Comment by 1dom

1 day ago

Hey, sorry! I don't want you to feel bad, and I don't think you should.

I think there are legitimate reasons to struggle with things like capital letters, and you've named a few: non-native language and interface device limitations. There's other accessibility reasons too, like I have some dyslexic family members who use less capitalisation than most. Also, direct or casual communication with individuals, the impact of the extra cognitive load is minimal - 1 or 2 people - so again, no real issue.

The problem I have with this piece is that it's clearly meant to be an intellectual or academic-adjacent piece, and it's clearly meant to be public/read by many people - that's why we're reading it on Hackernews. The author is not putting in the extra few seconds required to fix the problem when writing, and as a result, many thousands of people lose a few seconds each when reading. I feel there must be a point where the cost of the extra reading time to humanity outweighs the benefits of the intellectual contribution - I can't really tell because even if I overlook the capitalisation, I'm not smart enough to understand it anyway.

> Hey, sorry! I don't want you to feel bad, and I don't think you should.

no worries, but apologies accepted, and sorry that i make you read my non-capitalized comments :)

> The problem I have with this piece is that it's clearly meant to be an intellectual or academic-adjacent piece

that's a good point i hadn't considered. i am of course for correct capitalization and grammar in "serious" documents etc., HN for me is more like a blog. but HN links to third-party, "serious" sites, where such things should matter.

> many thousands of people lose a few seconds each when reading.

i guess i can't really comprehend why some struggle with reading non-capitalized texts in english, because it doesn't matter to my brain. but valuable to know, that other people prefer it.

> I'm not smart enough to understand it anyway.

+1. at least we can discuss about language, so it's not that we're too dumb in general ;)