[Steuard]

Honestly, I think there's a little something to this submission beyond the "Ha ha, lots of people made typos that could cause big problems" factor.

A public repository like GitHub makes checks for common errors like this really easy. Would it be feasible for GitHub or the community to automatically recognize broad classes of these likely errors and notify the authors? How sophisticated could that sort of tool become?

Maybe "given enough bots, most bugs are shallow".

[joshstrange]

I agree, it's too bad they banned bots [0], one alternative I see is:

>> Yeah, maybe the answer is a hybrid, bots that look for common mistakes and a website that lets people login to github and displays the potential fixes so they can fix the code in the browser and send the pull request. Like a way to try and introduce people to open source through guided fixes more or less. [1]

[0] http://www.wired.com/2012/12/github-bots/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717694

[wdewind]

Yes, in fact Amazon already does this. It will frequently warn you if your AWS keys are published in Github.