I think this is an outgrowth of the "use whatever power you have to push for change" culture. It has been highly effective in the past, particularly with gay marriage, and I think those victories gave it enough gas to run for many years even without success. There's also the social points that one gets from it as well. I know of at least one project that added a BLM banner to their site because of social pressure, even though they felt that much of the protesting had gone too far (burning businesses, looting, blocking traffic, etc). The whole "not to take a side is to take a side" is a powerful social pressure to conform. I know of one other project that added a BLM banner so they could get on an "awesome list of BLM supporting software" or something like that which drove them a lot of traffic. Anyway my point is that there are lots of motivations for such, and I suspect many if not most aren't because the person has a deep and abiding passion for the cause (though without a doubt, some do).

I don’t require them to be smart and professional, but they should be or will lose users. Thanks to OSS, I can just fork. But being OSS doesn’t mean you can suck and be random and still stay useful to people.

Of course if it’s your project, you’re free to do whatever you would like.

Counterpoint: much of our industry is often described as being in the business of disruptive technology.

It's been educational for me to watch how developers are reacting when they're on the receiving end of the disruption.

Profession - "A professional is a member of a profession or any person who earns a living from a specified professional activity. "

If you want professional behavior, pay the person.

If you want free, you get whatever the person wants to give you for free.

No one is required to do any work for an open source project, but they are expected to behave in a professional manner and plenty of people have been rightly criticized here when they acted inappropriately as part of an open source team.

Its debatable whether OP is right, but there's at least a case to be made that taking down documentation that was not costing any money to host for the sole purpose of making an unrelated statement (not one targeted at their customers, just society in general) does damage the professional reputation of the team and its product.

Anyway, if we ignore for now the circularity of that definition of "professional" and take it at face value, then swapping out your open-source docs for a political message would fail the definition of professional, not just based on the "earn a living" part, but also on the "specified professional activity" part. Assuming we're using their repo because it's, like, for programming computers and shit, we might be surprised to find out they had changed their profession from computer-programmer and computer-program-explainer, to worked-up self-important opinion-haver. Which even fewer people would pay money for, by the way.

If you don't care, then do whatever the hell you want of course.

It would be fine if the banner was close-able or displayed once a day or something along the lines of that. The problem isn't that they're showing support. It's doing it a completely obnoxious way that's the issue.

If you are one of the people doing this, look around you. Literally everyone slapped a BLM banner on their website, when everyone has done that yours literally adds nothing. Sure, put that message up there, but make it close-able. Not something that takes up valuable screen real-estate permanently.

Really, even that doesn't have much to do with open source, since companies exist that develop entirely open source products but offer paid support and enterprise contracts with warranties and guarantees. What this really damages is the reputation of ecosystems that rely upon foundational libraries made by hobbyists and one-man operations as weekend side projects.

The purpose of the banner is not to convert anyone, the purpose is to demonstrate that the author of the package subscribes to the correct opinions.

Plus, demonstrating what opinions are held is not the whole point. Part of it is telling others who support those causes that they're not alone. And it's also partially a "fuck you" to those who are triggered by mentions of causes like Black Lives Matter.

If they had a banner saying "Trump 2024" or "The AZOV Battalion are Nazis" I might not agree with them, but at least they are taking some personal risk of cancellation.

So if it's empty, so is commenting on HN, I'd extrapolate. Otherwise, it's gotten the attention of the sort of people who comment on HN, and that's something.

1. These political threads always bring out the most ideologically strident folk

2. Developer time/experience is impacted by these changes.

While I personally think these banners are fine and good to raise awareness, I do agree that there's a moral grandstanding element as well. I'm often puzzled why it's so controversial a belief to have. I don't see why folks are so annoyed at these banners though because I've been annoyed for years and years at crappy ASCII/figlet drawings that libraries/apps output that are garbled in my terminal's width/encoding and yet people still add those.

But mostly I'm wondering why it matters if they're taking a personal risk or not. How is that relevant to anything?

So either virtue signaling applies anytime someone expresses an opinion about something moral, in which case it’s a useless truism. Or it’s meant to express doubt or challenge someone to prove that they take action, in which case who owes you proof?

Putting a statement of support for a cause in your open source repo may or may not have any direct impact, but it is personal expression - and in general I am for personal expression.

I’m for signal, not noise. I don’t want stupid personal expressions, I want meaningful or beautiful or somehow useful.

I used to work with a person who would raise their hand in every presentation and say “security is important how is this software secure” even when it wasn’t anywhere remotely relevant. It was counterproductive and distracting and wasted valuable time that we could use to do something better.

I guess I feel that improving our world, ending war, making our society more just and fair, these are meaningful, useful, and beautiful things to do. They might be some of the most meaningful things actually.

> It was counterproductive and distracting and wasted valuable time that we could use to do something better.

This is an argument about context. Security IS important, I imagine we'd both agree, but maybe not in that specific situation. Like if I bring up climate change while we're rushing to the hospital after a car accident. Climate change is a real and important issue, but right now it's a distraction. So is an open source website an inappropriate context to indicate support for movements or disapproval of others? I don't think so, but if you do calling it "virtue signaling" isn't what you mean, and is actually a counterproductive distraction.

This is just false. Some signaling achieves nothing, but there's plenty of signaling that has caused individuals to change their behavior, politicians to pass laws, and corporations to change their products. The thing is it's basically impossible to tell which is the useful signaling and which is shouting into the void, even as the person signaling the signals. Which drop filled the bucket?

You seem to find it annoying because you think it's being done just to SEEM good, rather than to BE good... but when it comes to issues we don't have direct control of, there's not much difference. I can ACT on my belief that texting and driving is a terrible thing to do all I want, but it doesn't stop anyone else from doing it. The only small piece of influence I have over others is to signal that I believe it's wrong whenever it's appropriate. That and lobby for tougher fines (by signaling to politicians) and technological solutions (again, by signaling to corporations).

None of this is to say you can't criticize specific gestures as being empty - but to say signaling is always empty is just false.

I feel that way too. I want all those things. Adding “FreeUkraine” or “BLM” doesn’t do that. I don’t think virtue signaling is that big of a problem, but adding these phrases does nothing more than signal.

I don’t think it’s productive to call out virtual signaling in that I would never submit a PR to complain or remove. But I definitely notice it and it seems stupid. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it but a second or two while reading docs doesn’t make me think more highly of someone.

I think cynically it just seems like people say this instead of doing meaningful things.

They would be, if they actually made meaningful strides to accomplish those objectives beyond stroking the dev's ego.

However, I've gotten a lot of feedback from friends of mine that signalling my support for their cause or identity has made them feel more comfortable in the world.

That's both useful and beautiful.

I’m not saying that security reviews shouldn’t be performed. They should. Security should be part of design and code review. But it’s not a relevant question in every single situation.

That's the implication. But I'm pretty sure the critics would be even angrier if the open source project had taken action.

The virtue in this case being an implied rejection of groupthink.

You can always dismiss what they say by saying they don’t actually care, it’s just to look good.

It tells more about _your_ beliefs and what _you_ stand for than anything.

It seems a lot of HNers don’t stand for freedom too much. They stand for not being annoyed by the fallouts of this war.

"This is virtue signaling" is more of a dog whistle ingratiating yourself with a certain crowd instead of an argument. Don't know what youre trying to achieve besides that.

Genius move. Any concept that can be used to criticize you is implicitly outing me as part of your out-group. Now you can judge me not on my own merits, but on the merits of people you associate me with. And my posts can well-formulated and thought-out, you disregard them for factors i cannot possibly control.

This is the partisan thinking that i don't want to have business with. This is what i ghost people for. Call it cancelling if you want to, fact is, if you are walking through the world looking for friends, my place is the wrong address.

Judge me by my own merits, not by some other random people you picked.

Edit: After showing this to her, my wife straight out told me that you are psychotic ("einen an der Dattel haben") and that I should not argue with random internet people. Thinking about it, she is right.

I don't think recognizing that is conflicting at all with a positive outlook, or the choice to be optimistic, or a humanist, etc. You can choose to believe it or choose not to believe it, and still value human life and try to progress humanity forward.

Also don't underestimate the value/incentive of following your conscience, acting out your beliefs etc. Cognitive dissonance (which results from not doing so) is deeply uncomfortable and a good motivator for being "altruistic."

Something tells me that they don't want to actually fix anything and are just virtue signalling on HN.

https://github.com/isomorphic-git/isomorphic-git.github.io/i...

Please, tell me what else I am "virtue signalling on HN" about.

Also, SQLAlchemy is badass, rockstar tech, but in a good way. Only DB abstraction layer I've used that doesn't feel like a leaky, kludgy mess.

It’s like those people who do 50 commits instead of one to look busy. Just put that mental energy into real stuff.

People get killed and a HNer is annoyed by a gap around a banner.

It’s not a trendy thing, it won’t go away because of some random trendy thing.

HNers annoyance couldn’t be more irrelevant. And people are still getting killed because the world has decided that this war , as bad as it is, shouldn’t interfere with business too much.

People are still getting killed because we don’t want our precious little irrelevant easy lives to be disturbed too much.

The world still hasn’t waked up. We should be alarmed and fully supporting freedom. But the world is just annoyed. I thought moral values were important to open source.

It’s legitimate to ask what did all the Internet angst add to the solution? The answer it would seem is very little. I do hope it is different for Ukraine but I’m not holding my breath.

I see a lot of ambiguous statements these days, from too many people. People not wanting to "take sides", but in reality not yet willing to say they only stand for their personal interests, if not for a return to the law of the fittest.

What do you stand for?

Politics doesn't belong in software. Some software can be political, sure, but the only purpose of these banners is good PR and virtue signalling.

Our lives are going to change. Depending on how concerned and committed western people will be, we'll have to face a major energy crisis, or give up our democracies for cheap oil & gas. If trump is re elected, I see nothing good coming for the west. We are living crucial times, fascism is back in full force, our medias and politicians are being bought one by one with dirty russian money. And fascists don't feel the need to hide anymore.

But people fail to see why this war isn't yet another political, social or economical "issue". I looks like we're in for a very dark age...

The OSI is specially calling out an incident where someone actually put malware in their code which targeted Belarus and Russia. Totally unacceptable and not a form of protected protest at all, and arguably not speech.

[0]https://www.sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

[1]https://github.com/cirosantilli

It sounds like the underlying issue is insufficient testing of the UI layout with the new content, not the fact that there is new content.

Agree. I often have to click around to figure out why the black bar has shown up.

> less likely to stoke heated division amongst its users

This is interesting. Why does #BlackLivesMatter stoke heated division among HN users? And what does that say about the community that has been built here?

> and more relevant to the content of the site

I'm sure I don't agree. As the world moves further into automation, machine learning, machine analysis, and sousveillance, the interaction between technology and minorities in our communities is of vital importance to what we do. Questions of interaction between minority developers, customers, users, and community members and the majorities in those spaces impact on questions like hiring policy, behavior analysis and prediction (and the benefits and drawbacks of those tools), unequal treatment laid bare when the cameras are in the hands of the many and not the few (and the consequences of that knowledge), software that only works for a subset of users optimally because it was designed with only those users in mind, and other topics.

Software is growing to touch every part of human existence, and it's probably actually dangerous for hackers to traipse through life ignorant of that fact. We build things that impact people in a huge way, and if some groups are structurally invisible to the builders of those things, we really risk baking inequalities into the very engines of our society.

Simply because it is a political issue, on which people might have different opinions. And since that specific issue is not related to tech at all, it just causes conflict without any benefit.

While honoring the death of some generally respected figure in our field is hopefully less controversial and more informative.

Black Lives Matter is heavily interwoven with the sousveillance effect... As cameras have moved from a luxury to a ubiquity, control of the narrative of how policing works has fallen out of the hands of the people who do it. It doesn't matter why multiple black men and women were shot to death... People have seen it happen, and they feel in their guts it was wrong. It's hard to get to that gut-level effect without visual stimulus; people have been writing for decades about the negative effects of violent-response-authorized policing.

Now that we know this, how will things change? Will people try to make the cameras go away, will procedures change to account for everyone having a camera, will we all adapt to being seen more often in public? And at present people generally know when they're being filmed... What of the near future, where the tech to film something could be attached to a drone flying too high or too quietly to see?

It's very, very hard to slice a clean cut between technology and its effect on societies.

https://www.wtkr.com/news/technologys-role-in-the-black-live...

It would stoke heated division because different users see that slogan has having different connotations. What it says about the community is that it's actually a fairly diverse community, at least in terms of their beliefs (and very likely in other respects).

> ...Software is growing to touch every part of human existence, and it's probably actually dangerous for hackers to traipse through life ignorant of that fact...

HN does not need to hang up a #BLM banner in a cheap act of virtue signaling for us as hackers to grapple with the impact we have on society. Indeed, such an act would impede productive conversations.