I came here to read about couchdb but ended up reading about grammar for 2 mins. Does HN have an offtopic flag and if so can I by default collapse all offtopic comments?
My favourite technique for remembering this is to say "it is an apostrophe" (because it's is "it is", and has the apostrophe (in case that isn't clear :-) )).
I just remember that (possessive) pronouns don't have apostrophes. "My", "your", "his", "her", "their", and "our" don't have apostrophes, so why would "its"?
Meanwhile, contractions do have apostrophes. "Haven't", "should've", "that's", "you're", and "I'll" have apostrophes, so "it's" (meaning "it is" or "it has") should too.
Personally I wouldn't mind corrections on grammar. But I agree that the comments about grammar, even though in my opinion somewhat useful, still add noise to the discussion as a whole.
I've been thinking about this and, I think having a "grammar patrol" that had the ability to alter other people's comments for grammar on a site like HN or Reddit might be useful. Maybe. Of course there is potential for abuse. So you'd need a second group of people at the very least, who were given the ability to vote on the edits themselves as good or bad.
This second group would be the most difficult to establish and maintain at scale I think. Because whereas you could in theory allow anyone to volunteer as grammar patrol, you'd need to have a trusted group of people for group two. Otherwise, a group of trolls could sign up for both groups and make bad edits and then approve them.
At the end of the day it would probably require a lot more effort than what it's worth. Grammar mistakes are a bit of an eyesore but at the end of the day they usually aren't the end of the world.
Also, language is ever-evolving. So if in 50 years 80% of the population is consistently making a common set of grammar mistakes then that just means that the way to spell those words has changed.
Alternatively, allow people to suggest corrections to a message, a lot like code review tools allow line-by-line feedback or questions on code.
In order to prevent people from abusing it as another way to get their reply seen by everyone, you could make it a private communication between the comment author and the user giving feedback. Or make it possible for other users to see it, but make it hidden by default.
That way, if the author wants to correct their comment, they can, but nobody else has to see the clutter.
We could avoid all that and just have a way of correcting comments (with history, diff, and all that) which would show up upon clicking, say, "show edited version" or whatever. By default it would display the original version, but if someone wishes, one could display the edited version. This way the noise would be hidden. Perhaps to be able to add such corrections to comments, you would have to have at least n_1 karma, be registered for n_2 months, and so forth as a defense mechanism against trolls.
I am sleep deprived. I hope my idea comes across properly. It sounds good to me right now, might not sound good tomorrow. :P It is definitely complicated though and not sure it is worth the effort to implement and maintain.
That would actually be an interesting idea to pursue because I don't think it's even decidable and may require an AI/human to write back to understand. It depends on context that may not even be there. (Think of the absurdity of chain-comment-memes on Reddit, for example. The question may not even be answerable until lots of other people have replied. Now, you may not permit that as "grammar", but it speaks to the complexity of even defining grammar. Words are repurposed, etc. etc.)
Maybe... just maybe memes could be the key to AI /s
I make frequent minor grammar and spelling mistakes. Spoken english would rarely pick them up, nor would the listener be genuinely confused, but written english is different and while our Chomsky grammer parser is just one brain, we hear and read things differently. It is and It(possessive)s are not the same in semantic intent, and even sometimes in spoken flow people have to ask "did you mean it is, or it possesses" in some manner.
Spelling checkers which cannot read do not help. here and hear are both legal in the sentence parse in some ways, so cannot be detected as the wrong form without a higher semantic model. Few systems have this. Therefore, many small mistakes can creep through, apart from the ones I mis-type the system may itself be making them, in ways which our own spellchecking brain do not pick up. Here what I say, Hear what I say...
In his original message right after "it's" he put "(I believe?)", implying he was unsure about the usage and inviting feedback so I responded to that. If I misread, my bad, but I thought he was specifically asking.
