Hacker News Reader

Comment by general_failure | Hacker News Reader

Is there a list of objectionable words/language that one is not supposed to use? A quick search on the f-work gives thousands of hits on github.

View on HN

Interestingly, a search for "retard" in code on GitHub yields over 200,000 results:

https://github.com/search?q=retard&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93

Not sure what made this particular case different.

Or, decidedly even more offensive: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=nigger&type=Code&...

Most of those are badwordlists.

On the first couple pages, yeah. Skip 10+ pages and you get stuff like "nigger stole my bike" etc.

As a side question, shouldn't it be fairly easy to flag those repositories and then sort through those who have it as an offensive word list and those who are just being derogatory?

Probably that someone complained

I don't understand why they don't filter it on upload stage ("push"). "git push" > "sorry, can't push because of words: [list of words here]". Is it more difficult than later disable whole repo because of one stupid joke?

Because you may need to put those words in a repo in a non-offensive context. For example, a list of "bad" words to look for.

I'm against censorship at all, but when humans are involved in process, it becomes much worse.

You could work with hashed variants in that case; there might be performance benefits there, too.

Isn't the name "git" (and therefore "github") itself considered pejorative? IIRC, Linus did name the tool after the British slang word.

"Git is a mild pejorative with origins in British English for a silly, incompetent, stupid, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person. It is usually an insult, more severe than twit or idiot but less severe than wanker, arsehole or (redacted)."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)

ps. Yes, I'm a prude. And yes, I redacted a word from the Wikipedia definition above.

Github is an American company and the use of the word "git" in American English is not at all common. They may not know.

That said, I find this whole thing to be silly. What can you possibly get out of choosing to be the word police?

>> "git" in American English is not at all common.

It's common, except it's a verb, no? As Larry the Cable Guy would say, "git r done".

Those aren't typically derogatory descriptions of people, though. Profanity isn't necessarily an issue; derogatory language is. I'd expect Github to take down repositories containing slurs of any kind, while leaving up things like https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck/

It took me about 1 minute find other repositories using derogatory descriptions of people. I didn't even have to use my imagination.

And it would take you another 2 to report them, and github a few moments to act on it. They don't necessarily proactively search for it, they act on reports.

That doesn't explain why they were seemingly allowed to replace "retards" with "gits" which is obviously still being used with the same derogatory meaning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com