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Comment by lizard | Hacker News Reader

> Isn't this quite circular? People using code you publish publicly makes you reluctant to publish code publicly?

Not that I disagree with this project, but just to maybe help see it from a little different perspective...

When people publish their code, I think they typically expect it's going to be used like

    import my_package
    do_something_cool()

So it is a little weird when things like this come along and change that expectation.

It's kind of like, "I scanned millions of Facebook photos for soda cans to see if people prefer Pepsi or Coke!" People didn't post those photos be be part of a project, they just wanted to share some pictures with their friends.

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It's not unusual to want to change certain behaviours of a project, e.g. by subclassing something within it. It's also worth at least having some idea of the code you're running before you run it, particularly if you don't know the developer, for many reasons but for e.g. [0].

I'm not really sold on the perspective that if you're a sophisticated enough developer to know+upload+publish on pypi that you wouldn't expect someone to read your code. In many ways that's kind of the point. Not to say such people don't exist, but they're probably a small minority.

[0]: https://cyble.com/blog/over-45-thousand-users-fell-victim-to...

According to the stats on the original link, there are over 25,000 identified secret ids/keys/tokens in the data. And it looks like that's just identifiable secrets, e.g. "Google API Keys" that I'm guessing are identifiable because they have a specific pattern, and may be missing other secrets that use less recognizable patterns.

I mean, sure, compared to the 478,876 Projects claimed on https://pypi.org/, that's a pretty small minority. On the other hand, I'd guess many Python packages don't use these particular services, or even need to connect to a remote service at all, so the area for this class of mistake should be smaller.

And mistakes do happen, but that's a pretty big thing to miss if you are knowingly publishing your code with the expectation other people will be reading it.

Thanks for that, I can definitely appreciate this perspective. I’d say it’s more akin to uploading photos to a shared public host like imgur rather than Facebook, but regardless I can see how someone’s expectations of who/what would use it might be different than mine.

Kinda like you say yourself, the service is probably the least interesting part.

It doesn't really matter whether its a public repository or if you use thing your friends shared only within their network. When it comes to what people expect and how they'll feel about breaking those expectations, the only difference is that a smaller network of generally like-minded people _may_ already be cool with it, or at least it's easier to ask.

I'm not even saying they're right to feel weird about it. Just that people are going to feel what they're going to feel, and doing something they didn't expect is a sure-fire way to get them to feel _something_.

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