We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

https://curl.se/.well-known/security.txt

by latexr • 6 months ago

949 586 6 months ago

jraph3• 6 months ago

Context: [1, 2]

Open source code library cURL is removing the possibility to earn money by reporting bugs, hoping that this will reduce the volume of AI slop reports.
cURL has been flooded with AI-generated error reports. Now one of the incentives to create them will go away.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46701733

[2] https://etn.se/index.php/nyheter/72808-curl-removes-bug-boun...

dotancohen2• 6 months ago

Money for a report and a patch, with convincing test cases, might be worthwhile. Even if a machine generates them.

hobs• 6 months ago

To be clear, no, it is not, because of the opportunity cost of all the other slop. That's what this is all about.

creata• 6 months ago

Even if a machine generates them.

That sounds wonderfully meritocratic, but in the real world, a machine generating it is a very strong signal that it's bullshit, and the people are flooding maintainers using the machines. Maintainers don't have infinite time.

jraph3• 6 months ago

I've read this idea that we could make people pay for security reports a few times here on HN (and you get back the money if the report is deemed good). That feels very wrong.

If I find a security issue, I'm willing to responsibly disclose it, but if you make me pay, I don't think I will bother.

Punishing bad behavior to disincentivize it seems more sensible.

josefx• 6 months ago

Even if a machine generates them.

Why? If it is a purely machine generated report there is no need to have dozens of third parties that throw them around blindly. A project could run it internally without having to deal with the kind of complications third parties introduce, like duplicates, copy paste errors or nonsensical assertions that they deserve money for unrelated bugfixes.

A purely machine generated report without any meaningfull contribution by the submitter seems to be the first thing you would want to exclude from a bug bounty program.

TheDong2• 6 months ago

Not necessarily. Reviewing an issue report is already enough time. Reviewing a patch is even more developer time.

The problem they had before was a financial incentive to sending reports, leading to crap reports that wasted time to review. Incentivizing sending reports + patches has the same failure mode, but they now have to waste even more time to review the larger quantity of input.

Anyway, for most cases I'd bet that Daniel can produce and get reviewed a correct patch for a given security bug quicker than the curl team can review a third-party patch for the same, especially if it's "correct, but ai-written".

MBCook2• 6 months ago

What was a kind design to thank good contributors is now a lottery.

Throw enough AI crap at enough projects and you may get a payout.

The incentives fail in the face of no-effort flooding. They accidentally encourage it.

mgaunard2• 6 months ago

The new era of AI.

dotancohen2• 6 months ago

Everybody saw it coming. Frankly I'm surprised it took this long.

pepperball• 6 months ago

Not everybody. Some very mentally ill individuals thought we’d all be living in some start-trek post scarcity TV show.

burnt-resistor2• 6 months ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

It's kind of like people who live at the base of a giant dam but cannot comprehend that it could ever fail.

diffuse_l• 6 months ago

The policy link[0] page still has a link to the bug bounty program[1] which still discuss monetary compensation.

[0] https://curl.se/dev/vuln-disclosure.html

[1] https://curl.se/docs/bugbounty.html

mrspuratic• 6 months ago

Although it's not mentioned in those, it's going away at the end of the month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46701733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710

nchmy8• 6 months ago

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers.

I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can only come from issues. It seems like this would deter these sorts of lazy efforts.

mikkupikku5• 6 months ago

Heh, reminds me of that free T-shirt contest thing... Submit crap PRs to random FOSS projects for a chance of winning a shirt, what could go wrong?

https://ongchinhwee.me/shitoberfest-ruin-hacktoberfest/

yawboakye• 6 months ago

worked well for a bit. but then the program became popular and that’s when it hit the curb. terrible loss, imo. it was a brilliant idea to encourage open source work with a token reward. it relied heavily on good intentions, which quickly disappeared with the popularity.

jcims4• 6 months ago

Classic perverse incentive.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

"According to the story, the British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, and the cobra breeders set their snakes free, leading to an overall increase in the wild cobra population."

sensanaty• 6 months ago

The funniest/saddest part is that you could just game it on your own repos, you never had to go out and spam any real projects. If you just made 5 PRs in a repo you owned with the appropriate hacktoberfest tags, that was enough to pass the mark and to get the free shirt and stickers.

lukan• 6 months ago

I mean, if people adopt, I guess they can also flood the discussions with LLM nonsense. But for now it seems like the better solution.

skeptic_ai• 6 months ago

Why you don’t just put an AI guardian to close or to ask them to change the story. Or shadow ban

mikkupikku5• 6 months ago

Subjecting every real contributor to the "AI guardian" would be unfair, and shadow banning is ineffective when you're dealing with a large number of drive-by nuisances rather than a small number of dedicated trolls. Public humiliation is actually a great solution here.

Hamuko2• 6 months ago

I intensely dislike the idea that we need more AI in order to deal with AI.

If I ever need to start using an AI to summarize text that someone else has generated with AI from a short summary, I'm gonna be so fucking done.

blitzar3• 6 months ago

the only way to stop a bad guy with a llm is with a good guy with a llm

moralestapia4• 6 months ago

Indian students

How do you know this?

nchmy8• 6 months ago

Because their usernames are Indian and profiles have links to Indian universities, and sometimes descriptions of the 101 classes they're currently taking. That doesn't stop them from saying things like "I see this sort of vulnerability all the time"

normie30005• 6 months ago

"Students" sounds very speculative. "Indian" likely based on usernames, which are often a South Asian first name followed by a random integer.

nasmorn• 6 months ago

Sir, I agree with moralestapia. Not a singular one of the 20 lakh lines in the PR were written by ChaiGPT.

coldtea2• 6 months ago

Ever been on Stack Overflow before LLMs became a thing?

normie30005• 6 months ago

I've seen this - it's tiring even at low volume. Goes something like:

Someone creates a garbage issue. Someone else asks to be assigned. Someone from the project may say "we don't assign issues" (this step has zero effect over later steps). Someone else submits a PR. Maybe someone else will submit another PR. Maintainers then agonise how they can close issues and PR(s) without being rude or discouraging to genuine efforts.

nchmy8• 6 months ago

This is precisely what we've seen

thephyber4• 6 months ago

Those maintainers should be using LLMs to crate their breakup letter with the Issue/PR submitters!

halapro2• 6 months ago

You've been getting PRs? All I've ever seen is "can you assign this issue you me" spam and then disappear. I was nice to them for years but now I just delete the comment and block the users.

emmaviolet6• 6 months ago

GitHub PM here working on how we can make this problem feel better for maintainers. Really appreciate how tiring this can be, especially when even low volume is sustained for many months.

Would love your thoughts on some of the things we're thinking about: - Would it help to disable all PRs? All non-contributor PRs? - Would a "close as admin" button help address the issue of not wanting to be rude or discouraging? - What about Copilot doing an initial review and proposing to close anything that doesn't meet contribution guidelines - would that help a "close this" decision feel less personal?

compounding_it• 6 months ago

Indian students

Resume glorification and LinkedIn / GitHub profile attention do that.

I am seeing a lot of people coming up with perceived knowledge that's just LLM echo chambers. Code they contribute comes straight out of LLMs. This is generally fine as long as they know what it does. But when you ask them to make some changes, some are as lost as ever.

Torvalds was right, code maintenance is going to be a headache thanks to LLMs.

thephyber4• 6 months ago

Regard to code maintenance:

I’m actually of the mind it will be easier IF you follow a few rules.

Code maintenance is already a hassle. The solution is to maintain the intent or the original requirements in the code or documentation. With LLMs, that means carrying through any prompts and to ensure there are tests generated which prove that the generated code matches the intent of the tests.

Yes, I get that a million monkeys on typewriters won’t write maintainable code. But the tool they are using makes it remarkably easy to do, if only they learn to use it.

blitzar3• 6 months ago

Resume glorification and LinkedIn / GitHub profile attention do that.

I wondered why people would video themselves going around slapping strangers in public then shouting "its just a prank bro" - turns out it works.

coldtea2• 6 months ago

This is generally fine as long as they know what it does.

Thanks to their LLM reliance they'd soon not know what it does, and forget even the little they know about coding

oefrha2• 6 months ago

At this point I won’t consider any GitHub activity after ~2024 as hiring signals unless it’s very substantial work on high profile projects that clearly have high bars.

MisterTea2• 6 months ago

Torvalds was right, code maintenance is going to be a headache thanks to LLMs.

I know someone in a senior engineering position at Epic who does nothing but clean up PR's from their off-shored Ukrainian sweat shop coders handing in AI slop because all they need to do is close a ticket to get paid. They wind up rewriting half or more of it. Epic doesn't seem to care so long as this "solution" works and saves them money by paying a few really smart people to code janitor until hopefully all of them can be replaced by LLMs.

Havoc• 6 months ago

Noticed it in corporate context too. About 40% of the performance feedbacks I saw this year were AI written. India and USA crowd. Everything from Europe looked pretty organic but imagine that’ll change too next cycle

causalscience• 6 months ago

Indian students

Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I called them out. And if they did something poorly and I didn't call them out they'd never do back as far as I can tell and wonder "did I get it right? Could I have done better?". I don't get this attitude - at my day job I sometimes "run with it" but I periodically check with my manager to make sure "hey this is what you wanted right?". There's little downside to this.

Your comment reminded me of my experience, in the sense that they're both a sort of "fake it till you make it".

nelox• 6 months ago

This sounds like a real cross-cultural mismatch, but it’s doing too much work with nationality alone. In a lot of Indian (and broader South Asian) work contexts, questioning instructions can be read as challenging authority or admitting incompetence, so people default to executing without asking. That’s often reinforced by education systems and contractor dynamics where producing something quickly feels safer than pausing to clarify.

Add in time zones, language friction, and fear of losing work, and "just run with it" becomes a rational strategy. Meanwhile, many Western workplaces treat clarification and check-ins as professionalism, so the behavior reads as strange or careless.

The key point is that this usually isn’t lack of curiosity or reflection, but risk management under different norms. The pattern often disappears once expectations are explicit: ask questions, check back, iteration is expected.

nchmy8• 6 months ago

selfishness, laziness, lack of self-awareness, lack of shame, etc are obviously universal traits. But cultures absolutely reinforce them to different degrees. Many cultures around the world are built around the sorts of behaviors we both described.

Whereas other cultures have at least some (if not a lot of) resistance to it - eg publicly ridiculing when people step flagrantly out of line. This is good. My impression is that British culture is like this - "taking the piss", or worse, out of people whose egos start to get too large

Edit: what about this comment could possibly be worth a downvote...? Not that I care about points, but it just seems to be an objective assessment of human nature and cultures, without even singling out any cultures that need improvement.

BoorishBears• 6 months ago

Askers vs Guessers: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/2010/05/askers-vs-guess...

whateverboat• 6 months ago

It's desperational. The desperation of not having to lose any contract. The desperation of being just one bad year away from being on the streets and having to live a terrible life (no food security).

For students, often there is no pathway to actually become good due to lack of resources. So, the only way is to fake it into a job and then become good.

dostick• 6 months ago

Of course it’s cultural, they have to compete with thousands people just like them in environment where human life is cheap and anyone is replaceable. Any authority have huge weight, which comes from historical system how society is separated. And then any education they receive assumes cheating at exams, then cheat with CV, then cheat with work they do. It’s all about appearances.

LarsKrimi2• 6 months ago

That is a cultural thing, and one of the first things you learn to handle when working tightly together with Indians as an outsider.

I can't remember all the techniques but a simple trick is to ask them to repeat their understanding back to you before they start working on a thing.

But I don't think it's connected to sending "malicious" reports. That seems rather to be to pad their resume and online presence while studying to get an edge in hiring.

AgentMatt• 6 months ago

My guess would be yes, it's cultural. I'm not Indian but spent about 5 months there. Overall my impression was that people act much more on direct feedback.

It would be typical to do the first thing that comes to mind, then see what happens. No negative feedback? Done, move on. Negative feedback? Try the next best thing that makes the negative feed back go away.

People will not wonder whether they might bother you. Just start talking. Maybe try to sell you something. That's often annoying. But also just be curious, or offer tea. You react annoyed and tell them to go away? They most likely will and not think anything bad of it. You engage them? They will continue. Most likely won't take "hints" or whatever subtle non-verbal communication a Westerner uses.

I found it quite exhausting in the beginning, it feels like constantly having to defend myself when I want to be left alone. But after I started understanding this mode and becoming more firm in my boundaries, I started to find it quite nice for everyday interactions. Much less guessing involved, just be direct.

Professionally I haven't worked much with Indians, but my expectation would be that it's necessary to be more active in ensuring that things are in track. Ask them to reflect back to you what the stated goal is. Ask them for what you think are obvious implications from the stated goal to ensure they're not just repeating the words. Check work in progress more often.

freakynit11• 6 months ago

Indian here (~15+ years in tech). I've seen this behavior a lot, and unfortunately, I did some of this myself earlier in my career.

Based on my own experience, here are a few reasons (could be a lot more):

1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

2. Our education system mainly rewards results, not how good or well-thought-out the results are. Sure, better answers get more marks, but the gap between "okay" and "excellent" is usually not emphasized much. This comes from scale problems (huge number of students), very low median income (~$2400/year), and poorly trained teachers, especially outside big cities. Many teachers themselves memorize answers and expect matching output from students. This is slowly improving, but the damage is already there.

3. Pay in India is still severely (serioualy low, with 12-14+ hour work days, even more than 996 culture of China) low for most people, and the job market is extremely competitive. For many students and juniors, having a long list of "projects", PRs, or known names on their resume most often the only way to stand out. Quantity often wins over quality. With LLMs, this problem just got amplified.

Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

mytailorisrich• 6 months ago

Possibly as a consequence of this, what I have observed working with Indians is a very hierarchical structure in which you have a "lead" or "architect" who spells out what to do and how to do it in minute details and micromanages, and "devs" who execute as instructed.

YetAnotherNick• 6 months ago

I think it's mostly not cultural but just bad engineers lying. IT jobs pays the best in India, and it attracts people who have no skills in IT to just fake their way in.

So for every good developer in India there are probably 20 bad ones who have no idea what they are doing.

SwiftyBug• 6 months ago

I had the same exact experience with an Indian contractor. I requested that he used git instead of Shopify CLI for his changes to a store's theme. He acknowledged my request but kept using the CLI. I once again asked him to use git and even offered a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to pull, branch and then push changes. He absolutely ignored everything and simply kept using the CLI. That was actually amazing to witness. The only hypothesis I have is that it's some kind of cultural thing where asking for help is worse than doing the opposite of what's expected from you. I don't know, but your story supports my hypothesis.

littlecranky672• 6 months ago

It is cultural - the whole "not losing face" thing. In a project, I once was squad lead - I was onsite, my squad members were in Bangalore of course. Same experience as you. Once I wanted to talk about a piece of code that we need to improve and refactor, and I was acting in good faith calling the dev that commited that code. When I braught up the code on my screen to start a pair programming, he immediately denied having written the code. Unfortunately for him, being a junior, he did not know about git blame - I entered it in the terminal and his name showed up on that code. Still, he would simply just deny that he wrote it. I then took the git commit hash and looked it up in gitlab, able to bring up the MR he created and the reviewer (wasn't me). Even with that on screen, he still denied being the author - with no arguments or alternative reasoning, he just constantly would repeat "No, I haven't written that". "No no, but I haven't written it". I pulled even the JIRA ticket up, that was about that feature and guess what - he was the assigne and moved it to "In Progress" and "Done". Still with that on screen all I got was a "no, haven't written it".

I had more of those interactions, and we also exchanged some of the indian devs (they were sold to the client by a big consulting group, and immediately replaced by someone else if we wished). I later found out, people that I have had replaced in my sqaud for not being qualified, ended up in different teams in the same corporation, they were basically just moving around inhouse.

After a few month in the project I swore to myself never to work with offshores again. And as a side note, the bank I did the project with, does not exist anymore :)

raverbashing• 6 months ago

Yes it's "fake till you make it" without the making part

UltraSane• 6 months ago

I worked at a company where we had a untouchable manager who had some Brahman caste devs report to him and they absolutely HATED this.

tock3• 6 months ago

How much are the contractors being paid?

The people having a terrible time with Indian contractors always deal with folks making 3k-10k USD/year. Of course the quality is bad.

For reference:

Good Indian devs out of college make atleast 30k USD. Good senior devs make atleast 50k. The really good ones make much more. Most American companies outsource to bottom of the barrel contracting companies like Infosys.

hypeatei5• 6 months ago

This is called "saving face"[0] and it's very common in some Asian cultures. Western societies prefer directness, and eastern ones prefer harmony.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

dark-star• 6 months ago

Indian students were the reason that Google's Hacktoberfest was critiziced and ultimately terminated

Indian students have a long history of disrupting free/libre projects, this is nothing new

6LLvveMx2koXfwn• 6 months ago

This is hilarious and reminded me of the two stints I had in India, for about 8 months in total at the turn of the century. I was a hippy traveler and asking directions for almost anything was par for the course. I never had anyone local say they didn't know where something was once asked, even though me following their directions lead to the intended target maybe 10% of the time. It was funny and infuriating at the same time :)

opan• 6 months ago

I recently heard from a friend that this is due to something called "izzat". Admitting any sort of wrongdoing would reflect poorly on them and their family, to the point they would rather lie or do the wrong thing than damage their family's reputation.

dormento• 6 months ago

I believe it has to do with saving face.

I've worked with mixed nationality teams at a certain 4 letter austinite corporation a couple thousand moons ago. One thing in common with my Asian colleagues back then (many of which i still keep in touch with to this day), is that they would usually refrain from saying things that could rock the boat or disappoint you. If they lacked knowledge for the task at hand, they wouldn't let you know. If they were late on a delivery, they'd insist it would be ready by a certain date. This led to situations where other regional managers would have to plan contingencies to work around the issue.

Symbiote2• 6 months ago

There are also a lot of Indian students (there are 1.4bn Indians). There are lots of IT jobs, therefore presumably lots of IT students, and unlike in China Internet access (e.g. to GitHub) is not restricted.

pjc50• 6 months ago

From a half-Indian friend of mine, he described this as "ask vs guess" culture. https://medium.com/redhill-review/navigating-ask-and-guess-c...

Ask culture scales a lot better in a fast changing world full of strangers. Guess culture saves friction, but only in situations where people are mostly guessing correctly because the social structure and expectations are fixed.

waltbosz• 6 months ago

never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something

I experienced this same thing working with offshore Indian contractors 20 years ago. Interesting to hear someone else echo my observations.

samiv3• 6 months ago

I used to work with colleagues from China in contracting and I had the same experience with them. If they don't know something they have hard time saying that they don't know something or don't understand something.

Ficticious Example could be

Q: is this car red? A: it's not green. Q: yeah I know it's not green. But is it red? A: today is Thursday.

One thing I leaned it's not worth pressing forward and causing a scene. Instead it's better to use other ways of finding the information.

When guiding team members I always found it useful to have them explain back to me in their own words what they're tasked to do. It become immediately obvious if they were on the right track or not.

al_borland• 6 months ago

I ran into this when I went to India to help train our team over there.

I tried specifically asking questions where the correct answer was “no” and they wouldn’t tell me no. In some cases I told them I was expecting them to say “no” and they still wouldn’t do it.

It was very difficult to figure out what they knew or didn’t know without putting them through a test and seeing how they did.

dizhn• 6 months ago

I was contacted by a guy who said he found a vulnerability on my site. Something like phpinfo being available or something. I informed them that I was aware of it and it's not a vulnerability but did offer to give them a small Amazon gift code if they wanted.

This might be part of the motivation. What's pocket change in the west might be good money in the 3rd world.

epolanski4• 6 months ago

I don't know if it is, but I can swear every time I post a job opening (generally contracting work) on LinkedIn 95% of the applicants are Indians/Bangladesh/Pakistanis/Sri Lankans.

I ignore all of their resumes, not because I don't think there's valid individuals among them, I did hire them in the past, but:

1. because the signal to noise ratio is absurd. The overwhelming majority didn't even read the actual post.

2. Even when they are okay developers, communication is always a huge issue. Sync communication in call is though because urdu and other indian area accents are extremely heavy so I really struggle understanding their english, my bad but what can I do about it. If I try to keep it async or chat based then they tend to not ask feedback, clarifications, provide updates, etc. So you feel like you need to micro manage them half the time and they'd rather give you answers to make you immediately happy than surfacing problems.

3. Paying them is always an hassle. Wiring them money through bank accounts is difficult. They generally set up some Paypal or similar service or ask you to pay them on some Hong Kong account from a friend of theirs. I need traceable invoices and simple wires for tax purposes and when sending money to Pakistan multiple times anti-laundering got involved in my country, and we talking low hundreds of euros.

Still, props to the few good ones I've met, they've been critical on some projects of mine. Very professional and knowledgeable. But it's just too bad of a signal/noise ratio, seriously most applicants don't even read job descriptions.

Spooky23• 6 months ago

Culture and what companies want there. I was running a operational team with a couple of incredibly talented guys who had been escalation engineers for large software companies in India.

They were trained really hard to "restore" things in a way that hit some minimal level of the SLA, but not really. It created alot of issues initially in the organization as the "don't question anything" had really been ingrained into them. My observation there is that it made many of the useless support engagements I've experienced make sense, and that a place with that level of discipline and process must be pretty awful.

miohtama• 6 months ago

Indians gaming the system, discussed before the AI on Hacker News, about Hacktoberfest

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052

sfdlkj3jk342a• 6 months ago

Is this cultural?

Absolutely. I've been traveling for the last 10 years and lived in 50+ countries. I believe that all cultures have unique pros and cons and that the cultural diversity of the world is an amazing thing. There are good and bad people everywhere, so I rarely leave a place with such a strong opinion as the multiple times I've been to India. I really wanted to love India because of their rich history and diversity, but I ended up leaving with a feeling that their culture is overwhelmingly objectively bad.

stronglikedan• 6 months ago

Is this cultural?

In my experience, yes, but I hope that's just my personal experience over the past 20 years.

Qem• 6 months ago

Is this cultural?

https://burakpsych.weebly.com/uploads/5/6/0/6/56066915/ethni...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_distance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensio...

exe342• 6 months ago

they probably assumed you knew what you were asking for.

it's interesting how it parallels the issue with llms today, they are basically perverse instantiation genies. your wish is my command.

oreally• 6 months ago

Definitely not. Anyone growing up immersed in face-saving, high pressure, competition and possibly self-help influencers telling them how to achieve will exhibit these sorts of behaviors. Doesn't matter if you're white or black.

nerdsniper• 6 months ago

Is this cultural?

Many of my Indian friends say it is, but sometimes I feel they can be as self-critical of their country as many Americans are of the USA.

Demographics show that it doesn't have to be cultural - it could just be that India has 9x as many people under the age of 35 compared to the USA. Even if we were culturally similar, for every annoying US youngster "hustling" to try to get employment, there would be 9 early-career Indians doing the same. That alone is enough to drown the "Vox Agora" with Indian voices. Chinese citizens generally don't participate in English-language fora, so their large numbers would be massively under-represented.

If anything else is biasing the populations, the difference in numbers could be even more stark.

vpribish2• 6 months ago

there are definitely cultural issues you have to be aware of, and it's not just India, there are many cultures where questioning authority or admitting to uncertainty are less welcome - and some companies and managers reinforce these.

Always consider relative status and power imbalance regardless of nationality too. If someone is afraid to say no you have to factor that in - and 'calling them out on it' is maybe not the most effective reaction, especially if in public.

I always had frustrations with this as a manager until I could establish a personal relationship. Sounds extra hard with short-term remote contractors!

iso1631• 6 months ago

At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I called them out

Sounds like an LLM

darth_avocado• 6 months ago

Is this cultural?

Its incentives. If you’re an Indian student in India, unless you go to a prestigious university, your prospects of landing a job, let alone a good one are very small. Even tech companies that claim to be meritocratic elsewhere, rarely screen resumes beyond the top universities in India. The only other real prospect is to get your resume to stand out. Open source contributions, research papers etc are some ways to do that. And the talented ones make contributions, while the rest just try to fake it in the hopes to make it (it obviously doesn’t work).

There are similar incentives if you want your college application to stand out if you’re trying to go abroad for higher education. And if you’re already outside India, those incentives extend to job applications outside India. If you’re an international student looking for a job, even if you have work experience at known multinational companies, if it’s in India, the experience doesn’t count.

It’s all about incentives and responding to them.

michaelcampbell• 6 months ago

> Indian students
Is this cultural?

Could be, but there are a number of very popular Youtube and other video based classes/bootcamps (taught and targeted from/to Indian students) that teach how to work with git and github that show how to create PR's and comments in repos, and then a lot of students do that, on public (and popular) repos.

There are a couple very famous examples of this.

duckydude20• 6 months ago

i f8cking hate being born here.

volume of low quality content, dsa/leetcode, etc. is so high, good people/content gets left out. networking, connections, nepotism so much high. getting job based on actual talent very rare.

MNCs which are good outside are so much sh8t here; well capitalism doesn't give a f8ck anyways.

jddj• 6 months ago

capitalism doesn't give a f8ck anyways

It doesn't until suddenly it does. A glut of junk can eventually trigger a flight to quality.

Sadly, possibly not on a timeline which works for a given individual.

dbtablesorrows2• 6 months ago

I think you'll get downvoted to oblivion because outsiders often don't realize the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

I will try to give some context.

To give an example, the CSE undergrad from an average Indian college would've done 500 - 1000 leetcode "problems" for practice. But have little to no idea on how to survive in a UNIX shell, or to troubleshoot an actual problem. Hell, half of them haven't written more than 1000 lines of code for single purpose.

People early in their career (which is most SWEs including yours truly) follow whatever "influencers" on youtube (the local term being bhaiyya-didis), who give them rough "roadmaps" to "crack DSA" or "get high paying remote job". The result is that average CS guy spends most of his time navigating this rat race than studying computer science stuff that matters for the job.

I see similar kind of competition getting created at senior levels too, in the terms of people grinding theory and blog posts on "system design" interviews. I am not old^H^H^H senior enough to comment on it, though.

But it was not all bleak. IIRC, We were producing quite few good OSS contributions through GSoC, LFX etc... until few years ago (not considering my own among good ones). There were talented 1% or so (I known a few very talented people in personally). Nowadays these "hustler" variety people have started "How to crack GSoC" roadmaps [sic] too, and the spamming quoted above see may be related to this. This sort of insane rat race is not good for talented people. It's not good for companies either. Recruitment is basically lottery at higher levels too; I have seen people use AI to shamelessly lie on their resumes and get hired etc... Some of these problems may be present in west but India's scale makes some of these problems difficult.

tjpnz• 6 months ago

It's Hacktoberfest all year long, baby!

https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama

throwaway858254• 6 months ago

Usually the protection against such spam is social shame but the internet is now full of people who have no shame because shame was never part of their culture. It would be more effective to use GeoIP in this case.

direwolf206• 6 months ago

Internet reputation became easy to launder, thus meaningless.

com3• 6 months ago

It’s not just the Internet. It’s politicians and businesspeople and more generally, shameless citizens.

There’s a lot to dislike about shame as an enforcement mechanism but I’m starting to miss some of the upside it delivered.

brikym3• 6 months ago

I wonder how much of it could be stopped just by charging $5 a month to contribute to public open source repos. Even if github gave the $5 back in LLM credits or something it would at least put up a barrier. The reason there is so much traffic from third world countries is because the cost of accessing the internet is effectively zero.

bjourne• 6 months ago

The other side of the coin is that many real bug reports are dismissed out of hand. That is frustrating if you have spent hours or days triaging an issue and have submitted a well-written bug report. It would be useful if projects advertised what their de facto bug report policy is. If it involves snide remarks and pointless bureaucracy ("you did not check this box") then that should be stated to help others avoid wasting time. Perhaps an LLM could help with that: "The likelihood of an external bug report being acted upon is X%, given analysis of past interactions on bug tracker."

MadameMinty• 6 months ago

I've noticed this also. But I didn't ascribe it to LLMs, rather figured there is some sort of rogue educator in India who's instructing students to do this on public repos and they just don't know better. But the prof should.

ohyoutravel2• 6 months ago

I contribute regularly to some major open source projects and it’s happening here too. So many issues that aren’t issues. Constant “fixing” of documentation that doesn’t need to be fixed. Bug reports that aren’t bugs, followed by a bad PR “fixing” the “bug.” Or YOLOing an LLM PR to change major behavior that users are relying on. And I click and the authors are always brand new, with only vibe coded or examples projects in their history, and have some truly awful LLM generated GitHub “about me” page complete with emojis and links to their GitHub “projects.”

My suspicion is somehow the perception became that if you’re brand new and land a PR in a major open source repo (even as simple as rewording a phrase in a doc that doesn’t need to be reworded), that would help them get a job (they’re always Open to Work on their GitHub about me page).

It’s so much noise that it’s hard to find the real issues.

nchmy8• 6 months ago

Everything about this is exactly what is happening in OWASP repos.

emmaviolet6• 6 months ago

GitHub PM here. From what we've seen, you're right about the motivation; I've also seen plenty of job ads where "significant contribution to open source" is something that's called out explicitly as a valid substitute for professional experience in the area. While that's always well-intentioned and creates many benefits for the OSS community, the flip side is that it can also lead to the kind of problems you're seeing. Many new users are also motivated by learning and community, and not familiar enough with the community expectations to know how to seek that differently.

We have tried a lot here in the past (good first issues, more community support for new users), but haven't found a perfect solution yet. Internally, we're looking at options for admins to disable PRs on repos, or limit PRs to collaborators only, for example. From your comment, it seems like part of the challenge you're experiencing as a user is around Issues specifically. We've also been looking at options to delete PRs and Issues individually and in bulk, which could help after the event. Would welcome any feedback on other paths we could take here.

y-curious• 6 months ago

Reminds me of this Indian GitHub tutorial on how to open a PR on GitHub. The video got millions of views and has flooded a specific repo with countless README update PRs of people (mostly Indian) trying to append their name to the README.

Article about it here: https://socket.dev/blog/express-js-spam-prs-commoditization-...

efilife• 6 months ago

they flooded THE major server side js framework and it's happening to this day, every day. Express is something to backend what jQuery was to frontend 15 years ago

jcims4• 6 months ago

Holy cow, what a mess - https://github.com/expressjs/express/pull/6956

vacillator• 6 months ago

It's likely because of Google Summer of Code. OWASP has participated as an org several times and it's highly likely that they'll participate this time too.

Students often start making PRs around this time to get more familiar with projects before they can put in a proposal when the time comes.

As someone who's been a programmer for a while now, I feel it's pretty easy to identify slop code and when someone is using an LLM to communicate on issues. I'm not against using LLMs for writing code or even for using it to improve your communication, but it cannot be a substitute for critical thinking.

If I was a maintainer of an OSS project, I'd be more likely to _not_ select students who put out slop PRs, proposals, or messages without thought. And also make this clear in the contributing guidelines so contributors know what they're getting into.

yokoprime• 6 months ago

I seem to remember there was a large (indian?) educational YouTuber who did a tutorial on how to use Git where they forked a FOSS repo, made a change to the README.md and then made a PR. This caused a huge influx of garbage PRs for that particular repo and other FOSS repos.

pelagicAustral• 6 months ago

The typo PR's are top-cringe.

cactusplant7374• 6 months ago

What issue added GPU acceleration to Ghostty? It seems silly to add that to a terminal.

zo1• 6 months ago

Yet again poor communal behavior ruining it for the rest of society, and why we can't have nice things and colonize the stars.

raffael_de• 6 months ago

I'd argue that the or at least one major reason for the downfall of Stackoverflow (and not just a catalyst) has been a surge of Indian IT people triggering an avalanche of extremely low quality questions and answers. I've been a big fan of SO since about 2010. Not just didn't mind the harsh moderation but actually attribute to it learning how to properly ask a question. But at some point round about 2019/2020 it stopped being fun due to it going from knowledge base to garbage dump.

eudamoniac• 6 months ago

Related, every time you see on SO "please mark this answer as correct" it's usually not correct

vablings• 6 months ago

Stuff like this video is a huge source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez8F0nW6S

Check the closed PR's on express https://github.com/expressjs/express

Yikes!

ZeroGravitas• 6 months ago

I was going to comment something similar.

I was reading some GitHub comments earlier and the AI tone and structure in the comments posted by some users made me feel really uneasy for some reason.

I know a Brazilian who puts lots of emails through ChatGPT because they aren't confident in their English, but this seemed to be AI generating the majority of the content of the message too.

coryrc• 6 months ago

That person should stop. I give a lot of leeway to anyway who ends with "(English is not my first language, sorry for mistakes)" or if they also post it in their original language (if I'm confused I can machine translate parts of it if the confusion isn't obvious, which it actually always has been for any continental language IME).

zzzeek• 6 months ago

everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can only come from issues.

would be so awesome if github supported all that. probably kills their business model though

anonzzzies3• 6 months ago

Little bit offtopic; is anyone getting more reports of site vulnerabilities I wonder? There are how many AI tools claiming to find those automatically and we get a lot of reports, some even have the tool name on. Thing is, most, well, all so far in the past months, are not true. They seem hallucinations or false positives. We have closed source SaaS products, so these are external scans making these reports.

defraudbah2• 6 months ago

lol, fair and square

bilekas2• 6 months ago

This is great actually. I can feel the sentiment of the slop they've had to deal with.

Fair play to them.

rednafi• 6 months ago

Creating crap vuln reports or PRs on popular OSS projects has been an issue long before LLMs. Remember Hacktoberfest?

Students would often abuse it since there’s no adult in the room to teach them how to behave. I guess this is one hard way to f around and find out. But this is by no means condoning this sort of behavior.

Point is, LLMs made the situation more dire: it’s cheap to generate code, whereas reviewing still scales sublinearly. The only way to prevent this is by being rude to people who are rude to you.

ffaser5gxlsll2• 6 months ago

It's never fine to be rude.

Moving off github into a more niche platform was the best choice I have ever made to curb such zero-effort issue and feature requests. It raises the barrier just enough.

On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping. I participated in projects where the approach is to start a discussion on a forum first, and I get the same feeling you have as a tech guy calling ISP support on the phone.

eXpl0it3r• 6 months ago

The discussion requirement is often to prevent disappointment, waste of time, and anger, when maintainers simple close PRs, because it's not the direction they want the project to go. A lot of people will take this very personally, so it's much better to have a conversation about it beforehand.

Capricorn2481• 6 months ago

On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping

Seems like a completely appropriate way to handle things if you're still on Github. You said yourself the spam drove you off.

They could let people who are proven not to be spammers open PRs directly.

nullc3• 6 months ago

Problem is that the LLM operators don't care if you're rude. They copy and paste your response to the LLM and probably don't read it themselves. If they do read it they don't suffer any ego hit from it because if there was any error it was the LLM's not theirs and their LLM is busy telling them how brilliant and unparalleled they are and how wrong the haters are in any case.

CURL is free to try it, but I'm doubtful being rude will meaningfully improve things. I'm confident it won't improve the ratio of good to bad reports because non-chatbot powered submitters are sensitive to rudeness or even the threat of potential rudeness, and so this approach could easily reduce total volume some but mostly in the reduction of good submissions.

thephyber4• 6 months ago

I am friends with a solo maintainer of a major open source project.

He repeatedly complains that at the beginning of some semester, he sees a huge spike of false/unproveable security weakness reports / GutHub issues in the project. He thinks that there is a Chinese university which encourages their students to find and report software vulns as part of their coursework. They don’t seem to verify what they describe is an actual security vuln or that the issue exists in his GitHub repo. He is very diligent and patient and tries to verify the issue is not reproducible, but this costs him valuable time and very scarce attention.

He also struggles because the upstream branch has diverged from what the major Linux distribution systems have forked/pulled. Sometimes the security vulns are the Linux distro package default configurations of his app, not the upstream default configurations.

And also, I’m part of the Kryptos K4 SubReddit. In the past ~6 months, the majority of posts saying “I SOLVED IT!!!1!” Are LLM copypasta (using LLM to try to solve it soup-to-nuts, not to do research, ideate, etc). It got so bad that the SubReddit will ban users on first LLM slop post.

I worry that the fears teachers had of students using AI to submit homework has bled over into all aspects of work.

salawat• 6 months ago

I worry that the fears teachers had of students using AI to submit homework has bled over into all aspects of work.

As one does in academia, so to the market, because now we have financial incentive. It ain't going to stop.

throwaway858254• 6 months ago

In china medical students are required to publish original papers. Instead they just pay someone to write it for them and pollute the literature.

jacquesm• 6 months ago

So much for the curation argument of the price justification of professional journals.

nottorp2• 6 months ago

Medical? What's the point? I'm happy with 98% of doctors being able to handle known conditions and only the few percent that are really interested to do research.

ironbound3• 6 months ago

As a human being I really enjoy knowing things and being challenged to grow.

While crypto style AI hype man can claim Claude is the best thing since sliced bread the output of such systems is brittle and confidently wrong.

We may have to ride out the storm, to continue investing in self learning as big tech cannot truly spend 1.5 trillion on the AI investment in 2025 without a world changing return on revenue, a one billion revenue last year from OpenAI is nothing.

ACS_Solver• 6 months ago

Kryptos K4 seems to me like a potential candidate for AI systems to solve if they're capable of actual innovation. So far I find LLMs to be useful tools if carefully guided, but more like an IDE's refactoring feature on steroids than an actual thinking system.

LLMs know (as in have training data) everything about Kryptos. The first three messages, how they were solved including failed attempts, years of Usenet / forum messages and papers about K4, the official clues, it knows about the World Clock in Berlin, including things published in German, it can certainly write Python scripts that would replicate any viable pen-and-paper technique in milliseconds, and so on.

Yet as far as I know (though I don't actively follow K4 work), LLMs haven't produced any ideas or code useful to solving K4, let alone a solution.

thephyber4• 6 months ago

Yeah, you would suspect that the individual elements of solving K4 exist in some LLM, but so far the LLM slop answers are just very confident and very wrong.

My biggest complaint is that the users aren’t skeptical. They don’t even ask the LLM to verify if the answer it just generated matches the known hints from the puzzle artist. Beyond that, they don’t ask it to verify whether the decryption method actually yields the plaintext it confidently spit out.

I’m super impressed with Claude Code, though. For my use case, planning and building iOS app prototypes, it is amazing.

0dayman• 6 months ago

they're suffering from this big time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n2eDcRjSsk&t=2453s

embedding-shape7• 6 months ago

Ah, brings back memories when TPB did something similar to when MPAA and their "associates" emailed them. I think this is probably the best page where one could still see them: https://web.archive.org/web/20111223101839/http://thepirateb...

I'm not sure it helped in the end, afaik they did it since like 2003 until some years after the raid, but it still seemed like they didn't get the message and kept trying anyways, which from their perspective makes sense but still.

hypeatei5• 6 months ago

We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap

If shame worked, then slop reports would've stopped being made already. Public ridicule only creates a toxic environment where good faith actors are caught up in unnecessary drama because a maintainer felt their time was being wasted. Ban them, close your bug bounty program, whatever, but don't start attacking people when you feel slighted because that never ends well for anyone (including curl maintainers)

maipen• 6 months ago

This is 100% true. I've seen this happen over and over again.

Shaming does not work, you look like an idiot, people will start to despise you and then you end up ostracizing yourself from the rest of the community and the only ones left within your bubble, are circle jerk assholes.

It's one of those cases where you end up causing more harm than the ones you were complaining about.

Just pathetic behaviour.

f311a• 6 months ago

It worked well for me when people were stealing my articles, pretending they wrote them. One tweet or mention in Linkedin and the article is gone.

hypeatei5• 6 months ago

Plagiarism is much different than collaborating on open source projects but I'm glad that calling them out worked.

pharrington• 6 months ago

Test your hypothesis by attaching your offline name to your internet profiles.

hypeatei5• 6 months ago

That's sort of the whole point of this thought exercise, no? If shame worked in an environment with anonymous/pseudonymous users, then we wouldn't be here. The only people you stand to harm are the ones who attach their real identities to their profile (and they're more likely to be good faith IMO)

Besides, I've seen plenty of profiles here on HN who advertise their real name and espouse (in my view) awful takes that would most likely not fly in real life. I'd recommend reading this article[0] for an example of when people, with their real names exposed, can still cause a shitstorm of misunderstanding.

0: https://lwn.net/Articles/973782/

Applejinx• 6 months ago

One way this can backfire: if you have no reputation and are nobody, and get banned and publically ridiculed, this is now a badge of honor you can take to wealthy and deluded people convinced of the AI future, to say 'look, I have been shot at! I'm a true believer!'

And then maybe they will give you money.

direwolf206• 6 months ago

Only if there's a wealthy political group that hates the thing you just got ridiculed by. When you get expelled from a climate conference you can become a right-wing figurehead, but when you get expelled from the cURL vulnerability program, nobody cares.

sschueller• 6 months ago

I like the idea of refundable submission fee for bug bounties. No refunds for slop and poorly researched submissions.

amiga3862• 6 months ago

Links to all those crap reports: https://gist.github.com/bagder/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d...

(from https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...)

wojciii4• 6 months ago

From https://curl.se/docs/code-of-conduct.html:

"As contributors and maintainers of this project, we pledge to respect all people who contribute through reporting issues, posting feature requests, updating documentation, submitting pull requests or patches, and other activities"

Why have a code of conduct while being hostile to contributors?

I think they should handle this differently.

defraudbah2• 6 months ago

all curl team came here to downvote you, don't be so cruel :D

wojciii4• 6 months ago

Heh.

I understand they people hate to to waste time. They should just be polite about it.

Or you know .. update or delete the CoC.

javcasas• 6 months ago

I don't think that telling a LLM to create a fake bug report is "contributing".

8organicbits• 6 months ago

There's no mention of LLMs in the link. Humans are perfectly able to generate "crap reports" on their own.

I think the parent is correct in calling out the inconsistency of promoting personal attacks when that is explicitly forbidden in the CoC.

ath3nd• 6 months ago

Why have a code of conduct while being hostile to contributors?

AI issued PRs or issues being called "contributions" is like me dumping my garbage in front of your house and calling it a "donation".

Citizen_Lame• 6 months ago

Perhaps because they are not really contributors, so it doesn't apply.

wojciii4• 6 months ago

Then they should exclude specific groups from their CoC.

"You can't be a contributor if you're an Indian using AI".

I don't think this is the way ..

Sharlin3• 6 months ago

"Contribute" comes from the Latin con- "with, together" and tribuere "bestow". We need a new word for these slop submissions. "Detribute" might work well, for something that takes away from the common good, rather than adding to it.

brovonov2• 6 months ago

They are not contributors, they are spammers. There is a difference. Do you reply to spammers with friendly greetings?

wojciii4• 6 months ago

I should really. They are also people. Probably bored at "work" in some slum in Nigeria.

I'll try to strike a conversation with a spammer next time I can't sleep. Thanks for a great suggestion.

jeroenhd• 6 months ago

With the extra work that LLM slop has been causing to core maintainers, I think they're quite friendly. Hopefully the volume of the bullshit they receive goes down once they stop paying bug bounties. The people who got upset that their hacker alias got called out for submitting bullshit LLM slop got what they deserve.

michaelbuckbee• 6 months ago

I think this is probably less effective than if there was some sort of "credit" or reputational score for reporting that seems like something GitHub would have the information to implement.

IshKebab• 6 months ago

Yeah this seems like a good idea. Plenty of games have "you have to have this much reputation to play in ranked games" sort of things.

I guess people would complain if it was tied to Github.

tonyedgecombe• 6 months ago

I’d hate to see GitHub assigning reputation to users.

latexr9• 6 months ago

seems like something GitHub would have the information to implement.

But not the motivation. GitHub incentives this type of behaviour, they push you to use their LLMs.

GitHub is under Microsoft’s AI division.

https://www.geekwire.com/2025/github-will-join-microsofts-co...

embedding-shape7• 6 months ago

GitHub is under Microsoft’s AI division.

Finally an explanation to why GitHub suddenly have way more bugs than usual for the last months (year even?), and seemingly whole UX flows that no longer work.

I don't understand how it happens, do developers not at least load the pages their changes presumable affects? Or is the developers doing 100% vibe-coding for production code? Don't get me wrong, I use LLMs for development too, but not so I can sacrifice quality, that wouldn't make much sense.

embedding-shape7• 6 months ago

I think one of the last thing I'd like on the web is for Microsoft to start keeping a "social score" for developers who participate in FOSS.

I understand where it's coming from, and I too think the current situation sucks, but making Microsoft responsible for something like that is bound to create bad times for everyone involved.

vladms3• 6 months ago

Why no go the other direction and make it hard to identify a user, so people do not do it for fame. Open source worked before people were using it as self advertisement.

Might even be good for Microsoft - they would be the only one knowing who is who.

em-bee2• 6 months ago

the berne convention copyright defines inalienable authors rights that can not be sold or taken away from the author. the author of any copyright works always has the right to identify themselves with the work, and therefore your suggestion is not legally possible.

ehhthing• 6 months ago

This already exists on the previous platform curl was using (HackerOne), it does not prevent the slop.

At my previous employer, I had access to the company’s bug bounty submissions and I can assure you no matter what you try to do, people will submit slop anyway. This is why many companies will pay for “triage services” that do some screening to try to ensure that the exploit actually works.

Unfortunately this means that the first reply to many credible reports are from people who aren’t familiar with the service, meaning that reports often take a long time to be triaged for no reason other than the fact that the reporter assumed that the person reviewing the report would actually understand the product. It’s hard to write good, concise reports if you can’t assume this fact.

Honestly, I don’t know what can be done to fix all of this. It’s a bad situation for everyone involved, and only getting worse.

yrro• 6 months ago

Somehow, I knew this would be curl before finishing reading the headline. Good on them!

latexr9• 6 months ago

I was going to add “cURL: “ at the start of the title, but it didn’t fit. The current title is exactly the allowed length, so it seemed more appropriate to keep the message verbatim.

hahahahhaah2• 6 months ago

Dog whistle to AI. Love it.

trgn2• 6 months ago

AI doesn't mind you'll be ridiculing it in public

hahahahhaah2• 6 months ago

Not yet

julius-fx• 6 months ago

Fair enough.

zkmon2• 6 months ago

There's going to be avalanches of code everywhere. You can no longer expect some human to know what some code does or maintain it.

jen202• 6 months ago

You certainly can expect “some” human to know what “some” code does.

Things you cannot expect:

- ALL humans to know what SOME code does

- SOME humans to know what ALL code does.

hypeatei5• 6 months ago

Which is exactly what the AI companies want. An unmaintainable mountain of code that you need their cloud-based, paywalled LLMs to handle for you.

zkmon2• 6 months ago

Yep. Vendor-locking, AI-locking and also human-locking. The last one is where the code can only be maintained by specific persons.

ironbound3• 6 months ago

Can anyone tell me in 2025 how much big tech made in revenue from AI..

robin_reala• 6 months ago

Revenue or profit?

j-bos• 6 months ago

Seems like a lot of the problems had by the low friction of first eternal september and now LLM genrated reports and contributions, could be resolved by restoring friction. First time reporters/contributers could be required to send their report or PR by paper mail. Strict requirements for the sender: all text printed on postcards (no letter opening) as QR or other data codes according to a standard formatting. Anything even slightly off goes straight to the trash, high signal/interest contributors can still get their foot in the door.

SloppyDrive• 6 months ago

The eternal-september; or its international equivalent, kills things because the nature of the public you are interacting with has changed.

These issues with reports and junk contributions come about because there is a huge payoff for pretending to be part of the community, but the benefit from actually contributing is generally less direct.

I dont think you can solve this with "friction", because the people you want to dissuade are more tolerant to these kinds of barriers than the ones you want invite in.

CrzyLngPwd• 6 months ago

Every site and every service is going to be swamped with AI-generated slop and will have to deal with it by banning it, and then detecting and deleting it.

This was entirely predictable. When you give everyone the ability to be good at something with no effort, everyone is going to do it (and think they are the first).

My partner recently bought a book from Amazon, and when it arrived, I looked at the cover, flicked through it, and said it was AI slop. She complained to Amazon, and they just refunded her, no questions asked, and the book went in the fire.

latexr9• 6 months ago

When you give everyone the ability to be good at something with no effort

When you give them the ability to think they’re good. If they truly became good, this wouldn’t be an issue.

vivzkestrel• 6 months ago

- I notice a lot of stuff in github issues all the time

- For example, there is this +1 comment pasted like 500 times that I have seen a lot over issues

- Cant we have a github regex bot of sorts ^(\W+)?\+(\W+)?1(\W+)?$ that removes all such comments? or let the author of the repo control what kind of regex based stuff to remove?

- I know regex kind of sounds old fashioned in the age of LLMs but it is kinda simple to manage and doesnt require crazy infra to run

direwolf206• 6 months ago

Yes you can, and those comments will then say "plus one", which you will add to your regex, and then they will say "++", which you will add to your regex, and then they will say "I agree", which you will add to your regex, and then they will say "me too", ......

LeoNatan25• 6 months ago

+9001 agree, this arms race is doomed.

mixedbit• 6 months ago

Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to better fit the user's needs. To create Free software, you ship sources together with your binaries and one of the OSI-approved licenses, that is all. The currently default model of having an open issue tracker, accepting third party pull requests, doing code reviews, providing support by email or chat, timely security patches etc, has nothing to do with open source and is not sustainable. This is OK if it is done for a hobby project as long as the author is having fun doing this work, but as soon as the software is used for commercial, production critical systems, the default expectation that authors will be promptly responding to new GitHub issues, bug reports and provide patches for free is insane. This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid.

spicyusername• 6 months ago

    has nothing to do with open source

    long time ago

Sourceforge is almost 30 years old. GitHub almost 20.

How long does something have to be done a certain way for it to be "to do with"?

I would say we're now two generations deep of software engineers who came up with open source software commonly being mediated through public issue trackers.

That isn't to say it needs to stay that way, just that I think a lot of people do in fact associate public project tracking with open source software.

mnw21cam• 6 months ago

Thanks for making me feel old.

vladms3• 6 months ago

the default expectation that authors will be promptly responding to new GitHub issues, bug reports and provide patches for free is insane.

I think there are many insane expectations out there, open source or not, so I don't personally see it that linked with the idea/ideal of open source.

This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid.

Anything can be paid, nobody says otherwise. Some people prefer nobody pays for their source code (open source). Other people do support for free. And so on.

The currently default model of having ... has nothing to do with open source and is not sustainable.

There were always arguments why open source will not be sustainable, many having some truth in them. But the current issue can be probably solved with some push-back on the speed of things or how attribution works. Something similar used to happen on some forums: you can't post a new thread for one month if you did not reply at least once without getting down-voted. For the current problem : if contributions are anonymous for the first 3 years of you contributing (if you are not banned) and your name becomes public only after, then all this "noise" for "advertisement" will die. Doubt this will discourage any well intentioned contributor.

klez• 6 months ago

I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind.

Free Software sure, that wasn't the point.

Open Source, that was exactly the point. Eric S Raymond, one of the original promoters of the concept of Open Source coined Linus' Law:

    Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow

Which definitely points in the direction of receiving bug reports and patches from users of the application. He was also a proponent of the Bazaar model, where software is developed in public, as opposed to the Cathedral model where software is only released in milestones (he used GCC and Emacs as examples, which reinforces the part of your statement about the Free Software movement in particular).

ambicapter2• 6 months ago

Linus’ Law doesn’t really imply anything about maintainers behavior though. As an example, you can imagine maintainers that never update their repos. Every bug fix is a forking of the repo, and people only use the repo with the latest commits. Eventually, the bug count goes down as well!

pixl974• 6 months ago

ESR is also from a time where spamming countless reports/junk code wasn't really a concept.

They did have things like trolls and zealots that thought "Their one idea" was a gift from god and the maintainers were idiots for not adding it to the application. And eventually those people may have been banned from mailing lists. But in general the people posting code were typically well known and had some interest in fixing the application for some useful purpose.

Simply put, no idealism stands the test of time without change. Nature shows us that everything must evolve or it goes extinct. How 'free software' evolves is now up for debate.

solaris2007• 6 months ago

ESR was from a time that was radically different than the the VSCode / brew / macOS / Ubuntu centric era we have today.

  https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe5

NegativeK• 6 months ago

has nothing to do with open source

I partially disagree. It does have to do with open source: Github (et al) are about creating a community around an open source project. It's hard to get adoption without a community; it gives you valid bug reports, use cases you didn't think of, and patches.

You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that.

and is not sustainable

I 100% agree. People (including people at for profit companies) are taking advantage of the communities that open source maintainers are trying to build and manipulating guilt and a sense of duty to get their way.

The most insidious burnout I see is in disorganized volunteer communities. A volunteer is praised for jumping in with both feet, pushes themselves really hard, is rewarded vocally and often and with more authority, and is often the one applying the most pressure to themselves. There's no supervisor to tell them to pace themselves. And when their view switches from idealistic to realistic and then falls into pessimistic, they view the environment through a toxic lens.

Then they vanish.

pixl974• 6 months ago

Yea, and before we got issue trackers quite commonly issues and code chunks were shared via email lists that quite commonly had online archives. Think things kind of like the LKML.

embedding-shape7• 6 months ago

You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that.

Literally you cannot, you can turn off "Issues", but you cannot turn of pull requests, Microsoft/GitHub forces you to leave that open for others to submit PRs to your repositories no matter what you want.

stryan• 6 months ago

You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that.

Just a note, you actually can't turn off PR's on Github repos. At least not permanently.

BugsJustFindMe6• 6 months ago

This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid.

It is paid, even if not in money. It seems like maybe you lack awareness of the other forms of capital and reward that exist, because your framing implicitly insists that financial capital is the only form of capital and that monetary reward is the only form of reward. But there are also a bunch of other forms of capital, like social, cultural, symbolic, etc. which you have missed, and there are non-capital (non-convertible) forms of reward, like feeling good about something. It's the entire reason why permissive licenses still preserve attribution.

To wit, people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things. There are both intrinsic and extrinsic non-monetary gains here.

Stallman makes the same critical error in his foundational writings, so at least you're not alone in this.

(A foundational read on the subject of the different forms of capital is Pierre Bourdieu's The Forms of Capital: https://www.scribd.com/document/859144970/P-Bourdieu-the-For...)

nlawalker2• 6 months ago

people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things.

True, but the expectation means that taking on maintenance involves taking on and leveraging a large amount of reputational debt in a very risky way.

If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam".

madeofpalk• 6 months ago

I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind

Who cares? That was 30 years ago. How different were computers, programming, and the world back then?

Things change over time. The world is not immutable.

nullc3• 6 months ago

The original model works, the new model significantly fails. LLMs have taken many cases that were on the border over the line into failure, by changing the resource management tradeoffs. (Both by giving valuable contributors a cheap way to get 'extra eyes' on their own terms, and by empowering a new generation of trisectors and trolls to flood out even the most efficient public submission pipelines).

jen202• 6 months ago

To create Free software, you ship sources together with your binaries and one of the OSI-approved licenses, that is all.

Untrue. Shopping source with _some_ OSI-approved licenses makes the work Free software. Shipping it with others merely makes it open source software.

MaxBarraclough• 6 months ago

Technically correct, but not an issue in practice. If you want a licence that's approved by the OSI but not the FSF, or vice versa, you have to go looking for it. If memory serves there are no licences in the latter category, and the few in the former category are very obscure.

1313ed012• 6 months ago

I thought about this a lot recently and decided that the small, mostly complete, project I work on now, if I release it (I probably will), I will just post an archive somewhere with the source code, like in old days.

toomuchtodo• 6 months ago

What about posting it read only on Github so folks can download and fork it but not bother you with inbound requests (discussions, PR, issues)?

TomasBM• 6 months ago

I've also noticed this expectation. Where does it come from?

FOSS means that the code to be free and open-source, not the schedule or the direction of its developer(s).

embedding-shape7• 6 months ago

I dunno, I think at one point there was a similar merge as to what happened with "git and "github" where "open source the licensing" somehow became the same as "open source the collaborative and open software development process", and nowadays people get kind of confused when you say you're doing open source yet you don't accept pull/merge requests.

mixmastamyk4• 6 months ago

I don’t agree with this newer idea that has arisen that FOSS authors are “victims.”

It’s up to you to set boundaries (or prices) and communicate them, like an adult. If one is still rude and entitled then ban them from the repo, or let people fork, but not before looking in the mirror first and reflecting at your own behavior.

(I’m trying to imagine folks painting xfree86 maintainers as victims back in the day when xorg forked them for intransigence. The point is disagreements happen, deal with them.)

otikik3• 6 months ago

I think "we will ban and publicly shame you if you waste our time" is a very clear and adult boundary.

ghostly_s• 6 months ago

Afaict github allows you to disable 'Issues' per repo, yet few do. I presume that means they are okay engaging with issues on some level, but I find it odd almost none post a policy/expectations around them.

zahlman3• 6 months ago

I’m trying to imagine folks painting xfree86 maintainers as victims back in the day when xorg forked them for intransigence. The point is disagreements happen, deal with them.

... Did they try anything as petty as the xorg maintainers are nowadays?

snowmobile2• 6 months ago

This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid.

What's stopping any open source maintainer from charging for their work?

boca_honey2• 6 months ago

Irrelevance. The moment you paywall a project, it’s a death sentence. Unless you have a unique and highly sought-after product (top 1%), someone else will just make a free alternative.

nmz2• 6 months ago

I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating higher incentives until the task itself matches the level of work to be performed to achieve it until merged.

The project managers also get a cut of all merges, testers also must approve of the merge and that feature X is the one they want. So the project manager gets to work and improve/reject features, the user gets control over the features of the project they want and developers get to pick specific features they would like to work on (sort of). everybody gets what they want (sort of). All via attaching $ to the issues of the software, not the people.

carlosjobim2• 6 months ago

Those normal users are better off instead purchasing software. Then they will be listened to by developers if they report a bug or suggest a feature. Because they represent an incredibly valuable user segment: paying customers.

1-more2• 6 months ago

All we need to do is create Kalshi contracts! Users bet that a fix won't be created for Issue 123 by date XYZ, developers take the other side of the contract and then do the best kind of insider trading: changing the facts on the ground. We did it!

llbbdd2• 6 months ago

Are there any projects that have achieved anything close to this? I'm not against it in principle, but it seems like it ends up incurring issues from tiptoeing around wanting all the benefits of an incorporated business with employees or at least contractors without the stigma(?) of getting all official and putting someone in the hot seat of responsibility. Off the top of my head:

- A business has some intrinsic motivation however minuscule to fix unsexy issues like security problems or problems that aren't as visible to customers so they don't get hacked and sued and go under; in a pay-what-you-want bounty scheme all of your users are playing chicken to not be the one to put up the money for the fix. Instead they'll wait until it becomes a problem and fix it in their own branch; no reason to bother upstreaming it until someone comes forward putting up the money.

- IMO there's no way to measure cuts for something like this that can't be gamed. If you close out the bountied issue, but you make use of a bunch of utility code I contributed last week, who gets it? Or if the code I contributed is mostly a mechanical refactor of some very complex code someone else wrote? Do we divvy it up by lines of code, number of commits, etc, and that's just for the squint-and-it's-qualifiable metrics for engineers. No idea how you'd measure a cut for project managers. Someone also may be the steward of the repository and handle administrative work but not do a whole lot of feature-fixing, what cut do they get? Instead of juggling KPIs you can just pay all these people for their common contribution - time - and then you're back at something that businesses do really well.

- For any bounty system to work you need somewhere to track the bounties and hold money in escrow for payouts. Those services exist, they cost money to run, and they are going to take a cut. I'd assume they'd also invest and grow that money while they have it unless that's illegal for some reason I'm not aware of. An incorporated business keeps its bounties in the issue tracker, and its money in an account that accumulates interest that can go toward further development on the actual product instead of third-party support services. Crypto is a no-go here because that limits your contributor pool to exclusively crypto perverts, otherwise normal people have to speculate on it and convert it to normal useful money for a fee.

- I've worked at a place where the devs got to work on whatever they wanted. Required to, really, because there was very little interest or hands-on management from the owner in the direction of the product as long as sales were stable. We had a great time and got paid and we all learned a lot on company time and last I checked they are no longer in business.

- Timelines are a big factor too. If some open-source software I'm using is missing a big feature I'd like (and if post-2024, it's too substantial to just make a copy and have Copilot customize it for my use) I'm still not going to kick in the first $10 in the hopes that somebody someday builds that feature for me. I'm going to be dead or not using the software by then. If I thought the feature I wanted was worth $10,000 and I had $10,000 to kick towards it in the hopes that somebody somewhere would decide to build it, I would instead hire somebody on contract terms to do the work with a greater guarantee of results and some recourse if they screw me.

sinnsro• 6 months ago

You know what would be nice? For these billionaires to start sponsoring people instead of sitting on the obscene heaps of money they have—a patronage system. Everyone wins.

KronisLV• 6 months ago

I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating higher incentives until the task itself matches the level of work to be performed to achieve it until merged.

Have a bot on GitHub that nags people about the pool of committed money towards each feature, to show that they care about it - with the money being placed into an escrow and being released once the feature is implemented and merged, or until a date is reached with no merge and it's given back to everyone / or when the request is closed with no changes. Ofc no idea how you'd validate each individual issue well enough to prevent someone from misusing it, but one could feasibly create such a system, even if it'd probably get a lot of opposition from everyone.

CodeMage• 6 months ago

I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created

It might be good to have such a system as an option, but I wouldn't want it to become an expectation. I've got a couple of side projects that are out on GitHub. They have open source licenses and anyone is welcome to fork them, send bug reports, or pull requests, but I don't want to have any obligation of supporting those projects.

pseudohadamard• 6 months ago

That's actually how a number of OSS projects work, we'll give you what we want for free but if you want us to do what you want you'll need to pay us. Having to implement a compatibility mechanism for some company's buggy train wreck from 20 years ago is a lot easier when you know you'll get paid at the end of it. A number of OSS dual licenses have been created to accommodate this.

reneberlin2• 6 months ago

I fully agree. The psychological burden is also high, what makes the maintainer feel miserable over time.

burningChrome• 6 months ago

Years ago, I built what I thought was a pretty basic static site generator using HapiJS. I was using it for personal projects and after some convincing by friends, put it up on Github. My friends went on Reddit and posted it and then told me about it afterwards.

It initially got some decent traction and then all of a sudden, all the pull requests came, all the feature requests and then all the bug reports.

I kept telling people this was a side project, if they want to fork it go ahead, but this is not something I'm going to spend a ton of time on. Then all the hate started about how I put something out into the OSS community with no desire to support it. I was bad person, my code was shit and I should stop being a developer.

That was my first and last OSS project.

I applaud and respect the people who are committed to getting OSS out there, but for me, it was a horrible experience.

cjblomqvist• 6 months ago

Far from all OSS projects are like this. Eg. https://www.viblo.se/talks/

calenti• 6 months ago

Bitching is free and easier than making pull requests. And I bet it was 1 or 2 choads plus a variable pack of minions, not everyone. And Megacorp X can file all the bug reports they want, their lack of investment is not my urgency.

hypfer2• 6 months ago

Been there, done that, built walls.

If you allow me to go on a meandering tangent/exploration:

___

I mean if you think about it, this outcome is more or less inevitable, given the environment we've created.

The foundational building block being that people will always optimize for their own benefit and personal gain. They fundamentally have to, because no one else will. So that gives us a natural source of conflict, because not everyone is a builder (or at least not everyone believes that they would), meaning that they need to get someone else to do what they want to get done.

You as a builder of course operate no different to that. You also want to optimize for your own personal gain. Where it is different though is that you do not rely that much on external resources to do that, given that you can create by your own.

So these are our building blocks.

To have a functioning societal system, we do want and need to allow people that don't to receive a decent-ish slice of the output of those that create for various reasons.

Something something shared humanity, but also the fact that a society built out of autonomous builders quickly collapses. Plus multi-dimensionality, meaning that person A might be a builder in discipline X, but needs others to sustain themself in discipline Y. Society and all. Shared workload.

The mechanism that regulates the flow of resources between these agents is friction.

For example, social shaming for not sharing the fair part of what you're earning is friction. That is a constant eroding force and cost that is supposed to shift your internal mental calculus to make contributing to society the most sensible outcome.

Equally so, the act of being protective of your time, demanding respect, boundaries and fair compensation is friction that is supposed to shift someone else's mental calculus to make fair treatment of you the most sensible outcome.

____

Okay, many words, but what the fuck am I on about?

Here's where this self-regulating system implodes:

In the last two decades or so, we have absolutely supercharged the mechanism of shaming and public pressure (rel: Twitter).

Simultaneously though, we've also _vastly_ nerfed any forms of friction a builder might employ. (rel: GitHub as the default, being "nice and professional" as the default, etc.)

And that is what simply is not working. But we're not talking about that properly, because any platforms we currently have for talking about stuff are absolutely and utterly dominated by those that do not create; meaning that they get to dictate the rules.

In a very unsustainable way of course (see also collapse of democracy in general) but that is still the reality we find us in.

___

And that is _I think_ also where we can find solutions to these problems. Don't get me wrong, I'm not proposing to return to linus and tell people that they should be retroactively aborted for having made a mistake. There were many very important advancements we made culturally to push out toxicity.

We will need to reintroduce friction though.

Likewise, we will need re-engineer our communication spaces to shift the balance of power back to a sustainable equilibrium. Which doesn't mean "cold uncaring meritocracy" (also, what even is merit?) but it will mean not handing out ever-larger megaphones based on who is already screaming the loudest.

___

Anyway, TL;DR:

It's the system, stupid. It is like this, because it can't be any else given the currently governing rules.

Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.

necovek• 6 months ago

In general, there is a difference of ethos and culture between Free Software and Open Source movements. GitHub is the latter: strewn with expectations from low-effort requests.

With free software, many projects have their own code hosting with separate accounts, sometimes even separate bug trackers with another set of accounts (think Bugzilla + GitLab). Any submission is by definition bigger effort, and thus the culture is significantly different.

As an example, just try submitting a patch to GNU libc (if it hasn't switched to GitHub in the intervening years, though I'd be surprised as it's a GNU project, but it's also largely supported by Red Hat), and see where you get to. Or join the GNOME community and submit a fix. Or FreeDesktop. Or KDE. Or...

tom_m• 6 months ago

Totally agree. The expectations around what an OSS project should - or even must - have, do, and accommodate is absolutely insane. It boggles my mind sometimes as someone who grew up on OSS. I still contribute OSS and maintain some (small) projects, but I certainly don't feel compelled to support people. I often license MIT. People are grown ups, they can go fix their own issues.

ozim• 6 months ago

You mischaracterize the problem. You write like the problem would be corporate freeloaders forcing bug fixes on the open source.

Huge problem for successful OSS projects is like what we have for cURL right here - newbies trying to "earn badge of honor" for scoring CVE on high profile project. The variation of it is newbies trying to score OSS contribution on high profile project (hacktoberfest).

In the end all of it is propping own CV to land a software engineering job or cybersecurity job by wannabes.

As much as I don't want to do gatekeeping and especially "old" Linus Torvalds way of gatekeeping — cURL, Linux Kernel and many high profile projects require gatekeeping to go on forward. We didn't even start on the security side of things not to allow "shady contributors".

I hate "CV proppers", "OSS as great marketing tool", "corporate freeloaders", "APT threat actors using OSS as attack vector" because they break nice things that we could have.

thayne• 6 months ago

I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind.

From the beginning, GNU projects welcomed contributions, and discussions of bugs and features were in the public. Sure it was on mailing lists, not on Github, but it was more than just shipping sources with the binaries.

That isn't to say you have to accept third party pull requests and have an open bug tracker to be free software/open source. Sqlite is a famous example that doesn't follow that model.

vitrealis• 6 months ago

Why is cURL specifically receiving so many slop contributions? Or is this a recent phenomenon for every open-source project, and cURL are the ones most spoken of? First time commenting on HN!

dirkt• 6 months ago

They offered a bug bounty, so people think "let me just use ChatGPT to make money for myself".

But from I hear it affects other projects too. It affected curl more because with the bug bounty they actually need to invest work and look at those.

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-f...

[2] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...

hypfer2• 6 months ago

cUrl as a project has a lot of conceptual attack surface for someone looking to find _anything_.

It is large, very popular (hence impact) and written in C. It supports many many many protocols with all of their real-world implementation quirks. Obscure or mainstream. And always handling user-controlled data.

If your motivation is a cool CVE for your CV, you'd pick such a project as the target of your efforts.

acdha• 6 months ago

It’s not just them, but curl is one of the most popular open source projects in existence and it’s used in areas where security is a significant concern. The security industry has a lot of emphasis on someone’s portfolio for hiring, which isn’t bad (it beats “what frat were you in?”) but it means that there are a ton of early career people thinking that the path to a better job is getting credited for CVEs on major projects.

That’s a bad combination with LLMs which are almost perfect for letting the user think they’re being more productive than they actually are because the output sounds authoritative. You don’t have to be acting in bad faith to submit a slop report, just being inexperienced and over-confident will work if you don’t have enough experience in the area to reason about the security of the entire system.

Galanwe• 6 months ago

Having an overly long captcha for bug bounties / reports may be the one place where it serves a purpose

bob1029• 6 months ago

This note isn't going to stop even 1% of the jackasses who would have submitted AI slop.

There are much better ways to communicate the intended message. This comes off as childish to me and makes me think that I'd rather not contribute to the project.

cmxch• 6 months ago

Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a fork of curl that addresses it.

GaryBluto2• 6 months ago

This comes off as childish to me and makes me think that I'd rather not contribute to the project.

It's unfortunately the new normal, with FFmpeg's core team acting similarly. No doubt the result of what is considered socially acceptable expanding in ways it probably shouldn't.

redeeman• 6 months ago

that is a view many hold, until its their own time being wasted. Consider the responsibility these people have and take on their shoulders, only for a bunch of idiots to consider their AI slop worthy of pissing up and down their face. Most of them probably even know its just AI slop spraying spree

dmezzetti• 6 months ago

It's been an issue for a while and it's even bigger now in the age of AI. Lots of people use security as a way to "have their moment" and don't really care about adding value.

But scaring people off from security reports also isn't a great idea either.

anArbitraryOne• 6 months ago

Nice. But it deters people like me who aren't totally confident in sending reports, trading false positives for false negatives

bilekas2• 6 months ago

it deters people like me who aren't totally confident in sending reports

This is by design, you shouldn't be submitting reports on anything less than certainty. It's not the maintainers responsibility to prove out your idea. It's yours, and when you're sure, reproduceable, and documented it, then you can submit it.

tehryanx• 6 months ago

The real problem here is that this is now the only way the maintainer/reporter can reasonably work.

Proving out a security vulnerability from beginning to end is often very difficult for someone who isn't a domain expert or hasn't seen the code. Many times I've been reasonably confident that an issue was exploitable but unable to prove it, and a 10s interaction with the maintainer was enough to uncover something serious.

Exhausting these report channels is making this unfeasible. But the number of issues that will go undetected, that would have been detected with minimal collaboration between the reporter and the maintainer, is going to be high.

grayhatter• 6 months ago

Nice. But it deters people like me who aren't totally confident in sending reports, trading false positives for false negatives

There's no such thing as a reasonable "false positive" on a security report. There is such a thing as a false positive on a bug report. (A real bug, that happens to have no security impact, is still a true positive, just without a security risk)

If you can make it crash, or behave incorrectly, or have some repeatable, weird behavior; but you have no idea how you could exploit that for an articulable advantage, or access to the system you shouldn't have. What you have is a bug, not a security issue. You can, and should submit a bug report.

Then, critically; "if you waste our time" seems to be an important part of the statement.

If you don't know, you suspect it's a security bug because you shouldn't be able to do this, and it is leaking information that you think is suspicious, and you can easily demonstrate that you can make it happen on demand. And you report that bug, and make it easy for them to understand and either confirm the security, or reject because [reason]. You haven't wasted anyone's time and this wouldn't apply to your bug.

jb1991• 6 months ago

It sounds funny, but it's not. I once issued a bug to them that didn't have enough information about how to reproduce... and I was lambasted on Reddit and eventually just deleted my account there it was so terrifying. Some dev teams do not mess around. In fact I've shied off most social media since and no longer issue bug reports to any company, I was scarred deep over the treatment.

TheDong2• 6 months ago

I've read their reports before. When there's not enough information to reproduce, they do a good job of asking for more information first, and I've never seen a reasonable good-faith report elicit anything overt.

If you failed to give them proper reproduction information when asked, then yeah, you were wasting their time and they should rightfully close your issue.

I've never seen anyone on the curl team undeservedly "lambast" someone, and for a project that has a quite good reputation, I think the burden of proof is on you. Can you link to these supposedly terrifying comments?

msephton• 6 months ago

It says in the curl file that they will ridicule time-wasters in public and here is one pression confirming that it happened to them, yet somehow that's not enough? Come on.

Retr0id• 6 months ago

What was the bug?

xandrius• 6 months ago

Yeo without any sort of context, it's just like throwing a stone and then running away.

ambicapter2• 6 months ago

Wouldn’t it be ironic if GP never answered this request for simple follow-up.

burnt-resistor2• 6 months ago

It sounds like a karma farm victim fish story.

amiga3862• 6 months ago

That is sad, sorry to hear it.

But at the same time, sometimes you have to really persevere to get a bug fixed.

Consider the perspective of the maintainer of a popular project: to them, you're one person in a big queue of people all reporting problems. Most issues turn out to be "I need free technical support, which you don't offer, so I'll phrase it in the form of a bug", and it saps their time to look into the details of each issue to find whether it's genuine-bug or user-error.

So that's why you should try to give reproduction instructions as best you can, and be up-front if they're incomplete, or you only saw it happen once.

If the maintainer responds harshly, or even if you get commentary from others, remember they are (or should be) criticising the bug report, not you. Try not to take it personally.

And even if they decide to close it, or not investigate further, you've still done the world a favour by adding genuine details about something you saw. The bug report is still searchable when closed. Other people who get the same problem as you are likely to find it, and it might spur them to reproducing the bug where you couldn't, and re-opening or re-reporting the bug and driving it forward to completion.

phyzome2• 6 months ago

That surprises me -- from what I've seen, Daniel is actually remarkably tolerant of incomplete/unclear reports. (Too tolerant.) But I imagine that could depend on the day.

(Now, if you used AI to generate the report, well... that's different. Especially if you didn't disclose it up front.)

MBCook2• 6 months ago

On the flip side I’ve been following him for a while on Mastodon.

I’ve basically watched the AI crap cycle go from “this is a weird report, oh it’s fake” to “all the reports are trash, it’s so hard to find real humans in the flood” through his posts.

I suspect I would’ve stepped down long ago. I feel so bad for the open source maintainers who are just being assaulted with nonsense.

flerchin• 6 months ago

Share the issue or reddit thread.

perching_aix2• 6 months ago

How does Reddit come up in this?

The only official community spaces they maintain are:

- their GitHub projects (Issues, Pull Requests, Discussions)

- their mailing lists

- their HackerOne page

If you were harassed on Reddit that is still shitty of course, but it's not gonna be on the project's dev team:

Some dev teams do not mess around.

Unless some of the devs have verifiable, pseudo-official presence there at least.

on_the_train• 6 months ago

He rubs me the wrong way, too. Curl is overhyped and a pain to work with. And he's getting high on the "success" while crying about not being paid for something he offers for free. I think Americans have a nice phrase about having cake and eating it, too.

latexr9• 6 months ago

Not only is cURL not overhyped, it’s absolutely false that Daniel “[cries] about not being paid for something he offers for free”. He does get paid for cURL support.

https://daniel.haxx.se/job.html

He does criticise rich companies who don’t do anything to support cURL and demand preferential support, but that’s not the same thing (and does warrant criticism).

giraffe_lady2• 6 months ago

Please ignore everyone else and do not share any more information about this experience or yourself. These people do not have your best interests in mind and will not mind, or are intending to, make this experience even worse for you.

zahlman3• 6 months ago

There's a strange irony in the replies here, where people apparently lack the necessary information to reproduce your experience.

egorfine3• 6 months ago

It is a bit naive to expect Indian students to even know about /security.txt existence, let alone reading it.

gosub1003• 6 months ago

I think this is the perfect application of a micro payment service. Each PR must be signed with a nominal amount of money, say $0.15 give or take. You send in a commit, with no expectation to get it back.

regenschutz3• 6 months ago

I think a deposit would be better then. You make a deposit of ¢15 for each issue and PR you open, and then the maintainers can decide to give it back to you if it was opened in good-faith/useful/merged/whatever policy they decide on.

__turbobrew__• 6 months ago

Agreed. Could be fiat or some sort of crypto currency that requires the submitter to have a vested interest in the outcome.

Honestly, I would love it if I could front some money in order to have the devs look at my PRs. Half my PRs just go into the void and nobody looks at them until some staleness bot inevitably closes it.

This is a similar problem to resume spam. I always wish I could pay $5 when submitting a resume with the guarantee that someone would actually look at it and give me a fair shot. If I ever run a place I want to experiment with only accepting resumes through letter mail or in person.

thrtythreeforty• 6 months ago

I think this idea doesn't go far enough. If it's money that's motivating slop, fine - let's make it about money. $50 to submit a bug report. If it's legitimate, we send you back $60; the judgement is on the curl maintainers' honor. If it wastes time, well, at least the curl maintainer gets a steak dinner.

NoSalt• 6 months ago

Seems fair.

greenavocado• 6 months ago

I'll leave this chart to speak for itself https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users?...

johnwheeler• 6 months ago

Why do I always hear the cURL guy's opinions on this and that?

GeorgeOldfield• 6 months ago

ridicule you in public

love this. more projects should use this kind of language. cut the bullshit

Cort3z2• 6 months ago

I wonder if there is a way to blanket prevent these types of problems.

Possible solutions I can think of:

- Require an account with a paid service. Fix = require money - Require an account verified with real ID/passport etc. Fix = link to real person - Automated reply system to "waste tokens" if it is an AI that is responding. Fix is increased cost of spammer. - Have some kind of "vetting system" where you get on an allowed list to report these types of things. Seems not good to me, but perhaps there is something in it.

I wonder how much open source code is lost because maintainers must deal with this type of thing versus the "good" that AI can bring in productivity.

smsm42• 6 months ago

That would shut down all drive-by contributions, which may not be a good source of big improvements, but are a good source of information about bugs/maintenance issues. I.e. if I find a rare corner case where the code breaks, for an open source project I'd usually take some time to report it properly. But there's no way I'd pay for the privilege or bother to register with my governmental ID.

Cort3z2• 6 months ago

I agree, but if there were a common place where everyone did the registration once, it might be less of a problem. Something similar to the «verified» accounts on twitter etc.

I can imagine GitHub becoming this filter somehow

pixl974• 6 months ago

I've thought about this some and there are benefits and detractions in the processes.

First requiring a deposit system. This might work in the sense that someone dedicated can put down $5 and report a bug, and even if it's not a bug but their work is legitimate they get refunded at the end of the process.

- This doesn't scale well globally as $5 is nothing to me, but significant to someone that lives in a place almost no one in the US can pronounce correctly.

- Once you become trusted you no longer need a deposit.

- Most people what would submit a single, real, bug won't do this and you lose this information.

- How is management of this deposit system paid for? How is fraud dealt with?

wt__• 6 months ago

Could it actually be significantly lower than $5? Isn't the real benefit not the money, but that the payment creates a bit of friction plus a paper trail tied to an individual?

You could then build a reputation system, much like a spam blocklist, using some sort of hash of the payment details.

latexr9• 6 months ago

A lot of solutions have been suggested over the past few months, including those. They have drawbacks and it’s not how they want to run the project.

https://youtu.be/6n2eDcRjSsk?t=1664

b00ty4breakfast2• 6 months ago

Projects are not going to be so open open their development process if they have to keep wading through emoji-filled and erroneous PRs. The Bazaar doesn't work so well if nobody can get around the piles of manure that are being delivered

pixl974• 6 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Should be a highlight of the 2020's decade.

It's not just open projects, it's anything that accepts unvetted information at all. Bug lists full of shit. Forums full of shit. News feeds full of fake shit. Ads full of fake shit. Cultural zeitgeist full of fake shit.

Culture and society has not figured out how to inoculate themselves yet.

b00ty4breakfast2• 6 months ago

This kind of automated industrial output is the foundation of our culture, it's not surprising that we aren't prepared for the virtual grey-goo of the LLM era that is our milieu brought to it's acme.

beloch• 6 months ago

While I understand the frustration with bad reports, this is how you get more of them (from the spiteful) and fewer good reports from the people you just threatened.

ilovecurl• 6 months ago

I love curl.

reneberlin2• 6 months ago

A few weeks ago i saw a repo in Github that had closed the issue-board and explained the users: to move on to the discussions.

If the discussion leads to the insight, that this is worth a feature, the maintainer will implement it.

I think the same goes for PRs. If you think you have made something cool, then discuss it and offer your implementation and the maintainer makes it fit with you to integrate.

On the other side, if you want a feature it just doesnt have, simply forking it and updating from the source-repo is fair enough.

desipenguin• 6 months ago

Bots/LLMs don't care if you ban and ridicule them in public.

cynicalpeace• 6 months ago

My instinct to this was: "This is literally patronizing"

Threats are what every parent tells their child: "If you do X, I'll take away Y"

For parenting, a limited form of this probably makes sense, because the parent has an authority over the child given by The Nature of Things.

But between adults this mode of communication is grotesque, and it is more and more common.

Especially amongst redditors, forum moderators, and other geeks of the ilk.

freakynit11• 6 months ago

I summarized all comments and overall discussion using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/curl-crap-reports-bans/

We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

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