A web and mobile app for tracking cellar contents that doesn't feel dated or clunky, and with which I can make assorted dynamically-updating menus for different use cases. I'll probably do a Show HN once it's live.
There are so many times the Oxford comma prevents ambiguity. I have yet to see a counterexample. Commas separate list entries, don't change it for the last one.
This is how I was taught. Use ( ) or -- -- here and the Oxford comma for list of 3 or more.
I get lazy with adding the comma before the "and" in list, and without fail I hear my grandmother/father/teachers pointing out how wrong I am for doing so. Same for my use of semicolons followed by "and" or "but".
I never realized the Oxford comma was even something up for debate.
Many years ago working on natural language to SQL, when we had ambiguities this is how we’d clarify things with the user (albeit with the minimal amount of brackets necessary).
It eliminated some ambiguity. It should be quite self evident that even without an example it is quite impossible to eliminate all ambiguity (it’s a feature of human language.)
The more important property is that it never introduces more ambiguity. Ie at worst it doesn’t help, but not making it worse.
As written it is perfectly clear that Betty is neither the maid nor the cook, neither of whom the author bothered to name in this sentence. If that wasn't the author's intention they should grammar better.
> There are so many times the Oxford comma prevents ambiguity. I have yet to see a counterexample.
In every counterexample that I have seen the ambiguity involves an appositive phrase set off by commas which is lurking nearby in the sentence.
Commas are the most common way to set off an appositive phrases but most sources say that em dashes and parenthesis are also acceptable.
This means you can use a simple rule and not have to worry about ambiguous lists: (1) always use the Oxford comma, and (2) if you need to set off an appositive phrase for an item in the list set it off with em dashes or parenthesis.
"I'd like to thank my mother, Ayn Rand, and God" is the usual example.
Yes, you can reorder the list to remove the ambiguity, but sometimes the order of the list matters. The serial comma should be used when necessary to remove ambiguity, and not used when it introduces ambiguity. Rewrite the sentence when necessary. Worth noting that this is the Oxford University Press's own style rule!
The square-bracket clarifications here are meta-text designed to absolutely clarify the intended reading of the preceding text, so that the reader can contrast their understanding with the intended one.
There is no suggestion that one would do this in "regular" text.
I mean first off: no the exact same image is conjured because we are reading this in context of knowing who jfk and stalin are and we know they aren't strippers and all language is contextual.
That said:
We invited the stripper, JFK, and Stalin to the party.
We invited the stripper, JFK and Stalin to the party.
The supposed ambiguity is back. Although again there is no ambiguity to the reader. The juxtaposition of the two versions wouldn't work as a joke if there was any ambiguity
Just put the colon there if you need to introduce a list, it's one of its functions. "I'd like to thank: my mother, Ayn Rand and God". The same goes for that "two strippers" example: "We invited the strippers: JFK and Stalin, to the party".
I want you to know that I would only write this in a discussion nitpicking about grammar: :)
> "I'd like to thank: my mother, Ayn Rand and God".
A colon should not connect a verb and its objects; generally you need an independent clause before the colon (i.e., a clause that could be a complete sentence). One could properly say,
I'd like to thank the following: My mother, Ayn Rand and God.
Also, these examples leave ambiguity. Your mom could be Ayn Rand, and if she was, then you might very well think she was God, or be making a joke about it.
> "We invited the strippers: JFK and Stalin, to the party"
Nope. A colon isn't a parenthetical in the middle of a sentence; that is, you can't continue the sentence after a colonic phrase (there's no such thing so I made up that term :D ). And again, the clause before that colon is not an independent clause. One can use parentheses (of course) or em dashes for parenthetical phrases:
We invited strippers (JFK and Stalin) to the party.
We invited strippers - JFK and Stalin - to the party.
A proper colon might be as follows:
We invited strippers to the party: JFK and Stalin!
But I'd put an em dash there (and to heck with LLMs and their em dash overusage).
Only tangentially related (but hey, it's HN) - I'm so happy about the support/requirements for trailing commas in the modern language syntax:
x = [
123,
456,
789,
];
It makes editing such a list so much easier. Also, the commit diffs are cleaner (you don't need to add comma to the last element when appending a new one).
The oxford comma debate is so annoying because it clearly has nothing but advantages. Removing commas from a delimited list does nothing to resolve ambiguity, whether lexicographically or syntactically.
It's so useful as a delimiter and anti-ambiguity machine, that you don't even need spaces for it to work! See CSV or Japanese.
It's common in English writing to interject additional details in on a noun by using a phrase separated with commas. I've personally found Oxford commas can in certain cases make it unclear whether you're interjecting or not, like so:
Alice, the cook of the house and the guest were very chatty that evening.
Alice, the cook of the house, and the guest were very chatty that evening.
In the second, is Alice the cook of the house or not? This is the ambiguity of Oxford commas.
Headline's a bit misleading. They've never permanently lost a bag, and well done to them for that, but they've certainly lost them for periods of time. Just eventually found them.
Permanent losses are pretty uncommon in general. Good for them for minimizing but having bags on the next flight or delayed for a couple/three days is way more common. Probably would have to be stolen which is rare, especially in Japan, I assume or end up in some weird location without a scan.
Was flying into Narita once and I had checked luggage in part because I was carrying an award for a Japanese customer. I was sort of given a "we'll get back to you sooner or later." At which point I explained the situation to a supervisor I think and was much fluttering around and got the bag the next day.
I honestly have no idea how those dynamics work. At some point, the airline presumably pays, travel insurance does, or a combination of the two. At some point if it's just a bunch of old travel stuff, I guess I can see a customer shrugging, collecting the money, and dropping the whole thing.
I'm now imagining a situation in which a customer at the point of successfully making an insurance claim to pay for the nice new clothes they've bought themselves is infuriated to receive an email informing them that Kansai airport has found their luggage and will endeavour to deliver it to a hotel anywhere within the world within two days...
The customer has presumably been paid. If they're smart there's nothing or very little in the suitcase that can't just be replaced. The airline/insurance has paid out and just wants the claim to go away.
As a side-note, had a small kitchen fire with smoke damage last year and it was pretty obvious that, even though they were reasonably generous, the insurance adjuster, cleaning people, movers, etc. just wanted the whole process to go away so they could move on. They objected a bit to a few claims but, for the most part, spending $50K was nothing compared to the claims being reopened.
Once the insurance adjuster is satisfied that you're not scamming them, they're often quite flexible and lenient.
I've only ever had luggage delayed once, they gave me a little bag of toiletries and a couple hundred bucks and a few days later delivered the luggage; never demanded the money back.
I've had luggage delayed many times relative to the amount I actually check luggage.
There were a few insurance policy things that my adjuster pushed back on (no code upgrades) and there were a number of things that would have just been silly for me not to pay for when walls were being repaintedd and opened up. There was a fire inspector because of the size of the claim. But it was pretty reasonable overall--although of people wouldn't have had the available cash to do the whole job as it really needed o be done. And, given that a couple of contractors, saved my butt in the middle of the winter, I wasn't going to push back too hard.
And that's not a permanent loss. It may screw up your trip to a greater or lesser degree but I try to build in buffers at least for a shorter delay when I can. I have also had a few multi-day delays--on of which just caught my guided hiking trip with like an hour to spare. And I had already bought a new duffle bag worth of stuff as best I could.
Not true. Several SI prefixes already overlap with units. m is both metre and milli-. T is tesla and tera-. c is a prefix of candela (cd) but also centi-. (G is gauss (cgs unit, not mks/SI) and giga-.)
Obviously tone is hard in text, and it's worse in multilingual teams. What's been very effective for my current team is adding explicit context as a comment prefix with standardised terms:
- Nit for "it doesn't actually matter"
- Suggestion for "this approach might be better, what do you think?"
- Question for "help me understand this"
- Requested Change for "this is actually a blocker"
We include this expectation in our working agreement, stick to it rigorously for reviews where reviewer and reviewee haven't established a strong rapport yet, and use it as appropriate beyond that. So far we've had no confusion about tone in reviews.
