Day: March 23, 2017

Definition of EQUITABLE

1. having or exhibiting equity : dealing fairly and equally with all concerned an equitable settlement of the dispute
2. existing or valid in equity as distinguished from law: an equitable defense

Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you hate about Quora as of March 2017?

So here’s the deal. I’m not writing any more answers for this site. I’ll watch. Maybe you can ban me for that. If so, fine. Blow me. If not, fine. Blow me.

Meanwhile, maybe you could let someone smarter than your whole brain trust put together — his name was Aristotle, you should look him up — offer a cogent gloss on your application of your policies. I will write here again if and when this site becomes “equitable” rather than what (supposedly) passes for merely “just.” Otherwise, this is not worth my time any more.

Victoria Weaver here has A2A’d me
to give a high school roster, drawn from peers
that on the roads of Quora wander free,
who I should learn from, were I back at school.
What manner folly this? I still have dreams
of being forced to reenrol in schools,
where I would fain not linger. Yet, I warrant,
if teachers such as these were at my beck,
the nightmare might be more endurable—
so long as I am spared exams, bologna,
jocks—and the whole high school “experience”.

For Physics is Sam Murray my fond choice;
by then they’ll have completed their degree.
And such infectiousness as they display
when speaking here of kink or drugs or love
would be the very physic Physics merits.

For English choose I Jordan Yates, of course,
a writer most insightful and engaging,
who is embarked on paedagogy’s road.
Drama, I fear, is taught not separately,
in my antipodean experience;
yet any pretext sees her take the stage.

I find that latterly Philosophy
is taught where I once studied. If the school,
however, is of religious predilection,
Religious Ed will be an offering.
For either, I can find no substitute,
either for dogma or for moral soundness,
better than one McKayla Kennedy.

Of Mathematics I no longer know
who is to follow and who is to teach;
to Uri Granta would I give the post,
just so I may have access to his teaching,
both well considered and encyclopaedic.

For Music, Comrade Weaver, I choose you,
for we have much within the repertoire
to wage debate on. You might also take
the subject on of Politics—before
you find a lovely bridge to shoot me under.

… Then I awoke from out my reverie,
and realised that such a happenstance
I have no need to ponder. Here on Quora
I get all that, and more—without a schoolhouse!

(And here, too, all cool kids are in detention.)

Speculation, but I’m assuming there’s a direct line from haxxor to doxx(er) to vaxxer.

Leetspeak, the affective use of creating spellings in hacker communities, has taken up the use of -xxor or -xx0r as a creative spelling of –cker; thus, haxxor for hacker. haxxor – Wiktionary. The duplication of <x> is an affectation. In fact the very use of <x> instead of /k/ is an affectation: it is misusing the plural hacks (hax) as the stem of the noun hacker (†hacks-er) instead of hack. The spelling haxx – Wiktionary is also used for hacks and hacking, and I’m assuming it is a back formation from haxxor.

dox – Wiktionary is the Leetspeak respelling of docs (abbreviation of documents) in the sense of “Documents, especially information sought by hackers about an individual (address, credit card numbers, etc.)”

When it came time to form a verb out of the action of seeking dox on someone, the spelling doxx – Wiktionary prevailed. I am assuming it was done by analogy with not just haxx (still a noun), but also the verb *to haxx implicit in haxxor. Hence why the noun dox is more often spelled with a single x, and the verb doxx with a double xx (although both spellings are used). And I think this was affective analogy; I don’t think you needed the intermediate step of doxx0r (document hacker) for that to happen.

Now, English has a longstanding spelling convention that when you add a suffix to a word ending in short vowel + consonant, you double the consonant to keep the vowel short. Sit > Sitter. Spam > Spammer. You could say that by analogy, dox > doxxer. But there was no use of xx like that before in English: box > boxer.

Nor am I convinced that the need to make the vowel before the <x> short played a role: I just don’t think leetspeak would have ever spelled baker as baxor, for example, so that you would need to spell backer as baxxor to contrast the vowels.

So what I think happened is that the –xx spelling of haxxor and doxx opened up the possibility of applying the consonant doubling rule to other verbs. Once doxx was in place as a verb, and haxxor was already there, it became easier for verbs ending in /ks/ to be spelled with an xx, and even more easy for –xer nouns to be spelled as –xxer—as long as they are analogous to doxx: that is, primarily used online and informally, and clearly abbreviations of of something else. In fact, the parallel of haxxor made it possible to go straight from dox to doxxer, without even positing an intermediate verb to doxx—you can just draw an analogy now with spam > spammer.

The adjective is anti-vax – Wiktionary. By analogy with doxx and haxxor, and for that matter spam > spammer (a rule now applied to anti-vax by analogy with haxxor): anti-vax > anti-vaxxer – Wiktionary.

No, you should report this as a bug, and Quora should fix it, because this answer from a Quora staffer in 2012 said this constitutes a bug:

Kat Li’s answer to Why does the Quora algorithm repeat the same question in the feeds?

Don’t use the bugs@quora email though. Apparently they don’t use that any more. Use “Report a Bug” in the fine print in your Profile menu.

Btw, Quora Inc.: do try and prevent your staff from using in public the in-house word story for answer or post.

What would be a bug is if the same story showed up in your feed

I’ve seen story used on the Quora blog pretty recently. Your users (remember them?) are not exposed to your in-house jargon, and it’s not like you onboard them even with the stuff you expect them to know.