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Comment by pinum | Hacker News Reader

This terminology has been used for a long time in computing. It's immediately recognised by everyone and in no way endorses human slavery. I'm getting quite fed up of the OTT political correctness movement in tech.

Out of interest, what is your opinion on male/female USB connectors? Does one deserve to get fired if they make a joke about "big dongles"?

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The actual act of slavery existed as an accepted institution for longer than this computing term has. If we can make slavery a thing of the past (in the western world), we can also update to a more technically correct description of the behavior.

The term "slave" isn't even a good technical term. It would be better to call it a follower or replica which better approximates it's actual role. Not only is it "politically correct" it's also "technically correct", the best kind of correct.

We will not have "made it a thing of the past" until the words loses the kind of power over people where they are still seen as offensive by anyone.

True, but it has also been common practice for at least 20 years in the US to not use the term slave. Source: I worked on replication since 1996 and we were asked to use "supplier" and "consumer" at that time. Actually I've been surprised to see slave making a come back recently. Wondered if people hadn't received the memo or perhaps were outside the US cultural influence.

"outside the US cultural influence"

Where is this magical place you speak of?

Eastern Europe sees discussions like this being done by the "bored westerners" and finding it great fuel for right. When Django was moving away from "blacklists", the general attitude was to mock it, or keep quiet about it:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev...

There are other ways to offend someone from Eastern Europe, or more generally almost any country. It's not unusual for some painful recent history to be still a raw nerve.

Slavery is a significant topic in the US. It was a prelude to the civil war; it was abolished within recent memory; and the echoes of racist sentiment still affect the lives of millions: people alive today remember segregation, and both casual and systematic discrimination against African-Americans continue to occur.

This is not a big deal in Poland, which has no such extensive recent history with slavery.

But - for example - in 2015 the Russian ambassador in Warsaw was excoriated in public and summoned to the foreign ministry for his remarks partly blaming Polish policy in the 1930s for contributing to the start of WW2 and the subsequent death of millions of Poles. Now that was a raw nerve.

A different standard does not mean the absence of standards. People who fail to see that, and then mock others, are simply demonstrating a lack of self-awareness.

>A different standard does not mean the absence of standards.

But that was the point I was arguing for. That US standard is not everyone's standard.

Then we are in agreement. My remark was not a rebuttal to yours.

Worked with US teams most of my career (since '95 or so) and never had any of them complain about master/slave nomenclature in any of the software we used. I suspect that rather than being "common practice in the US", it's been common in whatever niche you work in or whatever part of the US, or even just in the specific companies.

Of course it might be I who've worked in such a bubble too, but given the number of people here who seem to find it annoying that people are even suggesting not using it, I'm inclined to believe the use of master/slave has remained more common that you think.

> I'm getting quite fed up of the OTT political correctness movement in tech.

Is it over the top though? It's a references to a deplorable practice that humans do; why shouldn't we strive for something more civil, and more technically correct? The slave of a database isn't the property of the master and subject to its every whim; it's a replica of the data that can do separate, independent things from the master with that data.

> Out of interest, what is your opinion on male/female USB connectors? Does one deserve to get fired if they make a joke about "big dongles"?

As for gendered connectors, the terms themselves don't carry (or shouldn't :() any judgment nor does it's usage. A valid cable, pipe, &c doesn't have to be heterogeneous/hermaphroditic and can be homogeneous. I would hope that the LGBTQ community wouldn't be offended that only M/F ends can "mate", as biological "mating" (i.e. copulation for the purpose of procreation) can only happen between M and F ends, and see it as a judgment on non-procreation intercourse.

However, if there was an issue about the term M/F being a judgment call, it would be responsible for the community (well, all communities, as the terms M/F for connectors goes beyond just electrical connectors) to listen and (slowly) introduce better names.

There is no reason to make a large portion of the population uncomfortable when it literally costs us nothing to change it (over the long run).

> deplorable actions humans do.

So when do we rename 'kill'?

...or killall

'Bash' is too violent as well. We should rename it to 'hug'.

`bash` is also pretty evangelical ;)

On a serious note, I've never actually understood where the term "hung" comes from in computing. Why is the process "hung" and not simply "stalled" or something else.

The real reason is because most of the concepts surrounding multi-process computing come from the telephone industry.

The modern interpretation is that system operators need to feel like they have a big penis.

> The real reason is because most of the concepts surrounding multi-process computing come from the telephone industry.

> The modern interpretation is that system operators need to feel like they have a big penis.

I actually didn't even think of it in that regard. I regard hung as in something that is hanging (dangling) from something else.

Hung is used like that outside computing. For example in the terms "hung jury" and "hung parliament". I have no idea how this word became common in computing though.

Humans kill many things over the course of their existence. For instance, we slaughter animals for food, pluck weeds to help our crops, and preserve food by boiling or chemical means (e.g. salt).

Killing is not deplorable. Murder is deplorable. (I'm a vegetarian, so I find slaughter for food deplorable too, but I'm in the minority here.)

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