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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea though I don't agree with his statement:

> The goal of the project is to make text hard to read for computers yet fairly easy to read for humans

I found it impossibly difficult to read and I'm an native English speaker. I'd wager people who studied English as a second language might find it harder.

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I find that this is very much mindset thing. I once "learned" a toy language used for communication in a role playing game (Dym'Yak, of the Dimday Tribe, of Defias Brotherhood EU server in World of Warcraft if anybody cares). The point was to make a language that seemed like gibberish to outsiders, but was parseable by members. The rules were simple - a small dictionary of special words (say a hundred game specific words or so), vague rules about spelling and then phonetical writing all the way. I.e. you pretty much had to subvocalize the text as you were reading it. It was quite hard in the beginning, but after learning to ignore your preconceptions about known words it became fairly easy.

Lat kan nu'gruk da blah kos lat ar ash dafft pyn.

I appreciate what you're saying but (if I understand you correctly) I think that example is quite a bit different to what's happening here as you're talking about is learning a completely new language rather than parsing intentionally misspelt english words. Unless you're saying the written form of your language was extremely loose on spelling?

I think the issue I have is I tend to parse words visually rather than phonetically.

Well, I should have been clear that the language was based on English, so it more or less ended up as "intentionally misspelt" English with the exception of the hundred word base dictionary.

The difficulty in learning it lay, as you point out, in that people tend to parse words visually rather than phonetically. The challenge was to alter your mindset while reading, to try to parse the words phonetically rather than visually. Once you learned to do that, it was fairly easy to use it - but yes, it took some practice.

Of course I understand that these examples are not interchangeable. I just wanted to offer my observation after actually having spent some time doing something similar to what this site tries to do "for real" (well, if you can consider an RPG real:)

Ahhh I see. That does sounds pretty similar to the title project then. Interesting anecdote as well. Thank you for sharing.

Also a native English speaker. I wouldn't call it easy, but I had luck loosening my expectations for the letter sounds and imagining someone with a heavy accent saying the words. An exercise in fuzzy pattern matching.

I would say that it might be easier to read if you are native in some other language because it depends on sounds of letters that you might be unfamiliar with. I'm a Swede and I find it quite easy to read..

Or perhaps easier. Some native speakers may find it hard to imagine their (written) language looking any different, whereas folks learning it as a foreign language have a benefit of perspective.

I actually found it quite easy to read and English is my second language. Maybe it's the other way around and native speakers have a harder time, since the way things are written is more ingrained in their thinking.

The only time I had to check the original lyrics was for the pass<->pes substitution, since I couldn't figure it out and the only candidate I arrived at was just silly ("piss") ^^

Seconded. Definitely unreadable. For anyone who didn't click through, a line from their self-chosen sample:

>'kause jou gnaw jusd wuaed thoe sai

I read that as:

'cause you know just what they say

Of which, only 'they' was wrong. Doesn't seem that unreadable.

The problem with this line is 'gnaw' is actually a word. I find it very difficult to look past what is actually written and try to convert a correctly spelled word into something else.

Which means that it is unreadable - because that's not what it says! You couldn't read it.

A high, high percentage of the translated text is easily readable. A few edge cases doesn't make it unreadable.

> A high, high percentage of the translated text is easily readable

Again, to you specifically. Different people have differing abilities at reading the English language. What you might find easy others would not. In my case I could not read about 80% of the example text. Which was why I made the point to discuss specific people (like myself) in my example rather than assuming everyone would be able to read that text equally competently (like you are doing).

That's why I didn't respond to you specifically, and only the person asserting that it's straight-up unreadable. It isn't.

I actually appreciate the opinion, that for some people it is difficult to read such kind of text. I also acknowledge, that some words are too fukt to be read properly :) However, the fact that this algo was written in one night and most people say it works, I feel a potential. It is all about polishing the lib of replacements, which is a part of the algo.

Your statement would be true even if the translation consisted of replacing every fifth word with exactly the four characters x--- where x is the first letter of the word being replaced.

So your comment would translate to:

>A high, high percentage o--- the translated text is e--- readable. A few edge c--- don't make it unreadable.

Does that make this scheme okay? It's 80% easily readable!

> Doesn't seem that unreadable.

To you, maybe not. But my point was that myself (specifically) and many others who aren't as comfortable with the written English language would find that text impossible to parse compared to other human-readable obfuscation techniques.

In my case I am dyslexic. I don't like disclosing that as I try my best not to let it affect me (I don't see it as an excuse, I see it as a weakness I need to try harder at - but that's a digression). If I struggled then I would bet that a lot of others who equally have to work harder at reading would struggle to read that as well.

Italian here with a quasi-native command of the English language. It's very hard to read. My mind tends to parse the words as if they were to be read literally.

E.g.: "I soumetymese scie jou pes outcyde mi dour"

In my mind, "soumetymese" reads as "s-how-meh-teemesseh". "Scie" in Italian means trails. That automatically reads as "she-eh" (not "see"), as it's supposed to be pronounced in Italian. "Jou" reminds me of the joule energy measurement unit, therefore automatically comes out as "jaw-ou" instead of "you". And so on.

> "I soumetymese scie jou pes outcyde mi dour"

Yes and "pes" surely doesn't remind me of "pass" but something entirely different and quite probably offending.

Indeed, that was the only word I had problems with, so I had to check the original lyrics.

The whole thread to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj5TL1l9QYQ&feature=youtu.be...

The trick is to run it through your "phonetic processor." Try pronouncing it out loud quickly and smoothly while listening to the sound of your voice. I couldn't quite read it directly, like I do with normal English text, but with a moment's practice I was able to do the phonetic step internally without actually vocalizing.

but "thoe" read that way is a word (i.e. "though"), and th is basically never pronounced as a hard t the way the line I quoted has it meant to be read. "wuaed thoe sai" is somehow meant to be deciphered as "what to say." I would say nobody reading using your method (or any other) can read it correctly. The other comment, for example, misread it (generously) as "they", to make it make sense grammatically. "you know just what they say."

The problem, very simply, is that's just not what the text says.

Of course you're right. The text is obfuscated, after all. It rarely is obvious for individual words, but I had very little trouble understanding it on the phrase and sentence level. It's very similar to that party game Mad Gab, although that one is intended to be much more challenging to understand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gab

I can read that phonetically, but the J in jou and jusd being a different sound. That's just mean.

Almost smells like a bug. English phonetics don't read J as a Y sound in any word I know of.

English is my 2nd language btw, but my practice reading Chaucer in high school helps with this. English before spelling standardized was ... fun.

I would say it is probably the other way around. I found it trivial, yet I have spent a total of 5 weeks in an English speaking country.

We are already used to deciphering English spelling,which is arbitrary at best.

I found that I am usually better than my British colleagues at understanding broken English. I suspect it has a lot to do with how you listen to a language.

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