Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

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> This is what we get with corporate-sponsored “social coding”, brought to you by Digital Ocean and GitHub and McDonalds, home of the Big Mac™. When you build the Facebook of coding, you get the Facebook of coding.

The author has this spot on. Everyone who has ever emphasized things like "your commit graph" and metrics like "number of PRs opened", or who uses GitHub star count to judge a project's popularity is collectively responsible for this kind of problem.

GitHub is a good tool, but its social aspect does not optimize for meaningful coding contributions, it optimizes for visibility. I agree with the author that sr.ht would likely avoid this problem since it's optimized for actual problems that programmers need to solve.

That being said, I think there are two other factors at play here:

1. I had a lot of internal debate about whether or not to say this, but calling it out for what it is – there is a bit of latent racism inherent in this outcry. A lot of the people making the requests seem to be male and South Asian, and I think this triggers people's inbuilt resistance to South Asian names. They will fall over themselves to advise `alina_stravinsky599` on the best way to make a typofix, but will yell "shitoberfest!" when `navinshah53` makes the same PR. [1]

2. Digital Ocean seems to want to juice metrics and use Hacktoberfest as a PR marketing move, so they have no incentive to actually offer personal mentorship that can enable anyone to make meaningful contributions to Open Source. Their "Beginners" page (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#beginners) recycles generic information about making PRs.

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[1] A personal, optional perspective regarding this: If you are a fellow South Asian man like me who actually wants to contribute to Open Source, remember that OSS maintainers will consider your PR as guilty until proven innocent. This is not fair, just like life. Your PRs need to be non-trivial, typo-free, and have perfectly passing tests. If you feel like submitting a simple PR to fix a typo or something, avoid the temptation and just leave it for others to participate in this feel-good fest. Consider spending that time writing closed-source code for money instead.

> They will fall over themselves to advise `alina_stravinsky599` on the best way to make a typofix, but will yell "shitoberfest!" when `navinshah53` makes the same PR.

Sorry, but stereotypes exist for a reason. South Asians (Indians) are very much over-represented in the "spam commit" category. And so, if people see this enough, they will build up a natural and understandable annoyance and resistance to future commits from such people.

> South Asians (Indians) are very much over-represented in the "spam commit" category. And so, if people see this enough, they will build up a natural and understandable annoyance and resistance to future commits from such people.

Try applying this logic to literally anything else in life (say crime statistics) and you will wade into racist territory in short order. I don't see why we get to be the honorable exception.

That all being said, I kind of agree that complaining about it is futile. I think that smart and practical Indian dudes should account for this kind of racism during their career. Hence my advice (which I follow myself) to them to stick to writing proprietary software and improve their skills in that arena. Or play the open source game on extra hard mode, it's their choice really.

Are you arguing that stereotypes are bad because they have the potential to be racist, or are you arguing that there is no value in applying a high-pass filter despite the high noise to signal ratio in online interactions?

Very, very ironically -- my high-pass filter suggests that your comment is edging down the well-trodden "let me convince you that actually, racism is okay in some circumstances" route.

So I will bid you a good day!

I guess you really are arguing against something purely because you associate it with "the r word".

Your argument is: "if you apply x to y, you get z, therefore x is always bad". Complete lack of critical thinking, and purely an emotional reaction to z.

> Sorry, but stereotypes exist for a reason

Because for very good reasons relating to survival in a no-tech world with dangers around every corner, the human brain jumps to over-generalities.

Generalisations can be a fantastic time-saver. I optimise for efficiency. If my false-positive rate is too high then maybe the data my brain has trained on is poor. But from what I've seen so far, and from what I've heard from other people, the data my mental model has been trained on is fairly representative across the board in this instance.

Trash commit freqs, unlike crime stats, are filtered not through institutions but through one's own mind. Granted, one can carry a lot of biases in what they look at and what they notice, but this issue applies to all heuristics in general.

That said, I used to carry a lot of… biases against Indian developers since that's what all the Chinese programmers talk about on Weibo and Telegram. I have seen a lot of impressive folks since then, so I don't really have that particular generalisation any more.

Heck, Chinese ppl would do the same 薅羊毛 thing if our mail service was less shitty. We even have js devs charging people in cash and stars for documentation. That's what you learn from living in no community.

> This is not fair, just like life. Your PRs need to be non-trivial, typo-free, and have perfectly passing tests.

How is this unfair? I haven't contributed to many projects precisely because I think it's disrespectful to the maintainers to submit anything but non-trivial, typo-free and with passing tests.

There's even a guide on contributing to open source software (and also about opening issues) that says this.

My point is that the same standards are not applied blindly, and that South Asian male names are judged more harshly that other ones for an equivalent PR.

And also, who said that your practices are the canonical ideal? Lots of people do get their first PR as a minor typo fix, and go on to do more significant things.

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