"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just because an article includes some provocation does make it ok* to swallow the bait and then bring it in here and start a flamewar with it. There's a much better option: don't take the bait in the first place.

* edit: I meant does not make it ok, of course - that was a typo.

dang, just so we are clear, are you saying my use of a technical term of my own field which I prefer, and which I definitely didn't come up with (it's on the Wikipedia page), in a newsletter I did not submit to HN, was a provocation and bait to start a flamewar (to which I was careful not to participate until now, even if there are some pitiful arguments in this thread)?

Certainly not. I phrase comments like that as a way of connecting with the point of view of the commenter, because that makes moderation more persuasive. By no means does it follow that I agree with them. I'm simply acknowledging how they feel [1].

What I'm telling the GP, and HN users generally, is that when something lands with them as a provocation or bait, we need them to pause instead of rushing to HN threads to vent about it, regardless of what the intention of the writer seems to them to be. It's all too easy for readers to get provoked, especially on the internet, even when no one intended to provoke them. Instead of reacting reflexively and making the thread even worse, we need them to handle that reaction and wait until they're able to be a bit more thoughtful [2].

Of course it's also my job to make that case to the commenter without inadvertently provoking anybody else. Obviously I didn't pull that off this time. I can see how my GP comment looked like a claim about your article, and I should have been more careful to disambiguate my own intent [3]. Sorry for fucking that up!

On another note, I wish you wouldn't be "careful not to participate" on topics that you know a lot about! If you participate by sharing some of what you know, there's a chance for people to learn. Of course the arguments here are pitiful—HN is a large internet forum. I don't like it either. But it's all relative, and you (i.e. all of us) shouldn't underestimate the power of adding solid information to a discussion.

[1] I used to tell people "Please don't X, regardless of how right you are"—but that sounds like I'm saying they're right, which I'm not (I say that to everybody). So now I phrase it as regardless of how right you are or feel you are, which seems to preempt that misunderstanding: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

There is another reason that might be valuable for cryptographers though: MitM might mean either {man,monster,machine,monkey}-in-the-middle (interception and manipulation unbeknownst to both parties) or meet-in-the-middle (space-time tradeoff for nested encyption schemes). AFAIK there is no other well-known suitable term for the latter, unlike the former.

Are you sure? I'm not a cryptogrpher and I think neither are you while Filippo Valsorda is indeed a serious cryptographer. And yes, I copied that list from Wikipedia because people is genuinely trying to replace the word without altering the abbreviation.

> people is genuinely trying to replace the word without altering the abbreviation

What? It's changed from "MITM" to "PITM". The first letter of the abbreviation is altered.

"That" list refers to {man,monster,machine,monkey}. Any three alternatives equally work for me. But cryptographers may have other concerns.

Good. (At the risk of stating the obvious: Changing commonly established things is how progress works.)

The downside is the cost to communication. I didn't know what a PitM was. After a bit I guessed it was Person, i.e. man in the middle, but I wasn't sure that it didn't mean something else.

I'm not sure how big the gain is here. Are people really going to read "man in the middle" and assume that no woman could ever do this?

Also: where are the people who were offended by "man-in-the-middle"? Can you point to a single non-man who was offended that the evil-doer in this example was identified as a man? Or can you point to a single man who was offended for the same reason?

There are people who object to all gender-neutral uses of "man", probably more from the belief that it perpetuates bias than from personally taking offense.

Well, now you know. And I bet the first time you read 'MitM' you didn't know what it was either.

Right, but learning and memorising multiple terms for the same thing has a cost. Maybe that cost is outweighed by the benefits of making terminology less sexist, that is what I'm unsure about.

Ok, I will bite.

Why is it good? What benefit does it achieve other than confusing people. It is also a good reminder that how things were before. One should not forget the past and things accomplished by many efforts. How is it different than 1984's newspeak or the idea of 'changing the history? Why not choose an approach similar to this (first link I found about Warner Bros' approach): https://twitter.com/stilkov/status/506324544177836032

Can we really label changing "Man in the middle" to "Person in the middle" as "progress"?

Are there other examples of progress that were meaningfully advanced by changing commonly established terminology which was never purposefully offensive?

Noticed it too and had to look it up. Was MITM bothering anyone or was it preemptive?

Eh, you don't get to control the language of others. If someone wants to say PitM, that's their business.

You can also call it SITC (someone in the centre) attack if you will, but the point still stands - it impedes communication.

So long as you expand the acronym in the first use, no one reasonable cares.

The same reasoning applies to "single letter variable names are fine".

Humans aren't computers. They have a finite number of concepts they can keep in their head. Using existing conventions leads to better understanding as it allow folks to get through a discussion without having to backtrack as often.

I care. Always preferred well established acronyms that everyone is familiar with.

From this day forward, I will refer to this sort of attack as a PiTM attack. Not much you can do to stop me I'm afraid.

> no one reasonable cares

I care. There's no need to make challenging technical texts more obtuse to read by reinventing all the terms.