The reality of the situation is that yall don't want to be excluded from communities for being racist, misogynistic, or creepy.
I think moderation and CoCs are needed, but this example looks to be an example of their misuse.
The reality is that you may be confusing a victim with your political enemies.
But, the employees at the foundation, who are responsible for keeping the community healthy, and for enforcing policies, would absolutely take complaints, then use personal accounts, email list history, chat history, and such. It's effectively like how HR works.
> The only thing I've heard
Right, because you're talking to the wrong people, and you're ignoring the fact that he has had folks complain about his behavior, and you're also ignoring his email list and chat history, which you could go look at.
You're acting like this is some kind of witch hunt, when it's simply "HR" enforcing "employment handbook" standards. It just happens to be that this is a set of volunteers, rather than employees.
I think we just need to reduce the amount of discretion involved in government action of all kinds.
It's not an equal comparison. The biggest governments in the world don't need anymore consolidated power.
> I think we just need to reduce the amount of discretion involved in government action of all kinds.
This we both agree on.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/defense-agency-pulls-openbsd-f...
Maybe that $500k that was earmarked for OpenSSL vulnerability testing would have found Heartbleed.
Disappointing?
This is what Hacker News has been for at least a decade. Why would you expect any better?
The clawback is this sentence, yes? "NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal anti- discriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott."
How exactly is "you must follow anti-discrimination law" a "naked" attempt at a double-bind?
(And, um, I'd be more worried about that "prohibited boycott" thing. It's mentioned explicitly in the sentence with the clawback, and I don't see where it's defined.)
This is a little-known but long-established part of US policy; see https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/enforcement/oac for more details. My employer actually has a reminder in the legal trainings of our corporate responsibilities under these policies (and yes, it rubs me the wrong way).
But ultimately, ideas are secondary to matter. Most people on this planet work for the profits of a very small group. If they weren’t divided among themselves, they could easily defeat that small group and organise society for the benefit of the majority.
As Warren Buffet said, class warfare is happening and his class is winning. We should all internalise that and engage in class struggle.
Considering the kind of money behind YCombinator, they're not exactly beating the rap.
Instead of getting distracted by what is a slur and who is using it, focus on the meat of the matter, which is discrimination in all forms beyond merit. Anyone distracting from the core topic is a part of the problem.
When I look at the other opinions and values of the majority of people who say that DEI compensate unfairly and too much, I either see that 1. they don't even accept to consider that maybe there was a bias, 2. they also defend policies quite marked politically. These two things make me think there is not really a compensation that it is too big, and that it is just the people who have different values that say they disagree. If it was indeed unfairly balanced, they would be more "pro-DEI on principle" that would react on the dysfunction. (not saying they don't exist, but they are just too few)
1) The grant was for a specific, bounded project, but the anti-DEI terms would have applied to all activities of the Foundation, regardless of whether they were funded by the grant. (Which isn't to say that those terms would have been acceptable even for a single project, but having them apply to unrelated activities is even worse.)
2) The terms of the grant included a clawback clause - if, in the administration's eyes, the Foundation did anything to "advance or promote DEI", the grant would be rescinded, and the Foundation would be required to repay any money they had already spent. Given the size of the grant relative to the Foundation's budget, this was an unacceptable risk.
2014 was years before it became a mainstream cry to treat trans women as cis women. I didn’t really hear or notice this until the late 2010s.
I also believe the trans community hurt itself and its own members by pushing this narrative/falling into this trap, though things like the bathroom bill made it inevitable?
Perhaps it’s old fashioned, but what I believe is an acknowledgement and celebration of differences. What the new generation pushed is hiding those differences; by pretending there are none.
It’s much harder to argue against “let’s all agree we’re all human and make this work”.
That's because somehow you only managed to notice the protests against the rollback of protections by those favoring discrimination but somehow missed the long push for those protections that led up to the federal policy wins (many of which were in 2014, specifically) including:
* Executive Order 13672 (explicitly prohibiting discrimination on gender identity or sexual orientation for federal agencies and federal contractors)
* Formal DoJ guidance that discrimination on the basis of gender identity was included within the scope of sex discrimination prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—an interpretation later validated by the US Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020).
* A wide array of regulatory and administrative actions by other federal agencies, mostly applying the same logic as the DoJ guidance referenced above to other existing sex-discrimination provisions in law an regulation.
TERF was started in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERF_(acronym)
The GOP started to make it a major issue prior in 2016. See Bathroom Bill: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
In 2017 the Southern Poverty Law said that the Christian Right was trying to separate from the T from LGBT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_...
The GOP started what is a woman in 2022 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
2017-2021 wasn't a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance, it was the big wave of active discrimination by, particularly, state-level Republican governments against previous progress in that dimension. That made the issue more visible, but specifically because it was the exact opposite of a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance.
But, sure, it probably would have looked a bit different if there had been a federal administration likely to defend rather than abandon that progress (but it probably still would have happened.)
Likewise for every topic that is under contest, including right wing topics.
As an aside, I'd say calling it "the Streisand effect" could be seen to be hinting that if people just stopped support trans so strongly, there would be less backlash. That might be true, but given trans people have historically suffered abuse, it would be risky for trans supporters to let things settle and hope for the best.
Of course they did, as they do now, it's game politics 101, it's all in the game plan.
The NC Bathroom Bill passed in March 2016, and it had an immediate flurry of corporate backlash that lasted to the partial repeal in 2017. The bill was part of a growing amount of anti-trans rhetoric (and legislation) from the Republicans starting a few years before. But it was the first bathroom bill AFAICT.
Are you saying that the Republicans would have been less likely to pass that bill under a Clinton presidency? If so, what's the extraordinary evidence for that?
Alternatively, if you are saying they would have been more emboldened to pass it, are you suggesting that the backlash would have been smaller under a Clinton presidency? That's in the realm of possibility, but again what's the evidence here? Obama had already shifted to supporting gay marriage before the relevant Supreme Court case (probably due to Biden's gaffe of pre-emptively announcing his own support for it). So I just don't see why you would assume a Clinton presidency would effectively muzzle support for trans rights in this case, or have any effect whatsoever on the NC Bill and its aftermath.
Edit: clarifications
Politicians know this, people don't necessarily.
Now, go on, parrot the same question again. Surely you’ll bait someone into accepting your framing of the issue sooner or later.
As I've said many times in the comments. I have 20+ years experience working for corporations. All through the me too wave, the increase focus on DE&I, and the general move to try and be less exclusionary. I've worked with woman, gay people, trans, and people of just about every ethnicity you could think of. Never once, in all those years, have I ever feared for my job or felt excluded.
Literally the only people I have ever heard complain are the ones I know for a fact tell racist and sexist jokes because they always felt comfortable enough around me to tell them.
If the fact that we are a bit more mindful about being racist and sexist in the work place bothers you, I think you may need to look inward at your own behavior. Not outward.
If you can't make your point without leveling extreme and baseless allegations at fellow posters, that's a good sign that your point is without merit.
People have had three opportunities now to give concrete examples of behavior that should be acceptable and makes them feel excluded or like they need to walk on eggshells. Nobody has offered a single thing.
So point blank: What can you not say or do in these environments for fear of reprisal?
A new DEI director joined a previous employer and started a mandatory survey to affirmatively label everyone's trans status. Whatever you entered would be used to auto-update your public info page with details on whether you identified as trans or not, with no opt out. I hope I don't have to explain why that's ill-considered at best.
Anyway, refusing to fill it out immediately escalated to a disciplinary meeting with the director.
That's so bad it almost feels like someone trying to out trans people under the guise of DEI.
Sure, this person was probably bad at their job, and that's problematic, but this isn't an example of someone being fired because they said something non-problematic.
It suggests they know these are not things to be said in mixed company and the real discomfort is the PSF events have become mixed company for them.
I'm happy to give people the benefit of the doubt. But this specific topic I don't think I've ever seen someone actually provide a real answer.
Phrasing outright racism/sexism in the form of a question seems to make it OK with other folks who tend to share the same mindset, but it isn't (and shouldn't be) effective in the workplace.
The devil doesn't need an advocate; especially not in a workplace.
I’ve been on several university hiring committees and the guidelines were always “if two candidates are equally qualified 1. Hire the veteran 2. Hire the minority” if a hiring committee chooses an unqualified individual to do a job that’s on them.
No proponent of DEI I’ve ever talked to in real life has said we should hire unqualified people to meet some quota.
"Major companies added more than 320,000 jobs to their U.S. workforces in 2021, and 94% of those went to people of color, according to Bloomberg."
How are the actual stats of employed in the trenches and in the C-Suites?
None of these were junior positions, they were all basically senior and staff engineer positions, based on the nature/criticality of the work. We had to interview a wide variety of people all of whom had never had a professional software engineering role before and some who didn't even speak a language shared by any members on our team.
I don't care if developers are cis trans black white male female or dogs[1] if they are competent. But there seems to be a recent trend of some who cry discrimination when their sub-par work is called out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
This sounds like you worked with or heard about 1 trans person who did shoddy work and now it's a "recent trend" that all trans software devs are saying it's discrimination.
----
"The doctors are sympathetic, and I think some of them even understand—regardless, they can offer no solace beyond the chemical. They are too kind to resent, but my envy is palpable. One, a trans woman, is especially gentle; perhaps because her own frustrations mirror mine, our cognitive distance sabotaging her authenticity." - https://ctrlcreep.substack.com/p/knowing-ones-place
So your assertion is that trans people, gay people, people of color, and women are inherently worse at engineering jobs then straight white men, and companies/institutions that hire them are somehow producing worse software? Ignoring all other economic and technological trends that have materialized over the last two decades?
Also, just for the record, some of the most brilliant engineers I have worked with in my time fall into many of those categories.
Every single one of these policies that I've seen over the last 20 years, including my role as a hiring manager in my past career, were aimed at leveling the playing field and providing equal opportunities to people who aren't in the majority. The only effect I've seen is that now people who look like me actually have to compete with others.
Edit: For the record I'm asking for links from reputable companies who would realistically be setting the tone for the industry. Not some random ass listing for contract work.
Other companies I can think of are Google and Microsoft. Many huge open-source projects have openly promoted specific racial outcomes. I might dig up links later but if you actually care about this stuff, Lunduke is a great source of references.
>Every single one of these policies that I've seen over the last 20 years, including my role as a hiring manager in my past career, were aimed at leveling the playing field and providing equal opportunities to people who aren't in the majority.
That is how it's sold, but in practice it means you have to turn down perfectly good white people (especially white men) to get arbitrary demographic outcomes. If 13% of the population is black and almost none of them study engineering, you won't be able to get 13% representation without passing up on better white candidates. The same can be said about women and other minorities. Different demographics have different preferences and that is reflected in what they study and how hard they work at it. Yet we are supposed to think there is something nefarious if there is even a minor discrepancy in outcomes. Give me a break. This isn't the 1950s. Nobody would risk discriminating against a minority because it could cause a lawsuit. But discrimination against whites and men is not treated the same way, even when it can be proved positively. One of those 3 lawsuits against IBM was dismissed by an activist judge with a one-sentence non-explanation for example. If you complain about this stuff publicly your career is going to be damaged and everyone will at best think you are a bad sport.
I'm going to try very very hard to ignore the fact it was James O'Keefe that "broke" that story. He's only one step above Info Wars when it comes to being a reliable source, and it's well established he doctors videos to fit his narrative.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that IBM did do something illegal here: they deserve to be sued and the person who was discriminated against is entitled to some kind of compensation (regardless of race/gender). But that's hardly evidence of some grand conspiracy against white men.
But maybe we can approach this conversation from a different angle. You clearly have a different view from me, so let's try to build up from some common starting place
Would you say it's a reasonable assertion that someone born into immense wealth and privilege (regardless of race/gender/sexual orientation) has substantially more opportunities in their life then someone born in abject poverty?
I remember thinking to myself: "Woah, that's not only extremely illegal but also I potentially would qualify for such a role without said requirement. I wish I'd recorded that."
The person they hired ended up being a disaster in the two years she was with us and she hired an entire organization underneath her that was exclusively of her own ethnicity...and I don't mean her country but her own ethnic group within that country.
> California passed Senate Bill 826 in October 2018, mandating gender diversity on the boards of public companies headquartered in California. The bill set deadlines in 2019 (for two women on five-person boards) and 2021 (for three women on seven-person boards).[66] It was challenged as unconstitutional on the grounds of violating equal protection.[67] The District Court ruled the challengers did not have standing, but was overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The District Court then denied a preliminary injunction. It is now pending another appeal.[68] A separate lawsuit found the law unconstitutional on May 13, 2022.[69]
> In 2020, California passed Assembly Bill 979, requiring publicly held companies headquartered in California to include board members from underrepresented communities. The law requires at least one director from an underrepresented community by the end of 2021, and up to three, depending on board size, by the end of 2022.[70] The term "underrepresented community" is defined as "an individual who self‑identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self‑identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender."[71] The law was ruled unconstitutional on April 1, 2022.
Remember when the government went anti-DEI crazy and started covering displays of influential women and people of colour at places like NSA? That kind of decision maker may be handling the PSF's grant.
I recently read in the local news that some city department, in order to comply with anti-DEI stuff, was changing its name to remove the word 'diversity'... and nothing else. DEI has no legal definition. It feels like the new "woke", where the actual meaning is irrelevant, and its only real purpose is tribalistic social signalling.
In development we'd just accept it as normal to say "Putting each literal value in its own module is not a reasonable application of modular design." without claiming that the name "modular design" is now misunderstood and irrelevant.
I would like to see this kind of thing treated, socially and legally, as equivalent to saying "This tech organization has a lot of Jews... can we do something about that?" (Indeed, many of the exact same people who are classified as white men who are disproportionately present in tech organizations by DEI advocates are also Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, and the DEI advocates are treating their white male identity rather than their Jewish identity as politically salient). If some organization refuses to refrain from treating the disproportionate presence of white men in some organization - or the assumed disproportionate presence of white men - as a problem, I think it's reasonable for the US federal government to refuse to give them grant money.
To solve the “all” problem, none of those people need to be removed from the organization. It merely states that diversity is good. To solve the “a lot of” problem necessitates getting rid of those members.
This is fundamentally why one is discriminatory and the other is not.
In the meantime, let's keep to real examples.
Yeah and that's obviously problematic, because the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys".
Are the common, strange brainwashing courses in the room right now?
This is obviously a bad faith take - trying to prevent anyone from even saying, let alone promoting, diversity because sometimes people discriminate (which is already illegal) is absurd even without acknowledging that discrimination happens already. This argument looks a LOT like "keep discriminating against people that aren't like me".
Constructive criticism for good faith people out there reading this who are concerned about "DEI" causing discrimination -- acknowledge all discrimination is bad and take a real stab at working on it as a whole. If your only "attempt" to prevent discrimination is speaking up against people trying to include more diverse sets of people in programming communities then you're doing it wrong (and showing your ass).
[1]: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...
I feel like statements like this are fundamentally vague. What does "supporting" the growth of a diverse and international community look like? Is it different from "facilitating the growth of" such a community? Without concrete definitions I feel like both sides are talking past each other. I would love to see concrete definitions and would be grateful to anyone who can give me sources from either side.
like, somebody going to a "women in tech" conference could result in suddenly having to find millions in cash to pay back the government.
But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
And for half the hn readership, it appears
I (a white man) would be upset at preferential treatment of white men. Or white women. Or black men. Or anyone. Where's the "judging by the content of their character" that the social justice movement (rightly) called for? I don't see it much these days.
Still, just because grants to open-source programming language foundations aren't the most important federal government spending priority, doesn't mean I want the federal government to remove the no-DEI condition on federal grant money.
Never once in my 20+ years working for corporations and government contractors, including companies with very strong DEI programs, have I ever felt excluded or marginalized. And I've never witnessed "reverse racism" (which is a totally absurd name for what would just be racism).
What I have experienced, several times, is people who look like me thinking I'm one of the boys, and flat out telling me they don't hire woman because they "cause too much drama", or only hire women they want to have sex with. And those are just two examples of dozens. Thanksfully those situations have plummeted over the years.
You flat out will not get an equitable work environment if you don't place a focus on it.
This only stops working when it bumps into Mother Nature's laws rather than man's laws, so that's what you have to focus on with these people. It's brutal but it's entirely impartial, they can tell Fox News that black is white and up is down, but Ma doesn't give a shit, and they hate that. Who does she think she is?
Remember the story about enforced diversity statements at universities, and the ex-soviet math teacher warning against them? I do and it was discussed here.
I have seen it from the same types of people who oppose DEI: born affluent, convinced that anyone who can’t retire at 45 chose not to, etc.
Look at Agile, a movement that took a good idea and twisted it into the opposite.
I'm not just saying me personally. I'm saying I have never even heard a creditable case of "reverse discrimination" in all my years, across all my colleagues.
DEI initiatives seek to put minority groups on the same level as majority groups. So they get the same consideration as everyone else, not more consideration. If that bothers you I don't really know what to tell you.
You don’t hear about the vast majority of discrimination instances because one simply doesn’t get hired. Often on purpose, “no culture fit” can’t be proven.
You have and will experience it, though usually won’t know. Thinking it doesn’t happen is very naïve.
For the record though, I'm 100% sure a white person hasn't gone a job because of their skin color. People suck, and that doesn't stop being true because of skin color or gender. My point is that DEI isn't some grand conspiracy against white people. They're for the most part well meaning policies intended to equalize a playing field that has been fundementally uneven for essentially all of human history.
"No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"
Not only is the PSF not subject to this clause, the only subject to the clause are governments and the PSF is not even capable of violating it. In what way would DEI programs violate this clause?
It is the diacrimination based on protected classes like race and sex that people have a problem with.
Well, its discrimination based on protected classes that has a higher legal bar to be acceptable to the government defining those classes, but protected classes (even in the US) differ between states and between the states and the federal government and, even within the same jurisdiction, for different kinds of activities.
But, no, what is more restricted by law and what people have problems with are not the same thing! Many people have problems with discrimination on bases which are not currently protected classes, and many people endorse discrimination on bases which currently are protected classes.
This is a half joke comment, I'm actually wondering - what can you discriminate on generally in US? (and where you draw the arbitrary line (not saying other countries are better/worse)).
In the US, it’s legal to discriminate on pretty much any basis, with the right justification. What the justification required is (which can be "none at all" for certain cases), however, depends on, besides the basis for discrimination, some combination of:
(1) Are you the federal government, a state (including any subdivision) government, or a private actor (and, in the latter case, are you acting as a contractor for the federal or a state government), and
(2) What is the function (employment, sales of goods or services, government benefits, etc.) for which you are discriminating?
If you mean, what can you discriminate on with no special justification at all, well:
(1) If you are a private actor, almost any basis which does not have an explicit legal restriction applicable to the function you are discriminating with regard to, and if the function isn't a narrow (but signficant) set of functions—the big ones being employment, housing, or a function considered a "public accommodation"—that is pretty much every basis.
(2) If you are the government actor (state or federal), almost no basis at all: while it is a low bar, pretty much every act by which the government discriminates is subject to, at a minimum, what is called the "rational basis test" (this is a consequence, essentially, of jurisprudence apply the due process clauses of the 5th and 14th Amendments and the equal protection clause of the 14th), which requires that the discrimination have a legitimate public purpose and some rational relationship to that purpose.
But to answer comprehensively is...well, a lot more complicated (and different, because of varying state law protections, in each state in some regards.)
The debt increases are a political choice: the budget was balanced at the turn of the century, which was used as the pretext for cutting taxes to a level which ensured the problems we’re seeing now based on highly unrealistic growth projections. Cutting all funding on open source, or science, or foreign aid, or even all of those combined is a drop in the bucket compared to our cost of healthcare being whole multiples higher than in our peer countries.
I think of it like crime or natural disaster: a PyPI compromise could easily cause economic damages on the order of a bad storm or small terrorist attack. Collectively we spend billions trying to mitigate those societally rather than telling each person to defend themselves, and this feels like the same idea adapted to a different context.
Hopefully nobody else funds this critical infrastructure piece of both the government and private sector software world. Especially someone of a country/color/gender you don't like.
(And of course, it should go without saying that relying on the public to react to the government’s capricious behavior does not make for a stable funding situation for a nonprofit.)
> This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
This Admin has shown that it's willing to do/say what it wants; there is nothing to stop it from accusing PSF, without having to provide evidence, that it had violated the terms, and then take the money back. It's a risk they were right not to take.