I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action • Hacker News Board

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#241

Post by Vinnl » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

monetus wrote: post #236

Vinnl wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A salary is something you trade for your work, i.e. it's for you to spend as you see fit. This budget would be for the employer to spend, but for the employee to determine how it would be best spent to benefit the employer. It's not a job perk, and not to the benefit of the employee.

I very much enjoy the way you speak about this. Workers determining resource allocation is classical socialism, so the politics would derail the idea in many places. If no one ever points that out though, and you focus on a voucher system rather than ownership, it is actually capitalist but still trying to get at the gains of distributed leadership.

Well... Maybe, if you squint at it. But the donation budget would be orders of magnitude smaller than your salary, let alone the company balance, so in my view it would require some creative reasoning to see that as full-on socialism.

(But then I live in a country where unions are normal, so I can't speak to how it would be perceived elsewhere.)

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#242

Post by bennofs » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 9:44 AM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #113

> I Love MDN hinges on the expectation on the part of web developers that this sort of information ought to come for free — the expectation we’re entitled to this sort of free ride. I think people should be entitled to a free ride. Important infrastructure can, paradoxically, be both free and expensive. We've committed, for instance, to spending a whole lot of money on maintaining all of our roads, but access to the…

Does it need to be the public that funds this iniative? I am not against that in principle, but such public funding would probably have to have some wider scope in order to benefit members of our society which are not planning to be working in web dev as well.

Why can't there be some sort of industry association that pays for shared goods that everyone in the industry benefits from? Are companies just unable to see the benefits gained from this?

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#243

Post by cultus » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #213

cultus wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a gay technical professional, and I see homophobic or otherwise dehumanizing language tolerated, with moderation efforts instead against those calling out bigoted comments. I can tell you this makes me feel unwelcome, and makes me disappointed in our industry in general. Dog whistles are often very obvious, as is the case here. Not allowing any common-sense deviation from "always presume good faith" is absolutel…

Common sense is always welcome. Note the word 'plausible' in that guideline—it extends over the whole. In this particular case it looks like we see common sense as pointing in opposite directions, but such differences are inevitable any time that interpretation and judgment calls are involved, which is certainly true of moderation. Beyond that, it's hard to answer general statements about HN moderation when they don'…

"Callout culture" is a term that has originated as a reaction to changing society norms around bigotry. Please critically examine your biases on whether you think combating bigotry or shielding people from social consequences of their actions is more important to you. It is not a new phenomenon whatsoever. People have always been cancelled, such as the Dixie Chicks several years ago after their opposition to the Iraq War.

"Callout culture" has only become a problem now that it is hurting the powerful. To create an inclusive community, you have to actively root out bigotry. Most bigotry is rarely explicit, but couched behind terms like "degenerates."

When you allow bigotry to fester, you are making the decision to exclude people like me and include bigots. You will have to make uncomfortable decisions. There's no way around it. The assumption that you can largely ignore barely-concealed bigotry and also be welcoming to minorities and LGBT folks is false, but widespread among liberals in the tech industry. A recurring theme is that high-status straight males are making most of the decisions, and even with the best intentions, they fail horribly at inclusion because they don't listen to folks not like themselves.

It's 2020, and there is ample evidence both around us and in the academic literature about the omnipresence of racism especially in our society. Does HN and Y Combinator actually want to put in the hard work to create an inclusive environment? So far, the answer is a clear no.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#244

Post by cannedslime » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

potatoz2 wrote: post #222

Macha wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WHATWG? The group of browser vendors that agree on web standards. I think the onus is on the person proposing a web technology to document it.

The spec already documents what ought to happen, what you need is documentation about what actually happens (say, on IE11).

I get your point...

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#245

Post by dang » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #172

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely clear what the commenter meant, since the whole controversy with Brendan Eich was about gay rights issues. It's not a stretch in any way to understand that "degenerate" meant "homosexual" or otherwise "immoral." Downplaying that interpretation really stretches "good faith interpretation" into the realm of "denial." Perhaps the commenter does not have English as their first language, in which case I'd…

(edit/p.s. I agree completely with your last sentence, except that the Eich flamewar should just be retired.) It's not "absolutely clear what the commenter meant", and that is the problem. Internet users are a thousand times too quick to assume they know "absolutely" what "the commenter meant" and then react reflexively to it. This is how the internet becomes optimized for outrage. That's why we have that guideline,…

The better way is to react reflectively, not reflexively. That happens in two stages. First, wait for your initial agitation to subside. (By 'you' I mean all of us, because this is universal.) That's necessary, because the reflexes that drive us to argue in mechanical ways are always the fastest to arise. If you observe yourself—that is, if you direct a portion of your attention to what's going on inside you as you react to someone's comment, rather than focusing exclusively on the comment and how bad/wrong it is—you'll notice this phenomenon easily. It is an activating, agitating feeling that drives you to react immediately. This is a threat response, and all it can ever do is pattern-match, i.e. repeat past responses to past threats. Think of it as responding from cache. There isn't time to compute anything new. For that, you need the slower, reflective circuits, and you gain access to those by waiting a little.

The second stage is to use your reflective capacity—which is slower and calmer—to look at the comment from multiple angles and ask yourself things that there wasn't time for before: what other interpretations might there be? am I sure that what I feel I'm seeing is actually here? do I really need to react this way / post like this? what effect is my post going to have on the thread [1]? is there a different way to relate to this person? who do I really want to be, in this context? what community do I really want to be part of?

The reason this is better is not because it produces any particular content. People sometimes misunderstand that and assume that we're telling everyone to always be civil, constrained, etc.—but that's not it. Rather, it's because it's the only way to make discussions not be predictable. If we're all reacting with cached threat-responses, the only thing we can do is fight the same battles we've all been fighting for a long time. Since HN is a site for curiosity and curiosity withers under repetition [2], finding ways to escape the predictable [3] and make new moves in the dance is a must.

Past thoughts here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...