Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What I do see a problem with is just assuming that everyone trying to do their part to moderate culture so as to be more inclusive is just an Internet whiner. This might have something to do with the fact that 99% of the time, they ARE internet whiners. This is why no one wants to be associated with feminism anymore. An over fixation on censorship and a staggeringly low amount of self-awareness.
>no one wants to be associated with feminism anymore Oh gosh, you're commenting on HN, you obviously should have some data to back your opinions with? Right?
Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
751–760 of 872 posts
Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone else in the thread suggested 'tin', which I love! "What does 'curl' do?" "Does what it says on the tin page." $ tin curl # get the contents of a web page curl https://news.ycombinator.com/
Foreigner here (French). Why is Tin funny? It stands for the small metal box with food inside, like Can, doesn't it?
'Does what it says on the tin' is a common phrase in English, usually applied to mean a product is simple and effective. I guess it's meant to contrast against the marketing hyperbole that you often read on tin labels.
Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
#753Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, it's always about offending people. But only theoretically, of course. It's hard to find significant quantities of people who are actually offended, which is in itself deeply ~problematic.~ >their impression is that the community here closes ranks to shout her down rather than accepting the legitimacy of her experience It does say a lot about you and your friends that they assume that anyone who dis…
The risk isn't that someone gets all huffy and makes a big deal about being offended. It's that people who you would want to participate silently think to themselves "I don't want to deal with this" and then go away. It's explicitly not the oversensitive feminists I care about here; it's the reasonable, intelligent women and men who have a number of options on where to spend their time and choose not to spend it in c…
>The risk isn't that someone gets all huffy and makes a big deal about being offended. It's that people who you would want to participate silently think to themselves "I don't want to deal with this" and then go away. It's explicitly not the oversensitive feminists I care about here; it's the reasonable, intelligent women and men who have a number of options on where to spend their time and choose not to spend it in communities where they feel unwelcome.
This is exactly how I feel each time this gender crap gets posted to HN. I used to come to this site several times a day, especially for the brilliant comments but those comments and tech discussions have been pushed away by people like you who want to talk about gender and social justice.
Can't we have a site just about tech? With brilliant people who share their knowledge? The one place where we only care what is inside peoples heads and not their feelings?
I guess not. Was nice while it lasted though.
Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
#754Great idea; shame about the name. Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly): the problem is not with what you [0] are thinking when you read the word "bro", but with what other people , especially newcomers, are thinking. The locker-room atmosphere that stuff like this creates is a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people, women especially, who infer that on top of all the technically difficu…
Its a bad name because it draws attention away from the actual content and towards meaningless debate that we all love so much. I prefer the github style naming that just describes what something is.
Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
People nowdays get offended about pretty much anything. I refuse to pay Dane-Geld[0] to them by worrying about every single word I use, because otherwise they'll never shut up. [0] - http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html
I'm not saying you're an asshole, I don't know enough about you to make that call, but comments like this really make you sound like one. You're basically saying, "I refuse to even try to live harmoniously with others because they're just going to keep demanding shit from me." If you don't want or care to examine your thoughts and actions, that's fine, but getting all high and mighty about it by invoking Kipling and…
> I'm not saying you're an asshole, I don't know enough about you to make that call,
Thank you for not making it.
> but comments like this really make you sound like one. You're basically saying, "I refuse to even try to live harmoniously with others because they're just going to keep demanding shit from me."
That's not what I meant, though it might have sounded like this. Please, consider it in the broader context of this thread.
I'm not refusing to "even try to live harmoniously with others"; if you knew me, you'd probably find I'm a very tolerant and cooperative person. The thing I refuse to is to live in a world where I have to weight every single word I utter, lest someone, somewhere, will feel offended because of ever-growing list of reasons.
Feeling offended is first and foremost the decision of a person which feels offended. There are things that are meant to be insulting, and it is good the society combats them, but then there are things that are just plain neutral until someone decides to pick a fight over them. I strongly believe this is the case here. What I refuse is to be a part of culture that is mostly defined by things you can't say.
People here talk about inclusive culture. Unleashing a gender shitstorm over a program name is not a sign of inclusive culture, it's a sign of culture that tries to weed out all diversity instead of celebrating it.
As for Kipling reference, it was literally one of the first things that popped into my mind when reading comment threads here - that we allow people to be offended over little, meaningless things, and therefore they'll find more things to be offended about - for karma, feeling of self-importance, mistaken belief that it matters, or whatever reason they're doing it for.
Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
Git is associated with completely ignorant, childish, and lacking in manners. So what? It's the name of a piece of software, and if there's sufficient adoption, it starts to lose its old meaning in a tech context. Which, for "bro", is fine by me.
Git isn't gendered.
Thus proving that this whole discussion is about the new fashion of aggressive gender-neutrality.
Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait; did you just define calling out a needlessly offensive name as evil? You do realise that would sort of be making the exact point I was trying to make, right? Or am I missing some seriously self-deprecating joke here?
Words are meaningless without definition. You say that the word "bro" is needlessly offensive. Let me ask you, where is your balance point? What is the right level of offensive? The cost of censorship is real, and teaching people to be helpless victims does more harm than any word ever could.
Yet even without definitions you are typing words and I am reading them and we're having a conversation here, so let's not go pretend-meta here.
The right level of offensive is the level that, given all viewpoints, does the most to benefit to society as a whole.
You're a rich straight white guy whose only discomfort over this comes down to not being able to say whatever you damn well want whenever you damn well please.
From this thread you can clearly see that there's a shit ton of people, many of whom have to re-evaluate their every word and action in our industry, for whom this triggers feelings of marginalization, ridicule and disrespect.
Insisting on maintaining your privilege over theirs and even going so far as to label their reactions as taught helplessness and defining that as evil ... well ... that pretty much sounds like the root of all evil to me.
Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
#758Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has been a casual term of friendship and acknowledgement between guys for even longer than it has been a douche-bag-frat-boy-sleazy-programmer reference, however. In my entire life , I have only heard "bro" come from the mouths of bullying douche-bag frat-boy sleazes, usually while telling me the assault they just committed against me was "just a joke". It has never come from anyone I would willingly subject mys…
And in my _entire life_ (including a lot of time spent with friends in fraternities and at frat parties in colleges), I've never heard "bro" used as anything but a shorter form of the term of endearment "brother", or at worst an ironic reference to the stereotype of the super-fratty popped-collar bro. Obviously both usages are prevalent, but your contention is that the term can't POSSIBLY be referring to anything but…
> including a lot of time spent with friends in fraternities and at frat parties in colleges
Then you're most likely exactly the kind of person I'm talking about.
Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not feeling oppressed. The problem isn't me feeling oppressed, it's other people feeling oppressed. Poor choice of language can set up an exclusionary environment. To you, this may be funny. To me, your accusation of humorlessness reminds me of people who engage in sexually harassing "jokes" in the workplace, and then try to get away with it by using "humor" as an excuse. You aren't the one who gets to decide whe…
Do you realize how patronizing it is when white males get preemptively upset over something instead of letting women and minorities speak for themselves?
The funny thing is women and minorities are rarely offended by these sort of things but the White males of HN seem to think everyone else is a damsel in distress in dire need of their protection.
Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
#760Earlier quoted context omitted.
Answer: yes, of course it's sometimes appropriate. But if you're having a serious conversation with someone on the subject of privilege, and you're on the privileged side (and they're not), the likelihood of you accurately identifying when they should lighten up is so vanishingly small (I keep finding my blind spots in spite of years of being attentive to this kind of stuff...), and the chance that they might actuall…
You're fighting to create a world in which the intellectual currency is not reason, evidence, or logic; it's self-proclaimed victimhood. If I claim I'm a victim in a way that you're not, it becomes literally impossible for you to prove me wrong. If I go on to claim that we need new policies to protect me from (and/or compensate me for) that victimhood, you can't disagree. You can't do anything other than supplicate.…
...you're jumping into a big argument that's not actually based on what I wrote. I'm making two main points:
#1 - When I sit down and really take the time to weigh everything, I consistently find that my first reasonable-feeling judgment was way off. So I've tried to stop trusting that gut feel, and I advise others do the same.