Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#811

Post by b6 »

halostatue wrote: post #805
b6 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not talking or thinking about race ... does absolutely nothing to help. But in the better future world we're trying to create where there is much less discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or sex or other body attributes, isn't that exactly what we'd be doing, not talking or thinking about race because it just isn't important to us? Isn't not talking or thinking about race exactly what we should be doing, as muc…

No, not talking or thinking about race leads to erasure , which is another form of racism. (For race / racism , you can substitute gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) To try to make this clear by analogy, one of the reasons that #OscarsSoWhite is a meme is because if black children only ever see white people winning Oscars…they won’t believe that they themselves could win one (and there’s 95%…

> No, not talking or thinking about race leads to erasure, which is another form of racism.

Erasure seems to be jargon with no widely accepted meaning outside of social justice. For now I will stick to what I perceive to be the average of the various dictionary definitions of racism. By that meaning, not talking about or thinking about ethnicity is definitely not racism.

> if black children only ever see white people winning Oscars…they won’t believe that they themselves could win one ... Having visible role models is important.

I think you're saying it's important to have visible role models with the same ethnicity and/or sex, and/or whatever other bodily attribute we're focusing on at the moment. But why would anyone think that unless they already have racist and/or sexist beliefs?

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#812

Post by djur »

farkas wrote: post #508
djur wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stash (Bitbucket Server now) lacks a ton of features that Bitbucket (and Github) have. Like most Atlassian products, the base product has subpar functionality that you can theoretically expand with overpriced and/or low-quality plugins. Also, the degree to which Atlassian products integrate varies a lot. FishEye and Crucible integrate closely. Both of them integrate OK with Jira. Neither of them really integrate at a…

> Stash (Bitbucket Server now) lacks a ton of features that Bitbucket (and Github) have CEO of Atlassian here. Can you list the features you deem missing? I want to check them against our roadmap, as I don't believe we have many gaps, and a host of things better.

(I'm going to refer to Bitbucket Server as Stash here because that's what it's been called for most of the time I've used it and to keep it distinct from the public offering I'm comparing it to.)

Stash and Bitbucket have converged more than I expected, mostly because my recollection of Bitbucket was closer to Github than it actually is. But versus Bitbucket, Stash is missing Mercurial support, snippets, issues, wiki, project overview pages, and some social features. The lack of snippets was particularly vexing to me in my day-to-day work until we started using Slack. And Slack snippets are still a poor substitute for Gists.

Versus Github, the difference is more pronounced. Github has better search (and it isn't even that good), much nicer pull requests with superior integration to the issue tracking system, a much better API, better profile pages, static site generation, and in-place editing.

Yes, I know the answer to the lack of some of those features is "use our other products too", but Atlassian's competitors offer products with lightweight issue tracking and wikis. And while the features Stash provides are generally decently implemented and usable (the last few versions have been a big improvement), Confluence... is poorly suited to be used as a programmers' wiki, to use the gentlest language I can muster.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#813

Post by proc0 »

argonaut wrote: post #632
proc0 wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm saying it's a wrong categorization, and inaccurate. People inaccurately categorize themselves as well. It would be more accurate to not refer to those categories as race, but as sub-cultures, because then it becomes something that isn't inherent to someone's identity. People of mixed race, for example, half "black", half "white", will often choose to be "black", and identify as such, when in fact, their race…

The problem is that people do it. Telling people to stop talking about it is not going to solve the problem while the reality remains that many, many people out there judge others based on race and other "inaccurate categorizations."

That's true, in practice it's different and it could be hard. But still, companies that take into consideration this incorrect categorization are exacerbating the problem, because I'm sure there are alternatives to helping unfortunate people without considering their race.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#814

Post by 574747775 »

People who want to build large companies are just plain scum. They are the upper class version of the aspirational middle class. The aspirational middle class can't wait to leave their peers behind and start managing them like slaves. The aspirational upper class can't wait to build a giant slave farm.

Since the agricultural era, humans have been taken over by slave drivers. We should be going back to small, decentralised groups of people. Big business and big government have done nothing but destroy this planet.

I used to work for a large company and that experience solidified my disgust for these places. I can fully understand why people would want to resign now that the company wants to grow. I decided that I would rather go down fighting then ever work for a large company again.

Has anyone asked why GitHub needs to grow? If there are other products that could benefit from GitHub integration, provide an api and let some other small group of hackers build it. All GitHub is doing is laying the foundations for their slave farm.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#815

Post by b6 »

mikeash wrote: post #691
b6 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I can readily believe lots of our problems stem from subconscious biases. But what do you think about the questions I posed? Are we trying to create a world where we don't care about body attributes? If so, do you advocate doing the exact opposite behavior (deliberately paying attention to body attributes and factoring them into decisions) for some temporary period and then stopping?

Yes to both. We're already factoring these things into decisions whether we want to or not. I don't see anything weird about saying that we should change how we do so, as a step towards getting rid of it altogether. I think that as long as we have large discrepancies in how many people with or without a particular attribute are in a particular profession, we'll have subconscious biases in evaluating who's good at tha…

I don't want to be unfair to you or your argument, but I can't understand what you're saying any other way than that we should build racism and sexism into our policies and processes as a step toward eliminating racism and sexism.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#816

Post by proc0 »

lerpa wrote: post #677
proc0 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. But I don't know what you're getting at. As a programmer, I just care that you write good code. In fact, I might as well be interacting with your mind across the internet, and don't even have to look at you in the face, and we will be collaborating just fine. Why does it matter for someone who deals with 0's and 1's what the color of the skin of your coworker is? Once again, if you're a programmer and you're sw…

It matters to them because people that push those PC nonsense are racists following the agenda as other people tell them to do. For them their ideology comes first, and professionalism is only worth it when it can be applied to meet their political goals. Never had problems working with people from all around the world, but if there is a bunch I would never consciously hire it is SJ activists.

Then we should hunt down this racist people, regardless of what their race is. It doesn't matter that the people doing this are white or whatever, what matters is that they're acting that way.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#817

Post by Karunamon »

13thLetter wrote: post #580
reitanqild wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't bookmarked those threads but I'm certain I saw a lot of comments here saying things along the lines of "the right to free speak only protects you against the government", strongly implying that what happened to him was fair game because it wasn't the government who staged it.

I don't recall hearing that much in the context of Eich, but it certainly is a common go-to argument more recently among those who want to see people punished for having incorrect political views. It came up a lot when Strangeloop kicked out Curtis Yarvin, for example.

I said it back then and I'll say it here: There's a difference between "having a political view" (thinking that non-heterosexual marriages are icky) and taking positive action to prevent others from having equal rights (donating money to a lobbying/social engineering group)

One is a thought, the other is an action.

Punishing people for unknowable bad thoughts is an Orwellian nightmare. Punishing people for visible bad actions is how society moves forward.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#818

Post by douche »

574747775 wrote: post #814

People who want to build large companies are just plain scum. They are the upper class version of the aspirational middle class. The aspirational middle class can't wait to leave their peers behind and start managing them like slaves. The aspirational upper class can't wait to build a giant slave farm. Since the agricultural era, humans have been taken over by slave drivers. We should be going back to small, decentra…

You'll get hammered, I'm sure for the rest of it, but this is a good question:

> Has anyone asked why GitHub needs to grow?

They are a making a pretty decent profit now. They could keep the lights on and keep doing what they are doing for the foreseeable future, make incremental improvements and scale out servers to pick up additional load without shaking things up drastically and taking in loads of VC money. That's not the sexy, billion dollar unicorn move, but it is a safe, sustainable bet.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#819

Post by proc0 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #529
arama471 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misinterpret proc0's comment: they are saying there is no excuse to treat Neil deGrasse Tyson as a shoplifter because of his race, that there is no excuse to ever decide that all people of a certain race or any category are all something or share something (in their comment "assholes" in yours "shoplifting"). Basically racism (using this definition: [1]) is never OK, regardless to which race and with which attrib…

> they are saying there is no excuse to treat Neil deGrasse Tyson as a shoplifter because of his race If that's really what he's saying, then that's even dumber. You can change how you think. You can help to change the thinking of the people you come in contact with. You can't change anyone you've never met, particularly the people who treated Tyson as a shoplifter. I'd love it if racism were to just disappear too. B…

I acknowledge it seems I'm dismissing and even excusing people who are racists. This is definitely not the case.

Let's pretend there are no races for a second. What would racist people do? They would probably still hate on "others". They would probably not have the vocabulary or the knowledge to group people, but they would still hate "others". The fact that racist hate other races is just incidental to the fact that we categorize people, and then they use that as a tool / avenue for their hatred. So why would we promote their tool for hatred? We don't categorize people based on eye color, so why skin color?

The idea is not to lose identity and pretend we're all the same, but rather to avoid explaining things with race. When someone behaves a certain way, or when someone can't get a job, or got the job, the explanation should not include race, because it's just not needed, it's inaccurate, and it promotes the semantic tools for racist to leverage and keep hating.

I'm definitely open to why this is wrong, so corrections are more than welcome.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#820

Post by 574747775 »

douche wrote: post #818
574747775 wrote: post #814

People who want to build large companies are just plain scum. They are the upper class version of the aspirational middle class. The aspirational middle class can't wait to leave their peers behind and start managing them like slaves. The aspirational upper class can't wait to build a giant slave farm. Since the agricultural era, humans have been taken over by slave drivers. We should be going back to small, decentra…

You'll get hammered, I'm sure for the rest of it, but this is a good question: > Has anyone asked why GitHub needs to grow? They are a making a pretty decent profit now. They could keep the lights on and keep doing what they are doing for the foreseeable future, make incremental improvements and scale out servers to pick up additional load without shaking things up drastically and taking in loads of VC money. That's…

None of these big companies ever do anything useful after their initial product. They just start buying small companies and sucking them into the big shitty company.
Post reply on HN