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Comment by rauljara | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I agree with everything he says (particularly the stuff about pundits trashing, the iPad; a few have, but I'd say the balance of press has been pretty heavily tilted in apple's favor), but I'm kind of blown away that I haven't seen a blog post comparing the iPad and Newton before now. Such an obvious comparison to make in hindsight.

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"Amy" is typically a girl's name.

Why are people downvoting an author asking that people maybe take a moment to check whether they're responding to a woman before they write "he"? Is it that much hassle to check a byline?

A small, italic, grey-on-white pair of words, one of which is an uncapitalized name

versus

The vast majority of tech writers and geeks in general being male

Downvoting the guy pointing out the incorrect assumption is unwarranted, yeah, but the assumption is one that'll be correct really, really often.

Which doesn't mean you shouldn't point it out. (Although yes, that is something I'm fixing when I get around to finishing my design.)

By the way - the "guy pointing out the incorrect assumption" is a girl.

I'm laughing. :)

Yes. I make no apologies for the lack of a gender-neutral human pronoun in the English language. If I don't know someone's gender, I pick one or use awkward constructions involving "the author". Feel free to inform the English language standards body of their oversight so they can correct it for the next version.

But yeah, downvoting a correction is silly.

Silly me. I should be better about that. Apologies.

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