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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

As an active Rust user in both my professional and hobby work, this ongoing fracas is very frustrating: everything thus far has been extremely oblique, to the detriment of my confidence in anybody in the community's ability to just speak their damn mind about what's really going on.

Some of the allegations in this post are worrisome (like the handling of travel costs, and the papering over of legitimate concerns around Palantir). But (and maybe this is just my shortsightedness) nothing explicitly stated rises to the level of "toxicity." I wish the community would be given more information so that we could fairly evaluate and justify the use of that word.

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I don't get the problem with Palantir. You can't prevent an organization from using a language in their project can you? The issue as stated seems to be that some people both worked for Palantir and were involved with Rust? Why single-out Palantir? Should anyone remotely related to any defense or surveillance be ostracized? Where does that stops? Who gets to say who is pure enough to be accepted?

I;m sure some will read this as me supporting Palantir, because that's how the Internet works, but I don't and find them unpalatable.

The same goes for travel costs. It seems a delicate issue: do you fund people who are deeply involved in the project and have shown a continued effort, or new members who might drop next week? To the author, the answer seems so obvious, to me it isn't.

I don't think it's anybody's idea to get Palantir to stop using Rust.

My memory is hazy at this point, but my recollection of the original grievance was that there was a (funded?) Palantir employee on the Rust team at the same time that they decided to put out a message in support of racial justice. The former certainly doesn't help the message of the latter, and people were (in my book, understandably) upset at the dichotomy.

My own work is partially funded with defense money, because the DoD funds everything. I'm not so happy with that, but I do think that working at Palantir requires several additional steps of introspective moral failure than merely receiving DoD money does.

> but my recollection of the original grievance was that there was a (funded?) Palantir employee on the Rust team at the same time that they decided to put out a message in support of racial justice. The former certainly doesn't help the message of the latter

That's a highly partisan opinion.

It’s definitely an opinion, but I don’t think either “racial justice” or Palantir the company are political parties.

The issue is more the hypocrisy.

C++ is used to write literal missiles that kill civilians in the middle east, but you don't see the leaders of the C++ community who work for big surveillance / big military / big tech also LARP as American communists on Twitter while working for CIA operations (although, if I have understood it correctly, black lives do matter to the CIA, it's the brown ones they have issues with).

When I saw the word "toxic" I was expecting standard issue misogyny, racist comments, or other standard "CHUD" behavior.

What I see here is evidence of a team that simply isn't experienced with running a serious organization and/or has personal issues around communication skills and personal organizational skills. That's not "toxic" but it is a serious scaling issue. In companies this usually necessitates bringing in someone in a senior executive role who is good at these things and empowering them to take over some of those functions.

Toxic to me implies actual covert or overt hostility.

Per this post, the core team has been overtly hostile to something as simple as maintaining an accurate, publicly-available list of Rust teams and working groups (which would include acknowledging alumni who are not actively contributing to the project). That's toxic behavior which is actively impeding people who might want to work on Rust. There's more to toxicity than "standard issue misogyny, racist comments" and the like.

And it's also wrong: There's a list of rust alumni on the website and afaik, every person that has served on a team can be added there: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/alumni

The author of the post complaining about not maintaining a list of alumni is listed on that page.

That list is there because I fought and pushed for that change to be there against the core team.

This whole thing is fairly complex, but from what I read of the links above racism and sexism are a component of the broader story.

Yeah, I think the author fails to explain the actual context of the alleged toxicity.

Context (in order):

1.) https://archive.fo/f10KK 2.) https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/announcement-ashley-willia... 3.) https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/914 and https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/928 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515306 4.) https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea... and https://github.com/rust-lang/team/pull/671

I've seen this exact list of links a handful of times now. It feels more like circumstantial guilt than anything else, given the lack of public information. I wish we wouldn't do that.

> I've seen this exact list of links a handful of times now.

To make it clear: it is not a copy paste, I collected them from my memory and history.

> It feels more like circumstantial guilt than anything else, given the lack of public information. I wish we wouldn't do that.

I get your point, but you were wondering where the toxicity was and even if we ignore the circumstantial facts and we do not point the finger at anyone, what we can clearly see in those threads is that the discussion [in the official threads and by official members] is not healthy at all, hence the toxicity.

I don't understand the basis for the conflict. What was stopping people from forking wasm-pack?

Read the last link in point (3). A core team member answers this question.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515306

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