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Comment by cloverich | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear, you're saying: "If large company x hires a single incompetent person, that is a good reason to never deal with said company again." I think that's the parents interpretation of OP and hence the "seems like a disproportionate response." (I agree it was absurd to flag the content).

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That's oversimplification. Even if it is just her own personal incompetence, if GitHub just hired her and let her loose as some kind of independent repo ombudsman to scold users, then yeah, that's a terrible management decision that warrants reconsidering your relationship with them.

We don't even know the whole story. The "woman" who sent the note is most likely just be an automated script.

Then apply the above-mentioned logic to the person/company that endorsed/approved said automated script.

The point is the same though. Resting a project's livelihood on a company that employed obviously incompetent process/humans/scripts is a risky move, and removing that livelihood from that company makes total sense.

It doesn't sound incompetent to me, there will always be false positives on that scale. Did they remove the OP's repo, or simply send them a message? If a legitimate email gets caught in your spam filter, do you switch email providers? Github and their process/humans/scripts don't sound like the incompetent ones in this scenario. I would be more concerned that my livelihood depended on such an over reactionary company.

"Hey boss,I tried cloning the Github repo of project X, but it says it can't be found, and I noticed our org page on Github is gone."

"Oh yeah, they sent us a message about the use of the word 'retard' in when referring to phase shifting."

"Oh, so they deleted our organization?"

"No."

"Oh? Well why can't I view it, weren't the projects public? What did you say to them?"

"I didn't say anything, I moved us to a different host."

You're injecting a lot of assumptions into your narrative.

My point is simply: if Github is flagging content based on perceived personal morals (not ever being allowed to use the word "retard," even in legitimate contexts), some choose not to associate their work with them.

And their bots hide "your profile from the public", when you are hit:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CpGcXmQXEAAyJU4.jpg:large

Even then, they still wrote the automation. It would be a prudent move to involve human review before emailing someone and accusing them of making a bigoted slur.

When there are numerous alternatives to GitHub why would I continue to use them? Clearly they were not putting the time and effort in to both train their employee and review the content (simply reading the sentence would give context), why bother dealing with them?

Also why as a code hosting service would they be getting involved with the politics of the content of projects they host?

Absurd being the key word. This isn't a simple misunderstanding we're talking about, it's a company employee using company time and resources (i.e. sanctioned by the larger company) for something that can charitably be described as misguided.

It raises questions about the internal company culture, their commitment to pragmatism (doubly important for a source code hosting site), and their priorities. Any developer could have told this person that a string match does not equal a linguistic match.

Small signals matter; they're usually all you get out of large orgs.

People who represent themselves as employees of a company represent the company. If the company permits incompetent employees to behave like this on their work profiles, that's not an unreasonable deal-breaker.

I don't really want my code repo judging me for my word choice.

A company shouldn't even waste time for things like that could.

I'm definitely not interested in company I'm paying for investing resources retarded things.

- a happy gitlab user.

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