You've clearly never been on the internet before. That image is already linked on thousands of sites. I'm assuming you'd say this exact same thing if I posted tubgirl or detroit hardcore?
This is not 4chan. I don't know what Tubegirl or Detroit Hardcore is and based on context I don't think I want to know.
Human life is is precious and that man was someone's son, possibly someone's husband and god forbid also someone's father. He was a person and he was loved by someone.
A web browser failing to render a gradient background properly, a few minutes of --IF IE-- hacks will never add up to anything even beginning to approximate the loss in that photo.
NSFW as a tag clearly has some room to fudge with cheekiness. Maybe it's an exposed boob or even a particularly racy cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.
There is also a point where it crosses the line into something very different.
In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart tried to explain
"hard-core" pornography, or what is obscene, by
saying, "I shall not today attempt further to
define the kinds of material I understand to be
embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . . "
I understand that you must feel slighted because you seem to be desensitized to this, and apparently other images of death and dismemberment. I'm sorry if my response has hurt your feelings - but your post is obscene and inappropriate.
Further to the disregard for the pain of the individual in that photo, you're also carelessly exposing individuals who have suffered similar losses in their lives to very painful memories.
And, how would one learn how to make their own tools, languages, and operating systems? You have to build them to learn how. So how does one build them without ever having built them?
I agree :) and yes, but apparently because I spelled itself like it's self they were too stupid to read the article. Funny how many of these people can read code, but can't figure out what I meant from it's self.
Thanks! I don't read Hacker News often and when I heard the article was here and 2 of the top comments were about my grammar I thought "and that's why I never read Hacker News". I was actually excited to see some discussion around the subject matter. I was pretty disappointed by all the talk about my "engrish".
100% agree and a point I was trying to make. This whole thing was a response to a reply to a comment I made. I had made a comment that the library they were doing a tutorial on was stupid because it could be done better and I could do it better. They then told me not to reinvent the wheel since it was already done by "geniuses". But yes, exactly.
I use jQuery, but I usually write my own plugins. Id never been able to write a library like jQuery on my own, or in any reasonable time frame, but I can write a slideshow for example in the same amount of time it takes me to find one that works for the project, read through the docs, read the API and implement it. But to some, and some past clients, thats stupid and im "reinventing the wheel."
I said, and mean "Reinventing the wheel is what makes good developers legends, not the other way around. Remember that." And i never said i hate what it means, ever. I said I hate when people say it as a bad thing.
1. This was a response to a reply from a comment I made on a blog.
2. My grandmother has a Ph.D in linguistics and knows probably a dozen languages. Boy would it be hilarious for you to talk to her. I can't even mention how many times I've talked to her about how spelling and grammar doesn't matter as long as the point and idea is conveyed and UNDERSTOOD. She's even against spelling out of things like "though" and apostrophes altogether.
3. If my blog post put you off this much because I spelled "it's self" instead of "itself" and had grammatical errors when I was in a hurry to write a response to someone, don't read it.
4. Not saying I'm even 1% as smart as him, but saying my thoughts are disorganized is a compliment. Einstein and some of the smartest people of all time have failed at writing/english and always been known as "disorganized": http://25.media.tumblr.com/b9vfl4b63gnm701hGDPaIVP0o1_500.pn... -- his desk. Organized people bore me to death.
I'd like to address your third point right off the bat, since it's the most important one: I didn't read your blog post. I stopped reading it after you spelled "itself" as "it's self". And, just like you said, it's because your grammar put me off. It's not that big of a deal to me, and shouldn't be to you, if you never intended anyone to read your post except for the person you were replying to. But if that was the case, why put it on a blog? If you want your blog posts to have the widest possible appeal, you should use standard spelling and grammar. It looks better, and it's easier to understand. No matter what your opinions on the relative importance of grammar, things like readability and aesthetic appeal matter. And if your work is not of a technical nature and is being published for a wide audience - like this blog post - they matter even more.
I'm not sure what to make of your point about your grandmother, since I'm sure you're aware that there are plenty of people with Ph.Ds in linguistics who would disagree with her intensely. I'm sure that a conversation with her would be interesting, and she might even change my mind, but the fact that she has a Ph.D wouldn't factor into it at all. My personal opinion is that spelling, grammar, and other elements of style are extremely important. The way that something is written has a major affect on the way it is received by the reader, and slight variations in word choice and spelling can change the actual semantic meaning of a sentence.
Using the "itself"/"it's self" thing as an example: Their meanings are not identical. "Itself" is often used as an apposition, which is how it would have been interpreted in the context of your sentence. "Its self", on the other hand, puts extra emphasis on the "self". Someone might legitimately want to spell it this way to emphasize both the phrase and "its self", which would be the phrase's characteristics. It doesn't read as an apposition, though, so the meaning is different. This gets right to the heart of what we're talking about: Using incorrect grammar has changed both the stylistic emphasis and the literal meaning of the sentence in such a way that makes it harder for the reader to understand. The reader shouldn't have to reconstruct what you meant to say out of what you actually said. (And, in any case, it would never be "it's self". Even following your grandmother's grammatical rules, you should have cut out the apostrophe entirely.)
As far as disorganized thoughts, that's fine when they're in your head, but when you put them on paper, you have to organize them. Organizing thoughts is what language is for.
Sorry for the looong post, but I wanted to make sure you understand me. I don't mean to attack you personally, but that seems to be how my comment was interpreted. A criticism of your writing is not a criticism of you. The main point I wanted to make is that style matters. It really, really, really does. I know you didn't necessarily mean for your post to climb to the top of Hacker News and get this level of scrutiny, but I hope you found the feedback useful. Don't take it too personally when someone criticizes something you write; it's just an opportunity to improve.
Listen, you're still missing the central issue here. "It's" and "its" do not mean the same thing. Not even close. It's not like the distinction between "less" and "fewer" noted in the Stephen Fry video, where there's some sort of reasonable gray area in the usage. "Its" is a possessive form of it. "It's" is a contraction of "it is". So, this is what you wrote: "The phrase it is self is flawed."
Which is wrong. Full stop. This isn't being pedantic about grammar or usage. You used the wrong word. That's not something that you can defend from any kind of fortress of linguistic theory.
And, yes, we could figure out from the context that you meant to write "itself" or "its self". But we could also figure out what you meant if you wrote, "The phrase itsalf is flawed." The fact that we can decipher your writing is not the point. You weren't trying to employ creative, heterodox language here. You simply wrote the wrong word. And I think that you know that. You went back and changed it, as you would go back and change any other typo after it was pointed out to you.
If you changed it, why defend it? The correct response is, "Yeah, I wrote this in a hurry, and I used the wrong word." Don't get all umbraged and whatnot. Just fix it and move on.
