I disagree about "next". I wasn't confused by the original usage. "Next" is more associated with "subsequent" than "upcoming". The "future" component is contextually inferred.
Probably nobody at all got confused by that word choice.
It didn’t take me long to parse out the meaning but the phrasing was confusing.
“The next book he wrote, Noise, ….” Would have been better or “After that book he wrote Noise….”.
I absolutely was confused for a second or two and thought “wait, are we talking about a different person? He isn’t going to have a ‘next’ book unless he had one queued up?”.
Did I need the explanation above? Not really, I’d come to the right conclusion on my own but I can imagine someone who isn’t a native speaker (reader?) might stumble on that more and I enjoyed the confirmation.
The sheer irony of your unwarranted pedantic critique of the usage of “next” is that all HN threaded comments, including yours, have a “next” link in their headers which clearly does NOT refer to unwritten future comments.
I'm reasonably sure this is not what happened, judging by my own recollection of when I have been tempted to write similar things, and my discussions with people who have written similar things. However, your story is both simple and coherent.
It's much easier to point out others' alleged irrational thinking, but the main purpose of books like this is to help you better understand your own thinking.
Would you please stop perpetuating flamewars and taking HN threads on generic tangents? You've been doing this a ton lately, it's not what this site is for, and the effects your posts have been having on the threads is regrettable.
I'm sorry to pile on, since I just replied to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I disagree about "next". I wasn't confused by the original usage. "Next" is more associated with "subsequent" than "upcoming". The "future" component is contextually inferred.
Probably nobody at all got confused by that word choice.
It didn’t take me long to parse out the meaning but the phrasing was confusing.
“The next book he wrote, Noise, ….” Would have been better or “After that book he wrote Noise….”.
I absolutely was confused for a second or two and thought “wait, are we talking about a different person? He isn’t going to have a ‘next’ book unless he had one queued up?”.
Did I need the explanation above? Not really, I’d come to the right conclusion on my own but I can imagine someone who isn’t a native speaker (reader?) might stumble on that more and I enjoyed the confirmation.
> Probably nobody at all got confused by that word choice.
This is overconfidence; e.g. it "it is clear to me, so it must have been clear to everyone else."
Indeed, there is a person in this overall thread [1] saying the use of "next" was ambiguous:
> I literally thought some unpublished book.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45548294
Ok, fine, probably someone will get confused about anything.
It was made clear to everyone because of the word choice in context. If someone didn't get it then they didn't put two and two together.
I looked up the word in a few different dictionaries and the top entry aligns more with "subsequent" in every one.
You are wrong on this.
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The sheer irony of your unwarranted pedantic critique of the usage of “next” is that all HN threaded comments, including yours, have a “next” link in their headers which clearly does NOT refer to unwritten future comments.
Not sure why I bothered responding to a troll.
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I'm reasonably sure this is not what happened, judging by my own recollection of when I have been tempted to write similar things, and my discussions with people who have written similar things. However, your story is both simple and coherent.
It's much easier to point out others' alleged irrational thinking, but the main purpose of books like this is to help you better understand your own thinking.
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Would you please stop perpetuating flamewars and taking HN threads on generic tangents? You've been doing this a ton lately, it's not what this site is for, and the effects your posts have been having on the threads is regrettable.
Also, please stop crossing into name-calling and personal attack, as you did here. jeffwass shouldn't have referred to you as "a troll" but there's no question that your posts have been having trollish effects in the threads, and this is actually what matters (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522090, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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I literally thought some unpublished book. But you shouldn't have doubled down on 'next'. Your first para was enough.
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Does it matter if it’s existing or upcoming? People who interested will search gor it and see if it’s already available.
So beside pedantic it’s unnecessary.
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Pinker calls it "curse of knowledge".
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