Top all-time · #2949
Felix Geisendörfer
Personal blog · felixge.de · on HN as felixgeprogrammingsystems
Felix Geisendörfer's personal blog at felixge.de covers programming and systems. Since 2013, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “The Pull Request Hack”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly cite Felix Geisendörfer's 2013 post 'The Pull Request Hack', which advises giving commit access to anyone whose pull request is merged. It recurs in open source maintainer threads.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Pull Request Hack10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2013-03-11
- The Pull Request Hack (2013)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-05-30
- The pull request hack4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-10-02
- Implementing State Machines in PostgreSQL3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-07-27
- Open Source And Responsibility2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-03-07
What Hacker News says?
I'd guess it was this: http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know”Submitted Implementing State Machines in PostgreSQL as a story · 199 points
HN discussionApple | Backend (Go, PostgreSQL) engineer | Shanghai, China | ONSITE | Full Time We're a small team that is having a huge impact on the mass production of Apple's products. If you're an expert in Go or PostgreSQL (ideally both), we'd love to talk to you. But perhaps even more importantly, you should be a good communicator and fast learner. Relocation is possible. My e-mail is in my profile. You might also enjoy enjo…
Comment linking /2017/07/27/implementing-state-machines-in-postgresql.html
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2017)”Submitted The Pull Request Hack as a story · 198 points
HN discussionThe Pull Request Hack | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417 (March 2013) http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html > Whenever somebody sends you a pull request, give them commit access to your project. I agree with requiring more accountability before granting the ability to create official releases.
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “Give away your code, but never your time”Submitted Open Source And Responsibility as a story · 54 points
HN discussion"Since the early days of node/npm, sharing commit access/publish rights, with other contributors was a widespread community practice. https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html open source is driven by sharing! It's great!" Yes, but, quoting from his post he cites: "So should you really do this for all pull requests? Probably not. While I've given a large amount of users access to various projects of m…
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “If it's not fun anymore, you get nothing from maintaining a popular package”Submitted Using TCP keepalive with Go as a story · 36 points
HN discussionhttp://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project”Submitted Implementing State Machines in PostgreSQL (2017) as a story · 30 points
HN discussionPretty sure it’s a reference to ideas like this: https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack/ which have been popular for a long time in open source.
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack/
on “On Bloat”Submitted Implementing State Machines in PostgreSQL as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> I even considered not submitting this comment, for fear of anyone misunderstanding or taking this the wrong way, and the inevitable "open source is a responsibility" responses. I'm glad that you did, thank you for taking the time to respond. > The thing is, you're actually implying more than you're saying. What you really mean is, "You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve submitted as s…
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “A plea for better open source etiquette”Submitted Connecting Go Profiling with Tracing as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIf the OP would consider becoming a maintainer of a project they contribute to, and then follow their own advice, they do have some warrant to their complaints, otherwise not so much, for the reasons you state. I got a substantial pull request to an open source project of mine [1] that I don't have much time for, and followed the "Pull Request Hack" [2] and made the committer a maintainer. My GitHub notifications fo…
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “A plea for better open source etiquette”Submitted Let's Fix File Uploading as a story · 5 points
HN discussionA similar thing happened to me with youtube-dl. I handed the project over and gave commit access to a couple of contributors who are now doing an excellent job at keeping the program up to date. Not long ago, this story was discussed here and makes a similar recommendation: http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “A plea for better open source etiquette”Submitted PostgreSQL operations that you can't EXPLAIN as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> PS. I was truly impressed with Richard Hipp fixing each and every of these cases within a couple of hours of sending in a report. I can't stress how quickly this will turn me from "it's a good library" to "it's an amazing library". (Or prevent me from tacking on, "but it's kinda abandoned".) I've never sent patches SQLite's way, but I've sent patches to other open source projects, and whole quarters go by with nar…
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “Finding bugs in SQLite, the easy way”Submitted The pull request hack as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis was Felixge - former core Node.js developer - with his pull request hack [0]. [0] http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?”Submitted GoDrone - A Parrot AR Drone 2.0 Firmware written in Go as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think what the author writes is true if you want to maintain absolute control over the project. However, in this post ( http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html ) and the related HN discussion ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417 ), we see that by empowering and trusting contributors we can often get surprising and unintuitive results. I've tentatively tried this and been pleasantly surpri…
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “Contributors do not save time”Submitted Vim Trick: Open current line on GitHub as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is a post about another post: https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack/ The tl;dr is up top: Whenever somebody sends you a pull request, give them commit access to your project.
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack/
on “The Pull Request Hack Is Fucking Magic”Submitted Advent of Go Profiling: Day 1-1 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI see that you already have 25 contributors, so you might wanna try filing an issue asking for someone to take over. A very good advice I've gotten is to grant commit access to anyone who files a PR that gets merged[0]. The best person to take over is probably in this list[1]. [0]: http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html [1]: https://github.com/eneifert/ZendeskApi_v2/graphs/contributor...
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
on “Ask HN: Anyone want to take over the ZenDesk C# API wrapper?”Submitted The pull request hack as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAnother similar article, "the pull request hack": https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack/
Comment linking /2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack/
on “I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know”Submitted Implementing State Machines in PostgreSQL as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
