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Nitpicker – an overly picky language style checker
- 5vforest 13y agoLoved the idea, but the in first few test paragraphs I tried, the only results I got were false positives.
- amitlan 13y agooverly picky!
- bbromhead 13y agoGreat idea although it doesn't appear to pick up the misuse of there, their and they're. I typed "I'm going to walk over their" and Nitpicker only told me that " I'm " is an informal contraction.
- ampersandy 13y agoOverly picky, at the cost of comprehensiveness I would assume. :) I might enjoy using this service if it was offered as a browser extension, since I find myself regularly proofing my writing to eradicate the informal language that I tend to use in my first drafts.
- inovator 13y agoMac - Chrome browser I pressed Analyze and nothing happened o.O
- nlohmann 13y agoThere was a problem with the server. It should work now.
- tincholio 13y agoThis would be awesome as an Emacs minor mode...
- jonemo 13y agoThe interface is a little confusing when you write a "perfect" text. I just wrote a few sentences, pressed "Analyze" and nothing at all happened. Pressed it again, nothing again. Maybe include a message like "Sorry, found nothing to nitpick about."
- nlohmann 13y agoThere was a problem with the server. It should work now.
- gus_massa 13y agoI've just tried it with: I tried it on some decent-looking HN comments. I am impressed that every "problem" it has found has been plausible, but disappointed that all have been wrong. This checker has one hell of a false positive rate. No errors / suggestions. I didn't get any feedback that the text has been analyzed and is ok. (I tried it with the original text and got some suggestions. It's working.)
- jonemo 13y agoNo, I don't think this is a server problem, it's a UI problem: If there is no mistake, there is no visible feedback. Which makes it hard to tell the difference between being an awesome writer and seeing a broken website.
- raminassemi 13y agoI like it, it does exactly the kind of "thinking" my brain doesn't want to.
- fady 13y agoyeah, did not seem to work for me. xubuntu, chrome 27.
- nlohmann 13y agoThere was a problem with the server. It should work now.
- mikegreco 13y agoAt this late hour I made a note to comment on this in the morning, when I could make my thoughts more succinct. I then realized the inherent irony in that action. I love this tool.
- C1D 13y agoThis was posted 5 months ago.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4985662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4985662
- artagnon 13y agoCurbs artistic freedom, and nitpicks style instead of focusing on grammar issues/ ambiguity.
- tibbon 13y agoThey seem fairly self-aware of this. It is called 'nitpicker'
- rplacd 13y agoRather tangential to the point of individual artistic freedom, but still rather related to artistic deviation in general (didn't think this worthy of a top-level comment - so it's got little to do with you, sorry): I don't trust prescriptionism without any awareness of context. I'm sure there a quite a few nitpickers who take pride in recognizing historical veins in modernist poetry when it's being spouted at them and hot-swapping in the right tropes as required.
- dsymonds 13y agoIt's ironic that the description has a language style error: "Nitpicker is a language style checker which compares your text ..." s/which/that/
- dlitz 13y agoIt doesn't seem to notice punctuation errors, either.
- ErsatzVerkehr 13y agoHm, really? I think I agree that "that" is better here, but I'm not yet convinced that "which" doesn't also work. If we truncate the sentence to "Nitpicker is a language style checker," it is still a true statement, which to me indicates that perhaps "which compares your text" is a descriptive rather than restrictive phrase.
- gngeal 13y agoIn American English, "which" is supposed to be non-restrictive if not followed by a preposition. At least if I remember it correctly. (I'm a Slavic person speaking an L2 English interlanguage, not native English, so I may be wrong.) Also, it seems to be a nice example of something that would require a substantial level of natural language understanding from the style checker in order to be detectable (or, as is the current fashion, at least a really substantial body of statistical data).
- codeflo 13y agoBut shouldn't a non-restrictive relative clause be enclosed by commas?
- westi 13y agoInteresting, it seems to have a way to go to match the quality of feedback that http://www.afterthedeadline.com/ http://www.afterthedeadline.com/ gives though.
- pjscott 13y agoI tried it on some decent-looking HN comments. I'm impressed that every "problem" it has found has been plausible, but disappointed that all of them have been wrong. This thing has one hell of a false positive rate.
- qwertzlcoatl 13y agoNot to nitpick but you should not use informal contractions. (I'm) Omit the 'of' after 'all' unless you change the meaning of the sentence. (all of) You should avoid using 'thing' - instead, name the entities under discussion.
- verroq 13y agoNatural language processing is hard.
- tripzilch 13y ago> Omit the 'of' after 'all' unless you change the meaning of the sentence. (all of) You mean like this? "(...) but disappointed that all them have been wrong (...)" Really? I'm not a native speaker, but that doesn't look right.
- Swizec 13y agoNo, like this: "(...) but disappointed that all have been wrong (...)" As non-native speakers (I'm one too), we have a tendency to use English inelegantly and stuff too many words in sentences.
- pjscott 13y agoThose extra words can help a sentence flow better. If elegance in language were simply a matter of maximal compression while following a set of grammatical rules, then writing would be a lot easier than it actually is.
- 13y ago
- charonn0 13y agoI used the word "Premise," which is apparently British, and therefore wrong. Avoid using British English. (replace with *Premize*) Premize?
- eridius 13y agoWow, that's a hell of a false positive. "Premize" isn't even in the dictionary. It must be a general pattern-matching rule for things like realise vs realize.
- Swizec 13y agoWhy would you want to avoid using real english? That's just silly.
- jonemo 13y agoYou know what's silly? Calling one version of English "real English" is silly. I think what you were trying to say is "British English". And I agree, why would you want to avoid using it?
- ErsatzVerkehr 13y agoDisappointed that it doesn't correct "The NSA" to "NSA".
- nano111 13y agoor "The NSA" AKA "Nobody" as in "Nobody is listening"
- ajanuary 13y agoThe first thing I did was run the website copy through it. It picked up a few problems such as the use of the passive voice. A demonstration perhaps to not take the results at face value.
- darxius 13y agoPretty cool. I would love to have something like this in Sublime.
- microcolonel 13y agoWhere's the code? I'd like to look at how you implemented this, and maybe at the rule db. This would be a great thing to have in offline software as a library.