Hacker News Reader

Comment by downerending | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong is that the people that wrote this are trying to stir up trouble, without care for the damage done to the community.

I'm fat. Know how many times this has mattered in an Open Source project? Zero. How many times I've been discriminated against at a conference? Zero. How many times I've had a patch rejected on that account? Zero.

It's bullshit.

So yes, I agree that no one should ever discriminate in Open Source based on weight. But also, no one should ever discriminate based on eyebrow length. (Mine are a bit weird.) Shall we write that in, too? How about people who tie their shoes with granny knots? How about people with red hair? And on, and on, and on.

None of this has any place in a CoC. And all such are slow acid eating away at the foundations of good will and civil behavior. Fuck that.

View on HN

Even if you don't experience discrimination based on body size, enough people do that it's become a subject and there are dedicated activists working to end discrimination based on size.

Additionally however, I don't understand how including it can be harmful? At the very worst it's a rule that never get's utilised because nobody ended up getting discriminated because of their body. There seem to be only potential upside and no potential downside.

AFAIK there doesn't exist a consistent systemic discrimination of people based on eyebrow length, but if it did, yes, why not write it in?

People in CS tend tot think you can just use universal abstractions to solve human problems the same way you can with programming (giant base class problem non-withstanding). I used to believe this too. Why call out specifics when a general description will do? But what I've learned is that we have to specifically call out any discrimination that is likely to occur. Yes, this is more complicated and certainly less elegant than a simple ”treat everybody well” statement, but the world has very clearly demonstrated that this kind of blanket statements simply don't work. People always think that group X or Y is an exception and that it's acceptable to treat them poorly, and thus you have to specifically call out all the groups that you should actually treat well.

In short, the problem is that it's divisive as well as pointless. If I tell you to follow one of the world's "golden rules" (e.g., Treat others as you would wish to be treated.), you will tend to remember that we are all walking through the world carrying our unique burdens, and will perhaps remember that when dealing with your fellow man.

If I provide a list of specific categories, you will tend to think not of the unity of humanity, but of a specific set of historic problems, and tend to rank those you're talking to in terms of those sets. As we're seeing in contemporary culture, this generally makes things worse, not better.

> How many times I've been discriminated against at a conference? Zero.

Hi. I mean the following non-offensively. As a formerly obese person, I really doubt this. People discriminate against fat people in social life, in the workplace, and yes even in a career in tech quite a bit. Educated people are good at not making it overt, or maybe they're not aware that they're doing it. But I think there have been various studies on how it affects people in the workplace (spoiler alert: it does). Also, one way I noticed this is the way people treated me before and after losing 100 lbs. It's ironic, because being treated shabbily was stressful; I would say that stress and lack of social recognition re-enforced my weight problem.

I do wonder how weight might surface in a real technical conversation though. I guess it's proper to avoid certain metaphors, like "bloated" code or the "fat binary" (where fat = multi-architecture) concept they used to have on old Macs. I'm typing this on FreeBSD and I note they have "newfs_msdos" and "mount_msdosfs" instead of "FAT".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com