When Men Were Men and HTML Was Static | Hacker News Reader

When Men Were Men and HTML Was Static

softinstigate.com

14 pointsmkj639 comments

I converted my site to static HTML about two years ago, using Octopress. It was a combination of getting sick of Wordpress breaking, and being able to handle huge traffic rushes. (My first time hitting the front page of HN, it crashed my site a couple times with WP).

Here's the thing though. You're trading one headache for another. Ruby is a fast moving, but fragile ecosystem. Octopress (which uses Jekyll) is easy to set up, and easy to customize. But long term... it's a PITA.

1. If you want to develop your site on more than one machine, you'll find yourself installing a bunch of bundles, then porting over your source files and finding it doesn't work. This has happened several times.

2. If you want to go cross platform - good luck with that as well. If you want to generate your site on Linux it's super easy. OSX or Windows - a small nightmare most of the time. I haven't really figured out why this is.

3. If you try to pull down the most recent version of Octopress or Jekyll and merge it... yeah you're going to break stuff a lot. Get ready to install a bunch of gems, and roll back versions of stuff sometimes.

4. Get ready for some random breaking. It happens, especially if you're updating packages. Jekyll will just break.

5. Every time you Google something, you usually find a bunch of Jekyll users asking the exact same question as you, and many times it just leads to a bug report on the Jekyll GitHub page.

All in all I would say it's still less hassle and bloat than WordPress, but you really do trade one annoyance for another. Because static HTML is so much faster I decide to stick with these hassles.

Jekyll is fairly good, but Ruby is an unstable ecosystem for real work. I think Jekyll would be a lot better if it were pure Python, or something similar.

> Jekyll is fairly good, but Ruby is an unstable ecosystem for real work.

Most of the problems you're describing seem to be caused by Jekyll's ecosystem than Ruby's.

Ruby's ecosystem isn't perfect (specially for beginners, without more context I'd say your issues #1 and #2 could be caused by the way you installed Ruby and/or your project's dependencies) but after years of working for real with it I've rarely found it being a problem itself.

We're solving some of these issue with Netlify (https://www.netlify.com), since we'll run your Octopress (or Grunt, Middleman, Jekyll, Docpad, etc) builds on our servers when you push to Github.

You'll still want a local Octopress install running when you're really developing, but at least with this setup you don't need anything installed to add new blog posts or edit content.

You can even fix a quick typo from your phone through the Github web UI.

I'd love to have something like Jekyll that just makes my existing setup static, and I can just regenerate it when I want. So my Wordpress site becomes static, sure I'll have to fix a couple of things, comments going to a different URL, searching would be broken, but I love that WP interface, and I've got several sites in it. I'd love to take my PHPBB forum static, that thing is horrible, but also nice to have, or my Wiki, both of those sites attract all sorts of evil people, it would be nice to have them all be read only. The longer I keep the PHPBB and this particular Wiki going the more attack vectors are being found, I'd love to just have a bunch of HTML docs.

I'm not sure I understand the title or what it's supposed to mean. Aren't men men now? Also, what is the relation between men and static HTML?

It alludes to a famous message of Linus Torvalds.

Torvald's used it and that may be the reference here but the phrase used commonly pre-dates his usage by some time.

I tried to find the origins of "remember when men were men?"/"remember when men were real men" or similar and I couldn't. Seems to pre-date the internet in general.

I found a book from 1918 with a very similar quote in it. I suspect it might pre-date that even.

Not necessarily; it is a common English idiom going back to the 19th century.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=when+men+were+...

Great resource. This quote from 1841 is fun:

> When men were men of manly mould, ere faith was bought, and friendship sold, and honour but a name for gold.

There are older quotes but I liked that one.

"When men where men" is roughly equivalent to "When men where real men" implying that today's man is not as macho as yesterdays hence less real.

For example "When men where real men they could service their engines, chop firewood, build a house and lay bricks".

The idea is that modern man is somehow less, it's a figure of speech more than anything.

It can also hark back to when things where done the hard way (which is the implication here I think).

I find it hard to believe how people in our industry today can be so ignorant of the issues around the use of machismo terms like that used in the title of the post. I believe that the author was just trying to be witty and was probably not intending to offend anyone. But his offhand use of the "when men were men' phrase is terribly offensive to many people.

Just to be clear: this isn't about simple 'political correctness' - trying not to offend anyone. This is about fixing a broken culture in our industry.

This industry has the potential to be completely egalitarian - silicon can't determine the gender of the people who wrote the code, and keyboards aren't particularly better suited to men's hands. Yet we've managed to build an industry that is completely dominated by men. That's a travesty and a waste, and deserves explicit effort to undo the damage. That means using inclusive language at _all_ times, even if it doesn't seem 'natural'. The fact that language like that seems 'natural' or 'innocent' to some people is a horribly broken and heartbreakingly wrong state that needs fixing.

Who would be offended by this? It seems to me the only thing that could be offensive is the implication that modern men aren't as tough as in the past. Is that what you mean?

Some people just need to find things to be offended by.

Yeah, except that the absence of women is a huge and embarrassing black mark on our industry. Just because you personally are too big of a cretin to give a shit doesn't mean everyone has their head up their ass. GFY.

The phrase uses maleness as a reference to something better or great. 'real men' are used as example of 'great'. It has the same effect as 'throw like a girl'.

I'll admit to being sensitive to the topic. I'm mostly surprised that given all of the attention that the barriers to women in the industry has been given over the last number of months, people still use language like this. My point is that we _should_ be sensitive to this issue. We should think about the women engineers that are on the margins, perhaps experiencing harassment at work or online, and consider how they would feel reading yet another 'manly man' reference to being a great developer.

I think the phrase actually is comparing modern men to men of the past. My interpretation is that it's teasing softer men that their grandfathers were tougher than them.

Doesn't seem to me like it says anything about women. I'm forced to conclude that this is a hot button topic for you, and isn't something relevant to the article or discussion at hand.

Hm... I agree that it's not the best title, but if anything, it's offensive to (modern) men, in effect countering their domination of the industry.

Parsing the sentence to only consider the modern vs traditional cultural reference (things were better in the past) is completely ignoring the point that it is using maleness to define good or great. The phrase is just an idiom, I'm pretty sure the author isn't _really_ trying to say things were better in the past, or that modern men are really weaker or whatever. It's just a turn of phrase that makes for an arguably witty headline. The point I'm trying to make is that things like this reinforce the male domination of the industry and push women away when we really need to be overtly trying to do the opposite.

Yeah, I usually say "when men were men, women were women and furry little green aliens from Alpha Centauri were real furry little green aliens from Alpha Centauri".

And no, this isn't sarcasm - it's a mouthful to say, but it's fun and shouldn't offend anyone. The short "when men were men" should also be completely innocuous but I don't need the kinds of people who get offended by it polluting the comments on my posts.

A good way to tell how much contact someone has with non-technical people is whether or not they say things like "it's simple, it's just a text file formatted in Markdown."

I once wrote some code to let my company's staff post job openings on our site themselves, instead of asking me to convert their word processor files to html. Markdown was the natural choice. I never heard any complaints.

Agreed, and with some simple "helper" text at the bottom, with a split-screen, editor on one side, and live-preview on the other it gets pretty good.

I use MarkdownPad when I'm doing larger readme or documentation files for github.. I can imagine it would be easy enough for others to pick up.

Imagine being a woman and coming to HN and seeing this. Clearly a place for her?

We need to drop sexist article titles like this from HN.

It's not a "title from HN", it's the original title of the article. It's the (general, with specific exceptions) policy of HN to keep the original article titles. I personally oppose it frequently, but it is what it is.

The article title isn't sexist, you're just hypersensitive.

Nobody with common sense, men or women, could take the title as being anything other than a generic throwback to a bygone era.

The article doesn't really focus on gender beyond the cutesy title.

PS - And you want to talk about sexist titles? Seems like every other day there is a title implying all men in tech are sexist neanderthals. But where are you when they're posted?

It is sexist and you would notice if it was the other way around and, you being as much of an ass as you are, you'd probably be a big fucking douchebag about it too. Way to turn the conversation to you boo-hooing about being called a sexist neanderthal, eh?

Any mere mention of men isn't within its own right sexist.

If it was the other way around and they merely mentioned women I would most assuredly not call that sexist either.

If you feel it is sexist then explain it. Why is mentioning men sexist? Is it the word? The implication that men work in tech' in general? Or something else.

It's not a "mere mention of men" it's some bullshit nonsense that implies men ought to be a certain way and it also subtly implies that we're all men here and that this is no place for women. Christ you are thick.

So your trades, name calling, and children temper tantrums are because of a "subtle implication?" Seems quite disproportionate to me.

Did you consider that it is such a subtle implication (your words) that maybe there is no implication there at all? I just ask because that implication doesn't exist anywhere in the actual quote (word for word), so plausibly it is your own baggage that added it to your reading.

You effectively created your own sexism and then got mad at that very same sexism. Maybe you should self-reflect on that a bit after you've calmed down.

I find this comment incredibly ironic considering "ninjaplease" is a reference to an incredibly racist stereotypical saying.

Men refers to humanity imo.

It doesn't and you're a cunt.

Wait did you just unironically use a sexist slur to insult someone for what you view as sexism..? That's special.

I was about to address you seriously, but you either have no idea what sexism is or you are not interested in an honest discussion.

I noticed a lot of words but none of them tried to justify why you used a gendered sexist slur to defend supposed sexism.

If you are unable to justify yourself, maybe you should consider how you behave.

That's exactly the attitude that keeps women away from jobs in this industry. This use of the term is _clearly_ a gender specific reference. We should be working on using more inclusive language. Language like this pushes women away, and that's a huge problem for us.

In context, it does not. In the popular phrase, "When men were men" the first use of "men" refers to adult male humans specifically, and the second use of "men" refers to possessing the virtues traditionally associated with masculinity (though the whole phrase is generally used metaphorically, rather than literally.)

It's ironic that his permalink doesn't handle a dynamic title field very well.

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