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Comment by adverbly | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy it. Seems to measure vocabulary + problem-solving-specific-to-this-question.

I bet plenty of "uncreative" people could easily do well if you just told them to pick specific things from different topics(e.g. an obscure food, an obscure job, etc...), which is all I did and I scored in the top 1%. You don't have to be creative at all to do that. You only have to think of such a strategy, and then pick some obscure things.

Also, there seems to be some cultural bias - it wouldn't accept chow mein, but I bet pizza would have worked.

Also, the instructions seem silly - the more close to "technical" the terms were that I picked, the higher they seemed to score.

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I got 90th percentile by rhyming my way through - box, fox, socks, locks, rocks, etc.

But that, I would say, is a display of creativity. Instead of using mental associations between concepts to generate words, you deconstructed them into symbols and found associations through symbols that have little to no connection to the underlying word.

Well put. The cultural bias may be approximated by comparing results obtained from English-as-the-mother-language speakers to those produced by people with less and less command of the language.

They should really limit the test to the most common 10,000 words or something.

I tried in good faith to not select obscure words (knowing from previous experience how the exercise works), but then I ended up typing in autoclave anyway, starting to wonder if it was too obscure or not. In hindsight, it was. It would have been nice to get that feedback before I submitted.

The task states: “Only single words in English.”

Chow mein is not a single world, pizza is a single world.

Very interestring. I might be actually wrong here.

So I assumed the problem is not cultural bias, but a tokenizer which does not have the concept of open compound words. For example a naive implementation which is just splitting the strings into chunks of printable characters would be suspectible to this problem.

To test this I have tried it with various open compound words. My theory was that it will reject all of them. Turns out it is not the case!

The site rejected “sweet tooth”, “apple tree”, “chow mein”, “banana split”, “school bus”, “life jacket”, “mobile phone”, but curriously accepted “rain forest”. This means that it has the ability to sometimes recognise open compound words. Curiouser and curiouser!

rainforest is a single word. it probably removes all spaces before checking for words.

> chow mein

That's two words.

>> chow mein

> That's two words.

No, it is a single open compound word. You can check this by consulting a dictionary, which will list 'chow mein' as "a noun".

Just because it says "a noun" doesn't make it one word. That's like saying "brown pants" is one word. If you know Chinese you'd know it's two words, because mein means noodles and chow means fried (as opposed to lo, which means tossed).

> Just because it says "a noun" doesn't make it one word.

In fact, it literally does, because "a" refers to a single entity.

> That's like saying "brown pants" is one word.

No, it is not at all like saying "brown pants" because in order for a word to be an open compound word the modifying adjective has to create a new noun. For example, 'living room' is an open compound word, while "brown room" is not. If you have trouble differentiating between open compound words and just words with modifying adjectives, once again, consult a dictionary.

> If you know Chinese you'd know it's two words

We are discussing English. In English, chow mein is what is called an open compound word, which is when two words come together to form a new single word. There are open compound words, like chow mein, and closed compound words, like notebook. But in both cases, open compound and closed compound words are singular words.

Edit: and also, the site explicitly tells you to select "nouns". So your objection that chow mein is "two words" (it's not), is irrelevant.

I'm aware of what an open compound is, and I still say chow mein isn't one of them. Show me a dictionary that actually refers to it as such.

Furthermore since it's a borrow word, usually the "compoundness" comes with the borrow, and it's most definitely two words in Cantonese.

> the site explicitly tells you to select "nouns"

It says to select 10 nouns. It says "Only single words in English". It also doesn't allow "Living room", so as you say, your objection is irrelevant because it doesn't allow open compounds.

> Show me a dictionary that actually refers to it as such.

Here you go: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/chow-mein

Note how it is listed as "noun", not nouns.

Just like living room: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/living-room

Note that there is no entry for "brown pants". Do you understand why both living room and chow mein are listed, but brown pants isn't?

> and it's most definitely two words in English.

No, it is not. Again, consult a dictionary.

> It says to select 10 nouns.

Yes, and "chow mein" is a noun. That the site doesn't seem to allow open compounds, but allows highly technical wording (despite saying to not use technical wording) would seemingly be a bug.

Your condescension is not necessary, nor is it correct. But I don't feel like continuing to debate someone who is so rude.

He is not being rude by asking you to consult a reference text.

> Do you understand why both living room and chow mein are listed, but brown pants isn't?

I already told him I know what an open compound is. This is just rude.

I apologize if my tone came off as rude. I try to match the tenor of the person I am responding to. My question was also asked in good faith. If you understand what an open compound is, but don't consider chow mein to be an open compound and have earlier compared it to being the equivalent of 'brown pants', then how do you in your understanding reconcile chow mein being in a standard English dictionary, but not brown pants?

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