Hn isn't just news about hacking. You could complain that this story doesn't fit the guidelines, but saying "it isn't about hacking" is much narrower than the guidelines allow.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I rather like the idea - but then I am a big fan of Heinlein's _Starship Troopers_ so I suppose I would like it.
I don't dispute your major points. However, I would say that your claim that "the US and NATO managed to put an end to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia" is a bit lacking in nuance.
Having spent a bit of time in Serbia after the Kosovan war, I saw little evidence that NATO reduced the amount of ethnic cleansing going on and a lot of evidence that NATO deliberately killed many civilians. The former Secretary-General of NATO, Lord Carrington, even claimed that the NATO bombing caused ethnic cleansing.
But this doesn't negate your main point and is a little off-topic - sorry about that - I just wanted to mention that not everyone thinks the NATO action in former Yugoslavia was a good thing.
Yeah, sure, but that doesn't make "those who were never born" any more meaningful to argue about than, you know, the present bald King of France or whatever.
"Logical Positivism" has been roundly debunked, but I think some of its principles, and those of the movements that came before and after it, are important and applicable. I call a lot of these "logical positivism" more by habit than by way of endorsing the philosophy as such.
If it's a "succinct and accurate way to explain it" then why do so many people find it jarring and confusing? If management speak really is a jargon then it is useful only when talking to other managers, not to people in general. (And, it would appear, especially not when talking to engineers.)
Yes, you're missing something. The article is a disclosure of a security vulnerability that has already been reported to the company responsible, including notice that it would be published and a request for confirmation that it has been fixed. (Edit: but your response is reasonable - I can see how the article title is misleading.)
I really, really like the idea. However, I neither have nor want a Twitter account. Would it really be difficult to allow people to use the site without a Twitter account?
Exactly. Educated English writers, including Shakespeare, have been using "they" as a gender-neutral third-person pronoun since Middle English. I believe there's even evidence of this in Old English.
It's only been in the past century that proscriptionist grammarians have dreamed up this pedantic rule and sought to eliminate English's sole gender-neutral singular pronoun. But since educated writers and common folk alike have been using "they" as a singular pronoun for centuries before these neo-grammarians dreamed up their rule, it's a hopeless and utterly useless quest.
The prescriptivist intervention wasn't in the past century, though, it was in the 18th. It's been traced to a single grammatical treatise—I forget the name but can look it up if there's interest—which argued for singular "he" as the standard. Ironically, the book was written by a woman—how's that for troll fodder?
Yes, you're right. I hesitated when I wrote "last century", since I had vague memories of the neo-classicists who were leading the charge for his/her exclusively, since they believed it more closely reflected pure Latin usage -- which they sought to emulate in English. So it doesn't surprise me that it goes back to the 18th century.
Ironically, most of the people I know who now advocate for the gender-neutral third-person singular "they", and from whom I learned its history, have classical training to some degree or another.
Thanks for the correction -- I'll have to try and track down that book.
The irony is considerable. Not only was the originator of generic "he" a woman, she was a successful woman entrepreneur when such a thing was unheard of. What's more, her book was known for arguing against the incursion of Latin rules into English grammar—which is what generic "he" was.
Wow, I'd never heard of Ann Fisher. And the fact she was arguing against Latin goes against all the conventional wisdom I've heard about the whole he vs they push. Very interesting.
Also, I've bookmarked that NY Times piece for future use when someone on the Internet berates me for using third-person singular "they" or "their".
