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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

For some reason, this article was rather heavily flagged. I've overridden that, because the project looks serious and credible. Are people just reacting to the title, or is there something else wrong with this story?

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As mavam said earlier: (Disclaimer: Bro team member).

For a project named "Bro", I believe that we have a very open and inclusive community. We do play with the word a lot but it's all in the name of fun and very convenient since the name lends itself toward so much word play. There have been times where people have started to use it in the more modern pejorative sense and we've actively yet quietly made it stop. None of us on the core team like that behavior and with the name "Bro" we have to be extra careful with how it's used within the community.

There has been a number of women that have passed through our community and several that are actively involved at the moment (I could say the same about men, our team isn't very large).

I really like that people on this thread have been digging quote out of Vern's original paper about the lineage for the name. That's easily the best response to all of the "Why Bro?" questions.

I'm sorry that more people won't see this comment. I only noticed it because I was taking one last look through old threads for replies.

Fortunately, there was at least some good discussion of the substance here!

Last time that I can recall a project containing "bro" in its title was on here, it was derided for excluding women and discouraging them from entering the tech industry.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121717

I think you're right, and if so these are some pretty lazy people doing the flagging. This project clearly has nothing to do with any modern connotations for the word "bro."

I helped employ women over men, when I saw that they were eager to learn. The reasons for that were simple, I believe that diversity helps to increase the efficiency of a team and that large monolithic,hierarchical,homogenic teams should be abandoned. Why are people so sensitive about some words? I thought I can't understand until I heard about the word "no-homo" last week. THAT was the most absurd word I've heard in my lifetime. As a kid I had zero problems kissing my best friend (on the cheek), regardless of sex and I'm straight. There's nothing wrong about it, but "normal is relative and time-variying".

When I was in the position to scan and choose between many hundreds of job applications and even on a mid-sized start-up, where only a few applications went in. No I am NOT a HR Person, absolutely not, but they asked me to do it, so I did that too.

EDIT: Not sure why this earned a downvote, but to your information there is no law forcing companies to let a % of women in for example (in the country I live).

maybe automatically flagged because the word "bro"

It's kind of hard to take them seriously, when the usage of 'bro' has become so unserious. And then they use their name in situations where 'bro' would be used for humor, e.g. BroCon '14, The More You Bro (on their Youtube account).

It's just a mess. The tech looks interesting though, but it's really hard to take them seriously because of the name they chose.

Edit: Why is this getting downvoted? I pointed out my reaction to the title. I had never heard of it before so had no connection to their writings from 15 years ago. P.S. I didn't flag it.

From their white paper:

> "Our monitoring system is called Bro (an Orwellian reminder that monitoring comes hand in hand with the potential for privacy violations)"

So Big Brother = Bro

How ironic that the thought police choose to flag a 1984 inspired tool :)

Quite fitting, really.

It doesn't even make sense because the modern usage is almost exclusively a pejorative term that is only used for some subset of white men. If you look through urban dictionary or YouTube, you'd be have to scroll a pretty long time to see any other usage. Saying that women are discriminated against because they can't be called bros is like saying white people are discrimated against because they can't be called racial slurs for African Americans.

Their email archive goes back to 1998. Presumably the name wasn't a troll 15 years ago?

It is a reference to ``1984" and Big Brother. Their naming choice was mentioned in the original paper about it from 1999: http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/bro-CN99.html

Fair enough. I'm guessing it was people reacting to the title.

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