Hacker News: BellsOnSunday

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases"

BellsOnSunday — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:17:36 +0000

Apart from the bit about killing people, for the most part.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years"

BellsOnSunday — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 22:02:14 +0000

Who says that's the advice "in England"? I'm in England and it isn't my advice.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking"

BellsOnSunday — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:07:42 +0000

Recently like in the last hundred years?

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking"

BellsOnSunday — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 23:57:29 +0000

More likely but not certain. People who rely on this rhetorically tend to ignore it isn't a slam dunk.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Leaving Haskell behind"

BellsOnSunday — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 15:57:12 +0000

There is the Simple Haskell initiative, which encourages what you're talking about, but no flag or pragma that says "this project uses simple Haskell". Obviously, simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. Fancy type features do have their use cases where they make types more expressive, the code safer and even simpler, so long as you've internalised how they work.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "What happened to Wirecutter?"

BellsOnSunday — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 09:46:21 +0000

In the UK the Consumer's Association and Which? fulfil the same role, and has been going since the 1950s. Before the internet the magazine was a part of everyday life for many - if my parents were going to buy something like a new washing machine my mother would go to the library and find the relevant issue. Online you can see some of their reviews but I think you need to subscribe to get all the (very rigorous) detail. The CA is a charity and has a sort of NGO status, able to issue a "super-complaint" if some industry is not working for consumers. I suppose I'm a lot less careful with money than my parents were, I never use it.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "When did people stop being drunk all the time?"

BellsOnSunday — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 08:56:19 +0000

I've just finished Pamuk's novel A Strangeness in my Mind, where the protagonist is a street vendor of the traditional Turkish beverage boza. Boza is a mildly alcoholic fermented barley drink considered ok for Muslims to drink. The gradual disappearance of boza sellers in the street is an index of the changes in Istanbul and Turkish society in the late 20th century, really enjoyable book. From what I've read I can imagine it's an acquired taste.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free"

BellsOnSunday — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 10:55:11 +0000

There are university leagues for every kind of sport in the UK. Most of the people involved take it very seriously but it's still just a form of recreation and doesn't attract crowds and money. I've never spoken with anyone who admires or envies the US system. If it came up in conversation I suppose most would find it utterly bizarre and likely to corrupt the purpose of a university, as I do.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Akan Names"

BellsOnSunday — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 13:44:40 +0000

Given what he did to the British economy in the shortest tenure of any chancellor, it's easy to believe he doesn't know what day it is.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Pink Floyd, 'The Wizard of Oz,' and me"

BellsOnSunday — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 13:09:01 +0000

Whoever worked out how to light a fire must have been very popular for a while, and then rapidly lost ground to the person who gave it a name.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "My ranking of every Shakespeare play"

BellsOnSunday — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 10:24:02 +0000

Most of those words weren't coined by him, his writing was just the earliest source that the dictionary makers could find. He didn't invent the word 'elbow', for instance.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? (2021)"

BellsOnSunday — Thu, 18 May 2023 09:31:02 +0000

Same way that Shakespeare "invented" the word "elbow" and thousands of others.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla"

BellsOnSunday — Tue, 02 May 2023 20:29:03 +0000

In the 19th C it was a word in the West Country dialect Thomas Hardy knew well, and appears in Jude the Obscure to describe the pig's member that is thrown at Jude. Apart from this description, it gets called "that part of the pig which is thrown away" and other euphemisms, so I suppose Hardy must have thought pizzle was already obscure enough not to get him into trouble.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs"

BellsOnSunday — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 12:35:27 +0000

    C-h f butterfly

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Worst Opening Sentences of 2022"

BellsOnSunday — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 17:59:25 +0000

Yep. That's me. I bet you're wondering how I got myself into this situation...

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Donald Knuth’s 80th birthday will be celebrated by two events in Piteå, Sweden"

BellsOnSunday — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 15:13:50 +0000

What's the little book of his about a man and a woman trapped on an island where they geekily explain things to each other? I might be misremembering the setting...started it once but it was pretty cheesy.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will"

BellsOnSunday — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 15:35:12 +0000

I think the tobacco industry has been no slouch in the marketing department, but the real difference is that there's no way to use tobacco that is safe and beneficial for you.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "“It is never a compiler error”"

BellsOnSunday — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 13:39:48 +0000

Yep, I was going to comment that if you write your own compiler you'll find plenty of bugs, which is the same point.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "Reflecting on Haskell in 2016"

BellsOnSunday — Mon, 26 Dec 2016 02:48:20 +0000

I know I won't be thanked for pointing out non-technical infelecities in the writing, and I'm not a grammar nazi or anything but... "There was a lot of excellent Haskell writing this year. One can’t possible enumerate all of them..." A lot of excellent writing is a singular noun, then it refers to "them", plural. Exactly the same mistake made in the next paragraph.

I don't want to be picky but if you're writing something public, learn how to use your language right.

New comment by BellsOnSunday in "How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm"

BellsOnSunday — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 13:54:04 +0000

It doesn't matter where Alec Guinness was born, he sounded about as Scottish as the Queen. Ewan McGregor's English accent OTOH sounds fake.