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Comment by codazoda | Hacker News Reader

I find her use of the words "me" and "our" refreshing. I've created a bunch of mostly unsuccessful businesses(1) and haven't really resolved this language for myself. Here are a couple quotes from the first paragraph...

> exactly one engineer - me

followed by

> our current tech stack

This is something I struggle with when I'm writing about my own business or product. Sometimes "our" feels like the right thing to say but I know it's really just "me". She seems to have resolved this herself and uses "our" when speaking about the company, the technology, company philosophy, etc. It's kind of refreshing and she might have just helped me decide it's okay to say "our" as a solo maker.

1: https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...

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The royal we serves an excellent purpose. A rule of thumb could be: imagine you hired an employee. What would stay "we" and what would stay "me"? In the former case, the fact that you are solo is an implementation detail and should be abstracted from your audience.

Although she is the only engineer, I'm assuming she is not the only person in the company, so the use of "our" might be a reference to the tech stack "used by the company" in that context.

Correct: there is one other person (a production assistant) and two cats. [0]

[0]: https://winterbloom.com/about

> there's one other person, a production assistant, and two cats.

A bit pedandic, but since we're talking about grammar anyway, that should probably be:

> there's one other person (a production assistant), and two cats.

As written, it sounds like the production assistant is separate from the person.

Alternatively:

> there's one other person- a production assistant- and two cats.

Because we're being pedantic, what you'd want is an em dash (—), not a hyphen (-). You would also omit the spaces.

> there's one other person—a production assistant—and two cats.

Or a spaced hyphen ( - ), if you want to stick with ASCII/keyboard characters.

> there's one other person - a production assistant - and two cats.

Thanks, I've edited my comment.

>>As written, it sounds like the production assistant is separate from the person.

Interesting, when I first read it I did understand that the production assistant was the person he was talking about. But yes, I can see why it could be confusing.

A bit pedantic, but a parenthetical can be indicated by em dashes, parentheses, or commas.

https://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html (rule 3)

That's fine in isolation, but mixing that inside a comma-separated list is not a good idea.

I agree, but that's a matter of style. It's technically correct. I did say pedantic.

Well, it's technically incorrect in that same way that

  system("echo "Hello, World!"");

is incorrect - it mixes syntax in a ambiguous/incompatible way. It's a bit more amenable to silent autocorrect though, so YMMV.

system() in general is incorrect, there are much better ways to run other programs, like posix_spawn, fork+exec, libpipeline etc.

For a non-constant argument, sure, but I was talking about the malformed string literal.

Even for a constant argument; it is better to just start the program than to start the shell and tell it to start the program like system() does.

Ack about the string literal.

It's not. There is a C specification that requires quotes to be escaped within strings; there is no such specification for English. One can write English sentences that require arbitrarily distant pieces of context to be parsed correctly (much like perl, where one can write lines which may or may not be comments based on the state of some other part of the program), and such sentences may be unwise, but are by no means incorrect.

This phenomena where two nouns are placed side by side is called apposition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apposition#Restrictive_versus_...

So the source of the confusion is that, in English, non-restrictive appositives typically are indicated with commas, but so are lists of conjuncts.

> As written, it sounds like the production assistant is separate from the person.

Of course you are the best judge of what English usage is ambiguous to you, but your suggestion of introducing a comma there is at odds with the convention that you can tell whether a noun following a conjunction is a subject (i e., starting a new independent clause) or an object (ie. the conjunction is bringing together two objects into one collection) by whether it follows a comma. I think your proposed cure is worse than the disease; personally I didn't find lvh's sentence at all difficult to parse.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/comma-before-and/

Louise and Lily are definitely 10x'ers though.

I agree. I think one thing that helps is what would change if another person joined.

Who started the company? Well, that would still be you and will never change, so use "me".

Who owns the tech stack? Right now it's "me" but after another hire it would be *us*.

We = me + my company

This is how I think about it as well. Though I make the decisions, I do that for a corporation. That corporation is not the same as “me”, though it may have only one owner at the moment.

Our is the two together : Speaker/Writer + Reader/Audience. When I am writing something with the mindset of explaining it to others, even code comments, ours feels more natural to me. Imaging a person sitting across the table, and we are demonstrating something. So instead of saying, "Now I am going to turn this nob", it feels more natural to me to say "Now We are going to turn this nob".

Yeah it's been interesting for me too when running a one-man SaaS side project. I want to break the mold of obviously being one person pretending to be many. When I used a boilerplate privacy policy as a starting point for my app, I had to go through and edit all the "we" and "our" language to either use first person, passive voice, or the name of the app.

It's probably good from a legal perspective as well to separate yourself from the company.

As I said in a downvoted post, I disagree. The post is a technical writing with an emphasis on setting up an environment for a single person.

For a technical writing, I would treat it like code, use the most accurate word possible, and here it is "me".

Even more confusing since by looking at the company website, there is more than one person involved. For example "When we use a third-party library, we pull its source directly into the firmware's source tree" implies that someone else has access to the repository when it doesn't seem to be the case.

It's not a court hearing where things have to be accurate or you're lying.

We generally is understood to be - me + project/company because the person and the project are not the same thing. Code bases do not get updated to reflect me/we grammer as people come in and leave.

Also technically a company is an artificial person, even a single person project can be we.

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