And if you get any news from bbc.co.uk or read British bloggers you'll get accustomed to sports teams and corporations being considered plural. e.g.: "Apple today are releasing..."
Well it's accurate, a corporation isn't an individual and when you're dealing with big business it is always controlled by multiple people so any decision is decided by a group.
No, you're wrong. The concept of corporate singularity started in the 1600s in England.
From wikipedia:
In the late seventeenth century, Stewart Kyd, the author of the first treatise on corporate law in English, defined a corporation as,
"a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual, particularly of taking and granting property..."
Noticed this too, but I think grammatically he used "are" in the inclusive sense that everyone at techcrunch
_is_ full of sh*t. therefore, if you work their... it must be so.
I can't see why you got down voted. That was my first thought when I read it. I reread it 5 or 6 times until I decided that I must be missing something.
TechCrunch = a corporation
A corporation = a legal person
Singular, not plural!
Probably because his comment isn't interesting, isn't relevant, and doesn't contribute to discussion. There are all kinds of true but uninteresting comments one can make, but making them shouldn't be encouraged.
Edit: I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but actively discouraging uninteresting comments is what keeps the signal:noise ratio high here.
Exactly. However, once upon a time, this site also had a tradition of not downvoting people all that much for comments that were simply a bit inane or misguided, rather than actively trolling or flaming.
I'd like to concur on that. I was a bit surprised when I got -4'd for stating that a website ad caused trouble on Opera (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491583). Perhaps I sounded harsh as well, but still, the goal was just to help...
Just look at how much chatter it created for something not relevant. Perhaps it's off-topic, but it was interesting to hear HN's views on what is and isn't correct.
Very true. Proper grammar is important, and this forum is as good as any place to clear up any questions so that mistakes can be avoided in the future.
>Techcrunch has been on the inflection point of "mattering" to the wider public, which scares the life out of me!
Your pants must be very soiled. Did you know that the wider public reads tabloids as well? Did you know that they read gossip rags? CLEAN UP IN AISLE GSTAR!
- Doesn't have original content
- Isn't that focused on startups anymore
- Tends to focus on the nerdy extreme of the startup spectrum
- Doesn't have nearly as broad an audience
Sorry, I love HN, but let's not get carried away with ourselves.
You don't have to have the same form as something in order to replace it. I don't think the number of breaking stories has any effect on the quality of HN.
Agreed, more emphasis on 'breaking stories' means that there'll be more fake 'breaking stories'. Look at tabloids, the more news they 'break' the better they sell and now everything is outright lies.
I enjoy that there isn't a race to "scoop" other HN reader-contributors as it stands now. There are plenty of outlets who live or die on scoops, and there will continue to be.
I (obviously) agree. You might see some reticence to post here though, as TC is a bit of a cabal and nobody with a public profile wants to shake the cage.
I have a public profile, and long ago dismissed TechCrunch as one of the least intelligent blogs on the Internet. The writing is bad, the content is boring, and now we know it's not even correct.
Frankly, I'm disappointed by this thread. HN's audience is supposedly smarter than your average Internet crowd. But all I'm hearing here is cheap bashing of the target that everyone loves to hate. Can anyone do better and post an intelligent comment that addresses the topic?
Again, TechCrunch is not boring. One of its strengths is not so much the "breaking news" aspect, but the tongue-in-cheek or tell-it-like-it-is.
In many news organizations, politically correct has removed any spark of interesting content. Not at TechCrunch. It's news with an attitude. You may or may not like the attitude, but at least there's one.
[disclaimer: you can accuse me of bias because of my company connections to TC, but it also means that I got to see some of the behind the scenes and I learned a lot doing so]
If people didn't like Techcrunch, they wouldn't go to the site. If Techcrunch was irrelevant, they wouldn't generate massive leads for pet projects that people create.
There was an article a week or so ago about how people were complaining every time Techcrunch posted a story about some Twitter application. The author of the article wrote back in protest basically saying, "well if you don't like the articles, don't comment on them."
Techcrunch generates buzz. They're good at it. I may live in a hole, but I didn't really hear about Last.fm until Techcrunch posted that story. Last.fm got a pageview from me off of that story.
And personally, I don't really care about TC's opinion. I'm smart enough to make my own judgment. But until they report it, I have little way discovering new companies.
I agree - Although the quality may be slipping, I still find the site useful enough to check it out daily in my news/info gathering routine in the mornings. If something interests me, I'll read the full post (which is becoming rare now days).
A while back I had sworn the site off because of link baiting headlines and the fantastically smarmy tone of some of the stories, but hey, there is still an occasion nugget or two.
If people didn't like Techcrunch, they wouldn't go to the site. If Techcrunch was irrelevant, they wouldn't generate massive leads for pet projects that people create.
these points are both true, but they don't alter the fact that Techcrunch is also full of shit.
If they are, why do people post TC articles on here every few hours?
I typically don't advise people to read articles that are full of shit.
I think people who whine about TC articles and think they are full of shit are in the minority. Their fan base seems to be growing rapidly. You can't impress everyone with your writing. And besides, TC is a blog. I think you're entitled to say whatever you want, even if its full of shit.
TechCrunch is awful, but there's no excuse for the spit in the face incident. I don't give a damn what lousy, fabricated article TechCrunch might have published to precipitate that. It's disgusting and totally uncalled for.
Don't treat Arrington like some soulless mythical creature. He's a real person. He's susceptible to being offended enough to get pissed off at people and to rant even when he's been in the business for a long time.
Can you imagine how low you'd have to be to fake an incident like that just to get a few hits? Arrington has his faults, but he's not a showboater.
(Also remember that this article was posted while he's taking a break from TechCrunch entirely. Don't blame him for this story.)
I don't think that anyone is treating him as a "soulless mythical creature", I am interpreting this as people viewing Michael Arrington as a person of low morals/values.
There's a tendency to assume that people that aren't you are heartless and will do things you never would do yourself. That's very rarely the case. In this case, assuming Arrington would make a huge drama for nothing, claim somebody did something they didn't, and leave the scene just to get some hits is treating him like somebody who's a tad inhuman.
yes, but don't you think if someone spit on you, that you would have at least chased them down to kick their ass? I mean the guy must have been pretty close to land a hit.
I've always found statements like this baffling. In my school there was very little picking on. The kids who did one thing did their thing, the other kids did the other. The whole era of bullying disappeared when we all turned 14 or so.
Mike is running a start-up. I can respect that. He sacrifices a lot of quality to be the first man on the scene: I don't like that, but I'm impressed as hell at his track record. He has a history of being a socialite and a bit of a jerk, neither of which I like, but at the same time that doesn't make him a bad person, just a person period.
I spent my high school life fiddling with computers, writing, and talking to teachers, and I had incidents of bullying myself. The whole "picked-on pickers-on" idea is a false dichotomy.
Well, what would you answer aggression with, then? Some aggressors may be turned aside by reason, but what about those who just, for instance, dislike your face? If you're not in a position to flee the situation, what are you going to do?
I just ignore stuff like that when it happens. I've been lucky enough never to have to be in a situation where I've had to do anything more.
I got my black belt when I was something like twelve, though, so if necessary I'd do what I had to then get away. But I don't like the thought of violence: I'd never find it necessary. People drop things if you ignore them.
We have to agree to disagree here. There are people who take reluctance to fight for weakness. And even if you are really the turn the other cheek sort, what if you are not the one being threatened, but someone close to you? Would you still find violence unnecessary then?
Right now you're espousing rampant paranoia. First you suggest that he would make up a story like this despite no precedent on his part at all. Then you say that the proof is that he didn't react violently to somebody spitting on him. Then you say that he's stupid for not doing that because the spitter might have been HIV-positive.
I live in a world where people are innocent until proven guilty, people are all generally trying to do the right thing, the average man on the street doesn't like physically hitting other people, and most people don't have deadly diseases, and that the ones that do don't spit.
I believe you are correct. I have no clue whether vaksel is American, but I do think Americans (I'm one) have absorbed--been fed?--a fair amount of hooey about HIV transmission and how to be "safe." Keep in mind, if you're old enough, AIDS was/is "that gay disease" and something quite a small number of injecting druggies were getting--as the "need" for a War on Drugs was building. I'm sorry to report, Americans are a fearful lot.
If you absolutely KNEW that someone had HIV and they spit (say) into your mouth, wouldn't you worry about it at least a little bit? Even though you know it's silly?
I think most humans are irrationally fearful about things like HIV.
I don't know if it really happened. I don't much care, either. But if I remember correctly, the title of the article in question was 'Some Things Need to Change'. That's hardly linkbait.
The linkbait accusation is also a little odd coming from someone who submits practically every linkbait TechCrunch article that shows up in the RSS feed.
Don't people realize that more than one person writes for TechCrunch. Erick Schonfeld was the sole author of the Last.fm TechCrunch article. Arrington had nothing to do with it and is still on vacation.
<i>TechCrunch is awful, but there's no excuse for the spit in the face incident.</i>
that's silly. I swallowed some water but there was a fly in the water somehow, it was wriggling, so I reflexively spat and your face just happened to be there. that's just one of many great excuses for spitting in somebody's face.
more seriously, there might or might not be any excuse for it, but if you thought it was anything but a matter of time, that's unrealistic. the appropriate response is just blogging that they're full of shit, but inappropriate responses still fit in an overall system of cause and effect.
I think the idea is that in order for your startup to succeed, you need TechCrunch to like it. The spitter probably got a bad review.
(Anyway, I don't think this is important. Very few people with money to spend have ever heard of TechCrunch. Their opinion mostly matters in the VC echo chamber, not in the real world.)
Overall, not a bad deal for TC, I'd say. Checking on the twitter stream shows that there's a lot of RT of this headline - which will only serve to spread TC's name around. It may be bad in the long run, but they may be able to issue some muted apology, patch things up, and restore their standing. More coverage, etc.
Of course, with MA's combative personality, it may go slightly differently, but it's probably a net positive for TC. Sadly enough.
Yeah I'm guessing most people on twitter already know about TC actually. Heck most of them probably first read about twitter on TC - they post enough 'twitter' stories there.
The most disappointing thing is that the TC writer is clinging to his story. After a complete denial he is still trying to suggest there is some truth in the rumor.
"Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either."
Is his last word on the matter. Essentially he is saying they have denied it but his "rumor" may even still be true.
That smacks of a lie somewhere along the line to me (and as it is my job to find lies I suspect it is the case). :)
I have the same problem, I just don't approve of 'style' when it comes to writing. There are lots of personal style and it does amazing, but there are company style guides and printing houses all have different ones.
I have a serious problem using '...' in writing unless it's from the person's mouth. I always learnt if someone says something directly to you then use '...' and if it comes indirect you use "..." so all novels should use "..." because it's fiction and was never said. Yet so many printing houses have gone away from using "..." and have switched to using the quotation form '...'.
I'm unsure why I get worked up over this, I guess I just think it's stupid so few people have control over how the masses perceive the English language. This is a prime example, in the US most institutions use 'is' in this situation, to such a degree that 'are' looks bizarre and the opposite happened in the UK.
The same is with 'ise' and 'ize'. Using 'ize' is so prevalent in the US that in many words the letter S is being supplanted with Z in situations it's not supposed to be. The prime example is how analyse is incorrectly spelled (even in spell checkers) as analyze and I'm sorry but it is technically correct to substitute the suffix 'ise' for 'ize', however analyse is a complete word without suffix, it's not discussing anal.
Style is not a matter of control, it's a matter of consistency. There are many, many areas in English where there is no clear rule as to what's "right", so to ensure consistency style guides make explicit what a given publication will do in that instance. Numerals for example, are often written out one through nine, but digits after that. Others will always use digits. Neither is "right", but consistency matters.
As for the quotes, I suspect you'll need to unlearn that rule. I'm not even sure how you got there, except perhaps by misunderstanding the rules for nested quotations, Eg:
"She was absolutely furious, she shouted, 'I hate you' and then ran off," said John
(If it helps any US readers to understand the British usage of plurals, think about the police. You wouldn't write "Police says it has arrested two suspects, but it is still hunting for two more", right? That dissonance is exactly the same as how US usage of the singular, particularly when it comes to music groups -- "U2 says it will tour in the fall" -- sounds to Brits. )
Either is correct in American English, but it may violate a style guidelines. It generally hinges on whether you consider Techcrunch a group of people or a monolithic entity.
like most people who post here you need to read Paul Graham's early work. professionalism is harmful to quality of work and especially so in startups. professionalism is an artifact of the industrial revolution and is not relevant in all fields. computer programming is to some degree post-industrial and professionalism is irrelevant and archaic for many programmers. criticizing a programmer for being unprofessional is like criticizing him or her for not being well acquainted with the phases of the moon and the effect those phases have on that programmer's crops.
rubbish. it is easily possible to be professional and produce excellent work. it doesnt have to be stuffy and haughty that's all :)
(and yeh I read his early stuff: not a fan. At every stage in a startup you have to get to a stage where you need to show some professional gloss to prove your not just another backroom programmer - IMO it is the core reason why a lot fail, they cling slavishly to that "fun guy" image and lose corporate custom because of it ;))
@the previous poster: I wouldnt call it unprofessional per se. Empassioned perhaps :D
That's just Google giving prominent placement to something they see as breaking news. It'll disappear in a week or so, then reappear somewhere much lower in a few more weeks as it's normally indexed by their crawler picking up links and rebuilding its graph.
Techcrunch has been on the inflection point of "mattering" to the wider public, which scares the life out of me!