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The fact that terms like Aho-Corasick, PLDI, Go, etc. are properly capitalized, including if they begin sentences, but otherwise sentences are uncapitalized, ma
by dooglius 7mo ago
The fact that terms like Aho-Corasick, PLDI, Go, etc. are properly capitalized, including if they begin sentences, but otherwise sentences are uncapitalized, makes me think it's an explicit LLM instruction "don't capitalize the start of sentences" rather than writing style.
- jlarocco 7mo agoWhat's with this silly "all lower case" style lately? Jack Dorsey's layoff message last month did the same thing. Is it some kind of "Prove you're not an AI by purposely writing like an idiot" or something?
- gfody 7mo agonot anti-capitalist, just a subtle preference away from capitalism
- fsckboy 7mo agoit's been common in the unix/c/lisp worlds since before you were born when 6 bit ascii was all caps only, people got used to monocase, then 7-bit lowercase ascii blew in a fresh wind.
- jlarocco 7mo agoWhat a condescending comment. It's too bad I can't vote you down.
- tux3 7mo agoNo, this is just what that writing style looks like. Names and acronyms are usually capitalized normally. I keep being surprised by the magnitude of the disconnect between this place and the other circles of hell. I'd have thought the Venn diagram would have a lot more overlap.
- dooglius 7mo agoOh the venn diagram might be big, the HN population just has a lot of variance I think, and is less of a community per se. I don't doubt what you're saying, though in the grand scheme of things, I think the "too lazy to hit shift" population dwarfs any of these groups.
- tux3 7mo agoYeah, I can agree with the variance. Except that the "too lazy to hit shift" community is not something I would ever confuse with people writing long form articles about their regex engine research that they'll be presenting at PLDI. The confusion might be understandable for people who have never encountered this style before, but that's still a very uncharitable take about an otherwise pretty interesting article.
- srcreigh 7mo agoChatGPT also loves Aho-Corasick and seems to overuse it as an optimization fall back idea. ChatGPT has suggested the algorithm to me but the code ended up slowing down a lot.
- sigbottle 7mo agoChatGPT was heavily RL'd on competitive programming in 2025, and aho-corasick is a traditional algorithm in the competitive programming space.