So you think women are being kept out of tech because tech communities are TOO pc?

What part is nonsense?

I just skimmed it. Seems like one person wants a maintainer removed and others don't. Did GitHub do something?

Isn't this like exactly what you wanted to happen? Free speech and market forces and all?

Like he said, "from the perspective of 1984"

no afaik github has nothing to do with that, and yes i prefer it that way. was just another example of the entitlement personality that is behind all of the other changes

Hah ha ha ha.

It's entitlement when one person asks for another person to be silenced for what they perceive as being against transgender people. But its not entitled when you you want those same people silenced for something you find offensive.

Why is this a problem? This is an intra-project issue.

never did i say anyone should be silenced so you might as well delete your post and think of something else to retort with

Would you want your daughter read Hacker News? I didn't think so.

She sees women are discussed like they are aliens.

She sees women must endure backwards neo-chivarly.

She sees men and women are acting like jackasses. Yes, I said both genders. This is the crux of the issue. No one is willing to say this.

When things are explained completely out of context, which creates a massive Twitter row; when stories are told in a way that are 99% bull****, purposely obscuring the truth because, well, the truth doesn't uphold "the story," you allow for lies, misinformation, and agendas to be openly promoted. I honestly don't think many people believe what they are saying (bull****) and the others are just parodying (Poe's Law). The remaining just wish it would all go away, and do the only thing that is responsible: ignore it. The people that truly feed into this stuff? Get rid of them. Yes, both genders. You don't need or want these people around. You claim to work in a cerebral industry. Why are idiots welcome at all? If this is really the best you can find while paying $90K / year, wow, just wow.

The github link is a pretty simple example. The guy said "they aren't facing reality." No one is asking what he responded to. Programmers are supposed to be logical, masters of asking questions, masters of debugging, which requires the ability to look for the root, but not a single person asked what he meant here, so of course it is okay to assume he meant the absolute worse thing possible, right?

If you allow a toxic environment in your office, which is includes backstabbing and everyone walking on eggshells, then you have to take action. If you look at your office and there is a slant towards one gender, too many people are thin, good-looking, etc, then you have a problem. Oh, but it is illegal to focus on hiring women or ugly people, right? No one said anything while only guys were being hired for the past 5 years. I bet that was just normal non-discriminatory hiring.

holy rambling nonsense, batman

Oh right. You just call it nonsense and think they're entitled for not just leaving and going somewhere else.

Neo-chivalry?

I don't know what you mean. But if you mean condescending treatment to women - sure, that's a problem. But its not what most people are advocating for and seems like a strawman of the actual issues.

I don't consider things like the GitHub code of conduct an example of neo-chivalry. Nor do I see widespread examples of useful discussion being suppressed because of neo-knights (?) or political correctness gone amok.

So let's stay concrete and start with a simple example. Do you feel like the GitHub code of conduct is bad?

Wow guys, relax.

I don't really care where the line is to be honest - that's a political debate - the problem I'm seeing is that there are no clear rules and whatever rules they have are arbitrarily communicated and enforced. There doesn't appear to be any kind of coherent process for enforcement.

It seems that random customer support persons are able to take down repositories without a coherent internal process as though the takedowns were compelled by a court order. It seems that these powers were granted to their low-level employees to quickly comply with takedown requests from governments and they are now being hijacked to serve a different set of interests altogether.

It's not like either GitHub or the repository were targeted by any kind of agenda-driven twitter mob or even issue-spamming prior to this and it'd be an odd thing for the upper management to care about in the absence of PR pressure, as there's a ton of offensive stuff on GitHub that's way worse. So it's kind of incoherent to blame the PC/SJW/whatever it is that people think is wrong with the world today. Instead it seems to be a rogue decision made by a low-level employee, potentially in response to a complaint. If you look at the email carefully, there are enough hints to suggest that this is neither a form letter nor something carefully written by the management. It's like GitHub hired someone with an ax to grind or someone who has no idea what they are doing. Censorship could have happened in a different direction with a different rogue employee (imagine fundamentalist types) and it's equally scary even if the optics would be different.

and the women who are acting like jackasses are the extreme feminists. see the rug that github removed from their offices? feminists were offended by the word "meritocracy" and github caves and has it removed. nevermind the intent of the word, which is to promote advancement based on skill and performance.

http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug

these feminists are actually HURTING the cause of the truly abused women that were discussed earlier in the thread by jjshabado

shh, don't speak too loudly in opposition, otherwise face condemnation and ostracization. it doesn't matter whether or not what you say above make sense. as long as someone takes offense, that's sufficient cause for concern.

yea, thats what it seems. but its a growing trend for github/tech sector/country at large, which is kinda what i meant the discussion to be about

is what the rogue employee did cause for termination? imagine the backlash the company receives after they fire someone who was simply "trying to do the right thing and remove an offensive word"

And by "scary" I mean things like your build failing at a critical time because some dependency you're pulling gets "disabled" by some random customer support person who didn't like the wording on the package/repository description.

I'm all for removing offensive language where they don't enhance the value of the product (dictionaries and bad word detectors are two examples).

I feel safe assuming it was well-intended in spirit, but people's fear was that it could be abused, and that is happening already.

A policy is half intent, half implementation. I think GitHub should be trying to stay away from political bickering found on HN and Reddit.

How is it being abused?

Why would it be cause for termination? It's not a junior customer support person's job to come up with an internal guideline as to how to properly enforce ToS and handle takedown requests coming from a variety of places and come up with procedures to ensure that the guideline is enforced consistently. It's definitely on the management. This isn't like a rogue trader losing billions of dollars where the "they should've known" standard applies even after you acknowledge that the management didn't have the proper procedures in place. As you grow in size, if you don't have proper procedures in place, it's quite inevitable that something like this would eventually happen.

Just as the earlier Julie Ann Horvath affair was not about GitHub's brotastic, misogynistic culture, this incident is not about GitHub drinking the PC/SJW koolaid. Both instances are somewhat indicative of the upper management not understanding how to run a company at this scale.

good point

Candybar just talked about an email chain where the GitHub employee had "an ax to grind."

People are now using GitHub as a platform to vent their anger at maintainers.

What are the rules for nuking repos? Does it take one person to write in and ask for the offensive repo to be removed? The idea, as I understood GitHub, was to serve as an open platform for sharing code, not ideas, not drama, and certainly not for others to demand take down requests. It isn't going to take long before people say screw it and move their stuff to other git* sites.

As an aside, I think it is kind of ironic that GitHub is piggybacking the technology of a fairly contentious and surly person. Even "git" can be called offensive language:

git (ɡɪt)
n
1. a contemptible person, often a fool
2. a bastard

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/git

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding what happened - but that had nothing to do with the code of conduct, right?

Again, this has nothing to do with the code of conduct. Nowhere does it say people should start opening issues when maintainers are doing things they don't like.


Still nothing to do with the code of conduct. But regardless, GitHub is a private company and obviously they're going to take down some things that they find offensive. Some people will agree with their definition of offensive. Some people won't.

I want GitHub to take down horribly racist content. I don't want them to take down content with the word '******'. But its not surprising that GitHub and I have slightly different takes on what content should be allowed.

But this gets back to this idea that some people think the things they want to say should be supported by a private company. By all means go to other places if you don't like the line that GitHub has drawn.

This has nothing to do with the open code of conduct.

This has been the case for years before GitHub adopted the code. Welcome to the internet.

This is a good question but this has nothing to do with the open code of conduct, which has to do with how an open source project governs itself. GitHub has not mandated that the open source projects it hosts adopt the code.

Edit: Slow-ponied apparently.

lmfao how did I miss that this was a thing?

github really does seem to be run by clowns

I don't really care but if they take down one on request, they should take down every repo that uses that word in a non-badwordlist way. Completely ridiculous to single out repo because of a complaint.

isn't that exactly how modding on this site works?

I assume this is the actual part of the code that people are unhappy with?

https://github.com/todogroup/opencod...490c445cba2eba

It doesn't seem to be used by anyone outside of GitHub (Facebook/Yahoo/etc all seem to have stuck to an earlier version) so I'm not sure why anyone really cares. Realistically, open-source projects run by major companies are going to subject to company-level politics, so none of this really matters all that much except for PR. The original version adopted by major companies seems entirely reasonable.