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Comment by oersted | Hacker News Reader

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> The akritai (singular akrites) is a term used in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th–11th centuries to denote the frontier soldiers guarding the Empire's eastern border, facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. (Wikipedia)

Akron means edge or border, so "frontiersman" or "those of the border".

EDIT: Commenters seem upset about the Muslim part, I didn’t mean to imply anything, you cannot just copy-paste contemporary disputes and prejudices a thousand years ago. In the historical context it’s just like most borders between different civilizations. The point is that they were a collective organization getting together to defend their land.

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Then it's perhaps not the best name, given what happened in the end to the empire's eastern border.

Sigh

This is a very simplified and uninformed view of what the Akritai were. The name choice is so wrong, it cannot even be called out as cultural appropriation, because it is far worse than that. LF just stick with languages you understand.

I would be glad to learn if you are willing to explain, this what I found from trusted sources, but it would be great to know if there’s additional nuance.

Akritai were locals who were to be used as the defenders of the borders instead of deploying regular Army or mercenaries. For this reason they were given land (so as to have skin in the game) and tax breaks. When the tax breaks stopped the Akritai rapidly vanished. These are also mentioned in Wikipedia pages.

So, in terms of a security project an Akritas would be you running an EDR agent on a machine that you own, not some of the signatory companies who basically do not own anything on the edge (end user equipment).

Com'on, it's not that bad. The idea of these organizations is that, since they're using and testing this software, "we'll see any issues first, we'll let you know, and we'll deal with it." The quoted part bears some resemblance to the tasks of Akrites.

Remains to be seen whether history will repeat itself: when the tax breaks/ free AI use stops, will anyone keep doing this?

Disclaimer: I have had nothing to do with this initiative, and was not consulted on the name.

> facing the Muslim states of the Middle East.

if true, then choosing this name was a very bad decision.

Imagine how Muslims would feel, demonizing them even more, before they were terrorists, now they are attacking open source and hence some organizations need akrites to defend from them.

I really wish such organizations which try to demonize anyone, to fail miserably

To be fair, the Akritai was the Byzantine Empire's effort to use the local population to defend the land, instead of having to deploy regular Army or mercenaries. It happened to be Muslim states that was the border. It bears no anti-muslim connotations as a word in Greek. In fact the epic of Digenes Akritas, speaks of Basil, an Akritas of a Greek mother and an Arab father (hence the name Digenes, of two descents).

But still, the name is a bad, uninformed choice.

Α better translation is "defender of the borders" or "Knights of the borders". Form "Akri" = edge, border.

It's not Muslim related even at the time they exists.

Apache is doing pretty well despite them being deathly foes to the Comanche and Texans but I doubt either Texans or Comanches object to the name because of something that happened hundreds of years ago.

I mean I guess we have stop calling things the Great Wall because it repelled incursions from the Manchurians and maybe those people who live in their ancestral lands who were defeated and incorporated into modern Chinese society might feel a tinge of anger…

That's who they had the border with, dude.

I wish malicious interpretations like yours would fail miserably. The word for the soldiers is about them, not who they fought.

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