Numeronymize | Hacker News Reader

Numeronymize

leancrew.com

62 pointssurprisetalk46 comments

For fun, I wrote some Javascript that will numeronymize text, but it will also "de-numeronymize" it again by converting the result back into random words that also match. (if a match can't be found, it returns the original word, and unlike the article, it doesn't handle non-English characters) https://www.timpark.org/n10e-s2e-t2t/

Ex: "accessibility localization internationalization multilingualization globalization" becomes "a11y l10n i18n m17n g11n" becomes "applicability locomutation intercrystallization metaphenylenediamin gastrocnemian"

I dislike numeronyms. They may be shorter to type, but unlike acronyms, where the acronym itself is a valid pronounciation, numeronyms cannot usually be pronounced. The only way to know how is to know what the original word is, so you have to ask every time.

My kates auth zen operator doesn’t support I ate teenen.

It works ok as long as there’s nobody named Katherine.

eye teen n

It will never cease to be funny how inaccessible "a11y" is if you don't already know what it means. Mike Judge couldn't even make this stuff up.

Probably anorthography: a loss of the ability to write or to express thoughts in writing because of a brain lesion.

If you don't already know, you use a search engine to find out.

(Lack of an obvious pronunciation is a good objection, tho.)

That doesn’t change the fact that it is inaccessible for no gain.

It’s shorter to say (4 vs 6 syllables), and to write - how is that ‘no gain’?

False economy. The trade-off between "saving some syllables" and the concomitant problems it causes is not worth it.

To this day I don't know what Eli8 means, and I'm not going to even bother to look it up. It's not communication.

> To this day I don't know what Eli8 means, and I'm not going to even bother to look it up. It's not communication.

My first guess would have been a username for somebody named Elliot. Given that it occurred in this thread, probably not a correct guess.

Communication requires thought and input from both sides - if I use a numeric abbreviation with someone who is unfamiliar with it, I am communicating badly.

I think where we differ is that I see such abbreviations as no worse than any other - TLAs (three letter acronyms) can also be as impenetrable.

I always thought you'd still pronounce it as the original word. How do you pronounce it? Aeleveny?

Yep - pretty-much, aye-el-ev-en-why although I may have miscounted the syllables in eleven in my parent post.

It's most pronounced in aye-ate-een-en, internationalization is a word I find myself stumbling when saying in full.

What?!?! I have never heard anyone pronounce these terms in such a ludicrous fashion, and it’s not because I don’t have exposure I do a fair amount of work in this space.

I have never heard any of those pronounciations.

>(Lack of an obvious pronunciation is a good objection, tho.)

ally?

Or the writer could keep their writing more accessible by using the word accessibility, understood by hundreds of millions of people, instead of some meme term understood by maybe thousands.

I18n is 4 syllables, internationalisation 7. It may not be pronounceable, but many abbreviations are not, and it’s still faster.

But yes, like every abbreviation, do use the full word the first time you use it “Considering the topic of internationalisation (i18n)…”

Indeed, it is strictly worse than an abbreviation made by removing the medial part, e.g. intl'n or acc'y, because numeronyms only keep the first and last character.

I shit you not, the reason I have heard that they are more "accessible" is because the words that get shortened are hard to spell.

I assume the real reason is because each of these indecipherable glyphs is a s8h* to identify the "cool" and "woke" (not in the US politics sense but in a more general sense of the word) crowd from the rest.

* If you don't know this word, you're not in the club

Fowler's Law on Unicode: There's always another bug, you just haven't found it yet.

Dr Drang's script counts the number of _characters_ not the number of _glyphs_. This matters because there's more than one way to represent é: Either just as unicode character \x{e9} ("NFC") or as a combination of "e" and the combining character that adds the accent ("NFD")

For example for "léon" this prints out "l3n" for me.

What you need to do is normalize to NFC.

> /usr/bin/perl -C -MUnicode::Normalize -pe '$_=NFC($_);s/(.)(.+)(.)/$1 . length($2) . $3/e'

NFC isn't right, either: some letters don't have pre-composed forms. Imo, you need to pull in a whole glyph-counting algorithm.

T3e is no b4r w1y to w3e t2t w2h l2g w3s t2n to n10e t2m e8e!

> perl -C -pe 's/(\w)(\w+)(\w)/$1 . length($2) . $3/ge'

Or for the less o4e among us, this v5n will only n10e words with l4h six and up:

> perl -C -pe 's/(\w)(\w\w\w\w+)(\w)/$1 . length($2) . $3/ge'

F3l v5n:

perl -C -pe 's/(\p{L})(\p{L}*)(\p{L})/$1@{[length($2)]}$3/g'

N12g w5t i18n w3d n1t b0e c6e, t2s t2s a u1f-8 c8e v5n. I c2l i0t I16r-v1.0

새0로 오0신 모0든 분1께 인3고 싶2다.

Translation:

There is no better way to write with long words than to numeronymise them everywhere!

Or for the less obtuse among us, this version will only numeronymise words with length six and up:

I spent some time staring at l4h, after quickly reading o4e as 'obese' on the way there. I suppose this might be a good Freudian slip generation scheme?

Numeronymizing without internationalization would not be complete, thus this [???] a utf-8 compatible version. I call it Internumeronymizer-v1.0

I misinterpreted this first as hacker/leet-speak, so that those words would be ALLY and CLAN..

I'm loving the perl one liners. I fear its a dying art!

Tangent:

I worked at a large financial news site for a number of years.

One of our best engineers spun up an "a11y" sub team. As it was quite involved and they went team to team doing things, I assume it was some sort of dev tool initiative.

It was only after I left and I was describing it as the "ally" team that I was told what it meant.

Its like "banal" its only when you say it out load amongst (hopefully) friends do you realise that you've not got it quite right....

I-1i think this i0s funnier t0o apply t0o short words. Also t1e word 'a4d' i0s pronounced like i1's written.

Okay what’s a4d

By the description I'd guess "afford", it's neat that you pronounce it the same way when it's abbreviated.

Ambiguously rude numeronyms can make you look like a big s2t.

Make your service names easy to remember: adopt the convention that they should be Hamming-distance 1 away from swears.

Does that mean git has an off-by-one error, as it is Hamming-distance of zero?

Today I learned something new, but I found it very ironic that after looking up a11y, the first example, discovered it meant accessibility.

edit: I do realize that I might be missing the joke entirely

While this project is probably a joke, the general usage of “a11y” is unfortunately not.

Spelling accessability as a11y is the pinnacle of irony.

Thought it was a typo. It's not:

https://mastodon.hccp.org/@igb/112734767519719978

> e14n -> "Andreesen Horowitz" is not a typo, it is a bit of an easter egg/joke (Sorry, I can't help myself.):

> "e14n" has recently shown up in social meda as shorthand for @pluralistic's "enshittification" coinage. Andreesen Horowitz often refers to themselves using a numeronym: "a16z".

Perl and its powerful oneliners deserve the credit for this exercise.

Is this 1337 speak for the modern world?

for whatever reason I always thought a11y was ally. but, is c14n c(i)yan? and, what is l18n?

this will come in handy once I start my vc fund.

You like to n10e for a11y, I like to n10e for c14n, Let's call the whole thing off.

Hopefully your v5e c5l fund will be a good fit for my s5p.

I guess this is the modern variant of l33t[1].

[1]: https://megatokyo.com/strip/9

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