I think it says something good about our community that whoever implemented this feature assumed people would be more likely to want to write mathematics than to discuss amounts of money.
However, I did consider whether to change the behavior of pressing ‘$’ and decided that people would probably use LaTeX more often than trying to use the dollar sign, and so was reasonably happy with that default behavior.
FWIW, I ran into the same issue with Arbital, and very quickly decided to change it to $$. Otherwise, any time you’re writing a post about money, it’s super inconvinient.
I actually had in mind the original author of the plugin, when I said whoever it was just didn’t consider it; but it’s interesting that you did think about it in this way!
It might be cool to survey current users of the site, to see what in fact are the relative prevalences of these two use cases. (Also there are lots of other similar questions I’d love to have the answers to.)
I think it says something good about our community that whoever implemented this feature assumed people would be more likely to want to write mathematics than to discuss amounts of money.
That is a nice thought, but it seems more likely that they just didn’t think of it…
(also, I don’t think that particular bit was custom-written for LW, though the dev team can correct me on that if I’m mistaken)
Nope, not custom-written. We are using this plugin: https://github.com/efloti/draft-js-mathjax-plugin
However, I did consider whether to change the behavior of pressing ‘$’ and decided that people would probably use LaTeX more often than trying to use the dollar sign, and so was reasonably happy with that default behavior.
FWIW, I ran into the same issue with Arbital, and very quickly decided to change it to $$. Otherwise, any time you’re writing a post about money, it’s super inconvinient.
Err… this seems like the kind of thing that *really* wouldn’t stand up to user testing.
Interesting!
I actually had in mind the original author of the plugin, when I said whoever it was just didn’t consider it; but it’s interesting that you did think about it in this way!
It might be cool to survey current users of the site, to see what in fact are the relative prevalences of these two use cases. (Also there are lots of other similar questions I’d love to have the answers to.)