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by tipjoy 6262 days ago
Dear author: Please stop misusing 'less'. It should be _fewer_ disks, _fewer_ books. Fewer is for discrete things, less is for continuous. As in: fewer dollars, less money. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer/less
1 comments

I would appreciate if 'dear author' proofreading-comments were actually directed at the author, rather than appearing here. Especially if, as here, the author is not an HN regular and the article already has its own comment thread, and the recommended correction has already appeared in those comments.

I'm OK with polite corrections that address writing that canonically lives here -- especially when it can result in a quick correction to the original headline/comment. (Even so, I would love to see software support for friendly proofreading comments that don't clutter the main thread -- for example visible only to the author, or appearing in a separate 'meta' view, or which expire when the revision-window of the target expires. Then we can get the benefit of many-eyes-improved writing without lingering proofreading noise.)