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Comment by pdpi | Hacker News Reader

Typo in the title: This is a _visualization_ experiment, not a _virtualization_ experiment. I spent way too long trying to find what was being virtualized.

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Belatedly fixed. Thanks!

I mean, the stars in this visualization are not real, they are "virtual" in the sense that they are a digital replication of something real in our computers.

You're right, it's probably a typo. But the typo at least doesn't make the title incorrect, just changes the focus a bit. Most things in our computers are "virtualized".

Edit: seems people are thinking that this comment is trying to "correct" something. It's not. It was a failed attempt to bring humor to a typo that might as well not be incorrect. No need to further try to prove how socially inept I am.

The site itself says "visualization of 100,000 stars"

You don't need to prepend the "I mean," to the first sentence of your post, unless you're under the impression that most of your introductions will not be perceived as genuinely yours.

And I don't believe that this kind of obsession with being technically correct will lead to great social outcomes.

The "I mean" is added to give an informal tone instead of a "Here is a correction since you are incorrect" tone. Obviously it wasn't enough.

> And I don't believe that this kind of obsession with being technically correct will lead to great social outcomes.

There is no such obsession. It's a joke, meant in jest. I'm confirming that parent is correct, and that I'm just being nitpicky for the sake of giving the title a meaning even if it's incorrect.

Granted, in real-life social situations, it's easier to spot when people are joking, in comparison to online text-only comments. Especially when the place where you leave the comment is particularly famous for being dry.

Right or wrong, I find it fascinating to watch language evolve like this and it's really apparent most in internet comments. I see so many sentences starting with "I mean" over the last couple of years where I can't remember it being commonplace before.

"For sure" is another sentence starter I've noticed, then there are terms like "on trend" which now seems to mean fashionable or popular.

I'd love to do a ngram analysis of this phenomena (?), or maybe just something simple with elastic search on Reddit comments where you can see how the use of search terms grows and evolves.

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