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Lead image is in pretty poor taste; so I was just told by a female. Aside from that, what developer thinks, "Hmmm, I need to add analytics, let me see what Fac

• orasis 7y ago
  If you’re doing ads on Facebook you have to use the SDK to optimize for in app actions.
• yesbabyyes 7y ago
  An aside, but I see this a lot on HN: > so I was just told by a female. What does "female" connote (not a native speaker)? To me, and translated into my language, it sounds like you're talking about a pet, a dog or some other animal. "Oh, it's a female". Translating it to eg Swedish or French, it sounds really weird, whereas the respective word for "woman" would sound normal. Is it different in English, or is this more a quirk of this forum/certain subcultures?
  • timthorn 7y ago
    No, it sounds weird in UK English too, unless as an adjective applied to a larger ungenered group. Eg "My female colleagues" sounds fine, as does "a woman I work with"
    • yesbabyyes 7y ago
      Thanks, that's pretty much how I would express myself in English. In Swedish, the words for "manly" and "womanly" ("manlig"/"kvinnlig") can be used for that ("my manly colleagues" would typically be understood as the men among my colleagues, rather than the most bearded/musky/etc among them). Now let's hear from a US English native!
      • mtrower 7y ago
        U.S. English native. This ("a female") sounds just fine to me. My friends or I might talk this way amongst ourselves(and no, I'm not talking about an all-male, socially mal-adjusted circle of friends). It's not what you'd call 100% standard mainstream English, but it's no so far outside the norm that I'd think twice about it either. While it's probably not how I'd teach a non-native to speak, I definitely wouldn't read anything into its use here, either. Chalk it up to subculture, I suppose, as suggested earlier.
  • BigJ1211 7y ago
    No it sounds just as cringe in English (at least UK English) as you highlight for Swedish/French. You wouldn't say "so I was just told by a female.", you would say "so I was just told by a woman." or an example of when female wouldn't sound (as) cringe "so I was just told by my female colleague". I don't think it's a HN quirk, you see it on certain subs of reddit as well. So it's probably more of a subculture thing, it could also be that from certain languages translations to "A female" make more sense, but I'm not aware of what that/those languages would be.
  • scarejunba 7y ago
    No one says "a female" in English if they're even mildly socially adjusted.
    • chooseaname 7y ago
      That's not true. I'm very socially adjusted. But thanks for the attack, anyway.
      • scarejunba 7y ago
        It's not an attack on you. I just assumed you weren't a native speaker. For English native speakers, it's definitely a weird way to speak.
  • chooseaname 7y ago
    It just means that I'm not. People are reading way more into it than they should.
    • yesbabyyes 7y ago
      That's great--it seems to me we both learned something valuable today. Thanks for the learning opportunity!