
“There is, unfortunately, no such thing as a truly neutral stance on inclusion” - samber
https://lobste.rs/s/nf3xgg/i_am_leaving_llvm#c_ubyrb0
======
dang
All: if you're going to comment in a thread like this, please re-read the site
guidelines first:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Then you'll know to assume good faith, to make your comments _more_ civil and
substantive as the topic gets more divisive, to avoid name-calling, and to
respond charitably.

HN's rules exist for deep reasons based on many years of working with
community dynamics. If you break them, you contribute nothing to resolving any
social issue—all it does is rile up the other side and fan flames—but you do
contribute to destroying this community. That's bad for all of us.

If you're feeling like venting about how wrong or bad someone is, don't post
right away; pause until the needle goes out of the red. Then review your post
and edit out any bits that still break the guidelines. That's what I do, and
it's the only way I know to make this place work ok.

Hacker News is large enough that it lives in a precarious state: the forces
that tear an online community apart grow with size and win by default. If HN's
health points go to zero, it dies as a place for thoughtful discussion, so
please take care with the health points.

~~~
Mithaldu
Reading this has made me find words i've been looking for for months now, and
maybe you will at least see these, hopefully even think about them:

As an idealistic goal your policies are great. In practice however i find they
sorely underestimate the differential in effort required between:

\- someone who has to censor their earnest thoughts preemptively to not be
censured by you

and

\- a troll gleefully dressing up words they know will hurt in dressing nice
enough to fly under your radar

You're asking the former to spend a lot more time and work, than it takes the
latter, for whom it's a form of playing, a game they enjoy. I don't have a
solution, but i think it's true that your policies have a chilling influences
on earnest voices and are creating a community where trolls are very loud.

~~~
dang
It's impossible to reply to that in the abstract. I'd need to see links to
comments that you think are gleefully trolling while evading moderation.

~~~
Mithaldu
If i felt comfortable discussing that in public i'd already have done so.

My point is that the state of things here is silencing voices who simply stop
bothering to post, while you let toxic people and their posts remain after a
slap on the wrist.

~~~
dang
That is a risk we care about. But most people who make such claims turn out,
when you look at the specific examples they come up with, mostly to want HN to
be moderated to support their own side and penalize the other. Not
intentionally, of course, but when you unpack what most people call fair vs.
biased, that's what it amounts to. There are exceptions, but disappointingly
few.

Most people have a tendency to see commenters we disagree with as
disingenuous, the more so the more we disagree. This distorts perceptions. In
my experience moderating HN, disingenuous trolls exist, but are less common
than users misclassifying each other as such.

So while we're quite willing to moderate and ban accounts that abuse HN in the
way you describe—and indeed have done so—we need specific links to evaluate.
Otherwise the null hypothesis has to win.

------
alew1
Good response by aphyr. If I’m reading right, the original poster left because
LLVM partnered with an organization designed to create internship
opportunities for groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. In
particular, LLVM agreed to take on one intern from that organization.

Everyone is entitled to their own reasons for leaving. But I do find it
frustrating that the left gets saddled with names like “snowflake” when such
small & reasonable actions routinely ruffle feathers on the right.

~~~
garbagetoss
It is not a small or reasonable action to declare that judgements of
suitability to work with an organization will be made based on sex, race, and
other non-functional dimensions. The fact that large nations, corporations,
and universities routinely engage in this kind of behavior does not mean that
an as ethical individual one must acquiesce when others do so, especially when
that person feels it may be within their reach to potentially make a
difference.

It's frustrating that these sexist and racist policies have spread like a
cancer across our industry.

~~~
Letmesleep69
When we know we have unconscious biases to people who are of the same race,
gender and orientation and ourselves is it really unreasonable to take action
to try to counteract this? Especially for internships where there isn't even a
professional history to compare.

~~~
voidr
> we know we have unconscious biases to people who are of the same race

If that would be true, this wouldn't happen:

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-
tria...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-
improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888)

> Especially for internships where there isn't even a professional history to
> compare.

You give them a technical test and whoever scores the most wins, if they score
equally, you can pick at random.

~~~
foldr
And if it wasn't true, this wouldn't happen:

[https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-
leadership/2013/oct/14/...](https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-
leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias)

You can't conclude too much from an isolated example.

~~~
voidr
> You can't conclude too much from an isolated example.

You can conclude that the effects of implicit bias are not well understood and
maybe we should study it a little bit more before we treat it as absolute
truth and factor it into decision making.

~~~
foldr
I don't see how I could conclude anything about how well understood implicit
bias is from one or two examples of it materializing or failing to
materialize.

~~~
voidr
People thought they understood it, they started applying policies around it
and then their assumptions turned out to be false, hence me saying it's not
well understood.

------
bquinlan
I'm a friend of Rafael and talked to him just before he announced that he was
leaving LLVM.

I actually disagree with many of Rafael's political views but I think that
some of the comments in this discussion are unfair. For example, one poster
assumed that Rafael is a member of the right - he is actually a member of the
BC Green Party, which is firmly on the left.

The LLVM code of conduct requires that people be welcoming to others of any
religion. I don't want to share too much about Rafael's personal life but he
has reasons why that requirement is problematic. Consider that some religious
beliefs make women chattel that can be abused at the discretion of their
"owners".

~~~
mercer
I find it interesting how you make a jump from 'religion' to 'religious
beliefs'. I think the distinction is a very important one, and it bothers me a
ton that precisely the people who argue 'against' particular beliefs seem to
use the two as if they are synonyms.

------
forgottenpass
No, nothing is truly apolitical.

But in practice it's pretty easy to see that there is a subset of political
topics inherently tied to the subject at hand, and a subset of political
topics that would be ginormous scope creep. (e.g. a window manager caring
about colorblindness vs. a window manager endorsing a political candidate)

It's pretty obvious that the colloquial statements around "no politics" or
some form of "keeping politics out" is simply a way to express how much
appetite someone has for the gray zone between the two extremes described
above.

It frustrates me that the inability to completely disentangle something from
the political is used as a thin edge of a wedge that ends in (paraphrasing)
"...therefore your project should spend effort on all my pet political
issues." At worst it's a dishonest tactic, at best it shows someone's hubris
regarding their hobbyhorse.

------
naasking
It's a thought-provoking comment for sure, but it makes a number of invalid
inferences.

> This is not to say that your particular choices are wrong. It’s just you are
> already engaged in “non-technical”, political work

A non-technical choice does not entail a political choice. In particular, such
choices aren't always about managing "power", which is what politics is about.

> With limited time and resources, you will have to make tradeoffs in your
> code, documentation, and community about which people your software is
> supportive and hostile towards. [...] At the community development level,
> your intentional and forced choices around language, schedule, pronouns, and
> even technical terminology can make contributors from varying backgrounds
> feel welcome or unwelcome

I don't think this argument is sound. "Not supportive of" does not entail
"hostile". Choices surrounding language, schedule and technical jargon does
not entail how welcoming a community is.

This is an overly simplistic viewpoint that's typically indicative of a
conflict theory mentality, but is not how good open source projects typically
function. If you're ready and willing to be helpful:

1\. if you don't know the jargon, people often help you learn it

2\. if you don't fit the schedule, people will often help accommodate your
efforts

3\. if you don't speak the language, people who do will often assist, but if
no such person exists, then that's just an insurmountable problem given
limited resources

> Consider: you wish to take only the best developers, and yet your post has
> already discouraged good engineers from working on your project. Doubtless
> it has encouraged other engineers (who may be quite skilled!) with a similar
> political view to your own; those who believe, for instance, that current
> minority representation in tech is justified

This conclusion just doesn't follow. You can oppose some inclusion efforts in
tech and yet not accept that current minority representation is somehow
justified. The above argument blatantly begs the question that inclusion
efforts a priori ethically justified, except the ethics of such efforts is
precisely the dispute.

------
moomin
aphyr on point as usual.

One small point: could we get the title changed? This is a link to a response
to the original article, not the original article.

------
ddtaylor
This reminds me of certain developers being mad at Linus for his rants. Seems
unlikely anyone is going to care much and it's a lot of fuss for nothing.

------
qntty
Cache:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F05U7x...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F05U7xm2r1UJ:https://lobste.rs/s/nf3xgg/i_am_leaving_llvm+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

Original link: [http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-
dev/2018-May/122922.htm...](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-
dev/2018-May/122922.html)

------
fijal
One thing that is completely omitted in the discussion here is that Outreachy
is doing something based on your residency (if in US, different rules apply).
This is well within their rights, but I wonder how that part affects the
"diversity" stance - I would expect a black person from Africa to have
generally a much harder time in tech than an African American.

~~~
jonhendry18
"I would expect a black person from Africa to have generally a much harder
time in tech than an African American."

Possibly the reverse, if bias against African Americans is partly due to
preconceptions and stereotypes of African American culture. Black applicants
from outside the US might benefit from being perceived differently because
they don't fit into the existing stereotype.

------
youdontknowtho
There were some great comments on lobster.rs. The one about groups A, A', and
B was one of the best things I've read about this kind of thing in a while.

------
phyller
Was the original link to the original post, or was this always linking to the
response that it goes to now?

~~~
phyller
Ok, the title has been updated and it makes sense now.

------
snvzz
Sexist and racist codes of conduct do understandably make people
uncomfortable.

~~~
nAwYz
Could you explain what part of their code of conduct (
[https://github.com/llvm-
mirror/llvm/blob/master/docs/CodeOfC...](https://github.com/llvm-
mirror/llvm/blob/master/docs/CodeOfConduct.rst) ) is racist or sexist?

~~~
falcolas
I highly recommend also reading the "stick" part of the CoC - the reporting
guide.

A person who broke the CoC by snickering at the repeated use of the word
dongle; unless a permanent ban is the result, the accused can not appeal any
remedial actions taken against them. They are not even guaranteed to offer
their side of the story in the investigation.

This CoC, like most, puts the power entirely in the hands of the accuser; it
is very much the open source equivalent of a "binding arbitration" clause.

~~~
foldr
I don't follow your comment. The reporting guide doesn't say anything about
people snickering at 'dongle', and neither does the post we're commenting on.
I also don't see anything in the CoC that suggests that snickering at 'dongle'
would constitute a violation.

~~~
falcolas
There is a well documented precedent for this exact behavior being considered
to be sexual harassment and having negative effects on the accused'
professional life.

> reporting guide doesn't say anything

That's part of the problem: explicit behaviors are not called out, only the
effect they have on the accuser matters.

~~~
foldr
>There is a well documented precedent for this exact behavior being considered
to be sexual harassment

By which you mean there's exactly one instance of it having happened in a
completely different community (a Python conference) with a different CoC?

------
Harkins
Lobsters sysop here - we're having trouble keeping up with YC News's level of
traffic. We're not going to crash, but the unicorn worker pool is small enough
that lots of users are getting 500s. I'm adding some caching.

~~~
timmytwotime
Actually more interested in how you're handling this than the PC fight that's
breaking out around the thread.

~~~
Harkins
I'm not sure what you're asking for. If it helps,
[https://lobste.rs/about](https://lobste.rs/about) has some notes on the
community and [https://lobste.rs/moderations](https://lobste.rs/moderations)
has the log of moderator actions.

~~~
megaman22
Pretty sure this meant the technical details of dealing with the increased
traffic of the HN hug-of-death, rather than moderating policies.

~~~
Harkins
The "PC" made me think he was talking about political discussion, but I added
some caching in
[https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/commit/e99c0783aa386740...](https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/commit/e99c0783aa386740c754011e95270262c5523443)
and I'm thinking [https://github.com/rails/actionpack-
page_caching](https://github.com/rails/actionpack-page_caching) would be good
for logged-out users.

------
nialv7
Why do we allow first person titles? They are uninformative (who is I?), and
click-baity

~~~
magduf
I have to agree. "I am leaving LLVM" doesn't tell me much. It only made much
sense to me because I had already seen news article about this on another
site, which had a much more informative title.

It would be better to have the title be something like, "<name>: "I am leaving
LLVM" " (note the quotes around the first-person statement). It might also be
helpful to have it look like, "<name> (LLVM maintainer): "I am leaving LLVM" "

