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joel.net
Personal blog · joel.netprogrammingweb
joel.net is a personal blog at joel.net about programming and web. Since 2020, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link joel.net for its post on how one video led to spam pull requests during Hacktoberfest 2020. It is cited whenever incentive-driven open source contributions come up.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
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Most-linked posts?
- One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 20209 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-10-02
- I Setup My Own Personal CDN Using Cloudflare and S32 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-14
What Hacker News says?
In a program like this you can’t optimize for the assumption that every participant is acting in good faith and contributing good work even if it’s not accepted. If a program incentivizes opening PRs even if they’re not accepted, the result will be a lot of maintainer spam from people opening useless PRs. This isn’t a personal hypothetical, it’s what we observe any time programs try to incentivize open source work.…
Comment linking /how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
on “Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany”Submitted One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020 as a story · 787 points
HN discussionAny time you introduce an explicit incentive, however small, to open source work the unintended consequences can become a problem. The Hacktoberfest incident is a good example: The program offered a T-shirt to people who had a PR accepted. The result was tens of thousands of useless PRs across open source repos and maintainers begging for the program to stop so they could stop dealing with useless PRs. https://joel.…
Comment linking /how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
on “Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany”Submitted How one guy ruined Hacktoberfest (2020) as a story · 215 points
HN discussionhttps://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama Very similar: some guy created a video and a lot of people submit useless PRs, except for a T-shirt instead of crypto. EDIT: Except, Hacktoberfest ran since 2014 and there was never an issue before the video, which (unintentionally) brought it a lot more attention and gave a bad example of an “improvement”. Incentives can be good if designed and explained c…
Comment linking /how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
on “The Disappointing Tea.xyz”Submitted I Setup My Own Personal CDN Using Cloudflare and S3 as a story · 13 points
HN discussionYeah true, but just look at the bulk https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
Comment linking /how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
on “Spamtoberfest”Submitted I Set Up My Own Personal CDN as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThat reminds me of hacktoberfest, it's not crypto related, but people were creating similarly pointless pull requests for t-shirts. https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628342
Comment linking /how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
on “Tea.xyz causes a flood of spam pull requests to open source projects”https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
Comment linking /how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
on “Show HN: Hacktoberfix, Fix your October already”It's Hacktoberfest all year long, baby! https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
Comment linking /how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
on “We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports”> When I did a coding boot camp, one of our assignments was to push a package to RubyGems. It didn't matter if the package did anything; just make up a name and publish it. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing was a common practice with other boot camps, and applied to NPM as well. I always despised how this effectively trashes the repository and represents a complete waste of digital space, no matter how insignifican…
Comment linking /how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
on “50% of new NPM packages are spam”
