111–120 of 215 posts
What is the output of "date -u +%W$(uname)|sha256sum|sed 's/\W//g'"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There's no excuse not to know common homonyms and misspellings. Would you consider dyslexia an excuse, or English as a second language? Or even semi-illiteracy? I think it's definitely possible to be very clever and still not a good speller, and not bother to double-check on an Internet forum. Einstein was notorious as a poor speller, which suggests he didn't double-check himself.
English as a second language is not an explanation for the "your/you're" errors which are generally sheer ignorance. Ignorance and IQ are certainly different. But IQ is generally measuring "problem solving ability", and when to use a contraction is a problem. If one is very clever, one tends to have that particular problem solved. But, whether the misuse is from inability to solve the problem, or a choice to not solv…
I see what you did there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thanks for a good point. 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 h…
Those who miss nuances of thought and logic are often the same folks who miss nuances of grammar. It's a skill one can learn. Using that as a membership filter would be no different than forming a programming group and restricting it to programmers.
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…
Very measured writing about yourself.
Copacetic shield.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I beg your pardon, I was trying to crack a funny. It seems it is impossible to parody an extremist belief without somebody mistaking it for the general article. I was attempting to parody the fundamentalist debating pedant point of view. Poe’s Law strikes again: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law
I'm disappointed - I think your idea is brilliant (although I wouldn't go with those examples)
In my experience simple, domain-specific CAPTCHAs work pretty well. They don't even need to include a frustrating image with hard-to-parse words. Just ask commenters a somewhat randomized question that any visitor to the site would be able to answer easily. It can be really, really simple - like for example asking them to enter the abbreviation for something: > Whats the abbreviation commonly used for the Hypertext T…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I disagree, I think it/it's is completely comparable. Sure, there's a long history to it, but it has evolved, and there are two reasons why it is comparable. 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 d…
I object to the assertion that people are accidentally inserting "it is" where they mean possessive "it". Certainly people such as myself who are strongly verbally oriented type the saxon genitive reflexively to reflect the spoken possessive-ization construct. In a similar way, I also very commonly "improperly" insert commas in my sentence to signify pauses instead of using them merely syntactically.
Furthermore, I maintain that "its"/"it's" is not equivalent to "they're"/"their"/"there". The difference between the first is purely convention, while the second set of words are only related to each other incidentally.
"Nobody accidentally writes her's, their's or your's."
Actually, I do quite often.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The depressing thing is I can imagine people genuinely making the exact suggestion you made, with no humour at all. Sorry!
Er, HN already does limit access via arbitrarily-chosen tests of user quality. They just chose different tests. :) I don't think it'd be a 100% bad idea to implement some sort of knowledge-based testing, wire it up to varying levels of initial access/privs on a site, and see what happens, as an experiment. User privs could then evolve once the user had actually posted or commented or rated things.