“Loose” is the opposite of “tight,” “lose” is the opposite of “find.” Easy to remember because the opposites have the same number of letters.

It always amazes me how often I see this spelling error.

Given that lose is pronounced looze and loose is pronounced looce I can see why it’s confusing.

I learned how to spell it in early grade school--maybe eight years old--so I don't understand what's confusing about it but I'm an educated man.

Maybe because not everyone is a native speaker that learnt how to spell it properly at eight years old.

It's confusing if you try to apply phonetics or any kind of logic to it, as an ESL person might, or many native speakers for that matter.

It is certainly not confusing it you learn it by rote and remember the rule. It is burned into my brain, but I see the mistake a lot so I assume it is hard to remember for some people. For me its vs. it's is something I still have to keep looking up.

Let's not let the minority become the rule. I have only had one person ever come back to me claiming they were a non-native English speaker when having made the mistake over many years of correcting people.

then maybe you should learn that a lot of HN readers are not native English speakers.

None of the people I've encountered--save one--ever came back to me saying they were not.

Very impressive...

In fairness it feels rather arbitrary and counterintuitive of a spelling rule.

Thank you for this public service.

Thanks.

What is interesting is that we are seeing people in other industries shamed for hiring people in unpaid or underpaid jobs and even people shamed for taking those jobs. I wonder if that is something that will ever happen in the software industry.

Open source software is clearly a net positive overall. However is it a net negative for the industry when enterprise developers rely on open source software without demanding their company provides financial support for that software? How is that different than the company relying on free labor from something like unpaid internships?

I think a lot of it truly is passion. Interns have goals that typically don't align with the company they go to work for. That's why they take crap pay. They get to not care and in return the company doesn't have to care about them! Everybody wins, and it's a choice all around. So it's mutually agreeable that the intern will put in some effort and get some reward.

Speaking for my own open source projects; There are already better, cheaper, and easier alternatives to my software. I'm already paying out the ass for something I could just download. I'm doing it for reasons that I can't, or won't, buy. And I know that sounds cliche because it is cliche, but passion is cliche.

We're programmers and hackers here. Just like a hot rod enthusiast spends $200k and 3 years building a car he could buy in a catalogue for $75k; we don't pay as much attention to cost/benefit relationships as we'd like to think.

How is having a passion for a particular piece of software different than having a passion for a specific job or company? Plenty of people have enough passion for an internship that they are willing to take it for free. However society has been discouraging that over recent years because that route is only available to people who have outside financial support and it can easily be abused by employers. Open source software has the same potential drawbacks.

Not every piece of open source software is diminishing the value of enterprise software developers just like not every unpaid internship is reducing the value of entry level labor, however both systems can easily (and even unintentionally) be abused by businesses.

The interns' goal is to learn the trade. The companies goal is to attract talent and/or get a ROI.

In my company an intern conducted research on scalability - creating tools to measure and monitor the software in the mean time. So not only does the company have some neat monitoring tools now, the intern actually found a bottleneck and improved the product. The company is now offering her a contract...

Caring about eachother doesn't have much to do with it.

Exactly right. Its amazing thing in software industry that developers want to be highly paid themselves along with free work from other software developers.

I guess it's the "eat or be eaten" attitude. Give someone a chicken that hatch golden eggs, and they will kill the chicken.