Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook now has clickable hashtags

newsroom.fb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 59 posts

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#41

Post by quarterto »

rmc wrote: post #32
Zikes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive the crudeness of the example, but there's a huge difference between the following two sentences: I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse. i had to help my uncle jack off a horse.

All languages change and have ambiguities. Modern English (with Capital Letters) has lots of ambiguities that cannot be disambiguated with capitals (e.g. "a small girls school")

So? Capital letters obviate one class of ambiguities. That there are classes of ambiguity they do not is not a reason to not use them.

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#42

Post by kmfrk »

weinzierl wrote: post #28
rmc wrote: post #3

A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.

I agree, except that hashtages are used in other languages as well. I think they even work in every language.

Just be careful, if you're ever in France: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamonkeyblog/2013/feb/06/.... :)

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#43

Post by jamesaguilar »

quarterto wrote: post #41
rmc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All languages change and have ambiguities. Modern English (with Capital Letters) has lots of ambiguities that cannot be disambiguated with capitals (e.g. "a small girls school")

So? Capital letters obviate one class of ambiguities. That there are classes of ambiguity they do not is not a reason to not use them.

Conversely, on its own, the fact that they remove some ambiguities is not a sufficient reason to use them.

Since the downvoters disagree, I'll provide a proof.

1. Suppose resolution of ambiguities is a sufficient reason for a separate case in written language.

2. Ambiguities exist that are not resolved.

3. New cases are not created to resolve these.

4. By contradiction, 1 is false.

QED

There may be other reasons which in addition to the resolution of ambiguity are sufficient to justify case, but you can't simply cite the resolution of ambiguity and say conclude that case is justified.

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#45

Post by ryanklee »

zemo wrote: post #34
rmc wrote: post #3

A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.

it's not English language that's changing, it's human language. Hashtags represent the implicit knowledge within human communication that there is a machine observer present. Hashtags are how humans help to guide machines to behave in the way that they expect.

Except people are now using them in both written and verbal communication when they know for a fact that there's no machine observer.

In other words, hashtags are now a functional part of grammar.

Sometimes it's for machine consumption. Sometimes it's for human consumption. Sometime's both.

As everywhere in language, context determines usage.

Edit: Here's an obligatory languagelog post on hashtags...

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3671

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#46

Post by weinzierl »

rmc wrote: post #30
weinzierl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, except that hashtages are used in other languages as well. I think they even work in every language.

Sure, it works for every language. Just like how lots of languages use ! to show an exclaimation on a sentance, or ? to indicate a question.

After thinking about it: For languages with no spaces or other word separators hashtags probably don't work that well. They might work for human readers but I think they are mostly useful because they can be automatically extracted or converted to links. I wonder if hashtags are used in Chinese or Japanese?

The fascinating thing about languages is that there is no rule without exception. When it comes to ! and ? even a familiar language like Spanish is suddenly strange.

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#47

Post by sneak »

rmc wrote: post #3

A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.

No.

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#48

Post by Zikes »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #43
quarterto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Capital letters obviate one class of ambiguities. That there are classes of ambiguity they do not is not a reason to not use them.

Conversely, on its own, the fact that they remove some ambiguities is not a sufficient reason to use them. Since the downvoters disagree, I'll provide a proof. 1. Suppose resolution of ambiguities is a sufficient reason for a separate case in written language. 2. Ambiguities exist that are not resolved. 3. New cases are not created to resolve these. 4. By contradiction, 1 is false. QED There may be other reasons whic…

No language is perfectly unambiguous, but language evolution should trend toward clarity, not away from it.

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#49

Post by jamesaguilar »

Zikes wrote: post #48
jamesaguilar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, on its own, the fact that they remove some ambiguities is not a sufficient reason to use them. Since the downvoters disagree, I'll provide a proof. 1. Suppose resolution of ambiguities is a sufficient reason for a separate case in written language. 2. Ambiguities exist that are not resolved. 3. New cases are not created to resolve these. 4. By contradiction, 1 is false. QED There may be other reasons whic…

No language is perfectly unambiguous, but language evolution should trend toward clarity, not away from it.

Or, a language should tend toward simplicity, without unnecessary frills. Which you'd prefer is probably just taste.

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#50

Post by rmc »

zemo wrote: post #34
rmc wrote: post #3

A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.

it's not English language that's changing, it's human language. Hashtags represent the implicit knowledge within human communication that there is a machine observer present. Hashtags are how humans help to guide machines to behave in the way that they expect.

That's a bit dystopic, implying for the first time that humans are aware of their new machine masters. But all languages, incl. English, has changed. English no longer has nominative/dative grammatical case markers (instead relying on word position), this can make spell checkers easier (since there are less permutations of words), does that mean humans did it for our machine masters? No because it happened hundreds of years ago.
Post reply on HN