Switch to Gender Neutral Terms | Hacker News Reader

Switch to Gender Neutral Terms

github.com

14 pointsahamez37 comments

Yeah let's just go through an insane amount of efforts to change everything IT so that we can accomodate the 0.something% of the population who can't just accept and he/she and move on

Trans and non binary folks are probably whole integer percent of populations, and are over represented in tech.

It's trivially easy to use "they" rather than he or she. Or "the person" or whatever the actual noun is.

It's not even a matter of making special provisions. It's just plain civility.

If you ask me to refer to you as a "they" or any other pronoun, that's how I'll refer to you.

Right? We already do this with names. "Please don't call me Bill, I prefer William". Ok, I'll call that person William. It'd be an asshole move to deliberately call them Bill.

Using someone's correct pronouns is the same. If they say, "use x not y" it's an asshole move to deliberately not use x.

Oh me too, of course. I just don’t understand someone expects to change the default way to refer to anyone else.

Perhaps because the "default" way misgenders about half of them.

It happens to everyone, even cis, and they just accept it and move on, too much importance is being publicly given to things that are private. I don't care about misgendering and being misgendered, here are a lot of people that for political and PR reasons are alimenting the delusions of a bunch of kids and people all over the world who are spending way too much time on something that is unimportant and private

> I don't care about misgendering and being misgendered

They do. What's wrong with respecting their wishes?

If referring to a definite existing person who is physically present the default is to infer gender from a combination of physical attributes, name, and style of dress. This works about 99.9% of the time. For example it is almost always possible to tell that a person desires to present as a female even if they have some masculine attributes and or name and you can be nice and predict what they would prefer. The small percentage of times you get this wrong you just correct yourself and apologize and move on.

Being decent to people is important. Now if you are referring to a hypothetical person for example in documentation you can't misgender them because you are speaking hypothetically. At that point I think the choice is an aesthetic choice as opposed to a moral one. On cannot be harmed by the documentation using a different pronoun because the person was never speaking directly of you in the first place.

Should have linked this issued (given hard to find, since the bot went wild), for more context and comments by the bot author: https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/pu...

My personal experience with most of these bots is, most of them are promoting some kind of service (image/badge bots) or try to enforce a certain behavior onto maintainers ("Your are missing a [code of conduct]"). Haven't yet come across anything useful.

If your political issue is something you truly care about, please at least make the effort hand craft your pull-request. And even then, it would be awesome to keep politics out of code.

One, you can't keep politics out of code. Code, like sports, like games, like movies, etc. is inherently political. Who has access to software? Who doesn't? Who is in the training set? Who isn't? Who gets the education necessary to write code? Who doesn't?

But I agree, you should target these improvements to open source tools you use, care about, or are a contributor to. It's ok to have a bot assist in writing the PR, but you should deploy it narrowly.

April Fools I guess, considering the actual commit content:

- many -> persony

- helps -> theylps

- here -> theyre

- historical -> theirstorical

Buggy bot, looks like a college student trying to help but not fully testing.

this was happening before april fools

Given how obviously stupid many of the changes are, to me this looks like a false flag attempt trying to stir outrage against a movement with good intentions.

They are absolutely all stupid. I skimmed through it twice and couldn't find a single good-by-fluke edit.

I'm assuming this is a piss-take.

Sadly it is not. The bot's github page leads back to a real looking webpage. But then again that could be some top tier trolling. The page is completely bereft of any personality, names, or faces... so...

For anyone that cares the argument basically comes down a weak form of the Sapier-Worf hypothesis and the primacy of emotions over any other consideration. A useless and potentially harmful admixture.

This is getting so out of hand, it's not even funny anymore. Just like the blacklist/whitelist debate or the github master branch shitshow. Are there no real problems left?

"Many" -> "persony".

I know it's just a poorly written script, but this replacement illustrates so well the craziness of this whole thing.

How so? These are obviously just bugs? Or obviously trolling?

Of course these are just bugs, when you look at the diff you can infer how naive the regex is.

I did say it was just a poorly written script, but I can't help looking at this and thinking of all the very serious people who simply want to remove the substring "man" from everything.

The PR was a couple days too early. Looks like a buggy bot that needs human supervision.

This got upvoted to the frontpage because it aligns with the preconceptions of a certain subset of HN readers. How representative is this single issue of the variety of discussions currently ongoing about inclusivity in tech?

Right? "College student tries to help out, program has bugs, HN loses their goddamn minds" lol

Edit: the replies to this comment are emblematic of HN losing their goddamn minds. Hey, y'all, sometimes humans are humans. Sometimes college kids have big ideas and don't nail it. Have a little empathy, have a chuckle, and move on.

"College students wastes maintainers times by pushing worthless PRs"

Moreover, they didn't contact the owner of the repository, who says they don't want bot flows.

Does being a college student mean you can just waste people's time?

It's absolutely contentless garbage!

I'm not sure what it is anymore. "College student" has a LinkedIn page that shows he's been at the college for 4 years and has had several internships in FAANG. The bot's linked website is slick and too serious to be an April Fools prank.

I wonder who the fools are if someone who can get internships at FAANG can't write a proper search and replace bot.

edit/ sorry guess I shouldnt have commented.

It's a poorly written bot is all. There's no debate to be had.

Oh, check today's date.

I guess tomorrow someone will be offended that someone is making fun of their movement to rid language of sexism and patriarchy. ;)

Edit: but... the bot tried to submit the PR 3 days ago. So... not an April Fool's prank?

This is NOT an april fools joke.

Anyway, the guy's not very good about hiding his tracks, he commited to this repo to test the bot, using his real account with name and face: https://github.com/inclusive-coding-bot/test_non_inclusive_r...

Looks like a student, trying to improve things and making some mistakes that are very much to be expected for a student project. Kudos for the effort, and I think they probably learned a good lesson in test data generation.

Lets just drop this.

If it is, it escaped into the wild a couple days too soon. It's so bad I really can't take it as something serious.

It's just a poor-taste joke at the expense of vulnerable groups.

One "debate me" is pretty cringe, but two, I don't think you'd find anyone who thinks those are serious suggestions.

It's either a bug or someone trolling. I push hard for gender neutral language, but not whatever this change is proposing. Helps is not a gendered term, and should remain helps.

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