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Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”
401 points by striking on Jan 21, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 112 comments
(TL;DR: http://i.imgur.com/LuPHqiN.png)

While digging around in drawers that hadn't been touched for decades, I found a wonderful piece of history. The Palm Treo 600 [1] was the Mercedes-Benz of the cellphone 10 years ago, and I was lucky enough to rediscover one.[2]

So I decided to restore it to working order, slapping in a T-Mobile SIM[3] and a fresh battery. It worked! It could browse the Internet[4], send/receive text messages[5], make phone calls...[6] The onboard browser even passed Acid1[7,8] and could do some level of JavaScript![9]

Unfortunately, most websites were a little heavy on this poor thing's CPU. One site that I knew wasn't heavy was Hacker News!

Unfortunately again, it didn't work. It "didn't work" in an odd way, though: it raised a "Communication Error" that would never occur on other pages, just Hacker News. So I did what any inquisitive individual would do: record a video, and ask HN support!

This is what I sent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqn-EmU5KPw

This is what they got back to me with: http://i.imgur.com/LuPHqiN.png

I am truly honored to accept this award. I'd like to thank Palm, for making such an incredible phone (10 days of battery life!), as well as the Academy. And also my parents. And you, dear reader. Thank you so much!

PS: kogir :)

PPS: I've always wanted to do some teardowns of old device UIs and see what our mobile device forefathers thought up. I have a couple of really cool archeological finds that I could share.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_600 (gallery of 2-6,8-9 here: http://imgur.com/a/Gu70R) [2]:http://i.imgur.com/xVdpUST.jpg [3]:http://i.imgur.com/2Yy8fkM.jpg [4]:http://i.imgur.com/nZ7GwC1.jpg [5]:http://i.imgur.com/OJuZmh3.jpg [6]:http://i.imgur.com/z9mNkHt.jpg [7]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid1 [8]:http://i.imgur.com/9VKcxlY.jpg [9]:http://i.imgur.com/5KeI9TI.jpg



> TL;DR http://i.imgur.com/LuPHqiN.png

> This is what I sent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqn-EmU5KPw

> This is what they got back to me with: http://i.imgur.com/LuPHqiN.png

> [1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_600 (gallery of 2-6,8-9 here: http://imgur.com/a/Gu70R) [2]:http://i.imgur.com/xVdpUST.jpg [3]:http://i.imgur.com/2Yy8fkM.jpg [4]:http://i.imgur.com/nZ7GwC1.jpg [5]:http://i.imgur.com/OJuZmh3.jpg [6]:http://i.imgur.com/z9mNkHt.jpg [7]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid1 [8]:http://i.imgur.com/9VKcxlY.jpg [9]:http://i.imgur.com/5KeI9TI.jpg

  (links as comment so clickable)


If only I had scrolled a bit first, I could have saved myself minutes. Thank you, and my support request is: please start auto-linking safe urls.


My browser does stuff like that for me. :)


From a Treo :) ?


Safari?


Safari doesn't do that out of the box. Something with an extension?


Actually, in safari, you can double-click on a link to highlight it, and the right-click menu has options "Go To Address" and "Go To Address in new tab". Quite useful.


You can usually do this in Firefox too, although just double-clicking doesn't work in this case because it selects the [1] at the beginning as well.


My chrome extension for sorting posts based on points also auto-links comments and posts https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-sorter...


I suspect this device can't do TLS. Blame POODLE for killing SSLv3:

* https://blog.cloudflare.com/sslv3-support-disabled-by-defaul...

Also RC4 is about to die:

* https://blog.cloudflare.com/killing-rc4-the-long-goodbye/

* https://blog.cloudflare.com/killing-rc4/

* https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-web-is-world-wide-or-who-sti...


My gut says that they've disabled SSL v2/v3, and that the device does not support TLS.


I'd love to see the results from visiting the Qualys SSL Client Test: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/viewMyClient.html

I imagine the issue is that we only support TLS 1.0+ and not SSLv2 or SSLv3. https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=news.ycombina...


I just tried it using IE6 with TLS 1.0 disabled and it does not load at all. If you watch the video carefully you will see the certificate errors that comes from the device having such an old certificate store too (in the case of google.com they now use GeoTrust with a cross certificate to Equifax). And I doubt the device support SHA256 certificates either. The device might not support the 3DES cipher suite either (as it was relatively slow compared to RC4) and many sites have disabled RC4.


Same happened to me trying to use Safari Books Online on my Kindle browser (as the only official way yo access their content on an eInk display). They dropped SSLv3, and in doing so the old 'experimental' Kindle browser can no longer access it.


Security Theater Everywhere strikes again. Unless you're logged in and entering data, Hacker News does not need SSL.


In addition to thwarting state-sponsored attacks mentioned by geofft, HTTPS also prevents ISPs and hotels from injecting ads[1,2]. And using HTTPS even for logged-out users prevents an attacker from sslstripping[3] the link to the login page, which is good because even the most careful users won't always notice when a login page is suddenly served over an insecure connection.

As a user of HN, I appreciate these security features. Suggesting that HN should not use HTTPS so that someone can access it from a 10 year old device that's impractical for modern web browsing anyways is possibly the weakest argument you can make against HTTPS.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/how-a-banner-ad-f...

[2] http://justinsomnia.org/2012/04/hotel-wifi-javascript-inject...

[3] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/


T-Mobile opted me in to a content filter by default. To remove it, last I saw I needed to give them my SSN (!!!). So, I live with the idiot filter, which actually scans for keywords in websites and blocks them. SSL obviously makes this sort of filtering useless, which is very useful.


Wow. This is in the US, I assume ("SSN")? I've never heard of this happening with a US carrier.


Yeah, social security number.

It's basically a private key we're all assigned at birth that can't be rotated. It was originally meant to be used in the state-sponsored welfare program "social security", but tons of businesses require it as a unique identifier.

Absolute stupidity on all fronts.


I'm pretty certain you can ask them for a random number instead, as only the government is allowed (last I recall) to __require__ an SSN. I know my doctors can ask for it, but are required to accept an alternative if I don't wish to provide the SSN.

For example:

http://www.identityhawk.com/Who-Can-Lawfully-Request-My-Soci...

Sadly, it's too late in the day for me to try to parse this: http://www.justice.gov/opcl/social-security-number-usage


Why not give them your SSN? Do you have any lines of credit?


Happened to me as well when I was visiting the US. My answer would be: because as a non-resident I didn't have one. But then again I'm not OP.


This doesn't completely stop sslstripping. It does mitigate the possibility of link rewriting. However, unless you directly access the site via HTTPS, there would have to be a redirect to the secure version, which can still be hijacked.


True, but HSTS (which HN uses) solves that problem on all but the first visit.


Indeed. But not on the Treo ;)


Instead of continuing the trend of downvoting you:

Without SSL, you can't be sure of the integrity of the data set by the site. It's important even when not exchanging private data.


So I should take it that you're OK with every country's intelligence agency modifying links on HN for their citizens, redirecting crypto downloads to trojaned pages for specific users, suppressing links that are overly critical of the government, right?


Are you sure that the agencies you speak of are not able to do this anyway? Even the Hong Kong Post Office has a place among the trusted CA's supplied by most vendors: not really necessary for everyone on the planet, I'd think. If even just one of those trusted CAs would or has become compromised, all bets are off. Which has already happened in the past anyway.

So, how you defend "SSL everywhere".. I don't buy it. I feel more for what the commenter you responded to said, because your counter argument comes with a lot of assumptions that have more problematic implications. A false sense of being secure does seem much worse than knowing that most of the stuff you do is actually insecure to begin with.

Plain text is not a bug. It's a feature! Cheesy, I know.


> A false sense of being secure does seem much worse than knowing that most of the stuff you do is actually insecure to begin with.

It may feel so, but it certainly isn't. Some security (against anyone but the top 0.X% of "bad guys") is certainly better than no security (random script kiddie in your coffee shop injecting 0-days from exploit-db straight to your browser).

And regarding the hopelessness of SSL/TLS - the CA problem exists and is pretty huge. But we know the solution[1]: it's called certificate pinning. When you control clients (Google/Chrom[e/ium]) can just pin your own certs/CA and refuse anything signed by the Hong Kong office. For the rest of us that don't, there's HSTS (to tell the browser to refuse http:// redirects from a MiTM, overriding TLS altogether) and Public Key Pinning Extension (HPKP). They aren't very widely rolled out, but we're getting there. Test your browser here[2], you may be surprised. This all assumes that the user won't ignore the warnings when they come up, of course. Also it would protect you from your second visit onwards - if you're being MiTM'ed at your first attempt to grab a site with all the above bells and whistles, your browser doesn't know about the pinned stuff yet, so it is vulnerable to SSL stripping, etc.

In short, it's certainly better than nothing (protecting you from 99%+ of bad guys) and we're slowly fixing it[3]. Don't let the man get you down.

[1] Until we get to a proper, more distributed solution

[2] https://projects.dm.id.lv/Public-Key-Pins_test

[3] Shamefully slowly - TACK was proposed so long ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010711


Alright, useful to consider. Thanks.


Protection against changes should be done with subresource integrity hashes (http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/). With HTTPS, an observer still knows who you're talking to, and since they can see how big the request and reply are, they can probably guess what you're looking at.


SRI does not replace HTTPS.

You say they can guess what you're looking at with HTTPS.. well if you use SRI without HTTPS, then they don't need to guess.. they absolutely know what you're looking at.

Also, if they can change the page (which they can if it's over http), they can change the hash as well.

Also, SRI is like 9 months old since the first draft... which means it does nothing for the visitor unless they are using the newest version of one of the major browsers.


Why would SRI protect against a MITM, who can simply change the embedded hashes? (not to mention that there's plenty of non-"resource" content that would not be hashed in the first place, yet an attacker might want to change)

Unless my understanding of SRI is totally wrong, it is to protect against malicious changes to third-party resources, usually by the hosts of those resources (or someone attacking them) or a poisoned cache thereof, not to guard against MITM.


No. Subresource Integrity Hashing allows an HTTPS site to use the trusted channel that TLS provides to verify the content of external resources it includes, even if those external resources are delivered over HTTP. There still has to be an HTTPS site to provide a root of trust.

For example, example.com (delivered over HTTPS) could use jquery, and include in the page it delivers to you both the URL and a hash of the jquery scripts; you could then fetch those scripts over untrusted channels or from untrusted servers, and be sure that they are the ones that the administrators of example.com intended to reference. If example.com were not using HTTPS at all, then they could just be the resources that the Man In The Middle of your channel to example.com intended you to see.


I totally agree (although you need more than SRI, since you also need some way of signing the original content, but I'd love to see a full spec for this sort of thing). However, SSL is what we have right now that works.

And I think, of the browsers that do support SRI (possibly in prerelease versions or behind feature flags), they require the page to be delivered over SSL anyway.


HTTPS is broken by content delivery networks who terminate SSL connections. HTTPS Everywhere makes the problem worse, by increasing load for static pages and breaking caches, forcing sites to use a content delivery network.

Take a look at that HTTPS certificate that you think means you're talking to the site of your choice. If it says "cloudflare.com", "incapsula.com", "edgecastcdn.com", "palmwebservices.com", "cdnetworks.net", there is a man in the middle of your HTTPS connection. This is the case for at least 38,000 sites we know about. There are probably more. (The list: http://john-nagle.github.io/certscan/whoamitalkingto04.pdf)

HTTPS Everywhere was well-intentioned, but the people behind it didn't realize that high-volume use of HTTPS forced less secure use of HTTPS. That's why it's a form of security theater.


HTTPS Everywhere was well-intentioned, but the people behind it didn't realize that high-volume use of HTTPS forced less secure use of HTTPS. That's why it's a form of security theater.

I still trust the link between CloudFlare and Hacker News more than I trust the link between a dodgy ISP and Hacker News. Further, there's no reason that a CDN can't use SSL to the backend, so in that case the only weak point is the CDN and the original site, not any of the links.

Using HTTPS to a CDN is still far better than using HTTP to a CDN or to the original site.


HTTPS does not break caches; that's FUD. Browsers can cache HTTPS pages just fine, and do by default unless told not to.

Nothing forces sites to use a CDN. HTTPS, by itself, does not massively increase load. If the limiting factor of your web server is how fast you can do cryptographic operations for HTTPS, you're doing rather well; most of the time that won't be your limiting factor.

Using a CDN is not wildly less secure than using a hosting service, and numerous sites use hosting services. "Secure to the CDN" is still a net improvement over "completely insecure".

By all means, complain about sites using a CDN that you don't trust. That's not an argument against universal adoption of HTTPS, though.


  HTTPS does not break caches; that's FUD. Browsers can cache 
  HTTPS pages just fine
Yes, but caching by intermediaries is a very important part of HTTP caching, and HTTPS effectively breaks that, does it not?


> Yes, but caching by intermediaries is a very important part of HTTP caching

Proxies are not a common setup; approximately zero home users use them, and a subset of corporate networks do (only the obnoxious ones).

In any case, caching proxies are far less important than caching browsers, and HTTPS does not in any way break caching browsers.


You seem to be extremely confused about how HTTPS works. If the site I'm visiting chooses to give a certificate to cloudflare for their service, that is their choice. What they choose to do server side is completely out of a customer's hands no matter how secure the protocol.

Even with CDN terminating SSL, it protects you from injected malware and ADs between you and the CDN by your ISP.


I agree with all this. However, HTTPS works today at least somewhat, and nothing else does, at all.

If you want to work on a spec to make cacheable, signed hypertext documents, I will be totally down for helping. But no such spec exists today.


See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910637.

Subresource integrity can protect against changes done on the server, while TLS can protect against changes done by a man-in-the-middle. They protect against different things, and do not significantly overlap.


If you were looking for MITM targets likely to have access to many interesting things, HN would be high on the lists of sites to intercept.


> Unless you're logged in and entering data, Hacker News does not need SSL

What about if you're in a country that likes to censor the news?


Why not create a non-SSL virtualhost? http://plain.news.ycombinator.com or similar.


Or just have each protocol do what it's supposed to, rather than redirecting one to another? In general, aren't advanced users supposed to like having the option to make their own decisions?


Yeah. How many users (not power users) actually type https:// into address bar? To my knowledge, if you don't include the protocol, browser default to HTTP.


Not on Hacker News (and many other sites) with a modern browser. The first time you visit http://news.ycombinator.com, it will redirect to https://, and you're correct, if the first time you visit happens to be the time you are MITM'd, this is a weak point.

However, after the first visit, your browser learns through HSTS (the Strict-Transport-Security header) that accessing news.ycombinator.com without TLS is not supported, and won't attempt to access it again except via TLS. (For a year, in HN's case - this is configurable by the site administrator.)


Point is that your grandparent comment was suggesting that visiting http://news.ycombinator.com should not redirect to HTTPS.


The "security theater" comment probably got you downvoted because it seems like an insult against HN, when it's probably more of a general reflection that not all sites need HTTPS, which is a fact (some need to not have encryption, both legally and for functional reasons).


Firesheep would allow some guy at your coffee shop or conference to steal your user account. SSL would stop them.


If you only encrypt what's important, you're doing your "enemies" half of their work :)


I used a Palm treo up until about 3 years ago, and used to browse HN quite often. My treo was modified and upgraded I should say :) beleive it or not, some poor soul actually stole it, probably not knowing it would be worth more on ebay as an obscure item than at a pawn shop.


Yeah, fellow former Treo user here. I loved that thing.

When people talk about how Steve Jobs invented the smartphone, I used to say, "but but but..." Now, though, I just sigh and nod like I'm still listening to them.


I hoped Nokia E6 would come close to the Palm Treo. The shape is about the same but slimmed down and without the antenna. And hardware is good. But the software is somehow disappointing (I expected more from a descendant of Psion). If I recall, the to-do lists on Palm were so much nicer, for instance.


Perhaps build your own web proxy which strips images, CSS and JS for a better web experience. Someone did that a year ago for his Macintosh Plus: http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-old-c...


I had this same phone, in the post iPhone era we tend to forget that smartphones did exist and some of them were actually pretty fantastic devices. From the 600 I upgraded to the 700w and that was probably my favorite phone of all time.


Totally agree, i sometimes reminisce about the good ol' days with my Nokia N70 i bought in 2005. Here's some memorable achievements:

- I watched most of the world cup 2006 games live streamed over 3G. -I used to frequently use google maps which without GPS would use cell towers triangulate my position within a couple hundred meter radius. - Used it as a wireless AP -And even uploaded videos to youtube.

When i first heard of the iPhone i wasn't that impressed as i already been using what i considered a smartphone. Obviously i that's all changed now! ;)


I remember at the time being a bit nerd-irritated over the iPhone release. At first I was thrilled because I'd fallen in love with smart phones starting with the early Treos and into the HTC PocketPCs. The one thing they always got wrong was poor graphics drivers/acceleration so even though they did so many things, it was like using a Windows PC with the generic VGA drivers (laggy scrolling, etc).

iPhone really fixed that one thing but at the time I was outraged (outraged!) that to get that smooth UI performance I'd have to give up 3rd party apps, 3G, MMS, GPS, (shitty by today's standards) video calling, copy/paste, task switching, and even the ability to change my wallpaper or ringtone!

Kind of amusing today with the relative parity between mobile OSes and the abundance of models to choose from but at the time I just remember being so frustrated with how no single company seemed capable of putting everything into one device. Still, those Treos and PPCs laid the groundwork for the insanely capable and useable devices many of us carry in our pockets today.


i also had a treo 6xx (then upgraded to 7xx) and it was the first device that i could actually do work on the road with (email, basic web, ssh, phone).

i remember it had outlook integration which was especially awesome because my employer at the time used outlook and i was able to leave my work-from-home post during the day to have lunch or drinks with friends in san francisco and not be out of touch.

even though this was barely ten years ago, now i feel really old.


While I never did own a Treo, I did have a Sony Ericsson P900, which came out about 2-3 years before the iPhone I believe. My friends thought I was crazy for buying such an expensive phone, but I was happy with it for so long that I kept it for about 5 years. Lots of flagship phones made years later still didn't match the features of that phone. I still have it, so maybe I'll try booting it up as well.

I think my experience with that phone is the reason I'm in love with the Samsung Galaxy Note series now.


This is the first thing I'd look at to make this work:

  telnet news.ycombinator.com 80
  Trying 198.41.190.47...
  Connected to news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.
  Escape character is '^]'.
  GET / HTTP/1.0
  Host: news.ycombinator.com

  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 03:19:43 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Connection: close
  Set-Cookie: __cfduid=d2949a43e20a9ea8923fe50222805b7621421810383;
      expires=Thu, 21-Jan-16 03:19:43 GMT; path=/; 
      domain=.ycombinator.com; HttpOnly
  Location: https://news.ycombinator.com/
  Server: cloudflare-nginx
  CF-RAY: 1ac05f0dbbeb0743-AMS
<html>

<head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head>

<body bgcolor="white">

<center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center>

<hr><center>nginx</center>

</body>

</html> Connection closed by foreign host.

Maybe you could set up a https->http proxy and access that to see if that solves your problem?


My palm Treos are still the most productive devices I've ever owned. Android is starting to get close but that keyboard and shortcut keys to go directly into an app on the Treo has been unrivalled.

Hoping with the sale of the Palm Trademark, and WebOS being free, which is a generation ahead of all mobile operating systems, before the javascript app craze came up, might, in some way, come to lead and inspire the way again.


I was recently looking for a sliding qwerty keyboard phone and to my dismay I realised that while we weren't looking, the NSA took them all away!

In my quest I found a phone database where you can search by features (I forget which one right now) and sorted through all possible candidates. My hopes went up momentarily when I saw the Dell Venue Pro[1] before I clicked "next" and saw how wrong they got it[2].

Eventually I sumbled on the Motorola Photon Q[3] - which I'm not even supposed to have, as it doesn't come with a SIM slot at all. Luckily some enterprising Korean guys have figured out the modding process and are selling them on ebay. I tried my luck and received it a few days ago. Really good value for money, loving the sliding action and physical keys but wish it were a bit more powerful. I think I've compensated for this mostly by cutting out a lot of fat and its puny dual core CPU now runs 4.4 fairly comfortably. I'll probably go back to my Nexus 5 soon but it's a great backup phone and I love the keyboard.

I'm half convinced that a custom N4/5 backplate with a built-in keyboard would sell like crazy. #kickstarterideas

TL;DR: Look at Moto Photon Q.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Dell_Venu...

[2] http://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/dell_ven... I literally burst out laughing as soon as I saw this. Bless you, Dell. (also: windows)

[3] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Motorola_...


This looks pretty sweet. THe treo I was speaking about was a little earlier than that and didn't have a sliding keyboard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_650

I'm pretty used to the swiftkey touch keyboard now, but the one feature that the Treo destroyed any phone that I ever used was the ability to press function and calendar on a keyboard and the app would move right into creating a new item on your calendar or to-do list.


Can it run Cyanogen?

The Blackberry Passport is one of the few modern keyboard phones, it uses Amazon's appstore for Android apps.


Yes, and CGM 11 (KitKat) as well.

The CGM wiki isn't entirely clear on this - there's a specific build for the Q which is somewhat outdated [1] so you should use this [2] [3].

Be aware that you'll need to tweak it a bit to make it super-responsive with 4.4 - at least for me, the N5 has really spoiled me (...especially after I went back to 4.4)

> The Blackberry Passport is one of the few modern keyboard phones, it uses Amazon's appstore for Android apps.

The passport is cute, but I didn't consider non-Androids (I'm a flasher:) and I wanted something in the "second/backup-phone" price range. The keyboard would likely be nicer than the Q's though.

[1] http://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=xt897

[2] http://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=moto_msm8960_jbbl&ty...

[3] http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Moto_msm8960_Info (get the _jbbl or it won't flash)


Cool, thanks for the pointers.


Out of curiosity, have you tried viewing a static page with the same content as HN, and checking whether it has that error?

Very interesting, and congratulations on your award!


Speaking of HN support emails, we emailed Daniel at 4:10PM a few days ago and got a reply at 4:12PM. Send a follow up email and another reply 6 minutes later. Brilliant.


That is very impressive. Almost as fast, or maybe even faster than me answering on IRC!


Funny, but this post doesn't follow Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Should be a "Tell HN" instead.


I had a similar issue when I broke out my iBook from 2000ish. It seems like the root certificate authorities had changed, or the certificates sent by websites weren't able to be resolved. Whether that was the changes to SSL/TLS, or the root authorities, I didn't get into :P


If you are using Classic Mac OS, Classilla has the most up-to-date SSL/TLS support (with both SHA2 certificate and SNI support!)


Thanks for the heads up! I was actually running a very old copy of Linux on the system, running a system update actually solved it :)


In my drawers, I still have all of my Handspring/Palm "smartphones", I used almost all their PalmOS lineup during the naughties:

* Handspring Visor+Visorphone (2002): huge!

* Handspring Treo 270 : broken lid

* Handspring Treo 600 : working, but broken screen

* Palm Treo 650 : working

* Palm Pré : still working, but broken USB connector


This one showed up early in the morning and executives were scurrying to find out what happened:

Subject: XXXX Case #XXXXXX : Priority changed to Customer Down Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 03:17:47 -0700 From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

To: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

CC: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

* Case Priority change * Case Priority has recently been changed to: Customer Down

Case Details:: Case #: XXXXXXXX Company: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Contact Name: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Status: New Category: Support System - Support Accounts

Subject: My name is spelled XXXXXXXX

Apparently, the customer could not function if their name was spelled wrong...


I don't think it's possible for something to be the 'most unique'.


I used to be similarly pedantic with English. But a few years ago I converted to descriptivism[0], and I've been much happier ever since. :)

[0] http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/prescriptivism-and-d...


Not in a single metric. But you can formalize what is meant: there are many metrics in which something can be unique. Something is deemed the 'most unique' when it is unique in so many metrics that the utterer estimates no thing is likely to be unique in more metrics. Even mathematicians use sloppy language.


Ha! this is great! Congratulations on your award ;)


Still using my Palm Pilot daily :)


Have u tried with NetFront


Uniqueness is absolute, so the support email is either unique or not. There are no degrees of uniqueness for something to be more unique than another thing. Sorry, but this grammar mistake is a big pet peeve.


Now if we ever issue this award again we will be obliged to repeat the mistake forever. :)

Had I thought about it I probably would have written "most unusual". Still, I'm not sure the pedant's case holds up on this one. Two things may differ from everything else to varying degrees; both are unique, but the one that stands apart more is arguably more so. Even among the unique support requests of 2014, Rob's email stood apart the most by a long shot.


Take the following definition of unique - being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else.

So if something is 'more unique' than something else, it doesn't really fit the first part of the definition because they are both only one of a kind, but it fits with the second in that it is more unlike anything else than the other thing.


I'd argue that definition is incorrect.

To be unique, all something needs is to have a collection of properties which (taken together) are possessed by no other instance within some larger population.

Even then, it's still quite possible to have multiple unique objects within a set.

This quality of "uniqueness" can then be ranked, based on how many of those unique properties (or subsets of them) are sufficient to still make the item unique.

E.g. blue sphere among blue cubes is less unique than a red sphere among blue cubes.

So yes, "more unique" is perfectly reasonable IMHO :P


I would urge you to, like I realised I had to a few years ago, get over it. Language is not defined by a dictionary or by history; roots and origins are truly meaningless. A word is defined by its usage; it’s one of the delightful things in the world for which it can be said that if enough people say something is true, it becomes true.

Uniqueness may once have been a boolean property (I cannot say for certain one way or another), but at present it is not.


Should we accept incorrect usage of language that is more confusing than the correct usage? For instance, using "begs the question" instead of "raises the question". It causes a lot of confusion because people cannot even agree what the misusage of "begs the question" means and it is never a better choice of words than "raises the question" if that is what someone means.


I am with Stephen Fry on this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY

Language evolves over time, and I am no more confused by someone (mis)using "begs the question" than I am by someone using the modern definition of decimate.


The point is that "correct usage" is not defined by logicians or etymologists or any kind of authority, but by society as a whole, and therefore has no one exact definition. Look up "literally" in any recent dictionary for proof.


And the misuse of 'literally' as a generic intensifier isn't even recent. It dates back[0] to the late 1600s.

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the...


Rarely are we in a position to "accept" or "deny" changes in language. They just happen, with or without our consent. All we can do is try to keep up and make some sense of the current state.


My dictionary lists two definitions for "unique." One is "being the only one of its kind" and is thus a binary property as you say, but the other is merely "particularly remarkable, special, or unusual," which is perfectly amenable to modifiers like this.


"unique" comes directly from the Latin "unus", one. The modernist, American wishy-washy uses of the word to mean "unusual" are a sad travesty of thinking. One should simply use the word "unusual" if that's what one means to say.


If you think words gaining new and changing meanings is "a sad travesty", then I think you are a nice person -- and I don't mean in the modern sense of the word.


The problem isn't gaining meanings; it's losing them. If unique becomes a synonym for unusual, then we no longer have a word that means unique.

I think these battles are worth fighting. As does Weird Al: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGWiTvYZR_w


I don't know why Weird Al thought that was necessary, but this supposed less vs fewer "rule" does not describe actual modern or historical usage. Self-appointed grammarians can choose to stick to whatever usage they like, but going around with stickers and marker pens only makes them look like pedantic bores.


Huh. So now you're against new meanings?


No. I'm saying it's fine for people to stick to the usage they prefer, which may organically bring about a change, but there's no need to be critical of other people for using what is a commonly understood usage.


Well in that case, you're wrong. There is a need, and it's to have words for meanings. Language is a commons, and we all get to discuss how it's used.


"commonly understood usage"

That means they do have meaning. I'm sorry if you had trouble understanding the meaning of the words in the post. I think everyone else got it, though.


You misread what I wrote. I'm not talking about words having meanings. I'm talking about having words for meanings.


From looking at the origins, it seems to me that pretty much the same objection could be leveled at your use of the word "one" as a pronoun instead of a number.


touché


"Say" comes from PIE, meaning to utter - in other words, to speak out loud - not to write, or to type. One should simply use the word "type" if that's what one means to say...


What a pathetic [1] argument!

[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pathetic


Language changes all the time. Everyone knew what was intended to be communicated. I don't really see what the problem is, it's not like there's some platonic ideal of the English language to be violated.


In practical, non-platonic terms the new meaning (remarkable like a few others) is incompatible with the old (unlike any other).


That's only sorta true.


You must be a blast at parties.




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