from Hacker News

A bot that tweets any time devs swear on GitHub

by deepsy on 10/9/17, 10:20 AM with 31 comments

  • by uiri on 10/9/17, 2:43 PM

    Author here. I made this almost five years ago when I was in high school. The Scunthorpe problem is real - "shit" is used in a lot of good compound swears.

    The code isn't public because I was concerned about people taking it to make a more popular version of the same thing. Not that it is difficult to glue together the two APIs. It is also an embarrassing mess of around 150 lines of Python.

    One issue with linking to the commits or repo is naming & shaming. The other is, as I mentioned, people trying to get on the bot intentionally.

    It scans a GitHub API once a minute so as not to put noticeable strain on their API. I think the firehose of constant commit messages has only gotten worse.

  • by painbody on 10/9/17, 2:05 PM

    I fear this will be used to further arguments that programmers create a hostile environment.

    I know people in all occupations swear, but this puts the focus on it and allows people to quantify it.

    Just imagine the article:

    "One report showed that the f-word was used over 5,000 times in a single month. No other profession that's been measured has showed near this level of profane, unwelcome environment. How are stay-at-home parents supposed to feel welcome in this community?"

  • by hasbot on 10/9/17, 2:45 PM

    > one bored Microsoft programmer has built a Twitter bot

    Hmm, I'm not sure I would want to be labeled, in public, as a "bored Microsoft programmer." His manager is wondering "Did he write this on Microsoft time?" "What else is he doing to alleviate his boredom?" "I give him plenty of work to do so why is he bored?"

  • by strictnein on 10/9/17, 1:17 PM

    The Twitter account:

    https://twitter.com/gitlost

  • by leejo on 10/9/17, 12:28 PM

  • by Erazal on 10/9/17, 2:01 PM

    I just sweared in a commit and it did not appear. Makes me wonder how the tweeter API works, how often it updates, etc... Off to discover new horizons !

  • by mrighele on 10/9/17, 2:55 PM

    A bit more evil would be to do something similar every time someone mentions "password" or "secret" in a commit message...

  • by MrQuincle on 10/9/17, 11:13 AM

    Moby Dick is not a swearword :-)

  • by pvinis on 10/9/17, 2:27 PM

    Would be nice to have the repo where the commit happened too.

  • by sAbakumoff on 10/9/17, 2:03 PM

    is it implemented by using GitHub web-hooks?