Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
littlestymaar | on: Softmax forever, or why I like softmax
Off topic: Unlike many out there I'm not usually bothered by lack of capitalization in comments or tweets, but for an essay like this, it makes the paragraphs so hard to read!
Validark | parent | next
If someone can't even put in a minimal amount of effort for basic punctuation and grammar, I'm not going to read their article on something more sophisticated. If you go for the lowercase i's because you want a childish or slob aesthetic, that can be funny in context. But in math or computing, I'm not going to care what someone thinks if they don't know or don't care that 'I' should be capitalized. Grammarly has a free tier. ChatGPT has a free tier. Paste your word slop into one of those and it will fix the basics for you.
LeifCarrotson | root | parent
We just had a similar discussion at work the other day when one of our junior engineers noticed that a senior engineer was reflexively tapping the space bar twice after each sentence. That, too, was good style back when we were writing on typewriters or using monospace fonts with no typesetting. Only a child or a slob would fail to provide an extra gap between sentences, it would be distracting to readers and difficult to locate full stops without that!

But it's 2025, and HTML and Word and the APA and MLA and basically everyone agree that times and style guides have changed.

I agree that not capitalizing the first letter in a sentence is a step too far.

For a counter-example, I personally don't care whether they use the proper em-dash, en-dash, or hyphen--I don't even know when or how to insert the right one with my keyboard. I'm sure there are enthusiasts who care very deeply about using the right ones, and feel that my lack of concern for using the right dash is lazy and unrefined. Culture is changing as more and more communication happens on phone touchscreens, and I have to ask myself - am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong. /s

But I strongly disagree that the author should pass everything they write through Grammarly or worse, through ChatGPT.

dagss | parent
Same here, I just had to stop reading.