> I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?
Currently, the text reads:
> This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
Since it has been hidden for more than 24 hours, this suggests that a moderator action has marked it as permanently hidden. Due to a recent decision, this means no one outside of the moderators or admins can view it: https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p...
Edit 2: Some comments suggest that Guido was banned from posting, but this is not accurate. I have edited the title from "Guido van Rossum's Post Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines" to "A Post by Guido van Rossum Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines" to clarify what actually happened.
I'm an outsider who only knows Guido van Rossum by way of interviews his writing.
Assuming your quote is what the original text said (I don't disbelieve you-- but nobody can see it to confirm) why would this have violated community standards? Is there some rule about not mentioning "un-persons" or something?
It's very confusing.
Edit: Answering my own question. There appears to be a kerfuffle afoot. Apparently the Steering Council has suspended a core developer for 3 months[0] but isn't naming the suspended developer or citing specific reasons why (per [1] and sparking a call for a vote of no confidence in the council which did not succeed).
Apparently even mentioning the suspended person (without naming them) is enough for even Guido van Rossum to be censored. Wow.
Edit 2: The suspended developer is Tim Peters[3].
Edit 3: Altered paragraph "Edit:" from "...or the reason why[1] (" to "...or citing specific reasons why (per [1]".
Edit 4: Added "which did not succeed" after "...vote of no confidence in the council".
That's kinda nuts, but kinda absolutely in line with all trends of the last 5 years. I remember similar shit happening in Linux community (the shit won, naturally).
But, anyway, who is the "Steering Council" and how come they have more influence than the 2 people who basically created python the language and python the community?
When Guido stopped being the sole leader (BDFL) he was replaced by the steering council which is elected and has the purpose of doing the following (Defined in PEP 13 which is the current governance model of Python. Right now Guido is a core developer at this time. See https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council
That's pretty obvious. The question was, who are these people, specifically, and why they were chosen and given that much power. I mean, I can see the names, but while I don't have to be told who Tim Peters or Guido van Rossum are, I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are.
Gregory P. Smith
Emily Morehouse
Barry Warsaw
Thomas Wouter
I've worked with gps and twouter before at Google; they were two of the leaders of the python ecosystem. twouter is a highly technically skilled contributor- when I found a 2 bugs in the Python runtime, he was the person who helped me fix them (bug 1: RPC calls from C++ to Python delivered during interpreter shutdown caused crash, bug 2: importing the same library twice with two different names caused crash) upstream.
gps apparently is a core contributor to cpython but I he did mainly administrative work afaict when I was at Google. From what I can tell, gps is the primary instigator in this incident.
Barry Warsaw: was lead maintainer of jython, I think also involved in the guts of cpython for some time.
That's what happens when Googlers have power these days. They are so used to censorship being forced down their throats at Google that it seems super normal for them to do it everywhere.
Greg, Thomas, and Barry are all old guard (20+ years as core devs), Emily and Pablo are relatively more recent, but still have 5+ years as core devs and are I believe more actively doing python feature development. All of these folks have served on the steering council before, some for 3-4 years.
Guido has served on the SC before, but has been stepping back recently.
I don't have a factual answer for you (be interested in one, too), only a cheek-in-tongue one:
It's like politics, the only thing you have to do to get elected is to get people to vote for you. And often the vote is only among people who _want_ to be elected (and in a position of power), massively reducing the pool of good candidates.
> I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are.
Barry Warsaw (https://barry.warsaw.us) is another of the "old guard" who can be pictured standing next to Peters and GvR fairly easily. He gained the title of "Friendly Language Uncle For Life" (FLUFL), and has previously been the project lead for Mailman and lead maintainer for Jython. He was the release manager for Python 2.2 (as far as I can tell, the first time this position existed), 2.6 and 3.0, and shared the role for 2.3. His name is all over 2.x-era process documentation. Prior to GvR's actual retirement in 2018, there was an April Fools' Day announcement of his resignation in 2009, authored by Barry Warsaw and Brett Cannon. This was accompanied by a hidden option (still available!) which changes the `!=` syntax to `<>`. Refs: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007289/ ; https://peps.python.org/pep-0401/ .
My experience is that discussions of bylaw changes tend to get heated and that trying to change your bylaws is like Russian Roulette, that is maybe 1/6 of the time there is some disaster which is either the end of he organization or that results in a major loss of members.
Wow, just wow. Reading all these makes me really worried about supporting anything built on Python long term. This creates an impression of a self-destructing dying community.
This is silly. The Python Foundation could die tonight and people will still build in Python for years to come because believe it or not, most people do not know or care about the happenings of these organizations.
Yeah, but my experience with Perl shows, once something like this happens, its pretty much downhill from there.
Not saying Python is going away tomorrow, in fact it might remain actively developed and used for decades to come. But with proactive thought, improvement and initiative gone. Competition will replace you in time. That's just how it works.
Also see for the last python release notes for some hardcore politics injected right into your tooling language. Python is unfortunately radioactive and can't be used responsibly anymore. They're halfway to selfdestruction
This sort of thing is nothing new in Python circles. It notably led to Jack Diederich's resignation from the PSF in June 2020 (https://discuss.python.org/t/the-psf-should-be-less-politica...) and may have contributed to the mass exodus of core devs in November 2020.
> why is everyone acting like a baby? Just move on. Who cares. Python is a language, who gives a fuck
My understanding is that a higher standard of discourse is expected on HN.
Also, I rather suspect your tone would be different if you didn't happen to agree with the message. Please consider that such bias is not in keeping with the spirit of the free exchange of ideas or the core principles of open source.
> You're telling me y'all ACTUALLY found this webpage and scrolled through it organically?
Yes. This page is the official, primary means by which the Python team announces a new release of Python. That's kind of a big deal.
They did endorse BLM (the organization, along with its very specific message which is not related to the business of writing code). You seem to have missed the link I previously fed you:
Oh come on guys, this is silly. We're all gonna stop using a tool because they offhand mentioned something we don't agree with? I mean, these tools are developed by people - people have opinions.
I understand politics is very divisive, but why is everyone acting like a baby? Just move on. Who cares. Python is a language, who gives a fuck they included a meme about it's OK to be White? I'm convinced nobody even found this meme organically anyway, rather one person found it and then sent it around to all their like-minded friends so they can sit around and point and laugh and complain together. You're telling me y'all ACTUALLY found this webpage and scrolled through it organically? Come oooooon.
It seems like the point is, you can see the same issue in very different ways. Did you read it from the bottom to the top? I was cringing until I got to the end and found the message to “Now read it bottom to top”. Still not saying it belongs in a technical document but it felt way less abrasive after reading it both directions.
The spicy bit is that this is the first release that contained such a political message. And also the first one that is managed by the guy who started the mess of this post, too! Not exactly sure if he's the one who put it in there, but it's one heck of a coincidence.
No, it is pure 1984. Censorious nonsense spearheaded by those who are held unaccountable for their actions. The fact that this came about on a topic of voting systems is even more ironic.
What the hell, has everyone caught and gone gung-ho on censorship? What the actual f*** is this?
How in the hell do you have the balls or ovaries to ban the creator --for something so inane. It's like a highscool supe who gets no respect and will at every chance show you the little power she has in such a classless way. So utterly petty defying belief.
I hope those dweebs get voted out pronto. That's an absurd abuse of power.
People who trip like that have no business having any power or control.
Most people haven't gone crazy, the kinds of people on this board are experts in silencing dissent and making it appear that way. I really hope the Python community can hold an open poll or discussion on a forum not controlled by the fascists and force the board to resign.
I hope that's just a rib. Else, one should be able to tell self control over stamping authority over others. Very few people openly speak their inner monologue, uncensored just releasing their stream of consciousness like a delirious hobo down a stench filled alleyway.
I speak my "inner monologue" and it is nothing like delirium or stench. Not sure who you are or who you're hanging out with, but better to get the stench out than let it fester.
* The top section "Our Community" is just general stuff like "be respectful." Is that a problem?
* The list of "Inappropriate Behavior" for meatspace Python events, what is wrong with it? Harassment, Deliberate intimidation, stalking, Incitement of violence, Insults, put downs, or jokes that are based upon stereotypes...
I'm sure we will all find some items we disagree with (really, no reference to "hugs"???) but you are challenging the very premise of a CoC.
The problem is selective enforcement and different interpretation of the listed terms. The Steering Council itself has been guilty of at least (verbal) harassment, insults, put downs and sarcastic jokes.
I am challenging the very premise of a CoC. They are useless newspeak documents made only to enforce the ideology of those in positions of power and not benefit the project. “Don’t be an ass” is standard fare in polite society. Do you need to be told “don’t scream at people” every day when you leave the house? Perhaps those with low inhibition and self-control need such a reminder, but I would argue those are the ones enforcing them the hardest. They are redundant in every form and your argument is reductive. “See? You can’t complain about this part, it’s standard etiquette! And even if you do disagree, don’t we all find things we disagree with?” It ignores the entirety of the point, which is that the sum of a CoC is torturous to a project, and makes it unlikely people will want to play ball with a project due to their loaded nature.
CoCs were invented by non-programmers to push ideological beliefs to programmers, and was accepted because they weren’t immediately toxic to the community. Akin to a cancer taking time to spread.
> If the incident occurred outside the community, but a community member's mental health or physical safety may be negatively impacted if no action is taken, the incident may be in scope.
IOW: they hold themselves free to go after people for stating political opinions entirely outside of any Python-related context, if someone else in a Python space deems those opinions sufficiently traumatizing.
> Does this pose a safety risk? Does the behavior put a person's physical safety at risk? Will this incident severely negatively impact someone's mental health?
Again, getting "triggered" by something is considered a matter of "safety". Some people are apparently fragile, and not responsible for their own actions, while others have a moral duty not to offend them.
> A person who makes a report should receive a follow-up email stating what action was taken in response to the report. If the work group decided no response was needed, they should provide an email explaining why it was not a Code of Conduct violation. Reports that are not made in good faith (such as "reverse sexism" or "reverse racism") may receive no response.
IOW: you have no recourse if people discriminate against you for being white or for being male. Not only that, but proposing that such a thing occurred is considered inherently "bad faith". And they will stuff terms in your mouth for this that you didn't actually use. [0] But not only that, when I was banned, they held up such an argument (by the way, the accusation that I even made such an argument was completely false) as itself a Code of Conduct violation, despite no language in that document which could possibly support such a claim.
Speaking of which, they don't even follow these procedures if they're inconvenient. See the "Follow up with the reported person" section? None of that bears any resemblance to how I was treated. (Not that it could, because I did nothing wrong and my "behaviour" had no reasonable "negative impact". [1])
There are tons of other "cultural" aspects you seem to be unaware of here. For example, defenders of the Work Group and their policies will constantly bring up (without naming names, as if anyone were unaware) the Adria Richards "Donglegate" incident from PyCon 2013. This is always described as a cautionary tale about what might happen to others like Richards without their CoC enforcement. It is never mentioned that Richards eavesdropped on a private conversation, took offense to a joke not intended to cause harm to anyone (and not even jokingly proposing any harmful idea!), and then ignored all the incident reporting procedures in the newly written PyCon CoC, opting instead to skip straight to social media for a round of public shaming.
[0] It's people with this political position who use the terms "reverse sexism" and "reverse racism"; people who correctly recognize the fact that racism can victimize white people (and be directly the fault of people who are not white, acting fully on their own agency) also correctly just call it "racism". Similarly for sexism.
[1] If you don't take that at face value, you are welcome to read my own backup of my posts related to the banning: https://zahlman.github.io/dpo_archive/ .
I think people are starting to see the long term consequences now; but the problem has been building for decades.
You don't get every university across every ostensible democracy banning free speech yet permitting physical violence against 'the far right' over night.
You need to subvert and replace the establishment piece by piece.
What we're seeing now is what happens when that sort of incompetence starts to impact manufacturing, engineering, production and the training the people in the field.
So the whole damned thing is turned on its head;
Here's an example: during Covid, the only people who were not purged from the medical establishment were those who adhered to the narrative. That's disturbing - the so called health care system intentionally purged of any person critical enough to question that narrative.
And even now that health care system retains the same personal and repeats that same line.
(If you really wanna know what the actual numbers look like the only people with numbers that can be trusted are funeral homes and insurance providers.)
But right now (in the middle of a health care crisis) some of the most competent doctors, nurses, etc remain unable to work because of mandates for them to undergo an invasive experimental procedure (from some of the least trustworthy companies in the world).
(That is to say, any bloody doctor I'd be even remotely inclined to trust with my wellbeing.)
Competency purged; 100 flowers pruned.
I could go on and on, but I shouldn't, so I won't.
I can't; I got permabanned from the site for hate speech.
What did I say? That it's unfair for men to compete in women's sports and that TRAs use bad faith tactics like deplatforming as a means to silence their critics and avoid debate.
The weaponisation of censorship is predominantly a far left tactic.
> The weaponisation of censorship is predominantly a far left tactic.
Incorrect. It's an authoritarian tactic, which can either be left or right.
On the right today is Idaho with their new book banning law prohibiting minors from accessing books with LGBTQ+ themes (regardless of whether there was any sex or not).
On the left, you have Tipper Gore which was famous for advocating for the sticker placed on CD's to alert people of potentially terrible lyrics.
> On the right today is Idaho with their new book banning law prohibiting minors from accessing books with LGBTQ+ themes (regardless of whether there was any sex or not).
This is misleading. It's against anything pornographic being made accessible in schools / to people under 18 years old, LGBT or otherwise. "Homosexuality" is mentioned only once:
> 3. "Sexual conduct" means any act of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse, or physical contact with a person's clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks or, if such person be a female, the breast.
In a section that's 11 points long. Besides which, this whole section already existed, it was just amended recently and this part I quoted wasn't changed.
There is nothing that in the law that allows the libraries to defend whether a book is harmful to minors once the challenge is made. So any challenged books have to go into the adults-only section.
26% of books challenged in 2023 had no sexual content. Since the library has their hands tied, those books must go into the adults only section. Including the books on Rosa Parks.
I see you are not even trying to defend your previous assertion that Idaho is "prohibiting minors from accessing books with LGBTQ+ themes (regardless of whether there was any sex or not)". Instead you have sent a couple of new soldiers into the fight.
I'm sorry, do you really need to be so damned pedantic?
Today - in the present, given the relative levels of influence of the different authoritarian groups, it is predominantly the far left that is engaged in the weaponisation of censorship.
I can't take the children's library arguments seriously any more.
Right now there are books in school libraries that are too obscene to be read from in council meetings.
Down voting this comment is burying your head in the sand. Censorship has been and will continue to be one the primary political fights of the 20s. They just arrested the Telegram founder a few days ago...
Re: the vote of no confidence [1]. Looks like most devs disagreed with the vote and have opted to let the council continue but transfer the "HR" Code of Conduct duties to the PSF.
The Python steering committee also threw the kitchen sink of accusations at him. IMO it speaks to character when you throw arguments like an adversarial lawyer. Not the kind of person you want to be around for work or life.
is the steering council able to remove messages without a recommendation? i think that if two "independent" groups have to cooperate then that's better than one group being able to act alone. now the question is how independent are these groups really. i saw another comment drawing that into question.
I badly paraphrased what citation [1] said. I've dropped on an edit. (I have no dog in this race, other than thinking that Python is a pretty important software project. I didn't mean to editorialize.)
> why would this have violated community standards? Is there some rule about not mentioning "un-persons" or something?
Flags may be cast by anyone, and this will eventually result in automatic hiding - flags on Discourse are weighted according to the "trust level" of those raising them.
There exists an argument that people who are not white are, in fact, capable of saying or doing things which tend to discriminate against white people; and furthermore that such speech and action is harmful and morally offensive.
"reverse racism" is a term used by people who find that position disagreeable or inconvenient, to mislabel, misrepresent and mock it.
The argument is not at all "far right"; it's centrist, and obvious. But certain extremist identity-based ideologues have manage to sell that nonsense with their propaganda based on the label. Occasionally you will see people who don't know any better use the term unironically, because of the dominance its derogatory use has achieved; but serious opposition to so-called "progressive" identity politics does not actually use the term.
Wonder if the moderators heard about the Streisand Effect. It’s a good time to learn about it.
> I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?
So he was banned for asking about someone who knows about voting. Transitive meta banning? I guess anyone asking about Guido’s post will also get banned.
> this means no one outside of the moderators or admins can view it
Imo that kind of deliberate intransparency is a massive red flag. Here for example I can choose to see hidden comments and make up my own mind about the content, which is excellent. Even if I don't use the feature, the fact that I could if I wanted to is a massive plus for trust in the process.
The same cannot be said for in-numerous other acts of flagging and hiding. Almost all posts from Clay in this thread has been flagged and hidden; you can't even make sense of Guido's replies to him because of that.
These are not "Python community guidelines". These are the guidelines of a tyrannical clique who have grabbed power and control the access to the infrastructure.
They abuse their power by banning any opposition and then using said infrastructure to libel and defame their opponents.
Google already fired one or two of them. I do not know what is required to restore the health of Python.
Similarly (un)funny how the technology behind blockchains, formal verification, and decentralization is ridiculed on the basis of inefficiency etc., Every. Single. Time. given such a governance structure would be so much harder for the legalese power trippers to regulatory capture...
What are you talking about? Were you around for the DAO moment a few years ago? Anyone who had a lot of crypto could powertrip and effectively veto any vote.
again, cryptography is not crypto, yes I remember the DAO, but no I didnt say buying democracy. I said using the technology behind blockchains.
Any rules of order or organizational structure could be formulated in say metamath as formal sentences and a UI built around it so that people can take steps and make decisions and prove they are entitled to do so.
a malicious actor should fail to be able to prove undeserved powers in a properly formulated formal system.
This is Guido. I can assure you there was nothing nefarious. The incident is best described as moderation automation misfiring. The post was restored and a moderator has apologized for the mishap.
FYI, Python is named after Monty Python , who got into all kinds of trouble making fun of and saying things that upset basically everyone (religion to LGBT), which is ironic considering the circumstances.
My spidey sense first got tingling a few years ago when the Python powers decided they were going to rename their git master branch to something else. Caused them unnecessary work and to this day it's not certain any developer or user actually asked for it. The word has multiple meanings of course; yet felt like a symbolic gesture to alleviate guilt totally unrelated to Python.
I didn't complain without a dog in the hunt, but I noticed those that did were implied to be monsters, and told that their mild disagreement "would not look good to history." Unfortunately a few years later I can say the opposite.
Well, Guido made his bed, now it's time to lie in it. ;-)
>Unfortunately a few years later I can say the opposite.
It's your contention that people getting up in arms about not changing the name of the 'master' branch specifically look good now, with hindsight? Can't say I agree.
It broke scripts and docs. Funny enough I never liked that name early on, in preference to to hg’s default. But once done for years, no point in changing it.
> For some people changing master -> main isn't a nothing burger, it's actively harmful.
I constantly have pain — years after the Summer of Floyd — from repos I follow which change the name of their master branch from ‘master’ to ‘main,’ which breaks all sorts of tooling, sometimes silently (my local copies stay on ‘master,’ and never get updates), sometimes noisily.
That switching is actively harmful.
> Some people genuinely love the name master and want it to stay and yes, that is weird.
I don’t particularly love it, but it is the correct name for the master version (as opposed to a local copy, or a remote copy, or a feature branch, or a custom branch, or whatever) of a repo.
How is introducing a breaking change "a nothingburger", but resisting a breaking change "a hill to die on"?
It's a breaking change, requiring me to fix CI, local copies, scripts and so on. It really doesn't matter if you rename "master" to "main", or "main" to "GloriousLeaderXiJinping". Just don't, it's harmful because it's a breaking change for no reason.
The change already happened, you're not resisting anything anymore. You're just being annoying.
> Just don't, it's harmful because it's a breaking change for no reason.
If only it were this simple. Many people got pissed off when Github changed their default. For NEW repos. Clearly, many people have more emotional skin in the game than you're willing to admit.
> I don't think a single soul implied they were monsters. There's nothing wrong with having your branch named "master" if, coincidently, that's what you have.
Github themselves tried to push the change on people, and reporting on the issue used phrasing describing the original choice as "no longer appropriate" as if this were some authoritative consensus (e.g. https://www.theserverside.com/feature/Why-GitHub-renamed-its... ). Github's change was disruptive because repositories created on GitHub wouldn't work properly locally in Git (depending on various details) and this was happening to users with very little technical understanding and no reason to care about the underlying political issue.
But aside from that, it's very obvious that many people think there's "something wrong with" using master as the default name. If they didn't, there never would have been an issue in the first place because nobody would have proposed to change it.
There is nobody out there advocating for the change without bringing up some strange hand-waving argument about colonialism. Not a single one of these people can demonstrate how using the name "master" actually causes harm - because it doesn't. But hordes of them are willing to argue for making the change anyway.
> However it's weird if you say master is the "one true name" and it HAS to be master.
Nobody says this. They say that they don't want others pushing (or literally pull-requesting, in many cases) changes on them for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with the business of their project.
> Like, why do you care? That's odd. That's what some people point out.
No, there's nothing strange about it at all. What is "odd" is the rhetorical strategy of trying to shame people for a benign choice, gaslight that they're the ones being insistent and ideological, and then gaslight that no such shaming is occurring.
> For some people changing master -> main isn't a nothing burger, it's actively harmful.
No, what's "actively harmful" is the idea that people should be compelled to change things because outsiders don't like them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism). Also the compatibility break mentioned above.
> > Terms like master-slave carry powerful implications of racial supremacy and oppression, and have no place in our lexicon
> The first part is just true - it's not up for debate. The second part, "it doesn't belong", is just opinion.
The first part is an opinion shared by people obsessed with race. Honestly even disregarding that we're talking about "master" without "slave", "master/slave" outside of technology makes me think of BDSM first. Nothing racial about it.
>Personally I think if you're a die-hard master-slave fan that's weird.
There is no concept of "slave" in git, there are no "slave" branches. That concept has never existed in git's source code. It's master like "master recording".
Ok but where do you think the term comes from? It didn't spawn into common use out of nowhere.
And I'll say - I don't think it matters. It's all stupid bullshit in my eyes. But if it doesn't matter, which it doesn't, then main shouldn't be a problem. In my opinion.
>And I'll say - I don't think it matters. It's all stupid bullshit in my eyes. But if it doesn't matter, which it doesn't, then main shouldn't be a problem. In my opinion.
And I'll say - I don't think it matters. It's all stupid bullshit in my eyes. But if it doesn't matter, which it doesn't, then master shouldn't be a problem. In my opinion.
>Okay I'm not the one who advocated to change master. That's already been done. Now we have people advocating to change BACK to master.
I don't believe that is what's being argued.
>Also really? Audio mastering?
Yes, audio mastering. The developer that created the concept of master branches in git specifically outlined his influence was from the concept of audio mastering (master recordings) [0].
>I don't know if you're bring purposefully obtuse, I hope not, but obviously I meant "master" came from slavery before audio, and audio took that terminology because it was already a popular word.
I don't know if you're bring purposefully delusional, I hope not, but obviously I meant "master" came from master piece before audio, and audio took that terminology because it was already a popular word. Because of, you know, mastering something?
>Yes audio mastering came before git, and slavery came before both. I don't even know why someone would even bother to argue otherwise.
Luckily "master" in this context has absolutely nothing to do with slavery, so your comment is an immaterial non sequitur.
The use of "master" in git has no historical or etymological ties to slavery whatsoever as outlined above. QED.
> The use of "master" in git has no historical or etymological ties to slavery whatsoever as outlined above. QED.
Not the argument I, or anyone else, is making
The use of "master" in Git may remind someone of slavery, which we don't want to do. For their sake. That's the argument actually being made and I think you'll notice it's much harder, if not impossible, to refute. That's the argument you need to target, not whatever high school debate class strawman you can come up with. Anyone can win an argument against an easy, made up argument.
> I'm not the one who advocated to change master. That's already been done.
Only for specific projects. I continue to use "master" for my own projects, because I disagree that the proposed reason to change has merit.
> Now we have people advocating to change BACK to master.
For the existing projects of others? Can you show any examples?
> Also really? Audio mastering?
Disbelief does not constitute an argument.
> And which, pray tell, do you believe came first?
I won't speak for the other poster, but as a matter of simple fact, Git was initially released in 2005, while other VCSes using the term may date as far back as 1969 (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/21859/); the concept of audio mastering dates to at least the 1920s with the introduction of the microphone (per the Wikipedia link), and in turn presumably has its roots in the idea of a "master copy" of text or artwork to be printed.
> I don't think you actually read that link. Or maybe you're hoping I don't.... The first part is just true - it's not up for debate.
You asked me to demonstrate that people make the argument, because you claimed that people don't make the argument. I showed you someone making the argument, and you have responded by reinforcing that argument.
The claim is that this "powerful implication[s] of racial supremacy" is harmful - we know this because the author is arguing that the change affirmatively should be made, and there is no reason to make the change without an appeal to such harm. But there is no attempt to explain how such harm would actually arise from simply using the terms as technical jargon. One might reasonably infer that the author is somehow claiming that such terminology justifies or advocates for racial supremacy; but there is no attempt to reason through that claim.
There is also no attempt to consider other potential implications of the term, nor the mindset which leads to this interpretation. Implication is only relevant in conjunction with inference, and these inferences are being drawn by clearly politically motivated people.
> Personally I think if you're a die-hard master-slave fan that's weird
Please stop coming back to this strawman. Again, a higher standard of discourse is expected here.
> Okay, and this bothers you why?
For reasons explicitly stated in my comment.
> Um, YOU do. Clearly you are
Again, a higher standard of discourse is expected here.
> YOU'RE an outsider asking python to change for YOU.
I did not ask for any change. I in fact criticized a change. Please stop trying to present change as non-change and vice-versa.
I am also not an outsider. I have been writing code in Python for about 20 years.
> "Doing nothing" IS NOT an apolitical stance.
Yes, it is. This, in your words, is "just true" and "not up for debate". But the fact that you would propose such a thing, perfectly betrays your agenda in posting here.
> the reason why master is used in the first place is inherently political
To be clear, are you asserting that the person who originally chose the term, had the explicit goal of expressing "powerful implications of racial supremacy and oppression" in version control software?
If you are not claiming that, then it is very obvious that "the reason why [the term] is used" is not political.
If you are, then you are, in fact, calling people monsters for sticking with it, and you are also making an inflammatory claim without evidence.
> One might not reasonably infer this because that's the most insane thing I've ever read. Do you just assume everyone else is this insane? They're really not.
Again, a higher standard of discourse is expected here. But I infer this because it is the only way that any sense could possibly be made of the argument.
If we claim anything other than "this terminology somehow justifies or advocates for racial supremacy", then it is immediately clear that nothing the author says about the terminology actually counts against using the terminology.
But the author insists that it is problematic to use the terminology. Therefore that must be the argument.
> But whenever I open up GIMP, I can't help but think about some sexual things.
This is your fault, bluntly.
> inaction CAN BE political.
This is a different claim from what you initially presented.
> Was this act of inaction political? Yes, yes it was. So yes, inaction can be political.
The police officers in your example were demonstrating action, not inaction. They made a conscious choice to ignore a legal duty. That is clearly different from failing to rename something in your code because an activist says you should. Nothing ordinarily obligates me to accept pull requests.
> I'm not asserting that, it seems you're having hallucinations.
Again, a higher standard of discourse is expected here. But I asked a question.
> And, it was known and understood because of... wait for it... slavery. The only reason it's in our lexicon is because of slavery.
First off, no, that is simply untrue: https://www.etymonline.com/word/master . The word is attested in other uses going back to at least the 12th century.
Second, I already addressed the possibility that you were not making such an assertion. In this case your argument also fails. You cede that the term is not used for a political reason, even if it were inseparable from a particular connotation (which isn't the case anyway). Simply having an effect is not the same thing as doing something for the reason of creating that effect.
> I understand it's very easy to win arguments against insane people but you'll have to try harder.
Again, a higher standard of discourse is expected here.
Very sad to see this happening to the Python community. Maybe we need a fork with only technical discussion allowed. This CoC/vote stuff seems to poison every community it touches.
I think the politics of power is unavoidable no matter how well you silo your technical work from your people work.
Ten years ago, Debian saw three well respected members of the Technical Committee resign — including two former project leaders, one of whom designed the .deb packaging system — during what I see as a similarly heated vote/counter-vote power struggle. This Python saga feels similar.
BDFL model seems to have worked pretty well for so many decades. Guido should have just transferred power to someone he trusted. Now look at him, he can't even comment freely.
This is a tough one. Guido was excellent at his role, and his decision to hand it over was a mature one. It was everybody's hope it would help to guarantee long-term future for Python, independent from corporate greed.
Now these new folks seems to be failing at the only job they had. Maybe they need more time to mature, or maybe the Python Community should take a more decisive stance towards this kind of abuse of power.
I think the lesson is, if you should ever find yourself in the role of a BD and plan to give up control in favour of a committee or suchlike, always retain the option to throw them out and re-assume control, in case of need.
Yeah because after that you just have 5-10 dictators which inevitable build up cliques with their own personal grievances rather than any ideas to benefit the good of the community.
I believe if things get too heated, all the parties involved should be forced to meet in person for a weekend to talk things out. I'm sure it would solve like 90% of these stupid conflicts, because people rarely get _that_ riled up when in the same room.
Written communication, especially asynchronus ones like email or forums, are just unsuitable to capture all nuances of human behaviour. Someone is tired or hungry and makes a bad joke; next thing you know there's a witchhunt…
(I also don't think they should be allowed to cite things said 5 years ago as a reason to ban someone today. How could that still be relevant?)
This type of behavior is abusing the members of the community.
Code of conducts should contain language to dissuade bureaucrats from
participating and especially from attempts at grabbing power.
As well as a straightforward way to report bureaucrats
and have them removed from the community.
Based on the same process as other abuses that may already be
included int the code of conduct.
You can vote your way into a CoC but you need to fork your way out.
When Codes of Conduct were first introduced, they sounded like a benign concept. But now it's becoming increasing clear that they're the Trojan horse that allows the inmates to take over the asylum.
Note that that is from very early on in the process. The last I heard (about a month ago?) the final result was several (many of? more than 3, less than all?) people who signed the letter mentioned in the Reg article left for various reasons, several right at the point when a certain person had their commit-status re-enabled after a ban. I believe said person was eventually banned at a later point.
There are at least 2 forks that happened seemingly as a result of these disputes (Aux, as mentioned in the Reg article and Lix)
This kind of drama seems to exist very specifically to programming language design and implementation.
Probably has something to do with the codified formal structures necessary for various committees/ decision making groups.
But it's interesting. This kind of stuff happens in ECMA, Rust, Python and a few others. Go seems to have escaped. Maybe because it's a corporate owned Lang? Similarly no drama in the Typescript world.
Corporate drama happens behind closed doors. It’s in the best interests of everyone at the company to present a unified vision, so that’s what happens.
Additionally, corporate structure is typically much more hierarchical. If someone has a complaint they can take it up with Anders, if he disagrees that’s it (unless your name happens to be Scott G or Satya N). This is, by and large, a good and efficient way to structure things.
A prominent and influential Go developer was effectively banned for life from Go community forums some years back. I honestly don't remember enough of the details to have a clear opinion on whether it was ultimately warranted, but I still feel sad that it happened when I think about it from time to time. The fact that it's legitimately unwise to discuss and decide CoC violations in public can make the resulting disappearances relatively invisible.
In short, the Go module proxy causes an excessive traffic volume on git VCS sources with frequent clones of unchanged repos. Regardless of whether or not the developer is/was always reasonable in how he discussed this, he was absolutely right about this being a hostile behavior from the official Go proxy that is the result of bad/insufficient engineering. The team's suggestions to simply stop refreshing his one domain were also not sufficient given that the problem clearly impacts all Go module VCS hosts.
The developer also appeared to be banned in a way that violated the Go CoC's own provisions around fair notice and a proper hearing, which is super disappointing to see.
Oh man, was Drew banned from all Go spaces, or just from the issue tracker as he mentioned? He seems to draw ire, although whenever I actually read what he writes, he usually makes a lot of sense. I imagine there are examples of him being abrasive, but it usually seems like he values being thoughtful and kind.
To take a stab at my perception of why this is: Its the same reason why everyone and their mother has an opinion on note taking; programming language design is a topic that has a comparatively low skill floor to have an opinion on. Its difficult to have an opinion on how, I don't even know, drivers should communicate with each other in the linux kernel, see I can't even come up with a great example of the kinds of discussions they have because the skill floor is reasonably high. Its more common to hear "We gotta bring Rust to linux"; even more common still is "Rust is too complicated" "too verbose" "we should change X Y Z" whatever.
I saw this in the re-enactment scene in the UK in the 80's and 90's [0], where there were endless schisms and political dramas. The same is true of any "scene" where the consequences of drama are minor and the participants have the scene as a core part of their identity.
I would expect there to be a class of admin in here that do not actually contribute code but have created positions of authority over the project based on "community contribution" only. There's a particular type of person that does this and derives great satisfaction from it. I'm not going to criticise this - often the "community contribution" is real and beneficial - but I don't think it helps when the focus of the team managing the project moves away from the purely technical.
[0] I'm sure it still happens, but I no longer witness it.
There's an online community for Cosmopolitan C on places like Discord. Everyone who's there, is there because I welcome them and want them to be there. The code of conduct is you have to behave like Mr. Rogers. There's no sexism, racism, name it. The C developers in our community don't even use swear words.
My personal conspiracy theory is that it is the corporations demanding the codes of conduct as a form of sabotage for products that they can't control.
He should have stayed on as BDFL. Now in the power vacuum a bunch of “activists” and political enthusiasts will take over and ruin the whole thing for everyone, or at least significantly slow down the progress
I'm glad he's stepped down. His opinion matters to be sure, but python needs to be a community developed language. He's a smart guy, and he matters still to the python community.
There was a tremendous amount of frustration around the walrus operator, which led to him stepping down.
It was happening a lot under Guido too, but IMO, Python was arguably a better language (at least in some ways) 10, 15, even 20 years ago. Python's three super powers were readability, simplicity, and a vast standard library that negated the need for most projects to seek out third party modules.
All three of those have declined. It's less readable than it used to be, it's definitely more complicated (not just complex, complicated), and the standard library is declining rapidly in relevance as it ages.
And it wasn't just Guido. Tim was a big advocate for all three of those super powers when he was more influential. They banned Tim and they censored Guido, so go figure.
> All three of those have declined. It's less readable than it used to be, it's definitely more complicated (not just complex, complicated), and the standard library is declining rapidly in relevance as it ages.
I find it much more readable, and more importantly more expressive. Certain new features are missteps IMO, but I just don't use them. But more importantly, the language has been moving away from cryptic %-encodings and other C idioms.
As for the standard library, that was already happening for a long time, and is inevitable. The world has fundamentally changed. In Python's heyday it was much harder to download and install and use a third-party library, so a rich standard library was an asset. Now it's full of specialized code that handles obscure and increasingly irrelevant data formats; multiple overlapping hacks for binary data; terrible and confusing date support; awkward interfaces that haven't stood the test of time (particularly all the networking stuff; Requests is one of the most downloaded PyPI packages, along with its dependencies which are probably almost never downloaded for any other reason); etc.
Lots of people still seem to think that the 2->3 migration was a mistake. They couldn't be more wrong. The old way of handling "strings" was abysmal, and spit in the face of the Zen. Error messages were confusing and implicit conversions abounded.
Also, just for the record: Guido van Rossum was in favour of the walrus operator. In fact, he co-authored the PEP (https://peps.python.org/pep-0572/), along with Tim Peters.
The walrus operator is nice, except in comprehensions. f-strings are great, except for the `=` debugging operator. Dictionary merging and update operators contradict the "one way to do it" with weird and confusing syntax that's completely redundant to methods that already exist.
Type hints are a sore spot for me. They're good enough when you just don't remember whether an argument is an object or a string, for example, but once you start type hinting deep into data structures, your hints become a mangled soup of nonsense for basically no real benefit. Typing errors are a rare occurrence—perhaps once a year in most projects—yet we clutter our codebases with verbosity to satisfy type checkers instead of prioritizing clarity for developers.
There's a lot that's just straight up redundant. Dicts are ordered now, but is OrderedDict deprecated? No, because it's just slightly different in weird and mostly unimportant ways. `frozenset` is a builtin, for all 3 programmers worldwide who use it. Python resisted match/case syntax for decades, but when it finally arrived, it did so in a way that’s anything but standard—good luck figuring it out without consulting the documentation.
Obviously some improvements are real. Every new version of Python brings valuable enhancements. But just go back to Python as it used to be -- pseudocode that runs. That's just not true anymore. The simplicity has slipped away and will never ever come back.
And the standard library? A very real problem, right now, in computer security is the software supply chain. Remember polyfill from like, yesterday? This is the era when we should double down on having a million dependencies from all over GitHub, from unknown developers with no commitment, because ... npm's hellscape is a model to follow?
I would argue the contrary. There's dependency hell, of course, but there's also dependency risk. If you were evaluating a product right now, and you saw its lockfile depended only on a specific version of the Python Standard Library, that gives you exactly 1 product to evaluate, exactly 1 team of developers to depend on. pip is great and all, but dependency resolvers have quietly let in a hundred trojan horses and a thousand unmaintained dependencies into tons of projects, and no one noticed it was even happening.
Python in 2005, when everyone depended on the standard library, was a safer place than npm is today.
>Dictionary merging and update operators contradict the "one way to do it" with weird and confusing syntax that's completely redundant to methods that already exist.
I find the unpacking syntax elegant. There are yet more unrealized possible generalizations of it that I can think of.
> Type hints are a sore spot for me.... Python resisted match/case syntax for decades, but when it finally arrived, it did so in a way that’s anything but standard
Many people expect match/case to be "a switch statement" but it really is not designed for this purpose. I agree that it's an awkward fit and I don't use it. Similarly, I only use type annotations for documentation purposes.
> Dicts are ordered now, but is OrderedDict deprecated? No, because it's just slightly different in weird and mostly unimportant ways.
Large amounts of existing code are dependent on those ways, because the code was written to use that design. The ordering of dicts since 3.6 is an accidental consequence of an unrelated space optimization. In my view, the team erred by deciding in 3.7 to guarantee that ordering. I have concretely identified a further space optimization which is prevented as a result.
> Python in 2005, when everyone depended on the standard library, was a safer place than npm is today.
The flip side of dependency risk is security risk from lack of maintenance. For example, the standard library `json` module is a frozen-in-time old version of `simplejson` (it even remembers a useless version number). That project is still actively maintained (https://github.com/simplejson/simplejson) but none of those improvements - even if they fix security - will make it into Python except by parallel work by the core dev team. (Or accepting a patch; but that also requires either the maintainer or a third party to notice that a recent `simplejson` change is a security fix, figure out how to backport it to the much older version, and make a PR.)
There are other ways to solve the problem. For example, an organization similar to PyPA could publish a set of "core" libraries, versioned independently from Python but explicitly tested as part of the CPython release process. (That would also allow for fixing the problem that the standard library isn't namespaced - which is at the root of the problem whereby beginners e.g. put their toy lottery project in `random.py` and get an error from a circular import, or - I swear I'm not making this up - having a `token.py` in the current working directory breaks the interactive REPL help - see https://stackoverflow.com/a/75068706).
So, yes, it would be nice to see lockfiles that "depend only on a specific version of the Python Standard Library". Right now, that dependency goes undeclared, and the maintenance work is distributed among people who are also busy with developing the actual language.
Guido is the community. He's the one with the most legitimacy to represent it. To imply that Guido is something separate and divorced from the community is textbook subversion. I can't imagine any reason that others leaders in the Python community would have irreconcilable differences with Guido than if their interests were to corrupt the project.
The walrus operator doesn’t seem like such a big deal now given these developments, and no doubt future developments of the same sort. The permanently offended aren’t going to just go until everything is in ruins and all the main contributors are gone.
Well, on the other hand, the only way out for a "Dictator" in the "BDFL" is to resign or be overthrown. He decided to resign, which is probably for the best. Otherwise a fork would have forced the decision, and been worse for the community as a whole.
Packaging and the 2.x to 3.x migration were both nightmares under his stewardship.
Keep in mind that the leaders of the PSF can be voted out, if so chosen by the community. And the community may have a different opinion on the election cycle and want to take python a different direction.
I wonder if there is a good list of these kinds of incidents going on in open source. It might be helpful in trying to figure out exactly what kind of clauses and verbiage, precisely, invite these kinds of takeover attempts like some kind of demon-summoning invocation.
One post. His posting rights haven't been withdrawn, it's one message in context which was elided out.
[edit: I am somewhat surprised people want to down-vote a factual statement, which in part aligns to the OP who changed the title of the post since it was being wrongly inferred his posting rights had gone, not a single post was being hidden. As the saying goes "you do you"]
I also don’t fully understand why some folks are worked up. We all have posts that are downvoted and removed even here on HN. If you don’t like the steering committee or whatever, just elect a new one.
Because he founded ycombinator, he should be allowed at least a little more leniency.
Of course if he goes around directly and explicitly bashing all sorts of minorities or doxxes some other users or commits any other actual big nono, sure remove him.
This is not what happened. GvR was impolite at worst, and impolite your founder shall be allowed to be
Yes, please help me understand why this is a big deal!
A committee that was chosen by a community decided to remove a post. It looks like the removal was well within their authority. If the community disagrees with the committee, they can move discussion to another venue, elect a new committee, and so on, no?
None of this adversely affects the performance or reliability of software written in python.
This doesn't directly affect the software as it currently stands.
It's mainly about the organisation. The people in charge have some a sequence of things that have increasingly alarmed people who care about the organisation of the project. More people are getting interested in what has happened with each step. This is one of the latest actions where even the key person who started Python has been impacted. This shows that the actions they were doing are important and worthy of attention as anyone who interacts within the organisation is within the reach of potential impact. No-one is untouchable. Outside though to the rest of us it's not directly impactful currently.
So then there is the impacts on wider things like software. As you say the community can just vote out the ones they dislike and vote in a new bunch. To me and many others, this sounds it should solve the situation. However I think some others see the problems as systemic, where the actions taken are a result of how the management organisation is structured and so the problems will occur again even if new people were in charge. If that's the case then more of a change might be demanded which could affect the software. (But in what ways is unclear)
On a HN scale, there's a wider sociological and cultural issue of how large open source software projects should be organised. And this is an example showing the problems of certain approaches especially as certain things were directly for reducing abuse and yet seem to be used in an abusive way. For many here on HN who are in various communities with similar structures, seeing what happens here is very important to them. There is a varying amount of personal investment in this story about the users own lives more than Python itself.
It looks like the removal was well within their authority
this is what i'd like to know more about. should they have this authority? especially to remove any posts in a non-transparent way? such a level of authority should be limited to removing obviously illegal or age-restricted content, but not the kind of message in question. and even then, it should require oversight from someone outside the committee, ideally people specifically trained for handling such messages.
Yup, and while I don't know the overlap between the committees, it seems like the CoC committee gave a recommendation to the Steering Committee, and the Steering Committee acted on the findings, and it wasn't just an instant ban hammer on Tim either.
Hiding Guido's comment I could see being controversial, but I also believe allowing relitigation or reinsertion of harmful drama in governance discussions as being disruptive. Hiding the comment wasn't punitive.
Also the project shouldn't go into freeze mode because a valuable contributor is doing time for a crime, such a practice would be super destructive to the project. It'd basically give filibuster power to any contributor of sufficient 'clout' to derail and delay any steering committee decisions indefinitely
Amazon wouldn't even officially fund python development internally (thankfully Chris Rose is a gem along with others so most never noticed), and they don't care about this kind of drama
Tim Peters, author of Timsort and the Zen of Python. He might be less of a public face of Python than GvR, but he was just as instrumental to its design all the way from the early years to its coming into the mainstream.
However, I don’t think reflexive actions like what you’re suggesting will sway anybody who’s not already convinced, or really help in any other way. Disruptive demonstrations can occasionally work IRL when they can serve to convey a concern to people who wouldn’t otherwise notice it, or to assure like-minded people that they’re not alone. Online forums, by contrast, are both lacking in passersby and plentiful in tools for suppressing disruptions.
Furthermore, I don’t think you can really outpolitick a politician on this low a level. Well-motivated and well-publicized forks could work. General apathy and nonparticipation could work. Other ways of voting with your feet could also work, if you can think of one. But you can’t argue (collaborate on converging to the truth) with an opponent who’s completely convinced of their own rightness and righteousness, only debate them (attempt to expose each other’s faults to an audience). Debating a politician won’t work, because they’ll crush you. It’s a large part of what being a good politician is, after all.
Why do you want to stick your opinion into something that you hadn't previously known about? What are you going to positively contribute to the discussion that will move things forward? How does that help?
Not OP, but stating that "ban for merely mentioning an un-person" is nuts looks like a positive contribution to me. Policies like this often stand because no one openly disagrees and no one openly disagrees because no one else does so you just assume everyone is OK with it. Until a child blurts out that the king is naked.
> Why do you want to stick your opinion into something that you hadn't previously known about? What are you going to positively contribute to the discussion that will move things forward? How does that help?
A prudent response, the revised ending of "The Emperor's New Clothes".
Amazon Meta or Google should please create and maintain a corporate fork. The performance fixes could happen faster and would probably pay for themselves. No more problems with issues like this. Would provide some people with good jobs.
I'm pretty sure Amazon does at least - I thought that the Python version that runs in Lambda had a few features on top of CPython (mainly around relative imports but possibly other things too).
I prefer the Jimmy Wales version of authority. The project operates democratically, but Jimmy always retains the ultimate authority to act as a sovereign at the end of the day because he built it, has the reputation of the project to protect, and it's his legacy. The option to fork the project will always be there if the people want new leadership.
Again, I would prefer he retain an unused veto. Who knows, perhaps he's entirely fine with his comment being removed.
The benefits of a sovereign are that they limit the amount of privileges that can be extracted from an political system. Obviously monarchs have their downsides, but if people can just up and fork the project, those downsides are limited.
I obviously can't speak to the politics of the Python Foundation (my favorite language and would buy every single person in this governance discussion a beer), but my point is that these types of monarchs generally have more (Taleb-style) skin in the game than someone who shows up later. More to lose (everything they've built), and so I would generally trust their judgement to care more about the institution as a whole, than about exercising power (which is the entire reason they have effectively given up power in the first place).
a wannabe king is more than welcome to fork this project as it sits, right now, today. and they can be as non-democratic as they want with their own little fifedom.
I have not paid attention in years, and with the acknowledgment that some of the contributors there were their own worst enemy and/or not without sin, but you should really poke around http://wikipediareview.com/ - to see just how untrue that often is.
(I'm talking confidential email lists, whose existence is not to be confirmed, IRC channels, brigading, and far worse).
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
It's wonderful seeing this three days later after Guido himself has come in to say that this was nothing nefarious and more of an automation mishap. Yet here stands dozens of comments from people crying about how code of conduct is ruining the world and the PSF and SC should be dismantled.
As is often the case, there is usually more to the story and we would be better off learning what really happened instead of immediately jumping to conclusions and then blaming people based on those conclusions. Otherwise we look rather silly when it ends up that it was all just a mistake and we risk ruining a good thing by our rash judgements.
It's not just how much information you extract, but also what you do with that information.
RCV, in the most common form of IRV, has a problem that I think is relevant.
If we accept the truism that the appropriate compromise won't be anyone's first choice, then the very first thing IRV does is throw out any appropriate compromise, leaving it to make a decision between inappropriate options.
I think we need to be more able to pick a compromise, not less.
Rated voting methods are great, but more complicated than simple choices. Given how challenging it is to get people to just pick the thing they want in very simple situations, I would not be optimistic about their implementation.
I don't think it's strictly true, and a system built around it as a rule would be easily manipulated and a bad system.
I'm not proposing it as a rule within any system, though, and my analysis generally holds so long as it's true a meaningful chunk of the time - it doesn't even need to be a majority of cases.
Yeah, it's painful seeing all the enthusiasm IRV gets. I've come to the conclusion it's how people think they want to be able to express support for third party candidates due to their frustration with the current system, but not actually seeing down the line to what happens when non-duopoly options gain some popularity. Basically it's still hopelessly wed to the two party model after the less-popular third parties are run off. It's only redeeming feature is that the same choices can serve as the input to a Condorcet decision process when the failures of IRV become apparent.
I think the worst thing about U.S. national elections is that the winner of the electoral vote might not be the winner of the popular vote. Whether or not that is right is beside the point but anything complicated about the results that make them hard to understand will subtract legitimacy. I’d go so far to say that the system will not survive if we got several elections where one particular party consistently loses one vote but wins other.
The last thing we need, seen through that lens, is a complex system where people don’t understand the results or how exactly their vote will affect those results.
> The last thing we need, seen through that lens, is a complex system where people don’t understand the results or how exactly their vote will affect those results.
And this is one of the best features of approval voting compared to any form of ranked choice!
"The winner is preferred to each other candidate, by the majority of voters" seems pretty straightforward to me. The problem with Approval is that we're right back at the Faustian bargain of needing to fully support the lesser evil at the expense of your preferred option. And the only thing Range adds is allowing you to moderate the amount of that bargain.
> "The winner is preferred to each other candidate, by the majority of voters" seems pretty straightforward to me.
It is, but 1) the public needs to be sufficiently convinced that all of the bookkeeping reliably determines which candidate that applies to in the face of possible error or malfeasance, and 2) sometimes there is no such candidate (cycles are possible) and what happens then can be complicated.
(And sure, ties are possible in ~any system, but if we treat cycles as ties we've made ties much more likely.)
If you have a Condorcet winner, sure. In fact, approval voting with "honest" ballots always yields the Condorcet winner if one is expressed†.
Where you get into trouble is that not all elections have a Condorcet winner. In particular:
> The problem with Approval is that we're right back at the Faustian bargain of needing to fully support the lesser evil at the expense of your preferred option.
> It's only redeeming feature is that the same choices can serve as the input to a Condorcet decision process when the failures of IRV become apparent.
I think the concern raised by PaulHoule is very important. Assuming, for the sake of this particular digression, that it can be sufficiently satisfied by IRV in a context under consideration, BTR-IRV seems like an easy sell over IRV. It's like IRV, but instead of discarding the candidate with the least first place votes, you do a head-to-head runoff (looking at the rank ballots you already have) and discard the loser. Not much more complicated to understand or administer, and you can never discard a Condorcet winner (or a member of the Smith set, except in favor of another member of the Smith set).
Ironically, "dumb" approval voting, by virtue of using additive aggregation, extracts more information from ballots than ranked choice. It's a reduced-resolution form of continuous range voting, just like discrete range voting (approval voting is literally {0,1} range voting!), that approximates it arbitrarily closely with sufficiently many voters.
(Approval voting also literally expresses more information about small numbers of candidates: there are 7 distinct approval ballots of three candidates, and only 6 distinct ranked ballots. In particular, it expresses more raw information about preferences between the top 2-3 candidates, which are the most important rankings in a single-victor election!)
The primary downside to approval voting over a good ranked-choice-voting system (IRV is poor, yet is often considered synonymous with RCV), is that it encourages strategic voting.
Let's take the 3 person example and assume I like candidates A, B, C, in that order. With RCV, I would just rank them in that order. With approval voting, I might want to withold my approval for the most popular opponent to A, in order to boost A's chances of winning.
I like approval voting for large democracies because of the reasons you mention and the fact that it is very simple. Trust in the voting system is paramount for a healthy democracy, and requiring algebra knowledge to understand the how your vote is counted is counterproductive for generating such trust.
The main reason "strategic voting" is a big deal when evaluating ranked-choice voting systems is that they actually experience spoiler effects (which more or less follows from Arrow's theorem, no amount of epicycles will totally mitigate them). Approval voting essentially pulls the bottom out of the two most impactful forms of strategic voting by satisfying independence of irrelevant alternatives and structurally enforcing use of the full range.
> Let's take the 3 person example and assume I like candidates A, B, C, in that order. With RCV, I would just rank them in that order. With approval voting, I might want to withold my approval for the most popular opponent to A, in order to boost A's chances of winning.
In a 3-candidate election, the bullet vote for A is not a strategic ballot, it honestly expresses your preference A > B,C. It would be strategic to vote A,C (instead of A,B,C), but it turns out that in elections of up to 3 (relevant) candidates, one of the honest ballots is always optimal.
(This is not to dismiss the impact of voting "for A" vs "against C", because that does matter. But there's a real trade-off there if you aren't fully informed on other voters' (adversarial!) ballots to discourage being the first to actually run that campaign unless you're sure you have a genuine majority.)
An arguable disadvantage of full range voting is that it overweights people who vote binary 0/100 and underweights people who vote 80-100. Since the former is almost always strategically advantaged, it seems fairer to just cut out the middle.
this is a zero sum fallacy. social choice is not zero sum. voters who use intermediate scores donate more utility to society than they give up by not being strategically normalized, leading to an increase in net utility. with enough honest voters, even the "naive suckers" are better off than they would have been under a normalized approval-style ballot.
https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes
Republicans have learned from what happened last time, when they remained split. Looking only at first-choice votes in the 2022 special election that Ms. Peltola won, she had 40.2%. The GOP’s contenders, Sarah Palin and Mr. Begich, had 31.3% and 28.5%, respectively. Under the RCV rules, Mr. Begich was eliminated, and his supporters were reshuffled to their subsequent preferences. Enough of them didn’t like Ms. Palin that the victory went to Ms. Peltola, with 51.5%.
Strangely, though, this result was sensitive to the order of elimination, meaning that the final No. 1 depended on who was the initial No. 3. If Ms. Palin had been dropped instead, a strong majority of her ballots would have gone to Mr. Begich, who would have beaten Ms. Peltola.
Not only that, he’d have won about 52.5%, a bigger victory than Ms. Peltola’s ranked-choice majority. Doesn’t that seem . . . odd? What if some Democrats ranked Ms. Palin first on their ballots to ensure that the most polarizing GOP opponent made the final round?
This is actually a really interesting real-life instance showing that, in this particular case, RCV didn't achieve an optimal outcome.
But what's a better voting system that would have achieve the presumably optimal outcome here (the less-polarizing GOP candidate Begich getting elected)?
If we just compare to simply plurality voting, the outcome seems the same: Peltola got the highest vote of the 3, so in regular FPTP voting, she would have won. Or if we compare to FPTP party-based elections as is normally done in the US, I think again it would have been the same: the GOP vote was split between Palin and Begich, and presumably Palin would have narrowly won that party's primary, and then enough GOP voters hated her enough to list Peltola 2nd-choice in the RCV, so presumably they would have also voted for Peltola in a regular party-based election, so again the outcome would have been the same.
If anything, I think this shows that these multi-candidate elections have odd-looking results when there's uneven numbers of candidates for the different parties. If there had been 2 DNC candidates, this might have played out quite differently. But maybe not: in this particular election, one of the candidates (Palin) was extremely polarizing and many voters truly hated her, but she had enough support from the right-leaning voters to get a majority on that side, over the more moderate Begich. But that was unique to the GOP side; there's no reason to think that the left-leaning voters of Alaska would have similarly voted in high numbers for an extremely polarizing candidate like AOC: Alaska just doesn't have many far-left voters the way some other states do. So it seems like the right outcome may have been reached here, because so many GOP voters in Alaska are willing to support a very extreme and polarizing candidate, rather than a more moderate one: they ended up making themselves irrelevant.
> But what's a better voting system that would have achieve the presumably optimal outcome here (the less-polarizing GOP candidate Begich getting elected)?
One I don't think gets talked about enough is approval voting. Vote for as many candidates as you like, whoever gets the most votes wins. Voting for all of them is effectively the same as voting for none of them. It also has the massive benefit for the general population that it's simple to explain. Even gives third-party candidates and moderate candidates a real chance at winning, since no one would feel like they're throwing their vote away by including them.
i like this. i think it even works for electing multiple candidates. we need 5 people in a committee. everyone list their preferred 5 or 10 or more choices. add up all the votes and the 5 top get chosen.
I think "begging the question" describes your answer, in the classical sense of "assuming what you need to prove."
You are assuming that a multi-party, multi-candidate election is a desirable norm. But that needs to be proven by you, not assumed.
In a pre-RCV system, the parties would choose their candidates, however they do it, and then the general election would pit one candidate of each party against each other, plus whatever other parties qualify for the ballot. The public has not accepted that that must be eliminated. It did make things hard for third parties, but so it goes. Prove that that's a bad thing.
So you'll take your arguments and go home, and not even try to convince me otherwise and potentially win me over with your candor and intellect and personality?
That seems like the problem with politics as a whole these days.
No, citing one example of the current system as "proof" that the whole system must be thrown out is the problem with "politics as a whole."
Also: thinking that a few paragraphs on Hacker News constitutes sufficient wisdom is another problem with "politics as a whole." It is not going to convince you no matter what I or anyone else says.
Do some research. That probably means reading some books, hate to warn you.
> We have a two-party system, and that's just the way it is.
Some argue that our current voting system creates the two party system we all know and hate. Derek from Veritasium did a video about this the other day. Really good stuff.
No need to come to Palin's or the Republican's defense here. Candidates are more than capable of trying to campaign for the second place votes.
Check out this IPSOS poll that says otherwise. That was run in January. Yet somehow by May both of the upopular candidates won their national primaries.
I'm going to be contrarian here and say, maybe it's the right choice. Bringing up already-litigated drama in an unrelated thread is not particularly constructive. If Guido thinks this person's opinions are relevant, he can send them and email and ask for them, right?
To some extent, the moderators are obligated to treat everyone equally. If they wouldn't let you or me relitagate past drama here, why should they let anyone? The core team should be setting the example for how other people should behave. If the core team doesn't agree with the values that they claim to agree to, and show this disdain by not enforcing their own rules, then why would they bother creating that governance structure in the first place? They are just being consistent with the processes that they agreed to and subjected themselves to. That's governance. Personally, I think it would be more alarming to the community if certain people didn't have to follow the rules.
As far as I can tell, there is no mention of not discussing the original decision in general. If there was, nobody seems to be following the rules as there are 8 billion Reddit threads on the topic. I knew nothing about this and had Names Named in about 3 seconds of searching. As a result, I don't think there is some sort of conspiracy taking place. Enough ink has been spilled on this issue; does it really need to be brought up again in a thread about voting systems?
Sure if he was being hurtful, hateful, etc. But is comment hardly seems wrong in light of the community guidelines: https://discuss.python.org/guidelines
More seems it's just embarrassing to the committee so they banned it.
You could read Guide's message (assuming the first comment is quoting it accurately) as being sarcastic about Tim Peters' banning. The mods probably feel like this is undermining their authoritah, and dropped the banhammer.
It reads to me as kind of petty sniping that's unlikely to really contribute anything useful to the conversation. But not something that really seems worth hiding either...
If the comment was the reference to a banned member, was the action actually inappropriate?
If the banning of the member alluded to was inappropriate, there is a time, place, and tact to address that. If the process does not allow for that, then you work towards changing the process. If the governing body doesn't allow for that, then why the heck would you make a comment that could derail a discussion regarding how that governing body is elected?
> If the comment was the reference to a banned member, was the action actually inappropriate?
Yes
> why the heck would you make a comment that could derail a discussion.
Banning the poster derailed the discussion even more. So much so, it made it to front page of HN.
I am not arguing they shouldn't have banned Guido because of who he is; I am arguing banning anyone should have a pretty high threshold, and when it happens it should be done with extreme transparency. Asking to wait for a member to join the discussion later about a relevant topic shouldn't come anywhere near that threshold.
I agree. But didn't he give up the Benevolent Dictator for Life
moniker? Sounds like a King Lear situation...
Since now we will divest us both of moderation authority,
Interest of ban-hammering, cares of tweets,--
Which of you shall we say doth love us most?
That we our highest privilege in the comments forum may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge. Tim,
Our eldest-born, speak first.
"the law" is always subject to interpretation in a given context. The entire concept of case law is that "the law" has been interpreted in a certain way in a similar context before.
> I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?
Currently, the text reads:
> This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
Since it has been hidden for more than 24 hours, this suggests that a moderator action has marked it as permanently hidden. Due to a recent decision, this means no one outside of the moderators or admins can view it: https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p...
Edit: I meant to post slightly more direct link in title: https://discuss.python.org/t/should-we-consider-ranked-choic...
Edit 2: Some comments suggest that Guido was banned from posting, but this is not accurate. I have edited the title from "Guido van Rossum's Post Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines" to "A Post by Guido van Rossum Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines" to clarify what actually happened.