This wisdom is at least certainly more true than claiming the inverse, which is a good indicator. Would amazon be what it is now if everything was powerpoints? It would almost certainly be significantly worse in many areas.

The point about bullet points being trash low effort ways to give information without rigorous thought is self evidently true.

Anyone who is considerate in how they formulate questions before seeking answers will tell you the same thing - often the dedicated formulation of the question leads directly to the answer. By just the same way, giving a full and complete answer can reveal to you a question - which may unravel and destroy your answer, or change the course of your idea.

the far more common and acceptable-to-use-without-introduction acronym for this is SO (significant other)

And to answer the question - the threshold is when people stop complaining about the use :)

As an Irish person, yes. Just calling Ireland Ireland when you are specifically being asked what country you are from for official purposes is a bit too orbital a view. Same goes for discussions from within a country holding contested ground sharing the name of a country with an island, blah blah.

It's a complicated subject, and nobody begrudges them the clarity.

I think if you ask around, you'll find yourself very much in the minority of Irish people. Republic of Ireland is almost never used outside of the football team, as it's simply not the name of the country.

While I. The context of the BBC, the distinction to Northern Ireland is relevant.

You're not understanding my comment at all. I'm not talking about the internal use of ROI within Ireland.

Not once have I heard anyone even broach this as a topic. Nobody cares. If someone asks you where you are from, and you tell them Ireland, and they inquire the north or the republic - what are you going to do? Just repeat "Ireland" at them like some kind of contrarian idiot? Tell them you are "not from northern Ireland" so as to rule out all of the places you are not from?

ROI is a perfectly serviceable term for helping people understand what you mean, if the context isn't clear enough already.

> Not once have I heard anyone even broach this as a topic.

I have a feeling you just don't pay attention or, from previous experience with you, are incapable of determining how other people feel about this topic.

> ROI is a perfectly serviceable term for helping people understand what you mean, if the context isn't clear enough already.

It's a specifically politically charged term used by people who either don't know better or have a bone to pick. It's not commonly used in Ireland and it's not used to differentiate innocently between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

> It's a specifically politically charged term used by people who either don't know better or have a bone to pick.

And you, quite clearly, appear to be the one who has a bone to pick! Everybody else is (thankfully!) now moving on with their lives.

> Everybody else is (thankfully!) now moving on with their lives.

Or you're just blind to the issues. Your comments here and lack of familiarity with Irish politics and culture suggests you may be a non-Irish person making assumptions about the country? Or maybe you are Irish and oblivious.

> from previous experience with you

Are you confusing me with someone else? I don't think we've spoken before.

> I have a feeling you just don't pay attention

To what exactly? Where does this topic come up regularly for you?

> It's a specifically politically charged term used by people who either don't know better or have a bone to pick.

You are the only one picking a bone. I'm merely relating that I don't care and have never heard anyone care before.

> It's not commonly used in Ireland

Did you even read my responses? I said as much myself. You're arguing with the ghost of someone else or something.

How's this help when speaking to someone who hasn't memorized a map of Ireland and does not know which town is in which country?

I think this is just going off sunrise and set +- some estimate. Which does not work as well the farther from the equator you get. It's light for hours up here before you wake, and we sleep like 2-4 hours after sunset.

Throwing my hat in here. The sub millimeter difference in the length of a dash conveys no additional meaning or clarity. It is impossible to argue me out of this position.

It's not like you can reliably write these consistently by hand either without going over the top in length to make it extremely obvious.

Here's some examples where the en dash could make things more clear:

-5--2°C

post-war-pre-digital era

See sections 10-O-15-Q

Try Our New York-London Flight Connection!

-5°C to -2°C

post-war - pre-digital era (not a sentence any sane person would use anyway).

See sections 10-O - 15-Q

Try our New York-London flight connection! (no kind of dash clears this one up without fixing capitalisation).

The last one was a gotcha: it's their newly established York–London flight!

Try Our New York–London Flight Connection.

Or if it was New York:

Try Our New York – London Flight Connection.

Note the additional spaces. Agree on the capitalization though.

> Try Our New York – London Flight Connection.

I'd wager serious money that if you put that on a sign and surveyed people, at least in the US, they'd all still conclude it is a "New York" to "London" flight.

What's the use of a communication tool, if it doesn't actually communicate anything to real people?

York doesn't have an active airport

In my region at least, -5 ~ -2°C, or -5°C ~ -2°C. If the something is making people confuse, we replace it with a suitable substitution. Re-educating people is really just last resort. Is there anything keeping us from changing it other than ego?

In all countries I've lived in (and until right now, I thought the entire world), that would mean "-5 is approximately equal to -2".

Have you heard of "to"?

Sorry, lol? You didn't really think this through. This is what that looks like using en/em

-5—2

That looks like dogshit.

It's a mistake in the first place to decide to use only dashes and no spaces to convey all of this lol

-5 - 2 (Everyone knows a sign has no space - if you are building your sign for idiots try some of these:)

-5 > 2 -5->2 -5 <-> 2 -5 to 2 -5...2 Between -5 and 2

blah blah blah

-5 - 2°C

= -7°C

HTH!

Em dashes don’t convey much meaning or clarity for me.

Rather, seeing too short of a dash is like putting two clashing colors together or wearing two pieces of clothes that don’t match. It just looks instantly off.

It’s just not aesthetically pleasing for me.

Length of breath/pause with a longer dash. Read some -- Emily Dickinson poems – you'll find a world ––– of meaning ––– in the millimeter.

Poetry routines breaks grammar rules. A lot of poems rely on very specific white space layouts that you'd never see in writing.

And your example shows how you can just use multiple dashes instead of having three different ones.

I have read her in the past and can't say there were world's of meaning between -'s. Can you link an example? I looked again and couldn't see any obvious ones. Generally she just completely abused the -. Does she even use a comma once? lol

worlds. world's would indicate that a world owns something.

Also, you can just write -s instead of -'s as the apostrophe indicates possession

Exactly the type of comment I'd expect to see on an HN discussion about different types of dashes.

This sort of anti-intellectualism is the perfect antidote for those who claim that improper grammar is nothing more than evidence of language "evolving."

I think many grammar rules are not intellectual but just randomly evolved conventions.

E.g. some English language rule says that a comma or ending period of a non-quoted sentence goes inside the quotes if there's something quoted at the end of that sentence. That rule feels anti-intellectual to me, as if there's some misunderstanding of how hierarchical placement in one-dimensional space works (since something that's not being quoted is being put inside quotes)

Spelling used to be more fluid and up to the writer/printer. Printers would also use different spellings as a mechanism to change the line width and otherwise format text to their liking.

https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Histengl/spelling.html

What is more intellectual about wanting to complicate the language for one reason, versus wanting to simplify it for another?

> I hated Apple’s ecosystem growing up, now I think it’s necessary.

Funny, because the overwhelming majority of people and systems exist outside of it and are doing just fine. This sounds like the sentiment of a crab in a bucket who's feeling quite safe from the sides since it was caught.

As of a few months ago, patagonia don't use pfas.

https://eu.patagonia.com/ie/en/our-footprint/pfas.html

What stage of "map completion" is this at? Seems overall to be very sparse on information. It makes claims like

> Explore over 500k maps down to streets

If I look at the UK - arguably the cartography champions of all time, there is nothing though the years other than the shadow of current day. There is basically nothing on Ireland at any point, even though it's a very well documented history rich area.

If we're alone in the universe, I'll eat my one and only hat.

> There's really no excuse for the library not having simple case conversion functions that operate on strings in-place.

Could not agree more. Any time I touch a C I want to scoop my brain out of my ear. So many simple unbelievably common operations have fifty "best" ways to do them, when they should have one happy path 99% of usecases require baked in. Nobody should ever have to seriously consider something as ridiculous as "is tolower addressable?".