>The dialog should be more contextual and, paraphrasing again, it should say “You’re about to kill 55,000 people.” That would’ve certainly made me pause.
> Honestly, they are blaming Github here.
I think both of these statements can be true at the same time. They are taking much of the responsibility while also explaining how some aspects of Github's design are partly responsible for the outcome.
It's not like they can just run a few SQL queries on prod and have the author PayPal them 10$.
They need to create a plan, cost estimate, risk assessment, get management/qa/security/SRE/... approvals, write the code, documentation, reviews, tests, run on prod, create invoice, etc. This means 10-20 people work for 1-2 days. I doubt that the author is willing to pay 20000-60000$ for this.
> That humble tool, which we open-sourced, quickly captured developers’ hearts and rapidly became one of the top projects on GitHub.
> We’ve raised a Seed Round ...
It's not hard to believe the seed round and the entire pitch of the commercial venture was tied to the star count, and it's not hard to believe that the author would drop $1/star to restore the count.
It’s fine to express the gulf of evaluation and execution that led to the error. It happened. There may not be any better known solutions at the moment to lower the risk any further.
Calling them careless is also unjustified. They made a mental error processing the information. Whenever humans are involved there is a risk of illogical and bizarre mental errors in decision making because we are degenerating meat robots granted full agency.
Shit happens. How we emotionally deal with it is the test of life as a human being.