LWN: Comments on "Garrett: What is hacker culture?"

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

Rudd-O — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 22:10:18 +0000

Grass house = Snoop Dogg's dwelling.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

Rudd-O — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 22:09:14 +0000

that by being nice human beings -- the SJW challenge to raise your game up to being excellent to each other --

That's what they *say* they want. And, to their credit, I don't doubt many want that. But it's a bad idea to evaluate ideas based solely on what someone says. Look at what they do. When you look at their behavior, it's all about being excellent to each other *in their tribe*, while simultaneously bullying and threatening anyone who doesn't fall in line with their political desires, or questions the validity of their beliefs.

Just one tiny example among hundreds.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

Rudd-O — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 22:03:00 +0000

Garrett is projecting there. There are plenty of people out there able to assign merit with little to no bias. There's a distribution of bias among people that does not validate Garrett's "original sin" belief.

Garrett's contributions are invaluable to open source, free software, and information security. His contributions in the domain of "social justice", however...

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

nix — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 23:06:50 +0000

In hindsight, this was an early indication that this was a person more interested in being right than in finding out the truth. (We have had ever so many signs since then. I didn't think I'd ever killfile the guy, but I've got him killfiled or blocked on every social media site we're both members of by this point.)

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

mjg59 — Sat, 12 Dec 2015 03:55:32 +0000

The aesthetic qualities are frequently the most significant parts of a changeset - whether it's perceived as being stylistically consistent, whether it's considered to be easily readable, whether it's thought of as an elegant solution. But these are things that different people are going to perceive in very different ways. There's no absolute scale to measure these factors on, any more than there's a "correct" ordering of the entirety of cinematic history by quality. You can't measure merit in a generic way, and therefore aiming to optimise it is already an aesthetic judgement rather than a real qualitative (let alone quantitative) one.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

ksandstr — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 23:59:32 +0000

>A key problem with that is that there's this myth that one can actually evaluate said "merit" for a contribution rationally, impassionately, and logically.

>We can't.

But that's wrong. A changeset to a program can be studied for its functional properties (quality of implementation, architectural impact, etc.) for both qualitative (not/present, 0/1) and quantitative measurements. The aesthetic properties of a changeset's result may be similarly studied, much as literary, musical, theatrical, etc. critique exists. These properties are the merit of the changeset, and this merit makes up part of its submitter's proven capability, i.e. concrete merit.

In this way, any other contribution that can be measured by means which provide for a discussion, i.e. not mere matters of taste in the absence of tie-breaking authority, is a valid source of merit. Conversely full touchy-feely contributions such as (for example) language policing are, when judged by their proponents' criteria, unmeritable; and their opponents' critique proves them worse than neutral.

>But until we realize that the other parts are also part of the discourse, we'll not get anywhere.

Pray tell: what are these other parts, and how would you define them in terms of measurable properties? Because until then, we'll quite literally go nowhere in the direction you'd want.

> Pray tell: if you can't define "merit", what is your meritocracy worth? ;-)

The definition of merit given above is worth only all the quantifiable progress that mankind has ever made, for better or worse. Please feel free to propose an improved derivative or a different option altogether, one besides some Tea Party tier of argument from ignorance or wishful thinking.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

ksandstr — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 23:46:08 +0000

>Because if it's not measured, it's irrelevant?

No. If measurements show it isn't there, then it's irrelevant in the context of measurement. If it's impossible to measure by its characterization alone, then it exists only as component of a necessarily false hypothesis. Both imply that it's _bunk_.

The touchy-feelie academics have been ruminating this stuff for decades now, and have yet to come up with an argument that's substantially different from the Marxist theory of "false consciousness" -- i.e. that God exists, and disagreement can only come from lack of spiritual (non-rational) enlightenment among the unwashed. Unsurprisingly those arguments are seen in conjunction to barely-veiled plays for power. "Listen and believe", said the priest, "and you'll be saved", but don't bleeding dare point out that it's the priest talking and having us do for him. Cui bono?

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

bronson — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 07:30:31 +0000

Do you honestly not understand the difference? I'm guessing you actually do know the difference and are trolling for a response. No idea why you'd want to though.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

elvis_ — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 13:36:52 +0000

I'm a white man and have had no problems previously being called that. But now that everything is offensive I'll be fucked if I will sit back and refuse to take offense.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

alison — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 18:53:49 +0000

>That's why I hate the PC brigade - all to often they want to ban the language of discrimination / bias / whatever >so we can't discuss the problem

I agree. I join these discussions just because, post-Adria-Richards, I know that I can say things that men might fear could cost them their jobs. I do fear that this issue, like other politically contentious ones, has reached the point where individuals seeking 'followers' and advocacy groups seeking funding may benefit by fanning flames. That level of controversy hurts everyone but the flamers.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

rgmoore — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 21:47:48 +0000

Mostly in the long tail of less frequently used words.

I wouldn't be surprised if you could do something similar with code, even if if you stripped comments and ran it through a format program.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

shmget — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 20:21:47 +0000

"Do that for a significant number of clues, and you'll end up with a good idea as to someone's sex. The problem, of course, is having access to enough clues ... :-)"

The problem is wasting a significant amount of effort to try to get an irrelevant information.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

Wol — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 18:34:35 +0000

> A big part of getting past this argument about bias is acknowledging that we are, all of us, biased. Admitting that doesn't make you a bad person: it just makes you normal.

+100 !!!

This, imho, is the KEY way of dealing with this sort of stuff. That's why I hate the PC brigade - all to often they want to ban the language of discrimination / bias / whatever so we can't discuss the problem, and then they assume it's gone away ...

Cheers,
Wol

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

Wol — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 18:32:04 +0000

> Yes, it's incredibly easy to tell men from women! That must be why I'm mistaken for female at least once a year somewhere on the net (in those fora where posting with a name that isn't your own is even possible :( and my normal netname, this one, is somewhat ambiguous, in that it is normally a *surname*, mostly in the German-speaking world, and thus is effectively gender-ambiguous).

I never said it was perfect :-) I didn't realise dskoll was a woman until she outed herself, either.

And please, I said an AI could do it. Mind you, that means that autistic people should be able to do it too :-)

I never rely on names, anyway. My knee-jerk reaction to the name "Robin" is it's a bloke (think Robin Hood). But to most Americans, it'll be a woman. And I've got a friend Robyn, who is a woman. I think most women here spell the name that way, to distinguish it from the male form.

> I think what you're actually identifying is 'diffident people' and/or people who prefer not to engage in flamewars or repost already-provided information, and assuming that all such people are female. This is not true. Even if it might be a stereotype that is often correct, that very much is not universally so.

No. Take a bunch of people, split them into half based on "diffident or assertive", and it's a pretty safe bet that the proportion of men (relative to the original) in the assertive group will be higher, and likewise women in the diffident group. Do that for a significant number of clues, and you'll end up with a good idea as to someone's sex. The problem, of course, is having access to enough clues ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

Wol — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 18:23:58 +0000

Thank you thank you thank you :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

nye — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 11:32:46 +0000

>However, I'm not aware that there are significant differences between genders.

Here you go: http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-fin...

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

pabs — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 09:57:45 +0000

That time is not wasted because there will be other people watching (some inexperienced) and learning the right way to do things.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

Cyberax — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 06:43:02 +0000

Distinguishing different writers is easy. If you analyze a large enough corpus of material then you'd see clear differences between people. Mostly in the long tail of less frequently used words.

However, I'm not aware that there are significant differences between genders.

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

bronson — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 05:26:43 +0000

Paragraph #3 should be pinned to the top of this comment stream. Absolutely right.

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

shmget — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 05:16:16 +0000

Hear, hear....

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

rahulsundaram — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 05:14:06 +0000

>But don't make the mistake of assuming that your desired outcome is shared by everyone (or indeed, anyone) else.

It isn't personal. We have years of experience with FOSS projects at this point. We can reasonably draw conclusions as a community on what works generally by our past successes and failures.

>To circle back to the point I've been trying to make, if you want someone to perform some work, you'll get far better results if there's some sort of mutually beneficial outcome;

Sure. One example of being inclusive is criticizing the contributions and offering suggestions to improve it rather than criticizing the person. Assuming you are interested in getting contributions at all, you are more likely to get the desired outcome by taking one approach over the other.

> ..incidentally, someone saying "no, I'm not interested in doing that" is a perfectly reasonable response.

It is definitely better than no response at all.

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

pizza — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 04:53:10 +0000

> If you put up a FOSS project and ignore for example, every single bug report, you are free to do that too. This discussion isn't about what you have the right to do but what approaches work better broadly.

I don't think anyone will dispute that for any given desired outcome, some approaches work better than others. But don't make the mistake of assuming that your desired outcome is shared by everyone (or indeed, anyone) else.

To circle back to the point I've been trying to make, if you want someone to perform some work, you'll get far better results if there's some sort of mutually beneficial outcome; ie something to make the requested effort worthwhile to the person undertaking it.

...incidentally, someone saying "no, I'm not interested in doing that" is a perfectly reasonable response.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

spaetz — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 04:45:05 +0000

Yes, there are systems distinguishing men from women through text analysis. Wol, don' t you remember Florian Müller using this to "proof" that Groklaws PJ was in fact a team of lawyers rather than a singke individual? Unfortunately, i cannot find the Link right now.

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

rahulsundaram — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 03:24:22 +0000

> The benefit may come in the form of warm fuzzies, resume fodder, or even cold hard cash -- But make no mistake, "Inclusion" is work, just like "support" is work.

Right. Writing code, translating content, artwork, bug triaging, marketing your project etc is work too.

>Just because I had the audacity to release software under a F/OSS license ("in the hope that it will be useful but with no warranty whatsoever") doesn't give anyone the right to demand I perform uncompensated work on their behalf.

If you put up a FOSS project and ignore for example, every single bug report, you are free to do that too. This discussion isn't about what you have the right to do but what approaches work better broadly.

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

pizza — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 02:48:17 +0000

> You're setting up a false dilemma by saying it has to be one or the other.

Not at all.

Perhaps the biggest fallacy in the Bazaar model is that there's this endless supply of capable volunteers who are willing to work for free -- Which is utter BS. Everyone in the Bazaar is there, first and foremost, to serve their own self-interests -- "X amount of work results in Y benefit to me"

Because even in the best of times, "Inclusion" requires a considerable amount of work, and at the end of the day, there's only so much energy to go around. Where do *you* focus *your* limited personal efforts? Making the software do the things you need or care about, or on fostering "Inclusion", whatever the other person(s) happen to define that term as on any given day?

In order to sell me (or anyone else) on performing work I wasn't inclined to undertake, you have to put it in terms of terms of benefit to me personally. The benefit may come in the form of warm fuzzies, resume fodder, or even cold hard cash -- But make no mistake, "Inclusion" is work, just like "support" is work.

Just because I had the audacity to release software under a F/OSS license ("in the hope that it will be useful but with no warranty whatsoever") doesn't give anyone the right to demand I perform uncompensated work on their behalf.

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

viro — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 02:12:42 +0000

His most famous article is complete bullshit. He needed to explain how comes that Linux development doesn't produce a disaster. He came up with a hypothesis and set out to verify it, by setting up a project (fetchmail) ran in a way that should have avoided a disaster according to his hypothesis. Then he had produced a paper describing the original question, his hypothesis and experiment he'd done, reporting that experiment as successful confirmation of hypothesis. What he had failed to report was that the result of experiment had successfully *falsified* the hypothesis in question - fetchmail is exactly the festering pile of shit his technics was supposed to avoid. Unsurprisingly, IMO, due to the lack of somebody with decent taste at the head of that project...

Then he proceeded to trumpet his contribution to the field of software engineering to hell and back. When questioned about the, er, discrepancy between the predicted and actual results, reply was basically "I'm not interested in fetchmail anymore"...

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

rgmoore — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 01:51:09 +0000

So what's more important? Inclusion, or Accomplishment?

You're setting up a false dilemma by saying it has to be one or the other. That what the whole point of CATB in the first place: you can take a huge team of volunteer developers from around the world, and they can compete with the supposedly elite developers from established industries. In the Bazaar model, code quality is supposed to come from parallelized testing and bug finding, not from requiring maximum quality from each individual contribution. That's why it's so ironic to see ESR on the side saying that code quality must take precedence over inclusion; it's exactly the opposite of what he said in his most famous article.

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

viro — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:39:55 +0000

... except that there had been fairly loud claims that (a) everyone has hidden biases (nevermind that presumed biases tend to be culture-specific - they are elevated to something eternal and universal anyway); (b) for that reason it is impossible to fairly estimate the worth of specific contribution, no matter what; (c) anyone rejecting things on their presumed merits is just hiding their biases and thus (d) any talk of doing so is a power-play in disguise.

I can show you examples of such claims, and you can easily find them yourself, for that matter.

Personally, I think that talk of meritocracy is an attempt to put an importantly-sounding theory on fairly obvious things that do not need that. Similar to "bazaar" bullshit - fitting reality into ideology. However, the reality *is* there and aforementioned claims are not attacking the wanking ideologues like ESR - they are providing lovely excuses to every luser out there, along with letting the holy warriors (spit) to feel less worthless than they actually are.

<satire>
You don't like that your code isn't accepted as-is? Claim that They(tm) are being biased; why, everyone knows that _this_ is what's hiding behind the so-called technical reasons. Your code is Good(tm), and if somebody disagrees, they are not nice, being mean, etc. And if somebody else confirms the problems, tell them off for ganging up upon you [hopefully, I'm not violating the copyright here]. Why, it's their holy duty to be welcoming and fix whatever these lowly peasants find not to their liking, after having taken that as is. Or let an intern do the same. In any case, bothering you with such issues means creating a hostile environment. Bullying. Which is sooo unprofessional - why, in professional environment you would just complain to their managers and have them STFU, take it and pretend they liked the whole thing.
</satire>

In case if you think that the imitation above is inaccurate, I can refer you to examples right on this site. Or you can search yourself - there's enough characteristic expressions in the previous paragraph...

_That_ is what's being encouraged by "anti-meritocracy" crowd. I don't give a damn about the purity of any ideology (be it randian or identity), but please stop pretending that it's all about not being horrible to people. Of course ESR is a twit in eternal search of ideologically acceptable explanation of how the things work - with the integrity fit for the highest government positions. And yes, he'll gladly spew forth explanations why being an obnoxious twit is Good(tm), so he's very easy to troll into providing a foil for that bunch. Unfortunately, there's considerably more going on, starting with active attack on the notion that technical reasons are anything other than a rationalizing disguise for powerplay ;-/

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

nix — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 22:48:04 +0000

Yes, it's incredibly easy to tell men from women! That must be why I'm mistaken for female at least once a year somewhere on the net (in those fora where posting with a name that isn't your own is even possible :( and my normal netname, this one, is somewhat ambiguous, in that it is normally a *surname*, mostly in the German-speaking world, and thus is effectively gender-ambiguous).

I think what you're actually identifying is 'diffident people' and/or people who prefer not to engage in flamewars or repost already-provided information, and assuming that all such people are female. This is not true. Even if it might be a stereotype that is often correct, that very much is not universally so.

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

nix — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 22:42:03 +0000

That they say they are meritocratic is not relevant here. That they do not use 'meritocratic' as a reason to be horrible to people because 'the code is all that counts' is what is relevant.

(I don't see how anyone arguing in good faith cannot see this unless they are viewing the conversation through a microscope, but perhaps you've forgotten how the thread started?)

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

pizza — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 22:09:06 +0000

> Those are not mutually exclusive. Lots of projects have both.

I don't dispute that assertion, but this whole thing is about setting priorities.

So what's more important? Inclusion, or Accomplishment?

IMO those priorities do change based on the project type/scale/lifecycle, there's no one-size-fits-all answer that's universally true.

(And yes, I realize that greater inclusion *may* lead to greater accomplishment. But if we're being honest, it may also lead to less...)

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

shmget — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 22:04:02 +0000

"Openoffice.org in the past vs LibreOffice now etc."

TDF Statute §2 "Object of the foundation"
(2) "The foundation furthers and supports a sustainable, independent and _meritocratic_ community..." (emph added)

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

broonie — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 20:19:36 +0000

That's one of the reasons why it's best practice for a code of conduct to not only talk about the conduct but also about how any issues will be handled - it really doesn't make that much difference if there's no teeth.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

Wol — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 19:45:42 +0000

> As far as I am aware, this sort of text classification systems have already been made. I do not know how reliable they are, however.

And, while Al says I make "squishy philosophical" claims, the fact is that most of these things I say, I HAVE SEEN claims that people HAVE DONE IT. Okay, I can't be sure that the reports are correct (and I can't be sure that my memory is correct :-), but I can state that I am confident, in my own mind, that I have seen credible reports that these things have been done.

And after all, isn't the CORRECT scientific response to outlandish claims to say "that's weird". What the true scientist NEVER does (which is what most people DO do :-) is to dismiss stuff that disagrees with their prejudices as impossible.

And yes, the reports I have seen is that, given a decent amount of text, it is incredibly easy to tell men from women. Even at a very gross level, men tend to be assertive, women tend to be diffident, and that shows in their writing. You don't need very many different TYPES of clues before clusters start appearing and correlations become evident.

And for nationality, there are a whole bunch of clues that enable me to recognise what (European) nationality people are. It helps that I can speak (for various definitions of fluency) one language in almost every major language group.

Okay, Al may be a hotch-potch that is difficult to analyse - I probably am too :-) - but that doesn't alter the fact that it's reasonably easy, given a decent amount of data, to group people together in assorted categories. After all, isn't that the definition of targeted advertising? And aren't the advertisers' algorithms reasonably good at this?

Cheers,
Wol

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

rahulsundaram — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 19:10:52 +0000

>Those are not mutually exclusive. Lots of projects have both.

It goes further. Any project that is nice, fun and inclusive is likely to have a lot more contributors (and contributions) than one which is technically pretty competent but otherwise off-putting. C.f. Glibc in the past vs now. Openoffice.org in the past vs LibreOffice now etc.

Social Justice Warrior - hard working defender or frothing zealot?

bronson — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 18:54:27 +0000

> So what's more important, a "nice, inclusive, fun" place, or one that actually accomplishes something?

Those are not mutually exclusive. Lots of projects have both.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

ovitters — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 16:46:38 +0000

In various projects this has been discussed endlessly before any implementation. A large factor in a CoC is that you have an indicator what kind of behaviour you expect. There's way too much focus on after-the-fact enforcement. A CoC mostly avoids things beforehand.

FWIW, I've removed people from mailing lists and Bugzilla without any issue. Not understand why that would be an issue? Though removing/banning people really is of last resort. Do everything you can not to! In practice it is a good guideline and helps to allow people to non-aggressively approach other people. E.g. the "dude you signed this CoC but don't you think your email/comment is not abiding by it?". I've gotten those (not proud)!

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

jond — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 16:38:43 +0000

> In Gowen's case, saying white men was very much a slur if he intended it or not.

I don't believe it is a slur nor is it intended as one. He was describing the aggregate-perception of the Linux developer community as personified in that photograph. I do sometimes see the expression "white men" used in a negative sense, but I don't think this was one of those times.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

jond — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 16:22:17 +0000

> Perhaps it's self-selecting, the more reasonable ones describe themselves using different terminology...

I know of few people who embrace the term SJW (Matt would be one), which was invented as a perjorative and is applied to a variety of people who otherwise would not necessarily describe themselves with that term. The problem I have with the term is it seems to be used as a convenient way to label someone and draw comparisons with the stereotype (really, a straw-man) so that whatever they are saying or doing can be dismissed entirely.

Garrett: What is hacker culture?

rgmoore — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 16:12:31 +0000

What's that expression about throwing rocks in glass houses?

He that lives in a glass house among you, let him first cast a stone at her.