Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwsteigerwalt | Hacker News Reader

“Would” is not an appropriate word to use in a headline like this. “Will” or “may” are much more appropriate.

I’m not sure if OP is Indian but in Indian English this is a pretty standard way of using the conditional tense in that variety of English [1]. It has led to misunderstanding and miscommunication on my part, so I’m not surprised to see such confusion here

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222166/which-dia...

The OP is Indian.

https://twitter.com/koolhead17

I thought that this was an Americanism (as I tend to assume that all weird misuse of English is) - thanks for teaching me something new :)

Right. Had me thinking "they would ... if what?"

It implies a conditional.

Edit: I see OP got this from the phrasing in the article "[Accenture] said on Thursday it would cut about 2.5% of its workforce..." . Not valid without the "they said."

At least in spanish media there’s a trend where lots of news are now titled in conditional to try to save face for the fact that the reporter has not done proper fact-checking so they can push the news quicker. And grammatically, it’s the better way, there’s an implied conditional. It also helps avoid clickbait ;)

Allegedly, an anonymous source was reported to have claimed.

The current headline of the linked article is Accenture cuts jobs, trims forecasts on worries of lower IT spending. I'm not sure if the headline had changed since OP posted it, but if so, there was no need to change it (I doubt Reuters would run with such a poor headline).

Personally I would use "to" instead

They have a Time Machine. It's in the past!

Well English is not easy for foreigners. I guess that’s true with any language if you aren’t a native speaker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com