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Comment by jpt4 | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect, Open Whisper Systems might ought first consider fixing Signal's multiplicate message problem, especially silent (to the sender) group chat spamming.

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Actually, my biggest "bug" is where the recipient uninstalls or switches to a new phone and Signal allows you to keep sending messages to what amounts to the ether before you finally realize that they aren't getting the messages.

As a Signal user, I've experienced this issue as well. I work around it by deleting the message, then re-sending it, but that's clunky.

I don't think that's the problem that jpt4 is talking about. I believe he is talking about how sometimes a group message will be received 20 times or more, and yet the sender will still see "message not sent" for some recipients.

That is the issue I'm referring to.

How does re-sending the message help? Everybody in the group has already received the message a dozen times or more.

It doesn't but the sender does not know that everybody has the message a dozen times so he resends it.

That's the only big complaint I've got about Signal.

>multiplicate

I'd never heard this word so I looked it up. Google didn't have a definition but merriam-webster was the first result. They showed me an extra concise definition and then this message...

>Wait, there’s more! This word doesn't usually appear in our free dictionary, but we’ve shared just a bit of the information that appears in our premium Unabridged Dictionary. There’s more definition detail there. Start your FREE Trial Now!

Umm.. Fuck you Merriam-Webster?

There's something weird about that marketing angle coming from a dictionary; it seems somehow at odds with the notion of completeness that we associate with reference materials. Like "there are secret words that only paying customers get to know about", or something?

Less- and more-comprehensive versions of dictionaries is a long-standing thing. And you've usually had to pay for all of them—I think it's weirder that you'd expect to have a fully-complete version of something that takes a lot of expert knowledge and time to put together for free.

It's interesting to think about it this way. I do have dictionaries of different sizes that I've paid for, yet somehow the differences between them didn't strike me the same way this marketing campaign does.

Good point, the internet does make the upsell much much much more in-your-face.

It's more than that; I'm old enough to have carried a compact Spanish-English dictionary while traveling. An unabridged dictionary was heavy enough that you couldn't hold it in one hand.

In other words, there used to be such a thing as 'too much dictionary'. Now, like any other information source, it's the size of my phone, except when it's the size of my laptop.

I remember the complete Oxford dictionary in my school library because it stretched over many large volumes. Forget holding it, you need a trolley!

They still vary greatly in quality and (accordingly) price.I have several chinese/english dictionaries installed through Pleco (on my phone). With a couple exceptions, they're not free.

When I was taking a formal class in Mandarin, some classmates complained, "the definitions you're getting from Pleco are so much better than ours! What are you doing differently?" They lost interest when I responded "I paid for the better dictionaries".

Different dictionaries have different strengths. CC-CEDICT has entries for standard Chinese versions of western names, and for slang. Then again, it doesn't even have usage examples. ABC has many, many entries, including stuff like technical terms in linguistics. Tuttle Learners' has very few entries (it's a learners' dictionary!), but it does nice things like provide antonyms and, where it might be helpful, character-by-character glosses. Tuttle has my favorite entry for 糟糕 [a mess/very bad/bad luck], headed by "[modif: 糟 messy + 糕 cake]".

With an abridged dictionary, there's no notice when it omits information. The web site's presentation makes it very clear that you're missing out on the full experience, and the tone seems a little like the company's holding the information "hostage". The realities haven't changed, but perception changes along with the presentation.

More expensive unabridged dictionaries and less exepensive abridged veraions have been the norm for nearly as long as commercially published dictionaries have been a thing. That one of the cheaper abridged ones is now free on the web doesn't really change that.

To the best of my knowledge, I've never heard the word "multiplicate" either, and I wouldn't have been surprised if there were no dictionary entry for it at all.

If you know the word "duplicate", though, you should be able to figure this one out.

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