> What's happening here is akin to the list of photos that every restaurant has to prevent people from bouncing bad checks.

No, that list is privately maintained and exclusive to the restaurant. It’s used for internal purposes. You’re talking about a public list used by others for external purposes.

> My own personal judgement.

Sorry, but I don’t know you or trust you. If you want a system people trust, it has to have more thought and transparency put into it than that.

> I have no idea why you're obsessing about a "russian timezone popup code."

The code introduced to the repo linked above creates a pop up if your in a Russian time zone about the war in Ukraine.

> I'm aware of about 40 of them. One of them is me.

Can you link to some?

> These lists are not complicated, and if it actually does go wrong, that person can just say "hey, i'm not that guy, can you fix it," and people will.

I have much less faith in people in positions of power than you do apparently. Especially when they’re arbitration rules are “their own personal judgement”.

> Unlike McCarthy, if we make mistakes and are told, we fix them.

How could someone like me verify this claim? I don’t have a link to the list or documentation of errors being corrected. Plus, it seems like these lists (yours at least) are run by individuals at their sole discretion? What McCarthy lacked was transparency and accountability to others. I haven’t heard how you’ve implemented either of those yet.

> Unlike McCarthy, we aren't ruining lives, ending careers, disbanding university participation, censoring, jailing, or murdering.

You don’t think ending up on a developer blacklist (forever!) would end a career or get them excluded from participating in other developer groups or uninvited from speaking at conferences?

And these lists in history always start with public shaming, and then progress over time from there. It doesn’t start out at maximum evil on day 1.

I’m not saying your list will 100% lead to evil, but “lists of undesirables” has been a precursor to some pretty bad things, so I hope you’re vigilant.

> I have a hard time understanding why you're reacting so severely to systems that are decades old and have never actually had any of the problems you describe.

I’ve been coding since ‘97, running tech companies since ‘08 and reading HN almost every week since ‘15 and I have never heard of such lists until this thread. OC said that the community should start one, and others agreed. No one linked to these lists and said they already existed. This is all very new to me.

I’m perhaps reacting strongly because I know of people who were accused by McCarthy and how destructive and unfair it was. I don’t want to see similar mistakes happening again in a community I’m familiar with and involved in.

This feels very reactionary, and lacking in many safeguards.

> If you're unable to tell the difference between a text file on github that lists people who have intentionally caused harm through package managers, and someone who manipulated world government to jail tens of thousands of people, some for decades?

It’s a text file that’s used to take some action though... Someone recommended pinning a visual indicator to the developer’s avatars (public shaming). Another wanted to identify the developer as someone who “conducted sabotage” with an alert.

And “intentionally caused harm” is where the problem is.

I’m sure you have good intentions. I just don’t like the “forever” stick approach, when the community was built around carrots (stars, forks, blog posts, ratings, instal stats, etc.).