11 ms·

Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code

30 points by mds 6y ago

Zenbit_UX 6y ago
We live in the dumbest time-line.
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  I'll drink to that!
entropea 6y ago
What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? It doesn't end racism or help black lives at all. It seems like a corporate facade of change while ignoring the real material issues of life for black inidividuals that these major protests pointed out.
- GiorgioG 6y ago
  Does it really give them good PR though?
  - treebornfrog 6y ago
    All PR is good PR.
- Clubber 6y ago
  I'm afraid the only thing that will come out of this is platitudes like this and no real change long term, at least until it all blows up again. Changing packaging is easy and gets you press. Search and replace is a little harder, but can be done with not many resources. Re-culturing a 100+ year old police departments independently while maintaining that police department's purpose is very hard and we have to do it for every bad one out there. Many cases need to be a complete ground-up effort. I think people who can actually do the work and enact that change are hoping it will just blow over with the next news cycle, because it's hard. I have hope though. I don't like living with our current justice system.
- axegon_ 6y ago
  The way I see it: free advertising. Nothing beats piggybacking on a hot topic by presenting a non-issue as an actual issue or a threat. Which is what that is, given that as far as cs is concerned, "master" and "slave" refer to concepts which have nothing in common with slavery, colonialism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, bigotry or whatever other buzzword you may think of. What is a bit worrying is that those exact methods of promotion were used on several occasions in history, and neither of them produced a good result.
- RegnisGnaw 6y ago
  That's exactly it. It reminds me of some aspects of China during The Great Leap Forward. The grain production quotas set by Mao was completely unrealistic. However if the local leader said it, they would be branded as "anti-revolutionary" and sent off to reeducation camps. So the local leader lied and said they achieved the quota and was praised by the party. This lead to other village leader saying they exceeded the quota (by more and more over time) so that they seem more revolutionary (pro-party).
  - singron 6y ago
    Misreporting regional grain production caused the central government to export "excess" grain and led to domestic famine. Replacing unnecessary uses of the word "slave" in corporate codebase probably has less dire consequences. Our problems with race are systemic and deeply rooted in many aspects of our culture. There isn't going to be a small number if things that will fix racism. The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. Unfortunately we also have a history of taking a few steps and declaring that we traveled a thousand miles, but I dont think the fix for that is to stand still.
    - RegnisGnaw 6y ago
      Definitely less dire consequences. It was more of a comment on the later leaders. They wanted to appear more revolutionary (eg. pro-party) so they lied and exaggrated more and more about their production. Similar to how these companies are doing these superficial changes so they can appear to be more pro-BLM/Woke/anti-racist.
- ghastmaster 6y ago
  It aids in the defense during the next discrimination lawsuit, as it can no longer be used as evidence to support a plaintiff's complaint. Edit: > What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? Source linked in OP article: > The request -- which has some suppliers furious and others busy re-labeling components -- came after an unidentified worker spotted a videotape machine carrying devices labeled "master" and "slave" and filed a discrimination complaint with the county's Office of Affirmative Action Compliance.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- brlewis 6y ago
  I'm not Black, but I don't think I need to be in order to answer your question. I do my best software engineering when I'm undistracted. If I've recently been treated unfairly, that's a distraction. Anything that reminds me of the unfair incident is a distraction. If I were Black and experienced a racial incident where the words "master" or "slave" were involved, I can imagine those words reminding me of the incident and making it hard for me to work. Maybe I'd be able to compartmentalize by context; maybe I wouldn't. I think this is analogous to bug chains leading to vulnerabilities. A bug by itself might not be a vulnerability, but it's worth fixing because it might be combined with other bugs in a way that's a vulnerability. Similarly, small issues can combine to become bigger issues.
- treebornfrog 6y ago
  Underrated comment.
- nemacol 6y ago
  This seems like a legitimate question worth examining. Are efforts to clean up terminology worthwhile? For who? My 2c, based on my personal feelings and hope... no evidence. This is low hanging fruit. Get people involved and thinking about current issues. Their employees, customers, and stakeholders might grumble or question the value of this work, but it does start conversations (like this one) and that seems good. We think and speak in the words we know and see. This individual change is not going to end racism across the world but I believe in aggregate, enough small changes over a long enough timeline, these things can matter. I think instead of criticizing changes like this we should appreciate that they are doing something. I mean, it is capitalism and at the end of the day they are making a choice that this is a better 'look' than to do nothing. A choice more and more capitalist enterprises have made in recent months. To me, this speaks to the continued change in our culture. On the other hand it does seem to bring about a strong reaction from some counter culture (? idk what to call it). Maybe this sort of thing makes folks dig in their heels more than it helps? Idk. I think it helps. But maybe not today.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Maybe you should read the perspective of why a black programmer finds it offensive and took action about it: https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially-loaded-tech-terms-like-master-slave/ https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially... Also, this isn't a "New" issue/ BLM issue, while it's been sped up by BLM, companies have been moving this way for some time. Python dropped Master/ Slave 2 years ago, before it was trendy.
  - entropea 6y ago
    I'm not against it if thats how I came off, I apologise if it sounded like that. I'm more against the corporate PR campaigns that drown out real material change for black individuals that those like Martin Luther King with the Poor People Campaign fought for. It happens over and over and I'm sick of seeing nothing actually change in society except for 15 minutes of corporate feel good time. Those ideas, police & prison reform, housing reform, water & infrastructure, education, for black individuals is what I want to see. Systemic change that will actually have a real effect. I was out for the past 3-4 weeks protesting against police brutality and BLM and it just seems like such a waste when syrup labels and github parent branches are the only change I really see occurring.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      It is a small quality of life improvement for a small number of black people in the programming community. Nothing more, nothing less. This isn't drowning out anything, nor does it alleviate the need for real change in the places where it's needed most. If a company does the right thing for the wrong reasons, that doesn't make it wrong.
Dig1t 6y ago
Google is also mass refactoring internally as well, blacklist/whitelist are now blocklist/allowlist and so on. It's quite a bit of churn.
- Shish2k 6y ago
  > blacklist/whitelist are now blocklist/allowlist and so on We did that… and then a week later, got informed that “blocklist” is still racist because it “looks similar to blacklist” and now we need to do a second refactoring to change it to “denylist”
  - gruez 6y ago
    >ot informed that “blocklist” is still racist because it “looks similar to blacklist” wtf?? Are we going to rename while loops too because it looks too close to "white"? Or blockchain because it looks too close to "blackchain" (slavery reference)?
- imglorp 6y ago
  This one kind of bothers me. Dark and light are concepts from long before written history and have nothing to do with humans even. Predators and bad things hunt in the dark, evil, etc. There's really no benefit to meaningless conflations of human social problems with other things. I agree with the other comment about assuaging white guilt; it doesn't help someone get hired, talk to the police, or find housing. Those are the issues we need to work on.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > I agree with the other comment about assuaging white guilt; it doesn't help someone get hired, talk to the police, or find housing. You make it sound like this is a bunch of white people unilaterally doing something so they feel better. As if there are no black programmers asking for this change. https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially-loaded-tech-terms-like-master-slave/ https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially... The whole point of this effort is to make the workplace less hostile for people we work with. Black programmers are part of that.
seemslegit 6y ago
The New New International version of the Bible is going to be soo awesome.
redog 6y ago
Why not owner or subject? Are accountants not to refer to master records? Do we have to stop killing child processes?
- secondaryditto 6y ago
  "I'm just waiting for Maria to kill her children" is a valid tech sentence, but probably not something that should be uttered in a public setting. :)
- cs02rm0 6y ago
  Probably, eventually. Just today I've caught myself talking about black boxes, no skin off my nose and Chinese whispers, wondering if those are on a list somewhere or if they will be. I'd say it all feels like papering over the cracks, but the paper isn't even covering the cracks.
- sebazzz 6y ago
  From what I've seen you can play the racism, gender or (in a lesser extend) religion card. That is because in that case you're clearly part of a group - and often a minority. It is however unclear if the ones who feel offended are also a minority within that group (but does that matter?). In other cases that is less clear, but I've also not seen many people offended for other reasons than the three I mentioned.
bdcravens 6y ago
In discussions about this on social media, there's significant push back from those who are actually affected by the issues BLM is fighting for, who feel moves like this are more white guilt with no real change for what really matters. I'm sure an at-risk youth, when pulled over by two white police officers, is grateful that a bunch of highly paid programmers aren't subjected to politically incorrect variable names. (edited: I referred to this group as "BLM core", but I realize that's confusing to some)
- Jabbles 6y ago
  Please provide a link to support your assertion that "the BLM core" is giving "significant push back".
  - neltnerb 6y ago
    Why would anyone waste time complaining about this, especially BLM organizers?
    - bdcravens 6y ago
      The feeling of shallowness. It's the equivalence of a corporation showing their support for DREAMers by adding tex-mex options in the company cafeteria.
    - Jabbles 6y ago
      I would be surprised, but I am giving the OP the chance to show they are not full of shit.
      - bdcravens 6y ago
        If you need links, I'll dig up links to the discussions I'm talking about. That said, this level of discourse sounds like it's devolving to what I'd expect on T_D or similar.
        deleted 6y ago
stuff4ben 6y ago
I remember talking to CloudBees reps back around 2013 when we were going to purchase Jenkins Enterprise licenses and they made a conscious effort to refer to build slaves as build agents or build nodes. I applauded them at the time for that even though there is still a lot of referencing of "slave" in documentation and blogs. I don't have a problem with "master" but I do have a problem with "slave" and I'd like to eradicate it.
- ghastmaster 6y ago
  Why do you want to eradicate it?
LeoPanthera 6y ago
I feel like I'm in the minority that thinks this is a good idea. I can easily see how some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing wording, but more importantly, I can see no downside to changing it. It will be a very small amount of work for a very small amount of time and then everything will carry on as normal. If this helps make programming more inclusive, even in a small way, then I'm all for it.
- entropea 6y ago
  How does it help black individuals though? Like how does it improve their lives, police brutality & prison reform, poverty, water quality?
  - Jabbles 6y ago
    If you agree with their premise that "some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing wording", surely removing it helps those people? Is this the last remaining piece of racism in our society? No.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    Even though many (or even most) people probably aren't offended by terms like blacklist or master/slave, there's a non-zero number of people who are. Obviously changing terminology isn't going to end racism, but it will have a small positive impact on some people. Even if 99% of people don't care, they're not harmed as long as the new terminology is clear. IMO there's no semantic loss by going from "master/slave" to "primary/replica" or similar.
  - escardin 6y ago
    In some sense, it doesn't. But the point of these measures is to be anti-racist. To make the environment more welcoming to people of colour. Maybe the majority of people of colour don't care, but I am sure that some do. In my own experiences, being actively welcoming provides a level of safety that silence will not, because the status quo is that it is not safe for me to be myself, even if I might plausibly be accepted among my specific peer group. Overall, these are small changes (what github is doing notwithstanding), and the amount of time onlookers have spent whinging about them far exceeds the time spent making the changes. No, this won't address the most pressing systematic abuses by minorities, but it does make one of the most lucrative careers less actively hostile to them.
simion314 6y ago
IMO if you change this terms with even better ones(that are more clear and more specific for the domain) then is great.
- cs02rm0 6y ago
  How do you do that when you have an established word an entire industry understands? Words only have the meaning we convey to them and as soon as you put more words in the mix that dilutes any clarity. We're back to the xkcd on standards.
  - simion314 6y ago
    I am not an english speaker, for example "black list" is a concept that translates worse then "blocked list" , the first requires you have some local or historical context the last one is just clear as day.
    - cs02rm0 6y ago
      Block has multiple meanings in English. You don't need historical context, but you'll always need context.
      - simion314 6y ago
        Sure, so what I am thinking as an example is when we create new code, say I have a feature that is available for users that have account of type A,B,C but not D or E , so I always do something like let allowedPlans = [A,B,C]. isn't this more cleared then if I named the list whiteListedPlans ? IMO is more clear and it translates better.
    - taylodl 6y ago
      Bingo! You’re not the first non-native English speaker who I’ve heard say that they don’t understand blacklist but immediately understand blocklist. This is language change for the better.
  - 6y ago
fooblat 6y ago
I worked for redhat in a past life and I recall having to do this for documentation back in 2003-2004 to comply with a California law[0] regarding vendors to the government. It's been a long time but I'm pretty sure I remember changing "master/slave" to "primary/secondary" in a bunch of bind docs. 0. (this might be it) https://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/ https://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.re...
- treebornfrog 6y ago
  I feel as though primary/secondary doesn't define the relationship properly. I, for one, think this is all getting ridiculous now.
  - fooblat 6y ago
    The chosen terms don't define the relationship. The documentation defines the terms in the given context, including their relationship.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Wow, this community is terrible. It's good to see that the people who matter are more advanced: Wikipedia is also (finally) doing this, as I noticed today. And so is Github. It's a renaming of mostly internal identifiers, a somewhat minor change for those implementing it, and a complete non-issue for anyone else. It doesn't matter if you are offended by the terms or not. Your opinion is somewhat irrelevant for once. The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not the basic mechanism. Additionally, this issue has grown in salience precisely because people opposed it. Agitating against such changes is just as emotional as the proponents are accused of being, only the justification is far more transparently dishonest considering the relative ease of this change as outlined above. People will invariably profess to be willing to help overcome the lingering effects of hundreds of years of slavery and continuing racism. But when they get the chance to do so, with the barest minimum effort, it's not going to happen. Not because anyone is racist, of course. No, this is about ethics-in-datastructure-identifiers.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Wow, this community is terrible. I don't think this is true. This particular topic seems to trigger a vocal group of people, but in general this community isn't terrible. > But when they get the chance to do so, with the barest minimum effort, it's not going to happen. This is what frustrates me most. In this particular case people don't even have to make an effort, they just need to be tolerant of efforts made by others and still we get the shouting.
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago
  > The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not the basic mechanism. My companies black systems architect just finished a whitelist feature and delivered it this morning. Should I, as a dutiful white frontend dev, inform him: a) that this was in fact a racist decision and he may be a racist or rationally motivated. b) that he's been oppressed by the whiteman for so long that he doesn't even know how racist this is, thus awakening his mind to the countless micro-aggressions around him c) do nothing, because this is stupid virtue signaling by marketing teams fueled by white guilt ridding the wave of a woke-movement that, at worse, will get them a neutral "whatever" response or some scoffs, and at best, a pat on the shoulder from the woke twitter-verse? Please let me know of your selection by reply and I will carry out the appropriate action and report back.
tekproxy 6y ago
How is this not kink shaming?
slipheen 6y ago
One thought that I had seen elsewhere on this subject really stood out to me. When these phrases are being replaced, their replacements are almost always more descriptive terms for that specific project, and the way those servers interact. For example- In Jenkins you run a "master" which schedules jobs, and "slaves" which run the jobs. After they updated their terminology, they referred to the job-runner as a "Agents." This makes it much clearer what the relationship is between them, and clarifies that the "Slave" servers aren't some sort of failover server, which is how a DB might use the same terms. I've seem other projects use primary/replica, and several other variations, but they almost always seem to be much better fits for what the software is actually doing.
- dingaling 6y ago
  One has to be careful though, because in espionage the 'agents' are non-professionals bribed or coerced to do the dangerous dirty-hands work. They're expendable and deniable. Many, many words hold additional meanings that aren't obvious to the mainstream.
LatteLazy 6y ago
This is a huge challenge for HN: can we treat this as the minor issue it is, and discuss it patiently and kindly?
- sdinsn 6y ago
  > can we treat this as the minor issue it is Is it actually an issue at all?
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    I don't think so, but some of the other comments here (including the top one when I commented originally) felt it was very very important and anyone not supporting immediate action was a racist...
jjj1232 6y ago
I’d ask every white person who says they don’t like these changes because they're shallow/pandering/not as good as real antiracist action to take a step back and ask yourself if that’s the real reason you dislike this change. Is it possible you actually had a knee-jerk reaction to PC-ness and are retroactively justifying it with logic? I think it’s common for people (maybe especially engineering types?) to have an emotional reaction to something and find a logical reason for that emotion instead of admitting that maybe they were just being reactionary in the moment.
- HappyDreamer 6y ago
  Definitely not just engineers -- that's how all humans function across the whole planet. That is, humans act based on feelings, and rationalize afterwards with logic (like you wrote). And some of the "logic" in this topic, is quite weird I have to say. (Personally I like most of these changes, e.g. "replica" or "standby" instead of "slave", also more clear & precise what it means?)
slap 6y ago
Great PR for Redhat, but will it stop police brutality in the USA?

30 points by mds 6y ago

Zenbit_UX 6y ago

We live in the dumbest time-line.

stronglikedan 6y ago
I'll drink to that!

entropea 6y ago

What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? It doesn't end racism or help black lives at all. It seems like a corporate facade of change while ignoring the real material issues of life for black inidividuals that these major protests pointed out.

GiorgioG 6y ago
Does it really give them good PR though?
- treebornfrog 6y ago
  All PR is good PR.
Clubber 6y ago
I'm afraid the only thing that will come out of this is platitudes like this and no real change long term, at least until it all blows up again. Changing packaging is easy and gets you press. Search and replace is a little harder, but can be done with not many resources. Re-culturing a 100+ year old police departments independently while maintaining that police department's purpose is very hard and we have to do it for every bad one out there. Many cases need to be a complete ground-up effort. I think people who can actually do the work and enact that change are hoping it will just blow over with the next news cycle, because it's hard. I have hope though. I don't like living with our current justice system.
axegon_ 6y ago
The way I see it: free advertising. Nothing beats piggybacking on a hot topic by presenting a non-issue as an actual issue or a threat. Which is what that is, given that as far as cs is concerned, "master" and "slave" refer to concepts which have nothing in common with slavery, colonialism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, bigotry or whatever other buzzword you may think of. What is a bit worrying is that those exact methods of promotion were used on several occasions in history, and neither of them produced a good result.
RegnisGnaw 6y ago
That's exactly it. It reminds me of some aspects of China during The Great Leap Forward. The grain production quotas set by Mao was completely unrealistic. However if the local leader said it, they would be branded as "anti-revolutionary" and sent off to reeducation camps. So the local leader lied and said they achieved the quota and was praised by the party. This lead to other village leader saying they exceeded the quota (by more and more over time) so that they seem more revolutionary (pro-party).
- singron 6y ago
  Misreporting regional grain production caused the central government to export "excess" grain and led to domestic famine. Replacing unnecessary uses of the word "slave" in corporate codebase probably has less dire consequences. Our problems with race are systemic and deeply rooted in many aspects of our culture. There isn't going to be a small number if things that will fix racism. The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. Unfortunately we also have a history of taking a few steps and declaring that we traveled a thousand miles, but I dont think the fix for that is to stand still.
  - RegnisGnaw 6y ago
    Definitely less dire consequences. It was more of a comment on the later leaders. They wanted to appear more revolutionary (eg. pro-party) so they lied and exaggrated more and more about their production. Similar to how these companies are doing these superficial changes so they can appear to be more pro-BLM/Woke/anti-racist.
ghastmaster 6y ago
It aids in the defense during the next discrimination lawsuit, as it can no longer be used as evidence to support a plaintiff's complaint. Edit: > What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? Source linked in OP article: > The request -- which has some suppliers furious and others busy re-labeling components -- came after an unidentified worker spotted a videotape machine carrying devices labeled "master" and "slave" and filed a discrimination complaint with the county's Office of Affirmative Action Compliance.
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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brlewis 6y ago
I'm not Black, but I don't think I need to be in order to answer your question. I do my best software engineering when I'm undistracted. If I've recently been treated unfairly, that's a distraction. Anything that reminds me of the unfair incident is a distraction. If I were Black and experienced a racial incident where the words "master" or "slave" were involved, I can imagine those words reminding me of the incident and making it hard for me to work. Maybe I'd be able to compartmentalize by context; maybe I wouldn't. I think this is analogous to bug chains leading to vulnerabilities. A bug by itself might not be a vulnerability, but it's worth fixing because it might be combined with other bugs in a way that's a vulnerability. Similarly, small issues can combine to become bigger issues.
treebornfrog 6y ago
Underrated comment.
nemacol 6y ago
This seems like a legitimate question worth examining. Are efforts to clean up terminology worthwhile? For who? My 2c, based on my personal feelings and hope... no evidence. This is low hanging fruit. Get people involved and thinking about current issues. Their employees, customers, and stakeholders might grumble or question the value of this work, but it does start conversations (like this one) and that seems good. We think and speak in the words we know and see. This individual change is not going to end racism across the world but I believe in aggregate, enough small changes over a long enough timeline, these things can matter. I think instead of criticizing changes like this we should appreciate that they are doing something. I mean, it is capitalism and at the end of the day they are making a choice that this is a better 'look' than to do nothing. A choice more and more capitalist enterprises have made in recent months. To me, this speaks to the continued change in our culture. On the other hand it does seem to bring about a strong reaction from some counter culture (? idk what to call it). Maybe this sort of thing makes folks dig in their heels more than it helps? Idk. I think it helps. But maybe not today.
ogre_codes 6y ago
Maybe you should read the perspective of why a black programmer finds it offensive and took action about it: https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially-loaded-tech-terms-like-master-slave/ https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially... Also, this isn't a "New" issue/ BLM issue, while it's been sped up by BLM, companies have been moving this way for some time. Python dropped Master/ Slave 2 years ago, before it was trendy.
- entropea 6y ago
  I'm not against it if thats how I came off, I apologise if it sounded like that. I'm more against the corporate PR campaigns that drown out real material change for black individuals that those like Martin Luther King with the Poor People Campaign fought for. It happens over and over and I'm sick of seeing nothing actually change in society except for 15 minutes of corporate feel good time. Those ideas, police & prison reform, housing reform, water & infrastructure, education, for black individuals is what I want to see. Systemic change that will actually have a real effect. I was out for the past 3-4 weeks protesting against police brutality and BLM and it just seems like such a waste when syrup labels and github parent branches are the only change I really see occurring.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    It is a small quality of life improvement for a small number of black people in the programming community. Nothing more, nothing less. This isn't drowning out anything, nor does it alleviate the need for real change in the places where it's needed most. If a company does the right thing for the wrong reasons, that doesn't make it wrong.

Dig1t 6y ago

Google is also mass refactoring internally as well, blacklist/whitelist are now blocklist/allowlist and so on. It's quite a bit of churn.

Shish2k 6y ago
> blacklist/whitelist are now blocklist/allowlist and so on We did that… and then a week later, got informed that “blocklist” is still racist because it “looks similar to blacklist” and now we need to do a second refactoring to change it to “denylist”
- gruez 6y ago
  >ot informed that “blocklist” is still racist because it “looks similar to blacklist” wtf?? Are we going to rename while loops too because it looks too close to "white"? Or blockchain because it looks too close to "blackchain" (slavery reference)?
imglorp 6y ago
This one kind of bothers me. Dark and light are concepts from long before written history and have nothing to do with humans even. Predators and bad things hunt in the dark, evil, etc. There's really no benefit to meaningless conflations of human social problems with other things. I agree with the other comment about assuaging white guilt; it doesn't help someone get hired, talk to the police, or find housing. Those are the issues we need to work on.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > I agree with the other comment about assuaging white guilt; it doesn't help someone get hired, talk to the police, or find housing. You make it sound like this is a bunch of white people unilaterally doing something so they feel better. As if there are no black programmers asking for this change. https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially-loaded-tech-terms-like-master-slave/ https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially... The whole point of this effort is to make the workplace less hostile for people we work with. Black programmers are part of that.

seemslegit 6y ago

The New New International version of the Bible is going to be soo awesome.

redog 6y ago

Why not owner or subject? Are accountants not to refer to master records? Do we have to stop killing child processes?

secondaryditto 6y ago
"I'm just waiting for Maria to kill her children" is a valid tech sentence, but probably not something that should be uttered in a public setting. :)
cs02rm0 6y ago
Probably, eventually. Just today I've caught myself talking about black boxes, no skin off my nose and Chinese whispers, wondering if those are on a list somewhere or if they will be. I'd say it all feels like papering over the cracks, but the paper isn't even covering the cracks.
sebazzz 6y ago
From what I've seen you can play the racism, gender or (in a lesser extend) religion card. That is because in that case you're clearly part of a group - and often a minority. It is however unclear if the ones who feel offended are also a minority within that group (but does that matter?). In other cases that is less clear, but I've also not seen many people offended for other reasons than the three I mentioned.

bdcravens 6y ago

In discussions about this on social media, there's significant push back from those who are actually affected by the issues BLM is fighting for, who feel moves like this are more white guilt with no real change for what really matters. I'm sure an at-risk youth, when pulled over by two white police officers, is grateful that a bunch of highly paid programmers aren't subjected to politically incorrect variable names. (edited: I referred to this group as "BLM core", but I realize that's confusing to some)

Jabbles 6y ago
Please provide a link to support your assertion that "the BLM core" is giving "significant push back".
- neltnerb 6y ago
  Why would anyone waste time complaining about this, especially BLM organizers?
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    The feeling of shallowness. It's the equivalence of a corporation showing their support for DREAMers by adding tex-mex options in the company cafeteria.
  - Jabbles 6y ago
    I would be surprised, but I am giving the OP the chance to show they are not full of shit.
    - bdcravens 6y ago
      If you need links, I'll dig up links to the discussions I'm talking about. That said, this level of discourse sounds like it's devolving to what I'd expect on T_D or similar.
      - deleted 6y ago

stuff4ben 6y ago

I remember talking to CloudBees reps back around 2013 when we were going to purchase Jenkins Enterprise licenses and they made a conscious effort to refer to build slaves as build agents or build nodes. I applauded them at the time for that even though there is still a lot of referencing of "slave" in documentation and blogs. I don't have a problem with "master" but I do have a problem with "slave" and I'd like to eradicate it.

ghastmaster 6y ago
Why do you want to eradicate it?

LeoPanthera 6y ago

I feel like I'm in the minority that thinks this is a good idea. I can easily see how some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing wording, but more importantly, I can see no downside to changing it. It will be a very small amount of work for a very small amount of time and then everything will carry on as normal. If this helps make programming more inclusive, even in a small way, then I'm all for it.

entropea 6y ago
How does it help black individuals though? Like how does it improve their lives, police brutality & prison reform, poverty, water quality?
- Jabbles 6y ago
  If you agree with their premise that "some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing wording", surely removing it helps those people? Is this the last remaining piece of racism in our society? No.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  Even though many (or even most) people probably aren't offended by terms like blacklist or master/slave, there's a non-zero number of people who are. Obviously changing terminology isn't going to end racism, but it will have a small positive impact on some people. Even if 99% of people don't care, they're not harmed as long as the new terminology is clear. IMO there's no semantic loss by going from "master/slave" to "primary/replica" or similar.
- escardin 6y ago
  In some sense, it doesn't. But the point of these measures is to be anti-racist. To make the environment more welcoming to people of colour. Maybe the majority of people of colour don't care, but I am sure that some do. In my own experiences, being actively welcoming provides a level of safety that silence will not, because the status quo is that it is not safe for me to be myself, even if I might plausibly be accepted among my specific peer group. Overall, these are small changes (what github is doing notwithstanding), and the amount of time onlookers have spent whinging about them far exceeds the time spent making the changes. No, this won't address the most pressing systematic abuses by minorities, but it does make one of the most lucrative careers less actively hostile to them.

simion314 6y ago

IMO if you change this terms with even better ones(that are more clear and more specific for the domain) then is great.

cs02rm0 6y ago
How do you do that when you have an established word an entire industry understands? Words only have the meaning we convey to them and as soon as you put more words in the mix that dilutes any clarity. We're back to the xkcd on standards.
- simion314 6y ago
  I am not an english speaker, for example "black list" is a concept that translates worse then "blocked list" , the first requires you have some local or historical context the last one is just clear as day.
  - cs02rm0 6y ago
    Block has multiple meanings in English. You don't need historical context, but you'll always need context.
    - simion314 6y ago
      Sure, so what I am thinking as an example is when we create new code, say I have a feature that is available for users that have account of type A,B,C but not D or E , so I always do something like let allowedPlans = [A,B,C]. isn't this more cleared then if I named the list whiteListedPlans ? IMO is more clear and it translates better.
  - taylodl 6y ago
    Bingo! You’re not the first non-native English speaker who I’ve heard say that they don’t understand blacklist but immediately understand blocklist. This is language change for the better.
- 6y ago

fooblat 6y ago

I worked for redhat in a past life and I recall having to do this for documentation back in 2003-2004 to comply with a California law[0] regarding vendors to the government. It's been a long time but I'm pretty sure I remember changing "master/slave" to "primary/secondary" in a bunch of bind docs. 0. (this might be it) https://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/ https://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.re...

treebornfrog 6y ago
I feel as though primary/secondary doesn't define the relationship properly. I, for one, think this is all getting ridiculous now.
- fooblat 6y ago
  The chosen terms don't define the relationship. The documentation defines the terms in the given context, including their relationship.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

Wow, this community is terrible. It's good to see that the people who matter are more advanced: Wikipedia is also (finally) doing this, as I noticed today. And so is Github. It's a renaming of mostly internal identifiers, a somewhat minor change for those implementing it, and a complete non-issue for anyone else. It doesn't matter if you are offended by the terms or not. Your opinion is somewhat irrelevant for once. The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not the basic mechanism. Additionally, this issue has grown in salience precisely because people opposed it. Agitating against such changes is just as emotional as the proponents are accused of being, only the justification is far more transparently dishonest considering the relative ease of this change as outlined above. People will invariably profess to be willing to help overcome the lingering effects of hundreds of years of slavery and continuing racism. But when they get the chance to do so, with the barest minimum effort, it's not going to happen. Not because anyone is racist, of course. No, this is about ethics-in-datastructure-identifiers.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> Wow, this community is terrible. I don't think this is true. This particular topic seems to trigger a vocal group of people, but in general this community isn't terrible. > But when they get the chance to do so, with the barest minimum effort, it's not going to happen. This is what frustrates me most. In this particular case people don't even have to make an effort, they just need to be tolerant of efforts made by others and still we get the shouting.
Zenbit_UX 6y ago
> The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not the basic mechanism. My companies black systems architect just finished a whitelist feature and delivered it this morning. Should I, as a dutiful white frontend dev, inform him: a) that this was in fact a racist decision and he may be a racist or rationally motivated. b) that he's been oppressed by the whiteman for so long that he doesn't even know how racist this is, thus awakening his mind to the countless micro-aggressions around him c) do nothing, because this is stupid virtue signaling by marketing teams fueled by white guilt ridding the wave of a woke-movement that, at worse, will get them a neutral "whatever" response or some scoffs, and at best, a pat on the shoulder from the woke twitter-verse? Please let me know of your selection by reply and I will carry out the appropriate action and report back.

tekproxy 6y ago

How is this not kink shaming?

slipheen 6y ago

One thought that I had seen elsewhere on this subject really stood out to me. When these phrases are being replaced, their replacements are almost always more descriptive terms for that specific project, and the way those servers interact. For example- In Jenkins you run a "master" which schedules jobs, and "slaves" which run the jobs. After they updated their terminology, they referred to the job-runner as a "Agents." This makes it much clearer what the relationship is between them, and clarifies that the "Slave" servers aren't some sort of failover server, which is how a DB might use the same terms. I've seem other projects use primary/replica, and several other variations, but they almost always seem to be much better fits for what the software is actually doing.

dingaling 6y ago
One has to be careful though, because in espionage the 'agents' are non-professionals bribed or coerced to do the dangerous dirty-hands work. They're expendable and deniable. Many, many words hold additional meanings that aren't obvious to the mainstream.

LatteLazy 6y ago

This is a huge challenge for HN: can we treat this as the minor issue it is, and discuss it patiently and kindly?

sdinsn 6y ago
> can we treat this as the minor issue it is Is it actually an issue at all?
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  I don't think so, but some of the other comments here (including the top one when I commented originally) felt it was very very important and anyone not supporting immediate action was a racist...

jjj1232 6y ago

I’d ask every white person who says they don’t like these changes because they're shallow/pandering/not as good as real antiracist action to take a step back and ask yourself if that’s the real reason you dislike this change. Is it possible you actually had a knee-jerk reaction to PC-ness and are retroactively justifying it with logic? I think it’s common for people (maybe especially engineering types?) to have an emotional reaction to something and find a logical reason for that emotion instead of admitting that maybe they were just being reactionary in the moment.

HappyDreamer 6y ago
Definitely not just engineers -- that's how all humans function across the whole planet. That is, humans act based on feelings, and rationalize afterwards with logic (like you wrote). And some of the "logic" in this topic, is quite weird I have to say. (Personally I like most of these changes, e.g. "replica" or "standby" instead of "slave", also more clear & precise what it means?)

slap 6y ago

Great PR for Redhat, but will it stop police brutality in the USA?