Navel gazing is the best way to convince yourself that things are going great and to give you that boost to keep working on the project. At some point you will probably look back at this and think it was nothing to brag about, but it doesn't matter because you're having fun and enjoying the feedback loop between you and your users -- this is a good sign.
Gender identity is actually a quite tricky topic and should be approached carefully. I would discourage anyone from trying to use this library, the real world doesn't fit neatly in your multiple-choice view of gender. For more information, please watch this great talk: http://vimeo.com/61172068.
The number of bytes in a sprited file can be smaller than the sum of the bytes of each file individually. So the best option might be to inline the sprite :)
There is a statistical margin of error. They will need to make many such predictions. Also, the act of predicting an event might cause it to become more or less likely to occur.
The real reason it's for hackers is that it uses Git and the command line to manage it. It may not be "hack-ery" enough for you, but it's certainly not software non-hackers are going to use.
| For all the talk of freedom, this is disappointing.
You're incredibly naive then. Freedom comes from the license. You can fork and modify to your heart's content. This is how open source freedom works. If you think you can do it better, then do it better in your project. Rails is not some sort of public good that belongs to the people. It is a project that people work very hard on and then give away. And for anyone to suggest that they should not get to decide how things work on the thing that they give away free of charge and for modification is both ludicrous and makes you sound very ungrateful.
Successful projects are successful because the leaders do a good job. They're good at listening, good at saying no, good at rallying support, and good at working with their users and their team. Your vote is with your shoes.
There's no "gradual creeping" or "ad-hoc" language features being added "on the fly". We spend a lot of time thinking about what features are included in Sass and most feature concepts do not get added.
Feel free to write your CSS in ruby, it would take less than a week to whip up a DSL for CSS, but good luck trying to get a designer to use it ;)
What if that weight was empirically determined by an algorithm instead of by a human, would it make it OK or should Bing hardcode in a demotion to that google-based data source?