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Giving you more characters

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261–270 of 493 posts

Re: Giving you more characters

#261

Post by pls2halp »

athenot wrote: post #236
tryingagainbro wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure that after a well deserved break from such amazingly hard work, they'll tackle the next increase in characters. Their solution makes it look so easy, but it isn't. /s Does "Hail Mary ..." fit in 280 characters?

As a Catholic nerd, I had to check. Yes. :) echo -n 'Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' \ | wc -c 210

Depending on the translation(i.e. trespass is too long), the Lord's Prayer either fits or is a few characters too long.

Re: Giving you more characters

#262

Post by saghm »

Have they gone into any detail about how exactly they're going to enforce different limits for different languages? If it's by the localization of your browser/app, what's stopping someone from changing their language to English and then typing 280 Japanese characters? If it's by doing some sort of language recognition on the tweet, how will it deal with mixed content?

Re: Giving you more characters

#263

Post by jcahill »

Y_Y wrote: post #127
askvictor wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use code blocks for anything but code; they're unreadable on mobile.

I think you (and many valiant others) are fighting a losing battle here. God forbid HN should allow a quote style, that'd be so bloaty.

Nothing valiant about telling users not to use a standard feature. Double-plus anti-valiant to suggest prioritizing mobile over desktop.

Re: Giving you more characters

#264

Post by sytelus »

dragonwriter wrote: post #43
jsnathan wrote: post #30

I'm not sure what to make of this. I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc? Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it. I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 14…

> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition It was related to the core of their value proposition when that was “microblogging that can be updated and recieved over SMS”. Now, its just legacy.

It's hard to compress your thoughts and present it in limited time or space while still keeping its essence and power. This is why lot of tweets are iconic: They are presentation of very strong ideas and opinions in tiny amount of space. You can wear them on t-shirt or thumb it out on smartphone while using just few seconds you have. Larger char limit means diminishing of this quality from writers part and also higher cost from readers part. The 140 chars might be accidental limit but it was just the right balance given the amount of tweets that already exists and able to express intent in that much space.

Re: Giving you more characters

#265

Post by justinator »

wtallis wrote: post #217
gsich wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they could use a browser that displays stuff correctly.

The browser's displaying things just fine. The problem is forums that provide custom markup implementing an insufficient subset of what HTML allows for. In this case, HN provides formatting for blocks of code, but not quoted blocks of prose.

Oh, and HN is still using tables within tables within tables (within...) for their text formatting. I'm sure someone here will defend that. looks at calendar

Anyways, flying cars everyone! We're going to be the VC for flying cars!

Re: Giving you more characters

#266

Post by 482794793792894 »

c3534l wrote: post #224

It would seem to me that the solution to the problem described in the blog would be to reduce the number of characters allowed for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users. The whole appeal of twitter, I thought, was if you said what you wanted to say the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey. I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets p…

Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian symbols).

And then they point out that in Asian countries people tweet more, so alright, who cares about history, do what works best. But you shouldn't just be looking at how many tweets are written. People are going to post more, just because it's easier to post something. That doesn't mean that people actually read these longer tweets just as much. Like, there is a feedback loop here, people would also start to tweet less, if they didn't bother reading tweets, because many tweets are also responses to other tweets, but still, this reasoning seems quite a bit oversimplified.

Re: Giving you more characters

#267

Post by Kluny »

saghm wrote: post #228
NamTaf wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that sixty-seven has four syllables, twenty-five has three.

In the first verse, there doesn't seem to be any pattern to the lengths (in syllables) of the lines; 10, 7, 8, 8, 12, 8. I'm not sure the meter would really be damaged that much by reducing the last line by one syllable.

Sixty-seven has a completely different feeling than twenty-five.

Re: Giving you more characters

#268

Post by imron »

always_good wrote: post #157
baby wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this more and more. Why is there a recent trend to use codeblocks instead of > ? Is there a popular platform where codeblocks are quotes?

Because HN doesn't preserve line-breaks and `>` doesn't do anything. You'd have to double-space the entire poem which is just silly. HN should just preserve all line-breaks so we don't have to hack around it.

Or it could do what Markdown does and preserve line-breaks that end in double spaces.

Re: Giving you more characters

#269

Post by tootie »

pg_bot wrote: post #97

I'm convinced there is no one at twitter that understands why they succeeded as a company. Their management team continually makes decisions that are reminiscent of shuffling around deck chairs on the titanic. I get the feeling that they only exist due to inertia which is a death sentence for most tech companies.

No one in silicon valley will say the reason, but it's blindingly obvious. It was dumb luck. Luck plays a part in every success and failure and Twitter was about 98% luck. There was and is no vision or strategy that explains this. No lessons to learn. Pure zeitgeist that is bound to crumble sometime after Trump leaves office.

Re: Giving you more characters

#270

Post by hkmurakami »

482794793792894 wrote: post #266
c3534l wrote: post #224

It would seem to me that the solution to the problem described in the blog would be to reduce the number of characters allowed for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users. The whole appeal of twitter, I thought, was if you said what you wanted to say the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey. I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets p…

Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian symbols). And then they point out that in Asian cou…

In Japan at least, the anonymity factor was at least as strong as the information density factor (TWTR > FB for a very long time there because people there generally don't want to tie their irl identities to online accounts).
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