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Comment by coherentpony | Hacker News Reader

> They're not lying to you

That's correct. But it's correct in the sense of "technically correct". It's a language-lawyer type of correct that nobody actually expects when communicating in plain English.

Yes, they're not lying to me. They're simply being intentionally and willfully misleading.

When I was 8 and my parents asked, "Have you brushed your teeth?" to which I responded, "Yes." What they're really asking is, "Did you brush _all_ of your teeth?" and not, "Did you brush at least two of your teeth?" I answered that latter question. And I thought I was the smartest person in the world when I did.

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Yes, thank you. I think sometimes we forget how fuzzy language is.

If you're response is "well actually..." you need to think if you're providing meaningful feedback that would make the original claim meaningfully different (i.e. you're adding nuance that would shift perspective). Otherwise it comes off as if you didn't hear anything the original person said because you're missing the meat. Technical corrections are fine, but they should come with some indication of hearing the thesis. Let's try

> Well technically they aren't lying to you. It's the number of seats left at that price and that price can vary. So it is misleading but not technically a lie.

But to counter that claim, simply clearing my cache and restarting the browser would result in both the price and number of seats left changing. Not monotonically. Sometimes it'd be a lower price with more seats. I saw all four permutations! Now I'm not someone with all the airline data, but when this happens over the course of a few minutes I'm pretty suspicious of the results. The likelihood of that happening without manipulation seems rather low.

> I think sometimes we forget how fuzzy language is.

I'm willing to bet a reasonable sum of money that the folks that designed the dark pattern didn't forget how fuzzy language is. In my opinion, the entire spirit of the design of the dark pattern is in fact the complete opposite: to exploit the fact that language is fuzzy in an extremely targeted fashion with the express purpose of extracting as much revenue as is pragmatically possible from the customer.

Parents> “Have you brushed your teeth?”

8yo> “Yes” (last week)

It's misrepresentation

Did you eventually make a career in law? :D

No, I'm a software engineer.

Software engineer is like a lawyer for JSON

Considering the possible alternative names for programmers:

Software Lawyer: we’ve got a code that ought to be well defined and straightforward to interpret, but a bunch of legacy rules have made it impossible to predict what anything really means without studying the system in great depth

Software Doctor: We’re trying usually trying to fix an absurd system ridden mysterious bugs while keeping it running. How it got into the state it is basically impossible to understand, it looks like they’ve just used parts for purposes totally unrelated to their intended use (the spine is totally in the wrong orientation).

Software Engineer: There is a rigid schedule posted on a board somewhere, but we’ve gone totally off the rails and have no chance of hitting any of those timelines.

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