Hacker News Reader

Comment by jankeromnes | Hacker News Reader

that has

View on HN

thank you. I can understand (not agree with but understand) some people insisting on writing name of companies with plural verbs like Google are and Microsoft have but a battery bell is a singular word no matter which way you slice and dice.

To be fair, judging by previous comments, it's likely the writer is not a native english speaker. English grammar is hard, and people make mistakes.
I for one would like HN to be an inclusive international community, and that means not jumping down people's throats just because their english is not 100%. I'd like to see any of us native english speakers try to submit something to a foreign language site...

Whilst I agree with your sentiments, a 2 word comment really is useless, not matter how great their English might be... rather than a "that's amazing!" type comment, a simple upvote on the original article would suffice, kind of like discouraging "Me too!" comments on Stackoverflow, it doesn't add much to the discussion.
Although having said that, my initial thought was the OP had hit return too early and not realised...

I wasn't talking about the grandparent comment, I was defending the submitter!
The GP's two word comment, while correct, is too reddit for my taste (nothing against reddit - both sites have their place).

British English seems to prefer treat entities like companies as plurals, while the rest of the English-speaking world seems to treat them as singular. Lots of discussion on this point can be found on Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com