Dear lord these guys are putting in work. I'm not exactly a huge supporter of Github (the company not the product) so I'm very glad to see it. I look forward to their continued growth.
Yeah, but I wish they'd give more credit where due.
On their markdown page they claim "For GitLab we developed something we call "GitLab Flavored Markdown" (GFM)." while that is obviously a ripoff of GitHub Flavoured Markdown.
This is why I like GitLab! Thanks for doing this :)
You're not only productive at shipping quality features but also listening to people using your product! This makes me even happier to be using it at work :)
@dang I'm sorry for this. Please understand I was inebriated when I posted this comment, but I will always appreciate your work and if you ban me for the following comment, I understand.
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syste - I love you man. You are an amazing CEO. Your company does great work and has a great product. I always become so happy when I see you actively responding to the comments here. You are a role model CEO.
Something so many companies overlook is actually listening to their users and taking their feedback seriously. I love you man, if you wrote an autobiography I would buy it. Congratulations to you and your team.
styse, you are a great motivation for the product company I run. I checked your strategy page and you are planning to integrate with NetSuite. Why not something open source for finance? ERPNext?
Thanks for your kind words. ERPNext looks cool. We try to use open source where we can although we also try to use boring solutions. In this case we already completed the NetSuite implementation so we're not in the market at the moment. BTW I'm not sure ERPNext is ideal for our use case, we would need multi-company consolidation.
GitHub Flavored Markdown is itself a rip of the markdown standard. Is it giving enough credit to markdown for GitHub to include the word "markdown" in the name? If so, then by extension it should be sufficient for GitLab to include "flavored markdown" in the name. ;)
The many "standards" of Markdown also now include CommonMark [1]. There is also some interesting history as to why it is not named "Standard Markdown".
I think phrasing it as "also now include CommonMark" is a little misleading, it has been around for a few years now and the entire goal is to take the quotes off of the "standards" to actually have a Markdown specification. The drivers behind it also include (IIRC) GitHub and StackExchange.
That said, I did not notice the "GitLab Flavored Markdown" in the story link but I'll be fairly disappointed if it is actually "yet another Markdown pseudo-standard" and not CommonMark.
It's also especially annoying when you consider that Gruber seems opposed to the idea of anyone else fleshing out Markdown properly, but he's not doing anything himself. At some point what he did with Markdown was basically just squatting on it himself, making any improving of it at the source impossible.
man I wish they would bring something new, cool and innovative to the space, instead being bent on doing feature-by-feature copy of github.
They have an amazing opportunity now to take advantage of github fatigue. But they are throwing it all away by trying to become an inferior clone of github.
It has integrated CI whereas GitHub requires using a third-party CI system, it's had Reaction Emoji (called Award Emoji for GitLab) for a while now, it has "Merge when build succeeds", CE is entirely FOSS, etc.
There seems to be a healthy competition between various ci software that works with github. Why would github try to kill that and take on such a high touch area.
Its quite puzzling why gitlab went that route, they are basically discouraging ci systems from integrating with them. I think this is would turn out to be a bad decision for gitlab.
Well, their CI is pretty good for starters... compared to self hosting jenkins, or paying for Travis CI. Self hosting gitlab integrated CI runners is a big plus for me.
As a third party service provider you could still host and/or modify those CI runners for specific tasks like node, go, etc.
And to give some additional background to dominotw's question. We didn't like the options for CI on-premises. And by integrating it directly into GitLab it is very easy set up a new project, encouraging people to use CI on more projects.
Having people use GitLab CI will mean GitLab is a less attractive platform for other CI products. We do have a good commit status API since GitLab 8.1 and there is a great Jenkins plugin that supports that http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jenkins.html
I'd be surprised if they did. I really don't see a business reason for them doing so. They are clearly laser focused on enterprise, which means massively bespoked internal build systems and work flow. And they'll be competing against a lot of entrenched internal solutions.
GitLab and Atlassian have a pricing model for displacing existing systems and encouraging adoption, but I can't see GitHub following suit. GitHub looks to like they want to be the Apple in the Apple vs Android. Android has the largest user base but due to Apple's premium pricing, they have the largest profit.
I’m a juuuuge GitHub supporter, but let me provide a different perspective: In business, there is product innovation and there is also business innovation.
Sometimes, you provide exactly the same product, but the way in which you do business around that product is the innovation. For example, a 100% open-source implementation of the JVM needn’t provide any technical innovation whatsoever: The innovations are in how it’s developed and how it’s licensed.
I won’t speak to whether GitLab is providing any business innovation or not, I’m just pointing out that if they are, that’s something of value in its own right.
They were getting a lot of heat when they refused to copy GitHub, because a lot (most?) of GitHub's features are just obvious and helpful. So... being a clone shouldn't be your whole strategy, but you should still learn from the competition.
I especially like that they have added configuration options to the .gitlab-ci.yml. If I am not mistaken, this means your project can auto-deploy using an arbitrary build process. Here's what an example .gitlab-ci.yml looks like with a GitLab Pages build configuration: https://gitlab.com/pages/pages.gitlab.io/blob/master/.gitlab...
You can indeed have a fully automated deployment. You could already do this with GitLab CI on an external server (S3 or anything else), but now you don't have to worry about hosting anymore.
We took inspiration from .travis.yml when designing the .gitlab-ci.yml file, but are continuing to add features and configurations that make it possible to work together with other GitLab features such as build artifacts and now Pages.
One of the big limitations of Jekyll + Github pages is you cannot use plugins..any plugins at all. If Gitlab's build process allowed for Jekyll plugins and custom domains, I may consider moving my pages there as well.
This is awesome. One question I have in comparison to GitHub Pages is if a global CDN is used and if there is effective DDOS protection built in. GitHub has to deal with regular DDOS attacks, and I imagine GitLab will have a few too. GitHub does a pretty good job with it, but before I move to GitLab Pages I'd like to understand that better but didn't see that info anywhere.
Right now, GitLab Pages is hosted on the same servers as GitLab.com, so it gets the same attention from our engineers in terms of reliability and uptime.
We're not using a global CDN, but this is something we will explore.
We don't have a lot of experience yet with DDOS protection so there might be downtime as we learn that. As you can see in the issue we're working to implement protection before we need it but it might not be ready in time nor can it protect against everything.
For what it's worth Cloudflare does not do anything different for Tor than for regular IPs. Since those are static pages with most likely not exactly questionable content the use of Tor is probably not all that important anyways that the total number of users that might be affected would be miniscule.
A site operator. It isn't censorship for someone to decide who they want to talk to.
CF is simply giving site owners levers to use if they so choose. While I am a strong supporter of Tor, privacy, and anonymity, CF has done nothing wrong here by allowing site operators to selectively choose who they wish to serve to.
Isn't the problem along the line of so many different people using effectively the same IP addresses (exit points) and looking somewhat similar to each other?
I'd imagine if there was a major ISP network out there that was doing NATing or similar for their customers so everyone came from a small set of IP addresses they'd get the same treatment. More users on the same IP means more abuse from that IP. If anything Cloudflare isn't discriminating. To handle Tor users better you'd have to discriminate (technical definition, not the negative form) to handle Tor users better
I'll second this to amplify the message to please not add CloudFlare for all custom domains and if you feel you must add it then at least make it optional.
This would be an absolute showstopper bug which would prevent some of us from using GitLab Pages if it became a requirement. Definitely do not want.
Not all DDoS is volumetric, and even in volumetric attacks it can be complex to differentiate legitimate traffic from the noise being generated by the botnet.
Effective mitigation is about far more than "How big is your pipe?" so this comment reads as somewhat uninformed.
tl;dr - Azure does not have a magic <SOLVE DDOS> button which someone pushes, fixes all kinds of attacks, and just charges you for this at $1175/hr whilst you sleep peacefully.
Better to ask about their minimum availability guarantee. Knowing that the servers can handle a DDOS attack is of little value if the service goes down for maintenance every day (just to give an example).
GitLab.com runs the same GitLab as our users and some upgrades require downtime. Other operations should not require downtime, we have multiple application servers and load balancers. The backend services are HA except the file storage until we complete the move to CephFS.
I'm not sure whether we've seriously considered Swift, but high bandwidth is important to improving our performance, one area in which Ceph seems to be the better choice [0].
This is great -- it has a killer feature that I think GitHub Pages is sorely missing (unless it exists and I'm just ignorant to the fact). Custom domains WITH SSL.
Right now I have my custom domain set up on GitHub, but it's not SSL. I would love to be able to do that.
1. the certificate is not generated by you (in the Free or the Pro plan) but by them and these certificates are for multiple domain names. So you end up sharing your certificate with other domains / websites of dubious nature that are also on CloudFlare's network.
2. CloudFlare only secures the connection between users and the CloudFlare network. It does not secure the connection between CloudFlare and your hosting service, unless your hosting service also supports TLS/SSL connections and you activate their Strict SSL option.
For the purposes of hosting a project website, secure connections are more important than ever due to the potential of external attackers, which could very well be a government institution, to infect distributed binaries or source code. Instances like XcodeGhost will become more common imho. And a secure connection between your user's browser and your hosting server is not 100% secure, but it's a good start. And towards that purpose CloudFlare Free in front of GitHub Pages isn't very good ;-)
I've been wondering about this. I share mine with several shops that appear to be selling low-schedule drugs on the clearnet.
Don't know what the implications for that are, except that someone poking around the validity of my SSL certificate will establish that mine is a free tier Cloudflare one.
If a domain that you share your certificate with has their certificate revoked or is blacklisted for any reason this could have a negative impact on you.
But the traffic after cloudflare's proxy is plaintext right?
I know CloudFlare has better thing to do than sniffing websites but I don't see the point of installing an SSL certification using clouflare or any other third-party which will handle traffic the way they do. You don't own the certificate, they do.
GitHub supports SSL for *.github.io so you can have your custom domain with SSL on CloudFlare, and CloudFlare can proxy https://example.github.io/... on the other side.
(1) Last I checked, cloudflare's "Strict SSL" mode only accepts from the backend a cert for the custom domain you're trying to serve, not accepting the github.io cert. A pity they don't let me configure what cert(s) to accept from the backend...
(2) In addition, Github have indicated their current github.io SSL is not actually end-to-end secure — it's only secure from their CDN (Fastly) but their link to the CDN is unsecure. So there is absolutely zero you can do — Cloudflare or anything else — to make GH Pages end-to-end secure on custom domains.
If I'm not mistaken, you have to change the DNS of the domain to something *.cloudflare.com to be able to use their service, so it won't work in this scenario.
When using GitHub Pages, the server -> CloudFlare goes over unauthenticated HTTPS (using the HTTPS "not strict" option), which means it is resistant to passive attackers but vulnerable to active MITM attackers.
How would you do that without handing over your private keys? Otherwise gitlab couldn't serve your site. Also, as soon as you point an A record of your domain to somebodies server, they're able to get valid certificates through acme (which is probably what they do). If you don't trust somebody, don't point your domain to them.
If your goal is to tick a compliance box saying "no third-party has access to our private key" or "our private key never leaves our DC", then they have it figured out. If you want an additional barrier between your web server and your private key for Heartbleed-like vulnerabilities, this is also viable solution.
If your goal is to have end-to-end encryption between your server and a visitor, or hope this is going to protect you in case CloudFlare or GitLab are owned, then this isn't a real solution. CloudFlare has access to your session keys, and if they're owned, those can be logged and used to decrypt traffic. Even with a leaked private key, older sessions would be safe thanks to PFS ciphers, so Keyless SSL doesn't really change anything here.
It's entirely possible that GitLab could integrate Let's Encrypt and generate their own private keys. Some large shared hosting providers already do this (e.g. DreamHost).
Keys are cheap and plentiful, just regenerate & reissue however often you like. The paid CAs I've used do free reissues with new CSRs no problem. You are already trusting them to serve your site so adding a private TLS key isn't a big deal.
The only downside I could think of is if you are using HPKP with a long duration, you could have issues with rapidly changing keys. But I wouldn't expect GitLab Pages to support setting those headers so probably another non-issue.
Gitlab is still super slow even compared to young projects like gogs. I know many ppl who shied away for gitlab due to its slowness.
If I was them, I would stop all copycat 'me too' features like ci/pages ect and put the resources to making it faster.
This is a sign that their features are pritorized by business ppl who want to put features on their slides .
We've made a lot of changes to GitLab in the last number of releases that make GitLab a whole lot faster [0], but we recognize that the performance of GitLab.com can still improve quite a bit.
For low-memory machines, we do recommend people to use Gogs.
This is the trouble for me using Gitlab.com. Feels like there is a lot of 'n+1' going on in the background. I'm sure there aren't, but it feels like a Rails app that is suffering from that.
Other than that it's great. I've moved nearly everything over from GitHub
gogs was designed from the start to be fast. Nothing but a rewrite would make GitLab as fast as gogs for basic stuff on small self-hosted servers. For basic uses, the resources required for the platform of GitLab (rails) is greater than the resources required to use all of gogs.
I really like GitLab, we use it and they follow the business model I wish GitHub had. But as they become bigger and bigger I have to wonder how much longer until they start antagonizing GitHub with these feature clones, and who should have my support when that day comes.
I am usually in the Open Source camp, but I don't think the choice is so easy here. Not only does GitLab copy GitHub, it does so by relying on a lot of Open Source sofware written by GitHub and/or GitHub employees.
You may like GitHub or not, but you cannot deny they contribute a lot to Open Source. I am not entirely sure how much that has changed since his resignation, but here is Tom Preston-Werner's position on Open Source: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...
>Not only does GitLab copy GitHub, it does so by relying on a lot of Open Source sofware written by GitHub and/or GitHub employees.
That seems like a bizarre complaint, considering git itself is FOSS, initially written by Linus, and that GitHub's entire business is effectively built around hosting git repositories.
We initially had GitLab EE under the MIT expat license. But this proved to be a problem for potential customers, their purchasing department didn't understand. We also like that now we can store the EE source in a public repository that accepts merge requests.
As long as we're talking about the GNU AGPL then absolutely! I would say that the original AGPL is sufficiently FOSS but it's GNU GPL incompatible which might be annoying. It's not necessarily a deal breaker though if it's handled well.
> As long as we're talking about the GNU AGPL then absolutely! I would say that the original AGPL is sufficiently FOSS but it's GNU GPL incompatible which might be annoying. It's not necessarily a deal breaker though if it's handled well.
It's GPLv2 incompatible. GPLv3 has a special exception for the AGPL.
> Out of curiousity, would you consider GPL Affero sufficiently FOSS?
Of course it's a free software license (although I have my doubts about the enforceability of the Affero sections in the AGPL). GitLab EE is proprietary (even though you can read the source).
You could support both of them. Support GitHub in defending their product from blatantly being copied, and support GitLab in preserving their momentum while making changes to their product so it doesn't look and behave quite so much like GitHub.
I was wondering if GitLab provides a Markdown editor that could be used by non-technical users directly from the web interface? Something like Prose[1], Dillinger[2] or StackEdit[3].
Of course you could argue if it's in scope for a project like GitLab, but it means that I could use static site generators for projects where non-technical users need to edit the content without ever thinking about a CMS.
Would be nice:
- if it would also provide an easy upload/commit of images to some configurable directory from that Markdown editor;
- configure a content-editor user that's restricted to a subset of directories;
- allow the user to preview the full website without pushing to the live environment;
- use a tag or branch to mark the version that can be pushed to the live environment.
It would probably be the most flexible CMS that's available right now.
Great start. The obvious missing feature is Let's Encrypt support. I would like to see hosting companies like GitLab implement HTTPS for 100% of their served pages, and Let's Encrypt is a key enabling technology to do so.
For this sort of thing, I've had great success sticking arbitrary services behind an nginx reverse proxy on the same network and terminating the SSL at the proxy.
This is great news, Gitlab really is coming along very, very fast. Does it say anything about where the sites are going to be hosted? Are they using AWS underneath or something? It's curious timing since literally just the other day I moved my Hugo site to Bitbucket + Aerobatics. But since I have all my other stuff on Gitlab already, it'd be kinda convenient.
Just want to shout out that you can actually get HTTPS on your custom domained Github Page now with Kloudsec[1]. We actually built a dedicated onboarding tool for this: https://kloudsec.com/github-pages
thanks for your reply jobvandervoort! Are not you afraid that people will use gitlab as cheap hosting service? So what are the limitations on content I can host there? Policy? Can I use it for commercial usage?
One of the founding principles of open source is that you can take a copy of someone's work and make changes to it (as long as you continue to make the changes public).
Github isn't open source so the analogy doesn't quite hold, but they're creating something and giving it to the community (as well as building a business).
> One of the founding principles of open source is that you can take a copy of someone's work and make changes to it (as long as you continue to make the changes public)
Also as long as you acknowledge it. It’s acceptable to copy a FOSS project and make a new one on top of it but you have to mention it; you can’t just create a copycat and claim you invented everything by yourself, especially if you start making money off it (well some licences let you do that but that’s not ethical).
The guys at GitLab are usually quite open about this sort of thing (having copied this and that, etc). I don't think they've ever claimed to have invented anything they have not.
We indeed try to be open about it. Let us know if we should improve the attribution somewhere, in this thread we already made a fix in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11432400
Congrats on new major feature. One thing I'd like to see developed further is support for per-branch pages. Right now it looks like you could jerryrig a build script that builds each branch in its own subdirectory, but that sounds bit suboptimal considering that any commit will trigger full rebuild of all branches.
For example if you have version branches like v1.3 and v1.4 etc, you'd want to have docs built for each branch and publish them like myproject.gitlab.com/v1.3/... etc
We considered bringing it to CE. But we still think this is more useful if you run a server with a lot of developers, our criteria for EE features as listed on https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship
Our thesis is that if you have less users you likely have less sites and you can set up a normal CI jobs to deploy it.
We have a wildcard DNS entry pointed at our server and we use b3cmd[1][2] for static servers. It also handles docker-compose projects. SSL everywhere, CORS supported, branches / namespaces supported. Pretty great so far.
I thought that, too. But on the other hand if you're running your own private instance what's really the point of serving up statically generated pages from GitLab instead of just directly off your own HTTP server of choice?
> GitLab Runners do not offer secure isolation between projects that they do builds for. You are TRUSTING all GitLab users who can push code to project A, B or C to run shell scripts on the machine hosting runner X.
Well, there is an issue for that[0]. Also, as of today[1], all shared Runners on GitLab.com are each on their own VM inside Docker containers, so that message does not apply for sure.
I a huge fan of Gitlab and have seen them grow since when I started using them.
This is a great new set of features. Looking forward to trying this out!
Yes. I lobbied several companies to terminate their enterpise contracts with github because of their racist attitudes. All switched within 2 weeks. Some to VS Team Services, some to Gitlab. My work projects went to MSFT, but I think I will transfer my side projects to gitlab from bitbucket, since they have pages now.
> I get the feeling that it was taken down only because it was inconvenient for someone
It's a tempting feeling to get, and a contagious one, but no—the only inconvenience we care about is that of HN readers who don't want to read tedious flamewars tacked like burning barnacles onto the top comment. I'm kind of glad you said that, though, because usually the sinister implication goes the other way, Gitlab being a YC-funded startup and all.
Speaking of convenience, it's not that inconvenient to scroll down to find the flamewar. Seems like a reasonable balance to me.
How many up votes does that comment have? I want to know how many HNers are so offended by diversity initiatives that they will lobby companies to boycott github.
"don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon so let's limit their scope of damage"
So when this guy makes workshops to spread his bigotry he is fighting for inclusion and when I speak up I am fighting against diversity initiatives? Are you for real?
My expectations are too high. I shouldn't except HN crowd to understand the difference between mainstream and intersectional feminism.
But it is hilarious that posts on gender and race issue get flagged to death, posts about class are always voted to the top, and anything that threatens the status quo spurs outrage.
There actually aren't as many posts on class, though we (where "we" really means society) seem to be getting there.
I'm thinking of adding to the site guidelines to please not post generalizations about the HN community unless you have data. It seems almost always to be associated with low-information, divisive comments. I don't mean to pick on you personally; lots of users do it. But almost always in bad parts of threads.
Dang, you've mentioned this to me before so I have been counting, but I prefer a more scientific method. Are there APIs that let me know the number of flags for a post?
Edit: also why I asked for the number of upvotes. According to him it was 45? That's a lot.
People cannot be taught empathy through corporate courses. It doesn't matter if they are straight, male, or whatever. Probably mentioned male middle managers because management is mostly male. I'm not this easily offended.
Not the person you replied to, but I personally avoided it for a long time by avoiding the comments on [political/news/gender]-focused forums and subreddits. It isn't exactly a mainstream term.
yes, sometimes stuff happens to "ordinary people" and their life is ruined. They have no choice but become participants rather than mere by standers that is how social change happens. ( edited for grammar)
Does that extend to how you actually had time to comment just for the sake of casting some pejorative insult at another random stranger on the internet?
In my experience, SJW is a term for people who are not actually working to improve the state of affairs of the world in terms of 'social justice', but rather people who have bought into a very specific, irrational, and blatantly hypocritical ideology.
This distasteful subculture really exists, and - as with anti-vaxxers, birthers, the chemtrail people, white supremacists and other irrational movements - it poses a fundamental threat to the values on which reasonable discourse is built. People who are immersed in SJW culture (as with those other subcultures just mentioned) become increasing comfortable rejecting reason and facts. Imo all thinking people ought to be at least as concerned about today's SJWs as they are about those other movements.
SJW is a pejorative, plain and simple. It means "shut up and stay in your place". In this particular case, the post I was replying to[0] was referring to a post[1] that I'm pretty sure was referring to racism against white people. Take that as you will.
So? 'Racist' is also pejorative. Racists exist and we ought to be able to discuss their existence and harms. SJWs exists and we ought to discuss their existence and their harms as well.
> It means "shut up and stay in your place"
I literally laughed out loud on reading this. Of course SJW doesn't mean anyone should stay in their place. Where do you get this outrageous idea? And what is that place, to you?
> In this particular case, the post I was replying t
I can't speak to the motives and thoughts of this particular speaker, but it seemed to me you were making a generalization about what 'SJW' really means, and making unwarranted claims about what we should be able to reliably infer from the mere use of the term.
> So? 'Racist' is also pejorative. Racists exist and we ought to be able to discuss their existence and harms. SJWs exists and we ought to discuss their existence and their harms as well.
What is a SJW?
> I literally laughed out loud on reading this. Of course SJW doesn't mean anyone should stay in their place. Where do you get this outrageous idea? And what is that place, to you?
I literally hope you enjoyed laughing out loud. What does SJW mean to you?
> I can't speak to the motives and thoughts of this particular speaker, but it seemed to me you were making a generalization about what 'SJW' really means, and making unwarranted claims about what we should be able to reliably infer from the mere use of the term.
You can't speak to this particular speaker's motives, but you can to mine? What does SJW mean to you?
I've already stated what SJW means to me, namely, the person using it is stating "I know I'm wrong, I just preferred it when people knew their place"
If you'd like me to expand upon that, I'd be glad to. I just don't understand where you're coming from.
Being racist against white people isn't countering racism it's just regular racism.
Neither is going so far to the end of the spectrum i.e. "too PC" isn't the opposite of racism either. Hired just because you're not white? Not really a self-esteem boost.
Being inclusive is what Github should be doing to counter racism without the racist sexist bigoted attitude.
Is it a problem for you? If so, and you didn't live there as a child, many people would just suggest that you move. Colonialism isn't history in Hawai'i.
It never really bothered me when I lived on O'ahu. I know the difference between "damn haoles" and "fuckin' haoles", and I know which one I am.
Unless Github's located in Hawaii, I'm not sure how that's relevant.
Github is predominantly white and located in SF. Are white employees there suffering significant "actual discrimination" as the post a couple levels up alleges?
Basically that's the new school of thought. Look at the Wikipedia page on Racism, for instance.
It's a tactic that's been around for a long time. Redefine words. Then pretend everyone's using your new, made-up definitions, and claim you've won the argument.
Maybe I'm just starting to notice it, but the level of doublespeak is really astounding these days.
I don't think it's necessarily doublespeak, it's that people actually use the terms differently.
Racism for example means BOTH the individual belief in superiority/inferiority of a particular race AND the societal/systematic belief.
This is why there are debates about whether Racism still exists in America, or whether discrimination against White people is racist. It depends on the context.
I've never seen this. I've only seen people say "Racism is bias PLUS POWER. It's literally impossible to be racist as a Y because Xs have power." I've not seen people say "Yes of course we'd traditionally call Y a racist, but what I mean is that they aren't being institutionally racist."
No one's talking past anyone. It's obvious what's going on. They don't want to admit that non-Xs can be terribly racist. So they flip words around so they can, at worst, say "well they may have prejudice". They invent stuff like "reverse racism".
And in fact, that's what Github's code of conduct enshrines.
Really have to disagree. "No one is talking past anyone" means you're not actually interested in having a conversation about this. Intellectual dishonesty is believing you have THE TRUE MEANING of the word. You really don't.
geez. i hadn't seen that tweet. crazy. i would love to consider gitlab as an alternative. need to plan on migrating my repos and gists over first. i can't support that type of culture. not today. not ever.
Holy shit. That's some of the most egregiously racist things I've seen and I'm not white! No business from me, ever!
Elaboration : I feel like apologising for the knee jerk reaction. A tweet I would forgive, but that corporate slide in a corporation that aggressively claims to be social, inclusive, community etc. is simply terrible hypocrisy.
But anyway I checked with my PM and my team uses self hosted gitlab and the decision was purely technical :)
Ironically, if white people were in charge, history suggests we'dve definitely done a better job of subtly excluding the "wrong" people without being explicit about it.
It reminds me of how ardent fans of <anything> (programing language, framework, brand, etc) are usually its worst enemies. But doing what they are doing, they are working for the opposition in fact.
Do you have a link to anything I could read up on regards to the "racist attitudes" you mention? Genuinly interested. I have heard some negative things about their environment, but nothing regards to racism.
I remember when github adopted the Code of Conduct, it was a clear sign for me that it was time to switch. All they need now is the equivalent of Twitter's "Safety Council" to complete the SJW combo.
They should have just had the Code of Conduct from day 1 and not waited until they had an incident to overreact to. I've worked for many places with Codes of Conduct and diversity programs and they are usually run pretty well and are not heavy-handed or staffed with exuberant amateurs. There are proven benefits and established best practices to get it done.
The problem isn't with codes of conduct in the abstract, but with the specific code of conduct that GitHub used. It explicitly permits racism, sexism, and cisphobia as long as they aren't against the wrong groups:
> Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:
>
> ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
Since you turned this into a discussion about race, I am inclined to speak up. Racism and discrimination is about who has power. Caucasians in America have all the power and hence the struggle of the minorities for equality. I admire github for taking a stance in the diversity debate( although I have yet to fully familiarize with the details). I know that people from all demographics desire equality and a more fair world. I'll work towards that world and keep build things.
Racism and discrimination have nothing to do with power. You're redefining the word so that it allows a particular group to engage in discriminatory behavior while avoiding accountability.
The previous speaker, who is definitely involved in an agenda driven redefinition of a word, probably has no conscious desire to engage in discriminatory behavior while avoiding accountability. S/he is almost certainly a well intentioned enabler of those who do wish to engage in discriminatory behavior while avoiding accountability
Apologies if I misunderstood, but I think you are asking me to clarify that I'm making a distinction between (a) one person allegedly having dishonest intentions and a conscious motive to do X and (b) that same person having better intentions, and doing X by accident.
The phrasing of the parent was "You are doing A so that B can happen.", which I thought was presumptive and unfair towards the other party.
I've known a lot of people who participate in the subculture of SJWs, and I'm confident that many of them have no conscious desire to be enablers of hatred and bigotry, not even hatred and bigotry towards white males. They simply don't understand the consequences of their beliefs.
Racism and discrimination are not exclusively about 'who has power', unless you abandon the existing and widely accepted usages of those words in favor of an agenda driven re-definition of the terms.
> Caucasians in America have all the power
This does not excuse anti-white racism, and is often mostly irrelevant to situations involving individuals.
Many people, sadly, will use this observation to justify their personal bigotry against white people.
you already made up your mind that [white males] got
to where they are unfairly
Given the disproportionate amount of power that white males have in America, there are two possibilities.
One possibility is that white males really are that superior. We (white males) have the power because we're the best. Conversely, this would also of course imply that other groups like women and minorities are intrinsically inferior.
The other possibility is that the system really is tilted in the favor of certain groups, and that has affected the distribution of power and wealth that you see in America today.
I believe strongly in the second possibility and reject the first.
why would Caucasians desire equality if they benefit
from inequality
We (again, speaking as a white male here) might benefit in the short term from inequality, but I believe that in the long term we benefit a lot more from equality. I love my country and my country is much stronger if we have an equal playing field.
I respect the fact that many people feel that actions like minority hiring initiatives are in fact the opposite of a level playing field. In the most myopic possible sense, that is correct. In a broader sense, I do not agree.
> The other possibility is that the system really is tilted in the favor of certain groups, and that has affected the distribution of power and wealth that you see in America today
Wrong.
There is another possibility, which is that once upon a time the system was severely tilted, and for various complex reasons there is a _massive_ multi-generational delay between leveling the system seeing the results of leveling the system.
Consider how difficult and unlikely it is for a low income white male living in a trailer with, say, alcoholic anti-intellectual parents to, say, become one of the wealthiest people in the country.
If we eliminated racism, we would not eliminate all of the factors that work against black children who are born into poverty.
There is another possibility, which is that once upon
a time the system was severely tilted, and for various
complex reasons there is a _massive_ multi-generational
delay between leveling the system seeing the results of
leveling the system.
I think most people would agree that many of the effects of inequality are felt on a multigenerational scale, and that solutions will only fully be realized on a similar time frame. Nobody, even the people making slides at Github, think this can be fixed in an afternoon.
What's the functional difference between "living in a system that is severely tilted" and "living in a system that has allegedly been repaired, but in practice will remain tilted for a number of generations until this alleged new-found fairness has a chance to propagate through the system?"
To those affected, I think there would be no useful difference between the two. Long-term solutions do not preclude the need for short-term action.
Consider how difficult and unlikely it is for a low income
white male living in a trailer with, say, alcoholic anti-intellectual
parents to, say, become one of the wealthiest people in the
country.
Absolutely. Odds are definitely stacked against that guy. White males can have any number of horrible problems. And many people of color are born into relatively easy lives.
To be clear: nobody is claiming otherwise. Regardless of your feelings about white priviledge, please understand that it does not involve the idea that all things are always easy for all white people.
>> What's the functional difference between "living in a system that is severely tilted" and "living in a system that is severely tilted" and "living in a system that has allegedly been repaired, but in practice will remain tilted for a number of generations until this alleged new-found fairness has a chance to propagate through the system?"
The second half of your second quote does not at all reflect the intention behind my statements. When people go around thinking that a 'system' is broken, it is all too easy to be sloppy in one's thinking about what _exactly_ it is that is broken. The definition of the 'system' is easily, dynamically changed to meet the emotional needs or political goals of the thinker or speaker at that moment; and they lose sight of (or intentionally hide) the logical fallacies (or dishonesty) that occur as a result.
My first point is this: At any point in time, manifest inequality of results does NOT logically require that there is necessarily either inequality of ability or, at PRESENT, inequality of treatment by 'the system'. This over simplifies the situation and you presented it as a nice, tight, seemingly irrefutable logical argument from which one _must_ conclude that the system is presently tilted. (Either that, or own the identity of the particularly terrible kind of racist who thinks one race is intrinsically superior to another). This is not just logically wrong onto itself, it forms the foundation for bigoted thinking on a larger scale.
To answer your question, the critical difference lies in developing an accurate understanding of the true nature of the problems. If we walk around thinking "group X has less money then group Y, therefore there MUST be a problem of Xism towards group X which benefits group Y" we are not only being irrational, we are missing out of important opportunities to more effectively improve the condition of the world for all involved.
> Long-term solutions do not preclude the need for short-term action.
I don't see how this really applies, on the face of it. If theoretically there were _no_ racism in the US, it would take generations for blacks and whites to have equal results, for a variety of reasons including the effects of inter-generational poverty and classism. But what types of 'short term' race-related actions might be needed in the hypothetical world in which there is no longer any racism? Reparations?
I mentioned the example of some poverty afflicted white male to emphasize the difficulties that _poor_ people have, not to draw attention to the plight of any white males as a group. I used a white male as an example to really drive the point home about the lingering consequences of generations of racism; the racism of the past has left many of today's black people in poverty, and not even a (presumed advantaged) white male can easily overcome some of the effects of poverty.
> please understand that it does not involve the idea that all things are always easy for all white people.
Who gets to decide the one true meaning of white privilege? I've discussed this topic with hundreds of people, and can confidently say there is a small but still frighteningly large group of people out there who disagree with you.
> The definition of the 'system' is easily, dynamically changed
Right. "The system" is merely shorthand for the totality of institutional and cultural factors that affect one's experience. Laws, cultural bias, hiring practices, etc. It's not meant to be a specific term, ever. I've never heard anybody claim otherwise.
> At any point in time, manifest inequality of results does NOT logically
> require that there is necessarily either inequality of ability or, at
> PRESENT, inequality of treatment by 'the system'.
Again, let me ask you: from the perspective of somebody experiencing this "manifest inequality of results," what's the difference?
To a young black woman in America in 2016 feeling every possible effect of centuries of (allegedly corrected) mandated inequality and familial discontinuity in America, what do we say? Do we just tell her that all those problems have been fixed, and it's terribly unfortunate for her that she was born before that effects of those (alleged) corrections bear any kind of fruit for the majority of black people in America?
> If we walk around thinking "group X has less money then group Y, therefore
> there MUST be a problem of Xism towards group X which benefits group Y" we
> are not only being irrational, we are missing out of important opportunities
> to more effectively improve the condition of the world for all involved.
Obviously, long-term solutions are key. Again: short-term action is often necessary unless you're willing to simply allow people to suffer in the meantime.
In the long run, sure, they really ought to improve the roads in my neighborhood so that I don't get so many flat tires. But in the meantime I'm not going to let my car sit there with four flat tires.
> I mentioned the example of some poverty afflicted white male to emphasize the
> difficulties that _poor_ people have
Right, you were very clear about that. Your point was obvious and I don't think anybody would disagree. I don't think anybody disputes the enormous amount of overlap between the problems of poverty (which obviously spans all races) and other problems such as racism.
And hey, just so we're clear: my car doesn't really have flat tires, and the roads in my neighborhood are pretty good.
> But what types of 'short term' race-related actions might be needed in the
> hypothetical world in which there is no longer any racism? Reparations?
What if people in positions of privilege, such as highly-paid white males working at places like Github, helped to ensure that members of minority groups enjoy the opportunity to become highly-qualified job seekers, and give qualified members of minority groups access to stable, well-paying jobs? Like those at GitHub?
> Who gets to decide the one true meaning of white privilege? I've discussed this topic
> with hundreds of people, and can confidently say there is a small but still frighteningly
> large group of people out there who disagree with you.
I think you said it yourself: a proportionally "small" group believe that all white people live inside a magical force field where literally everything is easy for every white person. Obviously with a large enough sample size you can find people that believe any damn thing. But that is generally not what people mean when they talk about white privilege.
Though I do question if maybe you misunderstood them. White privilege does not make everything easy, but it does actually suffuse most things. To take your theoretical example of an impoverished white male raised in an alcoholic household: while life certainly is not easy for that theoretical person, there are additional challenges he would face if he were black, female, etc.
And of course, one can certainly think of some situations where being white and male is actually a disadvantage. Again, not incompatible with the notion of white privilege or male privilege existing.
Please stop using HN to conduct ideological flamewars. The other comments are bad too but at least they aren't hauling in entirely new barrels of talking-point petrol.
A remarkably versatile word this has become, 'racism'. It seems to apply to gender, to sexual orientation, sometimes even to unexpected things like taste in music...
What happened in the world the last 2-3 years? It feels like someone took a shovel, dug up some old corpses from the graveyard of political culture and set them loose on the world again. Suddenly...
...people who call themselves 'feminist' start calling for what can only be described as a war between the sexes, given that they spout the opinion that males - preferably heterosexual, middle-aged 'white' males - are the cause of anything bad in the world. They obviously did not listen to Joe Jackson when, in 'Real Men', he sang 'and if there is war between the sexes then there will be no people left'.
...people who call themselves 'anti-racist' are trying to pull just about any public debate in a racial direction by claiming that it is all caused by the colour of the skin of whomever they're focusing on. Again, if that skin colour happens to be 'white' the person generally did something heinously wrong, while the same deed performed by someone who saw a bit more sun is either 'understandable' or 'justified' or 'caused by society being mean to (person)'...
...people who call themselves something between 'male' and 'female' start claiming that gender is nothing but a social construct and that there are really more than 50 'genders' and with that is it 'racist' to call someone 'he' or 'she' as it could be that person does not consider him/herself as either of those...
Meanwhile the real world is still full of REAL racism - just go and visit any middle-eastern country while being 'black' and you'll soon find out. For some reason the 'anti-racists' don't want to touch this subject, and other who do are quickly labelled 'racist' by them.
Meanwhile the real world is still full of REAL gender discrimination - just go and visit most middle-eastern countries (amongst others) while being female and you'll soon find out. The 'feminists' don't seem to want to speak up about this, instead they label those who do as, you guessed it, 'racist'.
Meanwhile the real world is still full of REAL discrimination against those with non-mainline sexual orientations. Again, just go to one of those middle-eastern countries I mentioned while being openly homosexual and you'll soon find out. For some reason the 'gender-denialists' are quiet about this, instead labelling those who do speak up as, again, 'racist'....
Meanwhile the position of women in the 'western' world is generally on a level with that of men, give or take a few cases of institutional gender preference. This does not mean that all professions have a 50/50 share of both (yes, both, male and female... not 'all 50') genders, eg. where I live (Sweden) nearly all veterinarians are women, nearly all lumberjacks are men, women are under-represented in IT but overrepresented in social functions, etc. Is this bad? Not necessarily, it depends on WHY there is a discrepancy. Is it because men are not allowed in veterinary college? Are women not allowed near computers? Of course not, this seems to be a case of personal choice. Are women incapable of handling chainsaws? No, they are not, but they are generally less strong than men and they don't feel at home in a group of men who talk about their favourite subjects of hunting, fishing and riding snow scooters (to take an example from our local - Swedish - culture). Does that mean those lumberjacks need to go to some re-education camp to learn to talk about more gender-neutral subjects? Of course not. Should women go to re-education camps to learn to talk about hunting, fishing and snow-scooter riding? No! Should there be male quota for vet schools to combat their under-representation in this field? No, if men want to become vets they can go to vet school. Something seems to keep them from doing that, maybe the fact that the field is female-dominated?
Fortunately there is no war between the sexes and men and women still get together to create more men and women. They create 'white' ones, brown ones, 'black' ones, 'yellow' ones, 'red' ones, etc. New humans who come to this world without prejudice about the colour of their skin, and - if they are lucky enough to live in one of those western countries which are largely free of REAL racism - should be able to live their lives to the fullest - unless the 'feminists', 'anti-racists', 'gender-denialists' (for lack of a better word) and other similarly befuddled people are successful in derailing the progress of the last few hundred years and throw us back into struggle and strife.
It is almost as if all these 'isms' (feminism, anti-racism, etc) are worried of becoming irrelevant due to the progress made on these fronts in the 'west' and started looking around for new 'causes'...
Would you want to work at a company which has a bullet point "some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"? That one struck me as particularly egregious. If you said that completely out of context, the average person is going to picture this coming out of some chauvinist white male. Ironically, it's coming out of people aiming for "diversity".
While these people may be discussing some legitimate biases, countering racism / sexism with reverse racism / reverse sexism is completely wrongheaded.
Cache headers are set to expire after 10 minutes at GitHub pages.
Which is a bit too restrictive on js, images or css files.
It would be nice if these cache headers could be set to a larger period (1 year, or something similar). I'm not certain if any engineering hurdles or dangers exist in doing so, and I'm not implying this is something that can easily be done - since obviously GitHub didn't do it for their Pages.
I disagree. The community decides what the community will be, and there's nothing wrong with asking for someone to keep the level of discourse to something above that of jokes a 12 year old would make.
I'd rather the community decide not to be the kind of place where novelty (mildly sexist) usernames are common. The conversation suffers when cheesy jokes are the norm. There are places and times for those kinds of things; many subreddits are totes down for "pm_me_X" novelty accounts. Take it there.
I'm not saying jokes are wrong, but there's a reason the cheap joke and image meme is discouraged here. They tend to rise above the deeper comments, because they're quick and easy to digest, and so get a lot of upvotes because of it. But, as a community, we're deciding to favor the deeper comments...even at the expense of missing a few jokes and image memes in these conversations. If that kind of selection doesn't suit you, there are many places that don't impose those guidelines.
> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.[0]
I would so switch to using Gitlab if my username was available. I'm `echelon` here, on Twitter, on Gmail, on Github... I was so disappointed to be `echelon1`.
Is there any means to claim a username if it isn't in use?
Would love to be able to use my GitHub username on GitLab as well. Currently occupied by a dormant user with zero activity over the last 10 months, no repos except a fork of GitLab CE and no added commits to it. Of course I don't know if he has private repos or not.
(I'm not sure why I got downvoted into oblivion. I stated my honest opinion--I haven't signed up for a lot of services where I can't use the username I want.)
I can't speak for anyone else, but it seems exceptionally ridiculous to me that you'd make a choice of which technology to use based on whether or not your username is available. I don't know if I'd downvote anyone for that, but it did inspire a laugh out loud moment.
Static hosting for $5 a month seems too high. If it would be $1 I might use it. But for $10 a month you can get a good VPS that you can use for any hosting needs (including a gitlab/gogs/whatever instance and a demo of your project (if it's on the web)).
I agree, perhaps the price isn't perfect, but $5/month buys you not having to manage the server, configure nginx for your domain, easy site upload, etc.
