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Comment by jmmcd | Hacker News Reader

Grammar Squad here with the facts. And just the facts.

When effect is a verb, the object must be the change itself, similar to cause: "Hacker News effected a significant deterioration in site availability". With affect, the thing being changed is the object: "Hacker News affected the site."

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In Iain M Banks (RIP) Culture novels, the remote manipulation technology is called the Effector.

Any chance this is related to the relevant biological/neurological/robotics terminology?

The problem is that the "Hacker News effect" is a noun, derived from the slashdot effect, and here that noun has been verbed.

What nobody's quoted xkcd yet? http://xkcd.com/326

Very good, but the Grammar Squad are not amateurs, and we have not been tripped up!

Was thinking about that :P

Thanks for that input but HN is a casual site, not a uber professional one (i.e. place where most people look for jobs). I'm pretty sure we all know what it means.

Yes, everyone knows what it means. But if you make a claim like "effect is correct here" you are entering the debate, so don't call the debate off-topic when you lose.

Sadly I left that part out of the original claim. My apologies for perhaps sounding condescending.

Correction was imo: a) correct (was proven false by you) b) unnecessary - pedantry is only OK in strictly professional context, which I don't consider HN to be. This was omitted from original claim by my error ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY).

I really meant to thank you for correcting me there i.e. "Thanks for that input". It might have came of as sarcastic, but was not my intention. There is nothing (of value) to win/lose in a debate. In fact losing debate is more enlightening.

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