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Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

What kinda gets me is the name Łukasz, because in German and English it is indeed an L and all the ones I know actually use the L (maybe unless talking to other native speakers).

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Yeah, Łukasz is the same name as Lucas and because ASCII and internet it's very common to just write it as Lukasz because no matter if you're talking to the native or not, they will know what you mean (it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter altogether when texting/writing informally online because the correct letters can be inferred from the context so why bother pressing that alt key). If you were to pronounce it correctly though it would be something like 'Wookash' (which looks ridiculous in written form but hey)

> it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter

Is it still common? It was popular when there were many encodings that always broke and when people wrote SMS by pressing number keys 5 times for 1 letter, now I don't see it that often. I'd say it's about as common as writting l8r in English :)

Less common than it used to be, but still happens. Mostly when writing in a hurry (of course without auto-correction turned on) or interacting with older systems and applications. Also, it is so rare to use Polish letters in a URL, that if you were to dictate one based on a Polish word(s) most people would simply spell it without them (ł → l, ą → a, etc.).

By the way, never try to use Polish letters in a Windows username. It works, but every once in a while something third-party or rarely used breaks unexpectedly.

I think I rarely use polish letters when I write on whatsapp/signal etc. and I don't think I often see them written. I don't pay that much attention though so it may be that I'm the only one

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