The use of man in this context is androgynous. It's merely an abbreviated use of "mankind," which is an abbreviated use of "humankind." I'm sorry if you're upset by this wording, but it's not inappropriate.
Note how all of the results are all about men and manliness, which is fine for gendered products and clothing, but doesn't really make sense for a piece of server monitoring software.
i think whats interesting is that people who use sentences such as "for the modern man" don't think about man as male at all and don't intend to offend anybody.
It's only picked out by the ones who feel oppressed by gender issues (which are often males defending females - in fact, genetics also makes us behave that way, ironically.)
Of course they don't think about, and obviously they don't want to offend, and that is why some good people point this out, so that people think about it and pay attention. Sometimes biases are so entrenched that we don't feel them. They feel natural, and therefore neutral. But, if you want to make a change, than it's precisely those seemingly natural things that you need to change.
You can keep using "man" or not, but I think it's helpful to pay attention.
Frankly, i think some people just like to complain about gender issues when there isn't much going on.
In some languages (ex: french), everything defaults to male-centric. Nobody cares or feels offended by it, and females have exactly the same rights as males.
Feminism isn't just about not offending people or giving women the same "rights" as men. You can make the (true) claim that blacks in America have the same rights as whites. But does that mean that there's no more racism? And even without the judgmental word "racism", does that mean blacks have the same opportunities as whites? I don't think so.
Feminism is about making sure women have the same opportunities as men not only by virtue of the law, but "on the ground"; that society doesn't gently (or not so gently) steer them in directions where they end up with less power than men; that they're no longer objectified and that female politicians are not called by their first names.
I'm not saying language can fix all that, or that it even matters all that much. It certainly matters less in cultures where feminism has had greater success. But it is a good place to point out how, perhaps inadvertently, we keep falling into the same gender traps. If you start thinking about your choice of words, language becomes less natural, so you stop treating it, and the culture it articulates, as "nature", and start treating it as the malleable social construct that it actually is.
No, you're right... it's not inappropriate. But really, something like "for the modern admin" is more appropriate and should be used. There is no need for the "modern man", so it should be left out.
The phrase of "modern man" was meant to contrast with old-school admins. For me, it brought up images of classic admins in server rooms either your straight-laced IBM types or your Berkeley Unix neckbeards. Take your pick, but they were both predominantly men.
> It's merely an abbreviated use of "mankind," which is an abbreviated use of "humankind."
"Humankind", "Mankind" (and "man" when used in a sense that is semantically-equivalent to the other two) are mass nouns that do not take articles ("the" or "a"). In the case of "humankind" or "mankind", using an article is just plain incorrect (consider, "one giant leap for the mankind" vs. "one giant leap for mankind"), whereas for "man" the use of an article can distinguish between the sense of "an individual adult male human" and "humankind" (consider "the story of man" vs. "the story of a man".)
So, no, in "for the modern man", "man" doesn't work as a shortened form of "mankind".
Only reason I didn't file a PR myself was I wasn't sure what the best replacement would be (dev? sysadmin?), but this should be easy enough to fix if they're amenable.
I agree with this. I know "for the modern man" is an idiom, but I think it's better to be overly conscious about this stuff. Would you lose anything by saying "for the modern dev"?
Have you thought of writing the metrics collection part (and eventually the whole thing) in Go? You would get the stand-alone distribution right away and would keep people from installing any extra dependencies.
We've clocked the CPU usage of the scout_realtime daemon at 1% on an Intel Xeon 2.40GHz CPU. Memory usage is around 22 MB. If you turn off the metric collection (by clicking the pause button on the web page), CPU usage will effectively drop to 0%, and you'll still be able to visit the web page and re-enable metrics at any time.
The word "manhole" is not a fair comparison. In that case they were dealing with an inanimate object. In this case, we're labeling any developer who would need this tool. Hence the inappropriate use of gender.
I'm assuming you're going to disregard their comment because of their gender? What does it matter what gender the parent comment poster is? They should have a voice too...
Ok, it's too late for me to edit, so please forgive my hastily aggressive response. What I meant by it is that it is easy to dismiss complaints about "one-sidedness" if things are tilted in your favour.
Look, I'm all for encouraging more girls in STEM, and all that.
My EE class mostly guys, and I'm sure we lost some diversity of viewpoints because of that.
However, let's just ask nicely once - and then leave it at that.
I would hate this to turn into another silly bike shedding flamewars on HN, where all the Social Justice Warriors come out of the woodwork, for their weekly feel-good topup.
That's the first thing I thought. Please, please change it. Things are difficult enough for women in technology without things like that. I don't care what the rational is. It looks awful, and I'd be embarrassed to show that to women at work.
Just change it to "modern woman" and shut everyone up.
That's the thing now right? Where the english language has left us with lack of a non-awkward sounding gender neutral term we just the feminine version and it's ok. I know, I know, everyone is going to chime in with their version of a 'non-awkward sounding alternative. But the person who wrote this, wrote it, it didn't go to the committee of HN, and that person wasn't out to offend anyone, so ya know, let it go, let live, all that... No? I tried.
The use of man in this context is androgynous. It's merely an abbreviated use of "mankind," which is an abbreviated use of "humankind." I'm sorry if you're upset by this wording, but it's not inappropriate.