I'm not sure, what he claimed to do, but if he didn't run around praising this as the next grep: wtf is wrong with those people? I mean you have to start exploring things somewhere and why not share them?
(And yes, like another comment said, HN voting is also shit when it comes to certain topics like big tech. Fortunately the crappiest takes upvoted by mobs tend to be modded down by saner humans.)
The primary thing people on HN don't understand about Twitter is the personalized feed. On HN, if someone makes low-quality posts, everyone sees it until it gets downvoted into oblivion. On Twitter, if someone's making posts you don't want to see, you block or mute the account and see less of it.
What makes a post "low-quality" is inherently subjective, but HN doesn't offer any personalization. I'd characterize HN's approach as being like a little Puritan village in the 17th century, where community members get together to decide someone's fate. Twitter is like a modern city... if you don't like the neighborhood, go somewhere else. Yes, there are trolls on Twitter. But you don't have to see them on your feed. The impact of an individual troll account on Twitter is much lower than the impact of an individual troll account on HN.
My general feeling is that very few people actually understand how community management works, even in broad strokes. Certainly not me. As a result, behavior which might be a red flag on one forum may just be part of the ecosystem in another forum.
I very, very rarely see that in merely low-quality posts. Those that are actually downvoted enough to be hidden are hidden for good reasons. I am sure you could find a handful, but I have never seen a hidden post about which I regretted it was not visible (I’d be curious to see how many you can find). It usually is proper bullying or racist rants.
Now, stories get flagged regularly because they go against the grain, and there are several of them I wish we could have discussed. But looking at the new stories, the flagging mechanism gets rid of much more spam than unpopular posts.
Anyway, I am not really willing to buy that without some statistics.
> As a result, behavior which might be a red flag on one forum may just be part of the ecosystem in another forum.
That is certainly true. But I find HN to be on the good side in that respect. Much better than the anything goes of *chan, the constant shitposting of mainstream subreddits (though there are some subreddits I love with great communities), or the constant passive aggressiveness of ./ and el reg (at least when I frequented those; I never looked back after leaving). Ars is nice as well, but a huge troll magnet.
The biggest problem with this idea is that there are tweets that you may have legitimate reasons not to want others to see. If someone is smearing you online in some way (revenge porn, lies about your actions, doxxing, stoking others to attack you, etc), then it doesn't really help you to hide these tweets from your feed, you need to have some recourse to hide them from others' feeds to actually achieve something.
Of course, this gets complicated often because it's not easy to tell apart lies about your actions from truths about your actions for example, and any mechanism you have to protect you from someone spreading false hurtful information is also a tool that someone else can use to prevent others spreading true hurtful information. Perhaps the court system is the only good way to solve it - I don't have an answer. But this problem also can't simply be ignored by hiding that person from your feed.
Snark OTOH, especially at an individual who is only representing themself, is just mean. Of course it happens here too, but it's rare. Reddit and Twitter are completely plagued by it – it usually gets the most engagement, whereas here it's rare and gets a chilly response.
Finally, there's one more differentiator. Twitter is people-oriented, you have a profile, usually your real name, and public follower count. Twitter is designed to be a popularity contest. Both hacker news and reddit are content-oriented. Sure, there's a username, but most people don't give a shit about who you are.
Recently I had a conversation with a friend that it is always really considerate and nuanced in every conversation (and other social network), except, Twitter where it becomes kinda vicious, or it managed always express an opinion in the most polarizing way possible. I didn't seem to realized it until I show some of the tweet it posted.
I can name a number of really bad pieces of software that are widely used because nobody has time/funds to do it properly. Lots of those programs are made by pre-doc students that are learning the basics, and as soon as they get competent at coding, they are absorbed by the private sector.
All the code since then was paid for, handsomely, and almost nobody complained about it.
I think this toxicity as you called is really harming OS.
it's the js variant of the perl 'replace' script floating around and packaged. just with javascript regexp syntax. so I would find it useful for js folks.
It would be incorrect now since you know she is a she.
Defaulting to he isn't bias, it's language feature of English since people didn't like using "it" to describe people, so "he" is a default singular pronoun.
.... Did "they" get removed from the dictionary or something?
When I was growing up, it was explicitly taught in school as being incorrect grammar to use "they" for an ungendered third-person singular pronoun. At some point I decided that was a stupid policy for lots of reasons, and explicitly decided to go ahead and use it anyway. But it still feels weird.
"used to refer to a person whose gender is not known or does not need to be mentioned"
To me that pretty much sums it up.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/they
What is taught in schools is prescriptive: They're trying to teach people "proper English" (sometimes called "prestige dialects"). So they tell you not to use "ain't", not to use double negatives ("I didn't do nothin'!"), not to say "literally" when you're speaking figuratively ("My head literally exploded!")... and not to use the singular "they" ("Can the owner of the blue car turn their lights off").
I retain the first three of those rules, in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure the Cambridge Dictionary has entries for "ain't" and "figuratively" that violate them; but I have deliberately chosen to reject the last one.
Dubious. The cited historical examples all refer to mass nouns or nouns with an implied plural. Usage with a concrete, singular person doesn't seem to be older than a few decades.
But that's the same thing. The crucial point being, we know it's one person.
> If you don't know the author's gender, using "they" has hundreds of years of precedent.
Citation please? The older the better. But mind, one addressee only.
OK, here's one from "Emma", written by Jane Austen. Emma and Mr. Knightley are discussing Harriet Smith, and Emma asks:
"Who is in love with her? Who makes you their confidant?" [1]
In this case, "their" is one specific person, a man who works for Mr. Knightley, has fallen in love with Harriet Smith, and came to ask Mr. Knightley his advice.
(Using 'they' rather than 'he' here is a bit strange, though, unless Emma was a lot more progressive than is generally thought about such matters; but hey ho.)
There are dozens of other examples, but most of those are of a generic situation, rather than a specific person whose gender is not being mentioned.
1. "Everybody should bring their own books to class".
2. "If anybody has left their book at home, they should ask the teacher to borrow one."
3. "Can the person who left their book at their desk please collect it at reception."
4. "Someone has written to say that they left their book at their desk."
5. "The author shows their bias here."
6. "Joanna has written to say that they left their book at their desk."
Gramatically speaking, none of these are plural. In the case of #1, there are many people involved, but it "resolves" down to individual actions, since each person has a separate book. In #2 it's an indefinite number of people -- it could be 0 or 1 or 50; but again, it "resolves" down to an individual and that person's actions. In #3-6, it's clearly one specific person, with various degrees of uncertainty about who that person might be or what that person is like. In all cases except #6, you can replace "their" with "his or her", which was the prescribed way of writing this in my grammar classes.
I'll grant you that #6, where you refer to a specific known person as "they/them/their", is new. But #5, which is what we're talking about here, 1) sounds perfectly natural to me as a native English speaker, 2) was the sort of thing the grammar classes explicitly taught against, 3) is a natural extension of 1-4.
But even you used a plural, by saying "books" in #1, demonstrating that even when coming up with this example, you did not "resolve" anything just because "everybody" is a singular pronoun. You used "they" not referring to the word, but to what the word logically implied, and thus this "they" is also plural.
I simply don't see this natural progression that you claim. I see distinct usages of "they" for two different types of indefiniteness: one of number, and one of sex. #1-#3 show the first type. It's old and uncontroversial. (You seem to place #3 differently, but as written, the speaker cannot know whether the owner of the book and the owner of the desk are identical, or two persons.)
But #4-#6 don't exhibit any numerical indefiniteness. Here the "they" is clearly singular. It's my understanding that this usage is novel and did not arise naturally, but is the result of a political campaign, starting about 1960. That's why I asked for older historical examples, which could disprove this theory.
This is not really true—certainly not anymore, at least—and from my vantage point has not ever been true at any point in my lifetime. Some style guides did continue to prescribe "he" in this way up until recently (maybe some still do), but that has never matched the way that any human that I've interacted with actually spoke. And I really do mean any—even the most crotchety/unenlightened/uneducated ones. If you had used "he" this way (outside of formal contexts, where it may have still been prescribed), then people would have looked at you like you're a fuckin' weirdo. Because it would have been weird. Because nobody said "he" unless they were talking about a specific (albeit possibly hypothetical/imaginary) person with the attributes that actually call for the use of "he", rather than "they/them".
Best you can do is to either completely ignore them, or tell them to grow the f##k up and behave like adults.