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Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

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Re: Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

#181

Post by carlmr »

gruez wrote: post #179
carlmr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can make it more fair by pricing UTF-8 bytes. 你好吗 = 9 bytes how are you = 11 bytes

not really. according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roadmap_to_Unicode_BMP.sv... , any codepoint bigger 0x80 (second half of the first box) is 2 byte per character, and codepoint bigger than 0x800 (anything past the 8th box) is 3 bytes charater. so while it might be fair for CJK languages, it's even less fair for languages that don't mostly use the latin alphabet.

That's true, considering the name of the website they would have the privilege of an even more expensive chat.

Re: Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

#182

Post by billpg »

stakhanov wrote: post #154

It's such an obvious idea, and it has been around for as long as spam e-mail has been a problem. I absolutely do not understand why it has not yet been adopted for all e-mail traffic worldwide. If an e-mail were to cost just one cent, it would never add up to an amount that a normal person would even notice, yet it would solve the problem of spam e-mail over night.

Where would the money go?

Re: Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

#183

Post by dragonwriter »

deckar01 wrote: post #177
ultraluminous wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question and not some MRA trolling, but how is that demeaning? How would the etymology of English pronouns would be demeaning to anyone?

The etymology of "woman" is very demeaning. It literally means "wife of man" or "servant". https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman

> The etymology of "woman" is very demeaning. It literally means "wife of man" or "servant".

Your own source disagrees with you; while it does say that it came from a word formed from “wif” plus “man”, “wif” didn't mean what “wife” means now but what ”woman” means now, and “man” meant what “person” means now (which is among the current meanings of “man”, too.)

The literal meaning of the compound is “woman person”. It's true that the compound “wifman” was used both for “woman” and “female servant”, but it's worth noting that the modern English word “man” includes among its meanings (and has for centuries) both “male person” and “male servant” (the latter being most commonly used preceded by a possessive indicating whose male servant is being referred to), so that the old “wifman” was a pretty exact equivalent of the modern “man” ignoring the (semantic, not grammatical) gender neutral senses of the latter.

Re: Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

#185

Post by TACIXAT »

cbhl wrote: post #156

I'm reminded how, last year, at work, they changed the length limits on performance reviews from characters to words. They found that character limits resulted in men having more room to express themselves than women -- "she" is longer than "he"; "girl" is longer than "guy", and "female" is longer than "male". Twitter also has interesting per-country dynamics because it uses a character limit. In Chinese or Japanese,…

I don't get the performance review thing, do people talk about themselves in the third person? I guess for peer reviews you would have less space if you were reviewing a woman, but it doesn't make sense for talking about yourself.

Re: Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

#186

Post by SaidinWoT »

jMyles wrote: post #170
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ I also find it culturally interesting that basically every female descriptor I can think of is more characters than the male counterpart.

That's because most of them are modifiers "wo"-men, "fe"-male, etc. Which really is pretty demeaning if you think about it. Over the years, there have been efforts in feminist and academic circles to introduce alternate spellings that are not derived this way. [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn

They've certainly come to appear that way, but in female/male (and, to a lesser extent, woman/man) the etymology is distinct.

Female comes through Old French "femelle", which ultimately traces back to Latin "femina" (where we also get "feminine", et al.).[0] Male comes through Old French "masle", derived from Latin "mas" (from which we get "masculine").[1]

It does appear that the ultimate transformation that aligned their spellings _does_ come from the many-centuries-old belief that they shared a common root (see the article on "female").

Woman was indeed a modifier on "man", originally "wifman", but at a time when "man" was almost exclusively in the sense of a human being (e.g., "mankind"). Prior to that, the sexes were "wer" (as in "werewolf") and "wif".[2] A couple centuries after "wifman" is first attested (around which time "werman" was also present), "wer" died off in favor of "man" and we ended up with the roots of our modern words.[3]

None of this to say that people should not continue evolving the language - the modern connotation and perception is far more important in informing how things continue to change. Just hoping to point out that the words actually _weren't_ derived that way.

Your point does, of course, still stand in the facts that "female" was modified to resemble "male" and "wifman" remained when "werman" died out, but this doesn't seem (to me) as demeaning as the idea that they have always been modifiers of the words referring exclusively to male humans.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/female#etymonline_v_5841

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/male#etymonline_v_42792

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman#etymonline_v_10826

[3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/man#etymonline_v_6766

Re: Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

#187

Post by skofgar »

stakhanov wrote: post #154

It's such an obvious idea, and it has been around for as long as spam e-mail has been a problem. I absolutely do not understand why it has not yet been adopted for all e-mail traffic worldwide. If an e-mail were to cost just one cent, it would never add up to an amount that a normal person would even notice, yet it would solve the problem of spam e-mail over night.

But I still receive spam mail in my (physical) mailbox. I imagine they're not doing that for free either.

I agree with you though, it would probably still (drastically) reduce the amount of spam we have to deal with and we might still get some very specific targeted spam

Re: Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

#188

Post by [deleted] »

jMyles wrote: post #170
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ I also find it culturally interesting that basically every female descriptor I can think of is more characters than the male counterpart.

That's because most of them are modifiers "wo"-men, "fe"-male, etc. Which really is pretty demeaning if you think about it. Over the years, there have been efforts in feminist and academic circles to introduce alternate spellings that are not derived this way. [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

#189

Post by [deleted] »

jstanley wrote: post #5
marc wrote: post #3

Hi all. About 2.5 years ago I created Highscore Money. I was looking at pay-to-play games and wondered what would happen if you'd take it to the extreme. The result was just a leaderboard you'd pay your way into. Whatever you pay, that's your score. Today, I'm launching a new social experiment. A chatroom where you pay for every message you send. Normally chatrooms can get messy quick, because there's no cost to send…

What makes this a social experiment rather than a simple cash grab? Are you donating all the money to a charity?

[deleted]
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