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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

What bugs me about crap like this is that it ignores world history, makes these people feel good about doing nothing of consequence, and takes attention away from things that will actually help.

If you are going to help, actually do something that improves the lives of people. Maybe, you should really put some effort into beefing up the Computer Science programs in black high schools and colleges? You are Microsoft, and had a damn policy of only hiring people from certain schools for certain job areas. In 90, one of your damn reps told a classroom of students that they were only good for "help desk" positions because of the school they went to. I'm betting some all black colleges were not on the hire list for actual developer jobs.

Actually doing something useful is hard, this is just signalling how cool you are.

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I understand that you are trying to be constructive, but I'm quite surprised by your use of "black high school" and "black colleges". Is it still a thing in the US?

Wouldn't focusing on fixing this situation be more beneficial than reinforcing it?

I understand that you are trying to be constructive, but I'm quite surprised by your use of "black high school" and "black colleges". Is it still a thing in the US?

Yes it is "still a thing". They are mentioned in legislation as Black Colleges. It was an extremely big deal this year when Black Colleges were successful in lobbying for Title III funding. In fact, they are listed officially as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Native American's higher education institutions are referred to officially as Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs).

Wouldn't focusing on fixing this situation be more beneficial than reinforcing it?

So, yes, that is what they are referred to in legislation, so stop trying to imply someone is not using the right words. It really ticks me off when people wordsmith but don't bother actually engaging or knowing any of the history of the people they are being offended for.

Maybe if you stopped implying racism where none exists, we would have a better world.

Wow, I did not expect so much aggressivity. Sorry if I hit some sensible point, but my question certainly did not aim to imply any kind of judgement.

I am not american and never heard about a "black college" before. Are those words (along with the TCUs you mentioned) used for historical reasons, or is there still segregation (wether legally or de-facto)?

The meaning of my second question was actually that I disagree that "beefing up the Computer Science programs in black high schools" will help much beyond a little short term relief. Efforts should focus about understanding and fixing the systemic problems, not the symptoms.

They aren't systematically segregated, mostly by circumstance and clustering by identity group. People tend to cluster in like-cultured communities either by country of origin and/or racial identity. It's not an absolute, but there are communities that are overwhelmingly black, chinese, japanese, etc.

Of course most of the real divides come down to income class, which is part of what should take an emphasis in terms of possible distribution of education funding.

Wikipedia's got a good overview on why "Historically Black Colleges and Universities" exist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historically_black_colleges_an...

TL;DR, the reason why these exist is because of historical discrimination against black people in college admissions.

While there is much less discrimination in admissions today then there was in, say, the early 1900's, these colleges still have a strong presence in the US today.

And to your point, yes I think we all (or at least most of us) want to live in a world where we don't need race-based communities or institutions, but because our country still suffers from extreme race-based segregation and inequality, IMO it still makes sense to have these active support structures in place.

I tend to bring this up in terms of hiring initiatives as well... if there are X% of people are of $identity Z in terms of the field in practice (let's say 20% female in software engineering). And a large company tries to hit 50% in hiring, they're actually reducing diversity across the industry.

What they should be doing is scholarship and mentoring programs to increase the base if that is their real goal. But that takes actual effort and costs real money.

A small symbolic thing is still worth doing, even if it doesn't directly improve the lives of people.

This doesn't even indirectly improve things.

What it does do is make a few people feel better because they are misinformed and so other things like education would be a better solution, something like "there's no need to feel bad about this word, and here's the logic about why."

No, no it isn't. If it doesn't actually help improve lives, its just an indulgence.

Props to you for committing to your austerity, but we're not all monks in cells.

Austerity? Monks in cells? Really, none of that makes any sense?

Hell, switching your Amazon account to one of those smile accounts will do more good than signalling.

>Austerity? Monks in cells?

You're complaining about indulgence! You're saying that this change won't help people as much as something else. This is a fair criticism. Changing some technical term is probably not a optimally utilitarian use of resources.

However, while you may be trying to live an optimally utilitarian life, the rest of us aren't. I can only speak for myself of course, but evaluating all my life's actions on only that axis is too strict for me.

But, like I said, if you want to do that: props.

No, I'm saying that it won't help people at all. Its an indulgence to make the person doing feel like they are doing something. It will not materially improve lives.

It would be fine if it just made them feel good, but it substitutes for efforts that would help. Its a personal indulgence taking energy from a system when more is needed. It also is a distraction from actual issues. Nothing is often better than something.

> However, while you may be trying to live an optimally utilitarian life, the rest of us aren't. I can only speak for myself of course, but evaluating all my life's actions on only that axis is too strict for me.

Yeah, this is wordplay that has nothing to do with me.

You keep complaining about indulging! What's wrong with indulging in something every once in while?

If your indulging hurts others, then it is something worth complaining about.

I don't exactly understand how you're hurt by this, but fair enough.

Utilitarianism is a philosophical framework. It's not for me, but based on your comments you might be into it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

I am not.

I see no supporting argument for “replacing master with main at GitHub hurts others”; is it somewhere in this thread and I wasn’t able to see it unassisted? If not, we would benefit from you typing it up.

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I reviewed your initial post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500764 and I was unable to parse out of your objections why you think that this change hurts others. Could you summarize?

Ok, here is my objection. I'm saying that it won't help people at all. It is an indulgence to make Microsoft feel like they are doing something positive when it will not materially improve lives.

It would be fine if it just made them feel good as people's mental health is an important thing that too many ignore. But, this will suck attention away from people who are actually doing things that will help people. The world has only so much time to pay attention, and that time is valuable. Microsoft is just adding to the noise.

They are bringing homemade cupcakes to a food bank and making the national news.

Inconsistent naming standards hurts everyone. Now some repositories will have master branches while others will have them named something else, it makes things harder to work with. If every developer spends just a minute wondering where the main branch is before realizing the new naming standards, that is still a lifetimes worth of time lost due to this change.

And if you look at that it analogy of a tree, what is a "Master branch". Also what is a "Main branch". It's trunk. Of course then it would be called "The trunk branch", which sounds silly too me, and trunk has a couple sexual slangs tied to it. I read on person naming theirs 'prd', 'uat', and 'dev'. Less typing and describes what the branch is for.

While we're being pedantic, it's a graph, not a tree.

So bar, line, pie, scatter, etc. would be good names. Hehe.

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