[HN Gopher] The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
Author : dsr12
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-05-21 05:32 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.engineering)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.engineering)
| karatinversion wrote:
| Taking "5 why's" to a whole new level!
| rkangel wrote:
| Surely this is down to one key error (pun intended) - Medium
| deciding to override a standard browser shortcut 'for the good of
| their users'. If they needed a manual save function then I might
| understand it, but they tried to be clever and made things worse
| in a subtle way.
| tomaszs wrote:
| An interesting fact for non Polish speaking readers: for non-
| official writing we often don't use diacritic characters at all.
| It makes writing faster. With the raise of spell checkers it
| fades out, but still, if you write without diacritics often you
| will be well understood.
|
| Second interesting fact: it is very popular for software and
| online apps, especially not developed in Europe to ignore
| diacritics. Not only polish ones, but also french, german etc.
| You get weird characters instead or can not write properly
| altogether. I hope the article will put a highlight on the issue.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I've noticed that I automatically lose some respect towards a
| person if I find that they don't use diacritics in their
| writing. Especially in a professional setting.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| 1. laske mi robisz
|
| 2. laske mi robisz
|
| --
|
| 1. you are (not really, pejorative) doing me a favor
|
| 2. you are doing me a blowjob
|
| ...must be one of better ones.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Czechs sometimes write without diacritics as well, but the
| resulting ambiguities are funny.
|
| For example, a customer of my e-shop gave his street as
| "Skretova".
|
| So, is it "Skretova" (named after a famous Baroque painter) or
| "Skretova" (Goblin's street?)
|
| Of course, most Czech cities do not honor goblins in their
| street plan...
| dhosek wrote:
| It's surprising how much software (mostly on Windows) doesn't
| properly handle Unicode in 2021. With something working in
| Unicode, it's not that big of a deal to both handle letters
| like L or z and also to run normalization on text strings so
| that you can (if desired) treat Lodz and Lodz as identical
| (e.g., for text searching).
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Just a note that normalization is not the same as diacritic
| insensitivity. Normalization is the process by which strings
| that are semantically equivalent (by some standard), yet have
| different underlying byte sequences, are transformed to have
| the same underlying byte sequence. For instance, replacing
| "e, combining acute accent" with "e with acute accent".
| 988747 wrote:
| Sure, but sometimes leaving out Polish diacritics makes the
| whole sentence ambiguous, or at the very least harder to read.
| I personally despise people doing that.
|
| More to the article's point: there were countless times where I
| accidentaly sent unfinished email by trying to type "s".
| danijelb wrote:
| Typing without diacritics is also popular in Croatia in casual
| scenarios
| crazygringo wrote:
| I feel like that's pretty true worldwide for languages with
| diacritics, at least for all the Latin-script languages I'm
| familiar with.
|
| It's really no different from people in English shortening
| "you" to "u" in texting as well, or "lol". Everybody saves
| keystrokes wherever they can.
| danijelb wrote:
| It's popular for some reason even in countries where it
| doesn't save keystrokes. For example in Croatia we have 5
| characters with diacritics (s, d, c, c, z), all of them have
| dedicated keys on the keyboard and yet many people have a
| habit of simply not using them.
| thenewwazoo wrote:
| e.metaKey || (e.ctrlKey && !e.altKey)
|
| seems to me like an exceptionally strange choice. Why not an
| exclusive-or? The thing they want to avoid is a false-positive on
| _both_ being pressed, so test for that directly.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| e.metaKey is the `[?]Command` key on Mac (used for the save
| shortcut), an entirely different key than the ones involved in
| the bug.
|
| Also, Javascript doesn't have a logical xor operator, so trying
| to do that would potentially reduce readability.
| smlckz wrote:
| > Also, Javascript doesn't have a logical xor operator, so
| trying to do that would potentially reduce readability.
|
| I also didn't know about any operator to logically xor two
| boolean variables (thought about (ab)using JavaScript's
| implicit type conversion mechanisms: `x ^ y`), and then I
| learnt that `!=` works fine as a logical xor for booleans.
| Tada!
|
| I don't know how much readability is reduced by this.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > Javascript doesn't have a logical xor operator
|
| x != y
| dhosek wrote:
| Although with the looseness around booleans in JS, I'd
| imagine that you might need to do something more like
| `(x==true) != (y==true)`
| zamadatix wrote:
| Wouldn't using XOR trigger a save on Alt + S? Unless I'm
| missing something with why the meta portion should have the XOR
| here instead.
| SSLy wrote:
| Meanwhile Cisco Webex still exhibits this bug
| sombremesa wrote:
| This post really exemplifies what HN is today: People oohing and
| aahing on a blog post that makes a mountain out of a molehill and
| ultimately complicates the issue rather than addressing it
| elegantly.
|
| I understand I'm not really bringing anything to the conversation
| by saying this, but can we really not do any better than this?
|
| On the other hand, posts like this make me really glad I'm
| leaving software for good, what with the industry just amounting
| to smelling one's own farts now.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| But it's got photos of some fine keyboards made by IBM and
| stuff!
| atuladhar wrote:
| Genuinely curious - in your mind, what would be "addressing it
| elegantly" in this case?
| hawski wrote:
| I wonder if it is a similar reason why currently on MS Teams I
| can't type the letter n.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| That's a really well-written blogpost! I was expecting it to be
| much more surface-level (something to do with character codes -
| still possibly interesting!) but it had new info for me on
| several levels (the background of the bug, and the personal
| history stuff didn't feel too fillery to me).
| Bluecobra wrote:
| I'm glad that they actually fixed the issue instead of just
| deciding to use a workaround, like copy/paste S from another
| application.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _The curious case of disappearing Polish S_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8986920 - Feb 2015 (117
| comments)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-21 23:00 UTC)