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Comment by killjoywashere | Hacker News Reader

So, sounds ... foreign, and probably not government sponsored. Are there any US free agents hunting Chinese, Russian, Israeli, French, etc hackers?

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> The hacker claimed to have “over a million data” [sic]

‘Data’ = plural of ‘datum’ according to the weird native-English tradition where people import entire grammar rules unchanged from other languages, long dead ones at that. So, the hackers used the word properly for the region, while Techcrunch was confused by this! Glorious mess.

The problem in the usage is that most native speakers use 'data' not as a plural, but instead to identify the continuous stream that is comprised of datum, and therefore as an uncountable.

Of course they do, as they should. Still too often there are annoying shits around waiting to dump the “it's ‘these data’, not ‘this’.”

Have I mentioned that using plural forms from a different language is arbitrary and stupid? All widely-used languages borrow words from others, but they bend the words to their grammar, not the other way around.

> annoying shits around waiting to dump the “it's ‘these data,’ not ‘this.’”

Calm down. They're not hurting you.

> All widely-used languages borrow words from others, but they bend the words to their grammar, not the other way around.

I don't think that's true. For example I don't speak Maltese but I read that it has completely different grammar for Arabic and Latin derived words.

Didn't English even used to have germanic-derived plurals (like "oxen") and Latinate ones (adding -s) coexisting until it took some time to mostly converge on the latter? English is a messy language to claim grammatical purity on, it is the product of some notable clashes of very distinct people.

When I was in school they really hammered it in that data was plural. If you didn't write something like the data are or the data show that'd be a red circle on your report or paper. It was a common source of lost marks for the class. Presentations too.

It was a big deal at least to our teachers.

It always did and still does sound funny to me though.

It also seems to be different in the computer science world compared to the the biology world. I see data used as a singular far more often in the context of computers than I do with other branches of science.

Treating "data" as plural very often seems like education flexing. There is no need to say "these data"/"this datum" in a normal conversation other than showing off the number of papers you have written or read.

According to Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/data#usage-1), both are correct.

> Data leads a life of its own quite independent of datum, of which it was originally the plural. It occurs in two constructions: as a plural noun (like earnings), taking a plural verb and plural modifiers (such as these, many, a few) but not cardinal numbers, and serving as a referent for plural pronouns (such as they, them); and as an abstract mass noun (like information), taking a singular verb and singular modifiers (such as this, much, little), and being referred to by a singular pronoun (it). Both constructions are standard. The plural construction is more common in print, evidently because the house style of several publishers mandates it.

I wasn't even thing about that. I was looking more at the larger pattern of speech here: "We hacked more than 1,000 sites,” said the hacker. “Now we are structuring all the data, and soon they will be sold. I think something else will publish from the list of hacked government sites.”

Long dead? Tsk, Latin is in ur courtrooms, making ur laws... de jure ac de facto.

not to mention scientific names for things. some named ages past but the tradition continues. i think i know what he/she means though

Alea jacta est

An Asterix and Obelix fan? :D

Foreign? Why? I didn't see any indication of that in the article, beyond what could be regular typos. And it's not like the US doesn't have its own fair share of disgruntled and/or greedy people capable of something like this.

No one says "over a million data" in English, though it is arguably grammatically correct. Together with the typos it strongly suggests a foreign speaker.

> I didn't see any indication of that in the article, beyond what could be regular typos

part of standard OPSEC is to run your typing through an anonimyzer tool. Hm thats not the colloquial names of those tools

Basically something to reduce the fingerprinting of how you write. Often times it makes you seem to have bad grammar, but some of the tools can intentionally give you the profile of a Russian person that learned English as a second language.

gives you an easy scapegoat to get away with the hacking, and gives the investigators an easy scapegoat to mask their incompetence

Yes. but they are officially not agents they are contractors, usually "retired" from an agency.

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