Terms like ”master / slaves” carry racial overtones so many prefer terms like ”primary / replicas”. Similarly, ”allowlist / blocklist” rather than ”whitelist / blacklist”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. This point has been argued to death a thousand times here already, and no interesting discussion is going to be had by changing the subject to it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Moreover this article is from 2018, so bringing it up in this context is an anachronism.
But I am still struggling to see an issue with blacklist and whitelist as they actually don’t seem to have anything to do with race, nor have they ever. They have more to do with darkness and light, or death, etc. Like something being a black box just has no relation whatsoever to race.
And if we start to change words that demonstrably have nothing to do with race, then anything is fair game. And that’s just a very unnerving place to be.
Jokes aside, what matters is what you mean by words and how do you feel when you realize that what you're saying genuinely offends somebody. Imagine you don't really think about slavery when you say "sell down the river". Somebody points it out to you what it actually means. You can say "oh, shit" and try to avoid the phrase. Or you can say "it's my inalienable right to keep using this sentence". Or you can say "well, yes in this case it makes sense, this sentence is racist, but if we start to police words, where does it stop?"
Let's see; let's replace that sentence with any of the above. Is "whitespace" really a space for white people or is it because space between words is ink-free?
Is a "race condition" a condition of a race of people or a competition of speed? The words are spelled and pronounced the same but they are not the same word. One comes from romance languages and the other from Norse.
But it's not only etymology. Contrast "master" in "master-slave" where it clearly means the owner/controller of the slave and it stems from shameful practices actually happened in our past by and to our ancestors. Contrast this with "master copy", "to master an art", etc. where the word retains its original meaning of "teacher" (magister).
Be smart, be curious, don't stop at the surface.
I also agree about there being nothing wrong with the word master, in the context of mastery of a craft etc.
But with databases, a slave often replaces the master if the master stops working. That simply never happened in real life so it’s not even close to an accurate set of terms.
We are diurnal so we mostly see light as a positive (daylight, when we are awake), and darkness as a negative (night when we are asleep, and have evolved to be more wary of a situation where we can’t see well).
My argument for all this is, instead of actually vilifying the colors themselves which are meaningless, why don’t we stop referring to humans as white and black? Where’s that debate? Because those words are meaningless. Neither are white nor black. They’re brown. We are all different shades of brown.
Critiquing semantic vagueness? Username checks out :)