skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EDIT: For comparison:

* "Common Mistakes of New Engineering Managers" (5hrs ago, 110 points, 30 comments) -> rank 2

* this post (2hrs ago, 1000 points, 500 comments) -> rank 20

Why is this post being penalized? Too many black folks commenting and up voting? (/s)

-----

Amazingly well written. I'm going to say some things. You'd guess wrongly if you infer that I'm bitter - since I'm personally very lucky. Having been born in a not so privileged family (more common than not in the world), by the luck of the draw I am today very privileged because I work in tech (in itself not that common).

The actual problem that is at the core of all of this is - incredible disconnectedness from the plight of even regular people by the world's tech bubbles. On average, people of color have it (!!!) even worse (!!!), but it seems that these SV/NY/LDN/etc. tech bros are completely devoid of any conception of how difficult any average Joe has it.

To illustrate disconnectedness: there was an interview with a YC partner a few years back that went like this:

INTERVIEWER: "What would you advise to the young folks interested in startups?"

YC-PARTNER: "I would tell them to be ambitious, try their best, work hard and if it doesn't succeed - it doesn't succeed. You should take a vacation and try again." (the emphasis and the exact phrasing of the vacuous advice are mine)

How the fuck does one TAKE A VACATION after your startup fails?!

It goes without saying that the YC partner and their brother received tech stocks from their grandparents for one of their teen-birthdays.

Here's a litmus test to know whether you're likely disconnected: As a techie/doctor/engineer did you become by far the highest paid person in your wider family by your mid 20s? If the answer is "NO", then you would be disconnected by default - unless you consciously invested effort to educate yourself.
> Have you never seen or heard of volunteers?

Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons.

> There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?

You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is. If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.

Guys please stop deciding you want to be upset about a comment and then trying to backsolve your rationale.
I work in the games industry, and as a small piece of anecdotal evidence, some of the best programmers I've ever worked with never completed a degree, and some never even started one.

There is a lot of talented people out there, willing and able to work hard. Limiting your search to university graduates is really shortsighted.
As someone from India who was frequently forced to learn and apply meditation by overzealous parents in my childhood, reading this article and the explanations/anecdotes here was positively shocking.

I never really got the hang of meditating, despite receiving training from branches of several international training conglomerates (ISCKON, Art of Living, SRF). But meditation as a practice, in the society I grew in, was hailed as the Godsend ultimate technique of taming your minds, something that will definitely and positively stimulate your brain and make you healthier and more active. I didn't (and don't) understand this stuff so I simply dismissed it as a harmless placebo and went on with it.

But before this I had never even thought of it being potentially harmful, and there were absolutely no warnings circulated about this anywhere - neither by the conglomerates and nor by the indie self-styled "gurus" scattered across India and the world. The fact that this is the first time I'm encountering this notion is quite surprising.
I've never seen or heard anyone major use GraalVM in production. I only hear Oracle and a small bunch of other folks hyping it. Tech also lives on hype and a long time until a tech reaches a critical mass is generally a band indicator (i.e. if something doesn't reach the mainstream in less than N years, it never will).

There are some exceptions (Ruby took off after Rails was launched, Python was adopted by Linux distributions and it also had some decent web frameworks such as Django), but there's a reason we call exceptions exceptions. It's because they're exceptional, they're not the norm. Plus in the internet age (I don't count anything pre-2000 as internet age, since dial-up wasn't something most people wanted to live through) it's a lot more likely for something with a great future to be adopted quickly.
We've had a few months to turn off an option in Github to change this behavior. I believe there was even an email that went out and a thread on HN concerning this change. Any conversation at this point is just whinging to the void to farm engagement.
No, he's complaining that they didn't ask him specifically. It really easy to find black developers who were consulted and agree with the change.

Here we go (this took under 5 seconds for me to Google)

https://dev.to/afrodevgirl/replacing-master-with-main-in-git...

Now there's duelling anecdata and the OP provides no suggestions on how to reconcile them.
As far as I am aware, no decision has been made to change the default. They just want it to be configurable and not have people make assumptions.

Has this changed?
The argument of the author is that he feels like tech is ONLY doing the name changes and is congratulating themselves about being inclusive afterwards.

I agree with this observation. For reasons that the author has articulated far better than I would in this comment, so please read the whole thing.
Github does business with ICE and CBP.

What does ICE and CBP do? Perhaps you've seen CBP at a port of entry when you enter the US. But that's only part of what they have been doing.

Visit this link, and skip to 01:23:03 to hear Elora Mukherjee's testimony of what CBP has really been doing in their detention facilities.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?462505-1/house-hearing-migrant... (video)

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20190712/109772/HHRG... (transcript)

Maybe you heard some of this on TV in 2019. But what was communicated then was a very watered down version of what actually happened.

You could say those children are detainees, but even detainees have dignity. Some of those detainees were newborns. What does a newborn know about immigration? laws? countries? You have to be a real idiot or a racist to take it against them.

And meanwhile, Github gladly offered their services to help CBP and ICE to operate.
The keepalive thing is a bit of a problem; we've been using the C# API in a client/server way, between processes on the same system written in different languages, and finding out if the other end of the connection has fallen over is surprisingly hard.
Germany is a really bad example though. The German way is to pretend racism just doesn't exist - today is the aniversary of a racist, arson attack that happened in 1994 killing 7 people (one of them pregnant) where the official line is still "the guy was just crazy what can you do ?!".

If you want to transplant the "master"-example, look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts as well as a weird insistance that offensively named streets, underground-stations and (for some reason) pharmacies "must not need to be renamed, why would you even be offended".

Germany is not the example to go with concerning offensive language.
And now I am imagining some video where they go down into sulfur mine and tell one of the miners "We bring great news for you! Github changed the default name of master code branches to something else! Gitlab too! It was kind of a little bit annoying a little but they're doing it anyway!"
Isn't this the exact sentiment that is causing the issues in the first place?
Dropping off social media.
We can still vote, so they still need us. With the time freed up by AI we can become more informed voters.
For the lazy, here [1,2] are some wiktionary links. Assuming these are correct, wow, this makes the whole main vs master thing seem even more silly.

> SLAVE: From Middle English, from Old French sclave, from Medieval Latin sclāvus (“slave”), from Late Latin Sclāvus (“Slav”), because Slavs were often forced into slavery in the Middle Ages.[1][2][3][4][5] The Latin word is from Byzantine Greek Σκλάβος (Sklábos), see that entry and Slav for more.

> ROBOT: Borrowed from Czech robot, from robota (“drudgery, servitude”). Coined in the 1921 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek after having been suggested to him by his brother Josef, and taken into English without change.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slave#Etymology
[2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/robot#Etymology
For $86 at purchase you get free shipping for warranty issues (Canada, may be more for Aus)
When you think about masters/slaves, do you think about black people only? If so, why?

There are countless examples in the history of the world about slaves, including different ethnics, in every continent. May they have a word on this issue too?
I know the topic is explosive, but I see a pattern here that is being repeated over and over again: people thinking they know for better what is good for some minority, and then making a big fuss about it. At no point does anyone think to ask people in the said minority if they think this is actually a good idea and what they want.

Another similar(?) example. In my country, there is a growing immigrant Muslim minority. Recently, there was an extremely rare case of the anti-immigration right wing party and the liberal green party rallying behind a unified cause: criminalizing male circumcision. The anti-immigration folk will of course get on any bandwagon that marginalizes the immigrant minorities.

But I also talked to some of the liberals who supported the initiative. They support it because they view circumcision as torture, mutilation and a violation of the child's rights. One even described circumcised males are "handicapped". I got the impression that many of these supposedly "liberal" people have never actually discussed circumcision with a person who is circumcised. Nevertheless, they seem eager to ban the entire practice and further marginalize an entire section of the population.
> If we can do both, why do we never do both?

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/perhaps-we-cannot-do-bo...
This is about 10% of the total energy usage of bitcoin. So replacing the energy destroyed by bitcoin would cost 40-50 billion.

It would be a very low-hanging, high-payoff way to improve emissions if bitcoin was just banned.
Does master not also designate a person that has achieved mastery in a given craft or art, like a "Kung Fu master"? Within git I think the term is used in the meaning of a "master copy" in the sense of a reference. I also think this change is pointless, and it will break so so many things.
Let's say you had a database based application and a feature to remove a subset of records. You wouldn't call that feature any variant of "ethnic clensing", "genocide" or "Holocaust", no matter how descriptive those terms were for your specific function.

Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description.

There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"
It's gigawatt-hours, and it's electrical.
https://ugly.video - browser based video conferencing using WebRTC

Main idea is to minimize the clicks for my three most common tasks: creating meetings, copying meeting link, and sharing memes.
The current problem surrounding using AI/ML in this area is that it can't distinguish between Jean Pierre and John Paul, Luc and Luke and authorities rely on it with no nuance or discernment.

You worry about artificial neutrality creeping in to the algorithms, but the algorithms already reflect human bias. We can't even reliably tell where someone is from yet we expect our AI to do it close to flawlessly.

I'm from East Asia and I think I can distinguish an East Asian's country of origin maybe 70% of the time. But 70% is nowhere near good enough if a person's life literally depends on the decision. And I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find someone even in around 90% accuracy. Migration and shared culture, among other things, make this difficult.
Agreed. For anyone's reference, here's what the acronym HBCU means:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historically_black_colleges_an...
How Can I Work on Interesting Problems and get Paid Well?[mid life crisis]
Hi all,

Having a 36 year old mid-life crisis at the moment. I've done well in my career, currently a partner at a mid-sized technology consulting firm; started as a Java dev and progressed through the ranks.

I've completely lost my passion for technology. I split my time between sales, architecture, and open source dev. I feel like I should be using my technology skills to help with global warming or something but I'm not... I'm using my talents to extort millions of dollars out of companies that need software.

How can I do something more meaningful and still get paid well?
So, let's suppose you have a really excellent forged letter of authorization saying you are authorized to read my mail. Totally convincing, anyone who sees it will have no doubt it's real.

What do you suppose you can do to give that effect?

In the US SMS case LOAs work because it's in the interests of the people who can make it happen to make it happen. The LOA is just to cover their backsides, "Why did you redirect this Michigan man's SMS messages and thereby enable his life savings to be stolen?" "Oh we had this Letter of Authorization, so we honestly believed it's what he wanted". They don't believe that, but their lawyers are confident that it's enough excuse that, at least until after somebody powerful is inconvenienced, it will hold up.

But nobody benefits from helping you give effect to your (convincing but bogus) LOA for my email. My ISP doesn't want anything to do with this work, if you're lucky they'll tell you that it's none of their business - more likely it just goes in the round file and you never hear back from them.

There is no central clearing house for email that you can give a few bucks to for my emails so long as you have an LOA to keep them on the right side of the law. Instead for email everybody involved is getting paid by me, not by you, so they've got no reason to help you at all.
I think this is kindof an important question. "If it's so insignificant, why do you care?".

I don't think it's so hard to understand why some people might be irritated, though. The social attitude that motivates the change to switch away from the term 'master' is not widely held outside of a subset of Americans who are apparently vastly over represented in making these kinds of decisions. It's a bit grating to be saying "consider how others feel" while ignoring how most people feel about it, and making the change made you want anyway.

It's a zeitgeist which results in things like someone complaining that VSCode including a candy cane icon is more offensive than the swastika, and the VSCode repository acceeding this complaint. - I feel if that's where you end up from wanting everyone to feel welcome and included, that you've gotten lost along the way.
Now I know this post is going to be jumped on by a whole bunch of tech bro going "I TOLD YOU, ITS POINTLESS TO CHANGE THE NAME" and yes, yes it is, for the reasons described so clearly by OP.

However what the tech bros then get upset by is increasing participation in IT in general. muttering things like "lowering standards" and "they'll get promotion before me". No darlings, they are doing a better job, because they are not snowflakes who throw their toys out of the pram for being asked to actually document their shit, or not replace good code with an entirely new language because they were bored.

I work for a FAANG in london, and what pisses me off is that despite having >4,000 staff in london alone, we only had 10, yes fucking 10 apprentices in 2019.

For those that don't know, its essentially a free pipeline of eager, cheap and clever teenagers. You get them for 3 days a week at below minimum wage, and they spend two days a week getting academic education. Whats more, because they are local to central london they are actually representative of the local demographics.

And they have the brass bollocks to complain about how difficult it is to recruit.

We had a juneteenth thing, where lots of our leadership took that as a sign to get a new headshot done so they could put the tiniest ring of text saying how they will work tirelessly to increase D&I.

almost a year later, and with a huge glut of 18-25s out of work, have we increased the apprentice count? nope.

fucking sort it out, and no, a butterfly rule is not going to fix it.
The thing is, type hints are optional. The vast majority of existing projects don't use them. Third party dependencies don't use them.

Python is a toddler in terms of typing system support. Probably a 2 year old.
The entertainment value of watching whining snowflake techbros get absolutely foaming mad about something they claim doesn’t matter at all makes the tiny amount of work I had to do to support this in my build system completely worthwhile.
I think that measures like renaming stuff creates a bunch of problems that ultimately make things harder than they already are.

Once people understand that there is a changing nomenclature that has to be used they will completely shut up about a topic in fear of repercussions from a hate mob. This in turn will eventually lead to the unconscious but very real behavior of distancing from minority groups. It worsens things. People need to understand that by forcing language change they will further divide people.

Geroge Floyd isn't dead because Linus called the git branch master. He is dead because of police misconduct. And GitHub won't be able to change that, the government needs to send police officers to academy for longer and train them right. They also need to introduce an environment in which this behavior is not tolerated and officers will lose their jobs if they behave this way.
> This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time

No, but it certainly makes you care less. Human attention is not linear.
This got me thinking about the Unix command "kill". As a non-American I would prefer a less violent name.
Note how master is not even the main term used to describe people who had slaves. The term typically used is owner, as in "so and so was a slaveowner."

A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word "owner" for being offensive.
Because it's utterly useless, stupid, out of context. Why Git, github, Azure DevOps, everyone have to change that and possibly broke backward compatibility with scripts, pipelines or who know what(yes, I can branch master from main, but why I have to?)? Why?
Should we completely stop to use master word altogether?
You don't really need a CoC to do that.
Sigh, I wonder when smart people did become so unbelievable stupid?
Who on the right is pushing this stuff?
I’m sure it has. Containerd will get Windows support soon. So we will have a Full Open Source Container Engine on Windows. (Remember Docker Desktop is closed source).
> I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".

Surprisingly, human minds do seem to work that way. After doing a "good" deed, we're liable to believe that we've done our part, and owe society no further action. Even if our good deed didn't actually change anything.

This effect is often called "moral licensing".
There are no solutions for suspensions from app stores. The solution is to not use app stores -- build better webapps, use the open web.

We could be living in a world where no open web ever existed, where everything would be filtered through app stores and closed environments like Facebook (AOL).

We need to preserve the open web, it is our most precious ressource.
I’m curious how Eulerian Video Magnification would fare as a DeepFake signal.
https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/
The World’s Three Biggest Coal Users Get Ready to Burn Even More
It does not origin from "master copy" or "Kung Fu master".

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/474419/does-the-...
> Is a name change really that difficult for everyone?

It's just a complete misunderstanding of the topic. Changing "master" branches simply confuses signified and signifier, and the fact that multiple signified can have the same signifier (like the signifier stool and the signified faeces and a thing to sit on. Removing the word doesn't remove the concept.

If these companies actually wanted to work for diversity, they could just do exactly that: employ more people from other backgrounds, or have extra internships for early orientiation in high school, or fund computer labs schools in poor neighbourhoods and so on.

Edit: As an illustration of how this doesn't affect the underlying meaning: In Germany there's a similar discourse going on, and the result is that the German radical right also started to talk about migrants instead of aliens or foreigners. But they didn't change their attitudes at all! They just adapted to the new word and kept their old concept.
Well 'main' is a more intuitive & UX friendly name than 'master' which new devs are going to intuitively relate to as it's commonly used to refer to the 'main thing', e.g. main road, main course, etc. I can't recall the last time I used 'Master' as a synonym to 'main' outside of technology (as a Redis Client author I still deal with Master nomenclature a bit). Can only think of 'Masters degree' but that has to do with Mastery knowledge rather than 'Master copy'. The only other usages of 'Master' I can think of (from TV & Films) is basically what they're trying to move away from.

As a library author I often deprecate & rename new APIs when I can think of (or have been proposed) a more appropriate and a descriptive name to replace a misleading name. I put a lot of weight into the name of symbols as it basically has the largest bearing in understanding its functionality & purpose. This is effectively what GitHub is doing, deprecating 'master' in favor of 'main' for new repos, which I don't see a problem with as it's looking pretty clear that all new technology is moving away from master/slave terminology - I don't see why Software needs to be forced to use their old legacy names forever if they're able to deprecate it and move to new more appropriate naming without immediate breaking changes.

This change hasn't broken any of my 100+ existing repos, GitHub is only changing the default branch to 'main' for new repos & have implemented a bunch of work behind the scenes to reduce the friction for orgs & users who also wish to rename their existing mater branches [1]. I don't understand the hate this effort to more modern & inclusive naming is inciting, if you want to criticize GitHub for their lack of action in other areas, criticize that instead.

[1] https://github.com/github/renaming#renaming-existing-branche...
Why would you be ashamed because of your skin color?
Perfect competitor of Clubhouse.
to be heard you do need to speak. Write your representatives in Congress your views on things they are or aren’t doing. Write a blog or vlog.

Oftentimes simply being talking in public gains otherwise obscure or even unhelpful views traction simply by being available.
I don't know about the average software, but my primary tools, Unity 3D and Blender are both significantly more productive than what I was using in 2001. (Was in the same industry).

I think a lot of software is just "done" and we see a lot of churn for no real reason. Office software like email, word, and excel are just moving buttons around at this point.
Lol, as another black guy, even before opening the thread I knew I'd find one of these grovelling comments from a house-type here.

I, at least, completely support GitHub's actions.

Btw, we're not "walking away from the Left", as is indicated in the recent election results. You might be confusing your own people for Hispanics.