Random note about accept-encoding that might have been corrupted by my memory: at some point in the past wikipedia was blocking Googlebot due to it hammering their servers. Some debugging revealed that Googlebot's accept-encoding header was different than browsers and so it was missing the wikipedia cache. (Wikipedia heavily relies (relied?) upon a caching layer because their pages can take like two full seconds of CPU time to render otherwise.)
The kinda awful fix was to add support for the compression variant nobody uses (deflate?) to Googlebot so that its accept-encoding header matched the common one.
It would be ironic if adding this header to Firefox wrecked their page load performance for wikipedia!
Everything has unfortunate connotations in some context. If I wanted I could come up with a number of reasons to feel insulted but that's not my thing.
I thought the principle you and the other poster were arguing for, was to minimize conflict. In the case of "bro" the conflict arises from a feminist critique of the word's usage in the context of a male dominated industry. In the case of the menorah, the conflict arises from the political controversy of the state of Israel, and its relationship to the Jewish community[0]. I don't have a problem with pro-Feminist websites or anti-Feminist websites, I just think it's professional to avoid stirring up debate with terms or symbols that would likely offend people with a particular viewpoint.
Perhaps you think the feminist viewpoint in this case is objectively correct and therefore deserves more consideration. In that case I would counter that the pro-Palestinian viewpoint is objectively correct. But my original argument was neutral on this issue.
[0] A relationship usually asserted to exist by the supporters of Israel, as is the case here.
I'm not a compression expert at all, but I've read about ANS a few times lately, and I wonder whether an ANS variant of Brotli might be an even better choice.
“I received a series of 'bro' jokes in response to my posting about this new feature.”
This proves that the name “bro” actually has significant meaning for many people, some of which find it a bad thing. This would be unnecessarily distracting, so it should simply be replaced with something like br, btl, bli or bti.
Save your outrage for when the solution actually has a downside of any significance.
> “I received a series of 'bro' jokes in response to my posting about this new feature.”
But this is not the part why people are pissed. If this would be the only reason then everybody would be fine, but before your quote the guy wrote:
> "bro" has a gender problem, even though the dual meaning is unintentional. It comes of misogynistic [...]
And this reasoning is just tumblerlina-SRS-gamergate-outrage-bullshit. People are not pissed because of the change of the extension but by the ridiculous reason given in the bug report.
They should have just stated that ".bro" might result in acceptance problems in large corporate culture and everybody would have understood this. But stating that .bro has a gender problem is just crazy.
> Save your outrage for when the solution actually has a downside of any significance.
In cases like this, much of the outrage stems not from dissatisfaction with any particular solution, but from people being offended that the concern was taken seriously at all.
That said I think the current trend of limiting not just insults but whatever can possibly be construed as an insult by anyone, -that might not be a smart move in the long run. Especially as some people seems very good at getting insulted.
While I usually am peeved by this type of thing I think it's probably wise to avoid setting off stupid people if you can.
That said, the commenters stereotyping of "bro"s as misogynist is offensive in and of itself. I know MANY bro's who treat women with respect. Stereotyping any group of people is hurtful and wrong.
That's exactly the point of Tim Minchin's song about the power of the language of prejudice, about a word with a terrible history of being used to abuse, oppress and subdue: just six seemingly harmless letter arranged in a way to form a word with more power than the pieces of metal that are forged to make swords: a couple of G's, an R and an E, a I and an N... [1]
Thanks for the spoiler! Do you really think there's anyone here on Hacker News who wouldn't get the joke without needing you to explain it to them?
The point the song makes is relevant to the conversation, and the song's well worth listening to even after you spoiled the surprise, if not just for Tim's facial expressions.
I posted the link because I believe his humor is a relevant path to enlightenment, not just an end to itself.
Are you suggesting it's good manners to reply to all the jokes on Hacker News and preemptively explain them for people who aren't native English speakers, and it's prejudiced to be against that? (That's a rhetorical joke. Please don't reply and explain it.)
And him giving the detail allows all the people who can't right now look at a video a chance to understand your point, and I don't see how the explanation detracts from the argument.
No. Disagree with the first part. At least where I live girls have had an advantage all the way through school at least since I was a kid which means at least more than two decades.
That shows a bunch of places where positive discrimination is not legal, and a few where it's tried, but none of them mention that it happens in universities.
