301–310 of 1001 posts
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?
Yet another sad attempt to impose your narrow focused view of the world on it. The author seems to have forgotten: There are people outside of the US who work in tech. As shocking as it might be to him, they don't wake up in the morning thinking "O gosh, I'm white, I need to repent". They actually read and write things like "master-slave" and not for a second think about what went wrong 150 yrs ago in some far away l…
>The author seems to have forgotten: There are people outside of the US who work in tech.
>As shocking as it might be to him, they don't wake up in the morning thinking "O gosh, I'm white, I need to repent". They actually read and write things like "master-slave" and not for a second think about what went wrong 150 yrs ago in some far away land. An no: Not thinking that isn't racism.
>Yet we all have to endure your petty fights and identity politics.
Clearly you didn't finishing reading the article.
Had GitHub not done anything it would have looked bad. Now that GitHub did do something, it's not enough.
I disagree that GitHub needs a minority consortium to ask them about every little detail and the impact it has on their culture/etc.
I really wish we could set up a "Culture Firewall" around the US for the next decade lest the whole world gets infected with these mind viruses.
identity politics is basically infighting and it's not very productive as pointed out by some other comments.
everyone should be consulted. however today’s black people in this case should not have the final word. they adapted to a system that opresses them so they might not have the vision of what the ideal system is. i. other words, even if today’s black people are not offended by this word it doesn’t mean it’s ok. same with the n word. black people use it but I think it is not ok. their grandchildren might do better in a world where black people don’t use this word. same with women. today’s women might not have the vision of what equality is. people with vision are needed and they might be black, women or even white men
EDIT: For comparison: * "Common Mistakes of New Engineering Managers" (5hrs ago, 110 points, 30 comments) -> rank 2 * this post (2hrs ago, 1000 points, 500 comments) -> rank 20 Why is this post being penalized? Too many black folks commenting and up voting? (/s) ----- Amazingly well written. I'm going to say some things. You'd guess wrongly if you infer that I'm bitter - since I'm personally very lucky. Having been b…
I always get a chuckle reading things by these VC types who grew up in upper middle class homes very far from impoverished people and their views on both the problems communities they've never interacted with will face and/or how to solve those problems, as recent as yesterday's post by sama on how innovation will end poverty.
Based on my experiences with people's depth on the subject, I think you have a half decent litmus test.
Well 'main' is a more intuitive & UX friendly name than 'master' which new devs are going to intuitively relate to as it's commonly used to refer to the 'main thing', e.g. main road, main course, etc. I can't recall the last time I used 'Master' as a synonym to 'main' outside of technology (as a Redis Client author I still deal with Master nomenclature a bit). Can only think of 'Masters degree' but that has to do wit…
I’m not entirely on board with (A).
The downside to fighting words is that the negative connotation in the word is actually strengthened when a major organization decides to censor it on such grounds.
Consider Winnie the Pooh and CCP: used to be a cute children’s cartoon character, was compared to China’s dictator and got banned—now any display of Winnie is effectively a statement. Previously you were free to take it at face value clear of any political agenda, but now the meaning is decided for you by a central authority.
Furthermore, in the case of “master”, it was replaced with another word—and words continuously acquire connotations. If some white supremacist community now adopts “main” as a slang for “white”, what do we do? Keep on renaming branches? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable approach.
I dream of a world where every single person is secure and no one takes terms personally, but I guess that can’t happen in foreseeable future.
However, I have to support (B). If we were starting with a blank slate, there’s really no argument to be made for “master” as somehow better than “main” at denoting the, well, main branch. (It could be a tough choice between “default” and “main” though.)
It’s hard to say for sure, but I suspect a lot of the pushback is subconsciously of the “we had to learn obscure terminology, so why should newcomers be spared?” variety.