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> JessicaTegner/pypandoc Pypandoc provides a thin wrapper for pandoc, a universal document converter. To be frank, that doesn’t seem like a project worthy of

> JessicaTegner/pypandoc Pypandoc provides a thin wrapper for pandoc, a universal document converter. To be frank, that doesn’t seem like a project worthy of $20k to me. Not very many commits recently [0], it has 918 source lines of code in the main package, and 547 lines of test code — it even describes itself as a “thin” wrapper, and the only thing it does is converting some arguments to Pandoc flags and calling the Pandoc executable. How many more features could be added to this project? What is it missing now? [0] https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc/commits/master https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc/commits/master

Spinnaker_ 4y ago
[flagged]
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Don't do that. Don't diminish the work of someone simply because they are a woman. Even assuming that money was given as part of some diversity program, to imply that is the only reason she got an investment is to imply that there are simply no qualified women out there deserving of investment. It's just like the criticism of Biden having appointed "so many" Black female judges. As if they are not perfectly qualified or even more qualified than a white male judge would have been. Not to mention the fact that "qualifications" has never really been the criteria for any of this. In other words, merit is far too nebulous a concept for a true "meritocracy" to ever exist.
  - RangerScience 4y ago
    Although I completely agree with you... ...I'm not seeing anything on the readily available info indicating a gender either way.
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
      https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc/commit/4becb4e6734036e7eee92d180ea8e7acc7333e6f https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc/commit/4becb4e6734...
      - RangerScience 4y ago
        a) thank you! (and I say this with an intention towards satire) b) why the hell was finding that worth your time
        Shekelphile 4y ago
        > b) why the hell was finding that worth your time Generally the only reason people dig up a trans person's deadname is for harassment or discrimination.
      - fidonj 4y ago
        [flagged]
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Completely disagree. The wokeness from these corporations, the DEI culture, the dividing contemptuous nature of this ideology needs to be openly and fiercely criticized. It’s destroying the very fabric of America. The fact that we are not allowed to do that on HN speaks for its ideological and dangerous grip on free thinking. The chilling effect is real.
    - Shekelphile 4y ago
      Treating a trans developer as no different from a cishet developer is not 'wokeness'.
      - ignoramceisblis 4y ago
        I think it's pretty clear from the parent commenters that they believe the developer /is/ being treated differently--with a bias/preference given that the developer is supposedly trans.
        Shekelphile 4y ago
        No, they don't. They insinuate that because it's a conveinient dogwhistle - the claim is always the same whenever a non cishet/white person attains any level of success.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        ignoramceisblis 4y ago
        "Insinuate" what? "Dogwhistle"? Maybe I was being too equivocal. The parent commenters /do/ believe the developer is receiving preferential treatment based on one aspect of their declared identity. And it's not hard to share their sentiment: what warrants a thin Python wrapper library, which does not really bring new capabilities itself, receiving $20k when there are many other projects which could make an even bigger impact with that money? It seems unusual to me. Especially when considering they were choosing from a pool at GitHub scale, which is about as diverse as it gets in the open source software community. I don't share the belief that "non cishet/white" people are unduly denigrated when they achieve success--not more than any other person on average, anyway. In fact, I see quite the opposite: there's tremendous amounts of pride when "non cishet/white" people achieve success.
  - ignoramceisblis 4y ago
    When decisions are made specifically based on superficial characteristics like skin color and sex, you shouldn't be surprised when people wonder if decisions are/were made specifically based on superficial characteristics like skin color and sex. eg. on Biden: https://news.yahoo.com/the-inside-story-of-how-biden-promised-to-appoint-a-black-woman-to-the-supreme-court-192146779.html https://news.yahoo.com/the-inside-story-of-how-biden-promise... The promise of the superficial characteristics came first. Then a solution (a candidate, in this case) was chosen from a limited solution set When people do things like this, they make it clear they don't want optimal outcomes, with regards to performance and the like. They make it clear that other, superficial, characteristics carry greater weight. This hurts any functioning society, certainly in the long-term. However, some people want that--for some societies.
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      Regardless of any "superficial" characteristic (I think many would argue that being Black in America in anything but superficial) what exactly do you think an optimal outcome is when selecting something like a judge? What is a high "performance" judge? Because even though for the first few hundred years of our nation's history, we selected judges only from a very large group of old, white, catholic/protestant men, we sure have come up with plenty of incompetence and corruption. Should we hire judges based solely on their LSAT score? Or perhaps only judges from the most ivy league, selective law schools? Or maybe we should select for judges who can recite the law by memory? Judges need to represent the people that they stand in judgement of. You want people that know what it is like to grow up poor or to grow up under racism or whatever. And Black women are severely underrepresented in the federal judiciary. Of course, any person selected as a judge needs to meet a minimum level of competence (something that has usually been the case up until at least a few selections from the last administration). Regardless, the solution set of Black female attorneys and judges is plenty large to be able to find fully qualified candidates for many, many federal appointments.
  - draw_down 4y ago
    [dead]
  - fidonj 4y ago
    [flagged]
therein 4y ago
Looking at the developer's profile, clearly GitHub recognized this developer's right to positive affirmation. Proud of GitHub for not caring it is a 918 line thin wrapper, this developer deserves to be set aside and carried to the top because of the challenging path they are on. Who cares if the better project gets the money after all. Edit: This post is so ambiguous that first I was discouraged when it got upvoted. :)
- hmoodie 4y ago
  [flagged]
RangerScience 4y ago
To be frank (and then polite and constructive), I think the relevant question is "What am I missing?" rather than "What is it missing?" ..and my guess would be that this is something like a cohort experiment. I'd bet they selected projects to have a broad sampling of kinds of projects, so they could see what working with them was like and what kind of impact they'd have - similar to a marketing trying out different audiences and types of ads, or startups running market experiments, or VCs shot-gunning to see what sticks, or developers doing 'probes' into problems and/or with technologies. AFAICT, GitHub wanted to get some data around the questions "What's involved in us getting funding to open source projects / developers, and what kind of impact can that funding have?" Even if your judgement of this specific project is apt (that it's weirdly small and inactive for receiving a grant), that may be the point.
- pas 4y ago
  Was there a grant application? Maybe they support the author to do something interesting, which is not evident from simply looking at the repo.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tedmiston 4y ago
Of course there are reasons beyond technical ones for including a project in an accelerator cohort. I attempted to view the application to see what types of questions GitHub asked, but they've taken it offline now. On a similar token, one of the other projects is an open source Linktree clone... the MVP of that concept is so simple and there are so many of these projects, that it suggests technical complexity was not a highly weighted factor in the selection process. That said, I have a few ideas: - Although it has very little recent activity, it has dozens of contributors, was a Hacktoberfest project, etc. - There is also often the desire to create diversity in an accelerator cohort. Every accelerators faces pressure for diversifying demographics. This also creates a flywheel effect to improve diversity in future batches. - Another idea is that perhaps someone saw the potential for this to be turned into a SaaS. Non-technical people need to convert document formats every day. Maybe this does something Pandoc doesn't or that would make it a candidate for that?

Spinnaker_ 4y ago

[flagged]

jjeaff 4y ago
Don't do that. Don't diminish the work of someone simply because they are a woman. Even assuming that money was given as part of some diversity program, to imply that is the only reason she got an investment is to imply that there are simply no qualified women out there deserving of investment. It's just like the criticism of Biden having appointed "so many" Black female judges. As if they are not perfectly qualified or even more qualified than a white male judge would have been. Not to mention the fact that "qualifications" has never really been the criteria for any of this. In other words, merit is far too nebulous a concept for a true "meritocracy" to ever exist.
- RangerScience 4y ago
  Although I completely agree with you... ...I'm not seeing anything on the readily available info indicating a gender either way.
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc/commit/4becb4e6734036e7eee92d180ea8e7acc7333e6f https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc/commit/4becb4e6734...
    - RangerScience 4y ago
      a) thank you! (and I say this with an intention towards satire) b) why the hell was finding that worth your time
      - Shekelphile 4y ago
        > b) why the hell was finding that worth your time Generally the only reason people dig up a trans person's deadname is for harassment or discrimination.
    - fidonj 4y ago
      [flagged]
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Completely disagree. The wokeness from these corporations, the DEI culture, the dividing contemptuous nature of this ideology needs to be openly and fiercely criticized. It’s destroying the very fabric of America. The fact that we are not allowed to do that on HN speaks for its ideological and dangerous grip on free thinking. The chilling effect is real.
  - Shekelphile 4y ago
    Treating a trans developer as no different from a cishet developer is not 'wokeness'.
    - ignoramceisblis 4y ago
      I think it's pretty clear from the parent commenters that they believe the developer /is/ being treated differently--with a bias/preference given that the developer is supposedly trans.
      - Shekelphile 4y ago
        No, they don't. They insinuate that because it's a conveinient dogwhistle - the claim is always the same whenever a non cishet/white person attains any level of success.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        ignoramceisblis 4y ago
        "Insinuate" what? "Dogwhistle"? Maybe I was being too equivocal. The parent commenters /do/ believe the developer is receiving preferential treatment based on one aspect of their declared identity. And it's not hard to share their sentiment: what warrants a thin Python wrapper library, which does not really bring new capabilities itself, receiving $20k when there are many other projects which could make an even bigger impact with that money? It seems unusual to me. Especially when considering they were choosing from a pool at GitHub scale, which is about as diverse as it gets in the open source software community. I don't share the belief that "non cishet/white" people are unduly denigrated when they achieve success--not more than any other person on average, anyway. In fact, I see quite the opposite: there's tremendous amounts of pride when "non cishet/white" people achieve success.
- ignoramceisblis 4y ago
  When decisions are made specifically based on superficial characteristics like skin color and sex, you shouldn't be surprised when people wonder if decisions are/were made specifically based on superficial characteristics like skin color and sex. eg. on Biden: https://news.yahoo.com/the-inside-story-of-how-biden-promised-to-appoint-a-black-woman-to-the-supreme-court-192146779.html https://news.yahoo.com/the-inside-story-of-how-biden-promise... The promise of the superficial characteristics came first. Then a solution (a candidate, in this case) was chosen from a limited solution set When people do things like this, they make it clear they don't want optimal outcomes, with regards to performance and the like. They make it clear that other, superficial, characteristics carry greater weight. This hurts any functioning society, certainly in the long-term. However, some people want that--for some societies.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    Regardless of any "superficial" characteristic (I think many would argue that being Black in America in anything but superficial) what exactly do you think an optimal outcome is when selecting something like a judge? What is a high "performance" judge? Because even though for the first few hundred years of our nation's history, we selected judges only from a very large group of old, white, catholic/protestant men, we sure have come up with plenty of incompetence and corruption. Should we hire judges based solely on their LSAT score? Or perhaps only judges from the most ivy league, selective law schools? Or maybe we should select for judges who can recite the law by memory? Judges need to represent the people that they stand in judgement of. You want people that know what it is like to grow up poor or to grow up under racism or whatever. And Black women are severely underrepresented in the federal judiciary. Of course, any person selected as a judge needs to meet a minimum level of competence (something that has usually been the case up until at least a few selections from the last administration). Regardless, the solution set of Black female attorneys and judges is plenty large to be able to find fully qualified candidates for many, many federal appointments.
- draw_down 4y ago
  [dead]
- fidonj 4y ago
  [flagged]

therein 4y ago

Looking at the developer's profile, clearly GitHub recognized this developer's right to positive affirmation. Proud of GitHub for not caring it is a 918 line thin wrapper, this developer deserves to be set aside and carried to the top because of the challenging path they are on. Who cares if the better project gets the money after all. Edit: This post is so ambiguous that first I was discouraged when it got upvoted. :)

hmoodie 4y ago
[flagged]

RangerScience 4y ago

To be frank (and then polite and constructive), I think the relevant question is "What am I missing?" rather than "What is it missing?" ..and my guess would be that this is something like a cohort experiment. I'd bet they selected projects to have a broad sampling of kinds of projects, so they could see what working with them was like and what kind of impact they'd have - similar to a marketing trying out different audiences and types of ads, or startups running market experiments, or VCs shot-gunning to see what sticks, or developers doing 'probes' into problems and/or with technologies. AFAICT, GitHub wanted to get some data around the questions "What's involved in us getting funding to open source projects / developers, and what kind of impact can that funding have?" Even if your judgement of this specific project is apt (that it's weirdly small and inactive for receiving a grant), that may be the point.

pas 4y ago
Was there a grant application? Maybe they support the author to do something interesting, which is not evident from simply looking at the repo.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tedmiston 4y ago

Of course there are reasons beyond technical ones for including a project in an accelerator cohort. I attempted to view the application to see what types of questions GitHub asked, but they've taken it offline now. On a similar token, one of the other projects is an open source Linktree clone... the MVP of that concept is so simple and there are so many of these projects, that it suggests technical complexity was not a highly weighted factor in the selection process. That said, I have a few ideas: - Although it has very little recent activity, it has dozens of contributors, was a Hacktoberfest project, etc. - There is also often the desire to create diversity in an accelerator cohort. Every accelerators faces pressure for diversifying demographics. This also creates a flywheel effect to improve diversity in future batches. - Another idea is that perhaps someone saw the potential for this to be turned into a SaaS. Non-technical people need to convert document formats every day. Maybe this does something Pandoc doesn't or that would make it a candidate for that?