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Indeed this shit is not easy! One day your on a huge blog/well known publication and your traffic is going nuts. The next day its all gone. One day your cele

Indeed this shit is not easy! One day your on a huge blog/well known publication and your traffic is going nuts. The next day its all gone. One day your celebrating your investment/funding win. The next your struggling to find more money and or accept it's not going to happen. One day your invited to demo your latest tech to one of the big tech firms thinking it's your big win you've worked years for. The next you realize/wonder damn did they just steal our hard work - why did they treat us like garbage? So many ups and downs. Sometimes you just want to give up, but you don't because this what you love to do and if you stop/give up on one tech idea you'll get restless and do another!

deleted 13y ago
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robotresearcher 13y ago
You got "you're" wrong 4 times in that 5 sentence post. I know it's pedantic, but this stuff is important if you're trying to make a good impression in written communication. Why take a chance on looking slightly careless, when it's easy to get it right? If you think it doesn't matter, you're wrong.
- sizzle 13y ago
  tactfully stated, HN is awesome.
  - derrida 13y ago
    HN is awesome. Democracy is fair. Jesus Christ is Lord. Praise be to Allah. Human rights are essential. The functioning of ideology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology Silicon Valley has its own ideology, and HN is the center of it. Any statement of "...is awesome" is a good candidate for finding the foundations of this ideology. Any good ideology has to encompass a diversity of views to survive. In this case, we see the public prostration of the spat out soul who voluntarily subjects their weakness to the crowd in the name of self-development. Addressing whether this is a good or bad thing would be to enter into the terms of which this particular ideology functions. Most ideologies typically benefit a certain class of people: clergy, politicians, a bureaucracy, academia, venture capital.
    - derefr 13y ago
      That wasn't a statement of ideology; it was rather more a concise way to say "you reminded me why I come here instead of somewhere else: it is, on average, composed of people like you, and I enjoy the atmosphere this creates. Thank you for being you, and for contributing to making this the kind of place I enjoy." When you see "community X is awesome" posted within community X, it's mostly a recent convert looking back and realizing that wherever they just came from was a comparatively bad fit for their personality and views. I hear it a lot, here, from hackers switching from /r/programming to HN. I hear it on LessWrong from people who came from, for example, the atheist community, or the skeptic community, and didn't realize it was possible to talk about those subjects without constant dick-waving and chest-beating regarding their respective out-groups. Either way, it's almost the opposite reaction to what you're accusing it of being: it's not like joining a cult; it's more like leaving high-school and realizing you can make friends with people because they talk about things you like, and behave in ways that don't annoy you, instead of just putting up with them because they're constantly forced to be around you for six hours a day.
      - sizzle 13y ago
        That is precisely the sentiment revealed by my comment, from being a long time lurker from reddit and finally switching over to HN full-time. The novelty of widespread intelligent discourse will wear off soon enough the more I participate.
- founder4fun 13y ago
  One day your getting upvoted for a possible empathetic comment. The next your getting knocked down for slight grammatical errors. Start-up life keep it coming. I've rode your high and lows and will continue to do so til the end!
  - robotresearcher 13y ago
    Honestly, I'm not knocking you down but trying to help you from making trivial mistakes that change people's perception and distract and detract from the important things. your => you're * 2 rode => ridden Again, why not get it right, since there's no doubt you can?
    - jcc80 13y ago
      You say you're concerned about perception and trying to help him. Honestly, do you think people perceive someone who makes a typo worse or the person who is repeatedly correcting them on an internet forum worse?
      - nbouscal 13y ago
        It's not a typo, it's a repeated grammatical error. I perceive someone repeatedly correcting someone else's errors as probably having too much time on their hands. I perceive someone repeatedly making grade-school level errors (as covered elsewhere, this is not a common ESL error) as not worth my time to even read. Up to you which of those is worse.
        jcc80 13y ago
        Was wondering if anyone would correct me for calling it a typo instead of a grammar error since if I wrote "your" instead of "you're" it would have been too obvious. Seriously though, I used to judge people the same way right after undergrad. I was young and thought people who made such errors were stupid. But, over the years I encountered some very successful people that could barely write and had to reflect a bit. "How is guy is a self-made multimillionaire when he can barely write?" I realized that my dismissing of people like that made me feel superior but it wasn't actually a good filter. Obviously you've reached a different conclusion by deciding that people who make grammar errors on internet forums aren't worth your time, so to each his own.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  This comment thread is toxic, and it's regrettable that you created it. Look at the replies you've engendered. Quibbling over grammar is not why most people read HN. Drew Houston writes without capitalization. Would you say the same to him? Ideas are what matter, not apostrophes.
  - robotresearcher 13y ago
    I agree, and I wish I hadn't. On your second point, I think there's a clear difference between consistent lack of capitalization that is obviously a stylistic quirk, and simply using a homophone because you don't know (or, I guess as it turns out, don't care) that you're doing so. This is a common mistake and not usually due to ESL/EAL. But I won't do it again, as it evidently is not a net good in this medium. Sorry, folks.
    - gruseom 13y ago
      "Not a net good in this medium" is exactly the right way to look at this. In a more robust environment, your (IMO) true and well-intentioned original comment would not have been a problem.
  - znowi 13y ago
    What makes this thread toxic, if you read closely, is your fierce defense of bad grammar all over it.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    > Drew Houston writes without capitalization. Thank you for informing me. Now that I know this, I'll look more seriously at Dropbox alternatives. This degree of carelessness and disrespect for others is dangerous in the CEO of a company asking me to trust them with my data.
  - nzp 13y ago
    Apostrophes, proper capitalization, punctuation, properly dividing text into paragraphs... all these orthographic conventions are essential to communicating ideas. So if ideas matter, apostrophes matter too. Capitalization even more so, no matter who the person is.
- rdl 13y ago
  I just thought about this: pg complained about people with strong accents potentially being at a disadvantage. I've noticed a few other YC founders (and successful sfba founders in general) who have strong accents; they're at a disadvantage, but it's not terminal. (the worst accents compared to overall level of success otherwise are probably Singlish speakers; EE are sometimes thick accents but generally standard vocabulary and grammar, and Indian English is a little bit of vocabulary but mainly pacing and accent, and generally not very far off from SFBA American English after a few months) What I don't see is a lot of founders who are bad at written communication. Maybe it's self-selection (those who can't write are less likely to try to write online, so I won't see them as frequently, if ever), but it really seems like being good at written English is a requirement for being a successful tech entrepreneur now. "Good at written English" doesn't necessarily mean perfectly idiomatic and grammatical American College English, but clear and persuasive when the reader is fluent in (American, College, Middle/Upper class, Standard) English. The nice thing is written English is much easier for "tech people" to learn; the best training is reading lots of well-written English, and you need to do that to participate in the technology and startup world anyway. The keys are: 1) having good source material (there's a tipping point, like some sizable non-US English communities -- which is why Singlish is a thing) 2) actually caring.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    Counterexample: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483053 Replace Drew's intentional lack of capitalization with this "your/you're swap," and you've got the same situation. It seems like people are just prejudiced, and are so prejudiced that they feel justified in calling people out on a forum under the guise of "helping" them. Yes, grammar is powerful, but this isn't a situation where it matters. They were expressing empathy. They weren't writing a press release. And we can't seem to find it in ourselves to avoid bikeshedding this thread.
    - rdl 13y ago
      your/you're isn't unclear (usually). "how is babby formed" type stuff is what is incomprehensible.
- nemothekid 13y ago
  You ever thought that everyone on HN might not be American or speak english as a first language? Its a comment on an internet forum, there is no need for the active grammar schooling. Your trivial, holier-than-thou, grammer nazi bullshit actively discourage other posters who may not speak english fluently from posting. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233681
  - halter73 13y ago
    While I agree that correcting grammar isn't usually that productive, I think that mixing up "your" and "you're" is probably indicative of a native English speaker. I doubt that "your" and "you're" are homophones in most other languages. As a native English speaker myself, I often slip up and write "your" when I mean "you're" because they both sound the same in my head and it's quicker to type "your". I think that a non-native speaker would be less like to make this mistake, because it requires the writer to decide to contract the pronoun and the verb and then forget to use an apostrophe. I think this is far more likely to happen if you're simply typing out a stream of consciousness than if you're translating your thoughts from a different language.
    - ludwigvan 13y ago
      Yes, as a non-native, I agree that it is not very common (almost never) for me to mix them up because I prononunce them differently. Another reason non-natives don't do this mistake might be that usually they are thought the written language first, so schools concentrate on grammatical issues more.
      - imarg 13y ago
        Adding another datapoint, as a non-native speaker myself, I believe I've rarely (if ever) mixed them up. As the parent commenter said, I've also noticed in the past that this mix up occurs usually among native English speakers. I've noticed it with other languages too, that native speakers often mix up homophones, probably because as a native speaker you write as you would speak and either you don't care or don't even think about it.
- Varcht 13y ago
  Does it really matter? Forum posts are stream of consciousness, more often than not typed on our phones and posted with at most a quick reread. For me the content is several orders of magnitude more important than spelling. Personally I find myself discounting more those that find the need to trifle over spelling much like I discount those that never dare to risk but choose to profit by critiquing in hindsight. Spelling might matter when trying to please the establishments but it's the underlying thoughts however spelt that matter.
  - robotresearcher 13y ago
    It doesn't matter all that much. Looking back at why I was motivated to offer a tip, I think when the poster pleaded "why did they treat us like garbage?" I wondered if his/her written communication could be contributing to that. This: > "it's the underlying thoughts however spelt that matter." is not true. You didn't write your post in txtspk because that is not the locally acceptable way of communicating. It could be comprehensible, unambiguous and require less typing, but it just doesn't meet the tacitly agreed standards in this community and you would not expect your ideas to have the impact they deserve if you chose to write that way.
- nbouscal 13y ago
  The real problem with grammatical errors is that regardless of whether or not the person can understand you, you're decreasing their level of processing fluency. High processing fluency has been shown to be linked with positive affect [1]. This means that by writing with grammatical errors, you are literally making the reader feel less positively about you and what you're saying. Daniel Kahneman refers to this as "cognitive ease" vs. "cognitive strain". Making your writing correct and easy to read increases cognitive ease, which makes your readers "like what [they] see, believe what [they] hear, trust [their] intuitions and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar." [2] Grammar is important for making a good impression as well, but that's really not the key selling point, especially for anyone in business. The key point is that if you want to persuade anyone of anything, whether it's to invest in your startup, to buy your product, or to leave their cushy Google job to work for you, you will be more persuasive if you use proper grammar. [1] "Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Affective Judgments" http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/reber-winkielman-schwarz-Fluency-PS-1998.pdf http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/reber-winkielman-schwarz-Flue... [2] Thinking Fast and Slow
hnriot 13y ago
Please learn you're vs your, it makes you look dumb.
- chegra 13y ago
  fI you unedrstnad waht eh is saiyng arne't you hte dmub oen to mkae a ibg dael otu fo ti.
  - nzp 13y ago
    ˙ƃuıuɐəɯ əɥʇ uɐəlƃ ʎləɹəɯ uɐɔ noʎ ɟı ʇxəʇ əsɹɐd ʎlısɐə oʇ əlqɐ ƃuıəq ʇnoqɐ dɐɹɔ ɐ səʌıƃ oɥʍ ˙əəɹƃɐ ı

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

robotresearcher 13y ago

You got "you're" wrong 4 times in that 5 sentence post. I know it's pedantic, but this stuff is important if you're trying to make a good impression in written communication. Why take a chance on looking slightly careless, when it's easy to get it right? If you think it doesn't matter, you're wrong.

sizzle 13y ago
tactfully stated, HN is awesome.
- derrida 13y ago
  HN is awesome. Democracy is fair. Jesus Christ is Lord. Praise be to Allah. Human rights are essential. The functioning of ideology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology Silicon Valley has its own ideology, and HN is the center of it. Any statement of "...is awesome" is a good candidate for finding the foundations of this ideology. Any good ideology has to encompass a diversity of views to survive. In this case, we see the public prostration of the spat out soul who voluntarily subjects their weakness to the crowd in the name of self-development. Addressing whether this is a good or bad thing would be to enter into the terms of which this particular ideology functions. Most ideologies typically benefit a certain class of people: clergy, politicians, a bureaucracy, academia, venture capital.
  - derefr 13y ago
    That wasn't a statement of ideology; it was rather more a concise way to say "you reminded me why I come here instead of somewhere else: it is, on average, composed of people like you, and I enjoy the atmosphere this creates. Thank you for being you, and for contributing to making this the kind of place I enjoy." When you see "community X is awesome" posted within community X, it's mostly a recent convert looking back and realizing that wherever they just came from was a comparatively bad fit for their personality and views. I hear it a lot, here, from hackers switching from /r/programming to HN. I hear it on LessWrong from people who came from, for example, the atheist community, or the skeptic community, and didn't realize it was possible to talk about those subjects without constant dick-waving and chest-beating regarding their respective out-groups. Either way, it's almost the opposite reaction to what you're accusing it of being: it's not like joining a cult; it's more like leaving high-school and realizing you can make friends with people because they talk about things you like, and behave in ways that don't annoy you, instead of just putting up with them because they're constantly forced to be around you for six hours a day.
    - sizzle 13y ago
      That is precisely the sentiment revealed by my comment, from being a long time lurker from reddit and finally switching over to HN full-time. The novelty of widespread intelligent discourse will wear off soon enough the more I participate.
founder4fun 13y ago
One day your getting upvoted for a possible empathetic comment. The next your getting knocked down for slight grammatical errors. Start-up life keep it coming. I've rode your high and lows and will continue to do so til the end!
- robotresearcher 13y ago
  Honestly, I'm not knocking you down but trying to help you from making trivial mistakes that change people's perception and distract and detract from the important things. your => you're * 2 rode => ridden Again, why not get it right, since there's no doubt you can?
  - jcc80 13y ago
    You say you're concerned about perception and trying to help him. Honestly, do you think people perceive someone who makes a typo worse or the person who is repeatedly correcting them on an internet forum worse?
    - nbouscal 13y ago
      It's not a typo, it's a repeated grammatical error. I perceive someone repeatedly correcting someone else's errors as probably having too much time on their hands. I perceive someone repeatedly making grade-school level errors (as covered elsewhere, this is not a common ESL error) as not worth my time to even read. Up to you which of those is worse.
      - jcc80 13y ago
        Was wondering if anyone would correct me for calling it a typo instead of a grammar error since if I wrote "your" instead of "you're" it would have been too obvious. Seriously though, I used to judge people the same way right after undergrad. I was young and thought people who made such errors were stupid. But, over the years I encountered some very successful people that could barely write and had to reflect a bit. "How is guy is a self-made multimillionaire when he can barely write?" I realized that my dismissing of people like that made me feel superior but it wasn't actually a good filter. Obviously you've reached a different conclusion by deciding that people who make grammar errors on internet forums aren't worth your time, so to each his own.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sillysaurus2 13y ago
This comment thread is toxic, and it's regrettable that you created it. Look at the replies you've engendered. Quibbling over grammar is not why most people read HN. Drew Houston writes without capitalization. Would you say the same to him? Ideas are what matter, not apostrophes.
- robotresearcher 13y ago
  I agree, and I wish I hadn't. On your second point, I think there's a clear difference between consistent lack of capitalization that is obviously a stylistic quirk, and simply using a homophone because you don't know (or, I guess as it turns out, don't care) that you're doing so. This is a common mistake and not usually due to ESL/EAL. But I won't do it again, as it evidently is not a net good in this medium. Sorry, folks.
  - gruseom 13y ago
    "Not a net good in this medium" is exactly the right way to look at this. In a more robust environment, your (IMO) true and well-intentioned original comment would not have been a problem.
- znowi 13y ago
  What makes this thread toxic, if you read closely, is your fierce defense of bad grammar all over it.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  > Drew Houston writes without capitalization. Thank you for informing me. Now that I know this, I'll look more seriously at Dropbox alternatives. This degree of carelessness and disrespect for others is dangerous in the CEO of a company asking me to trust them with my data.
- nzp 13y ago
  Apostrophes, proper capitalization, punctuation, properly dividing text into paragraphs... all these orthographic conventions are essential to communicating ideas. So if ideas matter, apostrophes matter too. Capitalization even more so, no matter who the person is.
rdl 13y ago
I just thought about this: pg complained about people with strong accents potentially being at a disadvantage. I've noticed a few other YC founders (and successful sfba founders in general) who have strong accents; they're at a disadvantage, but it's not terminal. (the worst accents compared to overall level of success otherwise are probably Singlish speakers; EE are sometimes thick accents but generally standard vocabulary and grammar, and Indian English is a little bit of vocabulary but mainly pacing and accent, and generally not very far off from SFBA American English after a few months) What I don't see is a lot of founders who are bad at written communication. Maybe it's self-selection (those who can't write are less likely to try to write online, so I won't see them as frequently, if ever), but it really seems like being good at written English is a requirement for being a successful tech entrepreneur now. "Good at written English" doesn't necessarily mean perfectly idiomatic and grammatical American College English, but clear and persuasive when the reader is fluent in (American, College, Middle/Upper class, Standard) English. The nice thing is written English is much easier for "tech people" to learn; the best training is reading lots of well-written English, and you need to do that to participate in the technology and startup world anyway. The keys are: 1) having good source material (there's a tipping point, like some sizable non-US English communities -- which is why Singlish is a thing) 2) actually caring.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Counterexample: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483053 Replace Drew's intentional lack of capitalization with this "your/you're swap," and you've got the same situation. It seems like people are just prejudiced, and are so prejudiced that they feel justified in calling people out on a forum under the guise of "helping" them. Yes, grammar is powerful, but this isn't a situation where it matters. They were expressing empathy. They weren't writing a press release. And we can't seem to find it in ourselves to avoid bikeshedding this thread.
  - rdl 13y ago
    your/you're isn't unclear (usually). "how is babby formed" type stuff is what is incomprehensible.
nemothekid 13y ago
You ever thought that everyone on HN might not be American or speak english as a first language? Its a comment on an internet forum, there is no need for the active grammar schooling. Your trivial, holier-than-thou, grammer nazi bullshit actively discourage other posters who may not speak english fluently from posting. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233681
- halter73 13y ago
  While I agree that correcting grammar isn't usually that productive, I think that mixing up "your" and "you're" is probably indicative of a native English speaker. I doubt that "your" and "you're" are homophones in most other languages. As a native English speaker myself, I often slip up and write "your" when I mean "you're" because they both sound the same in my head and it's quicker to type "your". I think that a non-native speaker would be less like to make this mistake, because it requires the writer to decide to contract the pronoun and the verb and then forget to use an apostrophe. I think this is far more likely to happen if you're simply typing out a stream of consciousness than if you're translating your thoughts from a different language.
  - ludwigvan 13y ago
    Yes, as a non-native, I agree that it is not very common (almost never) for me to mix them up because I prononunce them differently. Another reason non-natives don't do this mistake might be that usually they are thought the written language first, so schools concentrate on grammatical issues more.
    - imarg 13y ago
      Adding another datapoint, as a non-native speaker myself, I believe I've rarely (if ever) mixed them up. As the parent commenter said, I've also noticed in the past that this mix up occurs usually among native English speakers. I've noticed it with other languages too, that native speakers often mix up homophones, probably because as a native speaker you write as you would speak and either you don't care or don't even think about it.
Varcht 13y ago
Does it really matter? Forum posts are stream of consciousness, more often than not typed on our phones and posted with at most a quick reread. For me the content is several orders of magnitude more important than spelling. Personally I find myself discounting more those that find the need to trifle over spelling much like I discount those that never dare to risk but choose to profit by critiquing in hindsight. Spelling might matter when trying to please the establishments but it's the underlying thoughts however spelt that matter.
- robotresearcher 13y ago
  It doesn't matter all that much. Looking back at why I was motivated to offer a tip, I think when the poster pleaded "why did they treat us like garbage?" I wondered if his/her written communication could be contributing to that. This: > "it's the underlying thoughts however spelt that matter." is not true. You didn't write your post in txtspk because that is not the locally acceptable way of communicating. It could be comprehensible, unambiguous and require less typing, but it just doesn't meet the tacitly agreed standards in this community and you would not expect your ideas to have the impact they deserve if you chose to write that way.
nbouscal 13y ago
The real problem with grammatical errors is that regardless of whether or not the person can understand you, you're decreasing their level of processing fluency. High processing fluency has been shown to be linked with positive affect [1]. This means that by writing with grammatical errors, you are literally making the reader feel less positively about you and what you're saying. Daniel Kahneman refers to this as "cognitive ease" vs. "cognitive strain". Making your writing correct and easy to read increases cognitive ease, which makes your readers "like what [they] see, believe what [they] hear, trust [their] intuitions and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar." [2] Grammar is important for making a good impression as well, but that's really not the key selling point, especially for anyone in business. The key point is that if you want to persuade anyone of anything, whether it's to invest in your startup, to buy your product, or to leave their cushy Google job to work for you, you will be more persuasive if you use proper grammar. [1] "Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Affective Judgments" http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/reber-winkielman-schwarz-Fluency-PS-1998.pdf http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/reber-winkielman-schwarz-Flue... [2] Thinking Fast and Slow

hnriot 13y ago

Please learn you're vs your, it makes you look dumb.

chegra 13y ago
fI you unedrstnad waht eh is saiyng arne't you hte dmub oen to mkae a ibg dael otu fo ti.
- nzp 13y ago
  ˙ƃuıuɐəɯ əɥʇ uɐəlƃ ʎləɹəɯ uɐɔ noʎ ɟı ʇxəʇ əsɹɐd ʎlısɐə oʇ əlqɐ ƃuıəq ʇnoqɐ dɐɹɔ ɐ səʌıƃ oɥʍ ˙əəɹƃɐ ı