It's called a whitelist. A perfectly good word that isn't racist and one that normal people are quite happy to use. As far as I can tell the allow/blocklist craze hasn't made it out of the software world.
Both whitelist and allowlist are equally normal and good.
It's weird that people will claim that "politics" have no place in software while insisting that there is one and only one term "normal" people should use because the politics of the people who object to it are bad and wrong.
I agree that both words are good, but there is a difference.
Whitelist means that anything explicitly listed (in the "whitelist" or "allow list") is allowed (or included, etc) and other stuff is disallowed (or excluded) by default (although in some cases, a program (or something else) might ask instead of forcibly blocking access). It is a compound word; you should not use a space or hyphen. (Using two words "white list" may be appropriate when you are refering to colours, e.g. the white list includes the list of whatever documents are to be copied on white paper, or "white list" might mean the list that is printed on white paper.)
Allow list (I do not like the compound word; I think they should be separated and it looks better that way) is the list of what is allowed. (So, normally, this would mean that other stuff is not allowed, so it is still whitelisting.)
In situations where colours would be involved and using words such as "whitelist" would be confusing, such words should be avoided, in order to avoid confusion.
> Both whitelist and allowlist are equally normal and good.
Good is debatable, but normal?? No, obviously not. One is a word that has been around for over a hundred years and is understood by everyone that speaks English; the other is like 4 years old and only used by some software nerds. 90% of normal people would not know what it means.
90% of normal people have never heard of a whitelist either, but any English speaker could intuit what "allowlist" means more easily that "whitelist" without context. And both are technical terms of art in the context of this conversation, so what 90% of normal people would or wouldn't understand isn't even relevant.
And "enshittification" is even newer than "allowlist" and it's practically mainstream.
> any English speaker could intuit what "allowlist" means more easily that "whitelist" without context
That is not true IMO. Blacklist is a standard English word that any native speaker would know; whitelist (while not as standard) is easy to extrapolate from that.
There are so many terms in software which are nonsensical (starting with "computer science") which could be fixed.
The problem with changing whitelist to "allowlist" is that it implies that people who use whitelist are racists. You're not just virtue signaling (and confusing my spellchecker) but causing discord.
It would be perfectly fine if people switched to "allowlist" because they think it's a better term, but that's not the reason. They do it because they want to virtue signal or they're afraid of their peers (because they'll be called racists).
Using "allowlist" is actually bad because it gives agitators power and they keep changing more words to get more power.
I think that you are right. "Allow list" (or, in some contexts, "inclusion list") would be a better term, especially in contexts where colours are involved and it would be confusing.
The reasons that they usually actually have are not very good though, like you say, but nevertheless sometimes it can result in something better and sometimes not. But, banning words is not the solution, though.
I personally don’t assume people who use whitelist are racist, or those who allowlist are virtue signaling.
However, I certainly do assume that people who chastise others for using “whitelist” are virtue signaling, and those who deride people for using “allowlist” are racist.
Both are easily understood and I generally assume good intention from people. Just live and let live.
That is exactly why I hate "allowlist", "main" instead of "master", and so on. The reason they were proposed is because some people were trying to play dominance games with grievance politics. We should attempt to resist such bad faith tactics, not propagate them. And yes, unfortunately that means I have to take a stand on something that is otherwise inconsequential. But such is the price of pushing back on self-righteous prigs who are trying to police terms of art.
Glancing over your comment history, this seems to be a trend for you; being intentionally abrasive/provocative for no reason. And you get downvoted to oblivion as a result, so I'd hope you understand by now that your comments aren't appreciated.
Obviously you're entitled to your opinion and welcome to share it, but don't be surprised when that begins having repercussions on your career, and don't be surprised when people on this forum in particular don't respond well to it.
HN is focused on technology and business, not so much politics or your personal opposition to making historically oppressed individuals feel more comfortable in tech, a traditionally white & male dominated space. If you're going to make reasoned arguments around why changing the name of a branch has a demonstrable negative impact on your life, please do. If not, this isn't the place to air your grievances with crass and unproductive comments.
Glancing at your comment history, I can see that you believe your opinions are edicts and nobody can express differing opinions without you pulling your quasi moralistic hall monitoring trope.
The fact is, tech is now under the influence of the woke mob, and I believe that's objectively bad for tech, the people who work in tech, and the prospect of solving REAL problems with tech.
That was my Google Play Music use case as well. About a year ago I set up a plex server on my NAS and bulk downloaded my GPM library onto it (which to google’s credit was easy to do). Now I have them on my own hardware, and accessible on the go with the Plex app. It’s a better experience for video than audio, but it’s totally serviceable.
There had been murmurs for a long time of Google Play Music going away, so I moved off ASAP. Looks like that was a good call.
That was my move as well. I already had a decently sized NAS with Plex that was accessible anywhere. The music experience through GPM and Spotify is better, but at least I can manage the music myself and I never have to worry about it going away (or some weird licensing or exclusivity issue not allowing me to listen to something I want to listen to). And my bootlegs, b-sides, remixes, and rare tracks that you can't get on streaming services is preserved too.
Nothing about your argument was rational. All you made clear was that you do not understand what Apple's customers value.
Hint: It's not a technology spec sheet. And even if it was, their specs blow the competition out of the water. I think your focus on embedded systems is coloring your view of consumer technology.
That’s not realistic if you ever go on call. When you’re responsible for the uptime of a service and people’s first line of contact for issues is a slack message, you need to always have it be in a state to interrupt you.
It’s been down for years. No one cares. I don’t either. You can judge my linked in if you want.
On call work is not deep work. Fixing a bug may be, but you’re not doing deep work simply by being alert.
I am responsible for the uptime of a ton of big apps. If I’m in deep work, I miss all those slack messages. It’s the nature of intense focus to have tunnel vision.
It’s almost like humor is subjective. Yes, many people suck at it and do it in wrong or counterproductive ways, especially with the rise of “prank” YouTube channels and the like which view embarrassing people as the end goal.
Some of them even lead to products or other real features down the line (like the 2014 Pokemon google maps explorer, which went on to become Pokemon Go).
Yeah, some jokes miss the mark for me, but I get that my sense of humor isn’t universal, and frankly I think a bit of levity is important for us right now as individual and as a culture.
Yeah, regex can be a bit clunky at times and has a steeper learning curve, but they're pretty industry standard at this point, and portable across languages with a few caveats.
I’m in a field and physical area with a pool so shallow - that it seems like straight up madness to throw questions like that at people and kick them out the door for it.
Sure you built app on multi 20 core machines with functionality to search hundreds of millions of lines of code almost instantaneously, but are you someone I'd drink a beer with?
This snide remark dismisses the fact that working on software does mean working with other humans, not just unemotional robots devoid of any kind of irrational ideas. Being able to “drink a beer with” (and reasonably substituting the drinking of beer for just about any other social interaction) is an important part of being able to work with someone. Unless of course you believe an office environment consisting of a tyrannical manager barking orders at worker drones is a healthy relationship.
Are you having intimate romantic relationships with all of your co-workers?
If they get me out of work at 4:30 pm and keep the project I'm working on in quality code so I have less fires to deal with, that's good enough for me.
I think when people talk about this, they mean to push back against the fact that people will often to be biased to hire someone they think they could be casual friends with, share interests with, etc.
I like my coworkers and I find them perfectly find to work and make small talk with, but I don't share interests with many of them and wouldn't really care to hang with them outside of work. That shouldn't be a criterion for hiring.
I have found it highly annoying to work in engineering orgs where everyone seems to have the same interests. Everyone talking about Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, etc. constantly because it's assumed everyone else around also enjoys that conversation.
It's an ego thing to want to work with someone just like you instead of adapting yourself to others. It's basically bro culture. It's kind of what's wrong with technology culture.
Give me someone who is talented who makes great code so I can be home at 4:30pm and I don't care what their personality is like.
Additionally someone who tells me when something is an issue even at my ego's expense is extremely valuable, over back patters and schmoozers who just want to keep everyone happy. That leads to a terrible product. I would not like to see whatever product you're working on is like.
You all should take a long look at yourselves and ask why you have to work with people who are just like you instead of being adaptive to other walks of life, personality, and backgrounds.
Try getting out of yourselves for a minute. You might even learn something now outside of your own tiny tiny worlds!
That’s a pretty unfortunate interpretation of my comment, and not entirely logically consistent either.
I mean, if one person who rejects bro culture only wants to collaborate with other people who also reject bro culture, does that mean they are now proponents of bro culture?
I also find it frankly a bit weird for you to make grand sweeping assumptions about who some strangers on an Internet forum choose to associate and collaborate with. How do you know people here don’t work with people from other backgrounds?
If only the answer to "how" was as simple as "writing a web service for searching GitHub repos with regexes," even though the problem is probably in itself non-trivial if there's this much interest in search at all. At least the specification is clear enough.
I guess what I mean to ask is, how would people know this is a "correct" answer to the "how" question beforehand? Is the answer literally just "search" because that's simply what's trending right now?
If this were to be offered by an actual company (a first party solution), there are some features that'd be expected that make the problem space a lot harder. Here's an "intro to search" article that's a good read, and I'll use it to highlight some of the things that'd be different in a first party solution - https://medium.com/startup-grind/what-every-software-enginee...
(See the "Theory: the search problem" section)
Size: This is only indexing ~500k public repos. A first party solution would be expected to index all of it, public and private.
Indexing speed: This can take up to a few days to index. A first party solution would be expected to have a much lower index latency - seconds to minutes.
Query language: This can (and does) have its own simple query language. A first party solution would need to have support embedded into and not break backwards compatibility with the current query language.
Context-dependence: A first party solution would be expected to index private repos as well, and now the query context (logged in user) becomes another variable in an already multi-variate problem space.
Latency: Gets harder with scale, and a first party solution would likely provide a SLA/SLO around latency.
Access control: Same issue as context-dependence, with private repos being included.
There's also unknown but likely considerations around compliance and internationalization, which are quite tricky problems.
Note - I don't mean for this to be critical of the author at all. This is an awesome and useful tool, with a fantastic UX. I just want to make it clear that search at scale is a lot harder than it seems at first glance, especially as the feature requirements increase.
Engineering manager for code search at GitHub here... this is an excellent summary of many of the concerns we have as we work on code search at GitHub scale!
For GitHub, I would have to imagine only being able to search public repos with regexp would be good enough. GitHub has many strategies, but the main one is, they want to maintain, if not, expand their open source mind share.
The more reasons you give people to go to GitHub, the better off they will be in the future. So I do agree with you that as a commercial solution, this may not be viable, but for GitHub's public repos, this can turn into a very positive thing.
That might well be true but to scale this type of service to all public repos with decent latency and update ratio is a major technical challenge and likely very costly to maintain.
This is my personal observation, but GitHub appears to be a much more ambitious company, now that they are part of Microsoft. With a CEO that understands both the open source and the enterprise world and with Microsoft cash at hand, I don't think spending money to make search better would cause any concerns.
Doing technical things that GitLab, Bitbucket, etc. can't is quite valuable. It also helps with recruiting, since smart people want to work on difficult problems.
It may well be costly to maintain, but I think the operating cost would be well within the realm of an incumbent that wants to maintain and expand their reach. I've been studying the code hosting space for quite sometime and GitHub, from an outsiders perspective, appears to be much more focused and ambitious, which should cause serious concerns for GitLab.
1) Most people don't care enough about that to even be bothered by it, never mind change their entire tooling and move large amounts of code out of protest.
2) You are the exact same, it seems, if not worse on account of your hypocrisy? Your GitHub address is still listed in your HN bio, you've been active as recently as yesterday, and you're a pro user, so you _literally_ give GitHub money.
If these issues actually matter to you, delete your account. I'm sure someone would love to scoop up the username "sneak". But don't come here on your high horse shouting about ethics while you actively financially support the organization you're lambasting.
My account is comped, and has been since long before the acquisition. I'd forgotten about the link in my bio, as I put it there a long time ago. It's gone now, thank you for reminding me. :)
I am migrating my repositories off of GitHub this week, which is why I now only have about six remaining there instead of the 60+ that I had for many years. The remaining ones are the ones that need to remain online for services that pull from there; I intend to remove my remaining code from the site very soon, on the order of days. I actually happen to be building my new self-hosting server today, having tested out Gitea and found it a perfect replacement.
My account will remain, to squat my username to prevent impersonation, with a single public repo containing only a README explaining the situation and why use of GitHub is inappropriate.
