skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you serious?

Maintaining things is hard. Even for relatively simple stuff, things fall over all the time and suddenly your job is "make sure your mail server is up" instead of "accomplish your core business task". I don't have that sort of free time anymore.
They have every right to do it, but that doesn't make it productive. Is github really going to anoint itself word-police and comb through the source code of every project they host looking for words they [currently] consider potty-mouthed? Is that really where we have ended up? Do they have nothing better to do?

What if the word "fail" offended somebody at github? Should they take down projects that have that variable name in their source? (Not asking whether they have the right to do it--asking whether they SHOULD do it)

EDIT:

A couple more things to point out:

1. Think of yourself as an investor who has put money into GitHub. Someone drawing a salary using your money is sending out a message telling a developer not to use a potty-mouth word on the Internet. Do you feel they are putting your investment to the best possible use?

2. As a developer, I now have a new attribute to use to compare GitHub with competitors. I wonder if I have potty-mouth words in my source code. Maybe BitBucket wouldn't put my project in jeopardy because of it...

3. GitHub's own "remove sensitive data" link (referenced in the takedown E-mail) suggests their users use a tool called "BFG Repo-Cleaner". I'm sure they don't think BFG stands for Big Friendly Gun....
There's nothing wrong with it. I find the term offensive as well.

But it's worth noting because decisions like this are somewhat arbitrary, and we invest in this platform (the visibility/monoculture of github and your "stars" are what make it sticky). So what happens when your repo doesn't conform to their interpretation of social norms?

It's a relatively obscure repo (and I'm sure we all have a few of those ;)), that adds to the whole "arbitrary" narrative.

Another reason it's worth noting: it runs against what Github has made headlines for in the past couple of years: fighting pressures to censor content. What happens if/when leadership changes at the company (it already has over its lifetime): will the policy won't be relaxed even further? Thought exercises like this help us appreciate how invested we are in the monoculture that is Github
Plan 9's compiler does not have a very sophisticated optimizer (which is part of why it's so fast), so I suspect that they simply didn't implement anything which would have made volatile necessary.
I suppose that edges out the Airline Industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HKN-FWNq0&feature=youtu.be...
Currently down so google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:w7iPIv2...
"Nazi" is an ideology, a political belief. A ship (or a cup, a plate, a monkey wrench, etc.) doesn't hold a political belief. It is simply a ship.

It is a very nice ship, and serves a useful purpose. Not using the ship because it was built by the Nazi's is ridiculous. We would have to get rid of a lot of stuff in our lives, including the Bush family [1].

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworld...
If someone was interested in moving their content off of GitHub, how would they go about doing so? Doesn't popcorn time use something else? Asking for a friend, of course... :3

Edit: Looks like they're running GitLab Community Edition https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/
This is pretty much how I view Docker as well. Except it's not really the entire operating system. A VM image is the ultimate static linking.
They didn't just threaten to shut it down, according to their email (https://imgur.com/QC51FZz) they did disable it at the same time they disabled the parent repository a few days ago. (https://archive.is/XiTS9)
Are you really trying to make this about "a very significant chunk of your independence and freedom"? Yes, when you host with people who have standards of conduct and civility, you have to respect those standards. Get over it, or host derogatory content on your own dime.
Pi explained visually
In the future, if they decide not to take down some other repository, there will be an implication that they find the content less offensive than this.
Because "retard" may not be the last time, but the first. A precedence would be set that a repository may be shut down due to an arbitrary(not the word I'd use here, but for the sake of argument) reason.
wow, you have to be kidding. Nice troll, almost had me.
Related essay from PG: http://www.paulgraham.com/todo.html . Quote from said essay:

> So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands:
Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.
But if you're making a game, and create your own chat service instead, you end up as Slack.
>It's just such a superficial thing, almost arbitrarily deciding which words are 'sensitive' and which ones aren't

This cannot be further from the truth. Words that are deemed offensive are deemed so because of the attitude and the meaning behind using these words

The reason white people get yelled at for using n (don't know if I can post it on HN) is because it represents hundreds of years of oppression by white people that has basically continued. People who were "retarded" used to be thrown into asylums or abandoned as small children because they were just a pain to deal with

The thing about words is that they have context and actual loaded meanings, and trying to ignore that is to ignore how language works
Not intentional at all - most sign ups do this.

Most are getting the email but I am getting hammered.

Shoot me an email? wesbos@gmail.com
The term was being used in the same context as "dummies" is in the "for dummies" books. Do you consider dummies an offensive term? If not, why not?
Similar to hibikir's reply, what we do is attach a volume container to all app containers and logs are written to that. The run elk stack to view parse logs. For process monitoring we run cAdvisor on each host to view the resource usage of each container. Since your apps are containerized it easy to monitor them for resource usage, hook it to nagios etc. We have built custom gui to do all this.
So then zapt02 misspoke.
My brother is a retard. Your serve
This seems like just a bunch of excuses to keep breaking the web.
A honest question, why are most people here okay with this, but they’re not okay with for example Facebook censoring certain content?
For people who don't see what's wrong here. The issue is not about whether the word 'retard' is or is not offensive to anyone. You need to consider that GitHub currently hosts a large percentage of the web's open source repositories. This is censorship plain and simple, something that IMO has no place in open source. The issue is that there are plenty of things some people might find offensive on GitHub but you dont see them threatening everyone with takedown notices. It is the selective censorship of certain reasonable uses of free speech that is concerning here. Retarded is off limits, but cursing is okay (maybe?). Who decides what is and is not appropriate?
Or, decidedly even more offensive: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=nigger&type=Code&...
The Game of Life: a beginner's guide (2014)
might I add men and women are not equal in other capacities as well .. despite popular narrative and political correctness..
Probably that someone complained
Good Lord, I have heard so many different takes on 'what makes something offensive.' My favorite was a teenager telling me only one person has to find something offensive before we have to all consider it as such and stop saying it.

The fact that words "have context and actual loaded meanings" is besides the point. I am saying that these things come into fashion and then pass away.

I'm sure you know it was only in the past 70 years that 'gay' took on its new meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay#Shift_to_homosexual

Stop trying to lock words in place and ban them. Let people use them or avoid them as they will, and their meanings will shift, as they always have.
Valid points but having an email is much better to stay in touch in the future. If you don't like that - use mailinator- totally understandable

I'll publish the playlist in a week but for now I'm doing it only on the site.
Microsoft’s new small print – how your personal data is abused
The noun "retard" is not considered profane. I don't think it would have to be bleeped over in broadcast television.

It's also a verb which means to slow down.

For example, it is necessary to retard the ignition timing of a gasoline engine, and more so at higher RPM, to prevent detonation.
To be fair to Standard Treasury, the pitch ("we're building a new kind of bank") is an unusual one for traditional technology investors, so product validation, traction, etc. are probably going to be less important to the investors who are interested in evaluating this further.

But even so, the detail is quite lacking and there's not a lot that instills confidence that this company has what it takes break into a highly-regulated market dominated by institutions with billions of dollars in capital and more and better technology resources than the founders would like to believe. Building a viable new bank is not a $10 million proposition, so as an investor my first question would be: how much are you going to need to raise in the next several years for this to even have a shot?
github is within their rights to do this but it's horrendous that they are doing it. The corpus of offensive speech (or code in this case) is getting out of hand. The code is clearly humor. Not everyone appreciates the same humor but humor is _meant_ to be offensive. So, the policy will proceed to be no humor in code that isn't bland. But, then, all of silicon valley is moving toward this. A github founder got into a lot of trouble for "objectionable" humor. I'm certain I'll get lots of downvotes for this. But remember the old tale that "first they came for the Christians and I didn't complain because I wasn't a Christian..."
The Post-Mac Interface
Yeah, the level of math required is a concern career-wise.
This obsession with making every single website a hugbox these days is moronic. The word retard/retarded is seldom associated with actual retardation instead it's just a synonym for moron.

Even if you dissagree with that you should still be able to see that even if we did s/retard/moron/ or replaced it with git, idiot etc it would still violate the TOS.
I think you will get more bang for the buck by using something like ansible or salt (I have only used ansible and love it and I have heard salt is comparable)

You don't have a standard repeatable way to set up an environment now. You need to do that first before jumping on docker I think. Once you have that, you can start replacing parts of the setup with docker and see if it fits your needs.

The advantage of ansible is that it is idempotent and the changes it makes to the system are the same ones you make manually or via bash scripts. So it is quite easy to debug
I wrote a little review of the Mac human interface design principles of 1986, the Gentner and Nielsen's Anti-Mac principles from ten years later, and which ones seem in play today. Would love thoughts from the community about whether my observations are on/off target. It's long (10k words, 40min). TIA!
I don't know, I guess I'm supposed to consider it censorship and be outraged or something?

Some people feel entitled to say what they want on any platform they choose and cry "censorship" when their offensive speech is removed.

My guess is GH doesn't actively monitor things like this, but someone complained. So they're removing it, and it's just a matter of time before we hear a thousand "slippery slope" arguments.
GitLab is decent, Gogs is also useful (and has smaller system requirements, albeit slightly less features)

http://gogs.io/
Probably because facebook is by design a mechanism of human communication. Github is a mechanism for sharing code. The words used and then rejected were useless, and substituting them did not affect the communication in any meaningful way.

Calling vocabulary subs like this "censorship" greatly glorifies the users of said language, as unless they're deliberately trying to be offensive there is always an equally useful word at hand.
We in fact started with an HTML5 group chat application very much like Slack but ended up making a game.
It took me about 1 minute find other repositories using derogatory descriptions of people. I didn't even have to use my imagination.
Long ago, I was asked to fix a bug about a user interface hanging when too many items were added. After poking around, I discovered that there was an algorithm, whose run time was an exponential function of the number of items, that was taking several minutes to run (after which the UI would be responsive again). The punch line was that this algorithm was actually computing a value that was never used by the rest of the code, so I just deleted it. That was in C++ code written by an experienced developer.
A very good idea. I mean, that's probably the best way to get a foot in the door.
Oh sure, but that's not the context it was being used here, and there's no indication that this was some sort of automated email that was sent purely because a use of the word was detected.

I don't think anyone's out there trying to ban the word "retard" for its non-derogatory usages. Seems like a weird straw-man to worry about.
Just do it.

Nothing is stopping you other than your own will.
I think there are tremendous differences between C and C++ best practices. Are you really trying to create a single repository that covers both of them?

If you are a C++ expert and you are interested to moderate this repository please contact us at developer@codergears.com.

And you certainly don't want a C++ expert trying to moderate best practices in C. If you want to cover both C and C++, they need to be treated separately.
Burning VC money while building a customer base who is giving them access to their bank accounts, to sell future financial services?
context matters. Look at the diff that's linked. This had nothing to do with ignitions.
Yes, the developer had every right to say retard. 100% correct. And if they said it in front of me, I'd have every right to kick them, hard. Both of us will have paid a price, sure, but hey, freedom of speech wasn't violated.

You're free to call me a retard. I'm free to kick you for doing it. Everybody wins. But your calling me a retard isn't a divinely bestowed right to get away with it without a response just because you had the right to say it. GitHub chose to respond. The author chose to comply with the request. Done and done.
Have a nice look at this list and let me know if you'd like to ban all of these too. After all, they have context and actual loaded meanings, and in many cases represent hundreds of years of oppression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs_by_ethnic...
First Year, SoftwareSuggest Has Helped 15000+ Businesses Find the Right Software
Should we ban all these 'useless' words too? Like eggplant, spade, and oreo? After all, many people find them offensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs_by_ethnic...
Lets all cry Github monopoly now!
Solid. This is would also allow me to spend time teaching programming to my son as he gets older.
A bunch of retards apparently.
Would it be alright, then, if it said, "WebM for Black People?"

It isn't important to quibble over what words we consider offensive in the past, present, or future. The real problem is speaking about a classification of human being as being less than fully human or using those classifications as shortcuts for "inferior."

A person with darker skin is no less human than one with lighter skin. Similarly, two people with differing sets of abilities are both also fully human. Just because someone else is made of slightly different stuff doesn't make those differences fair game for ridicule.
> I am saying that these things come into fashion and then pass away.

If words can come INTO fashion for various reasons, then some must be allowed to LEAVE fashion for other reasons. Letting them pass out of empathy is probably one of the most noble and equitable reasons we could have to change our language.

Your argument is so strange. You argue that language is fluid then get angry, confused and dismissive when people use that fact to change the world around them.
Good job GH. It's sad this is shocking to some people. Perhaps they haven't dealt with anyone with mental disabilities or seen what their families deal with, and that's not their fault, nor is it an excuse. It's called empathy.
In a similar fashion, storing user properties like whether or not they want email subscriptions, their notification settings, etc... Is something that I often use a bitmask field in my model to save space in the db.

These can be queried using bitwise operations and you can abstract all of it with synthetic instance properties.

User.email_enabled = true would translate to 0010 or something in, for example, a properties column.

Really handy stuff!!!
Yeah, and now Ward's killing it in favour of some Web 2.0 thing I can't even begin to understand how to use.
Is it offensive? Yes.

Does Github have the right to take it down? Yes.

Is it unethical for Github to take it down? Not at all.

But should they? I don't know, I don't think I would have. It's kind of scary to use cloud services where it's hard to tell if your content might be judged in violation of some rule and might suddenly disappear as a result. If the offensiveness were more extreme (say, a repo dedicated to making fun of the mentally disabled), then yes, remove it... but the actual case here looks pretty benign to me. A poor choice of words, but with no intended malice. Coming down hard in this case looks arbitrary and unexpected, and arbitrary and unexpected rule enforcement is scary.

Certainly, though, it's Github's choice what kind of rules they want to enforce and whether or not they care if this scares users.
This brings up a point that's been nagging at me for a while: does making a community more inclusive necessarily mean making it less distinctive? GenderDetector (formerly SexMachine [1]) is another example of this process, wherein what was formerly considered within the norm of politeness is now sufficiently far outside to cause outcry. I'm curious what other people think -- this has been on my mind for a while, and although I like parts of the predicted conclusion (more people for me to share my hobby with!) others frighten me (genericization to the point of losing meaningful cultural identity).

[1] https://github.com/bmuller/gender_detector/pull/14
I personally feel that offensive language should be censored because they’re intended to be offensive and hurtful to people, while OTOH if its obviously not purposely offensive but just a method of expression, it should be given a pass. Leave that to self-censorship / the readers / users.

Also, given the semi-monopoly that these sites have, I think that they have some sort of responsibility to not exploit network effects and alienate users just because they can.
Grade A bullshit. You should get in contact with any farmers you know, they'd pay good money for this quality merchandise.
Brochures are documents, nobody has a problem with putting documents on the web. Also, mobile apps are sandboxed already on all major platforms.
An effect of this is that experience will mean practically nothing to people outside of the tech world - if the perception is that someone can do a $100k coding job with just a 24 week training course then my 20 years experience seemingly isn't going to add much value.

The job market for developers is going to get weird.
Time for GitHub follow their own rules and change their name to something that's not offensive.
Would it actually bother you if you couldn't use those words in those contexts? You're arguing over a principle while dismissing the real harm people have suffered. The word that got banned has no meaning or use outside the most base kind of interactions.

It's not like you can no longer say the word "eggplant" at the supermarket to refer to a vegetable.
Normally, I don't argue with people on the internet. Tonight, I'm bored and I'm making an exception.

That being said, this isn't an argument about how we should treat people. This is an argument over whether we should be allowed to say what we wish and let others react how they will. If people don't want to use this individual's code because of his questionable mentality, let that be their choice. Instead we're now papering over it and making him perhaps look nicer than he is.

Would you also like to halt publication of Mein Kampf? It's available in bookstores near you, and I assure you there are many people who are offended by its content, myself included.

Shall we reword the sections of the Bible chastising homosexual behavior?

Or do we only censor the little things?
Apparently a few different things have been called "memristors", but at least some of them have a resistance that depends upon the integral of current through them into the infinite past. DC current one way to write a 1, the other way to write a 0, and AC current to nondestructively read, I guess. Typically this works through ion migration in the material, and I suspect that resulted in abysmal endurance, putting an end to the promise of memristors.
Elastica Cloud Threat Labs Discovered Latest Google Drive Phishing Campaign
Who says that it's the same set of people? Personally, I have no problem with Facebook choosing what not to host on their platform either. And I'd certainly love to see them exercise that a little more often when it comes to personal attacks, especially those directed at specific people.
Which content?

If you are only interested in the repository itself, then you are already done, as everyone who cloned it would have a local copy of it. If you want to use a similar workflow (as in, an always available publicly addressable git server to push and pull to), you can do that with "git remote set-url origin <new repository url>".

If you want to move the wiki, you can also 'git clone' that, although I believe github uses a slightly nonstandard markdown language.

I do not believe their is a good way to migrate your issue tracker.
Github does. If you don't like it, fork it... just not on GitHub.
So to explain myself a lot of people tell me my brother is 'autistic'

Well my brother is not autistic. My brother has issues with understanding language and expressing himself. That does make it had for him to relate to ordinary people. But it doesn't mean that he has issues with socialization and emotional attachment. He desperately wants to fit in with people and have meaningful relationships with people.

As such I find the term Autistic, which assumes that he doesn't care about human emotional attachments. And assumes that he's somehow 'sick' to be extremely insulting.

I'd much rather people use the term retard because at least that just generally says that a person has one or more learning deficits and picks certain tasks slower than normal.

And frankly you're never going to get off the euphemism treadmill. That said for the reasons above, the concept of 'retard' is better than autistic by a long shot.
That was a fluke, and even Notch knows it.
"Dummy" is very pedestrian term. Compare "shit" and "poo." One is more offensive than the other, even if they are used to mean the same thing in the same context.
They can do whatever they want, that is the market at work. If enough people find it offensive, they will produce/migrate to an alternative.
Yes, I'm very angry and confused.
And it would take you another 2 to report them, and github a few moments to act on it. They don't necessarily proactively search for it, they act on reports.