Live data from Hacker News

Giving you more characters

blog.twitter.com

301–310 of 493 posts

Re: Giving you more characters

#301
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People could just use > like the internet has for ages: > In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. > When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. > Late at nig…

Well it's a poem, so each of the verses being represented properly, matters.

Usual shorthand is to separate verses with /

Of course, the effect is best when the poem is laid out properly (which sometimes includes using indentation). But using slashes is better than alternatives like using commas (which is ambiguous, since a comma can mean a pause or clause boundary within a line)

Re: Giving you more characters

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint." I don't believe this is correct but rather 140 characters limit was chosen because SMS will break a message greater than 160 characters into two messages. 140 characters leaves 20 characters for a username.

Well, it's correct in that 160 characters was chosen from a German (I presume, possibly English/"European") viewpoint, for sms...:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-...

Re: Giving you more characters

#303
post #141

The irony is that both Biz's [1] and Jack's [2] tweets announcing the change could convey the same message with a third of the characters. In fact, they'd be better written. The need to carefully think, rethink, edit, and reedit your tweets so they fit in the limit lead to much higher quality. [1] https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009 [2] https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824

example of how it could be better written in 140: https://twitter.com/brianrbarone/status/912788388150960130

https://twitter.com/DocPop/status/912799932829929472

Re: Giving you more characters

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's a parody, but why after a decade has Twitter not figured out a way to avoid giving the trolliest of trolls such exposure? It seems like 140, 200, 280, or 500 chars is the smallest and least of their problems.

For whatever reason, they do not look into impersonation reports at all. Their team is too focused on deciding the content of people's speech that it doesn't care about their actions.

They let David freaking Duke onto their platform, I think you can't accuse them of being censors beyond blocking active threats and harrassment.

Re: Giving you more characters

#305
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…

They found out that Japanese Twitter users don’t run up against the character limit, and are less frustrated as a result. The point is to make everybody else less frustrated, not to make the Japanese as frustrated as everybody else.

Re: Giving you more characters

#306
I remember reading the story of an ex-twitter employee who was not very happy about innovating with "140 characters". People learned the art of crafting content with 140 character. Many of the reply-to-self and 1/2 tweets are going to be history. So does people write on the notes, screenshot and share. I believe it's more about building a better graph with more content intake, than giving voice to express. Twitter is always a tool polished by its users and several inventions made due to constraints. Let's see how people are going to take the 2x tweets.

Re: Giving you more characters

#307
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe I'm writing this, but given the current modes of political communication in the US longer tweets may prevent nuclear war...

Indeed. If you recall when Trump announced his transgender ban on the military, he had a ten minute delay between part one and the actual subject of the message. "After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow....." During those ten minutes, even folks at the Pentagon were wondering if Trump was about to announce a strike on a for…

I thought he was going for something along those lines, then somebody got through to him and so he ended it up with something nonsensical, hence the delay.

Re: Giving you more characters

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At least the GP used short lines... I hate those single-line code-blocked long comments. A gift for you: https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmVARCKc4tqh82csydiAQ2JVmvvKeckm...

eternum.io looks really interesting and like something that can help move ipfs into mainstream.

Re: Giving you more characters

#309
post #33

In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-…

Great poem. And what I like about HN is that the first dozens of comments on the poem are about technicalities like how it is displayed in the browser, the mathmatics of it etc., not its interpretation :-)

Re: Giving you more characters

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 !

My understanding is that YC doesn't want to break scrapers.
Post reply on HN