Hacker News Reader

That's odd, even the Wikipedia entry (from Star Wars) begins with "is a derogatory term":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker

That's where it originates, and (I assume) it was chosen precisely because it's derogatory.

But also if you go to the talk page you can see discussions that lead to the change of the description of that page from "slur" to "derogatory term". That discussion was, from what I can tell, about the fact that slurs are for human targets and not machines. A lot of things are derogatory, particularly when applied to tools, and we would not bat an eye in the discussion. Something makes (at least some) people feel different about clanker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com