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GitHub reveals how software engineers are purging federal databases
- maest 2y ago[flagged]
- ncr100 2y agoRegardless, it would be nicer to keep our improved education so that people do understand the power dynamics implied in certain terms. Some people living today, working in and around a "git default repo setup" are descendants of slaves. Would it be better if public education simply discussed power dynamics, inclusion, and sensitivity?
- eej71 2y agoThere's a chance this is an example of Poe's Law. But I'm unsure!
- Edman274 2y agoIt's pretty obviously sarcastic, but it's interesting because ChatGPT thinks it's sincere. It appears that sarcasm detection is still outside the capabilities of large language models, which is surprising because people have been manually annotating sarcastic remarks on internet forums for the past 30 years. How could it get simpler than that to create a training set?
- fourseventy 2y ago[flagged]
- stanleykm 2y agoThe fact that people who think they are smart blame cultural shifts on a “woke cult” is amazing to me.
- alxjrvs 2y agoEvery accusation is a confession from the Red Hat crowd.
- goatlover 2y agoThe fact that people don't realize the same word can have multiple meanings and not just the meaning it had in some previous century is amazing to me.
- stanleykm 2y agowell look if people wanted to be able to use the words master and slave all over the place they should have thought about it earlier and not had masters and slaves to start with. i dont know what to tell you.
- cglace 2y agoPeople from the left who think they are smart have names for the people who represent this new cultural shift. It's natural to blame things you don't like on the other "stupid" group.
- stanleykm 2y agoI think there is plenty of room to critique what this person is calling “woke” terminology but the “warblgarbl woke cult” from the right is just absurd. Hacker News is apparently a place we are supposed to be able to have more technical and higher minded discussions than say Reddit but every time a cultural issue comes up we revert to cave man. Actually thats not fair to cave men, we revert to reactionary nonsense.
- AlexandrB 2y ago[flagged]
- simonw 2y agoI don't understand, what does that have to do with master/slave terminology?
- dgfitz 2y agoMy interpretation of the GP (my personal views on the debate have no bearing) is that the whole master/slave debate meant a whole lot to a few thousand people in one specific country, and absolutely nothing to the rest of the world. They then go on to mention a term that they find offensive, that seems like it shouldn't be offensive, and imply that under the same rules that master/slave was abandoned, we should abandon the term "equity" as well.
- AlexandrB 2y agoAdmittedly this applies less to master/slave, but certainly applies to terms like whitelist/blacklist.
- lo_zamoyski 2y agoWhat do you think communism was ideologically about if not a system of "imposed equity"? In the name of what were people persecuted and killed if not "equality"? For him, the celebration of these is offensive and excluding.
- ncr100 2y agoI'm a descendent of a grandmother who, as a child fled the brand new Soviet regime when my great grandpa was being shuffled off to the Gulag on the train in the cold North. I'm sorry that your family died by those same people who shuffled off my great grandpa. Hello. Is there a problem / disadvantage / critical misleading with using my context as a lens to understand what's the right way to appropriately address unfair power dynamics?
- 2y ago
- janalsncm 2y agoChanging “master” to “main” is exactly the kind of empty symbolic gesture corporate America loves. If you want to talk about real power dynamics, walk down the street in San Francisco. Visible poverty everywhere, in one of the richest cities on Earth. If you want healthcare, food, shelter, or political representation, you need to pay. That’s the relevant power dynamic, and because it is so intractable these activists have conceded it and instead resort to virtue signaling (“we can’t change the system but at least we want to!”). Who the hell cares. George Floyd’s problem wasn’t that not enough software engineers were aware of American chattel slavery, his problem was that being poor is effectively illegal.
- bastardoperator 2y agoNope, you can use git symbolic-ref to get the remote default branch.
- Boogie_Man 2y agoDoes wanting to keep master/slave and white/blacklist while also keeping information and resources for people historically (and to some extent currently) disadvantaged by systematic oppression mean that basically everyone will be mad at me? What do you call this position? Edit: The Google admin panel won't even populate the "allowlist" when you search whitelist which is frustrating. I'd at least like it to show up, even if it's believed to be important enough to change.
- 9283409232 2y ago> What do you call this position? Being reasonable. The master/slave thing is silly.
- readthenotes1 2y agoTo you maybe. I worked with a woman whose relatives didn't make it out of Auschwitz. She objected to us initializing System Services. Silly?
- zer8k 2y agoThe silliest.
- 9283409232 2y agoYes.
- justsocrateasin 2y agoI also had relatives that didn't make it out of Auschwitz. I could not care less.
- wvbdmp 2y agoGermans are a bit touchy on this. There are a bunch of two-letter or two-digit combinations you can’t have on your license plate, for example. Somemore far-fetched than others. At some place I recently heard about they use two-letter initials (extremely collision prone, but whatever), except for people like Nadja Schmidt. It’s definitely silly, but otoh I guess all culture is silly…
- AlexandrB 2y ago[flagged]
- stanleykm 2y agoIt’s the reactionary version of that.
- kobelb 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- gkoberger 2y agoYes. You could argue that removing some of these phrasings went too far, sure, but it came from a good place. We casually use master/slave metaphors for databases; it's not the #1 thing that needs to change but it's a move in the right direction. Again, aside from a slight eye roll, who is hurt or offended by us saying the phrase "master/slave" less? This attack on anything DEI is meant to terrorize and strike fear into anyone who isn't a straight white male. It's weaponizing decades of progress for marginalized folks into racist dogwhistles. Additionally, the original changes were optional and grassroots. This is a government directive. They're very different.
- dingnuts 2y agomaster in the sense of a db or branch is not a master/slave metaphor, it's the meaning of master that is an antonym for "copy" or "replica" as when one creates a master from which to form a mold -- the whole issue is based on a linguistic misapprehension
- stanleykm 2y agoand what about slave?
- maximilianburke 2y agoSo then when talking about database replication, why are the non-authoritative servers called slaves?
- stevetron 2y agoWhat I don't seem to understand, and I haven't found anything about, is this: How did Elon Musk and his staff obtain log-in credentials to the databases? Or log-in credentials for anything, especially given that the people in-charge were not willing to cooperate? And after all this purging is done, can't the databases be re-loaded from the backup-tapes?
- wwweb 2y agoThe new Treasury Secretary gave them to him. Or Trump did. It's not complicated, it's just a coup.
- AlgorithmicTime 2y ago[dead]
- simonw 2y agoThis particular story isn't about Elon's team - the PR is authored by the regular project maintainers, presumably in response to the executive orders that are flying around right now.
- BryantD 2y agoIt's sort of hard to piece it together because there's not a ton of transparency about what's going on. However, there have been a number of well-sourced stories on access at the Treasury Department. David Lebryk, who previously oversaw the payments system, was placed on administrative leave after refusing to cooperate. It only takes one person to say yes. And reloading databases isn't simple if you have to account for legitimate changes that have occurred post-backup. Given that we're talking about some of the core software that runs our government, I'd be extremely nervous about the whole thing.
- skywhopper 2y agoThe “people in charge” ie career government employees who refused to comply were walked out by security and fired. The political “people in charge” are lackeys of Trump and Musk, and they’re the ones who insisted on handing over the credentials.
- 2y ago
- cdme 2y agoFascist othering in the digital age.
- zer8k 2y ago[flagged]
- TylerE 2y agoThis is _actual, for real, fascism.
- TimTheTinker 2y ago[flagged]
- TylerE 2y agoGiving their billionaire buddies feee reign on us government systems does
- TimTheTinker 2y ago[flagged]
- mmcwilliams 2y agoThis doesn't appear to be strictly what is happening. Musk posted on Twitter yesterday that he "deleted" the group 18F. That is neither an examination, a report or a recommendation.
- TimTheTinker 2y agoI think he's overstating what he's actually doing for political points. The group is not deleted - but he's recommending such an action to Trump. https://www.barrons.com/advisor/articles/elon-musk-18f-irs-direct-file-0f61fff3 https://www.barrons.com/advisor/articles/elon-musk-18f-irs-d...
- philipLutz 2y agoFind and replace "Equity" with "1337"?
- tdeck 2y agoIt would be interesting to see folks align on new words to mean the same thing.
- trhway 2y agoHow it was done when GitHub didn't exist yet - my uncle's story about his time in the school in USSR : Children, open the history book at page 54, you see the photo titled "Soviet Marshal, Hero of Revolution ...". Now take the ink bottle and pour the ink over that photo as he is an enemy of the people.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoIt's still that way in China -- I saw high school or college textbooks with pages glued together or removed.
- qingcharles 2y agoThese developers have had to drop whatever projects they were working on to go back to previous code and spend time finding all of this, just to keep their jobs. Then they have to redeploy new versions everywhere, which also carries a significant cost. Really frustrating.
- ryandrake 2y agoThis seems just as ridiculous and frustrating as a few years ago, dropping whatever they're doing to remove "master" and "whitelisting" from the code. Different team, same silliness.
- amarcheschi 2y agoExcept that replacing "master" with "main" probably didn't affect the lives of people subject to systemic discrimination. This might do
- lucasyvas 2y agoI agree with the parent comment, but believe you have the more correct and important perspective in the current context. They are both probably forms of overcorrection, this too far in the wrong direction where the former could have been too far in the more ideal direction. Pandering is not as bad as discrimination, as you’ve pointed out.
- pipes 2y agoIt does not seem fair to me to exclude or include people in financial aid programs based on the colour of their skin. Individual circumstances seems like a much fairer and much less divisive system.
- amarcheschi 2y agoI hope that this was valued in accordance to other values. Eg. A rich black kid in Washington probably wouldn't be eligible to receive this grants, while a poor white kid in Kentucky would. I also hope that "systemic discrimination" would take into account more than just skin color
- throwaway_2494 2y ago[flagged]
- biddit 2y agoYou're assessing them with the wrong criteria. You don't hire architects to execute a demolition and you also don't hire anyone heavily invested in keeping the building standing. But you DO hire people loyal to you to perform the work, who will receive staunch opposition the latter group of people.
- Hizonner 2y agoIf you hired Trump's idiots to handle a demolition, they would: 1. Bring the building down on their own heads, with bystanders inside. 2. Destabilize the neighboring buildings to the point where they also had to be demolished. 3. Flood the site and cause a giant gas leak.
- dmonitor 2y ago4. Use the self-made catastrophe as evidence that more buildings are dangerous and need to be demolished
- cantstopmenow 2y ago4. Pat yourself on the back while people complaining about egg prices cheer as their kids die of measles.
- anigbrowl 2y agoIt's a mistake to dismiss them all as idiots. MAGA people have very different values from you, and you need to consider the possibility that they are comeptent and malicious.
- 0x3444ac53 2y agoSeconding this. Their reasoning is unsound to the point of comedy, their arguments are nonsense, they have a fundamental misunderstanding of science, technology, society, etc. Because they don't fucking care. They have an agenda. Sometimes it's rooted in bigotry, religion, or just antisocial beliefs, but they have an agenda and they can (and will, and are) execute it.
- belter 2y ago"..The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward..." - Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf (1925)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- skywhopper 2y agoAfter years of nonsense complaints about non-existent “cancel culture” and “censorship” campaigns, here we have the real thing happening right in front of our eyes. Literal “forbidden” words being deleted from government documents and already-published material. This is truly disgusting, disturbing, and vile.
- 1shooner 2y agoI don't support any of this reactionary nonsense, but there are certainly lists of forbidden words that grew along with the DEI movement. Of course they were forbidden for different (I'd say better) reasons, but it was ultimately also asserting power through control of language.
- cantstopmenow 2y agoHow much of that accompanied foreign dissolution of Congressionally-mandated institutions?
- azernik 2y agoHow much of that was actually removed in a crash effort, and how much was just fliers saying "please use this other word in the future"?
- dragonwriter 2y ago> the DEI movement. "DEI" is not a movement, it is just a rebranding of Affirmative Action to emphasize the goals and break the association with (long explicitliy illegal, but often popularly associated with Affirmative Action) quota systems.
- tbrownaw 2y agoI don't recall AA coming with affinity groups and explicit celebration and centering of differences.
- thrwthsnw 2y agoIt’s kind of lame that these guys are blacklisting words based on some master list. Normally these things get grandfathered in but I guess they’re just blindly following orders after getting sold down the river. It seems like an insane waste of manpower if you ask me. I’d hate to be the low man on the totem pole slaving away at this kind of bitchwork and getting ragged on by the bossman if I missed a word.
- hk1337 2y agoSeems like it's just a PR for removing it from the government website? Also, looks like they're adding a deletedAt field and soft deleting items in the database rather than hard delete.
- Hizonner 2y ago> Seems like it's just a PR for removing it from the government website? As a new crash priority ordered from outside by people who have probably never heard of the project. Not disruptive or anything. That's definitely how you manage a large organization. Oh, and this particular "PR" does nothing to aid anybody or improve anything. There's that, too. > Also, looks like they're adding a deletedAt field and soft deleting items in the database rather than hard delete. Protecting themselves in case it gets rolled back, I imagine. When you get toddlers in charge, you can expect new "crash priority" rule changes on a daily basis, so you learn to prepare.
- crooked-v 2y agoThe word "just" there is doing a lot to gloss over the absurdity of government workers ordered to censor the word 'equity' instead of doing actual work.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoSeems like there are more important things to do than code clean up
- lucasyvas 2y agoIndeed - doesn’t seem very “Efficiency” based does it.
- jjkaczor 2y ago"Land of the free" != "Forbidden words & phrases".
- TimTheTinker 2y ago"Forbidden words & phrases" is a pragmatic way to express "how to follow orders at this moment", but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison against worldview-level ideals like "land of the free". One could just as easily say that removing phrases like "final solution" is against freedom -- which it clearly isn't.
- tehjoker 2y agobased redditors are now in control of trillions of critical infrastructure. surely this will go well and not result in untold damage and predictable backfire
- wwweb 2y ago[flagged]
- mikrotikker 2y agoSuch people were already banned from Reddit for thought crimes
- sweeter 2y agoOkay 404, its evil that you put a fake hair on the github screenshot lmao... Side note, I really don't give a single shit what anyone thinks about Diversity equity and Accessibility initiatives (though, I do think being opposed to requiring businesses to have wheel chair ramps and such, comically cruel) I don't know how anyone can support having 18 year old randoms having access to Federal databases and direct access to the governments pocket book, and support going far past judicial processes to illegally gut the minuscule, nearly non-existent, social safety nets that we do have. Idk how anyone in their right mind can say the wealthy deserve a trampoline, and everyone else can't even get a safety net.
- cantstopmenow 2y ago[flagged]
- pizzafeelsright 2y agoI can support a diverse (young) and diverse (unknown, hired from the outside) team. If the database is so insecure that anyone from Texas can just walk in, I would hope we find a way to secure our data. I would assume a full audit is taking place. If not then demand it. We cannot allow people to spend our taxes without oversight.
- pc86 2y agoPlease don't lump accessibility in with DEI. Accessibility is a noble goal that most everybody agrees with. DEI is, at best, an extremely divisive thing that millions of people disagree with and voted against. Lumping them together is an attempt to save DEI by attaching it to A when they have nothing to do with each other. DEI is very new and A has been around for quite a long time at this point.
- tdeck 2y agoThis is only true if you ignore everything about the history and present of the movement for accessibility and disability rights.
- 2y ago
- tidus532 2y agoThe Remove DEI project the article has an open pr to revert the changes: https://github.com/HHS/Head-Start-TTADP/pull/2617 https://github.com/HHS/Head-Start-TTADP/pull/2617 Would have been nice if the article mentioned that.
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- everybodyknows 2y agoA concurrent parallel in the private sphere: I see today that all the pride/heritage weeks or months have disappeared from my Google Calendar. Digging into Settings (on desktop web) reveals options to turn on "Regional" and "Global religious" holidays e.g. "Start of Ramadan" -- but apparently no way whatever to recover the disappeared -- not even via menu button "Browse calendars of interest".
- Devilspawn666 2y ago[flagged]
- mehh 2y ago> In the UK people were arrested for saying thay all lives mattered. ahh just seen your account was just created, so wasting my time, but no, no one in the UK was arrested for saying that.
- bsimpson 2y agoI'm sure how the government functions on a technological level qualifies for "things hackers might find interesting," but the comments on these Trump/DOGE-reactionary threads are really disappointing. Too many of them are just signaling the author's ideological affiliations without adding anything substantive/curiosity-inspiring.
- Fraterkes 2y agoIf someone sharing their view on an issue isn't curiosity-inspiring to you, isn't that mostly an indication of your own incuriosity
- zachanderson 2y ago[dead]
- Devilspawn6666 2y ago[flagged]
- n4r9 2y ago> In the UK people were arrested for just saying that all lives ma*ered. Any reference for that? And why start out the t's?
- Devilspawn6666 2y agoYou could try a 2 sec search... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/two-arrests-police-say-all-4224240.amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bris... There was also another case where the police launched an investigation, which by itself is ridiculous: https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2020/6/23/uk-police-investigating-white-lives-matter-banner-over-stadium https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2020/6/23/uk-police-investi...
- Volundr 2y agoYour link talks about two people being arrested at a protest of 300, presumably for being involved in one of the "minor scuffles" mentioned. Not for saying "All lives matter". Or are you really suggesting that at an "All lives matter" protest these two were the only ones saying it?
- n4r9 2y agoBut are there any cases where someone was arrested for saying all lives matter?
- Angostura 2y ago> In the UK people were arrested for just saying that all lives ma*ered. You need to have a think about how you were convinced of that, and who told you it. because it isn’t true.
- LorenzoGood 2y agosrc/migrations/20250122205314-definitionally-dirty-work.js Is funny.
- pc86 2y agoAnd renamed, somebody got yelled at.
- peterfication 2y agohttps://github.com/HHS/Head-Start-TTADP/commit/8b808fd713749c23c69d00df1432219a16b3e3be https://github.com/HHS/Head-Start-TTADP/commit/8b808fd713749...
- sagolikasoppor 2y agoSo when we have to use main instead of master everyone is fine with it but now it's bad to purge words? I think this is great news. Well done Trump & co.
- kobelb 2y agoThis is false equivalence. Not using the phrase master was meant to create a more inclusive environment.
- Animats 2y agoWhat does the "paranoid = true" flag in there do?
- daft_pink 2y agoWhy has hacker news turned into politics central :(
- jefurii 2y agoYou could've just skipped over this page, but you're here commenting. Just sayin'
- daft_pink 2y agoit's cause my rss reader has like 10 articles about trump today from hn.... most of them flagged though.
- sanderjd 2y agoBecause of the inauguration a couple weeks ago. That's how it goes. Don't worry, it will settle down. And also: There are an unusually larger number of actual HN angles going on in this particular new administration. This article is clearly relevant to this forum, and so is the recent Wired article about the DOGE employees.
- Fraterkes 2y agoBecause it is part of the world
- saagarjha 2y agoBecause software engineers are being asked to perform political decisions.
- notfed 2y agoYeah this is really not the right article to complain about such a thing lol
- pc86 2y agoSoftware engineers who work for the federal government are being told (not asked) to follow a lawful executive order from a democratically elected President. They don't really have a choice in the matter.
- zX41ZdbW 2y agoHere is a way to monitor these changes in real-time: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIGNyZWF0ZWRfYXQsICdodHRwczovL2dpdGh1Yi5jb20vJ3x8cmVwb19uYW1lfHwnL2lzc3Vlcy8nfHxudW1iZXIgQVMgdXJsLCBldmVudF90eXBlLCBhY3Rvcl9sb2dpbiwgcmVwb19uYW1lLCB0aXRsZSBGUk9NIGdpdGh1Yl9ldmVudHMgV0hFUkUgbWF0Y2godGl0bGUsICdcXGJERUlcXGInKSBPUkRFUiBCWSBjcmVhdGVkX2F0IERFU0M= https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIGNyZWF0Z... The SQL query: SELECT created_at, 'https://github.com/'||repo_name||'/issues/'||number AS url, event_type, actor_login, repo_name, title FROM github_events WHERE match(title, '\\bDEI\\b') ORDER BY created_at DESC
- pdimitar 2y agoWait... HOW?!
- idunnoman1222 2y agoWell, it went too far in one direction and now it’s gonna go too far and the other direction and I guess the only people we have to blame and the only ones who care are the ones who cared
- danbmil99 2y agoHere's a thought: laid-off tech workers should encript every database and hold the keys for ransom. Or just until these jokers are nullified.
- pc86 2y agoIs "Here's a thought: commit crimes" really the thing you're trying to say here? What exactly does "nullified" mean in this context?
- tdeck 2y agoThat would probably cause the kind of chaos the administration is trying to create in order to justify shutting down and privatizing these agencies.
- moi2388 2y agoGood. The racism under the guise of DEI was insane.
- notfed 2y agoI struggle to connect what's described in this article to preventing racism. Care to explain?
- moi2388 2y agoIn itself not much. But that’s what the executive order to remove DEI is about, and this isa symptom of it. I think meritocracies are good, and racism in all forms are bad.
- latexr 2y agoSay there are two kids: little Billy and little Cody. Billy has been pampered all his life. He was from a rich family who gave him everything, including the best education. He had ample free time to be a kid. He was personally escorted to school on a horse and had private tutors on call. His final grade was 80/100. Cody lived in the slums. His family barely got money to eat most days. Cody had to work to help support his family but through struggle was still able to attend school. He had to do his homework on the bus. His life was full of hardship and out of necessity he did little else than work and study. His final grade was 79/100. One day they both apply for the same job. The employer says “Well, grades don’t lie. I’m sorry Cody, but I’ll hire Billy”. How is that a meritocracy? The goal of these initiatives is not to give an unfair advantage to other groups, it’s to even the playing field and combat the systemic bias. If you are truly for meritocracies and are able to see past what’s right in front of your nose, you’ll realise the status quo is inherently racist. To live in a true meritocracy you have to mitigate multiple generations of harm.
- properpopper 2y ago> He was from a rich family who gave him everything, including the best education. He had ample free time to be a kid. He was personally escorted to school on a horse and had private tutors on call. > His family barely got money to eat most days. Cody had to work to help support his family but through struggle was still able to attend school. He had to do his homework on the bus. His life was full of hardship and out of necessity he did little else than work and study. Cool narrative building, but this information should not matter for the employer, because that particular employer selects candidates based on grades - I see no issues with it Your comment is also implies that a kid from a rich family should have higher grades, but it's flawed - who has more motivation to achieve something? Also between "rich" and "poor" families there are a lot of kids from "medium" families, what about them?