Would you mind capitalizing "by", replacing "u" with "you", removing the comma, and capitalizing Paul Graham?

Thank you for your effort. I'd really appreciate it.

Edit: please don't downvote him. It was a good question, so let's all encourage him to continue contributing to Hacker News eh?

It doesn't take 30 seconds to notice that nobody else is using "txt speech". The grammar Nazi in me had to do it.

He's obviously a lot younger than you. "txt speech" is the new social norm, Grandpa. ;)

No, social norms are localized. "txt speech" is not the local norm, no matter how normal it may be elsewhere.

Besides, based on my observations, the inclination that "txt speech" is indicative of an immature manner is dead on, and people do indeed grow out of it. Today's txt-ers will type normally once they grow up. I can wait. l33t sp34|< is not a new phenomenon, anybody with eyes should be able to observe that it is not an endpoint... for anybody interesting, anyhow.

I guess it's hard to convey flippancy via comments. I completely agree with this comment. Grown-ups use the T9 on their phone.

"txt" speech is a norm for 13 year old kids on youtube and myspace. By 16-17 they're either all using proper grammar or too technologically challenged to be posting here.

I have NO idea how someone who writes in "txt" gets to be here, haha. Then again, the web is public. I sigh.

Did you just start reading stuff online, or are you his English teacher? ;)

Palish seems to be conveying the local customs in a kind way.

"But we're hoping that, as in past influxes, the new arrivals will with some prodding from the existing inhabitants learn the local customs." - pg

Yes, by pg, I mean Paul Graham. I guess I hadn't really noticed that the community here had grown large enough to need the full name for my meaning to be clear. I'm glad it has grown, of course, and I'll try to remember to not be so insular in the future.

Most likely. PG is his HN username.

pg actually. HN usernames are case sensitive.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PG

Whoopsies, ignore me, I'm stupid. :-)

EDIT: wait, does that mean there might be a ghost Unalone out there making me look bad? Suddenly I feel the need to register a hundred permutations to stay safe.

No worries. HN does a case insensitive search at the time of registration. ( guess how I know ;) ) Long back it wasn't doing that, I think.

Heh. It reminds me of a MetaFilter hack, where somebody figured out you could register usernames with Unicode characters in them. Enough to say that there are some characters in some alphabets that look exactly like normal letters.

To save you the effort - you cannot do the same on HN :).

Reminds me of the DNS hack where the same thing happened with DNS and browsers stopped displaying unicode domains entirely after a few too many wachovia.com lookalikes.

Aha, that's why Unicode snowman domain doesn't work for me.

http://www.☃.net/