Comment by swang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swang | Hacker News Reader

Well this is depressing. I was always meaning to install ML, now I'm not sure I can trust the developer for doing something so stupid and not feeling and contrition for it.

Is al3x also g3gg0?

  so a warning to everyone being pranked yesterday:
  you are not prepared for serious shooting with magic
  lantern, if this was a real problem to you.

  why?

  if you use ML for business make sure a failure, no matter if serious issues or not so serious (like yesterday) wont get you in trouble!

  - take ML-free backup-cards with you
  - make yourself confident with rescue procedures and how to temporary disable ML
  - ML, especially "latest" versions can introduce troublesome behavior

  yes, its cool that ML is being used in a lot of serious stuff. we really love that.
  but we expect users to be prepared for the moment when ML is going nuts for some reason.

  this day will come.

http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=14850.msg14...

There is also a picture in that thread (scroll up).

If anything, this gives you good reasons to trust these guys. Many people have installed and are relying on ML without reading the warranty warnings. At least they're pushing you to use good practices that stand you in good stead with any other dev and their product out there.

There are warranty warnings on any open source platform. I wonder what would happen if an open source database would decide to do this on april 1st :)

I'm not sure how enforceable a warranty disclaimer is when it comes to software that maliciously alerts the user to a permanent and irrecoverable hardware error.

maliciously?

The rationale given above is bupkis: "don't use us professionally because shit happens and good practices etc". The user in the story knew how to roll back and did so, and still wasted a lot of time and effort trying to hunt down the bug - being helpful, like an ideal user is. As an explanation, it's a total cop-out.

An April Fool's prank should be quickly evident to the victim, not make them spend hours wasting their time. Especially when the victims are strangers.

I hope this "developer" never touches any critical software.

I wonder why it reminds me of http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-01-31

What makes you trust other devs? You don't know them nor their intentions.

Not really a question about whether I trust other devs. It's more that these devs admitted to causing harm, and seem to think fooling their users is a good idea. Then when called out on it, they say, "people need to relax, just a joke bro, better be careful next time!" instead of just owning up to it and hopefully move on.

Installing firmware onto thousand dollar machines is stressful enough, they shouldn't be "taught" a lesson just because the developers thought they should.

It's almost like every notable april fool's joke in history.

There's always the guys that will say that lighting a bunch of tires on top of a mountain to fake a volcano eruption was irresponsible, but then again, these are the things we talk about decades later.

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