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Curious to hear your reasons for calling Red Hat a dark horse. (Which I presume is some kind of slur/holds a derogatory meaning)
by rbjorklin 10y ago
Curious to hear your reasons for calling Red Hat a dark horse. (Which I presume is some kind of slur/holds a derogatory meaning)
- bradyd 10y agoIt's actually not derogatory: "A dark horse is a little-known person or thing that emerges to prominence, especially in a competition of some sort, or a contestant that seems unlikely to succeed." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_horse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_horse
- champlinRyan 10y agoDark horse in this context means other companies unlikely to actually buy it, or win the bidding war. Its not any sort of slur that I'm aware of.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- halestock 10y agoPer wikipedia: "A dark horse is a little-known person or thing that emerges to prominence, especially in a competition of some sort, or a contestant that seems unlikely to succeed." In this case I would imagine it's because Red Hat is pretty tiny compared to IBM/Google/Oracle and could not put up a comparable amount of money for the purchase.
- ben_jones 10y agoDark Horse is the horse in the race nobody thinks has a chance of winning, but comes out near the front in the final seconds (surprising everybody). You could've just Googled it.
- IgneousPneuma 10y agodark horse just means not a main favored candidate
- mindcrime 10y ago"Dark horse" isn't a slur or pejorative in general. It's roughly equivalent to "long shot" or "underdog" or something like that.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mhurron 10y agoYou know what they say about assuming, except that it's not true; you just make an ass of yourself.
- dang 10y agoPersonal attacks are not allowed on HN. We've warned you about rudeness on HN in the past. Since you don't seem to have done it in a while, we won't ban you, but please remember that it's not ok and don't post like this again.
- dizzystar 10y agomy goodness, this is probably not a native English speaker, or perhaps never heard the expression before... why be so harsh?
- wtbob 10y agoNot understanding is fine: assuming that something one doesn't understand must be a slur is not fine.
- raarts 10y agoHe didn't assume but presume. And I think that's quite understandable for a non native speaker, given the connotation of the word 'dark'.
- selectiveshift 10y agoActually in this case presuming is not understandable, there is no evidence or reasonable grounds to support his statement.
- freehunter 10y agoWe are on the internet, and online dictionaries exist. There is no reason to presume or assume the meaning of a word when it can merely be looked up.
- dang 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624340 and marked it off-topic.