of an organization a user isn't a member of, period. Stars or no stars. Follows or no follows. Why should it? There's no corner case here, if stars pose a problem, the problem isn't the stars, it's a defective model behind. Hiding things that aren't meant to be seen in the UI means putting business logic in the UI. Just don't.
What an odd turn of phrase.
What's the value in capitulating to that? Also, a user saying "delete this stuff" is a pretty practical reason to do so.
Indifference != contempt.
i mean, this is the company that perfected the "throw it all away and start over" serviceability paradigm and the "we don't know what's wrong with it just reboot it every six hours" reliability paradigm for systems.
totally reliable business partner to trust for outsourcing critical business and government infrastructure for sure!
those who are serious and prudent seek assurance, for the reckless and feckless, there's azurance.
if the blog post doesn't work, i'd suggest renaming the project (specifically the cli) such that it makes reference to the hollowness of the new microsoft's apparent love for open source. that way when those thousands of developers (who happen the be of the exact variety that the dinosaur is trying to court) are invoking it every day, it can burn into their skulls to never ever work for, or choose technologies made by, microsoft.
score 5: funny, insightful
In a way, I think warnings and undo serve two different functions-warnings are meant to inform the user of their action, and undos are meant to roll back actions taken.
Undo-instead-of-warning is a great pattern for lower-stakes actions that are easy to undo and cause minimal damage if left done. This allows the few warnings you do show to be recognized as truly important.
There could be separate buttons, "Delete all my stars", "Delete all my watches".
Of course it does. You can’t watch/star a private repo unless you have access, so all watchers/starrers should be removed. If you kept the data as-is watchers would still see the repo updates in their feed, which is the opposite of the 'private' feature promise.
Yes, GitHub probably should show the stars in the warning UI, and hopefully that will prevent some of these mistakes. But GitHub makes it pretty hard to make this mistake already - the author had to _type out_ the name of the repo they wanted deleted into the warning box. At that point, it's hard to believe the author when they claim that this one addition to the warning UI would have definitely stopped them when they weren't paying enough attention to notice they had typed the entirely wrong repo into the confirmation box.
I mean this isn't exactly how it works. But it's a bit scary.
https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...
My view is that expecting humans to stop making mistakes is much less effective than fixing the systems that amplify those mistakes into large, irreversible impacts.
It's easy to be an armchair engineer and say "well, obviously, don't make this mistake in the future".
As a species, we will always take shortcuts. If a mental pathway doesn't need to be exercised to do something, it won't be. If we see the same popup a hundred times, we're going to ignore the contents by the 100th time because we're used to it.
But it shouldn't be possible to make this mistake if this was designed properly and in a way that made it clear that what you're about to do is actually dangerous and not "dangerous" like the other dozen times you've seen the same message.
Of course that’s a lot harder to do, since it’s a lot more than a UX change. So I’m not really slagging GitHub here. But it’s the right way to attack this problem.
In this case, I don't quite understand why stars and forks need to be deleted when switching visibility, since it seems like the two shouldn't be linked. I can star and fork my private repos just fine, so it seems like it was just easier to clear it out than to deal with RBAC at that level.
Many people won't notice some of their stars having disappeared, but many would be surprised to see their forks deleted without their consent, especially those that are not merely a mirror. People can have diverged forks after adding substantial changes without feeding them back to the original for a variety of reasons.
Pretend to do it, actually do it 24 hours later, and if they "undo" the delete within that time frame, just remove it from the delete queue process.
I still think you're right, but it's not even as simple as UX and small backend changes. Allowing the repo owner to re-play other peoples' actions comes with complicated policy decisions. GitHub could make it so only support can restore those, but now they're in the awkward position of having to say when it's okay to restore and when it isn't. Still, it may be the best compromise.
It's sort of equally easy to say Github should do X or Y to improve the UX in this (rare?) case without actually knowing the effort or opportunity cost.
Like maybe I'd rather Github figure out how to not have outages so frequently and how to not accidentally give people million+ dollar bills and such.
I doubt the engineers working on the stability issues or billing have anything to do with UX and vice versa. It's not like there's a singular focus that everyone at the company must prioritize above all else. Multiple people can work on multiple projects and not impact one another at all.
On the other, you have a few Microsoft hacks who could easily do the right thing on behalf of those millions of users.
That said, superlatives like "impossible" aren't realistic here. As long as an action is possible, it is also possible to fuck it up. The challenge screen does require typing in the repo name which is a pretty solid attention-getter. It would be nice to list the important side effects in big angry letters but I'll bet the list of side-effects that are important to some people would be pointlessly long. Maybe a sanity check requiring repos with extremes in certain metrics to get a sanity check from support first— but I have had some preeeeettty protracted response times from GitHub support.
There's many good ways to design this that wouldn't result in pointlessly long lists (which is another problem). You don't need to expose everything that will happen when you do an action, just the "most important".
With unlimited budget, you could compare a bunch of metrics to a baseline to figure out what might be important. Have a lot of stars, way more than the average? That would be nice to highlight. Only have a normal number of forks? Probably less important to highlight that. At the end of the day, Github repos aren't extremely unique. Sure there's probably extremely rare edge cases, but for most repos, comparing against a relatively small number of metrics should get enough to paint a picture of what might get broken. Everything else can be hidden behind a "... and X more" if people are curious.
This both highlights the most important things that might happen, and also provide people with an action to do before confirming, hopefully helping to break the autopilot at the same time.
> "most important"
Yes— the problem is determining the most important metrics for the human who's reading the dialog. Sorting the second part is a lot more difficult than the first.
> With unlimited budget
This framing is only useful to determine what behaviors would be great, not feasibility. We seem to both agree on the ideal behavior but not on the feasibility.
> you could compare a bunch of metrics to a baseline to figure out what might be important.
Important to whom?
> Have a lot of stars, way more than the average? That would be nice to highlight. Only have a normal number of forks? Probably less important to highlight that.
Average for what? Just average for everybody? For the deprecated SlackTextViewController which has vastly higher numbers overall than the unmeasurably more important net-snmp? What about for repos that serve as core functionality to frameworks that only care about forks? XML Schemas that people refer to but never interact with? What about for a company that doesn't care about stars because they're incredibly popular outside of that repo but it's critical for them to monitor the small number of people who've forked their repo?
> Sure there's probably extremely rare edge cases, but for most repos, comparing against a relatively small number of metrics should get enough to paint a picture of what might get broken.
The repo about which you said this mistake should not have been possible was an extremely rare edge case. The article went to great lengths to explore just how fantastically different this repo was. And if you're talking about painting pictures you're using the wrong medium. More information can make the message more pointed but only if it's brief and extremely relevant. If it's not, it's going to reduce the focus on the danger message.
> Everything else can be hidden behind a "... and X more" if people are curious.
Aaaand we come full circle. The whole point of this is to put the metrics most important to that user right in front of their face in bold type because that's going to stop autopilot mistakes. If it's hidden, it failed. Beyond that, the order in which you list things connotes importance— closer to the beginning means more important. Being hidden connotes far lesser importance. If you put the wrong things at the top and the right things behind a click then the autopilot user subconsciously assumes they'd care about the hidden things even less. You're increasing the risk of failure rather than decreasing it. If you're going to highlight anything, you better highlight the right thing.
The existing dialog is pretty clear that you should investigate what it does before you actually execute the command without giving people false clues, and that may be the best compromise. You don't convey false impressions but still convey danger.
> At the end of the day, Github repos aren't extremely unique.
From a quantitative perspective they're not incredibly diverse, even if they're probably more diverse than you imagine. What is immeasurably diverse is the roles those software packages serve, the people who interact with them, and what they need to accomplish their goals. Assuming you can boil that down to a heuristic using available data is something that needs to be concretely proven— not assumed.
- (not intrinsic) many interfaces only give you a few seconds to undo your action, which wouldn't help in this case
- (intrinsic) some events can be layered on top of your change, meaning that you have to either block the undo or reverse all the subsequent events too. This wouldn't be the case for this HTTPie incident, but does prevent UNDO functionality from being a silver bullet.
Also, if you must have I_WANT_CANCER type prompts, try to make them involve expressing what it is that the human is agreeing to, because sometimes it's only at that point the human realises their plan was very stupid. GitHub does that here (you have to type the name of the repo, to delete main_project you'll need to type main_project) but many things do not.
This is why I like Git's force-with-lease. When I try to forcibly overwrite the state, because I know Jim's push was wrong and must be undone, force-with-lease makes me express that, "--force-with-lease=jim-daft-change". And when in fact what I'm going to overwrite is Lisa's urgent bug fix, not Jim's erroneous change, the force-with-lease fails and to get it to apply this way I'd need to say "--force-with-lease=lisa-bug-fix" and that's one last opportunity to say "Wait, what? That's not what I want to do".
It is obviously possible to design a much better, contextual warning with (more) relevant details highlighted. How much time is usually set aside for those?
And yet, it's never going to stop mistakes.
And how many other places like these are there in a large service like GitHub?
A much better way to fix this is to expect mistakes and make it possible to revert instead. Soft deletes can make that trivial to implement for the most part too (except in GDPR like cases where you've got to really remove stuff).
This is not quite correct. In requires inputting the repo name. It's attention-getting the first time. But recently with some colleagues as part of a handoff we went through 50+ repos and archived the irrelevant ones. Very quickly the person doing the actual archiving went from typing to just copy-pasting the repo names. For programmers, copy-pasting from one spot to another can become very mechanical.
So I think this UI choice works well for something that is done very occasionally. But it's no better if people are in the habit. Whereas showing novel information about the cost of the choice would be helpful in breaking the routine. Then could then also make it so that they had to type something only when the operation has a high cost, and what they typed could be something not directly copy-pasteable.
If someone deliberately doing the same thing over-and-over can avoid the manual effort, that's fine. Their frustration would likely make them think about it less. You don't, and shouldn't get prompted to do the same thing using the API, either.
A common knee-jerk reaction to "users aren't taking our warnings seriously" is making the warning look more scary and involving more (mechanical) steps – such as two confirmations instead of one. Well, that's pattern matchable and subject to desensitization.
Like the article states, it's more efficient to instead show what you're about to remove, i.e. a summary of the content as opposed to an identifier, then you get both novelty and proportional scariness, depending on how "big" it is.
Considering this project was out of ordinary in having 54k stars (article mentions being in top 80), they should not be surprised that their case is not top of mind.
Sure, it would be nice to highlight the most destructive of actions, but they already had to type out full project path as confirmation.
I do believe it would be better if Github allowed restoring data in the next few days (soft deletes ftw) once they hit this issue themselves in the past.
And Github support should have recognized that this project is a special, out of ordinary project, and afforded it some engineering time to restore everything.
Lots and lots of websites and companies use the number of stargazers as a strangely important metric for success, so losing them can be really bad.
With industrial machines you have to assume people will do the dumbest thing possible. Because someone will find a way to get crushed in a moving part if they can.
You have safety fence after safety fence and regularly test that your lockouts work.
If you don't do all of this and someone dies you can face very harsh legal penalties.
We don't do this with software when the cost of failure is so much lower but we should still understand smart humans will make mistakes.
At least that is the idea.
The latter needs some kind of consequence in place to offset the benefits from purposefully making said mistakes.
https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...
This is applicable to almost any activity: "Sure he was driving drunk, but the car's manufacturer should have prevented that from causing any damage!" I agree that GitHub should improve the design here - privating a '10 star / 1 week old' repo shouldn't be treated the same as privating a '50k star / 10 year old' repo. I don't mean to diminish the fact that GitHub's UI should be improved here.
But the author needs to take some responsibility and realize they were ""driving distracted"", and not act like GitHub is 100% at fault here. Just because GitHub didn't act perfectly doesn't mean the author didn't make any mistakes.
But what you are saying is that marginal effort to prevent mistakes is not worthwhile.
Cars, to take your example, would not be as safe as they are today if they followed the principles you've shown in this post and the grandparent. And yes, even when driving drunk, which is illegal, is safer too - stay in lane, adaptive cruise control, automatic braking, etc. have all incrementally made even extremely ill-advised behaviours safer.
If no one in the world drank, smoked pot, or did drugs, how much better off would we all be? 100,000 deaths come from alcohol use every year in the United States alone[1]. That doesn't even account for countless cases of abuse, broken families, crime, and other negative effects of alcohol and drugs.
So many people say "oh well it's fine if I do it, I'm responsible" but then at some point someone isn't fine and isn't as responsible as they think they are.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death....
Perhaps that's true for your definition of "better off", which is perfectly fine, but it isn't universal. Even though I don't do drugs, I don't think it should be anyone's business to police what other people do with their minds and their bodies on their own time, as long as they don't pose a threat to anyone else.
Perhaps if we think more like adults instead of infants we can try to understand complex issues better instead of reinforcing black and white stereotypes of the world or rehashing whatever our favourite source of ignorance tells us.
It may be an even worse drug. People on drugs mostly have some awareness that their ideas aren't very good. But for those drunk on power, the fact that their same great idea has already been tried and led to total disaster is no cause for concern at all. You see, they're obviously smarter and better than the last batch of power-addicts who tried that, so they'll do it right this time. Heaven help us if we ever discovered a chemical intoxicant that was capable of making people that deluded.
One, those substances are fine for a lot of people.
Two, some of those substances are fine for most anybody. I've never even heard of a deadly marijuana overdose, and the evidence shows no increase in mortality for marijuana users.
Three, we already tried alcohol prohibition, and we are currently trying drug prohibition. It does not solve he problem you care about, while creating other large problems.
So really, you sound like somebody who has a personal hobbyhorse and uses pretty much anything (like say, losing stars on GitHub or mentioning a book on airplane safety investigations) to argue for it. And that sort of motivated reasoning around argument for societal change strikes me as way more dangerous than somebody eating a THC edible.
The wages of sin is death.
I mean, it would be disappointing to read it to find it summarizes exactly to what you just said.
From an individual user's perspective, you still need own your shit and avoid making these mistakes. You can't rely on everything you use having smart safeguards.
There will always be dumb/careless users that a product should consider. There will always be suboptimal UI (we could've just as easily been talking about CLI database tools) that a user should watch out for
- click "change visibility" in the "Danger Zone" area of the settings.
- select "make private" with an additional warning shown that you will lose all stars and watchers. Ok, maybe it should mention how many.
- type the name of the repo into a box and then click "I understand, change repo visibility".
And yes, sometimes it is important to expect humans to not make mistakes. For example, at railway crossings. Even if you drove over it 100 times and no train came, the 101th time you may still die if you don't check for a train before crossing.
For somebody going through a railway crossing, yes, they shouldn't allow themselves to be prone any mistakes there. However, for the people involved in the construction of the railway crossing, they should certainly expect everyone to screw up and scrutinize the safety. We don't want to leave anything affecting livelihoods to chance.
"On average, each year around 400 people in the European Union and over 300 in the United States are killed in level crossing accidents."
Anecdotal: You have to enter the full name for a couple destructive actions on GitHub, and every time I had to do it was so jarring to me that I stopped everything, rechecked what I'm doing twice, started wondering if I might be dreaming, am on drugs or a voice in my head is telling me to do something dumb. Like, yes we should improve nonetheless, and I usually try to put myself into other people's shoes before judging them, but this is just one of the few times where I just can't help but, you know, think it was somewhat dumb to make this mistake with the current system in place. Like, next time we have this stars and watchers warning in place and still someone will manage to proceed on autopilot, what do we do next? Have a siren sound go off in addition? Have the user enable their mic and spell out the repo name? Send a written letter to GitHub? You'll never get the error rate to 0, at which point would you rather accept people making mistakes and calling them out on it than adding more inconvenience on top that just bothers everybody else?
Nothing else on GitHub is like this: orgs and users are treated as the same class of entity pretty much all the time. I could easily see myself making the same mistake on autopilot.
If every system we're interacting daily should be fool-proof, it will requires enormous time and effort. Naturally, we invests more time and effort when it's about life and death situation. If we only lose 2 cents by our mistake, we just don't care.
Of course, I'd like to have more fool-proof design in all the destructive interactions from all websites. But, the question is, does it worth it?
I don't know. Github employees themselves have made this mistake as outlined in the post, and they were easily able to recover from it, which probably lowered the priority on changing any UX.
Essentially, it's a complete non-issue depending on whether Github cares about you.
Would you like the police in your area to behave in this manner? I think not.
On the other hand, you should really, really, really hope that GitHub has internal guardrails to prevent their engineers making cowboy edits to the production databases without manager approval.
Obviously it would be nice to see A similar response from GitHub regardless of whether the issue at hand is affecting themselves versus a member of their community. But, as long as humans are making the decisions, that’s probably a pipe dream. And honestly, policing could very well be the standard example of this.
> Sadly we can't easily do that without triggering lots of issue. We tried with a couple of projects in the past and found it caused a bunch of bad things to happen.
https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/149333028949351629...
Tbh, when I've deleted repo's, I've mostly just copied the repo name and pasted it in the box. Careless of me? Definitely. Can GitHub change that carelessness? Probably not. Will a box that says "Stars: 54k" help? I think it'd help me, at the very least.
[ ] Delete 54,000 stars?
[ ] Delete 8,000 watchers?
[ ] etcThere’s also an issue of taking a repo private, making changes when no one gets alerted, and making it public to make it harder for people to know what’s going on.
They could always notify watchers about the repo being made private.
I would say that makes things even worse. Because it's just training you to rely on -i/I as a sensible default. One day, you'll encounter that one distro that doesn't have that, and it'll be the time where you really wish it were.
An option that shows a y/n action. That's what GitHub does when you're about to make private/delete a repo (even more asking you to type out its entire name) and yet here we're.
"Just don't make any mistakes" is the worst stance one can have in this context, it denies reality and only assures you're unprepared when (not if) something important goes wrong.
I would also say that post does not come across to me as he is only blaming GitHub.
Thing is, we type all day, and can type pretty much any string at a decent speed without putting much thought into it.
Any of us must have mistakenly typed a full file path or API URL, just to realize it’s not the right machine or project after having typed it all. It just take 2 or 3s max after all.
I think it becomes an arms race to get attention on important things, we can do better by focusing more on every single destructive operation. We can also avoid having too similar interfaces for completely different contexts.
First of all, this is self-evident. But second of all and more importantly: it doesn’t scale.
The reason we have blame-free postmortems is because people will always make mistakes, so we find ways to change process or design to minimize those mistakes.
If you think you’ll never do something on autopilot, you’re fooling yourself.
The author also neglects to mention he had to type the full project name into a dialog box, which would be critical to any real postmortem. If typing the repo name into GitHub didn’t wake him up, why should we believe listing the number of stars would? The author said he thought he was in a different repo, but that makes no sense.
The real lesson, imo, is for people obsessed with stars to set up permissions, use dedicated accounts, and not toy around with settings you know are dangerous before you’ve had your coffee.
That’s a lot more reasonable than GitHub spending time to implement yet another warning box feature that the author has proved they can ignore regardless of how obvious GitHub makes it.
Please, quote from the article where you read this. I don't see it.
In the article I read, the author admits fault:
> I accidentally made the project’s repository private for a moment.
The author goes on to explain how they made the mistake.
> What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
> GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. In this context, and since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, my brain switched to auto-pilot mode.
> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
> That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.
The author does not attempt to hide or misrepresent the GitHub UI that requires confirmation. They show it for both "httpie/httpie" and "httpie/.github".
It does not matter that you have to type the repo name, because once you are on auto-pilot, you proceed past this step. In fact, the author doesn't admit it, but if he's like me, I'll bet they copy/pasted the name. Because the name alone is not sufficient.
The author then goes on to suggest what might have kicked him out of auto-pilot. Providing more information about the repo other than just its name. The name alone is NOT sufficient. And they author shows some example UIs from their own software.
Your suggestion: "The real lesson, imo, is for people obsessed with stars to set up permissions, use dedicated accounts, and not toy around with settings you know are dangerous before you’ve had your coffee."
This simply does not scale. It would require everyone to learn the same lesson for themselves.
I've been a sys admin and developer for over 25 years. People make mistakes. They make them all the time. Putting context-free (or minimal context in the case of the GitHub UI) "Are you sure?" dialogs in front of them does nothing to prevent mistakes.
All the author is asking for is a bit more context from the GitHub UI to help the user realize the significance of their action. This would help future GitHub users to avoid the same error.
What’s the star threshold? 1000? 5?
I’d hate to now have to type in the number of watchers and stars as part of the private/delete/move/etc prompt for all the times I know what I’m doing.
It’s a balance between punishing the non-stupid users vs protecting the stupid users. And people switch between these categories. I might be non-stupid today and stupid tomorrow.
When it comes to repetitive or familiar actions, this is physically impossible. If a repeated action is dangerous you cannot use a human interrupting themselves as your only control. It just won't happen.
Overall this is a classic UI design failure. In addition to the "people physically can't take themselves off autopilot" problem, the interface destroys the user's data without providing a way to get it back. It would take relatively little engineering effort to make this reversible.
Mistakes happen. It's better to have a really good Undo than a lot of confirmation dialogs.
A prompt that pops up to warn you that you're doing something potentially dangerous, when you know that what you're doing is benign, is a prompt that's crying wolf. You'll learn to tune it out.
A well-intentioned PM then thought the fix was to alias rm and add prompts to confirm. They had a whole project to add this alias everywhere.
First it broke existing scripts all over the place. So they fixed them to auto apply the confirmation.
Cut to a few months later and someone rm-rf’d something again, ignoring the prompt (or maybe auto applying it).
So the PM wanted a better message and a second prompt.
People are well intentioned but I’ve seen this path of stupidity that doesn’t solve the problem but is an activity in response to a problem.
If they're in autopilot, how are they going to "make sure"?
Everyone has been in this spot several times. Those who didn't are just lucky.
There's got to be external contingencies to protect people when they're in autopilot.
When I administered many VAX / UNIX machines waaay back, the terminals were all configured to be 'special' for the super user. It would have been HORRIFICALLY BAD if any command were executed unknowingly.
GH does -not- distinguish for project sizes, so there is NO SUPPORT for its users in this way. Every feature is to be considered with the same "shotgun severity".
To make a better system for every human, you can either try changing all the humans, or you can change the system that is supposed to serve them. One is easier than the other.
It's quite amusing to read this so soon after.
In this particular case the stars would have been a useful clue, but in the majority of similar cases the wouldn't be any stars. It would be a useless and redundant signal.
“I take responsibility, but…” is not “I take responsibility.”
Where does it say that they deleted any repo?
That... isn't how "autopilot" (or humans in general) work(s).
Humans err.
I copy/paste the repo name every time I delete a repo on GitHub. Yeah, it’s still a minor impediment, but it’s definitely not “TYPE the account and repo name.”
Humans will be humans, we can't help it.
Structures or systems that handle large amounts of user interactions should predict such use cases and design accordingly. a.k.a make them "idiot proof".
Have the advertisements/sign-up/GDPR pop-ups trained us to 'engage autopilot to dismiss the pop-up' as soon as possible irrespective of its importance?
"Are you sure you want to disconnect the server? No / Yes"
Click remove presents you with the following dialog box:
"Are you sure you want to remove the server? No / Yes"
Good luck! I mean, it's not a super huge deal to recreate the server entry, but still annoying when you're in the middle of something and just realized what you did.
Honestly, just replacing the "Yes" button with the action being taken would be enough to improve this. "No / Disconnect" and "No / Remove". But my personal opinion is that disconnecting is not a destructive action unless there's an open transaction or running query. So the dialog box should be contextual on that scenario, and otherwise it should just disconnect.
"Disconnecting will cancel executing queries and rollback open transactions. Continue? No / Disconnect"
Or the lazy web dialog popup with "Cancel" and "OK".
So you click on "Cancel Glorping The Frobnitz" and up pops a dialog with "Cancel" and "OK". It always takes a moments thought does the "Cancel" on the popup mean cancel the cancel glorping or cancel the cancel.
Since it takes literally seconds to change the button captions it might be nice to think of something clearer. Seconds if you're a UI expert which I'm not. Of course the webdev part of changing the captions on the page really would be seconds for me to do.
Typing error, it should be
> mean cancel the glorping or cancel the cancel.
Also, writing a solid blog post about a customer-service corner case and getting it to the top of news.ycombinator can be a great, if somewhat last-ditch, opportunity to escalate a problem.
GitHub doesn’t use foreign keys, the cascade delete must have been manually implemented.
<dialog-text>
If they click ok:
Asking again to be sure you want to destroy masses of data
<dialog-text>
But even that fails if there is a language barrier.
Surely GitHub is localized? (and if not, why the hell not?)
Relying on database cascade deletions is very dangerous. Especially since as the application/org grows, it's easy to lose track of all the things that may get cascaded. There's a good chance you'll find yourself having cascade-deleted data that you never intended to have deleted.
Manually implementing logic for "when archiving X, also archive Y and Z" takes more effort, but is a lot safer. When it comes to data.
What surprised me most is that github performs irreversible deletions when someone making a repository private. I would have expected them to just create a "is_deleted" column and set that flag to true. I wonder how much of this behavior is motivated by GDPR. Ie, complying with it requires completely deleting data when requested by the user, and they decided the most straight forward way to comply with that requirement is to delete the data immediately when requested.
I'm not at a terminal, so I can't check it out, but could you make a compound foreign key with the soft delete column and use the on update cascade? Something like `alter table stars add foreign key (repo_id, is_deleted) references repos (id, is_deleted) on update cascade;`
Couldn't you just use an on delete trigger for this? I have no experience one the subject however
Some databases also support INSTEAD OF triggers.
Yet there are many architectures beside MVC. Many of them decades old. Proven. Established. Yet unknown to devs who picked up a rails book on day 1 and never looked back (I've been guilty of that for years).
This particular problem is a textbook candidate for Command Pattern. The problem of undo is solved naturally in any event-sourced setup (git is even sourced, and moving through history a prime feature). Probably more architectures that I'm less familiar with, solve 'undo' as well.
But we are stuck with the web, backends in 2022, being built on MVC frameworks like Rails, where solving such issues is tough and complex. So we are stuck with a huge amount of warning dialogs to 'solve' this.
Point being: choose your architecture well, based on your needs and the tradeoffs. Don't just grab the next fancy framework, because that will decide for you, if, and how you solve things like 'soft delete' or 'undo'.
It will apply to all queries unless you specifically call " unscoped"
2. Like the article suggests, additional UX improvements could be made besides making it possible to restore a backup or providing an undo action.
3. I feel you are ignoring the fact that technology-wise it was probably Rails along with its MVC model that got them into their scale in the first place.
4. Had they focused on a more exotic architecture from day one, the UX of other features on the site could've been significantly worse.
I don't know the internals of Github. But we had soft-delete dragging down our database. Indexing, for one, becomes tough.
It also presumes everything lives in a single, canonical, transactional database. In real life, anything of scale, with legacy lives in multiple services. There'll be caches, search-indexes (elastic etc), data-lakes, leader/follower clusters and whatnot. Propagating a "delete" command is no easier or harder in such a setup, than propagating a "flag" which has severe business and security implications.
2. Like the article suggests, additional UX improvements could be made besides making it possible to restore a backup or providing an undo action.
Yup. My point was that with e.g. Event-sourced or Command pattern, you don't even need that whole UI in the first place. There could be a 20 minute "undo" somewhere. Or an "undo" that remains active untill another non-compatible command renders undoing unavailable. This is a common pattern. Which was invented decades ago, and is still used everywhere to solve this exact problem.
Why invent dialogs, soft-deletes, etc, when the problem is solved, done and non-existent, given you make the right choices? Why do software engineers insist on re-inventing wheels every few years rather than grab existing, proven and solid solutions for this?¹
3. I feel you are ignoring the fact that technology-wise it was probably Rails along with its MVC model that got them into their scale in the first place.
Why do you feel this? Rails comes with tradeoffs. I'm not saying "rails was a bad choice" But I'm saying "the choice for Rails brings the tradeoffs that e.g. Undo is hard".
Saying that "it is easy in Rails" is both disingenuous and unfair: there are hundreds of Gems, some of which grown to enormous project almost the size of entire ActiveRecord itself, to tackle these problems: it isn't easy. Papertrail, for example is a magnificent monster. "just drop in papertrail" really is not a solution, it's a problem.
> 4. Had they focused on a more exotic architecture from day one, the UX of other features on the site could've been significantly worse.
I.e. "tradeoffs".
¹ The answer, I'm afraid, is a mix of the doubling-of-developers-every-four-years (forever september), NIH, and unwillingness to invest time in learning the foundations layed out in the past decades. The last is what bothers me most.
For one thing, because it works very well and is much easier to wrap your head around than the command pattern (much less undoing a command, and keeping track of which commands make incompatible changes).
These things are worth the effort if you are going to build an app that will be around for ten years and serve an existing market. Much harder to justify if you are still figuring out what you actually need to do.
Like, I agree with you that most developers just don’t know about it yet, and therefore don’t use it, but that’s also a factor of MVC just being the right choice for 90% of all apps, and easier to get started with.
This comment seems to be down on MVC and Rails so I was curious about the alternatives you mentioned and came across your post that ended with praise of Rails ( https://berk.es/2022/03/08/the-waning-of-ruby-and-rails/ ):
> Rails still is a great way to get a prototype demo, or minimum viable product online in days with least surprises.
Your comment seems to indicate that you started discovering new architectures like the Command Pattern but it sounds like you are also still a proponent of Rails and MVC based on your blog post. Do you have any links to resources that helped you discover other patterns or could you share what took you on your journey?
In the Rails blog post, you said:
> I have a separate post planned on "RAD web frameworks", MVC and ActiveRecord, but it is safe to say that such frameworks, amongst which Rails, have found their niche, yet are by no means a silver bullet.
Is that post you are planning to write going to delve into some of the architectures you mentioned here? That would definitely be something I would be interested in reading.
He has a great article (2014), old, on why you may not want to build that framework at all[2] too:
> Using a framework requires a significant commitment. By accepting the framework into your code, you surrender your control over the details that the framework manages. [...] > And yet despite the huge commitment you’ve made to the framework, the framework has made no reciprocal commitment to you at all. That framework is free to evolve in any direction that pleases its author.
Another great source are the books, and/or youtube channel by Dave Farley[3]
What set me on a journey is -decades ago- the pain I, as a developer felt when developing web-applications for my clients. But worse: the pain they felt for getting delivered crap. "Why am I delivering crap" was the question that set me to research frameworks, languages, design patterns and architecture. Drupal, Rails, Django, ASP: I've worked with it, and delivered crap with it.
In general, I found that a framework matters. e.g. the simple act of reading ActiveRecord Critisism on wikipedia[4] got me thingking:
> also due to the strong coupling of database interaction and application logic,
This was true for project D, G and Y! This was why we failed to iterate at any speed at all. Because I can relate it immediate to Real And Actual Problems, Failed Projects, Slipped Deadlines, Burned out colleagues, and so on, all of wich I encountered during my career. Not saying all those problems were caused by ActiveRecord or Rails! But that they were caused by the choice for the wrong framework. Or the choice for a framework at all.
It led me to DDD[5], which then is the gateway into all sorts of Enterprise Patterns. I dislike that name, because the connotation is all wrong. Especially the subtitle of the canonical book on DDD struck a note:
> Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
This! This is why I'm delivering crap: I fail to tackle the complexity that inherit in any domain. In e.g. Rails, I would just spread it all over the place, fighting against ActiveRecord and Rails, yet still failing to isolate, modularize and capture that domain.
So I no longer use Rails, nor any framework in my startup. I occasionally do some freelance gigs, often Rails. And the more I learned how to Tackle Complexity in the Heart of Software through choices and tradeoffs, the more I see why a project in Rails that I'm flewn in to salvage, is doomed. It's the choice for Rails. Not lacking of services, not "Fat Models", not "missing tests" nor missing of any sort of "rigorous refactoring" Its Rails! Rails is just unfit for this domain, this problem, this customer.
Yet Rails shines for others: I restate: It's brilliant for simple CRUD. But anything you expect to have any sort of "Complexity in the heart" is probably unfit.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCfqyGl3nq_V0bo64CjZh8g
[2] https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/05/11/FrameworkBo...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCfqyGl3nq_V0bo64CjZh8g (his books are promoted on this channel)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_record_pattern#Criticis...
There is nothing about Rails or MVC preventing someone from doing this. This is a very common design principle for all kind of ERP and BPM systems: don't ever delete anything.
DIY in this case really is very simple. And far more flexible, performant even, and future-proof.
(I've worked on a project where two full-time devs spent days upgrading this gem; this is over 6 years ago). And a few months ago, I worked on a project where they had more code to configure, patch and work around paranoia, than any DIY ever did. My even simpler DIY version not only used 50% of the code we had to override the gem before, it allowed for some custom work that we could not do before.
And no: even DIY ain't as simple as you make it seem. Practical issue, that I encountered last year even, was where their "soft delete" was making state-machines very tough. Because in a FSM, "deleted" wants to be state, like anything else. But the "generic soft-delete" conflicts with that. So the project had both. And some fugly glue-code to sync between the FSM and the soft-delete and vice-versa. No suprise that this broke occasionally, making data re-available that people thought gone.
OTOH, I haven't been in such a mode, so I really got no right to comment on this. Best wishes to the team -- that those who saw his post will restar/rewatch the repo -- and (fwiw) thanks for writing it up and making me even more paranoid (in a positive sense) about doing such destructive operations.
This would entirely depend upon how often it shows up. The more often it shows up when the scare isn't relevant, the less people will pay attention to it.
>the distractions ("Type this repo's name", etc) just go away
I think it shows that what one types needs to be relevant information. In this case, due to the similarity between when the author would've been asked if they did what they were intending to do and what they typed to do what they actually did, we can judge the prompt isn't enough. If this also asked you to type in the number of git stars you were about to lose, that would've been enough to make author recheck exactly what they were doing.
The number of games that DO ask this question, immediately after saving, is ridiculously high it's so frustrating.
GitHub (Microsoft) had a non intuitive UI feature, they themselves were victim of. They restored for their own repo but not for the customer repo...Zero customer focus is the lesson here.
"...In our case, however, they refuse to do that, citing undesirable side effects and the cost of resources. We even offered GitHub financial compensation for any resources required. But, sadly, they declined. They have other priorities than resurrecting the community of one of the oldest and most popular community projects on their platform..."
"...So the answer to the question is, unfortunately, the following: GitHub will restore a repo damaged by making it private. But only if it’s one of their own projects, not a community one.."
It seems a bit much to expect the website to show you a warning of different levels of severity depending on the stars a repos has, particularly when the standard message is pretty severe and explicit. It even makes you type the name of the repo you want to make private before proceeding - I don't see how that wouldn't make anyone snap out of autopilot. I sympathise with the author's misfortune but it is pretty hard to look at that warning dialog and conclude that he was not sufficiently warned of the consequences or given a chance to reflect.
I find it disappointing that all of the lessons supposedly learned from this ordeal are lessons for other people, not the author. Surely lesson #1 should have been "check what repo you're in before taking destructive actions".
However, I can absolutely imagine doing the author's mistake and I think their UI improvement suggestion is great.
To me the interface design lesson here is valuable. A recommendation to "check what repo you're in before taking destructive actions" has zero value, since everyone knows that already.
---
Completely agreed on the second point though, it's weird to blame this mainly on GitHub.
GitHub may be better off preventing a repo with this size of a following from being made private without a support request or something requiring a second party to confirm.
Now I'm wondering whether this approach actually works.
Surely there are multiple solutions, but I think you distilled the essence well: make the truly dangerous action different to the learned repetition.
More and more IT systems are starting to do this for more and more tasks. I understand why: it's a hell of a lot easier than implementing a trashcan, timed undo, joining in helpful data, etc, but man, one good session with a couple hundred resources that need to be deleted this way is enough to burn you out pretty hard on these.
Also, systems that go for these lazy solutions tend also to go for the lazy solution of "just delete and recreate the resource" instead of implementing proper modify functionality. This compounds the problem. As if administrative tasks didn't already come with enough drudgery, now you have to constantly do the old timey school punishment of writing lines just to do your job.
"Just add friction" is evil. Easy, but evil.
As time went by they slowly started to “improve” the situation by constantly forcing you to click through a “changing this setting may have knock on effects to your system” banner…that they showed every time you changed anything. Making it completely useless for actually preventing you from harming your system and really just giving the impression they were trying to cover their butts legally.
I hated working with that platform.
If you're using Github's CLI tool, you can autoconfirm repo deletion so that you won't have to type the name ever again. It seems like if Github were to change their UI, they would need to somehow change their API as well.
> […] I obviously had no intention to make httpie/httpie private. So, why then?
>
> The proximate cause was that I thought I was inside a different repo; […] What I actually intended to do was to hide the HTTPie organization’s profile README, […]
>
> What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
>
> GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. […] since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, […]
>
> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
>
> That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.
There's no harm in that, and Github being used by millions of developers is a strong reason to make it just a little bit safer for even the rarer cases like these.
It’s fine to express the gulf of evaluation and execution that led to the error. It happened. There may not be any better known solutions at the moment to lower the risk any further.
Calling them careless is also unjustified. They made a mental error processing the information. Whenever humans are involved there is a risk of illogical and bizarre mental errors in decision making because we are degenerating meat robots granted full agency.
Shit happens. How we emotionally deal with it is the test of life as a human being.
>The dialog should be more contextual and, paraphrasing again, it should say “You’re about to kill 55,000 people.” That would’ve certainly made me pause.
> Honestly, they are blaming Github here.
I think both of these statements can be true at the same time. They are taking much of the responsibility while also explaining how some aspects of Github's design are partly responsible for the outcome.
It's not like they can just run a few SQL queries on prod and have the author PayPal them 10$.
They need to create a plan, cost estimate, risk assessment, get management/qa/security/SRE/... approvals, write the code, documentation, reviews, tests, run on prod, create invoice, etc. This means 10-20 people work for 1-2 days. I doubt that the author is willing to pay 20000-60000$ for this.
> That humble tool, which we open-sourced, quickly captured developers’ hearts and rapidly became one of the top projects on GitHub.
> We’ve raised a Seed Round ...
It's not hard to believe the seed round and the entire pitch of the commercial venture was tied to the star count, and it's not hard to believe that the author would drop $1/star to restore the count.
The article describes exactly what else they could do, including example screenshots from another app that does it.
For example, my README repo is and must be called “glacials/glacials”; if I wanted to delete it that is what I would type, but if I were an organization and wanted to delete it, I would type something else. This different behavior between acting as a user vs. acting as an organization is what caught the author off-guard. They typed “httpie/httpie” and consciously thought “yes, I want to delete the README repo, which I know must have name httpie/httpie, so that’s definitely what I’d like to do, I’ll go ahead and type that”.
This is not absentmindedness, it is a misleading product inconsistency. Were it not for this, I would 100% agree with you.
This screen gives you pretty poor context for your action. You can’t so easily see things that normally tell you at a glance where you are. They also don’t offer a good preview of the action, or undo, which is how you normally make potentially destructive actions less dangerous. Instead they made a scary prompt, but since they use that solution a lot, users may get desensitized to it.
If you feel something needs get giant flashing warning messages perhaps make it reversible for a week.
This would also be much nicer UX. Just click a button to delete something, and it says something like “This has has been moved to Trash, and will be permanently deleted in 30 days”. No big scary warnings needed. And you can still delete it immediately if you want (by emptying your trash afterwards) so it’s not in breach of any laws.
Like most computer warnings it was overly generic, it warned there are potential consequences, but never warned of the actual consequences. If the warning had said hey this is going to effect 55K stars and watchers, he would have known he was in the wrong spot.
The problem is if you expect a generic warning then a generic warning doesn't actually warn. A specific warning is more likely to, but not guarantied to catch attention.
I've done this for personal projects. I don't see why GitHub can't do something similar.
> It even makes you type the name of the repo you want to make private before proceeding
No, it literally does not. Nor does this mean you fully understand the implications of what you are doing as explained in the article.
> check what repo you're in before taking destructive actions
The amount of checking and automation of things for non-destructive actions, you'll forgive someone for expecting a bit of extra automation that, in this case, literally costs less.
On one hand, there's a UI change GitHub could implement that would greatly prevent this situation from happening again. On the other hand, one could try warn every github users that this situation can happen and to be carefull... Well I have my opinion on which would be most effective.
Also I believe that asking us every day the ridiculously braindead act, to copy a text from here to there is more harmful than it helps, it just sets people to autopilot mode. Although I don't have any measures.
Yes, GitHub should have a better UX around this action.
But...
There is another thing to consider:
Is it really necessary that a repo that is accidentally made private and then made public should lose its stars anyway?
Is that really what the repo owner or the people who starred the repo even want to happen?
Would you really not look at two repos that do the same thing, with similar ages and recent commits but one has zero stars and the other has hundreds, and not at least initially trust the latter more?
2) probably part of the currently required setup on their database side (triggers)
Features tend to evolve evolutionarily and certain data patterns are hard to invent around for security/privacy constraints. So err on the side of deleting rather than potential privacy/security bug.
Definitely fixable with some decent investigation, coding, etc. - but hard to prioritize.
When youtube videos are taken down or made private, they are not deleted necessarily from my playlists. There's simply an indicator that they video is 'no longer available'. I don't see why something similar can't be the behaviour for GitHub stars and watches?
Here's a list of your favourite songs, but two are missing, have fun figuring out which two it is!
- The users can still see all their stars and find the private repo, which makes it not private.
- The users can't see all their stars, they can only see their stars for the public repos. There's no way to find or unstar a private repo that you starred while it was public. This would lead to the situation that if you unstar everything and make sure you have zero stars, you could wake up the next week with 1 starred repos, and then with 3 starred repos, because some repos went public again.
- The users can see all their stars, but the private ones lead to a 404, which would be perplexing for a greater number of people than the current behavior.
- All private repos that have been public at least once lead to a "this repo is now private" message, that would in practice allow anyone to make an index of all the private repos that were public at least once. And it would also allow anyone to know when a private repo that was private at least once is deleted.
I think the current behaviour is better than all of these options.
Why seeing a start you made for a previously public repository makes it not private? People remember things too, there's also the webarchive. You should be able to unstar it or keep your star, the only difference is that you don't know if the repository still exists or not.
If an admin were to private->delete, then all the stars referencing the report would stay and thus the reference to the repo would still be there, on GitHub's servers. There's a difference between GitHub storing things forever and third parties on the internet being a forever archive of visible pages.
And there's always the potential to add a other toggle when privating a repo that lets you force-remove all stars.
When someone deactivates their account, you can see that you have X additional likes, but you can't access them. If that user reactivates their account, those likes suddenly show back up.
This could be a privacy issue if you've decided to remove likes for a certain categories of posts for whatever reason.
For GitHub, a couple other options I can think of would be to 1. show stars for private repos but only for the purpose of unstarring or 2. hide stars when a repo goes private and then give users an option to re-enable their star if a repo goes back to public. But these options are relatively complex, and I can see why GitHub would go with deletion.
Sounds fine and expected to me.
Current behavior is destructive.
>- All private repos that have been public at least once lead to a "this repo is now private" message, that would in practice allow anyone to make an index of all the private repos that were public at least once. And it would also allow anyone to know when a private repo that was private at least once is deleted.
This is a much better option.
Sorta like most social media apps when you want to delete your account. It doesn't delete it fully until a month later
Technically you want to delete dependent stuff, but in this case this seems like overstepping on development side.
Now that you're on the HN's frontpage, hopefully somebody from Github upper management will see this and all will be good soon thanks to gold old HN (especially when they did the same thing themselves and restored it).
Wish you the best.
That's not the only difference. The other difference is that you also have to type the full repository name, including the organization name.
If they wanted to delete the correct repository, they would have to type httpie/.github, but instead they typed httpie/httpie.
It's unfortunate what happened, but without GitHub removing the possibility at all to delete repositories/change the visibility, I don't know what else they could have done to try to prevent it. It's really hard as a user to affect the wrong repository, as you are gonna have to mentally and literally pause to write out the organization name + repository (httpie/httpie in this case) and if that doesn't stop you, I don't think anything would.
No, you don't have to type it, and I doubt anyone types it. You copy that line and paste it. Often it's done on autopilot, especially when in a rush.
In famous words of Mr. Larry wall, 3 great virtues of every programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
It’s typically short short, and it’s a very destructive action. It’s also very apparent to me why I would want to type it out.
That said, someone is going to make a mistake at some point. I’d expect better from github support here.
A lot of us navigate by typing, be it CLI, in our IDE, URLs etc. And we must have got used to type hundreds of times our company or project names every day, in many places.
I can't imagine typing <project name>/<project name> in a input box triggering in us a lot consciousness or extra care. Typing something more unusual could actually be more impacting I think.
As the author of the post suggests: Prominently spell out "This will remove 54,000 stars." vs. "This won't remove any stars (there are none yet)."
It almost certainly would help. When you attempt to delete a world of warcraft character you are prompted with the character's level, among other info. This is the biggest difference you'll see between the delete procedure for a level 1 alt with < 1 hr played and a level 80 (or w/e) character with >10,000 hr played if you've named them similarly.
Because of the relatively low character limit and the popularity of alts, this feature (delete character) gets a lot of use and misuse so it's reasonable to expect the developers to have put some thought in to it.
Right? As in, "this will affect 0 stars" vs "this will affect 54,000 stars" is an informational difference. Calling out "this will affect all stars" (without specifying a number) doesn't break a user out of doing it to the wrong repo, since that message is the same in both cases.
The community was valuable to GitHub as well.
I could see a spec on “sizable community thresholds” where if an interaction might blow away something of that size GH affords you an exchange with a “concierge” forcing a minor exchange with a real person.
Most of the time that's true, or we'd be hearing about this happening all of the time. But 'most of the time' is not 'every time'. 'Almost always' is also not 'every time'. This is a distinction that Human Factors people make that victim-blaming nerds do not.
You've seen the video on Youtube (or Reddit) of the guy holding the fish throwing his phone into the lake? He didn't do that because he was stupid, he did it because he made an executive decision to, "hold fish, take picture with phone, throw it in the water" and then his motor cortex swapped 'it' to the wrong hand and went on autopilot.
If you don't like that example, I know of a highly secure data center in Seattle that had the emergency power cutoff button pushed not once but twice by different tenants. The first time was a pure accident of bumping it while doing maintenance. The second time someone opened an acrylic case and pushed the button because they thought "buttons open doors, I see a button. Sure is weird that it is covered with a box... hey why did the lights go out?" You have problem, you observe action or object that solves problems (maybe not this problem), monkey brain attempts action to see if problem is solved.
Typing in the repository name narrows the gap between intent and action, but it doesn't close it. Technically making someone type, "Make hippie/hippie private" would at least make them spell out the intent, narrowing it again. But it doesn't make them state the intent. Strictly speaking, they are being told to transcribe text. Whether they parse the text they're typing or not is a separate step, in two different parts of the brain. Any of those fails to connect and you have a catastrophic destruction. From a Precautionary Principle standpoint, the consequences are exactly the same with all three options, and only the likelihood has changed.
If you want to make a big dent in outcomes you have to also reduce the consequences, not just the opportunity. Making all actions reversible is the most conceptually simple and the most technically difficult option. Parceling out consequences over time is usually less difficult, and if you pick an order that makes the feedback immediate, then the person realizes quickly that what they meant and what they said didn't line up, before the real damage kicks in.
Github is built around git. The two biggest ways to permanently lose data from git, one of them is protected by permissions and may be off by default. The other one is automatic but takes 30 days. That's two very different precedents that have been set, and they picked the wrong one to emulate.
This is not true.
We had an internal tool at a previous job that required you to type the name of a service's cluster into a field before deleting it. Automated deployments sometimes got left behind - and users would go in periodically and clean them up.
If you watched folks, they would type the name of the cluster being deleted into that box UNTIL they had to do this many times in a row. As soon as it was a "batch" job, folks would go through the motion of:
1. click delete
2. double click service name
3. ctrl+c
4. click text input
5. ctrl+v
6. press "Confirm"
It was remarkable, after someone did this once, I don't think I ever observed them going back to typing in the cluster name. That algorithm of "copy and paste" carried over into every prompt they saw of that form moving forward.
I'm guilty of this too - I no longer type the prompted name for this form of confirmation dialogue, it's a copy-and-paste.
Humans will always take the easiest route. We just have to accept that and come up with better solutions that aid humans or fit to our very weird nature.
You and most of the rest of us, I suspect. Like I want to type that out every time...
"We were in the top Xth percentile" makes the author sound like a complete tool and I have little sympathy for them, especially given they're already back to 3k stars.
Expecting the dialog to say "now, you've got 50,000 stars, are you REALLY REALLY SURE?" is just infantile, but really matches the overall tone the author has.
That's not in itself a huge problem, but in this case it was compounded with the fact that the generic repo he was acting on is named inconsistently for users vs organizations, and he had just done it on his user account. If I'm reading correctly, a user's profile readme repo is `<user>/<user>`, while for organizations it is `<org>/.github`, and, crucially, `<org>/<org>` is almost always going to be the core project for that org.
So yes, the warning says you will lose all stars on the project, but in the moment it would have seemed (to a fallible human brain who was in a user-space context) that this was the right repo, whereas a "you will lose 54k stars" message would have broken the user out of that space.
I don't think it's surprising they'd do such a thing for themselves and not a customer - I'm more surprised they didn't remove the footgun for future mistakes on their part.
Internal support is inherently limited: the single organization is of limited size.
External support has no limit in scope, you have to setup SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), communicate expectations, likely hire support staff...
Look at it this way: internal support is helping your friends, but external support requires setting up contracts.
Which makes them come out as hypocrites. You don't get to blame Microsoft for EEE, and then continue to help them with it !!
Opening up the ability to do that externally would potentially require multiple people working full-time to handle the requests.
"We even offered GitHub financial compensation for any resources required." Considering the tone of the article I think there's a very high risk if github accepted agreed to that we'd see an article titled "Github charges popular open source project $5000 to fix a minor accident"
If I was working at GitHub, and I nuked something, then the rest of my day would be un-nuking that thing. On the other hand if I was working on something totally unrelated, and then you my PM came to me and said "can you stop what you're doing and unfuck this thing" it would obviously depend on what I was working on.
(Not weighing in on whether they still should have considered it or not, just observing that their claim that it costs an unacceptable amount may not be inconsistent with having restored a much less comparatively "hot" repo.)
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20201116172809/https://github.co...
I’m not saying there isn’t a better way Github could handle this situation. Just that I do sympathise with the decision to cascade delete.
Stop sending notifications to watchers, and replace the repo in the stargazer's starred list with a "The following starred repos are currently private and cannot be viewed:" and make the stars be remove-only for a while.
If you made something public on GitHub that shouldn’t have been, it was immediately compromised, you just might not notice.
It seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion that doesn't feel like a lot of work, but could potentially prevent an irreversible mistake.
The OP's main suggestion is along exactly those lines. It's actually less extreme, in some ways (see OP's "Lesson 1").
> What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
> GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. In this context, and since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, my brain switched to auto-pilot mode.
> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
> That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.
The main thing I really don't get is why it even needs to delete all the stars? It's not like they delete all comments/issues... by users who have been deleted. So why could they not simply make the star point to a "ghost repository"?
GitHub is a large and complex set of applications, and making changes like that is probably not trivial. It’s probably not a high priority either. This is the first time I’ve heard of this in the existence of GitHub, and while that doesn’t mean it has only happened once, I suspect it’s rarely a meaningful issue.
Solving problems like this at GitHub’s scale is often hard both due to the need to do things that matter more, and due to how entrenched database schemas and application architectures tend to be. I’m sure their migrations are plenty scary to manage, and doing it to alter behaviour when toggling privacy on a repository understandably wouldn’t be high on their list of reasons to perform one.
Aside from those concerns, I bet there are a lot of lines of code which assume stars exist for specific reasons. Once they can exist for another reason, you have to rewrite logic around that, rewrite tests for that logic, etc. It could easily be way more work than it seems at a glance.
I do think including more context about what will be destroyed by the action would be great, and probably pragmatic, but… If typing out the name of the repository isn’t enough, providing context might not be either.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like one of those “Whatever, we’ve got a million other things to do” situations. It might get a handful of inquiries about it per year while a dozen other features get hammered with attention and requests from paying customers.
Again, not saying they can’t improve it. Just giving them the benefit of the doubt here and proposing that it’s possible that it isn’t better for legitimate reasons.
Github should be grateful for this feedback. I know that it takes effort to make your product or service better, but that doesn't mean that customers shouldn't ever say anything. Customers are telling Github how it can improve its service. Github can choose to listen to them, or not.
With some simple frontend changes, they can probably reduce accidental destructive changes to customer's accounts.
I think Github cut some corners here. I would much rather that repo stars were treated similar to how resources on other platforms are. If someone makes it private, then return 403 "repos is private"
I’m only commenting on how so many comments trivialize the work required to resolve this. I have a feeling nothing is trivial at GitHub.
1st iteration: delete button with a confirmation box (standard stuff). Users click through the box in autopilot mode and still delete their entire projects.
2nd iteration: someone came up with an idea: confirmation box + an additional checkbox (if it isn't checked, the delete button is disabled). Users still manage to delete projects by accident. When we asked them how that happened (we've set up so many hurdles!), the user says, just like in the article, that they thought they were deleting a different (test) project.
3rd iteration: I suggested showing the number of objects in the project (just like suggested in the article) so that the user knew they aren't deleting a test project.
I moved on to a different project since, but the saga probably continues.
Would validate/invalidate the authors ui suggestions.
"You have 55,231 GitHub stars. Please type 55231 if you want to delete them all."
But I guess, if you delete repos often enough, this will also become muscle memory.
Edit: Just saw the other comment here suggesting the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033996
I guess users will always be able to fuck things up.
Best solution would be to offer undos but then people will complain that deleting things does not actually delete. You are keeping data to yourself! Start citing privacy issues etc.
There is no winning here.
This reads like somebody was placing way too much personal mental value on “the repo for my project has a large number of stars”
I've had a very different experience around stars - they're just a bit of fluff and pretty unimportant compared to watches.
If the watchers still care to watch, they can choose to watch again.
If I unstar your repo, I have not taken anything from you because you never owned my star in the first place. Github presents this number to you as though it were important, to give you a dopamine hit when the number goes up. Their motivation for doing this is obvious. If you fall for this trick, that's on you. You have the choice to stop caring.
And even if the premise of these metrics being important were accepted, the fact remains that the removal of people from the watchers list is not irreversible. No irreplaceable documents were destroyed. No diaries were burned. If the repository had been deleted, commit history erased, that would be comparable to a diary burning. But that's not what happened (and would probably still be reversible.)
For which to happen you've to do the same thing: type out its name. So I wonder if people ask for privatize to be presented with number of stars, should when deleting a repo GitHub present you with number of commits, issues, releases, etc as well?
Your comment reads like you don't understand how a community works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Do you want to delete this?"
"Yes"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
....
"OMG it's all gone!?!?"
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.
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.
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.
But I think some other UI flaws contribute to that in this case.
Comfort with a UI means eventually you want it to get out of your way and your brain will do what it needs to streamline the process. At which point those elements intended to break the flow of the app no longer do.
A Firefox use case w study and their approach.
https://medium.com/firefox-ux/designing-better-security-warn...
Good discussion of the problem:
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/44609/how-do-i-avoid-...
My takeaways are as follows:
The best thing to do is provide undo. Then you can reduce the hoops people have to jump through because the consequences are less severe.
Simplify the modal so the text about what will happen stands independently enough to be parsec on first glance.
Show quantified data on what could happen. Instead of "you will lose all followers" which is true for any app, display "you will lose all 54,318 followers"
That's a much bigger failure than clicking the wrong button.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
People making bad UIs make them that way regardless of consequences for users.
You missed that besides fixing UX, we also train pilots to think about their actions, talk to copilots about their actions, take responsibility for their actions and most importantly, not to press buttons on "autopilot".
That's a completely different situation and defending learned stupidity of just clicking ok to everything.
Even using words like "future pain" is pretty crazy. "We lost 54k GitHub stars"? They're imaginary internet points! Cope.
Literally stop blaming with language like “GitHub deleted…”
> 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.
People frequently use the passive voice when referring to how software works. Like, “I entered my PIN and the phone unlocked”. “I entered my PIN and the phone unlocked itself” is maybe common too, but less common is “I entered my PIN and iOS unlocked my phone” or “I enter my pin and Apple unlocked my phone”[0].
Using the active voice shifts responsibility and autonomy for the action away from the author and onto GitHub. (Which, I mean, is exactly what the author was trying to do I think. But we were talking about ways the post could be changed to do that less.)
[0]: This is confounded a bit by GitHub being both the name of the software and the company. In context though I believe they meant the company?
I think the point I’m hung up on is I just don’t see blame in my version. I sincerely read it as a factual retelling, including GitHub (the software) as an agent that responds to commands and performs them. It makes me wonder where the borderline (if there is one?) would be between statements that convey neutrality versus seeming to be accusations (perhaps unintentionally and undetectably).
I am curious what you do see as GitHub the company’s contributing actions to the overall situation. And where the accusation line might be.
Clearly someone or some group of someones at Github built the functionality. And, in so doing, made it possible for an accidental deletion situation to exist, even if at the time they did it completely in good intention and with included warnings.
At some point though, Github themselves deleted data on their own repo by taking it private. They followed up by restoring their data, and not changing the dialog to be more clear.
Are any of these statements blaming, to your eyes/ears?
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?
Humans make mistakes all the time. We build systems to try to mitigate these and build them better by learning from new mistakes.
Civilian oversight of police departments could be instituted, too, investigating killings and maimings by police. It could be federally supervised, instead of relying on every state, county, and Podunk town to institute it.
While things can always be better the Github UX is good enough here. I am reminded of an old phrase:
“A bad workman always blames his tools.”
At some point you just need to accept responsibility for your actions and stop blaming others.
When Lauda Air Flight 004 crashed because the pilots accidentally deployed the reverse thrusters in air, even though it was the pilot who "made a mistake", Boeing was forced to change their design and now the original design is considered flawed.
Regardless, to make mistakes is human. What I don't really like is how the author starts attacking Github and Microsoft, just because they can't afford to fix the author's mistake. A huge red flag for me.
My advice is for Github to tell you that you’re losing 53,000 stars (not just “all your stars”) to help knock you out of autopilot.
I don’t get the finger pointing though. Obviously they messed up, it’s the entire post. But it’s also a good moment to reflect on how UX can be used to prevent people from messing up.
Unless you set the threshold to 1, in which case it's just more meaningless noise, like the repository name (apparently) is.
It is a workman, who builds a very succesful tool for others. Not a bad workman by my definition.
And his suggestions of improving the UI sound very solid. Also I am not sure, if you got the part, where he pointed out, that Github themself made the same misstake for one if their repos. Sure, sure, all bad workman.
That's a meaningless statement, though, as it can always be used against anyone complaining about something. I mean, you yourself wrote this the other day:
> I had to work with SAP Hybris a year or two ago. My IDE was not smart enough. Well actually I spent a good number of days trying to configure my IDE to be able to work properly with Hybris. I failed. What a mess
Are you a bad workman blaming your tools? Or do some tools just genuinely have faults?
> Yup, all watchers go when you go private and a bunch of notification settings etc. We've tried re-staring projects in the past etc but that ends up breaking lots of peoples notification settings. It's something we should make more reversible but hard for reasons <waveshand>
> It's the reason we display this when you try to do it. But a better fix would be for us to make it more easily reversible in the future.
https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/149333649025189478...
They make tech excuses which were ultimately their own design and tell that's not possible to be fixed.
I think there should be a follow-on discussion here about programming paradigm that empowers a "do what I mean not what I say" mentality.
Atlassian's recent fiasco https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/april-2022-outage-upda... is another motivating example for such a paradigm.
The author of the blog touches on this paradigm as a UI element. Software engineers should have pushed that as a "gotcha" up through Product Management to expose controls for such a risky scenario.
Certainly it's not a community owned by the maintainers. I don't own a connection with the people that upvoted this post, and stars mean exactly the same (effectively nothing).
But GitHub, by design, seeks to be as much of a social network as a repository hosting service and people take the stars very seriously. I’ve seen many CVs that brag about the candidate’s star counts.
This is so true - not sure why it isn't getting talked about more - they even have a feed now [which is getting better every few days]
Because people cannot judge for themselves if something is great or not, they always need proxies. It would be cool if we could somehow fix THAT.
Want to give users a way to remove all watchers? Great, make that /a separate action/ -- in no world and in no other application is it an intuitive UI/UX pattern to have make something private mean it gets deleted. That's absurd. Make private means "hidden for the indefinite future, but available to be made unhidden when I as a user see fit." That is the only reasonable definition I have ever seen (Instagram for example).
Whether you want to show a user that they watched a repository which is no longer public or simply have it disappear is up to the user, but I cannot understand why anyone thought that the straightforward solution was to /simply delete the data/. Between this and the now common downtime, I'm increasingly worried that GitHub is simply asleep at the wheel.
If Nat was still CEO this wouldn't have been a thing.
That's not to say recognition isn't a motivator, it is. Github stars just seem like a really poor proxy for recognition.
More seriously, why do they matter? Is it a prestige thing only or are there practical consequences to losing the stars?
It's also an important indicator of community size and authenticity, important factors in the decision to use the code.
I’d argue that GitHub should send them a notification that the repo they starred has been made private.
Seems like a good reason to delete it.
Now httpie is on 2.5k stars and if I only knew about it today, I'd consider using an alternative with 10k stars if there's any.
Choosing one library over another just because it has more stars is bad decision making.
Consider choosing a command line tool for making http requests. If you consider GitHub stars: - curl has 24.7k stars - httpie has 4.3k stars as of writing this - wget only has a mirror on GitHub with 264 stars
Does this mean wget is a bad tool? Does it mean httpie used to be vastly superior to curl with over 2x the amount of stars? I don't think you can really say anything meaningful about these projects based on the amount of stars, especially relatively to each other. Except for how many people clicked on the star button.
“They’re not stars, they’re a community!” What percentage of your community actively contributes bugfixes?
The app gained positions pretty fast in the free charts, but it never got close to what it was before. Biggest mistake I could have made in hindsight and there was nothing I could do about it. This was my first app in the app store, so I hand no experience with how things worked.
> And GitHub cascade-deleted our community that took 10 years to build.
How does losing stars equate to losing the community? Won’t actual fans be right back using and contributing?
If you remove a contributor of a private github repo it deletes their remote fork and all of their remote branches. To me that’s real loss.
Yes, but if "actual" fans are <1% of your existing user base then your reach and ranking is still far below what it used to be. I'm sure most people on GH don't even remember what repos they've starred, and httpie may be one of just thousands, of which many will disappear from their starred repos overnight without them even noticing.
One of the core bits of the talk is about the sort of messages our automated systems give us, and whether they're sufficient, or woefully lacking - which is what the linked article is also talking about, when it talks about how the "warning: about to burn down a house" doesn't tell if anyone's in that house.
But then this starts sounding like a guy who went to the same bank for 30 years, knows the tellers, and doesn’t understand why they won’t give him a small business loan.
If you started a company, rely on GitHub for core infrastructure, why would you not pay for it? And if you did this, why would you expect them to do support outside of self-service? Open Source doesn’t mean charity-worthy anymore. Most “successful” projects are either spun out of or spearheaded by a business these days. And it’s not like GitHub is rolling in profit. Their enterprise offering is just starting to get traction under MS.
I think the complaints would be more valid if they were outside of the norms in this space. GitHub + MS is still 1000x less shady than Sourceforge. I don’t think you’d see different behavior from GitLab et al.
To the real politik-like view: this experience won’t make you (or many others) move elsewhere or pay for the service. So it’s ultimately a 0 consequence situation outside of a blog post and some community discussion.
I’m general, I don’t love pieces of software or companies. I’ll wear free t-shirts to mow the lawn, not with pride. I don’t love GitHub, but I dislike it less than the alternatives, partly because it’s just the easiest. I think most are in that camp. Oktocat lost his street cred long ago.
I get it, we should all be very cautious when doing destructive actions, but it's also specially easy to be confused by github's repository naming conventions and you're not seeing the actual repository you're making private, just it's name.
600+ comments bashing Github for not having prevented this action. Meanwhile, Github:
1) has this action in the "danger zone", literally the only UI element using RED COLOR; 2) has a warning banner on the dialog box that pops up when you click that button; 3) requires you to type in the name of the repository (which everyone copies and pastes anyway because they don’t get the point of this exercise)
So when you have all those things in place and still fly past all the defenses on an autopilot, you're not that bright to begin with and you should only blame yourself.
Meanwhile, there are 600 comments bashing Github for not putting in undo, or somesuch. The problem is, though, that this kind of carelessness that led to the repository losing its social stats doesn't stay with computers. It may very well carry over to other aspects of life, because an attitude is something ingrained way deeper than just using one computer program.
And then we have Youtube brimming with compilations of how cars don't stand a chance with trains. You would think that: 0) unambiguous warning road signs 1) red blinking lights 2) ringing bells 3) the train itself honking its horn for a couple miles before even approaching the crossing should be enough warning for the driver to move his/her ass off the track, and yet here we are.
So, yep, we may need to have better systems here and there, but being careful where it says "danger" should be a part of basic fucking competence at whatever it is you do. There are, shockingly, areas in life where an undo button doesn't exist. No, the fact that the other side didn't put safeguards in is not an excuse.
You go to the danger zone, you fucking stop and think, and you read the alerts, and make sure you understand what they actually say. Then you proceed, maybe. Like an adult. Next time, what, they’re going to mistake deleting a repository with changing its visibility?
If httpie is that good, they should be able to regrow their stars in no time. What a first-world problem to have indeed.
If your client asks you for work and you get lazy because it needs some internal modification that could take a day instead of an hour, you just respond it's impossible.
Generally that's quite unacceptable especially when they already know about the situation from previous incidents and obviously human errors could happen again and the fact they did restore for their own project doesn't make it look any better.
>The problem is that the box looks exactly the same for repos with no commits and stars and for repos with a decade-long history and 55k stargazers and watchers. And it says “Warning: this is a potentially destructive action.”
>To paraphrase, the box tells you “You’re about to demolish a house. If there are any people inside, they will all die”.
>But it doesn’t include anything specific to break you out of your auto-pilot mode if you’ve confused the address and think you’re looking at an empty house.
just admit that you fucked up and don't look for someone else to blame. people would respect you more for it
One typical way is to add a confusing confirmation box, where saying yes leaves things as is, but "I want to demolish the house" is in a different location that the typical yes/no buttons
What did you want? A blog post that says "I suck, I'm a failure, thanks for reading"? Why is this your response to someone trying to be contructive while post-morteming a failure?
yes, that blog post would've been apt. as constructive as it gets.
>Why is this your response
because I don't want to send a notarized request every time I need to delete a folder, format a disk or submit a SQL query
Aah yes, the only 2 extreme options, no/minimal warnings and extreme warnings. "Who needs rationality or subtlety on the internet anyway?"
It seems like a temporary UX hack put in place because some tricky implementation detail handling stars on private repos. Like they said "we'll fix that later" and then the warning message stayed.
In a well designed system, making a repo public/private would be a switch where full state is retained back and forth.
I mean, it's kinda hypothetical but stars aren't even completely useless in a private repo (for a sufficiently large set of users with access).
I'd go further and say that even the UX around the destructive act of deleting a repo shouldn't be necessary: that seems undo-able. Overwriting would still need a warning (creating a repo in a namespace that previously contained data) as would anything involving losing access (deleting an org, freeing it up to the community at large), but not needing it for repo deletion-a relatively common action-would go a long way toward reducing "autopilot".
I really want to support that kind of sentiment. In fact, I want to support it every time I get a chance. That's just how I am. I enjoy people hating on Microsoft and such. I may even provoke it when it's not entirely justified.
But to be fair, making a twitter post about "some random project we host fucked up a bit, let's help them to get followers back" does seem to qualify as something "more to it". I'm pretty sure they weren't legally obliged to do that as well. And I'm pretty sure ads on github's official twitter aren't cheap either.
(But I do find that "not legally obliged" tone extremely insulting in any kind of relationships too. I myself also tend to get all "oh, so that's how you want to talk?" over that. I guess, I hate lawyers as much as I hate Microsoft. After all, they are essentially the same thing.)
What? Can anyone explain this? Are people so desperate about github stars these days that they’re willing to pay Microsoft for them?
I'm just saying: It doesn't need to be a considerable rewrite, it really depends on how your ORM or data layer is implemented.
But it is also a little silly for the blog post to show graphs extrapolating the hypothetical number of GitHub stars several years into the future. Their graphs' X-axis goes up to 2028.
I think the problem arises when product designers aren't sure which case their data deletion function is for.
If you dumped a bunch of social security numbers in your non-confidential data history and batch job system, you'd want to be able to permanently delete it as part of the incident response, to reduce the number of people that are exposed to data they shouldn't have access to.
But if you delete some lines of code from your text editor, they can just pop back into existence with the press of a key because you were probably just moving them around, or trying some buggy function without a piece of code you thought might be unnecessary to isolating the defect, etc. Editors clearly understand that you don't kill text out of an Emacs buffer to solve a compliance issue, so they keep it around even though you technically asked for it to be deleted. (Imagine how crazy it would be if deleting text in your editor deleted it from memory, the clipboard, version control, and your upstream VC server!)
In the case of this Github issue, there was clearly a fundamental misunderstanding. Github probably imagined the feature as a compliance type thing; get this stuff off the Internet as fast as possible at any cost necessary. Delete the list of people that even knew this thing existed! I could see why someone might want that. But what the user thought was that this was something they needed to do along the way to some other goal.
I have a feeling that people pick the compliance route more often than the "experimentation" route more often than not, not because they expect users to have actual compliance-type issues, but simply because it's easier. The net result is that users are trained to fear computers and fear experimentation, and that's a bad state we've put society in. This article is yet another victim of "if they said they were sure they wanted to delete it, we can just delete it". But it's actually pretty rare that people are sure.
Given your reputation, I find you will get back your stars again and maybe even higher than before. Or, at least, it shouldn't be that hard :).
With that said, I am glad to have come across this site. Sure seems to beat postman :)
CREATE TABLE stars (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, user TEXT, repo TEXT);
INSERT INTO stars SELECT
value AS id,
'User ' || value AS user,
'foo' AS repo
FROM generate_series(0,53999);
SELECT * FROM stars;
DELETE FROM stars WHERE repo = 'foo';
It also seems weird that it would be necessary to delete those rows at all; yeah, having stars for private repos is kinda pointless, but other than taking up space it doesn't seem like it'd do much harm, either. If the space taken up is really that much of a concern, then a periodic cleanup job along the lines of
DELETE stars FROM stars JOIN repos ON
stars.repo_id = repos.id
WHERE
repos.visibility = 'private';
1. https://github.com/github/gh-ost/issues/331#issuecomment-266...
So yeah, github didn't do any extra effort to restore what's imo essentially a vanity metric. Makes sense to me ?
If you do a copy-paste of what it tells you to type, that's on you. The entire point of that box is to get you to think about what you are doing, and explicitly type out the name of the thing you want to change.
Perhaps I've interacted with GitHub's UX enough to be familiar, but when OP put up a side-by-side screenshot and asked, "A 54k-star question: Which one of these two dialogs is safe to confirm and which one deletes a 10-year-old community?" ... I looked at the two boxes, saw the repo it was asking to modify in both cases, and immediately knew the correct answer!
I get that the ideal is that every person who takes any kind of action knows what they are doing and never makes a mistake. I don't know if it's realistic to expect that outcome, but certainly that's the ideal. But how far should UX designers bend over backwards to cater to people who perform destructive actions without paying attention to what they're doing?
I feel their pain and while I don't claim to be perfect, this was was self-inflicted as it was clearly stated in Github dialog warning:
"You will permanently loose all stars and watchers of this repository"
Please don't blame Github for EndUser fault. People are click-happy and don't read. I'm happy they're able to restore their reputation and followers, not because of pity but because their product value and reputation.
Congrats HTTPIE!
they should fix this, or at least pull username lists for stars/follows and give them to the user for followup.
if the user self hosted, they'd pull from their own backups. instead they trusted a third party and helped contribute to that third party's success. now it's that very success that the user contributed to that stands in the way of help resolving the user's problem.
shrugging and saying sorry is kinda pathetic.
A workaround here is to:
- leave the repo public - move it somewhere else (to private repo) - reinit original repo with empty content - once ready, bring back the old repo to previous remote
This way your stars are preserved.
From a data complexity standpoint, it sounds like they decided they didn’t want to have to make calls to the authorization layer when parsing a user’s stars. The downside is the behavior seen when a repo goes private, but my bet is that repositories being made private is far less frequent than calls to get a list of starred repos.
The thing that throws me off is that they shot themselves with this footgun - whenever we (munk-a's employer) footgun ourselves we remove the footgun to prevent future footgunnery. They made the original design decision one way, and when they were burned by it they didn't re-examine it.
It’s the framing that GitHub has inflicted a deep, irreparable wound to the author that I can’t reconcile with the facts.
You can also solve that by adding a flag column, or putting privated stars in a different table. That tiny bit of denormalization shouldn't be more expensive than the current process, or the other costs of privating/unprivating a repo.
I think the respectful solution is to show it as "you starred X, it's private now, you can unstar if you like" (make sure if the name changes privately then the new name isn't shown).
Such a solution is not only good in the case of mistakes like this, it also doesn't gaslight the person that starred a repo only for it to disappear from their list.
If I publish something and you save the link and then I decide “nah, I don’t want that to be published”, I haven’t gaslit you.
If you remove the content, that's fine.
If you make the link itself disappear from where I saved it, that's gaslighting.
A user's list of starred repos shouldn't be silently abridged just because one of the repos was removed or made private. A placeholder should be left indicating that the repo was once starred but is currently unavailable.
This is something I always found annoying about Google Play Music also; when they removed a track from their service it would just silently disappear without a trace from your playlists, so unless you saved a copy of the list somewhere and compared them you might not even know to look for it elsewhere. You're just left vaguely wondering why that song never comes up in the shuffle any more. YT Music is a bit better about this—they generally leave a grayed-out placeholder. Sometimes the metadata is lacking but you can at least see where it was and know that a track was removed.
It's honestly hilarious how the definition of 'gaslight' has expanded so dramatically in the past few years that it now means 'anything that confuses me'.
For future reference, here's what it actually means [1]:
> Psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator
Github did none of those things to you.
That fits just fine with simpler definitions like "To mislead someone such that they doubt their own memory, perceptions, or sanity."
It's an expansion from the original context but I don't think it's an unreasonable expansion.
Removing bookmarks from someone’s list without notification seems at least broadly comparable (in both cases, the victim is confused and might question their own memory, because the state of the world changed in an incongruous way), though it is the action of an emotionless machine with a programming bug rather than a malicious human.
Yes, if you remove a major part of the definition (intent) then it can fit whatever you want it to fit. Like Gino D'Acampo most famously said [1], if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.
"When a digital platform's state is altered in an opaque way without input on the user's behalf that directly commanded it to, and as a result causes them to question reality in the form of either their memory, the actual state of the system itself, or whether or not the system was intentionally made to do it by an unseen human."
Shadowbans, whether you think they're a good form of moderation or not, would be an example of LEDlighting.
In a game if the chat system stops working but the rest of the game works and everyone thinks they have been muted for some unknown infraction of the rules by an overreaching moderator, that's also LEDlighting.
Why do they not just give a public/private flag on star data than somehow modifying the data irreversibly?
For users, just remove the repo from their starred project list if it's not visible.
It should be possible for GitHub to restore. If not now, then in the future.
What in the world…
Write some unit tests, put a benchmark together, show me example commands to get started, ANYTHING substantial will mean much more to potential new users than seeing how many GitHub stars you have.
Just my two cents, I think this is WAY off the mark.
Well! I’m the fool, it seems. That actually sounds terrible and rather substantial. You’d think there’d be an Undo for that.
Something else to consider for situations like this (or maybe for your apps) is to use the element of time to prevent mistakes.
For example, when a user wants to permanently delete an account or do any action that’s destructive, irreversible, or catastrophic… queue up a job for 10 minutes, an hour, or maybe a day, that gives the user time to cancel it if they made a mistake.
Out-of-band could be another way to prevent mistakes. “Want to delete your account? We’ll send you a link for you to continue via email”. This would also be cancelable.
There’s a lot of ways to deal with potentially irreversible actions outside of “better error messages” or checking the equiv of an “are you sure?” Checkbox.
Their current hosts have even just proved that they don't care about them much -- only first party projects get special treatment.
My faith in their tech department is falling when they can't fix such a small issue.
Please type httpie/.github to confirm.
vs
Please type httpie/httpie to confirm.
At some point, we are going to have to stop coddling the users.
Backups aren't mean to recover from outages. They are also, and I would even dare saying mostly, used to recover from human mistakes. If the vendor terms and conditions don't allow this, github is not a production ready solution.
Sure, github could help Httpie, but that would be unexpected. More than killing your repo because you're not paying attention.
Destruction is destruction. I think a huge red notice should be enough to stop you from dozing off. I understand your pain, but I don't think that any of this is GitHub's fault. They can't read your mind, and they can't tell if you're feed up with OSS or just irresponsible.
This seems like bad design from a UX perspective. Projects I star are a characteristic of my account. If a project is made private, I still want to have the star in my account list; it feels almost like gaslighting to just remove a star.
You can’t star a private project, so by definition you can’t "keep" a star on a project that went from public to private. That’s not bad design, that’s a logical behavior.
That doesn't seem to follow. It's not intrinsic, it's a design choice, surely.
What about deleted repos? Should those be maintained as well?
If I know I starred a repo and then go back to it and it's no longer accessible, I want to see that I'm not going mad and have some information about why the repo is no longer accessible.
I now 100% feel necessary to build a Discord channel for OSS projects.
(doesn't have to be a mailing list, that's just the simplest feedback-request mechanism I can think of.)
Unfortunately....not
I do appreciate they aren’t yelling and complaining about it, however.
I would be on his side too if he started with accepting his part in this and took responsibility but he clearly blames GitHub for everything and learned nothing from this. Such arrogance, let's see if HTTPie will have a nice warning every time you try to do a http delete command.
I've done something similar to this and took responsibility. I accidentally deleted an Azure Resource Group with the CLI tool. It just says "Are you sure you want to do this? Y/n" Doesn't even tell you what you're deleting. Oh whoops all the resources within that resource group are now irreversibly gone now.
My lessons learned was, when doing something potentially dangerous no matter how unimportant you think it is, slow down and take your time.
Things such as making a repo private or deleting things are relatively infrequent. It doesn't hurt to take a few minutes to carefully check all the variables before doing anything. You aren't losing much time in the grand scheme of things. Now he's definitely lost more time. Was it worth the few seconds you would have saved if you were on the right thing?
For example, should "my brain switched to auto-pilot mode" be seriously considered as a risk to be mitigated?
It seems the loss of watchers is still an issue though.
Is rss dying?
As customer if you are getting something for free you have to assume all risks. Here would be nice if public repos are also paid for open source projects so that you can pay for basic backup and recovery.
As a service provider github think about the product - "how do I design a more reliable system?" Deleting data immediately is never a best practice better alternative is to delay the destruction.
Does HTTPie support WebSockets?
It shows how we gamify everything including open-source.
> What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
> GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. In this context, and since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, my brain switched to auto-pilot mode.
> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
> That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.
There's a subtle naming difference between profile README repos for users and orgs that was the root cause of this. The user typed the repo name in however because it matched the same format for the previous profile README repo, it didn't register that this was not in fact the profile README repo they were looking for.
Anyways it's embarrassing that Github made this same mistake themselves, and yet couldn't spare the time for a massive content creator contributing to their platform
You got my star back. Good luck.
gives no such warnings, and maybe it should, or maybe people should be _very_ careful when typing rm -rf in front of anything.
This was very much drama for very little.
Sure, some might follow the project to know about updates, but if people care that much if they are using the latest version of a CLI tool then they will certainly check it out again later.
Very very few people of those who followed the project cares, and close to nobody cares what percentile the project ranks as by number of stars on github. Heck, even the author cares so little that he let himself mess around mindlessly while ignoring warnings and forgetting what the project was called.
Github warned about the action, and even required written confirmation to make sure it was the correct repo. The author also makes a point about naming being different for orgs and private, but if the github repo had any meaning then the author must have been very aware of what the name of it was.
Sure, github can add even more roadblocks and confirmations for those who are very careless despite all the warnings, but I don't want that personally. It's a tradeoff, and I think github has the right balance.
But sure, the situation is mildly annoying for those few who actually care.
But the dumbest part: The complaint about github not using time to restore backups to correct the mistakes of the author. Sure, they probably could, but how will they decide if a user should get special treatment? If they start bringing out backups for some users then there will be a lot of others expecting and asking for the same thing, and more.
Some might say that it won't be a problem, but considering that the author is already expecting github to restore their backups for him because github restored their own backups only proves the problem.
^ this is not much better tone-wise
Devs retconned the concept of a like onto a star. That doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
That's why this is a #1 post.
> Devs retconned the concept of a like onto a star. That doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
Yes, the semantics are ill-defined.
I really don't care about the number of stars my project has if I'm going to make something private. It's not like most important projects sticks out by a very significant amount of stars. What percentile would? And what percentile of these occurances are on this scale? (basically none according to the article)
I'd care more about the number of active contributors who will loose access, if I did care for a message like that.
This is pretty significant because lots of downstream users and distribution maintainers use the watching feature to get release and security advisory notifications. If this had happened secretly it's possible that a security release would be delayed because they didn't see the announcement early enough. (In fact, in the article they mention they had a security advisory recently -- so it's possible the above scenario has already happened.)
The UI warns you something serious is going to happen with bold text on a separate line.
It makes you type the full path of the affected object.
His explanation for what he was doing in the first place (making a README file private) doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
It's a PR stunt for a startup company.
Sure, but the written warning was the same one for a completely safe action.
If a "type your repository name to confirm" box still doesn't make you double check that you picked the right repository, what else can they even do?
> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
It's not unreasonable for the author to have taken the action they did given what they were trying to do. The inconsistent UX for User vs Organization READMEs is a major factor in how the error happened.
And given the number of single-repo orgs where the org's main product repo name == the org's name, well, it's not as surprising I'd say.
“They warned me but because I didn’t read the dialog box because it was too boring!
He accepts responsibility for what he did, but points out the very real opportunity to improve the UI/UX of a very destructive operation with real contextual data about what is about to be destroyed.
I hope others are less judgmental of you than you are of them next you make a mistake in life.
You can be compassionate for a mistake and still insist someone take ownership over this own careless error instead of blaming others. You mistake compassion for “let them do or say whatever they want because they are a victim”.
The main takeway that I took from that article was the seemingly low effort improvement that could be made to the UI/UX of that action, which could help other people not make the same mistake.
That's not about blaming Github vs. themselves, it's a reasonable critique of an existing system and looking for ways to make it better for everyone.
Unless you think there is no room for improvement in that system at all.
You must focus a lot on blaming in your life if that's what you mostly noticed when reading that article.
There's no way for either us to really know the author's intent or what he thinks - beyond the words on the page - but you seem convinced that "where the blame lies" was a major motivation, even thought it's all between the lines even by your own admission.
I read it differently, so as I said earlier, let's agree to disagree.
>>"To paraphrase, the box tells you “You’re about to demolish a house. If there are any people inside, they will all die”. But it doesn’t include anything specific to break you out of your auto-pilot mode if you’ve confused the address and think you’re looking at an empty house."
>>"The dialog should be more contextual and, paraphrasing again, it should say “You’re about to kill 55,000 people.” That would’ve certainly made me pause."
Theres something about the juxtaposition that makes it feel like it should have been obvious. I think its because in those examples you would blame whoever didn't put whatever guard rail was necessary to prevent those outcomes. My suspicion is that it wasn't the authors intent and they were probably just upset, but thats an opinion I formed after reading the rest.
Do you agree that, hyperbolic metaphors aside, the UI improvement suggestion is a good one?
They could show you the number of stars, follows, commits, creation date, the number of files, all sorts of things.
Also, note that github themselves accidentally set one of their repos to private, but restored it to a previous state through backups. If the move is so boneheaded, why did github make it themselves?
A better question might be why, after making the mistake(which was big enough for the CEO to tweet about), and restoring from backups, they didn't just fix the glitch and prevent this sort of behavior.
Whether you agree with the tone of that article or not, the UI suggestions made are sensible. Showing the contents of the repo you’re about to change is a lot more useful than asking someone to type the name of it.
It makes you type user/repo, which is different in a serious way. It's easy for the difference between ".github" and "httpie" to set off alarm bells. But the difference between "httpie/.github" and "httpie/httpie" can slip through.
> "It's their fault, they only showed 5 warning banners. A 6th one would have totally stopped me from doing this."
The request is for the warning to say how much will be deleted, not to add another step.
But, it's also totally possible for a program to store a backup, and let the user restore that the next time they open the program in desperation for not having saved their document in a moment of distraction.
> but it should be a "lesson learned"
Yes. And as the article notes, the lesson can be that software and UX can be make to accommodate better for possible user mistakes. I personally think it's nice to have Undo actions, or some ways to revert possible mistakes. It makes software way less scary :)