I wonder however about the opposite effect. I think it was Bertrand Russell who said that boredom is an essential part of doing good work and learning to accept it an important part of getting good at something. If we make things too easy, flashy and fun for kids there is, I fear, the likelihood of setting wrong expectations, which will in short order sabotage the child's interest and effort.
However, that's not a necessary criteria. Substitute "he" for some other term, say "white person", and I doubt you'll see the need for a specific member of the excluded segment to speak up.
The real argument is around the second part of your comment. Which can be recast as whether male as the default gender, when used in texts, is a matter of concern for the development/opportunities of women. I think so. Along with salary differences, etc. We do not have to reach to Simone de Beauvoir to make that point... here is a link to a current analysis/view: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/gender-sensitive-langu....
Quote:
> Moreover, these issues are important for people concerned about issues of social inequality. There is a relationship between our language use and our social reality. If we “erase” women from language, that makes it easier to maintain gender inequality. As Professor Sherryl Kleinman (2000:6) has argued,
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> [M]ale-based generics are another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which “man” in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women.
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> Words matter, and our language choices have consequences. If we believe that women and men deserve social equality, then we should think seriously about how to reflect that belief in our language use.
There is a reason to call out Sandberg. The reason is to point out that this "mainstream" practise is unjust. And that the market should not set the criteria on decency.
You could say that "call[ing] out" Sandberg is unjust to her because, as you say, big banks do it too. However, (a) the injustice, in concrete material terms, is negligible in comparison to the lives of those working without pay, and (b) this logic, it seems to me, would suggest that all prosecution of individuals is fundamentally unjust unless one is able to round up each and every similar violators.
I suggest @jlgaddis's responses highlight an important distinction between "offensive" (the word used by @sjtgraham) and "racist". While it is always a good rule of thumb to seek not to offend, often we might waive that to aid humour or to bring out a point. In this case I suspect the OP (OC?) was trying to mock (in turn to highlight the uniformity of the Apple leadership team), by clever reversal, the common occurrence of some white people's inability to differentiate between people of other colours (I am brown, my sons at school are frequently referred to by names of other Indian kids, some who have graduated and left the school 3-4 years ago; that's hardly racist, or even offensive, especially in comparison to the lack of women and minority in positions of leadership and power).
The argument (like all "nobody is entitled" arguments) is self-defeating. If others are not to whine about X, what validates the author's whining about such others? What the author offers is an explanation of why corporations offer and revoke features like APIs. I think that is fairly well understood. That does not answer why others should not complain when that happens ("such is the world" is not an answer). It is as much a tactic of businesses to use pressure to open up APIs as it is a tactic of other businesses to offer or not offer them. What the spurned group are doing is really is making an appeal to the users of LinkedIn, etc, who are the "owners" of the data. Perhaps the author does not really wish to lecture others on entitlements, but means that such complaining is not effective. In which case, some data would help.
I was about to suggest iCloud, but it does not support some features that may be of interest to HN type users: in particular, "email personalities" - the ability to send outgoing email through the iCloud SMTP server using any of your various non-me.com email addresses.
There is much talk of honour systems and social contracts. None of us sign a literal social contract; it is a way to name an arrangement of affairs that we semi-willingly enter into (if you buy into it; on the other hand you may not: a baby born dependent on the world has neither the ability nor the wherewithal to enter into contracts - but that's another debate).
Sam can be seen to be acting as an agent of those in the periphery of the social contract, those who participate in it not because of mutual gain but because of implicit or explicit threat. The central question, IMHO, is one of what their claims are on our moneys (or social experiments). Sam quotes Mill and (again IMHO) legitimately raises deeper ethical considerations. In that sense, Sam's experiment is a deeper and significantly more interesting version of the original one, and the results (including the response) deserve examination - at least once the built-up rage is spent.