"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

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. This point has been argued to death a thousand times here already, and no interesting discussion is going to be had by changing the subject to it.

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

Moreover this article is from 2018, so bringing it up in this context is an anachronism.

Ack. I read the article before the 2018 suffix was appended to the link so was initially under the impression that it was a recent article. Was trying to be helpful given they concluded the article by saying they were hiring, and that some minor language adjustments might help them towards that objective. My apologies, definitely not trying to incite controversy.

Adyen is a dutch company FYI. And whether their post is from 2021 or 2018, this is not a helpful reply. I won't delve into why to avoid the exact flamebait dang was talking about, but suffice to say that if your comment were rude when saying it face to face to someone giving a talk, it's rude here too.

I actually sort of agree with retiring master and slave because they were just not good descriptive names. Primary and secondary are more accurate descriptions.

But I am still struggling to see an issue with blacklist and whitelist as they actually don’t seem to have anything to do with race, nor have they ever. They have more to do with darkness and light, or death, etc. Like something being a black box just has no relation whatsoever to race.

And if we start to change words that demonstrably have nothing to do with race, then anything is fair game. And that’s just a very unnerving place to be.

Quantum supremacy, command execution, whitespace, race condition, Red-black trees, blackboard, n-gram, Domain Specific Language, Domain, Chained iterators, locks.

Jokes aside, what matters is what you mean by words and how do you feel when you realize that what you're saying genuinely offends somebody. Imagine you don't really think about slavery when you say "sell down the river". Somebody points it out to you what it actually means. You can say "oh, shit" and try to avoid the phrase. Or you can say "it's my inalienable right to keep using this sentence". Or you can say "well, yes in this case it makes sense, this sentence is racist, but if we start to police words, where does it stop?"

Let's see; let's replace that sentence with any of the above. Is "whitespace" really a space for white people or is it because space between words is ink-free?

Is a "race condition" a condition of a race of people or a competition of speed? The words are spelled and pronounced the same but they are not the same word. One comes from romance languages and the other from Norse.

But it's not only etymology. Contrast "master" in "master-slave" where it clearly means the owner/controller of the slave and it stems from shameful practices actually happened in our past by and to our ancestors. Contrast this with "master copy", "to master an art", etc. where the word retains its original meaning of "teacher" (magister).

Be smart, be curious, don't stop at the surface.

Yes I totally agree with you. When this whitelist/blacklist stuff came to my awareness it didn’t sound right so I looked it up. And it seems totally unrelated so it’s a made up problem to solve.

I also agree about there being nothing wrong with the word master, in the context of mastery of a craft etc.

But with databases, a slave often replaces the master if the master stops working. That simply never happened in real life so it’s not even close to an accurate set of terms.

This is where I'm at too. Totally on board for retiring the use of master/slave for primary/replica. But like you said, whitelist/blacklist didn't have anything to do with race. I just don't see why it's relevant at all to the conversation when we are talking about terms or names that may be racially insensitive. It's on you to bring up evidence for why a phrase is insensitive. I've yet to see any.

The argument is that the underlying meaning of whitelist being “ok” and blacklist being “not ok” implies some bias based on color. It wasn’t long ago that there were “whites only” and “no blacks allowed” signs throughout the US. For foreign speakers using a more descriptive name like allowlist and denylist is a benefit as well.

These references have everything to do with presence and absence of light, not race.

We are diurnal so we mostly see light as a positive (daylight, when we are awake), and darkness as a negative (night when we are asleep, and have evolved to be more wary of a situation where we can’t see well).

My argument for all this is, instead of actually vilifying the colors themselves which are meaningless, why don’t we stop referring to humans as white and black? Where’s that debate? Because those words are meaningless. Neither are white nor black. They’re brown. We are all different shades of brown.

I mean I am not going to fight kicking and screaming as language evolves. I am also for descriptive names like allowlist/denylist. I just don't see the argument for changing that phrase it in the same light as I see the argument against master/slave.

yeah, nah. I still use master / slave and whitelist / blacklist, I'll continue to do so as long as this Orwellian policing of language continues.

Are you saying that when this policing will end you'll stop using master / slave?

> ithkuil

Critiquing semantic vagueness? Username checks out :)

Oan-n ti azgoch alisqoa

I am now using main branch instead of master branch for all my new projects.