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Comment by starttoaster | Hacker News Reader

> Was there a legitimate purpose or is he just a troll?

Call attention to a real issue that should be solved by the ecosystem so that people cannot do it in the future? In my opinion it is not useful or even sane to expect people to just _not_ do annoying things if you develop systems that allow people to do things that annoy you with them. Design and build systems that assume people will be trolls, and make it so people cannot so easily troll you with them. Failing that, there's nobody to point the finger at besides the person or people who made it possible.

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I’m just curious about the intent, as the article implies it was a deliberate prank. That would definitely have professional repercussions. We can laud him for drawing more attention to a major problem, but many (perhaps most?) potential employers may not see it as a positive.

> I’m just curious about the intent, as the article implies it was a deliberate prank.

The pranksters "thought it would be funny" (one is quoted as saying in the article).

To be fair, they thought that the idea of an "everything" package was funny and claimed that they only understood the full consequences after experiencing them. Never attribute to malice...

What's your intent by assuming what these hypothetical employers would think? They stated in the article that the intent was to raise awareness, not to troll. People are just assuming they're lying about their intent, but I don't see much point in trying to uncover a grand conspiracy here, fix the problem with npm.

I was hoping they had a reason other than “for the attention and lulz” that would be explained in the repo. I guess not.

There isn't really any conceivable reason other than for lulz is there, though? That's the whole point. Nobody NEEDS this, so the Node ecosystem needs to fix this in such a way where creating an everything package isn't even possible. The only attention this person deserves is whatever amount of attention is required to get people that work on NPM to work on a fix. I'm sorry for all the people that feel the need to act attacked by this, but frankly if nobody shines a light and causes some pain by being a lawful-evil prankster, the people working on Node will never bother to fix it. As is evidenced by the fact that it is possible.

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