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Comment by gilrain

5 days ago

Nobody said it was.

The article strongly implies it is a response to a comment complaining the blog is not inclusive because it uses British English.

There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm and we should all adjust our language to fit their definitions and culture. I intend to keep eating faggots, having a master branch in git, etc.

  •     > There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm
    

    You write it like it is a moral flaw in American culture. This cultural phenom isn't special to the United States. In my personal experience, any country with a large population suffers from the same: Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, India, China, etc.

        > having a master branch in git
    

    This is a weird cultural battle to pick. In the 2010s, when renaming the git master branch was at its cultural zeitgeist, none of the Americans that I worked with did the rename. It was always someone not from the US who would raise the issue on a team call. It happened so many times that I asked a few of them why they did it. Almost all of them told the same rough story: They say a "nerd news story" about the trend, then did a little bit of reading on Wiki to learn about the cruel history of slavery in the United States. Motivated by this, they decided to do the rename. All in all, pretty wholesome stuff. Never once was it some weird social justice warrior type of bullcrap. But anyway, you do you: Keep rockin' the "master" branch in git.

  • "There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm"

    This is now far more than an American assumption. I have seen younger continental Europeans bristle at UK English because they grew up in a world of social media that is converging on usage that is closer to US English.

    • Real question: Post 2010, are there any non-English speaking nations that get most of their English language media from the UK? Since everthing went online after 2010, I assume US has the highest influence (linguistically) only because of "mass". Dear UK readers: Please don't interpret my comment that UK language culture is somehow inferior. HN knows and loves UK humor!

  • When I read "inclusive", my mind jumped to accessibility, in that colloquialisms can be difficult to understand for a subset of people with autism (and other conditions), and also that they translate poorly when run through a translator, for those that do not speak English at all.

  • Equally, I doubt there was a single Brit involved in RFC 2617 Section 4.3 (for example).

    • Translation for en-US speakers -- Trump is an example of a nonce, as is his buddy - formerly Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

    • I don't understand the reference. I looked it up here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2617#section-4.3

          4.3 Limited Use Nonce Values
      
          The Digest scheme uses a server-specified nonce to seed the
          generation of the request-digest value (as specified in section
          3.2.2.1 above).  As shown in the example nonce in section 3.2.1, the
          server is free to construct the nonce such that it may only be used
          from a particular client, for a particular resource, for a limited
          period of time or number of uses, or any other restrictions.  Doing
          so strengthens the protection provided against, for example, replay
          attacks (see 4.5).  However, it should be noted that the method
          chosen for generating and checking the nonce also has performance and
          resource implications.  For example, a server may choose to allow
          each nonce value to be used only once by maintaining a record of
          whether or not each recently issued nonce has been returned and
          sending a next-nonce directive in the Authentication-Info header
          field of every response. This protects against even an immediate
          replay attack, but has a high cost checking nonce values, and perhaps
          more important will cause authentication failures for any pipelined
          requests (presumably returning a stale nonce indication).  Similarly,
          incorporating a request-specific element such as the Etag value for a
          resource limits the use of the nonce to that version of the resource
          and also defeats pipelining. Thus it may be useful to do so for
          methods with side effects but have unacceptable performance for those
          that do not.
      

      Can you explain your (assumed) sarcastic remark?

      5 replies →

  • But being non-inclusive by speaking to a particular cultural reference frame is not the same as being racist.

    • I agree, but some people seem to think it is, which i think what the article is a response to: just just in the comment, but in the wider push to use certain language.

  • > I intend to keep eating

    Wait, isn't that a cigarette? Why would you eat it?

    edit: nevermind, it's actually meatballs, the short version is for cigarettes