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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

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

This is actually useful. I didn’t know that generic “you” meant “one”. I always interpreted it as “you the reader” and felt desperate once a week when reading articles like these.

I love seeing helpful people create this moment :)

https://xkcd.com/1053/

As a native English speaker, I interpret it as “you the reader”. Or maybe I should say, I don’t intuit any material difference between “you the reader” and “any given reader” or “one”. I think your original comment is a good critique of the headline.

Doesn't have to be the reader, in general "you" would not know who it refers to specifically because it really mean anyone sharing the same experience. (see what I tried to do here?) One would probably have encountered those constructions while reading though ;). Never heard 'One' in colloquial English.

One could think that 'one' is a bit more like a general 'I' than a general 'you'

It is an abstraction: "you" immediately, but not just you specifically, hence any abstract "objected" person (even the first person taken reflectively as a mental instance).

Interesting. Are you a native English speaker? You in the general case is used quite a lot and I wouldn't be able to handle every single article or reference using that to mean to refer to me specifically.

But it does? It's generic, meaning you the reader are fully interchangeable with other possible subjects. At least that's the connotation it carries for me, and for what it's worth I'm a native speaker. If the reader (ie the target audience from the author's perspective) isn't interchangeable then I'd expect some other article to be used (ex they, the relevant professional, an interested party, etc).

I'm not sure it ever meant you the reader specifically, always have seen it meant to be generic or some hypothetical "one".

I'm not exactly disagreeing with that statement though. I'm claiming that it additionally carries the implication of the reader being a member of that set while alternative turns of phrase don't.

Where it gets tricky is that the reader might not be part of the audience intended by the writer.

Am not. Recently I started reading more classic literature and realized just how much my comprehension is lacking, even after working in English exclusively for years.

>This is actually useful. I didn’t know that generic “you” meant “one”. I always interpreted it as “you the reader” and felt desperate once a week when reading articles like these.

It does mean "you, the reader" or "you, any random reader from my intended audience" (e.g. fellow PhDs) in articles like these.

Using it to mean "one" is a different use, in more formal talk.

That said, the audience for this is still pretty niche.

(Even the audience for, say, 3b1b's explanation of what a transformer is, is niche.)

My guess is comment meant that in the context of the headline "you" normally would refer to the average Joe on the street; in this case, it means the average Joe who has a PhD in math, CS, or whatever. It all certainly went over my head and probably 95% (or slightly less than that given this is HN) of the people who clicked the link. But I would take the headline as a compliment that I don't deserve.

I read it as “it’s possible for (some)one”, not as “it’s possible for (every)one”.

They're asking what prerequisites would be needed to understand the article.

They seemed to be criticizing the use of “you” without qualification.

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