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I like the litmus test that only someone with a github profile with projects of their own and commits to any projects in broad use are privvy to an opinion abou

I like the litmus test that only someone with a github profile with projects of their own and commits to any projects in broad use are privvy to an opinion about tech culture. When I see an SJC opinion on identity politics and tech, my first instinct is to check github to see if the author has ever contributed to open source or has any sizable projects of their own published. I'd guess that 99 times out of 100 they don't. There are a lot of loudmouthed people with lots of opinions and no street cred. Pretty much every scandal over the past few years have involved someone with little to no content in their github profile. I encourage anyone with a particular scandal in mind to go find the github profile of the person at the center of the scandal and see if they've accomplished much if anything as software engineer.

rescripting 11y ago
This is a bit divergent but GitHub alone is a bad litmus test to determine if someone as accomplished anything as a software engineer. Many talented engineers are precluded by their contracts from contributing, use other channels to do so, or simply don't work on open source projects. Dismissing someone because of an empty github profile seems like a bit of a hair trigger reaction.
- orionblastar 11y ago
  Agreed but the SJWs will always make an issue with a project on a political thing and ask for a code of conduct. It seems to be an annoying pattern of behavior. You have to remember that SJWs have declared a war on hackers and people in STEM. Trying to find something wrong with them to make them lose their jobs or be kicked out of open source projects. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918 ESR has an opinion on it that SJWs need to be kicked out of open source projects. Most of them can't even code properly and submit buggy code that gets rejected, and then they claim discrimination.
  - adiabatty 11y ago
    Nowhere in that post did I see the opinion that good patches be rejected on the grounds that the author is an SJW — ESR appears to say he's quite happy to accept good contributions from anyone. What am I missing?
    - orionblastar 11y ago
      Good patches should not be rejected by the ground that anyone is anything. What matters is code quality. ESR was talking about the issues the SJWs make wanting a code of conduct and other political things. That they should be kicked out of projects when they do that sort of thing. If they submit good patches, it should be accepted. If they cause a political issue instead of a coding or debugging one then they are just stirring up trouble. In the example the POC (People of Color) submitted several patches but only one or two got accepted because they were good enough. The SJW got upset over the fact that not all of them got accepted. Called the project leader a white straight male, and project leader replied back he was a Latino and accepted a few patches from POC and goes by quality not race to accept or reject a patch. Really hard to tell a SJW from a troll pretending to be a SJW, Poe's law and all of that.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Any point you might have loses all credibility when you quote ESR. For this particular post: if you read the linked django thread it's clearly started by a troll, not an actual "SJW". And ESR's previous posts are mixes of overt racism and sexism with bizarre fantsy stirred through.
- gozo 11y ago
  Some of the best programmers I know avoid open source. Partly because of the drama. But mostly because if you spend you days working on "qualified" things (business systems, simulation, robotics etc) in a demanding environment with, at least help from, highly educated people it's just not that fun to patch JavaScript frameworks on GitHub with the "just fork it" crowd.
- malandrew 11y ago
  It's a bad litmus test if there is no github account or the github account is completely empty, but you know for certain someone is actually in a position doing real engineering. Every example where I've looked up an SJW's github account, they have had some content on it and it's been very little of very poor quality (typically some HTML and CSS and poor quality jQuery JavaScript or a remarkably trivial Ruby on Rails project). The only example I recall ever encountering where there was an SJW article where the person was quite accomplished was from an MtF trans engineer. That was also the only SJW article that I remember being pretty solid and found myself agreeing with a lot of it. That article was the only decent one I've read on Model-View-Culture. The two most prominent examples where the SJW had a remarkably unremarkable github account both worked at companies with a very very strong open-source contribution culture because they quit or were let go.
mikesickler 11y ago
There's a lot more to tech culture than programming.
- bjwbell 11y ago
  Over time I've become fond of the phrase "show me the code" (obviously stolen from the film).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
laughinghan 11y ago
By "an SJC opinion" do you mean "[wanting] more females and minorities in STEM"? How about these loudmouths, who include the creators of Django and NPM? http://osfeels.com/speakers http://osfeels.com/speakers Feel free to do your reflexive dick-measuring against my GitHub profile, too. (I checked out yours. Are you a serious contributor to anything with >50 stars?)
- dang 11y ago
  Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't comment like this here.
  - laughinghan 11y ago
    I apologize, in retrospect my comment was definitely inappropriate. I'm actually not sure which part of my comment was a personal attack, though. I think my first paragraph was a factual refutation of the parent's main point, I assume you're talking about the second paragraph? Was it "dick-measuring contest"? Though vulgar, I don't think anyone would call it a personal attack, I think it's understood [1] as the valid critique that the parent is judging people and arguments based on meaningless superficial criteria. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dick-measuring_contest https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dick-measuring_contest Was it "Are you a serious contributor to anything with >50 stars?", which could be interpreted out-of-context as implying they're unaccomplished? I think it's clear from context that I don't believe in judging people by their GitHub, in fact it's one of the main ways my comment was disagreeing with its parent. Unless pointing out hypocrisy is a personal attack?
    - dang 11y ago
      Thanks for being open about this. What made me think the comment was a personal attack was the combination of hostile sarcasm (not just "reflexive dick-measuring", but also "feel free") with introducing personal details. It's always risky to bring in new personal details about someone into a thread, but if the context makes it clear that it's being done with good will, it can be ok. If the context is hostile, though, that's basically never good. We're all hypocrites. The points one scores by digging up dirt to rub someone's nose in aren't worth the damage it does to the social fabric—at least in a place like HN where we care a lot about cohesion and it is always fragile.

rescripting 11y ago

This is a bit divergent but GitHub alone is a bad litmus test to determine if someone as accomplished anything as a software engineer. Many talented engineers are precluded by their contracts from contributing, use other channels to do so, or simply don't work on open source projects. Dismissing someone because of an empty github profile seems like a bit of a hair trigger reaction.

orionblastar 11y ago
Agreed but the SJWs will always make an issue with a project on a political thing and ask for a code of conduct. It seems to be an annoying pattern of behavior. You have to remember that SJWs have declared a war on hackers and people in STEM. Trying to find something wrong with them to make them lose their jobs or be kicked out of open source projects. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918 ESR has an opinion on it that SJWs need to be kicked out of open source projects. Most of them can't even code properly and submit buggy code that gets rejected, and then they claim discrimination.
- adiabatty 11y ago
  Nowhere in that post did I see the opinion that good patches be rejected on the grounds that the author is an SJW — ESR appears to say he's quite happy to accept good contributions from anyone. What am I missing?
  - orionblastar 11y ago
    Good patches should not be rejected by the ground that anyone is anything. What matters is code quality. ESR was talking about the issues the SJWs make wanting a code of conduct and other political things. That they should be kicked out of projects when they do that sort of thing. If they submit good patches, it should be accepted. If they cause a political issue instead of a coding or debugging one then they are just stirring up trouble. In the example the POC (People of Color) submitted several patches but only one or two got accepted because they were good enough. The SJW got upset over the fact that not all of them got accepted. Called the project leader a white straight male, and project leader replied back he was a Latino and accepted a few patches from POC and goes by quality not race to accept or reject a patch. Really hard to tell a SJW from a troll pretending to be a SJW, Poe's law and all of that.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Any point you might have loses all credibility when you quote ESR. For this particular post: if you read the linked django thread it's clearly started by a troll, not an actual "SJW". And ESR's previous posts are mixes of overt racism and sexism with bizarre fantsy stirred through.
gozo 11y ago
Some of the best programmers I know avoid open source. Partly because of the drama. But mostly because if you spend you days working on "qualified" things (business systems, simulation, robotics etc) in a demanding environment with, at least help from, highly educated people it's just not that fun to patch JavaScript frameworks on GitHub with the "just fork it" crowd.
malandrew 11y ago
It's a bad litmus test if there is no github account or the github account is completely empty, but you know for certain someone is actually in a position doing real engineering. Every example where I've looked up an SJW's github account, they have had some content on it and it's been very little of very poor quality (typically some HTML and CSS and poor quality jQuery JavaScript or a remarkably trivial Ruby on Rails project). The only example I recall ever encountering where there was an SJW article where the person was quite accomplished was from an MtF trans engineer. That was also the only SJW article that I remember being pretty solid and found myself agreeing with a lot of it. That article was the only decent one I've read on Model-View-Culture. The two most prominent examples where the SJW had a remarkably unremarkable github account both worked at companies with a very very strong open-source contribution culture because they quit or were let go.

mikesickler 11y ago

There's a lot more to tech culture than programming.

bjwbell 11y ago
Over time I've become fond of the phrase "show me the code" (obviously stolen from the film).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

laughinghan 11y ago

By "an SJC opinion" do you mean "[wanting] more females and minorities in STEM"? How about these loudmouths, who include the creators of Django and NPM? http://osfeels.com/speakers http://osfeels.com/speakers Feel free to do your reflexive dick-measuring against my GitHub profile, too. (I checked out yours. Are you a serious contributor to anything with >50 stars?)

dang 11y ago
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't comment like this here.
- laughinghan 11y ago
  I apologize, in retrospect my comment was definitely inappropriate. I'm actually not sure which part of my comment was a personal attack, though. I think my first paragraph was a factual refutation of the parent's main point, I assume you're talking about the second paragraph? Was it "dick-measuring contest"? Though vulgar, I don't think anyone would call it a personal attack, I think it's understood [1] as the valid critique that the parent is judging people and arguments based on meaningless superficial criteria. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dick-measuring_contest https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dick-measuring_contest Was it "Are you a serious contributor to anything with >50 stars?", which could be interpreted out-of-context as implying they're unaccomplished? I think it's clear from context that I don't believe in judging people by their GitHub, in fact it's one of the main ways my comment was disagreeing with its parent. Unless pointing out hypocrisy is a personal attack?
  - dang 11y ago
    Thanks for being open about this. What made me think the comment was a personal attack was the combination of hostile sarcasm (not just "reflexive dick-measuring", but also "feel free") with introducing personal details. It's always risky to bring in new personal details about someone into a thread, but if the context makes it clear that it's being done with good will, it can be ok. If the context is hostile, though, that's basically never good. We're all hypocrites. The points one scores by digging up dirt to rub someone's nose in aren't worth the damage it does to the social fabric—at least in a place like HN where we care a lot about cohesion and it is always fragile.