Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

mahmud

Computing progresses despite the ACM.

Kent Pitman has a similar stance:

http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PFAQ/acm.html

View on HN

Wow, the last one on that page is actually a recognized "Dark Pattern"¹:

    ACM used to routinely request certain kinds of "volunteered" contributions 
    and/or subscriptions on my annual invoicing. They would do this by adding 
    the things they wanted me to do (without my requesting it) and make me 
    have to line out the items I didn't want.

This is known as "Sneak Into Basket": http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Sneak_into_basket

If anyone has a copy of such an invoice (I've always thought "societies" were silly, never joined ACM when I was in grad school, and refused to join NHS on principle) they should throw a copy up on the Dark Patterns wiki.

¹ Racist nomenclature thumbs down

Do you really think that the term "dark pattern" has anything at all to do with race? Protip: associating everything with races is how racism continues; stop thinking about things in terms of races in general, and the world will be a far better place.

Protip: ignoring examples of terms with unintentionally racist overtones and telling people not to bring it is often a characteristic of somebody with unexamined privilege and lack of understanding of racism.

If you don't want people to think of you that way, avoid doing it. And when somebody else does, don't upvote them.

EDIT: downvoted. What a surprise. People here sure don't like getting called on their privilege.

Something to do with it, yes. Everything to do with it, no.

Ooh, Dark Pattern, that sounds awesome. Also, Dark = relative absence of light, or almost absence of light, but not quite. Also, in western philosophy and languages, Dark is equated to evil, as opposed to Light and non-evilness, that can be traced as far as the allegory of the cave, where shadows are illusions and reality is "above", "the light" that creates "the shadows".

If the word "Dark" invokes a racist meaning for you, you might want to consider retraining yourself in language and philosophy, you're on the fast track to becoming racist - racist being someone who connects meanings of human discrimination based on physical traits to any word (that could relate to color, light, whatever) regardless of the context and original meaning of said words. You're discriminating those poor harmless words!

If the word "Dark" invokes a racist meaning for somebody else, you might consider trying to understand why rather than attacking them. It's quite possible that ''you'' are the one who's on a fast track to being racist.

It's far too late for me, I'm already pretty racist.

I agree we should stamp out racial prejudice everywhere it appears, like that well-known racist Mel Brooks and his Canadian caricature, Dark Helmet. Neo-colonialist interpretation: inside every big black man is a whiny white man who can't breathe in this thing.

And let's not forget that closet bigot JK Rowling. Did you know the Dark Lord is really black? The movies got it all wrong.

Or the League of Shadows in Batman Begins... it was called League of Assassins in the comic books, so we can blame the interpolating hand of director Christopher Nolan...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com