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Comment by gompertz | Hacker News Reader

I say this as someone who cares about language, and who has no dog in this Carmack dispute.

I think you are overweighting a fairly simple grammatical error. The commenter expresses themself clearly and logically. It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language, or that they simply are not that careful about making grammatical mistakes. Not everyone is as pedantic about language as you or I may be.

Unreasonable people can write grammatically, and reasonable people can write ungrammatically. I think it is better to judge an argument by its reasonableness.

I think many people would consider your response impolite and unkind to the original poster. Surely you do not want to shame someone for their lack of mastery with the English language? Surely you would rather judge an argument on its merits?

May I suggest a last question: could you see yourself reading this comment to the original poster face-to-face? Does it not seem rude and condescending to imagine yourself doing that?

> It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language

This is more of a fun side note: It's more likely that they're a native speaker. People who learn English as a second language generally don't make the their/there mix up.

Half-serious take: My bet is on a deliberate attempt to throw off any attempts to match their writing style to their OG account via AI.

May also just be autocorrect? Like I have to actively battle my mobile keyboard to type "its" and not have it turn into "it's".

I use SwiftKey for this exact reason.

Other keyboards are seriously annoying by either not having prediction, putting them behind late T9s or they have predictions which seems to be made by someone who almost actively try to make me look stupid.

English is the only language I know and my international friends take great pleasure in correcting my grammatical errors. I've learned a great deal about my mother tongue from them!

I observed that too on myself (English is my second language), and I even wrote comments like that in the past, but after 20 years I noticed that I started making those errors myself, which sucks.

I'm guessing when you read people making this mistake over and over (I even saw it done in news articles) I guess your brain starts equating them together :(

I'm thankful for those people correcting it, although I think it is a losing battle.

That is a fun side note :) Do you have a source for this? I'd love to read more about it. I assume it's because when you're actually taught this specifically, you remember it, as opposed to native speakers who "learn" the spelling via osmosis or something.

Native speakers learn the language at a time when they can't read or write, so they have to rely on their listening. Non-native speakers on the other hand usually first see the language written down, and then hear / pronounce it, and connect the writing with what they hear.

If I had a penny for every time a native speaker wrote "would of" instead of "would have" in forums, I'd be a billionaire. "Their" / "They're" / "There" is also common.

But the funny thing is, I noticed I would make similar errors after being immersed in a native environment after a few years time. Somehow I just say to myself what I wanted to write, and the slip-up happens. So native speakers are more prone to this, but it's not only there privilege!

> So native speakers are more prone to this, but it's not only there privilege!

LOL, you won't fool me.

I observed it on myself, although after some time I started doing it too.

My belief was that it's because English is not spelled the same way it sounds, so people who learn it are forced to memorize pronunciation and writing separately.

I'd like to see the stats on that.

Going to reply on this comment since it's a thorough response to mine.

Look; I'm seeing a lot of reasoning across comments from non-native language, keyboard input, autocorrect, and so forth.

None of this changes the fact that the usage is just flat out wrong. Have we become so soft in society that nothing can be pointed out because of speculative reasons?

If it's a 2nd language, learn the language. If it's the keyboard, get a better keyboard. If it's autocorrect, double check what you write. Stop making excuses for everything.

All these cries for why we should accept there/ their/ they're uncontested is no doubt a reflection of the frustration Carmack must have experienced, if HN is any indicator of the FAANG workforce. John is known to be very direct and unapologetic himself, and here y'all are losing your mind on a slight criticism. It's no wonder.

I would suggest that it's not necessary to speculate too much about why they made a grammatical error. There are many possible reasons. For instance, I suggested that they may simply be less pedantic/careful about grammar. They may simply care about the form of their expression less than you or I do.

I think judging a hypothesis by its form/expression is not a great way to get at the truth. If a heuristic has to be used, then probably tone, coherence, and even-handedness are better than grammatical correctness. Those are at least closer to the substance of the argument.

I suggest that evaluating arguments on the basis of form/expression will not help you get at the truth.

It is your choice whether to be aesthetically dissatisfied by grammatically incorrect English. Many would consider that pedantic, though I might have a modicum of sympathy for you. However, I think the error you've made is to promote aesthetic displeasure into distrust for the OP's reasonableness.

I do not know about others, but I do not think I am losing my mind about anything. I suspect that most direct and unapologetic people have faith in the substance of their arguments, and would be frustrated to be judged using low-signal heuristics like grammatical correctness.

Thank you for saying everything I wanted to say.

I only add that the post above invokes some wildly spurious logic in counting the 5 instances of the same mistake as if they were 5 different mistakes. Such a basic error really makes me question his general reasoning ability.

There is also a good possibility that this person is hampered by dyslexia, a very common disability where such oversights are easily made.

What a fatuous argument. Have you considered that they may have used speech to text to dictate there (sic.) response from a mobile device, or that perhaps their (sic.) not a native speaker?

I find that the people who are overly concerned about semantics tend to be the people who have the least to offer in terms of substance. The idea that you can draw a correlation between one's technological aptitude and the inability to distinguish between various possessive adjectives is patently absurd.

Here's a pithy quote I created just for you: "it doesn't matter how many languages you can speak if you have nothing to say."

or just be dyslexic or any other myriad of disorders like ADHD etc that may affect such minor grammatical rules yet not change or alter the likelihood that they could be a senior meta engineer?

Sic is not an abbreviation, placing a full stop/period inside the brackets after the word sic is erroneous.

Sic! (Is an exclamation mark ok?)

> trying to be convincing on technical issues when you can't understand fundamentals of English is not persuasive at all.

Note to disprove your point but there are plenty of very technically capable people who learn English as a second, third, fourth language. In fact I would say in technical settings, such as here, that this is statistically more common than a native English speaker with poor writing skills.

There is/are and their sound very different in other languages, so I would say that people who speak English as a second language generally make these types of mistakes less often than natural speakers who learned speaking English many years before writing. (We make other types of mistakes more often though).

As a non-native Enlish speaker I'd like an n=1 'experience' to your n=1 'would say': the English is in my head first and then in writing. So at the time of writing there and their already sound alike and van be easily mixed up

This is true, but I (and you) learned to say and read/write these words at the same time, so we have an advantage over native English speakers in differentiating them.

At the same time the poster had a larger vocabulary than I have (which is true for native speakers generally, as I try to stay within simple English).

I've noticed this error more on natives than people that learn English more formally as a second or third language.

Perhaps the poster is trying to befuddle identification of their main account through stylography?

One can get quite paranoid on the internet, you know.

(I am not a dog).

Likely. I can't find it now, but there was an HN story not long ago where someone used fairly rudimentary techniques to identify former/alt HN accounts based on stylometric similarity. It worked VERY well.

If I were going to post from a throwaway account for some reason, I would probably launder it through an intermediate language on Google Translate for one or two cycles. Otherwise, if I didn't bother with that, I'd certainly scatter some intentional errors here and there that I don't usually make.

>there was an HN story not long ago where someone used fairly rudimentary techniques to identify former/alt HN accounts

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

Nowadays people would probably just use GPT prompts and rephrase to obscure identity. Good luck reversing the output to deduce the style of the author's original input.

Until OpenAI's logs get hacked and leaked ...

I am quite confident that Satoshi Nakomoto was an Australian bloke(s) living in Japan when he/they/their wrote the Bitcoin Whitepaper. The code itself does suggest it was one person, but I still think it was a few people with one at the helm.

If you're typing quickly, you can miss when autocorrect puts in the wrong replacement

I stopped caring about when people have incorrect your vs you're and there vs their because it's really about whether the autocorrect ai is getting them right. English is an evolving language that I don't think will keep those distinctions in the future

It’s not a fundamental of English, because it’s (that’s another example) impossible to hear. You’re (that’s another example) being pedantic about an artifact of our writing system, which is strictly not language. I’m being pedantic about this because i’m tired of this being pointed out.

Grammatical mistakes aren’t a means to disprove anything. Not everyone is detail oriented and I doubt it prevented anyone from understanding the meaning of what they were saying. Their post wasn’t even technical, more like a stream of thought

someone writing and wishing to hide their identity may very well be masking their writing style. The bad grammar here might be the social media equivalent of using letters cut from magazines.

Stop slandering people due to school training. We all understood what the person meant and I guess you got confused too many times.

It blows my mind that someone thinks that counting "their/there" mixups constitutes an argument.

We talking pronouns? This/these? Who's Cramack? That quote from his letter sounds like someone who constantly overstepped their bounds.

Their use of 'there' instead of 'their' could've been done purposely as a means of not being unmasked. A tool was posted the other week that took HN usernames and found accounts that it deemed as being alt accounts/similar writing styles.

Could be an attempt to throw something like that off

> specially anyone who doesn't know the difference between 'their' and 'there'

This is a really ablest take and should not really be seen here on HN. You have no idea what kind of an input device the author is using, if they have some handicap or disability nor even what their native language is. There are plenty of reasons a poster can make this mistake, and even more reasons to make it consistently. Please do better.

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