Comment by burnished | Hacker News Reader

Comment by burnished | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You should probably think more about that first sentence yours and about what I said. I'll try to help: which phrase requires less knowledge to understand due to being self describing? does that mean it is more, equally, or less descriptive than the other? do you need to have a specific problem in order to improve something? did I ever say or even imply that there was a problem?

You are unironically doing the thing I was talking about by not noticing that I already said that about git's master branch. Master/slave is also a pretty common phrase in computing when talking about hardware, and its a pretty ugly concept when applied to humans, so I'm also not terribly surprised people chose to change their default branch name even if the association is only tangential. You wouldn't be surprised if the old name was 'ScrapedCornea' and people didn't love it. But again, its bizarre that a shift from 'master' to 'main', which is shorter, provokes this response. Do you feel personally critiqued by it somehow? Genuinely curious.

If you had ancestors that were slaves in the 1800s and for that reason want to avoid any word that looks like "master", even if used in a different meaning, then by all means go ahead and change your git branch name, that's your business, as silly as it is. I only object if you want to project this absurdity on others, and make THEM change THEIR branch names.

I personally have much closer ancestors, that were tortured by the communists within living memory. What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me? Or in analogy with the github situation, if I asked people to stop wearing Che t-shirts? Would you say that was reasonable, or a sign of insanity?

As I said, "allow list" is more descriptive if you don't know the word whitelist in the sense that it's easier to guess its meaning the first time you see it. My point is that this is not generally considered important, just look at 100 random words, most of them would be hard to guess the exact meaning of, even if like me you studied classical languages.

Yeah, it would be pretty reasonable to tell people that you found something upsetting. You should give it a try. It doesn't need to be a universal maxim for people to care about and respect your feelings in the spaces you occupy.

Do you think anyone would take that seriously? I sure hope anyone I associate would just laugh and presume that I'm joking. It just isn't reasonable to be that sensitive. It certainly isn't adaptive, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was something about it in DSM.

Sorry, you're confusing the hell out of me, is this a way that you feel or not? Pretending to care about something in order to score points is bad behavior.

Pretending to care? I am not saying I care about communist symbols, I am saying it would be absurd if I did, I wasn’t in the war. And yes I agree that all the people that pretend that the word ”master” is an issue are behaving badly. It’s pointless virtue signaling by proxy.

> What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me?

Then out of respect I would would attempt to stop using it around you, And if enough people agreed with you we would probably mothball it in favor of something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com