bE9a3S5So8igd3's comments

> vast amount of people on traditional and social media saying all the things that you claim people are afraid to say refutes this.

Nope. As the OP suggested, lots of people aren't being open & honest about their opinions. Media, tech companies, etc. are overrun by deluded leftists. People are losing their jobs for defending their property. Current western culture is promoting witch hunts against anyone who opposes ideas like "there are 46 genders" or "systemic racism."

This is the modern, western, leftist suppression complex.

If you think that it is not the case that a lot of people are staying silent for fear of mob retribution, you are wrong.

> I wonder how much of this is occurring in tech companies because of the same phenomenon - people are just probably don't want to risk their jobs over something so unimportant.

It's the same really as not questioning things in the soviet union. See the fine HBO program "Chernobyl" for details on what happens when truths are avoided in favor of bullshit.

The danger with the new leftist fascism we see in the US is that people are afraid of saying the truth. Eventually this will be a problem.

Can't wait until they come for `server`

They're really going to eliminate racism then!

> whether or not they spend their free time coding outside of work

I would argue that candidates should absolutely be judged on whether they have significant portfolio work available to view publicly. Of course, this is dependent on the hiring managers' being competent.

Candidates shouldn't necessarily be judged on not having any public portfolio work though. I'm an advocate for take-home challenges. I think these give the best representation of actual work.

> as you advance in your career, the expectation is that you will work on higher level concepts

That's a valid argument and response to the OP in particular re: principal/senior positions.

> Github profiles aren't really a place I've seen used to showcase architecture and design skills, nor how candidates work with others, and those things matter significantly more than a 20 line patch in an open source library

You're underestimating how much work is actually hosted on Github these days. For example, what if one of the major contributors to an open source framework like Serverless, or a programming language like Swift, applied to your company? You're convinced Github doesn't matter, even though your default job application site probably requests a github link. In terms of documentation, formalized APIs, project management, github actually could still be a great source of information on advanced candidates and junior.

I'm more inclined to believe the industry has been inundated by hiring managers who aren't qualified to evaluate anything technical, so fall back on canned questions which are of absolutely no value. "Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a coworker" is not going to give you useful information. Everyone knows these questions exist, and everyone prepares some bullshit answer to them. What you are selecting for is "How rehearsed is this candidate." Wow, it turns out 90% of candidates had identical "challenges" and "learned" from their "experience" and are "growing as an engineer!"

It does make interviewing easier, and certainly helps with demographic hiring quotas if you don't actually care about a person's technical history - when you are hiring computer programmers.

Edit: Another point I'd make is that, as a candidate, when I find out who I'm interviewing with I always search their github. Most github profiles actually suck and are negative signals.

> Who said buying pack of Pokemon cards wasn't gambling?

Me. A pack of Pokemon cards is a tangible investment. As are, as far as I understand them, "loot boxes." The trading value may be probabilistic, but it's not quite the same as making a financial bet as in the stock market, lottery, traditional casino "gambling"

It used to be that you'd get toys with McDonald's happy meals. I believe the toy you'd end up with was also a matter of probability. There was also a candy phenomenon in the late 90s/early 00s called the "Wonder Ball." The commercials, imploring you to consider "What's in the Wonder Ball?" Also probabilistic. I wouldn't say either of these examples is gambling.

At this point it seems appropriate to mention that it actually doesn't matter whether something qualifies is "gambling" or not. It matters only to the extent that in 2020 people are fixated on labeling things, as if the word we've crafted to describe something is itself meaningful. These words tend to be trendy and suitable for e-propagation on Twitter words like "incel" or "autistic." Or "That's gambling! #gambling-bad"

There are lots of dumb things people can invest in. And investing in dumb things has gotten easier. That doesn't mean every purchase with a probabilistic value on the market is gambling, or that "gambling bad" and "not-gambling good."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Meal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Ball

As far as I understand "loot boxes" I don't think they qualify as gambling. At least not any more than buying a pack of Pokemon cards in the 90s.

> I don't care about your GitHub profile. It's a small value add, nothing more.

I think this sentiment may be unfortunately common. It used to be that having a good github profile was golden. I got my first two jobs probably as a result of my github activity. Lately I get the sense that no one even bothers to look. To me this signals that the company itself doesn't value technical matters as much as how good the candidate is at answering canned behavioral questions.

For example, if as a hiring manager you are convined that "Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a coworker" is more valuable than a decade of open source contributions to relevant projects, that's a problem IMO.

Not counter-narrative. Not-flagged

> half of the population (the people with power) directly benefits from an unjust system...

Fix what? Slavery (including the enslavement of whites) is not legal, at least not in the US. Everything is de-segregated and we have laws to protect certain classes of minorities. Beyond legalities I see black-promotion constantly in media. Everything looks perfectly fine from my perspective (I could do without the propaganda though). As a reminder our last president was (half) black.

You're imagining that the US is not beneficial historically to everyone. There's a reason people from Europe, Asia, latin america, etc. immigrated to America. They didn't come because "America is only benefits white slave-owners!" The entire point of the "american dream" is that people without power can find a way to prosper. Are we supposed to pretend none of that ever happened?

So what is this injustice du jour that suddenly, over the last few weeks, has become so pressing? Policing? I don't think there's evidence to support that blacks are targetted by cops because they're black. Poor neighborhoods probably do require more policing than non-poor neighborhoods as, naturally, criminal activity is more prevalent amongst the poor. Relative to other minorities my understanding is that blacks are underperforming in various ways. Surely you can't be so easily deluded into believing statements like "our black kids are being killed by cops every minute!" More whites are killed by cops. Blacks are overrepresented in proportion to their population. That blacks are overrepresented in certain figures does not support a radical claim like "systemic racism," contrary to Twitter logic.

Is it some other "injustice" you're so worked up about? Is it some imaginary injustice that is not even possible to resolve? Why don't you be specific about your radical claims; your statements are empty Twitter platitudes as far as I'm concerned.

Frankly, I resent the implication that I, as a white, am somehow benefiting from "injustice."

Counter-narrative. Flagged!

> WW2 wasn't really that long ago and neither was the the American civil war, both wars based on race and atrocities

I don't think the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was racially motivated.

> in America we aren't as far gone (but there are people in America who probably wouldn't mind killing other groups).

I agree. I think the definitely-not-fascist leftists in USA are dangerously close to lynching whites. Oddly, so many American whites are deluded into believing leftist activism mania is about making a cute incremental improvement rather than burning it all to the ground.

That national socialism (combined with 20th century eugenics) could become as popular as it did in Nazi Germany had been surprising to me. Given the state of the modern leftist cult, it's no longer surprising. People can actually be deluded to such an extent!

One thing I like about subscribing to HN via RSS is that I get to see all the submissions that were flagged or demoted. I clicked this one thinking for sure it would be flagged as it's counter-narrative, but not yet! I'll check again later, mods must be asleep.

Edit: Flagged!

Seems to me that mass email for activism recruitment should go to spam

How amusing.

As a thought experiment, if using the term "slave" is prohibitively offensive in a computer program (even if the reference is only conceptual and doesn't have anything to do with human slavery--as anyone with half a brain knows), what is supposed to happen in the event that a program, or some "casual" text actually does need to refer to actual human slavery? Is it a topic that can no longer be put to words, because the words are offensive? For example, what if I wrote a computer program to do some sort of analysis on historical slavery data. Is it acceptable or not to name a variable "slaves?" Do I have to rename it "disadvantagedPersonsThanksBLM" ?

Would the reasoning be "conceptual slavery cannot be expressed in such a way, but real slavery is permissible to express" ?

What's next, "leader?" Maybe red-black trees have to be renamed? Integration tests? Maybe we have to switch default terminal colors to pink-purple to satisfy the definitely-not-fascists?

I don't really understand what "welcome" means. Historically on the internet people are simultaneously "welcome" and "not welcome," i.e. people discover places of socializing and choose to participate or not. In my decades of socializing on the internet, most places are hostile to some degree. I also wouldn't bother to complain, because hostility is an unavoidable part of human nature, even hostility toward hostility. Some set of people within a given community will be "nice," and some will be "mean." Most people inhabit some indefinite point on the nice-mean continuum. It would be ideal if comments like "females suk lol" were removed, but something tells me that's uncommon.

I think that "I would feel more welcome if..." (a very common motif in modern activism) suggests a few things:

(1) The operators should care about me/my demographic (2) The operators should signal that they care about me/my demographic (3) The operators should preferentially signal that they care about me/my demographic (4) The operators should counter-signal, i.e. counter-welcome other people/other demographics (determined by perceived opposition to me/my demographic)

This may seem like a trivial exercise, but consider how non-welcome a person with conservative political interests would be not only on HN, but in the tech industry as a whole. Consider how non-welcome a white male might feel on Twitter, etc.. Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)

It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

Oh, I dunno I just found that by exploring gitee

Thanks I was devastated by the word "master" and now I feel very, very "welcome"

The worst redesign yet. It looks even worse than an early version of Gogs I tried. Of course, if you're paying designers they ultimately have to design something even if it's crap. Ideal github design was maybe in 2012.

Unrelated to the redesign, but the documentation for things like Actions just scream "microsoft." It was really hard for me to find the important information; had to sift through pages of abstraction gunk where things aren't explained clearly or with code. Felt like IBM product pages. Very non-github. This clueless internet-explorer-type design trend will almost certainly continue IMO. They simply can't help theirselves.

Unfortunately I also don't like gitlab or bitbucket. Github circa 2012 was the gold standard for the design solution, while everything else was cluttered or pad-y or overreliant on side navigation. Now everything sucks.

What's sad? Actually, you can find the classic (good) github design alive and well in China: https://gitee.com/drinkjava2/frog

You mean fascism? It couldn't be!