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Comment by sunir | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see the need for moralizing. They took responsibility, and offered GitHub money to help. They aren’t leaning in heavily to blame Github here.

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.

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Honestly, they are blaming Github here. They included a whole "Lessons" section, which are complaints about Github's UI, then database design, then community support. I don't think we should be making fun of them for accidentally privating their repo, but I absolutely laughed at

>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.

> They aren’t leaning in heavily to blame Github here.

> 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.

That's fair, there are two things that rub me the wrong way here. First being how big of a deal they're making about the github equivalent of bookmarks, stars are not a community, period. The more significant thing is that this industry runs on mv foobar foobar truncating foobar with no recourse short of forensics, github's confirmation flow is quite good. Sure it could be improved, but it's so much better than pretty much everything else we have to interact with that assigning responsibility to them for not sounding a klaxon in addition to requiring one to type in the exact name of what's being deleted is absurd.

> and offered GitHub money to help

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.

https://httpie.io/ has a star display on the homepage, and the story https://httpie.io/about alludes to the star count:

> 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.

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