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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

I remember how "master" and "slave" were banned a few years back in information technology context and people cheered that ban. And surprise surprise, the same mechanism of arbitrary bans can be turned 180 degrees. And it appears that if the only criteria is a superficial offense at the established word unrelated to the imaginary offense, then many different people can use that same mechanism to ban or attack whatever they want. From all sides of the political spectrum. Who knew, right?:)

PS: I'm against any word bans with a very few extreme exceptions. Blanket bans for whatever random person deems offensive inevitably led to this^. Like clockwork, every single time.

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There was never a ban like this on the master-slave terminology. A lot of places started moving away from those terms, but plenty of others just kept the old naming. There was no top-down directive from the federal government like there is here - I don't think it's fair to compare them as if they are equivalent situations. This is heavy-handed in a way that makes peer pressure look completely benign in comparison.

The same issue as with some other terms in 21st century. For example monopoly by the 19th century definition would be almost impossible today, because "look, that company has a whopping 0.1% of the market, hence we with 99.9% are not a monopoly". So yeah, it wasn't banned everywhere, but that reached momentum wide enough for me to consider it essentially a ban.

And as a I said below, even if call it not a ban but idk "popular advisory", the point is that it set a precedent. And now right wingers would really ban words they don't like.

Also they may argue that they did not ban their words either. Can you apply for grant elsewhere? Yes you can, technically. "So what the problem"(c) they will ask.

It's different because it's the federal government. You can't compare it to a bunch of companies deciding to do the same thing because of popular opinion. While both processes have their own mechanism for driving conformity, one is essentially democratic, while the other is strongly autocratic.

A lot of people like to focus very exclusive on the aspect if its top-down, with the implied message being that censorship is acceptable as long its done by companies or community leaders rather than government. Yes, it is worse when it is done by governments. But no, it doesn't make censorship acceptable. So much debate happens because some people view all censorship as bad, that is rules intended to inhibit speech and shutdown wrong-thinking, while others want to distinguish between government censorship and "good" censorship. As someone who stand in the "all censorship as bad" category, there is no good censorship! Only grades of wrong.

Different wrongness do get compare. That doesn't make very very very wrong to be equivalent to just very wrong. Both are however wrong. The kind of censorship and self-censorship we have seen in science, popular media and even humor in the last few decades has been insane compared to the decades previous. To throw in a random example, someone who criticized religion was murdered a few days ago in Sweden, and as a society we kind just expected it and waiting for it to happen. Something like Monty Python could not exist today as they would had either been censored or murdered, and so they would have been forced to self-censor long before their skills as comedians would have grown.

Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.

Then you agree that what's going on now is wrong, and there's no need to bring up lesser wrongs to distract us from that.

> Then you agree that what's going on now is wrong

Obviously yes. Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.

> and there's no need to bring up lesser wrongs to distract us from that.

There would not be a need for that if people agreed that censorship is wrong. As long people see some censorship as good, rather than a lesser wrongs, the trend of ever more censorship will just continue and this kind of events will continue to occur and at larger scope. Censorship is a kind of political violence that once accepted only expands until the social rules totally breaks apart. It can't exit as just a rule for the government, it must be something that people inherently support as a concept.

Voluntarily choosing not to say something is preference, not self-censorship. For example, some people choose not to swear because they don't like swears. That is just a preference, self-censorship is when you want to swear but don't because of external pressure.

Nobody was forced to stop using master/slave, some companies just chose not to because that was their preference. They didn't want to use the word slave anymore. It's reasonable to call it pointless or performative, but I don't think any of the decision-makers at these companies were forced into it. Most companies did not change anything, and they faced absolutely no consequences.

I'm sure there were some (for example) GitHub employees who didn't agree with the decision and maybe felt censored, but basically every company on the planet has standards for language in the workplace, so in that sense every company is guilty of censorship. GitHub did not force any of its users to do anything, you could still use whatever language you want, and you can search "slave" right now to see how common it still is.

> GitHub

Let's not mix up issues though.

Removing 'master' in git has much less justification than removing master/slave terminology.

Nobody removed “master” from git though

https://github.com/github/renaming

https://www.theserverside.com/feature/Why-GitHub-renamed-its...

They did stuff. Plenty qualifies as "removing". (And I didn't say they reached out and changed the entire world.)

And unlike master/slave, it's fake inclusivity.

Cool story, nobody removed “master” from git though

They did (and encouraged) a lot of "removing".

Which is different from saying they "removed", because "removed" sounds like 100% removal. They didn't 100% remove, but that's not my argument, only a strawman of it.

So will you meet me at what I actually meant, or are you going to insist on your own wording that doesn't actually rebut me?

Git isn’t GitHub. GitHub changed the default for GitHub, didn’t touch existing projects and made it optional for projects to switch.

I didn't say they did anything to mainline git's source code.

Hell, I didn't even say they accomplished their goal. I just criticized the goal, not just for github but for everyone else doing the same thing. And the goal is about git repos. Lots of those are on github, and lots of those are influenced by the things github did.

TL;DR: Lots of people removed "master" from git repos.

> Lots of people removed "master" from git repos.

So because a lot of people chose to no longer use "master" in their git repos, it justifies an authoritarian rollback of science and health? No one cares what their git branches are called. Get that stupid chip off your shoulder and smell the fire. The country is burning.

What the hell are you talking about? I never made any comparison between those.

(I sure hope you're not just complaining that I'm wasting words on it while more important things are happening in the world, because that's pure hypocrisy and applies to 99-100% of comments on this site. "Never do anything unimportant" is a terrible motto. So is "never complain about anything minor".)

Yes, I think that it is good that they did not touch existing projects. (Much of the complaints (including my own complaints) when it was announced were due to ignorance of the working of git and of GitHub; once I learned how it is working then I do not have complaints about it.)

Even for new projects, if you create a empty repository on GitHub and then send a repository from your own computer, it will work with whatever branch name you give it, at least in my experience (I had sent repositories with the only branch named "trunk" and it seems to cause no problems at all as far as I can tell).

Neither git nor GitHub software cares what the branches are called as far as I know; I think they just changed the default settings if you are creating a repository using GitHub, but you are not required to use them.

And, actually, I read the documentation and you can even make per-user settings on GitHub, and you can change the default branch name for git itself too (and, like in GitHub, this setting can also be changed in git).

They also added the function to rename branches (you can rename any branch, not only the default branch), and they provide documentation about how this is working, so this is a side benefit of their work on this, in case it is sometimes useful to rename branches (although I think probably it is usually better not to rename existing branches, maybe sometimes it might be useful).

Furthermore, "main" is shorter than "master", and starts with the same two letters; but in my opinion, these are minor benefits (although they are still beneficial anyways).

However, even though I think this is good, this does not imply that all software that used "master" and changed it, were doing good. In many cases they weren't good, but git (and GitHub) isn't one of them that isn't good. The reasons why it is good or not good have to do with the existing working of the software and of working of names, and how the changes are being handled, and is not because of racism and stuff like that.

The justification is irrelevant. You can think it's as dumb as you want to, it still isn't censorship if nobody is being forced to do anything.

Are you pretending that the previous administrations did not lean on tech companies to directly censor speech - or do you really not know?

I wasn’t crazy about moving away from master, but this isn’t a word ban, it’s a concept ban. They’re not really banning the word diversity, they’re banning the study of diversity by any name.

Renaming master to main, doesn’t mean that you can’t do trunk based development, it just means you’re using a different term.

Yes. That ban (sorry, I still think that's what it was in reality) was a mild one and inconsequential. I personally have no problem with that specific episode.

The real problem is that and other such minor episodes normalized word bans as a general principle. So as soon as more radical people come in power, they have used it to ban what THEY want.

Just like normalizing talks about occupation of Greenland today, will inevitably lead to the real occupation in 20-30 years in the future, by some Mango v2.0.

If there was any value at all in renaming it to main, it was preventing people from being reminded of the unhappy concept of slavery. I don't think one ban is more conceptual than the other, if there's a difference it's that scrubbing an unhappy concept from research is more pragmatically damaging than scrubbing it from nomenclature - not because one's morally better, but because the former is more difficult to evade.

I disagree. If people want to call it "main" that is OK and I do not have an objection, although slavery and racism is not a part of it. Using different words does not solve slavery or racism or anything like that.

There are some minor advantages of "main", but many of the previous objections to the change are invalid and based on ignorance of the working of git; once I figured out how it works, I do not have an objection, since you can call the branches whatever you want to do anyways, and the names "master" is not something special anyways except for what it is called if you do not otherwise specify a name. Furthermore, existing repositories on GitHub are not automatically changed, and they added function for renaming branches (which can be useful for other reasons too), so for these reasons I think what they did is good.

Some minor benefits of "main" is that it is shorter than "master" and starts with the same two letters as "master" (which might sometimes matter, e.g. if the branch names are listed in alphabetical order and you want to find them in the list). These benefits seems like only minor benefits to me, though.

However, my opinion about the change in SQLite, changing a table name from SQLITE_MASTER to SQLITE_SCHEMA, is different. I think that the new name better describes what it is for (it is the table for the schema of the database), but I would not have made that change, since it can cause problems. They did consider some of them (such as authorizer callbacks, which is something that I had thought of too before I knew what they did about it), and work around them, but that just makes it more messy, so I still think it was a bad idea, but now it is done and it would not be good to undo this change, either. If I was in charge of it I would have deferred the change until SQLite4, rather than changing SQLite3. (There is also the issue of the SQLITE_SCHEMA error code.)

Are they actually banning it? Or do they just say "we are not paying for that kind of research that we see brings no value to our society"?

When you say they were "banned", do you mean a handful of companies voluntarily decided to stop using those words internally and published blog posts about it? I don't recall it going any further than that.

These were not banned. I still call master-slave systems master-slave, and I haven't gotten banned from anywhere because of that. Some people don't like it, and other people don't like that some people don't like it, and some people ban its usage from their platforms, and other people enforce its usage on their platforms, which sounds like a free marketplace of ideas to me!

Nothing was banned, culture changed.

This happens as you age. The world and customs you grew up with, despite how they may feel too you, are not the natural state of the world.

Accept that new customs may replace them.

That should never have been banned. It was a stupid ban then and is a stupid ban now.

"banned"? Like there's some singular entity in charge of all of IT that gets to ban things?

Yes, we have mandatory linter rules which won’t let us check in code that contains the word “whitelist” or “blacklist” or “master” because they are somehow racist.

I work at the biggest tech company, which employs hundreds of thousands of people and these rules are applied across all codebases.

This stuff is widespread across big companies and the government.

That's just your organization, I meant "all of IT" when I said "all of IT".

There are posters here acting as if there is a singular entity in charge of IT, that forces this rule on everyone.

I don't see what consequence it is that your particular organization prefers to do things its own way. It's a completely different proposition from pretending like the word is banned outright for everyone, by someone.

There's a pretty big difference between a private company pandering to progressives by banning a few words versus the federal government suddenly declaring that many different words and concepts are banned. These NSF flags are just one case out of many, similar changes are being rushed out across every federal department. I agree that the word bans at your company are stupid, but the govt changes are a whole other level of bad.

Agreed. It's groups in multiple camps that want to force everyone to change how they do things. Superficial, performative "action" and causes don't change anything. Let's just be sensible and try not to harm or discriminate against anyone for any of their attributes. How is this so difficult? I think it's that there are too many people who have firmly married their identities to hate of their socially-acceptable (in their hermetically-sealed echo chamber of team red or team blue) scapegoats.

Since what we're looking for is a peace that eliminates collateral damage, perhaps the best course would be to reassure both sides that they can have security without having control.

In my opinion government focus should be on the education of young people, and not on trying to force and bend adults to behave in the narrow "correct" way. Again, with some exceptions. If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. If we want people not to use some slur or derogatory term - teach people in the school. And so on. The problem is that across the world education is a third tier activity for the government and is largely neglected. No big profits there.

Some people will choose to antagonize men or women even after being made aware of the facts. That's why people who are unwilling to tolerate a low level of bad behavior and the after-the-fact nature of punishment wind up demanding absolute and preemptive control over everybody else.

> If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education.

You also have to introduce rules for hiring – unless you want your interventions to have an 80-year delay on them. (Or we could make unqualified 18-year-olds responsible for hiring decisions, I suppose.) If you're training children up for careers they're going to be kept out of, you're doing everyone a disservice.

Removing reasonable discriminating items from hiring is good idea, like mandating no photos for example. But we can't remove all of it and people will still be discriminated, even just by name and surname. Then we decide to force the issue and add diversity quotas, but those are both neither enough nor are truly enforced. Then we start creating DEI departments, thought police and... well. It doesn't work very well.

Also in practice these quotas are often put at the lower rank jobs, where there is little discrimination anyway. E.g. IT industry will eat up any good candidate, usually. The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy. There are no quotas for CEOs or Senators, or top politicians etc. And really won't be.

So considering that, I tend to think that quotas is a losing game, and only education is the solution. And I mean real efforts there, not some token programs for 30 girls per nation or something. And yeah, unfortunately we will need to wait a lot.

I also think quotas are a poor solution. Pretty much all of the surface-level DEI stuff in the US is – or, I suppose, was – absurd. (Mandatory corporate training where a voice reads out a list of slurs… What problem is that meant to solve?)

However, my experience of DEI specialists is overwhelmingly positive, even those in the US. Maybe I've got lucky, and have only interacted with competent ones: who knows? But if they say a system involving quotas is the best solution currently-feasible – which iirc I have been told – then that won't convince me that quotas are good, but it will convince me that the other options are worse.

> The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy.

This isn't a problem with quotas. It being a problem presupposes that quotas work, surely?

That ban is imaginary. It never existed. Many people decided to use other terms at their free will and others didn't. Both terms can be still found in plenty of projects.

Master. Slave. Look at me go!

Oh no! You're banned now! Look, the international word police has put a warrant out for you.

And other problems that do not exist.

Can you point me when Biden or Obama issued a word ban around the words master and slave in an IT context? Thank you.

Can you point to where Trump issued a word ban for grant funded research? Not this post, because it's not describing a word ban and it doesn't even seem to have a source.

I can in fact. Trump literally just issued a mass retraction and censorship of research publication depending on a set of keywords [1]. That is, by definition, a word ban for CDC-funded research. In fact you posted in that thread on HN, so you should already be very well aware of it.

[1] https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orde...

This was DC city government not Obama and Biden.

Absolutely correct.

We’re still not allowed to use “whitelist” and “blacklist” because it’s somehow racism.

We have linters which bar us from checking in code with these words and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats.

Now the same people who applauded that policing of speech suddenly are offended when their explicit political speech is being removed.

It’s just simply hypocrisy.

Way to 'what about' speech policing. Yay to normalizing less freedoms because 'someone else did something too'.

I’m not trying to what about anything, I’m actually a fairly extreme free speech absolutist.

I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy, the people complaining the loudest are the same people who exuberantly censor people they disagree with.

These type of people have lost moral authority.

> and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats.

that is quite disturbing to me

That's ridiculous. I use whitelist and blacklist just fine and have for the last decade plus. No one in the government told me it wasn't allowed.

You're really offended by these linters huh.

I resent others trying to police my language, especially when the language is not offensive.

People who do this obviously get joy out of bossing other people around and pretending they are being virtuous.

It's a strange hill to die on brother.

But you do you.

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