Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
#2I dliberately put speelling mistakes to confirm I am not an AI.
Re: Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
#3Seems like something that would be well received if one and exactly one guy was doing it, and annoying as hell when 35 additional jabronis started to run the same type of script, like what you see with the oh-so-helpful AI PRs on github that make random ass changes nobody asked for.
Especially given we already have pretty good spell checkers, and have had for way over a decade.
Re: Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
#4Nice idea…but this will just end up in the same bucket as “I really like your website {domain} and especially your post {link to blog post} about {topic} would you like to include a link to {our service}” SEO link building spam.
Re: Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
#5"English being my second language, I curse it everyday and wish it could be more like, say, Hungarian, in which such a thing as a spelling bee would be unthinkable."
I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi").
If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English and I guarantee people will adopt them as loanwords in short order. Never define them, we'll figure it out from context and vibes, and we'll never pronounce them correctly, which might make it grating to listen to them spoken back to you. But you can absolutely just incept words into English. We'll take them. We're hoarders. We all love that shit.
My favorite thing about it is the register system that developed from all this theft. There are at least three: German, French, and Latin. German is less formal, and French and Latin are often equal but differ in that French is less bureaucratic than Latin. The start, commencement, and initiation of something are different. And an initiation is different from an inauguration. You ask your friend, question a witness, and interrogate a suspect. Greek is more abstract than Latin. A moral question is nearer to the heart than an ethical question. You diagnose a disease, you judge a person. You have compassion, you merely feel sympathy.
Though, I would hate to learn it as a second language for the exact same reasons.
Re: Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
#6"English being my second language, I curse it everyday and wish it could be more like, say, Hungarian, in which such a thing as a spelling bee would be unthinkable." I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi"). If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sen…
the zeitgeist hungers for loanwords
Re: Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
#7I dliberately put speelling mistakes to confirm I am not an AI.
Is it otherwise that easy to confuse your writing with an LLM's? What if they deliberately start including spelling mistakes into slop pipelines, as the post points out?
Re: Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
#8"English being my second language, I curse it everyday and wish it could be more like, say, Hungarian, in which such a thing as a spelling bee would be unthinkable." I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi"). If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sen…
> If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English
I've been doing something like this with Finnish (which is in the same language family as Hungary) - I use Finnish colloquialism but directly translated into English. Things like "going ass first up a tree" (meaning doing something in a sub-optimal way) or "better on the ground than in the devil's mouth" (when you spill something). I find it amusing.
The author is right though, the English language is dreadful; In Finnish the words are written and pronounced the same way. Try that with some names of cities or towns in England.
Re: Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
#9"English being my second language, I curse it everyday and wish it could be more like, say, Hungarian, in which such a thing as a spelling bee would be unthinkable." I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi"). If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sen…
> If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English I've been doing something like this with Finnish (which is in the same language family as Hungary) - I use Finnish colloquialism but directly translated into English. Things like "going ass first up a tree" (meaning doing something in a sub-optimal way) or "better on the ground than in the devi…
Going ass first up a tree is funny enough to catch on if you keep using it. It fills a real semantic gap in the idea space of taking great pains to do something the wrong way. I'll never forget reading it just now.
Come on now though, dreadful. There's something beautiful about a language that's a fusion reactor for all other languages on Earth.
Re: Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News
#10Is it kind to email people telling them they wrote 'its' and not 'it's'? Thus used to be called being a grammar Nazi and is just a different kind of asshole