Author of the post here. Github finally took the offending page down approximately 10 minutes after the post appeared on the front page of HN. Total coincidence. I'm sure!

Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first.

And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.

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koolba 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first.

This also works for Google support.

> And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.

I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.

It was already a problem before agents could automatically perform these actions.

And it’s not something you can really automate on their end either. At least not the judgement call on the removal. Imagine if there was a fully automated process and it inadvertently took down a legit project.

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debugnik 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.

Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book.

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amdsn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I had several small requests for moderation (deleting and banning spammers posting spam/crypto scam issues/PRs in my repos and ones I contribute to) answered within a day earlier this year after more than a decade of never needing to request moderation. I'm not defending GH here as it's obviously unacceptable that the OP's issue took this long, but they definitely do or at least did have mods. I would guess they need a lot more of them if something this serious went unaddressed, or maybe the ones I interacted with are now gone and have not been backfilled.

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ktm5j 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean.. for better or worse, this is how corporate America works. Hiring to solve a problem that's not costing them money (and solving it doesn't make money) is probably not going to happen, especially with the current state of the economy. They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works.

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Paracompact 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works

Where does this myth come from, and how does it survive? It's either an excuse for parasitic corporatism, or an expression of learned helplessness. Nobody has been successfully sued for prioritizing the long-term health and reputation of a company over self-starving quarterly profit.

Is there a perverse incentive toward the latter anyway? Yes. But it mostly serves current leadership, who are evaluated and paid on short horizons, at the expense of the long-term investors who own most of the equity.

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ktm5j 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Definitely not a myth, friend. Read this article from Harvard Business School: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/fiduciary-duty-to-investors

"Accepting funding from investors puts you in a fiduciary role in which you’re responsible for managing their money and putting their needs above your own"

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mindcrime an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The reality is "it's complicated". But the strongest form of this - that "companies must maximize profits over ALL over concerns NO MATTER WHAT" is basically a myth. See:

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

https://www.legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-co...

https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/archives/56/5/end-sharehol...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value

So yeah, "fiduciary duty" is a real thing, but that's not quite the same thing as saying that every single decision has to be focused on nothing but profit maximization.

	▲	ktm5j 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		So you think making bad business decisions is holding up to fiduciary duty? You can't throw money at every problem that you'd like to solve, calling that malice is silly was the point I was trying to make.
	▲	29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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tripletao an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nothing in that article says you're obligated to maximize profit, and you're not:

> To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Executives are free to pursue near-term profit at the expense of everything else if they choose, and the shareholders are free to replace them if they don't. That's a choice by those executives or shareholders though, not an obligation.

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ktm5j 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

I said it's their biggest priority, not their only priority... solving a problem that doesn't cost money and the solution doesn't make money is bottom of the barrel. Come on guys, be real.

	▲	usefulcat 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		FWIW I totally agree with that. What I (and several others) disagree with is the idea that the concept of fiduciary duty confers an obligation to pursue profit at the expense of all else. Is there an incentive to do that? Yes, or at least it's obviously quite possible. But is there an obligation? No. Relative the comment you were responding to, it sounded like you were defending the idea that an obligation exists.

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usefulcat an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Where on that page is there anything to indicate that hiring more QA or mods would be so bad as to be considered a breach of fiduciary duty? That seems like a pretty big exaggeration, at best.

This behavior is a matter of incentives, not obligations. No need to apologize for them.

"Fiduciary duty" does not mean "pursue profit to the exclusion of all other considerations".

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usefulcat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors

"Obligation" is the wrong word. Should be "incentive".

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mistrial9 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

many readers here have not experienced a standard of customer support that was common decades ago. Google in particular created a new standard for ignoring the customer on a large scale, in my own experiences. Secondly, the customer paid money to a company for service, while an emergent business form does not take money from the customer directly, blurring the definition of customer.

I strongly agree that failure to stand for consumer rights is both learned helplessness and an apologist cooperator psychology. CA Voter here.

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hyperhello 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If we have no way to strike back, they will simply suck every drop of blood out the way you use every part of the buffalo. There is no way to escape Microsoft when they just buy everything and turn it into part of their garbage moat.

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ruined 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

how does anyone expect to solve AI alignment when we can't even solve corporate alignment

	▲	ktm5j 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Life sure ain't perfect.. not much you can do about that sometimes.

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majorchord 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you provide evidence of these claims?

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csomar 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean we are in the thread of evidence right now?

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veverkap 3 hours ago | parent [-]

GitHub support is full of amazing, hard working people.

It is also comically understaffed. This is not because they can't find people to work - it's not given the budget necessary.

	▲	nikanj 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They might be amazing and hard working, but that doesn’t free them from the yoke of policy and script

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elAhmo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is a problem they could solve if they want to. They have billions of profits per quarter.

They just don't want to. Not malicious, just ignorant and disrespectful of their users.

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rkagerer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m sure they are swamped with such requests

Then maybe they should be growing their customer support capacity along with their business. It drives me crazy how big companies have normalized cutting those departments down to anemic proportions. Especially those where you're a paying customer.

	▲	someonebaggy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Remember when Google lost a lawsuit for defaming a business in their AI search results?

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alightsoul 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

YouTube already does it autonomously with seemingly no legal consequences for them because you agree to it in their tos

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dogleash 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.

It's malice from whoever is responsible for under-staffing. It's also malice to prioritize the squeaky wheel for optics; it's intentional to reduce the spread of the knowledge of how unresponsive they are.

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vkou 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.

Handling these requests at whatever scale they operate is their responsibility.

Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to take on all of their customers.

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elAhmo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Describes pretty much any of the big companies. For example, I have seen numerous times people got their account locked on Google, or their app stuck in limbo at Apple, and then after post becomes viral all problems get solved.

	▲	latexr 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Apple in particular is mocked because they explicitly say (used to say?) “going to the press doesn’t help”, but they’ve shown time and again that it’s the most effective way to get them to take action.

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zamalek 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For this specific case, a DMCA would have gotten you a much faster take down. As far as I can tell it's automated. Sure, they could appeal it but then the malware nature of it would be in the crosshairs of the reviewer.

Not excusing their slow response, though.

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ajmurmann 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It might not be a willingness issue as much as a bandwidth issue.

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post-it 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Bandwidth can be bought with money, of which Microsoft made an extra $133.7 billion this year.

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ajmurmann 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We know that coding agents have been pushing GH to its limits. Scaling is hard - especially staff. Maybe they aren't trying to scale support but I think it's reasonable to give them the benefit of doubt here, given what we know publicly

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ndiddy 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This is one of the things I dislike the most about large tech companies. They get way more customers than they can adequately provide support/moderation for and either offer no support or shitty automated support. Then when something falls through the cracks people always go "what do you expect them to do, hire enough people?" Yeah I do!

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cwillu 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Microsoft is not some plucky upstart company with 12 employees and an unexpectedly popular product. We do not, in fact, need to give them the benefit of the doubt here.

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dualvariable 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having "hackers" on this site giving the benefit of doubt to companies clearing hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year will never cease to stop being ironic to me...

	▲	ChickeNES 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		On the site run by a VC firm? Why is that a shock? Besides, hacker does not mean being a kneejerking reactionary against corporations.

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veverkap 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They aren't trying to scale support. If anything, they are trying to throw AI at the problem. The support team is understaffed and overwhelmed.

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iAMkenough 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s a self-inflicted issue they should have properly planned for.

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cj 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You’re saying this is a problem money can’t solve?

There’s no need for benefit of the doubt when it comes to the level of support provided by tech companies.

Bad support by tech companies is a conscious profit-preserving choice.

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whateveracct 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They have to dump all that free cash into data centers, sorry

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kstrauser 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft is elite.

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NobodyNada 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sounds like they can afford elite customer support.

	▲	4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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pllbnk an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have for a long time said that the way to regulate these huge companies would be to have government-mandated SLOs for live support.

For example (simplified), if a user makes a call, a person with sufficient privileges to handle 90% of the cases should answer on the other end within 2 minutes. If the case cannot be handled, the higher-up with privileges to handle 99% of the cases should be reached within 5 minutes. And to be fair, it should be mandated for all companies, not only FAANG-like.

But a company like Meta (for example) with a billion customers would then have to decide whether they want to work on quality improvements for their services or whether they would like to hire a million technical support staff.

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iAMkenough 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Good thing HN provided them some bandwidth to do their jobs.

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cyanydeez 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

unwilling to provide proper support?

Just seems like a silly rational response to the same problem.

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locknitpicker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes,evidently bandwidth from HN unblocks takedown requests of malicious content.

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ajmurmann 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies. I guarantee you that once an issue hits the HN front page, even engineers who might have totally different talks will get involved. (Never worked at GH or have talked to anyone there in years but this is how everything works pretty much everywhere)

	▲	toomuchtodo 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The public shaming will continue until the internal incentives improve. Make sure to drop that HN thread link into the internal task tracker y'all. Don't forget to report to journalists if the severity warrants it (Brian Krebs, 404media, etc). "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."

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a13n 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How did you report this to GitHub? Your post shows an automated response from GitHub support. Did you follow GitHub's documented instructions on reporting abuse? https://docs.github.com/en/communities/maintaining-your-safe...

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monster_truck 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They're generally extremely quick about this if you ping ~anyone on the security team with the offending url and a link to the real repo. There is a long ongoing game of cat & mouse against malware in repackaged things like first party windows utilities to leverage the signed binaries.

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alightsoul 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This was not my experience at all. Someone on the bitchat android commented with a virus, reported it and was taken down 2 hours later

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kachnuv_ocasek 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hacker News saves the day once again!

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nikanj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same goes for all companies bigger than a startup. The first line of support is AI, the second line is clueless, and the third level is powerless. HN is the only way to reach a human with both ability and willingness to help

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hsuduebc2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just send DMCA if you want their attention, they act harshly and quickly. Even when it's false one.

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ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago | parent [-]

https://marksgray.com/intellectual-property-law/how-fraudule...

Fraud

Do the ends justify the means?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism