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HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
- Taniwha 4y ago"Sun Ra" might not be the sun god you are thinking of ..... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1ToFXHW5pg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1ToFXHW5pg
- xk3 4y agoYes, I know who Sun Ra is. Because I didn't see ^Ra$ in my list of common nouns then it means that there hasn't been a comment just about Ra. But now there has: Ra. Ra. Ra. 4 times total now :-)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pimlottc 4y agoWhat is a soft quote?
- minimaxir 4y agoThey are better known as "smart quotes" iOS at the least by default will substitute "dumb" quotes with smart quotes in text boxes.
- akkartik 4y agoLooking around, I got the impression they're double rather than single quotes.
- xk3 4y agosmart/soft quotes are usually: ‘|’|“|” but there are also other quoting glyphs in ASCII but especially UTF-8
- fuckstick 4y agoWhy are they soft or smart? That makes no sense - they’re just open and close quotation marks.
- elguyosupremo 4y agoSmart quotes really refers the feature some software has where it automatically detects what type of quote should be used (opening or closing) and puts that in so you can just use the same quote key at the beginning and end and it'll substitute in the right "smart quote".
- drran 4y agoBecause option to enable substitution of minutes(') and seconds(") symbols by proper quotation marks is often called as «Enable smart quotes». For example: 10° 33' 19" -> 10° 33« 19». Very smart!
- anjbe 4y agoGood post! I must point out, though, the correct symbol for minutes and seconds is actually the prime. As in, 10° 33′ 19″.
- bentcorner 4y agoThey are smart because the feature that inserts them is "smart". "Context-aware quotes" or "smartly inserted quotes" might be more accurate. A PM somewhere probably thought "smart quotes" sounded neat, and here we are.
- TheDong 4y agoThat's incorrect. This is a double quote: ", 0x22, ascii This is a smart open quote: “, 0x201c, unicode This is a smart close quote: ”, 0x201d, unicode By default your keyboard double-quote key produces the ascii double quote mark, and that is what's used for quoting in virtually every programming language. Word and many email clients will use smart-quotes by default, but they're pretty rare in programming, hence why the "some among us" phrasing calling them out as strange. That's what the linked repo is referring to by soft quotes, and the command given specifically uses 0x201d above.
- fuckstick 4y agoThey’re not smart quotes - they're just open and close quotation marks. What is smart about them? And I don’t see how one is any “softer” than the other. People’s programming editors often do paren matching - does that make them smart parens? No they’re still just regular old parens.
- TheDong 4y agoWhy do we call them "hot dogs" when they typically have a very low percentage of dog meat (often 0% I think)? Why do we call it a "gravy boat" when it's not literally a boat? Did you know there are male ladybugs? Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to be anything smart about them, and I'm not making the claim there is, I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.
- Manu40 4y ago"gravy boat" Cause it's shaped like a simple boat. Or sort of is. Kind of like how 'soft quotes' are considered soft because they aren't in a very hard like up and down position, and are instead positioned like a feather softly falling. (or so I guess)
- fuckstick 4y ago> Why do we call them "hot dogs" when they typically have a very low percentage of dog meat Because historically, the insinuation was that cheap sausages contained dog meat, that’s why. Someone has answered your gravyboat question. And your ladybug example is bordering on blatant troll baiting. > Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to Some “people” call them ATM machines even though the M stands for machine. > I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about. The agreed upon terms are Left Double Quotation Mark and Right Double Quotation Mark - nothing about smart quotes in the Unicode tables. I get that the term smart is used colloquially - but your comment suggests that their Unicode names are “smart”. I do think it is overall silly and confusing to refer to the characters themselves based on some formatting or automatic insertion feature.
- colejohnson66 4y agoWhy is OP describing that as “disturbing” (I type with “smart” quotes)? It’s not intentional; it’s just because I’m on an iPhone.[a] On the default keyboard, if I want "dumb" quotes, I have to tap and hold the key to get the popup. Simply tapping the quote key is less effort. [a]: On my computers, I’ll use "dumb" quotes. Easy way to see where I typed a comment from, I guess.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoit’s an old gatekeeping / geek dick measuring thing, don’t worry about it
- Manu40 4y agoI'm upvoting you, because calling it disturbing really doesn't make sense unless egotism is involved. IMHO. If someone can explain why it's not just egotism, please go right ahead. Otherwise, it really does seem like it. To me at least. Other comments try to sort of deal with this problem in their explanations about soft and hard quotes, but they don't really deal with the part about it being disturbing. What's so disturbing about using a feature available on your device? Especially when it does nothing harmful to the user, or recipients of that users communications?
- wahnfrieden 4y agoIt is egotism
- ShamelessC 4y agoA good-faith interpretation would be that "disturbing" is meant more lightly than that. It's more like saying use of tabs (or spaces) is "disturbing". It is a cultural disagreement on surface level, but not _really_ a disagreement if you were to probe further (I doubt the author thinks people are literally disturbed if they use soft quotes). Further, if you check my sibling comment you'll see that it is a common mistake for beginner/intermediate coders to paste these quotes into code. This is the source of the "cultural debate" in this instance. They are making a judgement about how this common copy/paste problem shows up in practice. Not a judgement about "proper usage". It's honestly a little surprising that you took this so personally. It reads rather playfully in my opinion.
- Thorrez 4y agoAre there any other places on on the internet that call them "soft quotes"?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nicd 4y agoSpeculation, but two causes could be: - Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN. - Using a third party HN client that only supports plaintext. For example, I imagine there might be at least a few people out there who might access HN from a terminal client?
- xk3 4y ago> Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN Yes, I think it is a thing where people type into Microsoft Word (or similar). Given how moving around the web can cause text in fields to be lost, I don't blame them. But it was a surprising discovery for sure.
- segfaultbuserr 4y agoMobile devices is my guess. For example, iOS by default does not use straight ASCII quote, all quotes are "typographically-correct" curly quotes, pretty much in conformance of Apple design-obsessive reputation.
- fuckstick 4y agoIt’s the default substitution done on iOS devices - the OS used on the most widely used smartphone in the US - this is a lot more common among HN users than copying and pasting out of MS Word??
- banana_giraffe 4y agoA people using iOS with its default “Smart Punctuation” behavior?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- koolba 4y agoDoes the “Intel” filter also catch titles with: Intelligen[t|ce]?
- chias 4y agoGiven that 'sun|moon' resulted in 30905 moon 36100 Samsung 44937 sun my guess is no.
- xk3 4y agoIntel is ^Intel$. The nouns are separated by word boundaries. Feel free to explore the files in the repo
- leephillips 4y agoSeveral commenters have pointed out these defects in the regexes reported in the article, and you’ve replied by telling us that, in addition to all its other faults, it misrepresents the code it’s supposedly describing; in my case going as far as to tell me that I’m wrong. This whole thing is wasting the time of anyone who makes the mistake of thinking it might be interesting.
- drfuchs 4y agoThis has been driving me nuts for decades: "Smart Quotes" first appeared as the name of a feature of interactive document editing tools, wherein the user would always keyboard the "vertical" single or double quote ASCII character, and the software would look at the context of where that quote character was being inserted, and choose the correct "left-quote" or "right-quote" character to actually insert into the document. Unfortunately, users (and product managers of competitors) misinterpreted the label in the check-box in the UI that enabled this feature, and thought that "Smart Quotes" meant that the name of the quote characters somehow had the word "smart" in it. But, no, it just meant "turn on the intelligent logic for which quote to insert into the document." Source: Me, 1988 or so, working on FrameMaker. I don't think there's a reference to the word pair "Smart Quotes" anywhere earlier than the FrameMaker ~2 manual, and certainly not in any book on typography. I'd be happy to learn that I am wrong, if anybody has a pointer.
- neilv 4y agoTeX (as a mostly batch formatter) didn't do this, but it did map ASCII quote characters to the typesetting ones. Including mapping a sequence of two single quote or backquote characters to the typeset double quotes. (FrameMaker was great, BTW. It was what got me into developing fancy layout style sheets and templates, which I later also did with Interleaf, MS Word, LaTeX, and various Web stuff. Somewhere in there, I worked on DynaText and DynaWeb at EBT, so overlapped a bit with Frame as it got into SGML.)
- drfuchs 4y agoInterestingly, the logic of mapping of two single quotes into a double quote was not built into TeX; rather, the metadata in each of the standard fonts simply used the ligature mechanism to handle it, just as they would specify that "f" followed by "t" should turn into the single-character "ft" ligature. It's a shame that ASCII (and its visual representation on terminals from most manufacturers) has a wonderfully slanty left-quote character, but the right-quote character is typically shown as vertical. This makes TeX input files that contain quotations look kind of yucky, which is all the more galling as the original SAIL terminals had symmetric quotes, so everything looked beautiful there (never mind also having proper uparrow and downarrow characters to indicate superscript and subscript, rather than the ugly caret and underscore characters that we're all stuck with in ASCII-land TeX). Source: Me, 1980 or so, working on TeX and Metafont.
- permo-w 4y agothis title makes me roll my eyes. such a blatant attempt at confusing-titleism
- permo-w 4y agoConfusing-Titleism, or: how HN bloggers try to trick you into reading their posts
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Tomte 4y agoThey aren't smart or soft, they are typographically correct. On PC I have AutoHotKey bindings for German and English quotes, single and double, and I'm usually using them.
- flobosg 4y agoOn Linux I use Fcitx and Ctrl+Shift+Alt+U to open the Unicode character picker, while on Windows I have my fork of a character picker discovered a while ago (https://github.com/flobosg/character-picker https://github.com/flobosg/character-picker) bound to the same shortcut.
- somat 4y agoread up on the compose key it may change your life for the better. or it may be difficult to replicate on windows/wayland leading to additional stress in your life. or perhaps you enjoy your current setup, which does not sound half bad, although not as good as the compose key. Most linux desktops are different and more complicated but here is how I set mine up on openbsd. pick a key that is handy but you don't use much, for me this was the context menu key, on many european keyboards there is an altgr key set aside for this exact use case. in ~/.xsession add a line like "xmodmap -e 'keysym Menu = Multi_key'" create a file ~/.XCompose to setup your own compose sequences. mine looks like #load system compose files include "%L" <Multi_key> <w> <e> <b> : "\xf0\x9f\x95\xb8" # spiderweb read /usr/X11R6/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose to get a feel for the existing compose sequences.
- anjbe 4y agoI do the same, except instead of xmodmap I use “setxkbmap -option compose:ralt” (plus a few other options) as described in the xkeyboard-config(7) manpage. It has some useful features: https://man.openbsd.org/xkeyboard-config.7 https://man.openbsd.org/xkeyboard-config.7
- flobosg 4y agoI am aware of the Compose key, but have yet to find a good key to map to it (I use AltGr for third and fourth level characters already). I’ll keep it in mind in case my setup breaks down in the future.
- altisome 4y agoThis is the first time I'm hearing the term 'smart quotes' or 'soft quotes'. I googled to see what it is and all I got was some 'smart' quotes. There's an obscure Wiktionary page on smart quotes which also does not really explain what it is. The GitHub page being linked itself is so vague and cryptic it's hard to understand what is even talked about. To all those who are confused, smart quotes or soft quotes are those context aware quote marks that some word processors insert which depending on context, will put either closing or opening quote marks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- robin_reala 4y agoI just type them in? On a Mac it’s as difficult to type a typographically correct quote as it is to type a dumb quote, just a modifier and a key. OK, so it’s not labelled, but if you know how, why wouldn’t you?
- robin_reala 4y agoRealised I should have provided some reference (and too late to edit my initial post). On an en-Intl Mac keyboard: “ = option + [ ” = option + shift + [ ‘ = option + ] ’ = option + shift + ] There’s a few others I use regularly as well: … = option + ; – (en dash) = option + - — (em dash) = option + shift + - Then there’s a bunch of accent meta keys, so you can use option + c for façade, option + e, e for fiancé, and option + u, i for naïve.
- corobo 4y ago> There are 126,000+ quotations on HackerNews using smart quotes. I find this deeply disturbing. Mobile devices appear to do this by default. iOS in my case anyway. I turned them off because it was messing up my hugo blog's frontmatter whenever I start a post on mobile.
- tuukkah 4y agoIf you wonder where the shell commands "library" and "lb" come from, see https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library And specifically, "nouns" here are defined by this regex: https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library/blob/main/scripts/mining/nouns.py#L41 https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library/blob/main/scripts/m...
- leephillips 4y agoThis is kind of sloppy; some of the conclusions don’t follow from the data, because the regexes aren’t carefully constructed. I didn’t read much of it, but in the first one he’s captured all sentences beginning with Intelligent, Intellectual, Intelligence, etc. This could have been made more precise by just including a [. ] after Intel.
- xk3 4y ago> in the first one he’s captured all sentences beginning with Intelligent, Intellectual, Intelligence This is simply not true. Look at the files in the repo directly Intel is ^Intel$. The nouns are separated by word boundaries
- leephillips 4y agoI’m going by the article, in which they aren’t.