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Comment by m0ck | Hacker News Reader

As with many these pseudoproblems, it is initiative by white people to signal virtue to other white people and show "moral superiority". I can't imagine someone actually feeling uncomfortable over it, this isn't even case of master/slave, "master" means just "primary" in this context. But I get it is easier to solve than real problems the marginalized groups face (such as police reform) and earn brownie points on Twitter (like with rainbow logos coming and going away every year).

What I am afraid of the most is that eventually GitHub etc. will force everyone to change names, including existing repositories, breaking CI pipelines and other things in the process. Sounds absurd, but unfortunately very possible in today's climate.

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Do you have any evidence for your claim?

Because the first time I heard about it was from 17 years ago when a black man complained about the use of master/slave and filed an EEOC complaint. See https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/masterslave/ .

Your hypothesis is that virtue signaling describes the movement to get rid of the term.

Have you considered that the term master/slave was popularized and maintained as a form of virtue signaling?

Quoting from "Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature" by Ron Eglash" available from https://sci-hub.st/10.1353/tech.2007.0066 :

> ... being unconscious of social mores was a good sign for a future physicist, because physics transcends culture. Perhaps this kind of emphasis on a technical identity is at work here, too, and the master-slave metaphor is attractive to engineers because its free use “proves” that they inhabit a nonsocial or culture-free realm, which is a matter of professional pride

You read my post wrong. I said explicitly this is NOT a master/slave situation, "master" has completely different meaning here, there is not any "slave" branch under its rule.

I agree the master/slave pair itself is a weird terminology to use (especially the slave part), but master branch, master degree, master ball in Pokemon games are all fine in my book.

Context matters. This is not far away from attacking anything associated with words white/black.

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