System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2016/system-loads-web%20pages-34-percent-faster-0309 <comment><USER2> Interesting. The paper was released before HTTP/2 was in widespread use. They do show that their approach has significant improvements over SPDY alone...I wonder how the comparison to HTTP/2 alone would fare.

<comment><USER3> Aren't they orthogonal? No matter how fast HTTP/2 is or how much it decreases connection setup times, requesting resources in the "right" order will always be faster than doing it in one of the "wrong" orders.

More efficient protocols might reduce the disparity, but there should always be one. Right?

<comment><USER2> Yes, it would always be faster, assuming relatively heavy pages. But the reduced number of requests, hpack compression, and server push features in HTTP/2 might reduce the performance improvement to something less impressive.

Given that Polaris has some downsides, it might reduce it to the point that you wouldn't consider it. In it's current state, Polaris requires a lot of pre-work...including dependency analysis via a real browser. It also serves up pages that wouldn't work with javascript disabled, and might not be terribly search engine friendly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Relevant paper: "Polaris: Faster Page Loads Using Fine-grained Dependency Tracking", [http://web.mit.edu/ravinet/www/polaris_nsdi16.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/ravinet/www/polaris_nsdi16.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Argh, don't people Google names before using them? Polaris was HP's virus-safe Windows project:

[http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-221.html](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-221.html)

<comment><USER5> The quintessential hardest problem in IT: naming things.

Polaris is also a missile. And a star. And a PowerPC port of Solaris.

We're always going to have name duplication. At least it's fairly easy to disambiguate with a Google search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> but we can already make web pages load 500% faster by not shoveling a ton of shit, not loading scripts from 60 third-party domains (yes stop using CDNs for jQuery/js libs, those https connections aren't free - they're _much_ more expensive than just serving the same script from your existing connection), reducing total requests to < 10, not serving 700kb hero images, _1.22MB_ embedded youtube players [1], 500kb of other js bloat, 200kb of webfonts, 150kb of boostrap css :/

the internet is faster than ever, browsers/javascript is faster than ever, cross-browser compat is better than ever, computers & servers are faster than ever, yet websites are slower than ever. i literally cannot consume the internet without uMatrix & uBlock Origin. and even with these i have to often give up my privacy by selectively allowing a bunch of required shit from third-party CDNs.

no website/SPA should take > 2s on a fast connection, (or > 4s on 3g) to be fully loaded. it's downright embarrassing. we _can_ and _must_ do better. we have everything we need _today_.

[1] [https://s.ytimg.com/yts/jsbin/player-en_US- vfljAVcXG/base.js](https://s.ytimg.com/yts/jsbin/player-en_US- vfljAVcXG/base.js)

<comment><USER7> > stop using CDNs for jQuery/js libs, those https connections aren't free - > they're much more expensive than just serving the same script from your > existing connection

Do you have a source for this? My understanding is that, in real usage, it is cheaper to load common libraries from a CDN because in a public CDN (for something like jQuery), the library is likely to already be cached from another website and has a chance to even already have an SSL connection to the CDN.

Obviously 60 separate CDNs is excessive, but I don't know if the practice altogether is a bad idea.

<comment><USER8> Using a CDN for _common_ libraries _may_ help, but doesn't always, and is something you should measure rather than just assume. The situation where a CDN actually hurts performance is one I've seen periodically at different clients.

When people talk about serving jQuery, or J. Random JavaScript library, from a CDN it means the _specific_ _version_ of jQuery (or whatever) that they're using. There's literally no guarantee that the specific version you need will be in any given user's browser cache, and this is exacerbated if you loading multiple libraries from a CDN, or from different CDNs. If your CDNs serve files with low latency then it may not be a big problem, but not all CDNs do. Slow responding CDNs will slow your page loads down, not the reverse.

Moreover, if you're serving over HTTP2/SPDY there's even less likely to be a benefit to using a CDN. Again, it's something you need to measure.

One area where a CDN (e.g., Cloudflare) can benefit you is by serving _all_ your static content to offer users a low-latency experience regardless of where they are in the world, but that's rather a different matter from serving half a dozen libraries from half a dozen different CDNs.

<comment><USER9> > ... something you should measure rather than just assume

How do people do this?

My obstacle with this point is each CDN would have a different impact in each locale due to the locations of their points of presence, and CDN-ing each resource would a different impact based on the sites that particuar individual had visited.

Measuring it in any useful way in advance of a change would be really hard unless I'm missing a trick, and measuring it in hindsight would require the kind of performance logging that PaaS-level apps don't have access to.

<comment><USER6> my recommendation is to first serve everything yourself over TLS (minified, bundled, gzipped). if you can, run HTTP2. then measure.

if this does not deliver the perf you expect (chances are that it will), then look into CDNs.

if you need to serve media that needs a lot of bandwidth (expensive) then look into CDNs.

if you need some form of real-time comm like WebSockets or WebRTC that actually requires low latency, look into distributed systems (amazon, google, azure, cloudflare?, etc..)

<comment><USER9> Sure, my question was _how_ people measure.

<comment><USER6> your best bet is [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Performance](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Performance)

combined with either IP2location or Geolocation apis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, uh, what does it do? I mean, I can't even tell if it's a server or client side change.

<comment><USER2> The research paper[1] describes Polaris. Basically, you have to make large, sweeping changes to your html, server side. Instead of your original page + js references, you serve a bunch of javascript that then dynamically recreates your page on the client side in the most performant way that it can:

• The scheduler itself is just inline JavaScript code.

• The Scout dependency graph for the page is represented as a JavaScript variable inside the scheduler.

• DNS prefetch hints indicate to the browser that the scheduler will be contacting certain hostnames in the near future.

• Finally, the stub contains the page's original HTML, which is broken into chunks as determined by Scout's fine-grained dependency resolution

[1][http://web.mit.edu/ravinet/www/polaris_nsdi16.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/ravinet/www/polaris_nsdi16.pdf)

<comment><USER11> That sounds like a fun idea for a precompiler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Talk to some people in the porn industry. They will tell you how important fast pages are. You will also be surprised what they have done to achieve this.

<comment><USER13> This sounds potentially interesting. Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> From my experience preconnect is a big improvement for connecting to 3rd party domains. Will also mention that once you have JS deferred, CSS on a 3rd party domain (google fonts) can cause some major slowdowns in terms of the start rendering metrics if using HTTP/2 on a slow connection; all the bandwidth is used for the primary domain connection and not used for blocking resources, end result being images get downloaded before external blocking CSS.

</comment><comment><USER15> The web is way better without JS. Rendering engines could in principal do the same (improved) dependency tracking.

</comment><comment><USER16> I feel Webpack deserves a mention as it resolves the dependencies at build- time and compiles one (or a few chunked/entrybased) assets, hence also solving the problem of too many roundtrips

</comment><comment><USER17> What are you looking to learn about a CDN?

There are many ways to accelerate page speed and, like everything else, it's a question of costs and benefits. For most things, some level of technical debt is OK and CDNs even for jQuery are good. Of course, good design and setting things up right is always the best - and the other question is where your site traffic comes from.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there a comparison with Google AMP?

<comment><USER19> Paper was released way before AMP. Also not really related to AMP, so I don't think it's necessary to draw a comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > What Polaris does is automatically track all of the interactions between > objects, which can number in the thousands for a single page. For example, > it notes when one object reads the data in another object, or updates a > value in another object. It then uses its detailed log of these interactions > to create a "dependency graph" for the page.

> Mickens offers the analogy of a travelling businessperson. When you visit > one city, you sometimes discover more cities you have to visit before going > home. If someone gave you the entire list of cities ahead of time, you could > plan the fastest possible route. Without the list, though, you have to > discover new cities as you go, which results in unnecessary zig-zagging > between far-away cities.

What a terrible analogy. Finding a topological sorting is O(|V|+|E|), while the traveling salesman problem is NP-complete.

<comment><USER21> That's amusing, and I wonder if this particular analogy was chosen deliberately. But I don't think there's anything wrong with it - it's designed to make intuitive sense to non-programming readers, not to be some rigorous description that can be automatically translated into optimal code.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps a different analogy would be better, e.g. ordering materials when building a house. If you can only order one material at a time, you would probably want to order the concrete for laying the foundation before ordering the roof tiles. Loading website resources is a lot like that (at least compared to the travelling salesman).

<comment><USER22> This still smells NP Hard. I mean, in practice for simple dependencies it is probably quite tractable, but this is a combinatorial optimization problem that seems pretty similar to an online modification to Job Shop Scheduling, where the material requirements map loosely to machine-task pairings that would be unblocked by orders, acting to make the problem more complex, not easier.

<comment><USER20> Your sense of smell is off. Assuming a directed acyclic graph (the usual shape of a dependency tree), assume we write the result order to a list L. Walk over all vertices once, create a mapping M of each vertex to its number of incoming edges, and add all vertices without incoming edges to a list R. This is O(|V| + |E|). Now, pick the first item of R and append it to L. For each outgoing edge in the item we chose, decrement the associated count of its receiving vertex in M by 1. For each item where the count becomes 0, append it to R. Keep running until R is empty, and you're done. This second part of the process is again O(|V| + |E|).

We're done and found a topological order in O(|V| + |E|).

<comment><USER22> Yes, I know that topological sort is O(|V| + |E|). What I am claiming is that the problem of buying building materials in an optimal order isn't topological sort: there are numerous topological orders of a graph, but some will be much much slower than others to build at your construction site. To determine which of the many possible orders is the fastest one, you have to take into account how long various tasks will take and how many workers you have available for those tasks. When you get some materials, that unlocks certain parts of the gantt chart of what sounds like Job Shop Scheduling. To me, this is the same form of complaint as pointing out that Traveling Salesman isn't Topological Sort.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The chemistry between online display advertising and SEM - <AUTHOR> http://www.kneoteric.com/blog/internet-marketing/online-display-advertising-and-sem The recently concluded Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertising Integration Study made some startling revelations, putting many online marketers at wrong. <comment><USER2> For some reason, that article bothers me. I'm not sure it it's due to the content (Let's show people more ads! They aren't ignoring them after all!) or the tone (We need to defend our industry!). Also, very very sparse.

<comment><USER3> It's spam; that account does nothing but spam that blog over and over again. Zero content.</comment></comment>


China's tech giants are venturing into autonomous driving - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1254112/every-big-tech-firm-in-china-is-becoming-a-self-driving-car-company/ <comment><USER2> Ah, so many links are in Chinese.

I wonder if it would be a good business to setup a website dedicated to curating these non-breaking news on China in English.

<comment><USER3> Google translate nowadays is almost good enough for reading such articles. You can tell that it is machine translated as some of the words a human writer won't use the same way but you can understand most of it. Its not as good at reading forum post etc where a lot of slang and colloquialisms are used</comment></comment>


D3.js ~ Voronoi Diagram - <AUTHOR> http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/voronoi.html <comment><USER2> It seems sort of alive and gives me the creeps. But very cool.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not really news, just cool.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really understand it, but I like it.

<comment><USER4> Each colored region contains one circled point, and the region itself is the set of points to which that circled point is the closest circled point. When you hover over the diagram, your cursor acts as yet another circled point with its own (yellow) colored region.</comment></comment>


YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6052538 <comment><USER2> community-contributed subtitles are an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me, particularly with non-English videos from small operations who may not have the resources to provide quality transcriptions/translations. I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents. Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether.

<comment><USER3> > I don't think this functionality was as little used

Based on what? Because you used this feature a few times, it became widely used? We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand.

> Clearly more options exist for managing spam

Yeah, I've heard this one before from well meaning people who start out with "why don't you just ..." without realising that the approach would have poor precision/recall at scale. Any hard coded rule would probably rot. Building a classifier to detect this abuse would be tricky considering it's low prevalence and that ML was doing a poor job of captioning in the first place (nothing to compare it to).

Another day, another top HN comment that confidently presents opinion as fact. Would it kill folks to be a little less confident?

<comment><USER4> > We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a > thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand.

If you really take all of YouTube into account then yes, the actual number was probably very small, considering how many cat videos, fail compilations, music videos, wedding videos etc. there are. "Last Christmas" doesn't need Cantonese subtitles but surely makes up for a lot of views.

I'm subscribed to about 100 channels with many of them making high quality videos about different topics that required research, have animations for explanation or otherwise took effort to make. These often times do have subtitles in different languages and I'd consider that pretty valuable. Throwing those in a bucket with TikTok compilations when evaluating the usage of community translations or subtitles in general is just nonsense.

<comment><USER3> Clearly they need _some_ method of prioritizing their work. HN would have you believe that every product and every feature should be supported till the end of time, regardless of whether it's used or not. In practice, in the real world, features that have few takers are removed because the maintenance burden doesn't justify the benefit.

> I'm subscribed to about 100 channels

How often have you actually relied on _community generated_ subtitles? Note that even if you used subtitles, those could have been auto-generated.

<comment><USER4> > How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles?

Almost never, since all the content I consume is in English. But several channels made posts about that upcoming change and there was quite some feedback by people depending on this (as far as I could tell, especially the Spanish speaking community).

> In practice, in the real world, features that have few takers are removed > because the maintenance burden doesn't justify the benefit.

By that measure, traditional TV stations better scrap subtitles too, since the number of viewers actually relying on them is a minority, and maintaining it probably takes some effort too.

I think community generated subtitles, just like regular subtitles on TV, enable people to access information (or entertainment) they otherwise couldn't. There should be a better measure for its value than just how much effort it takes to maintain that functionality vs the number of users, otherwise there would be little reason for any kind of barrier-free technology or efforts really.

<comment><USER3> So just to be clear, _any_ project that improves accessibility can never be shut down for any reason under any circumstances? That's a pretty hard stance to take.

> By that measure, traditional TV stations better scrap subtitles too,

You made an implicit assumptions that TV subtitles and Youtube _community contributed_ subtitles are used by the same proportion of people. That's almost certainly wrong. And remember, Youtube auto generated subtitles still exist for all videos.

Look I don't work for Google, but it pains me when I see a thread full of people shitting on them without any basis in fact.

Here's a radical idea - we trust the people working on these things to take a call on it.

<comment><USER4> > So just to be clear, any project that improves accessibility can never be > shut down for any reason under any circumstances? That's a pretty hard > stance to take.

You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage between users creating subtitles and creators assigning them to their videos. And then you mention auto- generated subtitles like this is something trivial that just works. Compared to everything else that is required to run a platform like YouTube, community generated subtitles pale in comparison.

> Here's a radical idea - we trust the people working on these things to take > a call on it.

Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for mankind? Never did the quality of a product suffer because corners were cut in order to save a few cents during production. Trusting a company like Google. A radical idea indeed.

<comment><USER3> > You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources > and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage

Yes. This right here. This is typical HN. You have absolutely no idea about what it takes to build or police this feature. You have no data about how much this feature is used and abused and by who. Without knowing _anything_ you are confidently asserting that it costs very little to maintain this feature.

I'd ask you to reconsider this approach but tbh, this is the easiest way to farm upvotes on HN. So you do you.

> Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for > mankind

I trust them a lot more than people who speak authoritatively while knowing very little.

<comment><USER4> > Yes. This right here. This is typical HN. You have absolutely no idea about > what it takes to build or police this feature. You have no data about how > much this feature is used and abused and by who.

As someone working in the field it's at least possible to make an educated guess about such things.

> Without knowing anything you are confidently asserting that it costs very > little to maintain this feature.

No. You are primarily coming up with phrases like this, like "typical for HN" above to make it sound like everyone complaining is a pleb with no clue and you are far superior. You then go on to claim the reason people do this is to "farm upvotes" as a blanket invalidation, instead of contributing anything of substance.

> I trust them a lot more than people who speak authoritatively while knowing > very little

I initially criticized that you suggested going by share of users when judging the usefulness of this feature, by comparing it to CC on TV and similar technologies. I tried reasoning why I believe this is an important and valuable feature that should not be removed. Only in my _third_ comment did I mention that I can't imagine that it takes too much work to maintain this feature. But you immediately jumped at it, screaming THIS!! and continued your arrogant ramble about stupid HNers. The only one in this whole comment thread coming across as authoritative is you.

> I'd ask you to reconsider this approach [...] So you do you.

Sometimes it's best to follow your own advice.

Over and out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What fucking bollocks, community-added subs are an absolute boon for language learning channels.

If you go to Francais avec Pierres youtube channel for example, where they post videos covering various things about the French language, you can find translations in a number of langs, it's a worthwhile exercise to compare community translations with automated translations— there is just no comparison. Why why why must you do this google

<comment><USER6> My feeling is that at Google, building something novel (e.g. community contributions) is more important than maintaining something (e.g. dealing with spam/abuse in community contributions). Unless it brings in profit or collects valuable user data, anything that takes developer hours to maintain eventually gets canned.

There could be a code silo issue here as well. My understanding is Google dev teams are very mobile and hop from one project to the next, and so the knowledge and desire to maintain something goes away with it.

<comment><USER7> I hear this explanation a lot. What I don't get is how Google, a company known for being exceptionally clever in how it manages engineers, hasn't realized that their organizational structure causes this sort of build-and-abandon pattern. In any case, the rest of us at large shouldn't have to suffer just because Google can't figure out how to build meaningfully long-lasting services.

<comment><USER8> I'm sure they are aware (or at least some people there are aware), especially since it is repeatedly pointed out on the internet. They just might not care.

<comment><USER9> I can't imagine they care.

Yeah, people are justifiably upset that they dropped this feature. But they are also, to my knowledge, the online video source that ever offered a feature like this in the first place. So nobody's upset is realistically going to translate into an exodus to a competitor, and the effect on their bottom line is negligible, and they have zero reason to care.

You know how the last 3 hours of any game of Monopoly is just this long, shitty, inhuman slog that isn't fun for anyone, except perhaps the person who lucked into owning all the properties? We've made it to that phase of the game.

<comment><USER10> We've been at that phase of the game for centuries if not longer. There is no easy fix

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just noticed that Google Maps translates a lot of German business names into English, which is exactly what I _don 't_ want when I'm driving along, looking for their sign. There's enough "Denglish" (intentional use of English-like terms) in use by Germans themselves that this adds rather than removes confusion for non-native German speakers.

For example, "Stoffe Bauer" into "Fabric Farmer" - Bauer is a common family name, and Stoffe is the first thing on their sign.

<comment><USER12> lol, that's terrible. And a great example of lacking context.

Youtube also seems to randomly machine translate video titles into German for me, but weirdly enough only sometimes, for some videos. And has a similar problem that short labels etc just don't work if translated by something not optimized for it - and that a German channel probably would use English words in many cases...

<comment><USER13> Same from English to Dutch, I wonder what triggers that, is it something the video owners has to enable? or does it only happen when there are good subtitles available (either community provided or auto-translated)

<comment><USER14> I've seen the same video appear with English title one day and with German title another day. I've also seen translated titles on Russian videos without any subtitles (I don't speak Russian, video was still interesting).

I suspect the suggestion/front page algorithm has a new branch, suggesting a small number of interesting-to-you foreign language videos with translated titles and adjusting from there.

<comment><USER15> Love to use opaque tools that are designed to randomly change functionality and presentation. I think as far as divination goes, dowsing rods are far more reliable

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google just wants to eliminate any remaining trust users have in them, don't they?

Every feature they remove, they do because it is a burden on feature velocity or maintenance. Fine, but why are they so bad at weighing it against long term trust? At this point, I expect the search box to search, Gmail to send emails, YouTube to host videos, maps to do navigation, and docs to edit docs. One core feature per platform, all other features will probably be dropped sooner or later.

It's a bad look, Google.

<comment><USER17> They're getting hammered from the left for insufficient moderation of content, and from the right for overly aggressive moderation of content. It's a lose- lose where the only real option is to remove extraneous features that enable users to upload content visible to others. Even if there was a standard of moderation that would satisfy everyone, there's too much to moderate.

<comment><USER18> _Even if there was a standard of moderation that would satisfy everyone, there's too much to moderate._

If only Google had a half a trillion dollars to spend on something other that spying on people. And if only there were 35 million people out of work.

But, alas, poor sweet simple Google cannot possibly lie in the bed it made.

<comment><USER19> Ah, so in this version you have thirty-five million people who could agree on what is offensive. That's a daunting task without the "million" involved to begin with.

<comment><USER20> When you get hired as a regulation enforcer in any other scenario, it's not your opinion but the actual regulations that determine your recourse. If it's up to the opinions of the enforcement regime, that's because the rules are unclear or opaque.

<comment><USER21> The fact that you believe something like content moderation can be boiled down to some hard and fast regulations, let alone a set of regulations that people could agree on, is honestly kind of scary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> IMO, subtitles from community contributions are a good way for me to enjoy foreign YouTube contents. Removing that is a bad news for people like me.

There are also a petition about this: [https://www.change.org/p/google-inc- don-t-remove-community-c...](https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-don-t-remove- community-captions-from-youtube) But I doubt that it would reverse YouTube's decision.

</comment><comment><USER23> Alternative Free video hosting sites :

[https://www.dailymotion.com/](https://www.dailymotion.com/)

[https://lbry.tv/](https://lbry.tv/)

[https://d.tube/](https://d.tube/)

[https://dlive.tv/](https://dlive.tv/)

[https://www.bitchute.com/](https://www.bitchute.com/)

<comment><USER24> The federation of peertube instances, which I feel will eventually be the most critical alternative of all:

[https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances](https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances)

<comment><USER25> I have a random question about peertube hope you guys dont mind.

Can I run a background task on my machine to help in some way with making the content of some instance more available to people, or would I have to run my own instance?

<comment><USER26> I think you can torrent the video and they should then also be served from your machine.

<comment><USER24> From this FAQ it looks like you _may_ be able to as long as you torrent from something that is WebRTC friendly.

[https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#s...](https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#should- i-have-a-big-server-to-run-peertube)

<comment><USER26> I wasn't aware of the WebRTC requirement. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am Deaf. Community-added subs are wonderful and a lot better than AI generated subs. However many of them suddenly stop a few minutes into the movie. It looks like subtitling was too much work and got abandoned.

But even so: Incomplete subs are better than AI generated subs.

AI generated subs are better than no subs. So I switch to AI subs when neccessary. This shows that incomplete subs are welcome to me!

I hope that Youtube reconsiders their decision.

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems like they have enough resources to train their translation NN and speech-to-text NN. I don't think google has introduced those features for the users in the first place but they were a means to get training data.

<comment><USER29> Their automated CC sucks, always has, and I check multiple times a year only to see that it still sucks, most recently last month. I've never had the best hearing, so I usually turn CC on when I can, particularly with ESL speakers with heavy accents; but if the only option on a YouTube video is the automated captions, then the only option is crap and I'll go without. On the other hand channels with a large dedicated fan base will often have fans contributing captions out of their own volition.

If they really think their NN is good enough to replace community contributed captions, I have yet to see evidence of this, and there's no evidence in the announcement that this is a vote of confidence in their tech. If anything, it's a vote against their ability to manage spam and abuse, they just don't want to deal with it anymore.

<comment><USER30> To be fair, the Live Caption feature on Pixel phone (which can transcribe videos you are watching) is great. Maybe they plan on rolling that.

<comment><USER29> A lifetime of thinking that companies can reimplement cool tech they have in use somewhere else in a place that it would be even more useful has left me disappointed in the possibilities. I'm not familiar with Pixels because I don't use them, but even if I took you at your word that it is automated captioning that works, I wouldn't hold my breath that it will show up on YouTube just because Google has the tech on a Pixel.

It's not like companies like Google have never had technical regressions either. Their core service, Google Search, is less useful to me than it was 10 years ago.

<comment><USER31> Search became less useful because it's optimizing for ad revenue, not user experience. I don't see that conflict of interest here. If anything, better subtitles would lead to more watch minutes (from non-natives) and hence more ad revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have always wanted to edit the auto-generated subtitles and translations for some YouTube videos but never knew how. Perhaps the feature could be much more popular and really boost reach of some videos if they made it more visible and easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER33> Ugh I follow a dutch guy (Master Milo) if he doesn't do the subs then one of his followers will. When watching on a tv or phone I rely on these subtitles as there is no option to auto translate the auto generated subtitles. This will be bad for him as it will no doubt have an affect on his viewing numbers and his revenue.

</comment><comment><USER34> It is too bad that the automated speech to text isn't good enough to allow them to turn this feature off without losing a great deal of high quality subtitling.

<comment><USER35> Writing high quality captions requires more than just knowing what they are saying, although that is a large part of it. Furthermore, knowing what they are saying may require more than just listening.

(I don't use YouTube, but this applies just as well to television.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> [https://amara.org/en/](https://amara.org/en/) is an alternative service, but probably even less discoverable for most viewers.

<comment><USER37> Is there any way for me as a creator to pipe in subtitles from that service automatically into YouTube's captions? Because then you could have one person go there, write the subtitles, have the creator approve it and then all of the viewers can see them.

<comment><USER38> You can enable the YT integration if you are the owner of the channel.

[https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/40227-l...](https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/40227-linking- youtube-and-amara-accounts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > This feature was rarely used

Seriously? Without the subtitles from fans, I can't really count how many great content I will miss, especially for relative niche languages.

</comment><comment><USER40> I can totally see this abused for channels / topics with toxic communities. Personally, I've only seen this work largely as intended. Overall, it's a net loss, I don't really see many communities replacing this feature by coordinating with the creator. Frequently, videos I watch doesn't even get automated transcription feature - there's a lot of good foreign content out there.

</comment><comment><USER41> Between that and the ads becoming completely obtrusive, cutting my video at random moments, I really wish there was another alternative. I don't have TV for years any more, and Youtube has become the new TV.

<comment><USER42> This is why YouTube needs to be spun off from Google: because there are alternatives to YouTube (Vimeo, P2P streaming), but good luck finding an alternative to _YouTube_.

<comment><USER43> YouTube runs at a loss. If it was spun off from google it would not be viable.

<comment><USER44> as far as I'm aware nobody has ever shown this, all analysis I've seen that lead to that conclusion are based on ideas that Google pays Tier 1 provider rates for Youtube bandwidth, which is definitely not true (Google is directly peered with pretty much every ISP on earth)

<comment><USER41> There are some sources. [https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/593tgc/reminder_go...](https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/593tgc/reminder_google_runs_youtube_at_a_loss/)

I still believe Google has a LARGE interest in owning it though. Obviously. It's simply maybe not good enough in itself

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Somehow this minor feature stands as proof for me that Google doesn't know its customers and doesn't care. And yet they will be financially successful. Maybe they are too big.

<comment><USER46> To be fair, this sentence could be valid in regard of most big tech companies. Take for example the ESC button of Apple, or nearly any UI redesigns of Facebook, the [whatever Ballmer's Microsoft used to do with Windows] for Microsoft, and so on.

Having said that, I agree that Google should know better. They base their entire strategy on pure data, but I fear that in this way they are forgetting to factor in things that are not (yet) measurable or measured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is it me or does it seem like a lot less content is getting autogenerated English captions? Maybe the backlog is growing, but I've been used to all new content being captioned, but am surprised when new uploads aren't captioned.

</comment><comment><USER48> No, they are removing the ability to create them. The existing contributions will remain.

<comment><USER49> Not quite. It seems like creators have until September 28 to choose to publish existing community contributions, and if they don't, it seems like they will all disappear. That's how I interpret, "You have until September 28, 2020 to publish your community contributions before they're removed."

<comment><USER48> [https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/61967856?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/61967856?hl=en)

        If you have contributions currently saved as drafts, these will be available for the next 60 days (until Sept 28 2020), and you have until then to publish them before they're removed. Any already published contributions (titles, descriptions, captions, etc) will continue to show up on videos and can be managed by Creators in YouTube Studio.

<comment><USER50> IIRC this was basically what they said when annotations become unavailable to new videos. They're completely gone now, so probably a year or so until community contributions are completely wiped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Rather ironic that Google is having a problem with spam.

</comment><comment><USER52> The old school technique was youtube-dl coupled with a separate search for subs.

</comment><comment><USER53> RIP Kizuna AI community subbed videos

</comment><comment><USER54> YouTube marked a huge shift on the internet. But of course all good things come to an end. It was an incredible free service that I loved and still love so much. Not to say it's going away but ye I do notice cracks in the facade .. it's no longer the new thing or even the current moment it is showing its age

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm partly happy and sad at the same time. 90% of the people in the Netherlands speek english and go to universities that are also fully english. When you suddenly see your favorite content with strange dutch translations it makes it worse (for me atleast) I would just have hoped that they would allow individual users to disable the community changes. When translating things there where always a lot of personal touches or words that where on purpose translated to something more funny in the other language. I always had the feeling there really was a person typing those translations. I understand why google would like to automate this. I just hoped that they would allow users to specify if they want to keep the personal translation the automated translation or nothing at al or a mix for example a option to never translate titles.

</comment><comment><USER56> Yet another cool feature lost to the fact that the YouTube "community" is a toxic swamp.

<comment><USER57> This is the real problem. None of the other conspiracy theories, "Google is evil", profit-based claims, etc. are the cause. The problem is that people are horrible, awful, disgusting monsters, and letting them communicate on the Internet in public forums is a terrible idea.

HN is literally the only public forum I use, and only because it's small enough and obscure enough that most of the trolls stay away, and a couple moderators can keep it usable.

Yahoo removed comments, ridding the world of one of the larger cesspools. Reddit's entire raison d'être is to serve as a fetid pool of the worst the Internet has to offer.

We can't have nice things because we don't deserve nice things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> And now just imagine Google managing Wikipedia.

"Community contributions allowed viewers to add closed captions, subtitles, and title/descriptions to videos. This feature was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse so we're removing them to focus on other creator tools."

With this rationale all wikis must close down. But no, they don't. They started to fight spam technically. And if I remember Google was also pretty good in this spamfighting niche, with Gmail, decades ago. Nowadays with YouTube and News shutting down apparently not anymore. Those Google PMs really made a name of themselves as worlds worst.

</comment><comment><USER59> People have been "contributing" legit looking subtitles and then inserting some spam in the middle for self promotion. Most big youtube channels e.g. pewdiepie has disabled community contributed subtitles.

<comment><USER60> One possible solution is to make it very clear that the subtitles were not written by the video poster. Something like a red triangle next to the language name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> This looks like a great opportunity for a new startup. There have been past annotation features disabled by YouTube as well.

My guess is YouTube wants to take a step towards broadcasting online instead of community videos.

</comment><comment><USER62> I saw earlier in the discussion about the new Australian media laws re: Google's use of news articles, a googler explain that Google News still exists as a gesture of good will from the company; as a service that costs them a rounding error, that some subset of users still use and enjoy, is something they keep doing just because they can.

I wonder how they would explain this.

</comment><comment><USER63> Someone will write: "Google continues the war against its own users".

</comment><comment><USER64> > Once you have same language captions for a video, your community can submit > translations to help you reach a global audience.

Oh so they realized it's free labour and whant the users to train their speech recognition AI.

<comment><USER65> And much like Google 411 they are probably killing it now that their model has reached a saddle point with spam removal costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Google is a f*kng machine learning company, they do things randomly just an "artificial intelligence" would do. I wonder if there are executives left making any decision other than where to move the money.</comment>


AmazonFresh Has Launched in Bay Area - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2013/12/amazonfresh_has_launched_in_ba.php <comment><USER2> I tried Google Shopping Express (a similar idea) for a while and found that what really matters is how delivery works. I'm typically at work all day and I (like most San Franciscans?) don't have a doorman to receive deliveries.

These Amazon pages don't say much, but they show pictures of delivery trucks in front of Victorians like mine and a grocery bag on a welcome mat. If they left a bag full of food in my entryway like that it'd probably last 20 minutes before being stolen.

<comment><USER3> You have the option of "Attended Delivery" with Fresh, where they make sure to hand it over to you, or doorstep, where they leave it outside. In my current neighbourhood (South Bay) I have no trouble with unattended delivery and prefer not worrying about being home in time for my Google Shopping Express deliveries, but it would be totally different living in San Francisco.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! That makes sense. I didn't see this in their docs, ut your comment inspired me to look harder. It seems their "learn more" link doesn't say much, but if you pick "Help" from the footer it has a more detailed FAQ that says what your comment does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't $299 a year a lot of money? Here in London the major supermarkets have time slots where they deliver for free (typically late in the evening), but even a prime time delivery, let's say, Sunday morning, costs no more than £5. The most upmarket online vendor, Ocado, offers one year of free deliveries, anytime, for £40.

Ok, there's also Amazon Prime thrown in, which is good; and I suppose that in the Bay Area the average delivery journey is longer than in London. Still, it seems a bit steep to me. Maybe it tries to place itself as a luxury service in the Amazon range?

</comment><comment><USER5> Odd ... all big supermarket chains do this in all of the UK.

My Tesco delivery is arriving in the next 20 minutes ... plus no annual charge over here.

<comment><USER6> But delivery isn't free, and if you are a regular user you can pay £120 per year for all inclusive delivery with Tesco Delivery Saver.

<comment><USER7> Amazon's is a ridiculous $299/year!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that they're opening with a different price model than Seattle's. $299/year and according to GeekWire their groceries are approximately 14% higher than in-store.

[http://www.geekwire.com/2013/jeff-bezos-amazon-fresh- closer-...](http://www.geekwire.com/2013/jeff-bezos-amazon-fresh-closer- solving-economics-grocery-delivery/)

<comment><USER9> I would pay a 14% premium to not have to go to the grocery store after work.

<comment><USER10> I kind of like grocery shopping, especially if it's in a decent store that has enough registers open and where the vegetables aren't molding on the shelves and the cans aren't all dented.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I can't stand to eat food that came from a dented can...

<comment><USER10> Dents in the wrong place can let in air and spoil the food inside.

<comment><USER12> Clostridium botulinum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The annual price seems prohibitively expensive, especially compared to services like Instacart.

They don't seem to be offering a very good argument for why the service is worth the cost IMO.

<comment><USER14> I could almost kind of justify it if the selection were better (especially since they also deliver from local businesses and offer Amazon.com items), but everything I tried to buy today was either completely unavailable (cat litter and chicken sausage), or only available next day (super fancy chicken sausage from some local meat market that I could just go and get myself today in 10 minutes), and I couldn't purchase an order under $35 even if I wanted to pay more on top of the still inflated prices. Amazon also offered up breastmilk storage bags when I tried searching for gallon milk. Iiiinnnnteresting.

I really wanted an alternative to Instacart and Google Shopping Express especially for the random Amazon items I'd want to throw in and a little more competition (really missing Trader Joes delivery), but I'm pretty disappointed so far. I was in Seattle this past weekend and I was super pumped to try it just to buy a water kettle for my hotel room and going all "I wish this were in SF!" but I can't actually find anything that I want to buy at home that would come faster/better than regular Prime shipping or competing services.

I ended up ordering from Instacart with almost everything I wanted instead because I was so frustrated (and I would walk to the local market but I'm sick). Easily would have been willing to migrate my grocery shopping to any service but they're all kind of shitty so :(

<comment><USER15> Just out of curiousity, what are you looking for in a delivery service that Google Shopping Express/Instacart does not offer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Double-parking quick delivery trucks remind me of nothing but the 2000 bubble. Here's one way too big for the parking spot about to block a fire hydrant in the Upper Haight just last night: [http://imgur.com/61lAhjW](http://imgur.com/61lAhjW)

<comment><USER17> |Here's one way too big for the parking spot

Just like every delivery truck ever...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As an daily HN reader and Canadian from a very small town, you guys in San Fran live in a very strange bubble.

<comment><USER19> This isn't a new service, it's just new to San Francisco. It's been running for 6 years in Seattle.

<comment><USER20> I've seen it around LA as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting to see a new spin on this. Webvan was one of the biggest busts of the dot com era ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan)) -- interesting that Amazon resurrected it..

<comment><USER22> More interesting... They bought Kiva Systems for $775 million from Mick Mountz, a former Webvan employee who identified warehouse fulfillment as a prohibitive cost in delivering groceries.

[http://www.kivasystems.com/about-us-the-kiva- approach/manage...](http://www.kivasystems.com/about-us-the-kiva- approach/management-team/mick-mountz)

It's unclear if Amazon has actually started using Kiva, though. Does anyone know? That 60 minutes special didn't show them using it.

Edit: Changed from "the prohibitive cost" to "a prohibitive cost."

<comment><USER23> > It's unclear if Amazon has actually started using Kiva, though.

Yeah. They use them a lot. A lot, a lot. It was cheaper to buy the company than pay to outfit every FC. All newish fulfillment centers ( [http://www.amazonfulfillmentcareers.com/amazon- fulfillment/l...](http://www.amazonfulfillmentcareers.com/amazon- fulfillment/locations/) ) are divided into "kiva" and "non-kiva" areas. I think there is only one FC that is fully "kiva," but it may be as many as 3 now. Details are NDA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if this is an experiment to bring all Amazon shipping in house? This would fit with their huge distribution system build out across the globe. In the meantime Amazon's relationship with UPS and FedEx is not disturbed.

</comment><comment><USER25> What we need is another kind of mail box. A "AmazonBox", but takes deliveries from other companies as well. Big, refrigerated, with a public/private key.

<comment><USER26> Amazon does have Amazon Lockers - the 7/11 down the street from me has them.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200689010)

<comment><USER27> Yes but going down to the 7/11 to pick up your groceries defeats the point of delivering groceries. People need lockers at their house or at the very least the nearest street corner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Has anyone noticed that they give you gigantic bags for free? Our office (LA not SF) orders fresh all the time for basic food and they always give us enormous re-usable bags.

I'm trying to figure out, are they doing this on purpose (paper bags would be cheaper)? I'm assuming they are, hoping that you'll go shopping and use their cool bags and using this as a method of free advertising.

<comment><USER29> At least in Seattle they do ask to get the bags back, although it's not enforced (we once got a number of dry ice freeze packs as well).

The packs are also cold-keeping, so I wonder if that makes the paper-bag alternative moot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here in the south bay I don't have InstaCart, but my local Safeway does deliver.

The experience isn't the best (someone has to be there and sign) but a) I have a nanny and b) I don't pay $299 or 14% more for the items.. in fact, I would pay less as I don't carry a loyalty card, but deliveries give you the loyalty price (presumably, they collect the same kind of info anyway).

<comment><USER31> Serious question: Why would you sign up for the delivery with all of your information but not for the loyalty card?

<comment><USER30> It's a matter of I don't want to carry the card around with me, and I'm lazy - I'll do all the signup for the convenience of delivery, but just lower prices? - not worth my time - at the counter I can usually whine and convince them to use their "default" loyalty card, and get the lower prices with no "tracking".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow, one avocado for $1.25. Aren't they usually a lot cheaper than that in the Bay Area? That's like East Coast prices.

<comment><USER33> No I buy avocados at Safeway for $1.50/ea

<comment><USER34> $.50 at Grocery Outlet in El Cerrito.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wish it was better but I decided not to use them anymore... wrote a blog post about it

[http://petersid.com/why-you-shouldnt-use-amazon- fresh/](http://petersid.com/why-you-shouldnt-use-amazon-fresh/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Impressively they are accepting VISA, MasterCard, and Flooz

<comment><USER37> So close! I was hoping to finally be able to spend my Beenz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Curious what "San Francisco Area" means. I can only get Fresh in San Francisco, not Oakland. Maybe down the peninsula?

<comment><USER39> The interesting thing about that, is I can order Homeroom (a restaurant in Oakland) delivery, but not to my house, 10 blocks down Broadway

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder how Instacart feels.

<comment><USER41> Probably pretty good since: a) It validates their idea. b) They just launched in Boston today. [http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2013/12/in...](http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2013/12/instacart_introduces_neighbor-.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Amazon now has it's own delivery fleet. UPS and FedEx are F'ed?

</comment><comment><USER43> I wish they would do this in Philly I currently Use PeaPod by Giant.</comment>


Popular JavaScript Package Manager Npm Raises $8M, Launches Private Modules - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/popular-javascript-package-manager-npm-raises-8m-launches-private-modules <comment><USER2> Do I just not get the scale? For this investment to make sense, they would have to get to $100s of million dollars, but by charging a few thousand companies $7?

And I'd say there's a 50/50 chance node will completely collapse within 10 years or so. And that's being generous, javascript is a controversial language and the standards committee moves very slowly. I honestly can't see it staying king once browsers can support other languages. You only have to see how fast Ruby was a darling and even now might be regarded on its swan song, less than 10 years later. Tech changes, the next big language will hit soon.

Congratulations to them and all that, and great product, I'm just wondering if someone can explain the sense in investing so much money into something like this? As this seems an incredibly risky venture?

<comment><USER3> > I honestly can't see it staying king once browsers can support other > languages.

Theres no way this happens anytime soon. Google already tried that with Dart and it failed.

<comment><USER4> It's funny how people forget that IE had supported multiple languages for a very long time: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Architecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Architecture)

        Internet Explorer does not include any native scripting
        functionality. Rather, MSHTML.dll exposes an API that
        permit a programmer to develop a scripting environment
        to be plugged-in and to access the DOM tree. Internet
        Explorer 8 includes the bindings for the Active
        Scripting engine, which is a part of Microsoft Windows
        and allows any language implemented as an Active
        Scripting module to be used for client-side scripting.
        By default, only the JScript and VBScript modules are
        provided; third party implementations like
        ScreamingMonkey (for ECMAScript 4 support) can also be
        used. Microsoft also makes available the Microsoft
        Silverlight runtime (not supported in Windows RT) that
        allows CLI languages, including DLR-based dynamic
        languages like IronPython and IronRuby, to be used for
        client-side scripting.

<comment><USER5> Gecko too for a while (because there was concern that VBScript would catch on, AFAIK), though it was eventually removed. The nsIProgrammingLanguage enum is the last vestige of this support: [https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/xpcom/base/ns...](https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/xpcom/base/nsIProgrammingLanguage.idl)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my company we had been using Git links in our package.json files to point to private dependencies hosted on our local GitLab instance. Recently, we setup an npm-compatible private repository that allows us to publish private packages as well as cache public ones.

It's been awesome to finally get back to using semver to manage all our dependencies. Our build server automatically publishes to our private repo on a successful build.

I think that a lot of companies will find this service extremely helpful and a lot cheaper than having an employee spend the time to try to set up a private repository locally.

<comment><USER7> I had set up a private repo at a previous company around the time NPM was experiencing a lot of outages, and also to handle our private modules. It worked well when it worked well, but it did definitely require babysitting once a month or so. Totally the kind of thing you want to NOT just have one developer understand.

What "npm-compatible" package did you end up going with? Assume you're not doing the couchdb mirror, which I really don't want to do again either, so I'm curious if this is a low-dependency sort of thing.

<comment><USER6> Our Ops guy did it using Nexus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> npm is a pretty important piece of node itself; I'm actually surprised Joyent hasn't picked them up (maybe they're tried?). Maybe this funding will help it iterate a little faster.

<comment><USER9> There's an interview where Isaac says if npm would sell to anyone (which it wouldn't) it would definitely not be to Joyent.

+1 re new stuff. npm v3 has some rad de-duplication stuff on the way.

<comment><USER10> If npm isn't ever going to sell out how are their VCs planning on making any return on investment? Go public? (Which is arguably selling to the public)

<comment><USER11> hmm. I don't going public is the likely option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In an alternate universe: _" Popular Linux Package Manager (apt|yum) Raises $<few>M, Launches Private Repositories"_. Something sounds strange.

</comment><comment><USER13> What would be the potential business model?

</comment><comment><USER14> Does private modules increase the SLA of NPM?

The biggest issue we face with using github and npm for deploys is the intermittent service outtages.

<comment><USER6> Setup a local npm cache. There's lots of instructions online on how to setup nginx to act as a proxy to fetch npm modules and cache them locally. This way, you don't have to worry if npmjs.com goes down, your build process will pull everything from your local cache.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, that's not a bad suggestion for our needs.

I would expect a paid-for service to not require me to run my own proxy though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They misspelled Ryan Dahl's name :(, I miss Ryan. Congrats to Isaac and NPM, they are such great guys!

</comment><comment><USER16> Npm is a good pièce software and the free public, pay for private GitHub like model wins.

<comment><USER17> It wins? Does it? Because I don't see how you become a company worth nine digits of VC by selling private JavaScript package repositories to twenty thousand people. We're talking about a difference not only in degree but in kind to Github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> do they want to be like Sonatype for node.js ?

[http://www.sonatype.com/](http://www.sonatype.com/)

<comment><USER19> They'd better not. Nexus has horrible node.js support: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yctqs1sN8U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yctqs1sN8U)

Check Artifactory instead, they have first class support

(Disclaimer: I am with JFrog).</comment></comment>


Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21234170/microsoft-word-two-spaces-period-error-correction-great-space-debate <comment><USER3> We debated this in 1993 on the www-talk mailing list [1]. Terry Allen (an editor at O'Reilly) wanted rendered HTML documents to follow Tex conventions with extra space after a period. Marc Andreessen (still at NCSA in 1993) pointed out browser developers couldn't do the syntactic analysis required to distinguish the end of sentences from inter-sentence periods. Guido van Rossum (working on Python version 1.0 at the time) weighed in on the whitespace issue and complained "it's mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff) that makes people want this." We ended up with browsers collapsing spaces between sentences for the web. Most style guides [2] seem to have settled the issue in favor of a single space but debate rages, eh?

[1] [http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q3/index.h...](http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q3/index.html)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_and_style_guides)

<comment><USER4> We should have gone with 1.5 spaces as a compromise.

<comment><USER5> Or a slanted space, like a mezuzah.

<comment><USER6> Only for Ashkenazim/Chasidim. Sephardi and Mizrahi hang them vertically. [https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert- slan...](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-slanted- mezuzah/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See [https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracliteanriver.com:80/?p=324) for a great article on the history of wider spaces between sentences — how there were two traditions of typography and things started to shift towards equal spaces in the 1930s–1960s (i.e. inter-sentence space being the same as the inter-word space). I'm even holding on my lap right now a book published in 1957 by a reputed publisher (Parkinson's Law — Riverside Press / Houghton Mifflin, 24th printing) that uses wider spaces between sentences. As do of course all of Knuth's books (e.g. TAOCP Volume 4A from 2011).

For some reason, the other typographical tradition (which I suspect owes its ascendancy to William Morris in some way) is dominant today (which is fine), but the way they've nearly completely rewritten history (e.g. blaming "double" spaces on typewriters) is mystifying.

The current version of the relevant Wikipedia article is here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_senten...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_sentence_spacing&oldid=952211622)

<comment><USER8> I don't strictly oppose this typographical tradition; my native tongue has many widths of spaces (in particular between a measurement and the unit there should be a slightly narrower space) and I'm used to it.

What I dislike strongly is this idea that one should alter the source manuscript to emulate these typographical conventions. It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces. They are in no way equivalent!

<comment><USER9> _> It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces._

Using a double space is a simple way of telling the computer that you want a wider space, because otherwise it can't tell that you mean the end of a sentence.

<comment><USER10> Similar to the spacing convention, we use two hyphens to signify an en dash and three for an em dash.

<comment><USER11> I can't recall ever seeing three hyphens used to signify an em dash in a document published on the net. (I added the word "published" to account for the possibility of the existence of a markup language I am unaware of that employs your three-hyphen convention.) I am fastidious enough about usage that I probably would've noticed and remembered.

In my experience, its always two hyphens (or space, hyphen, hyphen, space).

<comment><USER12> LaTeX converts three hyphens into an em-dash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting thing is, living in Europe, AFAIR I never heard about "use two spaces" rule until now (even if in a long monospace plaintext, I might have subconsciously used it sometimes to disambiguate).

If I saw that in a Word document, however, I would have thought the author was a technically-illiterate person who puts extra spaces around commas, quotes, parentheses etc. or uses 10 spaces instead of 1 tab for indentation.

\---

Talking typography trivia: in French language, it's _mandatory_ to put a space before "double-characters" like : ; ? ! - the side effect is that it often allows to easily recognize a French person online even if they write in English.

Most people: Hello! How are you?

French people : Hello ! How are you ?

<comment><USER14> While we're on the topic of typographical prejudice, I confess that if I see a Microsoft Word document at all, I tend to assume the author is not so technically literate.

The intersection of "people I've seen use Word" and "people who know how to write a program" is extremely small.

<comment><USER15> Wow, what industry do you work in and for how long?

Reasons for technical people to use word:

1\. A non technical person may need to edit or even just comment on the document at some point

2\. It's stupid, but in a lot situations people are conditioned to take an email with the real content attached in a word doc more seriously than a plain email. You could use a PDF to the same effect but see point 1.

3\. Actually imo it's the best tool for the job it's designed for. Markup/markdown and adobe have their places but not in everyday business writing. Or even scientific, it beats latex for journal papers imo (see point 1).

<comment><USER16> > Wow, what industry do you work in and for how long?

I don't know about the OP, but in the mathematics community you need to have _a lot_ of confidence on yourself to write a paper in Word. It would be a much worse offense than using comic-sans, and it would likely be interpreted as a flamboyant deviation and unnecessary attention whoring.

<comment><USER15> Interesting.

I have once written for a journal that insisted on latex but can't say I found it a good way to work (and that's after plenty of experience with it including a phd thesis). I can see how it might be better for math heavy writing, especially 10 years ago, but most of the basic latex math commands work in word now anyway.

If that field frowns on word so much it should just insist on latex for paper submissions to save anyone the embarrassment, but people enjoy being dicks I guess.

<comment><USER13> A friend of mine is a physics PhD. Most journals require to use _their exact LaTeX settings_ for every little detail in order to have an article published.

Which means quite a lot of menial work to redo the article each time you apply, get refused, and want to send to another journal.

<comment><USER16> > Which means quite a lot of menial work to redo the article each time you > apply, get refused, and want to send to another journal.

What kind of menial work do you mean? Isn't that just a matter of changing the class of your document? Why would you need to change the text of the article itself?

<comment><USER15> I'm not GP but some journals have formatting requirements such as specifying which sections (e.g. introduction, background, methods, results, discussion) you must have and in what order. Also relative size of these e.g. how much background is expected? Word/page length limits both for the abstract and complete article. Nit picks like whether you refer to Figure 1 or fig. 1 in the text (and whether it's capitalized if not at sentence start). Usually if you reformat a bibliography to a different referencing style, even automatically, it needs checking as the database fields will have been used in different ways and often errors creep in. Different wording for competing interests and author contributions statements and maybe a different position for the former (in the main manuscript / a separate file). The list goes on...

Not to mention often the latex style (or word template) given often directly contradicts the author instructions page on the website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This may not seem like a big deal, but consider the effect that such an influential source of "correctness" can have on the general sense of what is correct.

Spell checkers like Word's are responsible for the "z" in British English being demonised. Once upon a time, according to linguist Gretchen McCullen, it was common in British English to use both z and s. But somewhere along the line, automated spell checkers categorised one spelling as British and categorized the other as American, and it created a whole new hobby for many British people who fancied themselves the guardians of the English language, courageously pointing out whenever someone used the filthy, "dumbed down" version from across the Atlantic. We have these brave volunteers to thank for defending the purity of the famously consistent English language, and for these people we have spell checkers to thank.

Thanks a lot, spell checkers!

<comment><USER18> This sort of thing long pre-dates spell checkers, as other have pointed out. Here's an older example for you. The word "alright" existed fairly quietly and unobtrusively in the English language for decades, as a formation similar to "altogether" and "always", until Fowler and other authorities got hold of it after World War 1 and demonized it.

* [http://jdebp.uk./FGA/all-right-variants.html](http://jdebp.uk./FGA/all-right-variants.html)

<comment><USER19> Huh, didn't know "alright" wasn't universally hunky-dory. In Australian English it's a common word and that's how it's spelled, and I believe "all right" would be considered actively wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I remember a typing teacher being very serious about two spaces after the dot[1]. He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute for a zero "0". Fortunately both of these rules are now firmly in the past along with witch burning. This is progress.

[1] yeah, I could call it a period or a full stop. But its also a dot. Variety is the spice of life as is properly finishing your

<comment><USER21> > He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute for a > zero "0".

Whoa, never heard that one. Did that have any major traction at some point? What was the point?

<comment><USER22> Some older typewriters had no 1 or 0 keys: [https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/this_typewriter_has_no_1_or_0_keys_people_used_i/)

<comment><USER20> The irony was that all the typewriter keyboards we were using had separate keys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One thing that's nice about being a programmer is that I haven't thought about any mechanics of text formatting for many years. When I save a file, it just gets reformatted according to rules that were set up exactly once. I have no idea whether or not I use spaces or tabs, or whether there are semicolons at the end of lines, or whether it's "} else {" or "}\nelse {".

It makes me sad that the least technical users have to use the most primitive software tooling. Something that programmers never think about (because they are best equipped to program their own programming tools) is apparently something that results in national studies and extremely snide articles because nobody will make good tools for them that end the problem once and for all.

<comment><USER24> Being a programmer won't save you from this particular style war. If there's a comment in your code with a sentence that begins with a double space, your code formatter probably won't flag or remove it in the same way that MS Word will. And it's likely shown in a monospace font, which makes it more noticeable.

How many spaces do people put after a full stop in comments in their code?

I go with one, but Vim's J and gq commands annoyingly insert two spaces when joining sentences from separate lines. I'd love it if someone could tell me how to fix this.

Edit: found it, the command is "set nojoinspaces"

<comment><USER25> Broadly speaking, internal consistency is the best & most important style. So just follow the convention of the codebase you are working in (ideally with a code formatter to help)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's pretty obnoxious. I do two spaces out of habit, and would prefer it just removed them quietly rather than forcing me to relearn. (which is what HTML does, effectively.... it displays it the same if you use two spaces)

<comment><USER27> Yeah I was forced to do this as a child when writing typed stuff in school and wish I hadn't, hopefully won't be too hard to relearn.

We were also forced to have perfect MLA citations in high school where the librarian had to sign off on it and you had to go rewrite it for any arbitrary little thing - what a monumental waste of time. They probably still make the students do that.

<comment><USER28> When I was in school they still had us using MLA but there were sites you could post any URL or book title and it would generate the citation for you.

Given the seeming inability of many people to gauge the voracity of primary sources, I'm not so sure the teachers were wrong in this case. I know I liked reading wikipedia and copying the sources from there, but there's something to be said for teaching exactly how unreliable a source is based on the inability to properly cite it.

<comment><USER27> That software didn't work for us at the time because we had to follow some document provided by the school and what software did exist was often slightly different in the exact placement of punctuation.

I think that focus was a waste - when you really need to do that in graduate school it's not hard to figure out and you can use software to do it.

They also made us put inline citations in the writing itself (you couldn't even say the year someone was born without citing the source).

Of course the teachers didn't actually look at the source and discuss its quality (which may have been useful) - they instead obsessed over minutia of where exactly a space or period is required in the citation and if it's a periodical or website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I try to explain to people that punctuation like "'" and "." is overloaded, and the real point of the second space is to disambiuguate.

They just don't get it, and perhaps won't understand the problem until it kicks them in the shin.

The appropriate counterattack might be to introduce some coding and just show how gnarly sentences are to process as a result.

<comment><USER30> Please can you give an example? That would make your point easier to understand

<comment><USER31> Especially the overloaded ".". Apart from usage as a decimal point and elipsis, where it's obvious, what are the overloaded cases?

<comment><USER32> Abbreviations in the middle of a sentence (When he was talking with Mr. St. Cyr, he saw a bird. Then...")

<comment><USER33> Except that in the tradition current when I was growing up neither Mr nor St require a dot because they both include the last letter of the word. The dot is meant to indicate that letters following it have been omitted.

<comment><USER34> This is a key punctuation difference between North American and UK English. In NA, we use the dot here, but not in the UK. Actually, I've started to adopt the UK convention, because I think it looks neater.

<comment><USER35> Meanwhile, the house style at the NYT is to use periods between each letter of an acronym in certain cases, e.g. W.H.O., D.O.D, and U.N., but not NASA for some reason.

I've had to occasionally append to existing texts that use the period between each letter style, and I have to say, it's incredibly annoying to physically type.

<comment><USER34> In regard to the NYT style: that's because WHO, DOD, and UN are not in fact acronyms, while NASA is. So it's entirely consistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Two spaces are the only civilized option, and I hope the world's numerous, two-space-loving lawyers use their now abundant spare time to lay into MSFT about this.

<comment><USER37> I believe the software should add wide spaces after periods correctly, and not the user. Two reasons: first, two spaces is too big a separation between sentences. Second, it's really hard to maintain consistency (or ensure that there's consistency) in the use of double spacing without the help of software. It's easy to miss when reviewing.

Let the software do this menial task. That's what computers are for, aren't they?

<comment><USER38> A wide space after a period is only sensible when the period ends a sentence.

<comment><USER39> It would seem sensible to me that a word processor should treat a double-space as a hint that the preceding period ended a sentence, and a single-space as a (weaker) hint that it did not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "If you're still [wanting to use double-spaces], you will be able to ignore the suggestion. The Editor feature in Word allows users to ignore the suggestion once, make the change to one space, or turn off the writing-style suggestion."

On the one hand, it's reasonable to assume that it would be a configurable option.

On the other hand, I feel like having a title like that doesn't suggest it's an option/configuration. ("Word now flags double spaces after a period as an error" makes it sound like it's an error to use double spaces after a period).

"What should the default configuration be?" is an entirely different question to the flamebait "which one is correct, single or double" (especially given that there seem to be a number of established uses of both).

</comment><comment><USER41> People have strong opinions on either side of this issue. I grew up with two spaces so anything else doesn't look correct. I did however get past indented spacing on paragraphs pretty quickly and that's mostly gone away.

Thankfully book publishers still use them so they're not going away any time soon. Sure hope that Word has a way of toggling it off.

<comment><USER42> As far as I'm aware book publishers ask authors who are using word processors to use a single space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The whole debate over one space vs. two is just stupid. TeX got it right 40 years ago, recognising that it's no longer necessary to constrain ourselves to a integral number of space characters (a holdover from the typewriter era), but instead to use what it calls "glue" as separators between characters, words, and sentences.

Glue between words is given a higher weighting than that between characters. Glue between sentences is given a higher weighting than between words. So you end up with sentences being separated from each other by more whitespace than words. The exact amount will vary, as the Knuth-Plass line breaking algorithm [1] tries to find the most aesthetically pleasing set of places to break lines.

Arguing for one space or two spaces misses the point.

[1] [http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass- breaking.pdf](http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf)

<comment><USER44> So I think it doesn't quite miss the point. the point is that you want one ASCII space after a period and then you want the layout algorithm to do something intelligent (like make it as wide as two spaces or 1.5 spaces). This is why "1 space" is correct and two spaces conflates different layers of document creation (the textual information to display and how it is laid out).

<comment><USER38> I think two spaces makes more sense as an input mechanism, although the ship has sailed so it's no longer possible.

That way the document generator can tell the difference between periods that are inside sentences, and those which end sentences.

When using one space everywhere in the input, the document generator has to guess, and will sometimes guess wrong.

That's why HTML doesn't, and can't, do that kind of intelligent layout. End of sentence wide spaces in the middle of sentences looks awful.

<comment><USER44> I mean arguably then we would want a totally different character for end of sentence and not two spaces in a row. I think modern tools are smart enough to properly space "Mr. Foo" v."I was sad. John was happy." and if not you can always manually fix the spacing edge cases yourself without modifying the text.

<comment><USER45> When I'm writing HTML or TeX, my practice is to use a carriage return after sentences. That makes it easier to reorder them when I do a revision pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I grew up putting two spaces after a period. A few years ago, after reading an article arguing for one space, I decided to try single spaces, as open- mindedly as possible. However, after a few days I ended up going back to the double space, since the single space just looked plain ugly to me. To me single spaces make all sentences look like run-on sentences, at least visually.

On a different, though my side lost this religious debate, I have higher hopes for the eventual demise of all caps (which always look ugly to me, even in document or section titles.)

<comment><USER47> WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH ALL CAPS?

Personally, this to me (a digital immigrant from the EU), is like shouting at someone. Apologies for the rudeness.

I wonder if this is universal among people who migrated to the digital world in the 90s?

Is there a universal way of vocalizing net-lingo? Or how does this evolve over generations (do digital natives speak the same lingo that we learned?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I found these two thoughtful Wikipedia articles give an interesting background. I didn't know Vi and Emacs used to recognise double spacing as an end-of-sentence navigation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_digital_me...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_digital_media)

<comment><USER48> It's still a configurable in Emacs. In particular, it's controlled by the sentence-end-double-space variable, which on my Emacs (27, built a little over a year ago) was still set to true by default, i.e. considering sentences to be separated by double spaces. I have a line in my config that disables this, as I'm used to the single-space tradition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Well then I guess that's another reason I won't use Word (sure you can turn it off, and it's a minor annoyance at most, but still).

You one-spacers will have to pry my double-spaced sentences from my cold dead fingers. It's been scientifically proven to be at least marginally superior¹ (no matter how badly The Verge wants to try to convince anyone otherwise), it's substantially less ugly than using a single space, and it's easier for machines to parse (a period followed by two spaces or a line break is unambiguously the end of a sentence, whereas a period followed by a single space is - unless the two-space rule is in effect - ambiguous).

This is one substantial reason why, to me, no website will ever be quite as readable as a PDF (let alone print). At least a PDF-outputting typesetter (e.g. LaTeX) can intelligently account for this and add the additional spacing, and it looks _fantastic_ and is delightfully readable when combined with properly-justified text (also a rarity in websites - and Word documents, for that matter). But with HTML, I can't even _emulate_ it with double-spaces; browsers boneheadedly replace even the double-spaces with single spaces.

I certainly don't buy the "saving time" aspect, either: Ifwereallycaredaboutsavingtime,thenwhybotherwithspacesatall?Imaginehowmanykeyswecouldfitintoakeyboardifwegotridofthespacebarentirely!Nottomentionhowmanybyteswe'dsaveineverytextfile. (More seriously, unless you _really really_ suck at typing, one v. two spaces should be entirely insignificant in terms of time spent) (EDIT: and I'm only half-joking about that suggestion; there are plenty of examples of people who don't use any spaces _at all_ after sentence-terminating punctuation, so the aforementioned example is just taking things to their logical conclusion)

\----

¹: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6) (The Verge mentioned this in the article, irrationally downplaying its significance)

</comment><comment><USER50> It seems slightly odd, given that there are different traditions of between- sentence spacing, that there doesn't seem to be a Unicode character for the kind of space between sentences.

<comment><USER51> As with all letter spacing, the size is determined by the font metrics. There doesn't need to be a special character for it.

<comment><USER52> Even assuming the goal is to get something like the below?

Mr.^Smith^turned^off^the^lights.^^Then^he^went^to^sleep.

<comment><USER53> Not the person you asked, but I think so. Some fonts also convert "fi" into a character where the letter-spacing is very small and the i loses its point, so there's definitely a mechanism for letter combination / adaptive spacing.

<comment><USER9> Converting "fi" into "fi" only requires a lookup table, though fonts can do some pretty fancy things: [https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType- Reference-Manual/...](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference- Manual/RM06/Chap6morx.html)

Knowing that "Mr. Smith." is intra-sentence but "Me. Smith." is inter-sentence is well beyond what fonts can do, however.

<comment><USER50> I thought the rule was that ligatures shouldn't cross syllable boundaries. Like the fi in "fine" can be replaced but not the fi in "barfing", so it would need to be a bit more than a lookup table. Or maybe a dictionary-sized lookup table isn't a problem anymore.

<comment><USER9> I see [https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50660/when- shoul...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50660/when-should-i-not- use-a-ligature-in-english-typesetting/50957) suggesting this, but I don't believe any fonts implement this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Strange, I learned double spacing in school in 1991 and have somehow gone my whole life until today without knowing or noticing that single spacing was even a thing.

</comment><comment> alok-g If I as an author disable the check and continue to use double spaces, would it stop flagging on my machine only, or on the readers' machines too? If only on my machine, then the option to stop the flagging would do no good to me and I would request Microsoft to stop flagging this.

Instead of making such determinations on English grammar/punctuation/spacing, I would recommend Microsoft to first improve the grammar checker in Word to implement the well-settled rules of grammar, where it is significantly lagging with nearly no developments since a decade or longer.

</comment><comment><USER55> Great! No more having to find/replace all the double-spacing in documents I review.

<comment><USER56> I came to say I know a couple of people that edit and format documents for a living and they hate getting documents with double spaces.

<comment><USER57> Why?

<comment><USER58> Because whether or not it is "correct" in some meta-sense, it probably isn't the style used by whatever organization they're doing the editing for. Organizations tend to have style guides for external documents. (And may go off different style guides/rules for different purposes.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I used to be in favor of double-spacing but then learned it was because of monospaced fonts. So now I only do it when my output is in monospaced fonts.

</comment><comment><USER60> Where did people learn to double space? I've never had anyone even mention such a thing in school.

<comment><USER61> Typing classes. That would be typing on an actual typewriter, not "keyboarding" on a computer.

<comment><USER49> I learned to touch-type on a computer, and still learned to use two spaces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Double spaces are considerably more readable, especially for those of us with visual impairments.

</comment><comment><USER63> I stopped using Word when I need section numbering that wasn't completely broken. I am therefore not massively surprised they've left that broken for 20 years and decided instead to take sides in a white-space religious war. You know, to "help users."

</comment><comment><USER64> This kind of deliberate but trivial breakage can't be an accident, and there's enought precedent ("let's screw with the VS/office interface today shall we"). So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news? or something else.

But I don't believe that 'correcting' a typographical convention is what this is directly about.

<comment><USER48> > _So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the > news? or something else._

In larger teams and companies, changes move pretty slow through the design- development-QA pipeline. Maybe this change was made a year ago, and worked its way through the pipes only now?

<comment><USER64> What has this to do with my suggestion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Having learned to type on a typewriter in the early 90s (yet another way to date myself) for a long time I used two spaces in word processing and emails etc, and then switched to one as it seemed the popular convention. At some point my brain made the switch to what it considers "normal". It's been so long, I can't remember when that happened.

</comment><comment><USER66> > Microsoft has settled the great space debate

No, Microsoft doesn't get to "settle" a language issue.

This also reminds me that some (many?) French speaker believe upper-case accentuated letters (eg. É È À) are incorrect, just because it's impossible to type them on Windows (unless you know the right alt code, but most people don't) and typewriters.

</comment><comment><USER67> I was so annoyed reading text with two spaces after each other that I've built a writing application [1] that just does not allow to insert two spaces or newlines.

[1] [https://monsterwriter.app](https://monsterwriter.app)

</comment><comment><USER68> This reminds me of the Tabs vs Space discussion, and how once Bill Gates did an AMA on Reddit and his answer was that tabs was better because of consistency.

<comment><USER69> Consistency with what, all the other code that uses tabs?

<comment><USER70> In code which uses tabs one logical indentation level is always one tab. You can show tab with different width in you editor, but the source code is consistent.

If spaces are used you never know how many spaces is one logical level. There is no agreement - some people prefer 2 spaces, some 4 and may be somebody uses 8 or 6.

Even worse - I sometimes see when in a single source file some parts use 2 spaces for one logical indent and some - 4 spaces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> An historic day. Here's Bill Hill advocating a single space after the period back in the early 2000's: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3NsdPNbZY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3NsdPNbZY)

</comment><comment><USER72> The only thing more annoying is my car locks itself if I don't open the drivers side door. So basically when you unlock your car; open a rear door to retrieve some items, dropping your keys on the rear seat to free up both hands, and then shut the door because (A) it's raining, or (B) it's blocking your path or (C) any other reason--you will be locked out, and good and truly fucked. It's pure genius!

The only feature I enjoyed more, was the time the computer slammed on the brakes (for no real) reason while I was merging (my fault because I did neglect to shut off that idiotic automatic brake feature). There is however, no way to disable the automatic door locking feature.

That reminds me--I need to tape a brick inside of one of the wheel wells so I can smash open one of the windows, so I don't freeze to death some snowy winter night.

</comment><comment><USER73> Many technical replies. Hardly any mentions of CMOS or other real authorities.

<comment><USER3> Yes. It seems many developers will honor coding conventions or Internet RFCs but love to engage in debate about orthography when it suits them, rather than referring to the Chicago Manual of Style or another authority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> [https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between- sentences....](https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between- sentences.html)

</comment><comment><USER75> How self-righteous are The Verge's writings about this...

</comment><comment><USER76> This ruined me when I first tried to use gtypist. Couldn't easily see the double space and got like every line wrong the first go around.

</comment><comment><USER77> Argh! It's not my fault, I was brainwashed as a child. I try to keep it down to just one space but I can't help myself. I'm the victim here!

<comment><USER78> You did a great job in that comment, though :)

<comment><USER79> It's just how HTML is rendered, you'll never know whether OP used 1 or 2 spaces in that comment.

<comment><USER80> If you look at the comment through the Hacker News API, there's two spaces before the last sentence.

[https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?pri...](https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?print=pretty)

Although, the documentation says that field is HTML, so I'm not sure what to think.

[https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

<comment><USER81> Same in the HTML markup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> That's good. It's super annoying to read sentences that start with a double space, it burdens my reading speed.

</comment><comment><USER83> As Jebus intended. Now if we can just enact the death penalty for people who don't use the Oxford comma!

</comment><comment><USER84> I prefer a single space myself.

However, my copyeditor recently told me that, in order to promote distancing, MLA is going back to two spaces after a period for the remainder of this year...

</comment><comment><USER85> So war then.

</comment><comment><USER86> Great! Maybe I can finally kick the habit.

</comment><comment><USER87> Good. The only reason that habit is a thing is because of typewriters, which are monospaced. Some people just cargo culted the practice long past its expiration date...which makes for awkward spacing.

<comment><USER88> The practice originally came from typesetting. If anything, it's _more_ relevant and appropriate now than it was in the days when your font choices were limited to 12-point Pica and Elite.

<comment><USER89> Programs that do typesetting for you (Markdown, LaTeX), will ignore the number of spaces after the period in your "source" code and lay it out in the output with a single space.

I've gotten in the habit of single-space in variable-width fonts, and double- space in fixed-width fonts.

<comment><USER90> Not so for the default mode in LaTeX.

It tries to guess which periods indicate end-of-sentence (based on whether the next letter is capitalized) and will add additional horizontal space accordingly, unless you tell it not to by declaring your document uses "French Spacing".

(Edit: and my memory may be serving me incorrectly here, but I recall 20 years ago having a support package that also detected double-space in the source as another indicator of end-of-sentence, but that was probably a non standard extension.)

<comment><USER91> Won't that mess up titles like Dr. Livingstone and Mr. President?

Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

<comment><USER49> > Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

It would be a lot less hard if we were able to unambiguously tell the computer whether a period ends a sentence. I wonder how we could _possibly_ do that...

(Less sarcastically: a lot of Unix programs - Emacs, vim, troff, etc. - <USER2> this problem by defaulting to double-spaced sentences, thus resolving the ambiguity. Kinda odd that this ain't the Tex approach; there's already precedent by using doubled-up ``backquotes'' and ``single quotes'' to produce "smart double quotes", and lone `backquotes' and `single quotes' similarly become 'smart single quotes'.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>