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It's a way of denoting a user name, similar to how @ designates Twitter user names. I suspect ' is common on HN because ' designates a symbol in lisp.
by grzm 10y ago
It's a way of denoting a user name, similar to how @ designates Twitter user names. I suspect ' is common on HN because ' designates a symbol in lisp.
- eropple 10y agoI picked it up from 'tptacek, I think. @ didn't make sense, so...
- tptacek 10y agoIt's why I use it; also, because my motivation for quoting usernames was that people had dumb usernames, like "the", that I was mistakenly evaluating in sentence context. :) You definitely can't use @username on HN; many (most?) HN commenters don't have @username on Twitter. I'm @tqbf on Twitter, not @tptacek.
- lovich 10y agoThanks for the information