skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a few reasons why a gendered pronoun might be used:

1. To indicate 'a human' as distinct from 'a machine', where 'they' is insufficiently clear

2. To refer to an actual person of known gender

3. Most European languages have a notion that inanimate objects have a gender, so they might refer to a computer or a dress as 'he' or a yacht or a book as 'her'. This makes little sense to native English speakers but can be a difficult habit to drop.

I think it's pretty clear that none of these are valid uses in this case (although I wonder if #3 might have some responsibility for the initial commit? Would be good to get some input from someone who knows more than I do about linguistics).

However, I'm not sure that 'they' is much better, because it's still anthropomorphic - it implies that the calling function is a person, which isn't true - it's a function. The correct word must be 'it' - there is no 'they' in one function calling another function.
Same here! Stay strong guys! What a horrible tragedy!
My girlfriend, not a programmer per say but has done a some technical documentation in her time, says that non-gendered pronouns doesn't make her feel more accepted but gendered pronouns do make her feel less accepted.
The password field is for creating a password for this account, you don't have to type the password of any other account. There's no security risk here, since you never ever reuse passwords, right?
I find it jarring to see a plural pronoun where a singular is correct. Reading "they" where "he" or "she" is appropriate causes a slight mental distraction and disrupts the message the writer is trying to convey.

I've always been taught and considered "he" or "him" to be gender neutral unless context indicated otherwise, in the same way that "man" can refer to any human and not just a male.

This is a tempest in a teapot if I ever saw one. Women are not underrepresented in technology because of male-gendered pronouns in code comments. As someone in the earlier discussion suggested, if you want to make a difference, quit complaining about pronouns and go help mentor some girls at your local school, Girl Scouts, Girl's Club, etc. If we had more females writing code, we would probably see more use of "her" or "she" in their comments.
John Carmack, leaving Id and join Oculus was awesome.
Of course I did, and I agree with the point. However, I also read the original article, which never referenced a specific phone (it did mention a few vendors in a one sentence, but that's it). The use of "iPhone" versus "smartphone" (again, we're commenting on an article here) has implicit meaning.
what is the preferred python speed-up route these days?
I've tried:
numpy C API
cython
weave
numba
parakeet
It's addictive behaviour. If you're ahem rather active on HN, you might be interested in the book "The Fix" by Damian Thompson.
That is one great navigational layout.
"It" is correct when talking about a function.

The original complaint was a about using "he" when the antecedent was "the user."
You misread me. The effort to eradicate singular "they" is a late 1800's movement, and, I agree, that movement is archaic. The singular "they" has been a feature of English since Chaucer and remains current; Conrad used it, as did CS Lewis.
Hacker School was an amazing experience for me; I had been programming on and off for ~2.5 years when I attended last summer. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat more about it (email in profile)
Yahoo Users Anonymous: A Transcript
her is still better than them!
Reminds me of Christopher Payne's lovely book about the (DC) substations of the New York subway http://www.chrispaynephoto.com/substations.html
Yikes! Looks like I'm running up against Heroku's 20 database connection limit.

Edit: Fixed?
Richard Stallman on good things and bad things about Bitcoin
Pepper indeed!
> It does make me a bit grumpy to see things like SnapChat being offered $3bn

Supply and demand. The value that Snapchat provides to individuals and advertisers is tiny but huge in aggregate. There just isn't the same volume of people with conditions like Alejandro's and the variety of problems people face make the economics especially challenging within a free market.

However, I feel we're at a really exciting point in history. With open source software and hardware, the work that a single person like Alejandro's dad does can be provide value and spread like neither before. Advances in tech that seem to provide only minimal value to us allow for engineers to be trained, gain the skills and have the know how to make a significant difference to people like Alejandro.

The challenge is how can we channel as much of the value and tech created by the free market into problems that the free market struggles to solve, like disability and assistive technology. Open question!
it's needlessly ambiguous in an environment where it can easily be construed to mean what it commonly and currently not in Shakespeare's time means

It's not ambiguous. When used with a plural it means a plural ("the users, they did this"); when used with a singular it means a singular ("the user, they did that").

Nor has it changed since Shakespeare's time. It had exactly the same dual use back then.
It's only jarring if you harbor the misconception that "they" always requires a plural antecedent. But it does not. The distraction is coming from your own head, not from idiosyncratic usage. Better writers than us settled this long ago.
I'm surprised by the disproportionate level of angst from the people who are upset about the use of 'they' in place of 'he'. I can see the point of eliminating both and using 'it' instead, but some of the comments on that Github issue sounded like the kind of 'political correctness gone mad!' drivel that one[1] reads in the Daily Mail[2], for goodness' sake.

[1] A gender-neutral pronoun!

[2] If you're fortunate enough to not know what the Daily Mail is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI
is this the same as connectify dispatch?

http://www.connectify.me/dispatch/
Sir Jonathon Ive is senior vice president of design, and is listed as an executive, and was considered to be Jobs's "spiritual partner at Apple".

Look at the placement of Ive here http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/

When a company fucks up, and is caught, and has court ordered scrutiny, it seems reasonable that the executives are going to be scrutinised.

The way to avoid this scrutiny is to avoid breaking the law.
We don't know whether physical reactions in our brains allow for and depend on calculation using real numbers, which can only be approximated using our current computing technology.
I tried to reed the references, but I couldn’t find a complete description of the motor he is using.

The crystal radios have a diode. Does the device have a diode? Does it work without the diode? Does it work if the diode is reversed? (The black thing in the right side of the motor looks like a diode, but I couldn’t distinguish the cathode bar mark.)

I’m not sure, but if this were based in atmospheric electricity, this should work even without a diode and don’t work if the diode is reversed. If this were based in RF, this shouldn’t work without a diode, but it shod work with the diode in the other direction.
Kid holds BTC sign on ESPN background, gets sent few hundred dollars
I don't understand how. Is the user female? Must she be? Why did the author choose a gendered pronoun when they had a gender-neutral one available to them? There must have been a reason; the author isn't assumed to be ignorant of basic English.

Also, "her" is "still" better? "Still"?
I think it is implied that "any task" means "any legal task". $1100/hour is definitely the highest I have ever heard of for a lawyer, much higher.
Are there downsides to using the stream-fusion package? If not, why hasn't it been made the default so that the first naive version is fast?
I also keep thinking of it as a game changer. Why ever bother with prototypes again when you have case classes, or callbacks when you have function shorthands. I fully expect Scala.js code to be more concise and maintainable than Javascript code, and will probably perform better too thanks to the Closure compiler.
They have. It's called Kiva Systems and Amazon acquired them in 2012.
I wonder what is done with the heat produced by the rectification. Presumably when you convert power for 7-10 customers at a time they aren't residential customers and the heat must be quite great. It seems a shame to just radiate that all away.
Understanding if original image was edited with JPEG ELA(Error Level Analysis)
I agree. He rejected the original pull request on the grounds that it was "trivial." It didn't add anything new, didn't improve anything, and didn't correct any problem.

The then reverted the commit when procedures weren't followed (he had already rejected it).
Sun's "carrier grade" kit all ran on 48V DC, I gather it has been the norm in telcos for a long time.
The Fluid Dynamics Of Archerfish Hunting by Spitting
Not at all, there is a great deal of precedence in computer science for building durable interfaces on top of unstable ones.
I don't think you understand why people approve of what the NSA is doing, which is why that's usually going to be an ineffective argument. The NSA promises a safer country, and all we have to is let them do a little bit of surveillance behind the scenes. We won't even notice -- it's not intrusive in the same way that a cavity search is. An NSA supporter once asked me if I would have given up the metadata on my phone if it would have prevented 9/11 and saved ~3000 lives. I wouldn't, for reasons that have been discussed on HN repeatedly, but I think it's still a fair question.

The real issue here is the power imbalance combined with the lack of oversight and accountability. When I talk to NSA supporters, that's what I try to emphasize.
Your unwillingness to accept that some people want to learn before doing something irreversible is borderline trollish. Having a gut feeling does not imply an immutable opinion, especially after evaluating related facts. Every person has a responsibility to understand the consequences of their actions and in-actions. What you are seeing here is a person being more diligent with his kid than he was with himself.
This is one of the few things that my unique and unfortunate biology give me some authority to speak about.

I'm trans -- and that means I've done time as a female developer, and as a male developer.

When I was a guy, I used to laugh in the face of women that complained about things like gendered pronouns in source comments.

Now, with different ears to hear, it has gone from (say) this:

The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop him from sending it twice

To this:

The POTENTIALLY-YOU needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop NOT-POSSIBLY-YOU from sending it twice

It is jarring because while the syntactic form of the sentence remains static, changing the reader alters the semantic form of the sentence to one with an inconsistent grammar. Even more than the (obvious, probably unavoidable) implied suggestion that the typical user is male, it is this post-parse grammatical inconsistency which makes the text itself weirdly difficult to read.

Sexism comes in at the level of parsing.

If this doesn't make sense to you, please google 'indexicals' (in the advanced-logic sense) and read what the grey eminences have to say about pronoun resolution in sentential signification.
It sounds like you should move to CyanogenMod.
Toolbar Peddlers Use Your System To Mine Bcoin
How awful, Apple breaks the law and then whines about the pocket change ($70K x 52wks x 2years = $7.3M) charge for enforcing it's own compliance.

If Apple thinks $70K/week is high for lawyers, wait until they get the overage bills from their new HQ building contractors.
I don't understand why this is on the front page in the #11 spot? It has 4 points and it's 45 minutes old.. The HN rankings system continues to confuse me.

--

Clearly its getting overwhelmed with HN traffic. Maybe click throughs are included in the rankings calculation? Then again, if many people are clicking through and then not up voting it, it's not necessarily a positive thing.

I do think it's pretty cool though! Great job.
It starts in the 1910's and 20's with Henry Ford: mass production of goods while paying your workers a high enough wage to buy your own products. This gets further codified in the 1930s with the New Deal: tax supported social safety nets, government support for unions and corporate regulation. The upshot of this is a new social consensus: the rich cannot get richer by taking a bigger slice of the pie, only by growing the pie.

Then World War II has two more effects: it finally kicks the U.S. economy into gear through massive government spending but maybe more important the rest of the first world (Europe and Japan) has most of it's infrastructure heavily damaged. The only other potential competitor, the Soviet Union, disengages from the capitalist economies of the 1st world and builds it own 2nd world of communist countries. This leads to spectacular growth in 1950s and 1960s for the U.S. and with the New Deal consensus it mostly goes to the working class and the middle class.

In the 1970s, the consensus starts to break down primarily due to two factors: automation and globalization. The rest of the world begins to recover and compete. And because thy haven't had the same sort of growth the U.S. did, their workers are much cheaper. Additional automation begins to create an ever-lowering ceiling on how much a low skill job is worth. Once the machinery to automate a job becomes cheaper than the worker, that worker is out of a job.

In the 1980s, the business owners (who never really like the New Deal) use their newfound leverage to create a coalition with libertarians and social conservatives to essentially dismember the government portion of the New Deal. Once this is done, the pie continues to grow, but the rich have start to grow their portion of it.
gender politics in tech is an increasingly polarizing issue but I don't think that was the reason for the rejection.
A glimpse of undefined behavior in C
I think a better solution would be to select random gendered pronouns but keep them consistent (for example don't switch mid sentence which is the worst of both worlds).

If you are describing a transaction between two people, make one male and one female. If you have an odd number then distribute gender at random.
"Open Source" and "Shareware" go together like milk and cookies.
This is the first time I've heard someone try to explain an extortionate hourly rate as "reasonable fees".

Would the argument be the same if a private firm was charging the government at the same rate? Or would we be here with pitchforks demanding answers?
The power of labor unions for low-paid workers is not as strong as you think. Where I went to school (U Chicago), there was a very active mostly student-organized university workers' labor union, but workplace violations were still routine. The power to strike is no help when you depend on your paycheck to survive, and the union's legal clout was no help when the laws were hard to enforce and deep-pocketed employers were your adversary. If you look around at lower-class unions, you see a broad pattern of ineffectiveness. For example farm workers have the UFW but being a farm worker remains one of the most intensely miserable jobs in the US, with constant rule-breaking by the employers, and a lot of unrepresented workers.

We already have a nearly flawless way to increase the welfare of low-paid workers, and that is to redistribute wealth to them through things like the negative income tax. Having enough money to live is the best negotiating position, union or no union. (For example, I think this is why middle-class unions have been so much more effective than lower-class ones.)
I think that's fine. There is nothing gender-specific in the antecedent "the user" so either "he" or "she" can be used in reference (though don't switch back and forth, I've actually seen writers try this and it gets really confusing).
I should point out that this is fully inspired by the other day's top post of procedural HN headlines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815282). I thought it would be a cool addition to mash them up with other news sources with sort of sensational headlines and add voting.
No, it's stranger than that. People (myself included) think twice about a $5 app that will be used for a huge aggregate time, but don't hesitate at $20 for a cinema ticket to a craptastic film, or a subscription to some sort of sports channel. The app in using to write this cost me $6 and I have used it for way too many hours (and its one minor bug clipping comment length is still there damn it!)
Still erratic

An error occurred in the application and your page could
not be served. Please try again in a few moments. If you
are the application owner, check your logs for details.
Official Clip of DevconTLV October is out
Well, at least if you're unlocking it. I pull out my phone to check the time fairly frequently.
Did you double-post your comment and then delete one?
Yes, I do have a very different definition than you do, which is what makes your almost-begging-the-question rhetorical adoption of the implicit redefinition of freedom as Those Enumerated By Richard Stallman...well, kind of funny. On the other hand, I will enjoy my freedom to use software without concerns of ideological purity because I have alternatives if I don't like them.

Nothing stops you from writing your own to-your-specifications launcher or SMS client or email client atop the openly-licensed Android stack (and leverage having an actually useful, widely-supported phone). People might even use your GNU-gold-starred alternative if it's more than barely functional, though the track record of said gold-starred software with regards to UX doesn't fill me with optimism. But I do wish you luck.
In the USA, old landline telephones all ran on (nominally) 48V DC, with the "positive" being ground, and the negative 48V "below ground". Telco central offices all have/had huge glass carboy lead/acid batteries, with giant copper buses running 48V DC all over the buildings.

It took me years of asking, but I finally found the right person, who told me that the 48V-below-ground negative meant that dissimilar metal corrosion is drastically reduced in telco "outside plant".
I think the reaction here is a little bit absurd. At first glance what I see is a revert due to a policy issue. Now, it certainly is a petty one, but having said that, I don't see any reason to believe that it is a result of the sexism issue in our industry. Of course there IS a sexism issue in our industry and I am happy to discuss it, but I just don't think that this one revert has any place as the centrepiece of that conversation. Rather, it seems like it is being used as an excuse to get angry.

EDIT: Likewise, I don't think this one commit can be used to make such sweeping generalizations about the node community as the OP is doing. Maybe the commit IS driven by sexism. There is still no evidence that it is the whole community that is responsible and that this is not an isolated incident.
How About Apple publishing their lawyer fees to prove $1100/hour is high?

Not going to happen. Why?
Seriously? 5 months to create a product (assuming you don't have anything right now, based on the not-existing pictures & the scenes from Iron Man as the product video)?

That won't work.

Also, what about 'iWatch'? It obviously features the iOS keyboard and homescreen.
"iPhone" is a specific example of something that might fit the case. I could've said "Nexus 4." Or "keys." Or "pack of gum." The idea was to add a little color by use of an example that's more easily visualized. Similar to the bits further down about a setting child on fire and farting in public. Just a little writing trick.

Maybe it would've been clearer had I written, "For example, if they have an iPhone..."
> This works the way secrets work in real life.

Hmm, no, it doesn't? Your analogy makes absolutely no sense.

If a party wants to make its connections private, then make it private from both sides of the connection. All Facebook has to do is fix this.
I think the postcards example hurts his argument.

People send postcards all the time precisely because for the most part they don't care about privacy in their mail. In my personal life I can't think of a single example where I sent mail that I wanted to keep private (outside of maybe mail that had my SS#). I think most people are rather indifferent.

"If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut"
The main function of the envelope is to tied a bunch of papers together so they don't get separated in the mail.
Disagree. The fact that he initially rejected the PR then subsequently tried to revert another commit shows he was upset at being overruled.
Snapchat's Evan Spiegel: Saying no to $3B, and feeling lucky
I have to ask - what games? We're months into a series of cut-throat games of Puerto Ruco and Power Grid (a new find). It's seriously competitive.
I think a better solution would be to select random gendered pronouns

This can work, and it's certainly good practice when one is talking about social situations, and is one of the reason that "Alice and Bob" are such enduring characters. It's probably less good when one is talking about computations, where gender (and, indeed, personhood) is just a distraction, unless we really do believe in feminine functions and masculine monads.

It also wouldn't have helped much in the original Github issue, where a single instance of 'he' was being corrected. Git's patch-oriented workflow is great for correcting local bugs but not so great for global things like "do we have the correct balance of pronoun genders across our codebase?". I think if you ever end up having to ask that question, something has gone badly wrong.
Why not using it ? What is the difference between us and a tree ?
I remember receiving that news alert on my phone at about 1:30 am. It was surreal.
Maybe 'bad' is not the best description for getting your point across in this case. I feel that the two of you understand differently what you tried to say.. 'bad' is quite emotionally charged for some (for someone it's directed at) and can distract from the discussion for this reason, and I think there are adjectives that do a similar enough job without this while still explaining what happens here from your point of view.
It will be interesting in a few years or months when, considering the publicity, I'm sure we'll hear from whoever get hired for this position.

If the person hired is also satisfied in the position, I suspect that will make no difference to the naysayers.

But it's not that easy for a company to keep employees happy. Many who pay market rates have mostly miserable workers. To me, a genuinely satisfied employee is never an example of a moral or other mistake by a company.
Bitcoin Miners Bundled With PUPs In Legitimate Applications Backed By EULA
The user calls the function directly? With what, a magnetized needle and a steady hand?
Recall that de-anonymization analysis is pretty effective these days. Even if you post under a made-up user name, there's a pretty good chance they can figure out who you are.

That's one reason I post under my own name; anonymity wouldn't buy me much anyway. Even in forums where I'm technically anonymous, I don't try hard to preserve any secrecy about my identity. It's more a matter of "There's a culture here of intemperate posts protected by anonymity, so if you notice me posting there, please also understand that I might be responding in kind."
The idea that the grandparent is saying anything bad about iPhone specifically is not present in that sentence and is certainly not present in the full comment. I think you should go back and re-read it, then examine why you chose to take this as an attack on a specific brand of phone when it's not even an attack on phones in general.