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Comment by waterhouse | Hacker News Reader

You joke (I think), but given what happened to the "master" branch on GitHub, it seems likely that some people will try to push the point, and, if they make enough noise, it's likely that the organizations involved will eventually cave (not the chess grandmasters (!), but the administrator types). I googled a bit and turned up a couple of news articles: https://apnews.com/article/184386cc09be6c69535919402a13fa3f and https://au.sports.yahoo.com/chess-centre-stunning-racism-deb...

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The github change is brought up by a lot by people, but, all github does here is this. On the default set of commands it shows you if you don't have a repo pushed, it shows you the help command with 'main', instead of 'master'. Just a word change on a default help document, that's it. If you knew your commands you wouldn't even notice this.

If you just make a repo and push your existing code to github, it will work with 'master' as it is.. they actually don't have much of a say in how people name the git branches without severely shooting their whole service in the foot..

iirc git was also looking in to changing the default name when you run git init. Yes, it makes no difference at all, its just a name. But the fact is that a lot of people felt it very important to make this nonsensical change. There is no reason why the colors of chess pieces would not fall under the same justifications.

It was GitHub who wanted to make this change. I don't think they can impact how the git command works. GitHub has a separate desktop UI client but afaik the git binary is from a different organization.

I think if you look at arbitrary religious restrictions, those also probably trace their origins to an overactive neurotic mind with too much time on their hands. Those guys then develop nonsensical restrictions.

>I don't think they can impact how the git command works.

The git team independently discussed it on the git mailing list after github made the move and decided they want to move in the same direction.

If someone thinks chess colors are racist, they should get educated on their history first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_and_Black_in_chess#Histo...

Nearly all the outrage over word use and six-figure tax bills for rewording city and federal documents is the result of ignorance of etymology, homonyms, and homophones.

I made the mistake of pointing this out on Twitter, and was promptly and aggressively told that, as long as anybody is upset, etymology doesn’t matter.

Awomen.

History is sexist: it's his story!

A quick search shows it has already happened.

https://twitter.com/magnuscarlsen/status/1108662247860199424

I don't know how people don't see the irony. This is introducing race into a non-racial game.

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