Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub, fuck your name change

mooseyanon.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#91

Post by gspr »

dijit wrote: post #15

it should be noted that git (the binary) is also in the process of deprecating `master`. This is the message I get on my machine when running git init: hint: Using 'master' as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call: hint: hint: git config --global ini…

I wouldn't say it's in the process of deprecating "master". It's just reminding user that they shouldn't plainly assume that the default initial branch is, or will always be, named "master".

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#92

Post by tudorizer »

cheschire wrote: post #16

Eliminating the usage of words with offensive connotations from the English language is double plus good. edit: Downvotes and the wording of some responses make me concerned that some folks may be unaware of the reference. Doubleplusgood is a newspeak word used in the book 1984. Newspeak is a language that is used to eliminate the ability for people to express unapproved thoughts because there are no words with which…

People will always find negative conotations for any word. Have you see UrbanDict recently?

Words are not he problem, attitudes are.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#93

Post by INTPenis »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #11

I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word but I can see nothing wrong in "master". Not a single moment in my life I thought about slavery when hearing/seeing the word "master". Should we also rename master degrees perhaps?

Same here, until this debate surfaced I never thought about slavery when I saw these terms.

What made me think more about slavery was the materials that go into computers like cobalt and sulfur. Someone has to go down into the sulfur mine and get that for us. That's an actual master/slave relationship that is going on right now to power all our fantastic infrastructure.

But so much industry has depended on sulfur for so many years that this debate is much deeper and more complex. The ugly truth is that someone far away has to be enslaved for us to live comfortably.

Bring that debate to the front instead and we might find a technical solution to it.

But it's always cheaper to find a desperate person than to maintain a robot that is being attacked by gas and sulfur daily.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#95

Post by dkdk8283 »

sunaurus wrote: post #4

I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is. I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these t…

You had 700 years to get over it. Harboring bad emotions is negative for all involved.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#96

Post by bluecalm »

arunc wrote: post #42

Lots of good points made in this. We have eradicated the usage of the exclusive terms in our team not recently but well before 2014. It's a cultural change to be precise. We are very conscious of the biases that could arise. In fact, during hiring we specifically ask the recruiters to look for diverse pool of engineers. Still I concur with the OP's statement that the percentage of African American in the tech industr…

Doesn't telling the recruiters that suggests they should take a skin color or gender when making their decisions? That sounds pretty bad to me and would be illegal in my country.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#97

Post by beshrkayali »

The issue is way bigger than a stupid meaningless branch-rename.

I'm very happy to see this post. This whole stupidity is so extremely frustrating to me. It's a perfect example of how little thinking the mainstream wants to put into important issues, how toxic American-liberalism is, and how easy it is for the masses to follow any seemingly-positive action just to avoid seeming negative.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#98

Post by sago »

panny wrote: post #59
sago wrote: post #37

> I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t. Boom. So I'm indirectly asking a black software engineer by virtue of reading the blog: What are the things that should be done instead? Not a lot we can do it about stop and search. How do we actively bust bias? He slams the 'meritocracy' meme: I know that is widely b…

He answered before you asked, >Inevitably there will be some of you in the audience asking, “Well what do you want them to do? They’re trying their hardest, help them with some solutions!!”. >I don’t want this post to be about The Solutions™ but here’s one for your noggin; there is this a significant intersection between career changers/developers coming from non traditional backgrounds (i.e. people with no CS degree…

Somehow I think I skim read and didn't retain that paragraph! Thanks. I'm sure that says something about me...

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#99

Post by cies »

sunaurus wrote: post #4

I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is. I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these t…

I agree that master->main is pretty pointless.

But what about getting rid of "slave", "blacklist" and "whitelist".

The last two kind of opened my eyes to connotation of black and white, that may be problematic to some. Also I find "allow/denylist" more descriptive, maybe that helps.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#100

Post by lcrz »

sergiotapia wrote: post #28
lcrz wrote: post #9

I just want to add a link to this[0] post here as a counterpoint for why changing language _can_ matter. The author seems to imply that the name change is all about being non-offensive to some people. Since the author doesn't find the language offensive, they conclude that name change is only political correctness or virtue signalling and a hollow gesture. I do not agree with that. Language and words are very powerfu…

Frankly this is the opinion of a white guy, why should latino and black people care about his perception of "racially charged words" like `master`? This is like some dude from Vermont telling me I should use latinx as it's more inclusive -- linguistic colonization eh

Ok, that's fair. Here's an article from Wired where there are people of color on both sides of this issue: https://www.wired.com/story/tech-confronts-use-labels-master...
Post reply on HN