After getting tired of scrolling (which reminded me of this http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h... where you scroll through vast distances to appreciate how far apart things in our solar system are) and noticing the huge headings separated by large vertical whitespace, I had an idea: since the headings are so huge, I could just zoom way out and see and read all the headings!
Unfortunately, the page outsmarted me and as I zoomed out, it somehow figured out I was doing this and increased the font size so it's the same size it was at 72 points when I was at 100% zoom.
Well, all right web designer. You "win". The amount of effort you put into defeating my efforts to read your content is astounding.
You would rather have to press the right arrow key 50 times? I find it to be a whole lot faster to scroll quickly through content rather than forcing me to click through every single damn slide.
EDIT: It is interesting that the vw/vh units don't take zoom into effect, I hadn't thought of that. Interesting.
Scanning through the content (going from slide 5 to slide 20) is far faster with scrolling, at least with Apple's trackpad and OS X's scrolling inertia. Maybe it doesn't work as well on other devices.
But it is useful to walk through each slide with a keypress, so I'll probably add that feature as well. I want both.
I hate to pile on, but I also find this incredibly hard to read. The problem is that the precision with scrolling one "slide" down is very hard to get the same every time. Clicking a right arrow guarantees one click, one slide, whereas with this UX I'm constantly scrolling, then reading, then scrolling, then reading, and it's enough to make me not want to read the content.
I feel like this is a misbehavior in browsers' zoom function, though the effect is the same. Does anyone know if the standard actually requires this quirk?
Alright so looking at the comments we've got one person complaining about the naming of the framework, one person complaining about the argument of sexism surrounding the use of the word "guys" in a gender-neutral context, one person complaining about the UI of the blog itself, and one meetup recommendation. (And now we have one comment complaining about the other comments, BINGO!) Nice work HN!
James, thanks for the informative talks - I hope we can continue to push the bounds of React Native and succeed in making it an obvious choice for developers in the future. For anyone who hasn't tried it, I highly recommend giving it a shot for any new app you work on. There's a lack of Android support at the moment (it is about 5 months from release I believe), but at the very least you'll speed up your iOS development significantly. It's hard to justify native development now (for me, as a non-iOS dev) when you can, for example, create a camera view in React Native with a single line of code.
Thank you! I don't really care about poor comments (I've come to expect them), but the only thing that makes me sad is that it triggered HN's "controversy" mechanism and dropped the article about 20 places in a few minutes. When an article gets more comments than votes, this kicks in.
I just wish people and companies would get over this "react(ive)" naming fetish. It reminds me of back in the late 90's when everything was Web-this and Web-that. It makes the distinctions really hard to google for. React, reactive, functional-reactive, etc. Overloading gets in the way of learning and progress.
To be fair, the term "functional reactive" was invented by Conal Elliott and Paul Hudak back in '97 [0] and has merely been co-opted recently by the "reactive" buzz. Which is a shame since genuine FRP is quite a bit nicer than most modern bits and pieces still.
I don't see the complaint. It's "React", not "Reactive" — even though React is inspired by principles from reactive programming, it is only tangentially related, and I don't see how it can be construed as an instance of fethisism, or how you could possibly find it so offensive.
You can interpret the name in any number of ways. UIs are all about "reacting" to user input and data changes, for example.
> As a non-native speaker, isn't "guys" a correct term regardless of the gender?
"Guys" can be used in both a male-gender-specific sense (for which the female-gender-specific rough equivalent is "gals"), or in a gender-neutral sense; there is no structural way to distinguish the uses. Like most places in English where a word has both a male-gender-specific use and a gender-neutral use, the latter is somewhat controversial with certain groups, who prefer unambiguously gender-neutral terms rather than dual-use terms that can either be male-gender-specific and gender-neutral.
To elaborate a bit on why it's considered controversial, I recommend this article by Douglas Hofstadter, from Metamagical Themas: https://books.google.com/books?id=o8jzWF7rD6oC&pg=PA152#v=on... . It's a pretty rigorous treatment of a pretty weird issue, and it's got pictures!
To roughly paraphrase: If "guy" means "man or woman", and "gal"[] means "woman", the two words we actually have are "person" and "woman". The implication of that should be unsettling to anyone who doesn't truly believe that women are a distinct group from the general, male, population.
It's regional and context-specific. On the U.S. coasts, "guys" is considered gender-neutral when used in an address (e.g. "you guys" or "guys, listen to this"). It seems like depending on region it might be the case that "guys" can be broader (e.g. "Facebook guys" being gender-neutral), although personally as someone who grew up in the Northeast that sounds non-idiomatic to me.
There's been some linguistic research that shows that men are more likely to interpret "guys" as neutral than women, although unfortunately I don't have a link.
Some people prefer not to use the "guys"-as-gender-neutral slang even on the coasts both because it sets male as default and because it can be misinterpreted by people from other parts of the U.S. and the world. Personally I've stopped using it unless I'm actually addressing a group of dudes.
I have used "guy" in the past and now make a conscious effort to avoid it.
There's no need to create an implicit bias when saying something like, "We'll need to recruit some Python guys to deal with this." Just use "people" instead. (Unless you're referring to the guys in the men's room.)
As is usual with communication, the answer of "who creates the resulting effect" is "both the speaker and listener, not one or the other". Particularly, in this case, the speaker's contribution comes by choosing a term which has both a male-gender-specific and a gender-neutral sense rather than something unambiguously gender-neutral.
Are you defining ambiguity by the number of people who report to have each interpretation? I suspect if you asked 1,000 American native English speakers (I don't know about English in other countries) how they interpreted that usage of "guys," the overwhelming majority would respond with the gender-neutral interpretation. Even among the people who are offended by the potential male-only interpretation, I suspect that for most it would be clear that they actually did understand the speaker's intentions.
This is a matter of some controversy. There's pressure to shift away from using it in gender-neutral contexts, but there's certainly no broad agreement.
Folks is a classist, and refers to commoners, which might be considered offensive to those in the audience with aspirations, as well as to those in the audience in the upper class.
Note, that was slightly tongue in cheek, but this is apparently what we do with words today... find some way in which they could be considered offensive, and then immediately begin to take offense at them.
While I understand that there are indeed legitimate reasons to encourage people to choose their words thoughtfully, I can't help but wonder how terrible life will be when choosing to take offense at the innocuous becomes more prevalent than simply choosing not to take offense. The latter is, I believe, the more enlightened path.
And if you asked them, "Hey guys, raise your hand if you use the web" you'd get men and women raising their hands. "the guys" != "guys" in this case. The word is very - or awfully, depending on your point of view - ambiguous, and can be used in a gender neutral/ambiguous way, like third-person plural pronouns in other languages.
Well, duh, that's because you used it in a non-gender-neutral way. If you said, "hey you guys, raise your hands", then that is way more gender neutral. Like all of language, differences in meanings can be subtle. They can also depend on where you are from.
it is a correct term, however it is not gender neutral. unfortunately, english doesn't really have a good gender neutral set of pronouns, so you have to make due.
Meanwhile in the real world everyone, including women, addresses a group of people as 'guys' - even a group that's entirely women. I'm not saying this is right or wrong but saying it's an aggression against women is a bit much.
There's malice and then there's perception. One could certainly look at just about any colloquialism without intended malice and draw "microaggression" from it.
Knowing where to draw that line is not - nor has it ever been - universal.
You're literally describing what microaggressions are: Small interactions, any one of which is harmless and without ill intent, which accumulate over the course of the day, week, or lifetime as an atmosphere of pervasive discrimination which is completely invisible to those responsible for creating it.
Microaggressions are insidious precisely because they're so innocuous; they let well-intentioned people participate unwittingly in systemic oppression that they would never consciously support.
If you're noticing yourself get a bit defensive about this idea, forget the word itself and just frame it like this:
You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words. So when you're around people who have really different life experiences than you, how do you make sure you don't cause harm without meaning to?
ag·gres·sion
əˈɡreSHən/
noun
hostile or violent behavior or attitudes toward another; readiness to attack or confront.
Aggression is, by default, defined by intent, not perception.
> You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words. So when you're around people who have really different life experiences than you, how do you make sure you don't cause harm without meaning to?
This was my point about there existing no universal set of social rules. So when someone says "don't say X, it's offensive," I have a tendency to look at that as more a matter of latter-day Tumblr cause celebre than anything real.
As a matter of brutal honesty, when someone tells me that X is offensive to them, I respond by not doing X anymore. I don't accept wide swath rules about such things and apply them universally, unless I observe them with any frequency in the wild. If we all cast that net, communication would be extraordinarily difficult and language impossibly rigid and uninteresting.
Microaggression is a term of jargon, as Google would have happily informed you. Its root word, not its synonym, is "aggression". Microaggressions are by definition not intended to hurt, or they would be, you know, aggressions.
That's an important concept, because it augments your theory of mind with this fact: There are things that you do, from time to time, that hurt other people in ways too small for them to complain about. For the most part, these things are random and not worth the effort to try to predict and avoid. And no one would ever call out one of these things as offensive, because taken individually, they aren't.
But certain individuals, and certain groups of people, are "randomly" subject to that sort of thing far more often than others. Your barely-hurtful word is a barely-wet raindrop in the ocean of hurt that defines their world. And certainly you can't do anything about their ocean, but maybe, sometimes, it could be worth your effort to not participate.
Basically, I'm not trying to give you rules to follow. I'm trying to suggest that the world does have patterns, and the way to relate to patterns is with rules. So please, make your own rules, but don't reject the whole idea-- or else live in a world you understand and fit in to a little bit less.
To be fair, I responded within that sibling, even before this response.
I will reiterate, though, that it's impossible to capture or represent the feelings of a large group with a one-sized-fits-all rule. Whether I accept them or reject them depends exclusively on the reality of the situation and audience.
I apologize! I did in fact not mean to be curt, and I felt so bad about that that I edited in a more complete response that you will hopefully prefer :)
Great, and now you've edited so that I look like the crazy one...
The word isn't really my issue, although I cannot argue it's poorly constructed.
My issue is the idea that one person or group can universally dictate that "X is offensive to Y." That's an impossible thing to do, and it has a side effect of dictating what's offensive instead of responding to what's offensive.
I have no horse in the SJW goings on, but my casual observation has been that there's as much creation of social taboos as there is attempts to raise awareness of existing ones. In either event, a one-size-fits-all approach is misguided.
It's definitely a crappy word out of context, and the defensiveness is probably to be expected. Who are you calling aggressive!...
On the other hand, it's routinely frustrating when especially technical communities, full to bursting with misappropriations of common terms, seem especially unable to see past the letters in a word to its meaning in context. Maybe we just intrinsically don't believe that other areas of inquiry could be so complex as to need their own jargon...
One problem is that most fields accept that their jargon is in fact jargon that folks have to learn. Some chunk of SJ folks don't, which is dismaying because it ignores educational privilege.
That's a good point, though I don't think it's such an uncommon thing; think of the beginning programmer who has to be laboriously convinced that the first definition they learned for "type" or "function" is not the meaning of that word.
I'd speculate that true appreciation for jargon comes more from multidisciplinary studies than anything else, so in any field the most passionate, least experienced members are likely to make a mess of things-- and if there's one thing the activist community has in surplus it's members with a high passion:experience ratio.
Having acknowledged that issue, I'm still reluctant to excuse anyone in this case, simply because we're talking about a term that doesn't have any other meaning. If you see a word you've never heard before, and think "I can probably figure out what this refers to based on its sounds" with Google sitting right there, naah, the problem isn't the jargon.
Edit: Like, seriously, would this happen if the word was "microclimate" or "microevolution"? Yeah, on the YouTube comments, but not usually on HN.
> You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words.
I don't like the weaselly binary assumption here. You are implying "You are either a well-meaning person or you are not." That's an unbelievably narrow (and, honestly, childish) view of human interactivity. It also implies that you alone hold a monopoly on how "well-meaning" is defined and that it is your sacred duty to impose that doctrine on others.
You're basically attempting to confuse people into accepting your moral ethos as a candidate for common assumptions of what "well-meaning" should be.
This is underhanded and not well-meaning at all.
Perhaps you should try avoiding causing unnecessary harm with your words next time.
'You are implying "You are either a well-meaning person or you are not."'
I think that's appropriate, actually. That you've defined well-meaning to encapsulate more people than it does is probably the core of the disagreement, but I think it's fair to say that most people are well-meaning, but not all people are.
Comparing and contrasting "almost everybody" to "Ann Coulter", and I think it's easy to draw such a distinction. Most people are simply trying to communicate without deliberately pissing everybody off, while Ann Coulter gets pretty decent play out of pissing people off for the hell of it.
That said, your point on "well-meaning" being an arbitrary distinction holds, though I would assert that if more people assumed good faith until proven otherwise, we wouldn't find ourselves being offended by every little thing.
Huh, I don't get it. I'm being really sincere here; I want you to think seriously about what it means, to you, to be kind to others, and then change your use of language -- or not -- however you see fit.
But that message didn't even get past the firewall. Instead you decided to elaborately deconstruct what is probably the least presumptuous part of what I wrote, as a way to impute some contrived ulterior motive to me, as a way to not engage with what I was saying, at length.
I guess I don't see what you're hoping to get out of this interaction at this point. Like, okay, you don't need to think about how your words affect other people... if you really don't want to?
If you think pronoun accuracy is a primary concern regarding women in tech, I'm going to guess you have never seen a woman in tech. They are far more concerned about memory leaks and pointer management.
Nope. A guy is a man, multiple guys are multiple men. Gender-neutral equivalents: people, folks, team, friends, colleagues, you all (and various similar regionalisms - yoounz, y'all). Good on him for making the effort.
I'm not sure who gets to prescribe what the word truly means. Descriptively, the plural is used overwhelmingly to refer to a group of people regardless of gender.
Unfortunately, the page outsmarted me and as I zoomed out, it somehow figured out I was doing this and increased the font size so it's the same size it was at 72 points when I was at 100% zoom.
Well, all right web designer. You "win". The amount of effort you put into defeating my efforts to read your content is astounding.