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English is the main language in countries widely spread around the world, and is widely spoken as a second language in many others.

Even people from non-English speaking countries can speak English.

Why are you stumped, what does 'global' have to do with language?

I subscribe to a global streaming service of Hindi content.

Hacker News is global and English-only

It’s to do with the sound, not the letter. “User” is typically pronounced “yoozer”, with a leading consonant sound, so it’s “a user”.

There are all kinds of cases where this reveals interesting things about how someone pronounces things.

An American will speak of “an herb” because the h is still silent there (“an ’erb”), whereas an Australian (and most other English dialects) will speak of “a herb” because it’s no longer silent.

In the KJV, 1 Kings 10:29 gets two in one verse, speaking of “an horse for an hundred and fifty”, showing that in the English of the early 1600s, you had “an ’orse” and “an ’undred” by pronunciation, whereas all major dialects now sound the h. (For reading aloud, I personally say “a horse for a hundred and fifty”, having decided that a/an are the same word just with context-dependent spelling and pronunciation, like “the” has two context-dependent pronunciations (“thuh dog” versus “thee elephant”, likewise based on the next syllable’s sound), though they’re both spelled the same way.)

If a Rust developer writes “an &str”, they’re probably pronouncing it “an ampersand str” or “an and str”, but if they write “a &str”, they might be pronouncing it “a str slice” or “a reference to a str”.

Yes, but it's based on the word's pronunciation starting with a vowel sound, not the word's spelling starting with a vowel letter. In the word "user", the 'u' is normally pronounced as 'yu', which starts with a consonant; therefore the correct phrase is "a user", not "an user". Contrary to ReactiveJelly's speculation, this is true in both American and British dialects. Perhaps there is some other dialect where it isn't.

I'm guessing/hoping you're able to click on those comments once you make an account and login... either way though I agree it's a silly restriction.

I read it and still don’t really understand what I am seeing.

It could. Right now, they've got about the same amount of support, so it wouldn't even matter much. (Though the caniuse stat is kind of misleading, since you wouldn't see the scrollbar on mobile anyways, and a large part of the non-support is coming from Safari on iOs)