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Ask HN: Why do many recent comments have hyphens separating two paragraphs?

2 points by 1R ↗ HN
Recently comments with a sort of two-comments-in-one style, involving a hyphenated separation between body and postscript have been trending on HN. Viral meme? GPT-4? What's up‽

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Why?? Is it because of the bipolar nature of the commenters state of mind, like: here is one take (hyphens) here is another?

4 comments

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themodelplumber
It's a simple language-technology that allows you to express nuance that's not available in English otherwise. We are reinventing German, Chinese, you name it.

BTW it's not really necessary to throw words like bipolar around, that's a tad extreme. :D

1R
You propose that English, German, Chinese (presumably Cantonese, Mandarin et al) and any other language that can be named is incapable of nuanced expression, is incapable of expressing meaning, without newer language-technology? And you also suggest that the word bipolar is extreme?

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It's difficult to even imagine how anyone expressed logic to compute before Unicode! /s ;p ヅ

themodelplumber
That's a pretty vigorous, absolutist summary of something I never said.

There is some serious emotion here, have you been thinking about this for a week straight or what? :-)

And re bipolar, I don't think it's a stretch to say it's inappropriate or even rude to use the word bipolar in a critical context, I mean you know we have bipolar users here right? From previous memory...

(I'd guess you're not against change that's entertaining, novel, or what? This is a technology site last I checked...that's how this mindset works...)

1R
No offense intended. Sorry if my post or comment hurt you. Thanks for your comments.