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.

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?

Be serious here. It takes a few seconds to change the branch on a Git repository.

This isn't a technical problem that needs some complex processes and automation.

I haven't used master as the name of the primary branch for years across multiple companies.

Sooner or later, y'all are going to be outdated.

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.

George Carlin had a word or two to say about this phenomenon: https://youtu.be/hSp8IyaKCs0

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.

But it does hurt since it equates anti-racism with meaningless nonsense therefore directly undermining the purported cause.

Unless of course the real motivation isn't to help but instead to demonstrate power and status...

> 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

So why do we exclusively use blacklist to refer to bad things we want to exclude?

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.

This is the point you can never get through to them.

The word itself isn't negative. It's usage _may_ be negative, but if you think the word itself is negative then you're the racist one.

It's originally from England, hundreds of years ago, not US history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting

> 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.

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.

Glad I don't work with people that would fire people for calling out a hostile workplace. FYI that's illegal...

> That's not even the worse part.

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.

This is a non sequitur strawman.

> 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.

> This is about you, not about them.

As such, this sounds like projection.

My favorite part about this response isn't the "non sequitur strawman", although that's amazing in and of itself.

It's the assumption that I'm not a descendant of a slave and have no insight based purely on a post in which no mention of ancestry or race happened.

It's like the old meme about tying a buttered piece of toast to a cat, they spin in the air indefinitely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttered_cat_paradox

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.

---

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

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/lewis...

> 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.

> It's the assumption that I'm not a descendant of a slave and have no insight based purely on a post in which no mention of ancestry or race happened.

You are not and you don't. I know that because based on your attitude, it would have been the very first thing you trotted out to justify your position.

Even in your response here you don't claim that.

It's disgusting how you try to play that card while having none of the life experiences.

> Am I hire-able? I aint white,

Neither am I

> so presumably you SHOULD hire me to help with racism. yet I rename my main branch to master on all personal projects.

The fact that you come up with yet another non sequitur clearly shows you are not ADOS.

> 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.

Blah blah blah. None of this makes any sense whatsoever. There isn't any logical argument here. It's just you ranting.

> 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.

Oh no, you have to refer to the primary branch as main instead of master. Poor you!

> It's why I'm such a fan of the following C.S Lewis quote

Your quote is ironic given his defense of slavery, the usage of that quote to justify the white man's burden, and it's justification for why slavery was ultimately the greater good for gifting "civility" to its victims.

> 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

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 [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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".

I'd never hire a software engineer who tried to make major disruptive changes to play meaningless language games and score social status points.

It may be meaningless to you. But it's not meaningless to other people.

Now you can choose not to care about their opinion and be dismissive of their integrity by claiming it's only for social status. But you're never going to hire the best engineers if that's the approach you take.

I've worked with some of the very best in the industry and never seen anyone do great things by being intolerant of people.

You are not dismissive of their integrity, you are acknowledging truth. People who make a fuss about bullshit like this is whom nerds used to disregard and whom we should still disregard when we want to do things.

You don't speak for everyone in the technology industry.

And you don't get to choose what everyone will or should do. Therefore you really need to be tolerant of people's different versions of "truth" and assume that they are acting in good faith.

>Therefore you really need to be tolerant of people's different versions of "truth" and assume that they are acting in good faith.

Only a total fool would assume something is true you know not to be true.

> I've worked with some of the very best in the industry and never seen anyone do great things by being intolerant of people

Same here. It's my 23rd year as a software engineer and I'm lucky to be a part of this crowd. Tonnes of tolerant, talented, brilliant people.

Being tolerant doesn't however doesn't mean we like being subjected to bullshit like the master -> main change.

It's just writing a shorter word. Why does it bug you so much. Unless you want to make bigger changes to society to counter the effects of racism instead? Cause we'd like that.

It bugs me because no one asked about this and it's purely virtue signalling.

Not only that, it implies that black people are unable to contextualise vocabulary.

What would you have people do instead that is actually helping and not virtue signaling?

There's already plenty of affirmative action being taken. We have black history month everywhere now, minorities are getting much better representation in the media. Please don't pretend nothing positive is happening and we have to change master to main at all cost or all hope is lost. Also, this is predominantly American problem but it's shoved down our throats here in Europe like our "wealth" was built on the back of slaves.

I'm Polish, can you imagine how ridiculous this is becoming from our perspective?

If you try to bend over backwards to appease the whims of every group of people you'll never accomplish anything. A good engineer realizes this, and prioritizes accordingly. It's a core competency of the job.

Not pushing back on master -> main is a sign that an engineer will not make good decisions on the job.

Also this has nothing to do with "intolerance" and your framing of it this way is a classic manipulation tactic: "You wouldn't want to be intolerant would you?"

I think you're saying it would appease someone, so I think the logical next question for you is why it'd be so hard for you?

Adopting Christianity as the official company religion would also "appease someone". Why would that be so hard for you? It's just words after all.

You don't know how to change the main branch name in git? You shouldn't be in charge of hiring anyone.

Its not a trivial change, git actually doesn't have an default branch, it is actually just the remote HEAD. And its not possible to git push that information. Thats also why all the manuals about changing the "default branch" require setting some select box in the WebUI.

I do maintain a git mirror chain with several pulls/pushes in a row and the whole master/main thing has been a pain in the ass. And both sides in that debate implicitly made that wrong assumption that a "default branch" even exists, which bites me even more.

A default branch absolutely exists, it's what you get when you git init.

Yes, but thats a recent addition and is not related to the git clone behavior that people call "default branch".

As of git 2.28, it has a setting named “init.defaultBranch”.

git config --global init.defaultBranch trunk

Is one of the things that people complaining about this kind of thing should do, since the respect for tradition should probably transcending tooling.