Hacker News Reader

Comment by williamsmj | Hacker News Reader

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/26/num/ makes a similar point. I don't remember us saying people only have themselves to blame when that article was posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24904204). Not sure why we're doing it on this post, which makes a number of completely reasonable and specific suggestions for improvement.

View on HN

"Type a specific thing to confirm" (as suggested by the post you linked) is exactly what Github does for destructive actions. And the author still messed it up because they were on "autopilot". At that point the suggestions go beyond being reasonable.

The confusion is justifiably well explained by the article:

> 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.

You really think that adding contextual information in a destructive modal (i.e. "You are about to erase 54,000 stars") is "beyond being reasonable" ?

It seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion that doesn't feel like a lot of work, but could potentially prevent an irreversible mistake.

It doesn't suggest that you type a any old "specific thing". It specifically suggests that you type something to demonstrate you acknowledge the scale of the destructive operation you are about to perform.

The OP's main suggestion is along exactly those lines. It's actually less extreme, in some ways (see OP's "Lesson 1").

This isn't "exactly" what Github does. The author suggests the number of machines to destroy in their example- a Github equivalent would be to use a number that represents the amount of resources to be destroyed. This is close to what the OP recommended.

So you never copy and pasted into dialog boxes? This is exactly the same thing as the Windows warning messages were they found that nobody reads the because they are being trained to click them away.

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"?

> Of course, if you run into this a lot and you actually intend to hit that many machines, someone might start cutting and pasting the number. In that case, I would say that you're using that tool far too often, and should take a look at changing the way things are done to avoid having to rely on it this much.

They could very easily list the number of stars that will be deleted, as a sanity test. That in my opinion is even more reasonable than having to type the repo name, and should be implemented.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com