If someone determines my identity through textual stylometics, finds me, manages to get me to reveal how to get my bitcoin, and then kills me I won’t even be mad. Just impressed.
That's always why I have a good laugh when someone comes out claiming to be Satoshi when they end their sentences with only a single space after a period. If you wanted to come out as Bitcoin's creator, you'd have used 2 spaces...
I think that just shows the age of the person. I learned how to type correctly on a typewriter, and that is the way that we learned. It means, for me, that SN, like me, was educated in the 70's and 80's, and formally learned how to type.
I didn't learn how to type on a typewriter, but it was still considered proper formatting to use two spaces after a period when I went to school, and I used two spaces after a period for a really long time on the internet. I finally got out of the habit awhile back.
I got my first typewriter when i was nine, and started programming when i was 10 back in early 80's. But i didn't formally learn how to type until i had a school subject for it when i was 15. It was the best thing i could possibly have done. By the end of the course i could type error free at 65 words a minute. Now i can type faster than i can speak. I can't recommend it enough.
It's so ingrained for me I probably won't ever stop. Unless I'm on a phone that does automatic spacing. The fact that you stopped to me indicates you probably didn't do it that way for 20 years.
The anecdote I heard was that the extra space made it more clear when sentences were ending based on how the fixed-width typeface would read. With proportional fonts the spacing is already clear enough with 1 space, and that has become the conventional thing. So adding the extra space creates too much space now. It certainly sends a signal to me that the person has absorbed a “rule”, but not its purpose, which I think doesn’t reflect well on that person. But on the whole that’s a minor side note and I try to not go overboard interpreting details like that.
> With proportional fonts the spacing is already clear enough with 1 space.
That's your opinion, and a bizarre one at that, since one-space isn't any more clear in a proportional font than a non-proportional font. Proportional fonts help pack letters within a word, not pack words within/between sentences.
> It certainly sends a signal to me that the person has absorbed a “rule”, but not its purpose,
It sends a signal to me that a person looks for bizarre ways to feel superior to others, instead of trying to understand why someone behaves differently.
> Proportional fonts help pack letters within a word, not pack words within/between sentences.
I was probably wrong to try and fuzzily remember an anecdote rather than look it up :) but my understanding was that in a proportional font the combination of a period and space was good enough to show the end of the sentence clearly for whatever reason.
> It sends a signal to me that a person looks for bizarre ways to feel superior to others, instead of trying to understand why someone behaves differently.
This is fair. Though I promise I don’t feel superior to pretty much anybody if that helps. Learning about this actually came from wondering why some people used two spaces after sentences, not starting out judgmental. I think I was mainly thinking of formal contexts where you would already be judging somebody's choices (resume, professional portfolio, publications) more so than just random language use in comments or whatever. But I didn't put my finger on that last night!
I had this uneasiness writing my own comment and reading your comment, and did some actual reading this morning, and this turns out to be one of those things where the story I absorbed about it was too simple. There seems to be ongoing debate about this just like everything else, and even though most publishers and editors prefer 1 space after a sentence. I had though I heard that spaces after periods actually render a little wider anyway but that seems to be wrong?
I knew I worded my comment kind of badly and probably shouldn’t have made it in the first place. But at lest posting it helped me get corrected on my assumptions.
Wider sentence spacing certainly predates the typewriter, but the question then was not "how many spaces" but "how much space".
Someone writing by hand obviously does not count a discrete number of spaces, and a cold-metal typesetter has a wide variety of spaces available: they might use a one-and-a-half-en space (either a single piece of type or an en space followed by a half-en space) or an em space.
It must have been the introduction of the typewriter that brought the idea of "two spaces" instead of "wider space".
I wonder if that gets changed by the site or something. I remember thinking "I better be sure to use two spaces otherwise someone will call me out on it."
Here's a test. I definitely put two spaces prior to this sentence.
EDIT - indeed it seems that HN changes the spacing.
Curious, what are the reasons to prefer one-space-after-period over two? Regardless of old or new medium, proportional or monospaced font, I find it more legible when there's more space between sentences. Sometimes periods find themselves within a sentence (especially in technical writing), so ideally that would have a different markup I guess.
HTML frustrates me; I don't know why it defaults to collapsing spaces, when so often my spaces are intentionally semantic.
The reduction of whitespace in HTML is there to allow you to split text as desired in the source file without adding unintentional newlines/tabs/whatever -- it all just gets collapsed to a single space. (Outside of pre-styled tags at least)
I learned on a typewriter (early 90's), and when I moved to a computer (I was poor and really didn't have access to one growing up) I initially used double spaces after the period, but at some point I switched.
That would help for sure, but it need not be assumed. There are other collections of text besides the public internet. Some of which are only accessible by certain entities and certain of their employees, to be sure, but still extant. Email, for example.
Note I’m not implying the person has done anything wrong... on the contrary. But someone with a large quantity of BTC has reasons to be wary of rogue actors.
What's the play here? Let's assume the NSA or CIA has archives of everyones emails. Would the IRS troll that to try to find out who has all this money so they can properly tax it?
