A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy • Hacker News Board

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#171

Post by actionfromafar » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

simianparrot wrote: post #156

em-bee wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, the limits are economical. not cultural. you can't control the effect on culture by limiting immigration. economics is a different issue. the problem of course is that these issues get mixed, and people use economics as a reason when culture is their problem. and they are blaming their own economic situation on to much immigration when often that is simply not true. germany has 200.000 open positions in IT right…

And look at Germany now. I have friends and family there. Merkel’s utopian naïveté has certainly not benefited Germany at this point. It went way too far. I can’t believe people are like this. But it explains why Europe is more and more split on this topic: It’s two irreconcilable worldviews and one of them requires ignoring observed reality.

Are you making the case that Germany should not have united?

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#172

Post by em-bee » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 2:46 PM UTC

simianparrot wrote: post #165

em-bee wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are completely missing the point. what exactly should germany have done? let those people suffer? stick them in crowded refugee camps? you do not get to turn a generous humanitarian aid gesture into blaming germany for being dumb to let all these people in. this is not ignoring observed reality. observed reality is a consequence of people not being welcoming enough. of not being supporting and considerate of the…

I’m sorry, but not being welcoming _enough_!? Seeing the incredible, life altering strain the German model has put on the lower and middle class while they’ve bent over backwards to be more welcoming to strangers that share none of their values and consistently and purposefully alienate themselves from the general German population, I simply cannot agree we are observing the same reality. Full disclaimer: Some of my…

i have traveled and lived in countries all over the world. first in europe and western countries. already there i found there is a gradual change of friendliness the farther south i went. among western countries the US is the most friendly. despite their issues with racism, the people are welcoming to foreigners and immigrants.

then i visited asia, and i was shocked how much more friendly and welcoming people are there. if you haven't been there it is unimaginable. same goes for africa. seriously. on a global scale, europeans are the worst in being welcoming. so, yes. germans are not welcoming enough. they are principled however, and it is those principles that made them invite those refugees.

the state of germany is not deteriorating because of empathy, but because of the unwillingness of some people to adapt and adjust to the new reality. this lack of adaption leads to confrontation, and that confrontation is the cause of any deterioration. the culture is not destroyed by immigrants. it is destroyed by lack of tolerance and unreasonable expectations.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#173

Post by thevillagechief » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 3:24 PM UTC

simianparrot wrote: post #121

fredrikholm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to say that ~80% of Sweden and Norway don't vote for right wing populist parties like SD and Fremskrittspartiet, so "vast majority of us" might be a bit of a stretch.

That's a misrepresentation of statistics though. FRP is the second largest party this election, with 23,8% of votes, only second to AP who got 28%. But many people won't vote based on the immigration issues, because so far, other issues are more pressing. But my point was that I am absolutely sure the majority of Norwegians _want Norway to remain a country that retains its cultural history_ while not being exclusive…

Frankly, I might be sympathetic to this view, except for a few countries: The US, the UK, France, Belgium and maybe a few others. The US is a country of immigrant, so none of that cultural history nonsense holds, except maybe for the Native Americans. As for France and the UK, yeah no one told them to go colonize a bunch of countries around the world and impose their culture on them. They don't get to complain about retaining their cultural history. Belgium doesn't get to complain either after the atrocities they committed in Central Africa.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#174

Post by nightpool » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

picadi wrote: post #152

nightpool wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"These randos" are our friends and fellow contributors. Probably everybody in the Ruby community has worked with theme in one capacity or another. The article provides no reason why they should have had their contribution permissions revoked. Just because you think of Ruby as a "niche DSL" and the people maintaining its core infrastructure as "randos" doesn't mean the rest of us do.

just because someone is a nice community member doesn't mean they deserve rewrite-the-commit history admin level access to rubygems and bundler. they can be great committers even without the ego boost of knowing you hold the keys to get a ton of companies hacked without interference. also, if you step back, Ruby's problem is it consists of a fading community of millenials and Gen Xers who first came to Rails when it…

I'm not saying that they're just "a nice community member", I'm saying that they're the ones doing the work. They're not randos, they're trusted maintainers in the ecosystem with a proven track record. After the purge, rubygems and Bundler has only one active maintainer, one who's splitting his time between Rails, Ruby core, and many other open source projects. The bundler and gem-specific experts have been removed, and we've gone from a bus factor of 4-5 to a bus factor of 1. This is much, much more unacceptable then the theoretical risk of a trusted, active maintainer with 10+ years of community experience suddenly deciding to go rogue and rewrite history (has this ever happened in the history of a supply chain attack?)

Also, commit access to Github doesn't even say anything about access to deploying the actual package on rubygems. If security really was the goal, there were a million less invasive ways to make this change then revoking commit access from the active maintainers. Set up branch protections, require approvals, etc. There are a lot more tools in the toolbox other than "remove all of the maintainers".

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#175

Post by rezonant » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 8:05 PM UTC

scuff3d wrote: post #160

rezonant wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair it is an objectively crazy idea that dynamic typing is better than static typing (I'll start the war, it's fine).

Lol. I assumed a Ruby person would prefer dynamic typing and I didn't want to insult you. But yeah I agree. Given the opportunity I'm almost always going to go for a statically typed language.

> Lol. I assumed a Ruby person would prefer dynamic typing and I didn't want to insult you.

Nah it's the worst part about Ruby.

Also, naturally I ended up at zero points on that post lol. That wrecked someone's day.