Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

Re:Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch by mekoka on Thursday November 29, 2012 @10:38AM (#4848233)

Thanks for this post, there were some nice tips in there. Although, I do have some nitpicking about your writing style. Maybe it's just me, but I found that your use of "+ve" instead of just saying "positive" and of "&" instead of "and" did not have the intended effect of speeding up reading, quite the reverse actually.

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Re:Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch by politician on Thursday November 29, 2012 @10:47AM (#4848299)

Seconded. Initially, my brain told me that +ve was the name of the site, so I was confused when I looked for a product page link only saw "Cucumbertown".

Granted, that's mostly laziness -- apparently I've got a rule that matches "strange words near the top of the post" to "probably the name of the product".

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Re:Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch by chacham15 on Thursday November 29, 2012 @10:50AM (#4848325)

I dont know about anyone else, but when I saw "+ve", I just thought to myself, "what is that?" for about a half a second before giving up and moving on.

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Re:Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch by rolleiflex on Thursday November 29, 2012 @06:46PM (#4851012)

It doesn't even parse for me. If "+ve" means "Positive", what does "+" mean? Positi?

Regardless of what you do, a little bit of respect for English is always a good thing to have.

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Re:Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch by Cherian on Thursday November 29, 2012 @10:55AM (#4848354)

Thanks for the feedback. Corrected.

Call this a hacker’s laziness + Yahoo chat room era slangs.

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Re:Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch by ajross on Thursday November 29, 2012 @01:21PM (#4849353)

Agree with the former, but it bears saying: you're about 2 millenia too late to be complaining about the use of the ampersand. :)

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Re:Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch by mekoka on Thursday November 29, 2012 @04:46PM (#4850458)

I'm not complaining on the use of the ampersand, but unlike many people seem to believe, it's not semantically equivalent to "and". Beyond just joining two items in a phrase, the ampersand marks an association between them and emphasizes it as a single definite idea, a "thing".

Ampersands are often used to mark brands, names and cultural items made up of multiple components: Johnson & Johnson, Dungeons & Dragons, bread & butter, fish & chips, Gold, Smith & Associates.

If I say "I had some fish & coleslaw" that would make a few people wonder if this is some popular recipe they should google.

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