Good workmen also blame their tools. Because sometimes tools are bad, and that's how they get improved.

“A bad workman always blames his tools.”

It is a workman, who builds a very succesful tool for others. Not a bad workman by my definition.

And his suggestions of improving the UI sound very solid. Also I am not sure, if you got the part, where he pointed out, that Github themself made the same misstake for one if their repos. Sure, sure, all bad workman.

Maybe the UX is not great, but surely having to type "httpie/httpie" would have given me a pause.

Regardless, to make mistakes is human. What I don't really like is how the author starts attacking Github and Microsoft, just because they can't afford to fix the author's mistake. A huge red flag for me.

Once you do it a few times, writing the repo names means nothing. You have to do it on your repo with 0 followers just making it public. It’s not very notable unless you’re new to Github.

My advice is for Github to tell you that you’re losing 53,000 stars (not just “all your stars”) to help knock you out of autopilot.

I don’t get the finger pointing though. Obviously they messed up, it’s the entire post. But it’s also a good moment to reflect on how UX can be used to prevent people from messing up.

What should the threshold be? 53,000 stars? 50,000 stars? 25,000? 100? No matter what number you pick, there will be someone with fewer stars who considers their stars important enough to merit a warning.

Unless you set the threshold to 1, in which case it's just more meaningless noise, like the repository name (apparently) is.

Always show the number if it's more than 0. It's more informative and might catch your attention better than "something bad might happen"

They didn't say so, but 100% they copy-pasted the name from the prompt. I always do. They didn't type manually it in a way that would help them catch the error. That's a big reason that "enter this thing: ______" isn't foolproof. Perhaps it should at least be made unselectable.

> “A bad workman always blames his tools.”

That's a meaningless statement, though, as it can always be used against anyone complaining about something. I mean, you yourself wrote this the other day:

> I had to work with SAP Hybris a year or two ago. My IDE was not smart enough. Well actually I spent a good number of days trying to configure my IDE to be able to work properly with Hybris. I failed. What a mess

Are you a bad workman blaming your tools? Or do some tools just genuinely have faults?

he said "I failed" not "the tool failed"

While lamenting the tools. They also wrote "my IDE was not smart enough".

Completely disagree; when it comes to programming (where all tools are infinitely malleable), it’s a poor programmer who puts up with suboptimal tools.

I don't think he's blaming HN to the point where he's shirking responsibility for what he did. I read this post as a clever way to get play on HN which will help him get some of his stars/watchers back.

Couldn't agree more. The author not only messes up his own repo while blaming the GitHub UI, he proceeds to then whine that GitHub employees won't restore his data from a backup.

But the point he makes, is that Github made the same misstake - and for themself they could restore it.

If it's a mistake that even a GitHub employee can make with very heavy consequences, is that entirely the fault of the author?

When Lauda Air Flight 004 crashed because the pilots accidentally deployed the reverse thrusters in air, even though it was the pilot who "made a mistake", Boeing was forced to change their design and now the original design is considered flawed.