That's not even the worse part. The refusal to make a change that costs you nothing in order to stick it to people you don't like is much worse and indicates all sorts of behaviors you do not want on your team.
I was mentally and physically abused as a child by my stepfather.
If, in the middle of him choking me unconscious someone had given me the choice between "lots of people tell him he's horrible" and "someone gets him off of me", which do you think I would choose?
Do you think those who are disadvantaged due to their race would rather you worry about helping them get on their feet or not hiring someone for not wanting to name a branch "main".
You add to the hurt of this world in the name of victims who would rather you do something more useful. This is about you, not about them.
> You add to the hurt of this world in the name of victims who would rather you do something more useful.
Wrong. Maybe try talking to people that don't want that kind of verbiage instead of making bad assumptions. Removing terminology associated with slavery has high support among those that actually were descendants of slaves.
Am I hire-able? I aint white, so presumably you SHOULD hire me to help with racism. yet I rename my main branch to master on all personal projects.
So the question becomes, do the above posters hire me or not? Presumably no since I have the wrong opinion but if they refuse to hire me they're furthering racial inequities so then presumably yes.
Of course, this paradox goes away the second you acknowledge both are stupid reasons to hire or fire anyone.
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Here's the real problem with the other posters.
A complete and utter lack of respect for the effects of their decisions on the lives of other people.
It's why I'm such a fan of the following C.S Lewis quote
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously in this thread—way over the line at which we ban an account.
Moreover, it looks like you've been primarily using HN for flamewar and ideological battle. That's another line at which we ban accounts, regardless of which ideology they're for.
Moreover, we've had to warn you about breaking the site guidelines multiple times in the past.
Normally I wouldn't ban an account without giving someone another warning first, but the sheer nastiness of how you behaved in this thread is so awful that it actually takes my breath away. You simply can't treat other people like that here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Therefore, I've banned this account, at least for now. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> It's disgusting how you try to play that card while having none of the life experiences.
sigh
I have 18 aunts and uncles, all but 1 of them was beaten and raped in a boarding school growing up. My mother was sent to that school at the age of 5, she married at 16 because it was the only way to get out of that school legally. If they were caught speaking anything but English they would be locked out of the dorms during the night, especially if it was winter. They used to force everyone into the shower and make them soap up to be as white as possible. They would be inspected and if they weren't white enough they would get beaten with a strap while in the shower.
I grew up hearing these stories.
Then one day in 9th grade I came home from school to my mother crying and she started talking about things that happened to her at that school. Things we _didn't_ grow up hearing. I won't repeat them here. I started crying because even at that age I had the wisdom to understand she was hurting and I couldn't help her.
The boarding school where my mother went doesn't exist anymore. The school shut down, the buildings were pulled down, and speaking with people who have attempted to document what happened there, it's apparently _extremely_ hard to find any records of it outside of the people who went to school there.
Do you know several of the people who ran that school later got a humanitarian award? I remember it like it was yesterday, it was announced a few days before our family reunion. The anger was _palpable_ across the entire family.
I've seen interviews with others who have gone to these boarding schools so I've seen and heard even more stories. One of a student who was accidentally beaten to death and just disappeared but everyone knew what had happened. A girl who would be pulled out of the lunch line and taken into a room with a priest who would make her pleasure him (girl, not young adult) and give her a penny afterward. She apparently became a prostitute.
Did you know _many_ of my race have black ancestry mixed in? Do you know why? Partially because _they were enslaved together_. Did you know blacks and women both technically got the right to vote before my race did because they got citizenship before my race did?
That's not even going into my own personal experiences, but FYI, I've been called the N-word before.
----
Now for the real question.
Are you a terrible human being for making me relive my own life experiences because you denied them, or are you an amazing human being for not believing a minority could ever possibly think renaming master to main was pointless.
Or maybe you can go to sleep tonight confident in two truths.
1. If you don't announce you're black immediately then you aint black, and
2. If you don't vote for Donald Trump, you aint black.
Or who knows, maybe I just made it all up.
and let me end with another CS Lewis quote.
> Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. _But I reject slavery_ because I see no men fit to be masters
It really is not about that. The problem is that some people feel the need to bend over backwards, making symbolic gestures that do not change the underlying issue. As if renaming 'whitelist' to 'allowlist' is going to turn any neo-nazis into angels.
> As if renaming 'whitelist' to 'allowlist' is going to turn any neo-nazis into angels.
As if that's the point?
What do you think a hostile workplace is? Do you think being consistently subjected to verbiage that negatively impacts your mental health is a good thing?
Seems odd to me that so many people want to hold onto things that hurt other people and justify it by saying it doesn't solve anything despite the fact that those people are telling you that it will help them.
I don’t think the idea is to convert neo-nazis. People feel pretty powerless to help fight racism and doing small things like this help them feel a bit better.
Also, changing language that explicitly says “white good”, “black bad” can’t really hurt. It takes very little effort and “allow list” is actually clearer anyway.
> Also, changing language that explicitly says “white good”, “black bad” can’t really hurt. It takes very little effort and “allow list” is actually clearer anyway.
That isn't what they say at all. The only way that argument holds any water is with profound ignorance.
It's the same line of thinking as saying that "red team" is offensive because "red" used to be a derogatory term for native Americans. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816
For the same reason black card is considered exclusive and prestigious.
Maybe you are the problem, associating everything with race and in if in your mind black is inferior, then everything using black as an adjective would be negative for you.
It does cost something, quite a lot actually, my company (correctly) refused to bow to the pressure to migrate because it would have been too expensive to update our tooling.
And acquiescing meekly to absurd demands is a much worse behavior for a team.
Even worse behavior in a teammate would be trying to browbeat their coworkers into wasting energy on performative nonsense to score social status points.
In a just world anyone who suggested this would be fired immediately.
Does that shift not regularly annoy other people? I work on several projects throughout the week and not all had their primary branch moved from master to main. I end up getting the branch name wrong a few times a week when context switching..
Is there a better solution than updating some of the older projects and automation?
Not diving into the debate about whether this is a useful change, but I do want to push back on the notion that this "costs you nothing." It costs effort, which means it costs billable hours, and therefore money. The question is if that spend pays dividends.
It also creates downstream impacts. Reddit famously had a major outage caused by this; my team had all of our builds break because a transitive dependency changed methods from "blacklist" to "allowlist".
