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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the content of the OP and the PRs you linked, my first thought is "Is it Hacktoberfest[1] already?". I mean, seriously, what's up with the such low quality PRs? Is it common to have people spamming repos with trivial changes absent some sort of incentive?

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/digitalocean_hacktobe...

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Sometimes fixing a typo would be a new coder’s first open source commit. It’s pretty stupid to assume every new PR would be a major new feature or bug fix. It makes OSS unnecessarily hostile to get into.

Although this commit in question isn’t even that sadly.

probably for resume?

“Contributed quality improvements to Epic Games Unreal Engine”

luckily, GitHub makes it terribly easy to verify how much and what you actually contributed

The problem here is that they’re not even trying. How can they not know that such PR would never be merged? For this reason I don’t think public contributions are why they send the PRs

that might be obvious to me and you, but i don’t think the author knew

The main repo I work on for my job is open-source, and yes, it happens fairly regularly that someone opens a nonsensical PR that might randomly perturb some Markdown or YAML file, or attempt to merge commits from some other developer's in-progress branch.

I'd say we only get them about once every week or so, but then the repo is not anywhere near as high-profile as the Unreal Engine, nor as likely to be on the radar of children.

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