Hacker News Reader

Comment by rany_ | Hacker News Reader

Why is "expert" in quotes? Aren't 11 zerodays impressive?

It's in quotes because it's a quote from Maddie Stone as opposed to a judgement made by the author.

Totally off topic, but I'm often tripped up by these multiple uses of quotes like this. Why do we use the same symbols out of a huge space for both quoting and sarcasm ?

There are separate symbols for sarcasm, but in "serious" writing emoji aren't considered appropriate. And sites/software likes to restrict them, like e.g. HN, which is why the sarcasm above is marked by quotes instead of the appropriate emoji. Some earlier internet cultures used :> But I fear that is understood less widely nowadays.

On Reddit people sometimes put /s at the end of a sentence to indicate sarcasm.

And then there is also the irony punctuation which looks like this: ⸮

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

But I have never seen anyone actually ever use it. In fact I only ever heard about it so rarely that I almost miswrote and was about to say that interrobang is sometimes used for indicating sarcasm. But when I looked it up I read that interrobang is for showing surprise of course!

As for your :> there was a guy that used to use it on an IRC channel that I was on. But I never understood quite what he meant by that kind of smiley. And later I looked it up and in his case I think the description I saw on Urban Dictionary fit pretty well, which said it was like a mischievous or devious smile. And I guess that also fits good for when you are sarcastic. Ever since I read that definition of :> it makes me think of this cartoon grinch smile https://meme.fandom.com/wiki/The_Grinch_Smile

BBC articles tend to use it a lot, it's probably part of their style guide. I snicker quietly at each title that "is worded" like "this", imagining a Dr. Evil air quoting each segment dutifully.

Not a linguist or anything, but I'd say there's really just two categories: direct quotes (usually with a source), and then scare quotes which are used to communicate that you don't endorse the usage of the contained word(s).

Sarcasm should be put in single quotes.

It looks like the chain here was 'visit some site via browser' -> 'kernel exploit' on ios, windows and android.

I'd call whoever is responsible for such a valuable amount of 0days expert/nation state level for sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com