Re:The quadratic problem nobody fixed
by dooglius on Monday March 23, 2026 @03:27PM
(#47494018)
The fact that terms like Aho-Corasick, PLDI, Go, etc. are properly capitalized, including if they begin sentences, but otherwise sentences are uncapitalized, makes me think it's an explicit LLM instruction "don't capitalize the start of sentences" rather than writing style.
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ChatGPT also loves Aho-Corasick and seems to overuse it as an optimization fall back idea. ChatGPT has suggested the algorithm to me but the code ended up slowing down a lot.
ChatGPT was heavily RL'd on competitive programming in 2025, and aho-corasick is a traditional algorithm in the competitive programming space.
Oh no, this is just what that writing style looks like. Names and acronyms are usually capitalized normally.
I keep being surprised by the magnitude of the disconnect between this place and the other circles of hell. I'd have thought the Venn diagram would have a lot more overlap.
Oh the venn diagram might be big, the HN population just has a lot of variance I think, and is less of a community per se. I don't doubt what you're saying, though in the grand scheme of things, I think the "too lazy to hit shift" population dwarfs any of these groups.
Yeah, I can agree with the variance. Except that the "too lazy to hit shift" community is not something I would ever confuse with people writing long form articles about their regex engine research that they'll be presenting at PLDI.
The confusion might be understandable for people who have never encountered this style before, but that's still a very uncharitable take about an otherwise pretty interesting article.
What's with this silly "all lower case" style lately?
Jack Dorsey's layoff message last month did the same thing.
Is it some kind of "Prove you're not an AI by purposely writing like an idiot" or something?
not anti-capitalist, just a subtle preference away from capitalism
it's been common in the unix/c/lisp worlds since before you were born
when 6 bit ascii was all caps only, people got used to monocase, then 7-bit lowercase ascii blew in a fresh wind.