Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

[edit: Possibly I'm being too hasty in recommending swearing off Open Source contributions. Go forth and contribute, I suppose :) Leaving my original comment below for completeness.]

For other South Asian/Indian people like me, a pessimistic but practical counterpoint to this -- if you happen to be Indian and have a username that marks you as such, just lie low for a bit and don't contribute anything; especially during Hacktoberfest. I promise you that this will actually be a net positive for your career.

Work on proprietary (aka closed source software) and earn money. Open Source was never particularly welcoming to us in the first place, and the tradeoff of marketing freebies versus being viewed negatively as a group is and a society is not worth it.

View on HN

> Open Source was never particularly welcoming to us (Indians) in the first place ...

Do you have any evidence to support this? I am an Indian and my own experience has been totally opposite. The open source community welcomed me, guided me, and appreciated my work when I began contributing to open source. See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NUTCH-559 for an example. This was my first significant open source contribution to an Apache project. I was young, naive, and had very little prior software development experience. The change I submitted added new features but it also removed a lot of code that I incorrectly assumed to be not serving any purpose. The Apache committers helped me to refine the change, make it better, and even appreciated it with a "Wow" with this comment: "Sorry for the late review... I have finally reviewed your patch and I have to say: Wow!"

I think this was very welcoming. It filled me with confidence to tackle more complex problems both at work as well as in open source. Thanks to that good experience, I still contribute to open source whenever I can and I write and maintain a few open source projects of my own.

No. Just look at my username; you don’t get more Indian-sounding than that. The way forward is to submit high-quality pull requests, not spam them to get a free T-shirt, and certainly not to give up and let people ruin it for you. I personally guarantee you that it’ll work out.

> Just look at my username; you don’t get more Indian-sounding than that.

I know, right! Incidentally, a past draft of my advice was going to refer to you and 'manishearth on the Rust core team as "good" examples to emulate. All this talk about "Shitoberfest" and such is driving me up the wall though.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I feel like we are not welcome, but I guess a lot of people in this thread are saying otherwise, so I should consider that perspective.

People don’t want to be racist. Nobody here (at least, I hope) is getting pleasure from saying that a bunch of Indian people are spamming them with low-quality pull requests. But the fact is that this is happening, and it’s better to try to figure out what is actually happening rather than throwing up your hands and saying “these people have tarnished my ability to ever file a pull request”, it’s much more useful to try to identify what’s really happening and then see if we can fix it.

The fact is that DigitalOcean basically ran a lazy but well-meaning program that was promoted with a poorly-thought-out (but also well-meaning) video on YouTube to a majority Indian audience who largely had no experience with open source etiquette and thus we have the logical result. It’s not that they’re bad people or stupid or whatever, but they were just in the perfect storm of things that told them to do what they’re doing right now because they literally got no guidance at all. This is just “I accidentally sent my feature request email to the development mailing list because I’m unfamiliar with how this process works” but magnified by several orders of magnitude and also slanted towards participation by a certain group of people. The frustration is of course towards the circumstances that led to this happening but it’s often hard to express that and much easier to tweet angrily about “Indian dudes spamming me with PRs”.

> "Shitoberfest" and such is driving me up the wall though.

People are complaining about actual spam that in no way improves their repo, and are angry at DO and GitHub for not being prepared for that. This has nothing to do with actual contributions and the people making them.

The heck are you talking about? I’ve worked on a good number of open source projects big and small, and spent significant time working with at least one Indian in the process. While a certain subset of people like to force identity politics down everyone else’s throat (mostly by claiming nonexistent discrimination), the vast majority of people don’t give a rat’s ass about whether you’re Indian, or black, or female, or gay, or whatever, and only judge your contributions by what you’re actually contributing. You’re not welcome if you spam, that’s for sure, but even then you’re just a spammer, not an Indian spammer.

No reason to lie low, just continue making good, earnest PRs which look nothing like this Hacktoberfest spam.

It's not the username in these examples that's the problem.

> It's not the username in these examples that's the problem.

It totally is. Make a profile with a Western-sounding, preferably female name, and submit a similar typo-fix PR. I can guarantee you that it will be accepted, or at the very least, not featured on a Twitter account called "Shitoberfest".

Minor typo fixes and such have been an established way to make a first bite-sized contribution to OSS projects. What changed this year that people are suddenly yelling at the top of their voices about the 30 (yes, thirty!) emails that they got this week?

Have you not seen the PR spam examples people are reacting to in TFA? You can't pick an {avatar, username, nationality, gender} combo that's going to get this diff accepted into React:

    - # React
    + # React an amazing project

These aren't minor "typo fixes".

That’s not what’s happening here. Have you actually looked at the examples of the PRs linked? They’re not fixing minor typos, they’re introducing nonsensical copy pasted changes. These are not low effort commits that you could argue don’t hurt the project — these are quite literally spam.

Take a look at these: https://github.com/grails/grails-static-website/pulls?q=is%3...

If you want to know how maintainers feel then read all of them.

>> It totally is. Make a profile with a Western-sounding, preferably female name, and submit a similar typo-fix PR. I can guarantee you that it will be accepted, or at the very least, not featured on a Twitter account called "Shitoberfest".

I have made a genuine typo fixing PR and it was accepted by the repo. And yes, I don't belong to the group you refer to in your comment. I don't know what's happened with you or why you feel that way. It would be better to support your point with an example or an incident.

>...not featured on a Twitter account called "Shitoberfest".

Do it 20k+ times and it very well may be. You appear uninformed about what is actually happening.

These aren't typo-fix PRs. Thousands of them simply added "an amazing project" to the title of the readme, as was suggested in the video.

> the tradeoff of marketing freebies versus being viewed negatively as a group is and a society is not worth it.

The reputation comes from mediocre youtube tutorials, sweatshops like TCS and infosys, bullshit sites like geeksforgeeks, and incidents like this.

I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation.

> The reputation comes from mediocre youtube tutorials, sweatshops like TCS and infosys, bullshit sites like geeksforgeeks, and incidents like this.

I'm not Indian, and I think the reputation comes largely from the proportion of educated people not behind the Great Firewall of China that are Indian, and people mistaking “the proportion of people who do I see do X thar are from Y background” with “the proportion of people from Y background who do X”.

The above may be the result of large population (with better contact to outside world than china) too..

But the bullshit is real, and its frustrating.

> I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation.

I think that we are in agreement regarding that? I have no right to complain about it either.

I can offer advice to bypass Open Source contributions altogether, which would have the side effect of stopping incidents like this. And it's not like projects are starved for README contributions either, coding bootcamps or someone else will pick up the slack.

Then, should we stop writing good code because some shitheads set a bad example?

Let me be clear, when you write open source code there are incentives like creating / improving tool for our own use, experimenting, or having a legitimate contribution, even if it is for sake of resume. The software we want to write as OSS is often not the software we can write as proprietary, sell and make money.

Should we give up all the advantages of open source for our side projects? Aren't other people contributing to open source and that's making world better? Should we do a disservice to ourselves and open source community because some people among us have created a bad reputation?

It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?

I’d really like epithet to reserve that for people who are actively malicious. There are no signs to the contrary for the people submitting spam PRs being enthusiastic developers looking to get into open source and score some swag while they’re at it but lacking the guidance to really understand that they’re being annoying to other people.

> Then, should we stop writing good code because some shitheads set a bad example?

No, I'm saying that we should write great code, and not open source any of it. I don't understand why the concept is so unpopular?

> It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?

Absolutely not. But I think that today, if Ghemawat made a typo fix contribution to 10 random projects for Hacktoberfest, at least one of those project maintainers who didn't know about him would be yelling about "spam". I'm not sure how to prove this; maybe someone who knows him can ask him to try? :) This is HN after all.

Also, since you bring it up, I'm guessing that the vast majority of Sanjay's code at Google is proprietary and not available to the world.

Which of the article examples (or in-the-wild hacktoberfest PR) is a case of a "typo fix contribution" that you think was unfairly rejected?

I'm an Indian and I beg to disagree. I have made small contributions to open source projects, including fixing typos, and have never felt unwelcome.

I'm a teacher of economics and open source software including Python, Julia, LaTeX, R and Linux are essential to my work. I would find it hard to pay for proprietary equivalents of all the open source software I use. I consider it my duty to contribute back in whatever way I can.

My national pride is not hurt just because another Indian who did something wrong was criticised on the Internet.

This is crazy that anyone should feel defined by 1 dude who just happens to have the same skin color as them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com