People... Please stop using foreign alphabets like that! It's a nightmare for those of us who know the alphabets. It took me a good 20 seconds to read the title. And it's magnitudes worse when someone uses cyrillic for instance and it's native to me.
No that's a reversed-R which happens to look identical like a Cyrillic letter. I don't think that's a problem any more than getting confused and trying to pronounce a circle in a logo as an "o". In contrast, the text here is trying to look Greek but doing it poorly.
Not really confusing when you assume the intention is to look clever - the more different the letterform you find while it still being recognisable as the one you are replacing, the more exaggerated your effect is without further reducing readability.
(Yes, I know this isn't "just to try look clever", ala 1337-speak, and is trying to make a relevant reference to the cross audience understanding the is relevant to a cross platform executable, but the point still stands about choosing less similar but still similar enough glyphs)
It's not even that, why does this headline deserve to stick out from others on the HN front page? What's the next step, make your title bold or twenty lines long for an unfair click advantage?
> 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞
I'd rather see submissions stand out for their content.
People have of course been pulling such tricks for years. We don't allow it generally, and in fact are pretty strict about that. But all such rules have exceptions.
The quality of this post is so high that it doesn't feel right to override any aspect of what the author created, including quirks like the title. There may be a superficial similarity to garden-variety title pimping, but as someone who bathes in spam every day I can tell you how rarely such gimmicks come attached to first-class feats of hacking prowess. Respect for content requires looking closely enough to detect truly unusual cases, pick them out of the mud, and give them a special place.
Another principle applies here too: it's good for readers to have to work a little (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). If a title like that appears at #1 on HN, there are two possibilities: (1) this is dreck that somehow managed to evade all of the standard moderation; or (2) something's happening here and you don't know what it is. Actually, either possibility is rather interesting, and it's not hard for any HN reader to do the bit of work to figure it out. Even if it takes 20 seconds.
I guess for HN OP should have refactored the title to be "Actually Portable Executable" but I thought the whole point of the title was that it's something we can interpret that has been "written in something else" which is fitting given what the article discusses? It's a direct copy/paste from the source and I don't think OP was trying to stand out in any unfair way.
I'm not blaming the HN submitter, but you can also see how bloggers can easily abuse this if whatever unicode characters they put in their title are allowed in the HN submission on the grounds of "it's a direct copy/paste".
FWIW, the title stands out, but at least for me it's not working in the favor of the article. Unless it was for the content ("actually portable executable"), I would actually stay away from articles with such strange fonts.
It's a bad thing to do for attention, like hacker elite speak using numbers would be, but is that why the author did that? Did you read the article? It's about a file that can be read by all Unix, Windows, and MacOS. Part of how that happens is one OS mistakes some other text for executable code while the other OS doesn't.
Therefore the title of the article written in multiple language letters and somewhat readable in one language despite that is a good introduction.
I would argue you could write an informative title, and reserve the problematic text for the article text, where you can explain why you are doing that. Just like the comment you were responding to I can't imagine screen reader users are super stoked by how "appropriate" this title is
I have at least one visually impaired Twitter follower (there may be more that I'm unaware of). This is why I don't do clever things with Unicode characters or post those text-picture memes and always type in alt text for my images. I'd like to think that I would be sensitive enough to do so without having him in my followers list, but I suspect that if I'm honest with myself, I probably wouldn't so I'm thankful for his presence to remind me to keep things accessible.
Oh yes, the Cyclopean usernames of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Definitely not screen-reader friendly.
To that note, would it be possible to change the title of the submission to "Actually Portable Executable"?
It would help people focus more on the content of the article, make the submission more accessible for non-English & blind readers, and feel less spammy and exploitative, all at the same time.
I doubt the author of this article or the submitter wants this to be the top thing people are discussing about their article anyway. And that is the title -- if you go to the library source code[0], its graphical banner is using the normal English letters. The unicode weirdness here is only being used typographically, the author isn't claiming that their title should be pronounced differently or something.
I guess I'm not as l33t as I thought I was, because I couldn't read that without having to figure out what each number was supposed to be individually.
I'm not sure what precluded me from reading that, but I don't think not knowing numbers would have helped me figure out that portable is p0274813 without context clues. Might need a more readily parseable example there.
OPs compaints fall into the accessibility bucket. The site makes itself less accessible since some people (greek alphabet users) have trouble consuming the content.
I've learned some degree of Russian (and certainly enough to roughly read Greek) and even that's enough for me to have to take a few passes to parse it as English.
The only boundary this transcends is readability and is ironically not portable at all.
I'm really pleased to hear this, because I've kept scratch notes in english text written in the greek alphabet for decades, and every so often I wondered if it was more readable than I expected if someone who read greek happened to glance at it :) (It's not secrets - more like a habit of stream-of-consciousness writing while listening to someone talk, that would probably look bizarre).
Things that are subversive, clever, mind bending, tongue in cheek ... tend to get criticized around these parts for not being simple, plain, and literal.
If you (i.e. anyone) really wants to be helpful about things like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com. Downweighting off-topic subthreads that get upvoted to the top is one of the best interventions we can do for discussion quality. We do that whenever we see them, but we don't see them all.
There are a couple of users who email us regularly when they see things like that. This is one of the highest-leverage contributions anybody can make to HN, so we'd certainly appreciate hearing from more such users. Actually I only found out about this subthread because of such an email.
Supercilious complaints, on the other hand, just make the thread even worse. Please don't do that. The thing where some HN commenters use HN to posture over the rest of HN is tedious, and in poor taste. Let's just work together to make it better, to the extent possible.
Which, I would argue, says at least as much about the HN crowd as it does about whoever posted the article under this specific title.
EDIT: more specifically .. it's rather ironic how judgmental (and honestly: pretty darn pretentiously) so many here instantly get, yet how there is this implied assumption that the collective wisdom and judgement of this community is above criticism itself, somehow. It might say far more about HN, that nobody appears to be discussing the article's content itself, than it says about the (mis)use of alphabets.
I can read Cyrillic fluently, and a bit of Greek too, yet I'm not in the least bit upset about this pun. If this does upset anyone, maybe it's time for some seriously self-reflection for those people, about what they decide to get upset about and what not.
FWIW, it's not annoying or upsetting to me. However, I took Russian years ago. The only thing I remember is the alphabet and some random words. I also live in a country where the language is not my native one. So, when I saw this in a language I may be able to pronounce like a 3 year old, my immediate response was to think "oh, let's see if I can guess what this says" into "wait what..." into "wtaf" into "oh, that's dumb." I skipped that article this morning because while I wasn't upset or annoyed, I was disappointed. I was disappointed that a skill I once worked very hard for was wasted. Since it was also at the top of the page, I felt like it was abused in this community. In fact, I attributed the title for the only reason it was on the front page. When I just clicked to see what the comments were, I was pleasantly surprised to find I was not the only one disappointed with the alphabets chosen for this title.
It's probably more virtue signalling than actually being upset. Complaining is a way for the complainer to show off they know the actual pronunciations.
The stupid game was getting too cute with the title, in a way that essentially invited a backfire. Arguably, it's still better than many titles from the newsrooms, but newsrooms reached the bottom long ago and decided to open a deep mine.
Thus, the stupid game led to a stupid prize, where major thread (in fact, one that felt like drowning any other discussion) was about the title technicalities, but not about content.
IMO this is not in the same category as people complaining about a website requiring Javascript or using the wrong font. It's an unreadable title for screenreaders. And unlike Javascript or CSS styling or trackers, needing a screenreader is not a personal choice, or a limitation that people can turn on and off.
I think it's fair to point out when a good article makes itself inaccessible due to a trivially correctable problem.
I'm not even saying that the author can't make the joke they're trying to make, but even a small title change like "αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε (actually portable executable)" would basically solve the entire problem without sacrificing any of the meaning behind what the author wants to convey with their misuse of Unicode.
It is a good article, which is why the pointless pushback over accessibility is so frustrating. There would be no engineering effort or large compromise required to make the title of the submission readable. It wouldn't suddenly make the article bad, or not worth reading. It feels like it's being exclusionary just for the sake of being exclusionary.
You need to see when me and my friends start chatting in English written in Cyrillic. It's epic and utterly frustrating for the first hours, then becomes like native ;)
One of the other things that bugs the hell out of me is when in the late 90's during the boom of irc, here in Bulgaria everyone was writing in Bulgarian with latin script. And to make matters worse:
4 = ch
6 = sh
And some people keep on doing it. I can understand it when you have to switch between scripts every 2 seconds but most commonly that isn't the case and you are either having a conversation with someone or leaving it for later when you have time or when you feel like it...
Йес, съмтаймс уи ду дис то каунтър шльокавица ин партикюлър.
Edit: for the non initiates. It's this written in Cyrillic: "Yes, sometimes we do this to counter shlyokavitsa in particular"
Shlyokavitsa is the name of the forementioned style of writing Bulgarian with latin letters. The original meaning of the word is "low quality, self-made alcohol", possibly even poisonous because of methanol
I personally think its kind of creative, and looks cool. Though the author might like to be aware of the discontent it causes certain individuals. This is mean but it comes accross as though you are just wanting to show off you knowledge of a different alphabet...a complainbrag. Seems unlikely you'd take the effort to bother but thats my perception.
One might argue that "context" is a valid discriminator for that, but your point certainly has validity too. They are just two different arguments. The argument of arrogance in claiming an absolute right from wrong, and the argument that context can make one interpretation more correct because it relates to the meaning and not just the description of something.
Yeah apparently the converter I used used a Cyrillic character, the actual "LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL F" is ꜰ. Also apparently there's a "LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL *" for every letter except X[0][1].
I could ready #1 immediately and thought "hey, I can actually read faux-cyrillic a lot better that I thought" and then I realized that you used a semi-proper transliteration.
It's horrible to some of us that don't know the foreign alphabet too. While I had no problem reading the title it still makes my eyes bleed and my brain hurt to see it. ;)
