Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

Meta: I would suggest a title change on HN.

Current HN title: "UBC Engineering removes online classes, obstacles for international students"

Article title: "UBC Engineering removes all upper-year online classes as obstacles remain for returning international students"

The shortened HN title, upon my first and second readings, implies that UBC removed obstacles for international students. In fact, the opposite is the case, as the article title clarifies.

View on HN

Or change the comma in the current title to a semicolon. It not a useless punctuation mark ;-)

I'm afraid you have just demonstrated the only pragmatic use for semicolons outside the C family of languages.

How do you separate lists of things that themselves have commas in them, if not with a semicolon?

Example: San Francisco is home to law firms such as Campagnoli, Abelson & Campagnoli; Carlson, Calladine & Peterson; and Carter, Carter, Fries and Grunschlag.

Style guides for a number of other languages do it by treating organization names like titles or labels and enclosing them with quotation marks. Unambiguous!

Nested lists though

x, y, and z; a, b, and c; and i, j, and k make common groups of variable names.

I use them fairly frequently; I find them useful for establishing a causative relationship between clauses.

An attempt 'to verb' ('pun' or whatever you'd call it very much intended) 'obstacle' perhaps? They 'obstacled' the international students?

Anyway, agree it's at best ambiguous.

Yeah lol this is so misleading.

Your title is way too long for HN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com