81–90 of 215 posts
This makes me wonder how much AI development is done for nefarious purposes. Someone's going to crack this and then they're going to have to make a more intelligent captcha system. Some day we're going to have strong AI and spammers will be thanked for it.
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I know this is not appropriate, but it made me laugh so hard. I'm trying to write as correct as I can, but the GP just proved that these mistakes happen to everyone, even the people that think that it might make sense. What about non-native speakers? Their point might be valuable, the participation in a discussion really help- and meaningful, but still - these now/know, there/their, you're/your mistakes are common. A…
I will agree with the others. Non-native speakers (such as myself) tend to pronounce the words more carefully, thus they don't confuse them as often. In my head, "then" and "than" sound totally different. Same with "they're", "their", and "there", "loose" and "lose", etc.
Probably this just proves that my accent is crap, but for me 'then' and 'than' sound about ~the same~, ditto for 'their'/'there' and 'loose'/'lose'. Again - probably I'm just missing something here. Improving my spoken English is definitely on the list of things I want to do..
So people who are detail-oriented grammarians are necessarily good commenters? Since when? The assumption here is that you can tell a comment is going to be stupid by testing whether or not the person understands homonyms. The only thing you check with that is language ability. I'd argue you'd be better off searching for common internet memes and cliches instead of original thinking -- since that's a sign of a lazy o…
They are homophones not homonyms - normally I wouldn't be so pedantic, but in a thread around the idea of people having prove they know meanings/spellings/etc, it seems suitible.
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*then
I know this is not appropriate, but it made me laugh so hard. I'm trying to write as correct as I can, but the GP just proved that these mistakes happen to everyone, even the people that think that it might make sense. What about non-native speakers? Their point might be valuable, the participation in a discussion really help- and meaningful, but still - these now/know, there/their, you're/your mistakes are common. A…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will agree with the others. Non-native speakers (such as myself) tend to pronounce the words more carefully, thus they don't confuse them as often. In my head, "then" and "than" sound totally different. Same with "they're", "their", and "there", "loose" and "lose", etc.
Interesting. I kind of replied to the first line in an edit above, but the second one intrigues me. Probably this just proves that my accent is crap, but for me 'then' and 'than' sound about ~the same~, ditto for 'their'/'there' and 'loose'/'lose'. Again - probably I'm just missing something here. Improving my spoken English is definitely on the list of things I want to do..
When I speak, of course, they sound identical, but my spoken accent is not the accent I think in.
He's missing this one Fill in the gap: a) it's b) its "The hacker got access to the server and killed ... processes" lolz
The problem with this one is that at one point in the English language's history (17th/18th century I believe), the correct possessive form of "it" was "it's", which is arguably more correct^. ^You make nouns possessive by adding a saxon genitive to signify the distinct possessive-izing "s" sound. The word "it" is also made possessive with this same sound when spoken, but for the sake of a contraction (read: abominat…
First, we weren't alive back when "it's" was used this way. Nobody currently alive was. There's no argument of "they're doing it the old way", because it's not even in living memory. As of the current standards, and those of the past 200 years, they are simply doing it the wrong way.
Second, it can't even be argued that they are confused because of the old way. Nobody accidentally writes her's, their's or your's. The reason people write it's is nothing to do with the possesive apostrophe, it's purely because of confusion with the "it is" contraction.
This makes me wonder how much AI development is done for nefarious purposes. Someone's going to crack this and then they're going to have to make a more intelligent captcha system. Some day we're going to have strong AI and spammers will be thanked for it.
First link I could come up with: http://singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com/pester-power...
Here’s my test for whether you’re qualified to post to Hacker News. Pair the following five comments with their corresponding definitions: 1. “Raganwald is a blowhard whose pathetic attempts to score karma reveal him as an insecure dweeb who can’t get over being kicked around in grammar school. He and his mumblings should be should be flushed down the toilet bowl like the turds that they are.” 2. “What, raganwald is…
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This sounds like a social signal, not a cause-and-effect relationship. You are not establishing that some quality of being an idiot causes someone to have poor grammer, you are saying that the ought to know their grammar “just because.” Your argument reminds me of the argument that someone ought to wear a suit and tie to work: There is no excuse for not knowing that a suit and tie is what people wear to work, and any…
You don't always need causation, sometimes correlation is enough. EDIT: To clarify, it doesn't have to be that stupidity causes bad grammar, but if bad spellers are likely to be bad commenters, that's all you need.
Establishing correlation without causation is a minefield, IMO, although each of us may come to different conclusions. Filtering people on the basis of correlation and not the primary attribute is discrimination. I doubt filtering a forum is illegal discrimination, but I’m uneasy about where that might lead me personally if it were my forum.
Giving a ridiculous example, at a certain time in history, correlation might have established that 90% of the people who used AOL to get onto the Internet posted idiotic things. Should all AOL users have been banned from forums? I suspect that many forums would have had a net positive benefit from such a policy, however the 10% false negatives disturb me greatly.
I would morally prefer other mechanisms for filtering the 90% out, preferably mechanisms that directly test user’s propensity to the “post idiotic things.” This is a personal view, and I can accept that others may not agree.
p.s. And then there’s the question of gathering actual data and not anecdotes. The worst way to proceed would be to claim that since we seem to remember that 90% of all idiotic comments contained grammar mistakes, there’s a 90% chance that a comment containing a grammar mistake is idiotic.