Hacker News: SiVal

New comment by SiVal in "Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more"

SiVal — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:36:51 +0000

Yes, Dick has been a nickname for Richard for about 800 years but only got its modern slang meaning in probably late-19th or early 20th century. It seems to have come out of the British military from the phrase "Tom, Dick, and Harry", which were such common names that the phrase meant every ordinary man. (Tommy was already slang for "British soldier".) And from there, one more evolutionary step for mankind....

New comment by SiVal in "Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more"

SiVal — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 17:37:04 +0000

The English form of daughter was also -dottir, but it was not common.

New comment by SiVal in "Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video, demonstrated on ThinkPad X230"

SiVal — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:13:10 +0000

Would a bit of Post-It Note (for minimal adhesion) damage the screen coating if left on most of the time? Would even that much thickness stress the screen when opened and closed thousands of times? Is there a better (self-service) material?

New comment by SiVal in "The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan"

SiVal — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 11:05:39 +0000

It's a little sad, but you're right of course that many books no longer make business sense now that everything they offer is online and free. Well, when the AIs put us all out of business and we're home all day in our rabbit hutches, we'll have plenty of time and free content to read.

New comment by SiVal in "The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan"

SiVal — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 06:24:37 +0000

Ah, I thought your name sounded familiar! In 2008, I bought "Reading Japanese with a Smile" on a trip to Japan and loved it. It was very well done and perfect for me. I ended up buying two copies and for years I kept checking on Kinokuniya visits hoping it would become a series. No such luck, but my guess is it was just too much work for too little reward. But you should know that a HN reader still remembers your work fondly after 16 years.

New comment by SiVal in "Claude for Desktop"

SiVal — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 03:02:08 +0000

Is this for the paid version? I'm using the free version, and it hasn't asked me for a phone number, but if the paid version requires a phone number, my reaction would be the same as yours: sorry, no.

New comment by SiVal in "AM radio law opposed by tech and auto industries is close to passing"

SiVal — Sun, 05 May 2024 07:10:54 +0000

I would love to see kids given the materials and taught how to build makeshift emergency radios in science class every couple of years. Then they could take them home, stick them in a closet or drawer somewhere, and in case of emergency, they would be everywhere.

New comment by SiVal in "Did we lose our way in making efficient software?"

SiVal — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:13:38 +0000

Does Apple charge 15% for each dollar up to a million plus 30% for each dollar above a million, or when you cross a million (in a year), do they suddenly jump to 30% of everything? IOW, if I have earned $999,999 so far this year, I have to pay Apple about $150,000. If I then make another $1 sale, do I owe a few cents more or another $150,000?

And once your rate goes to 30%, does it stay there the following year, or does the whole system reset to zero each year?

New comment by SiVal in "Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site"

SiVal — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 07:21:37 +0000

I understand that some businesses might want to take the hit from a cost surge because they get an even higher revenue surge. But a large fraction of sites aren't like that and would prefer a loss of service to a cost overrun. Service providers should always offer a "maximum out-of-pocket cost" service option. Those that don't aren't suitable vendors for most customers and customers should be warned about them.

New comment by SiVal in "Ask HN: Local Mac Wysiwyg HTML Editor? (for “Lo-fi” website)"

SiVal — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 05:39:05 +0000

I'd like the same but with one more deployment option: create a (simple) static site that doesn't require any web server. I started an old relative on Dreamweaver about 25 years ago thinking that simple HTML files would make a good, open, archival rich-text alternative to plaintext. He wrote many articles that can still be double-clicked and viewed on any platform today and are among the most likely doc formats to still be readable a century from now (if any still are).

I had hoped that simple HTML would become a better choice than PDF or MS-Word for ordinary people writing for posterity, but unlike old Dreamweaver, almost all HTML tools today produce docs that must be served by a web server (and consist of separate HTML, CSS, JS, img files that get scattered.)

New comment by SiVal in "Ten years of “Go: The good, the bad, and the meh”"

SiVal — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 19:05:11 +0000

I completely agree. The wonderful speed of the compiler allows for quick small-change, test, small-change, test development. In theory. They then sabotage it by making "unused" warnings into errors, which forces you to waste the time the fast compiler could have saved, making temporary changes (ex: commenting out/in) that aren't needed for the test and won't be needed for production.

New comment by SiVal in "Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?"

SiVal — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 00:39:56 +0000

If they were so advanced that they left the ordinary material world behind, then anything is possible. Otherwise, they would probably be like us in the sense that their in-use technologies would span every level from lowest to their own highest. As our tech improves, we continue to use the wheel and shaped stone and conrete, iron, steel, glass, knives, ceramics, etc. We still use things that are pulled out of the ground (like our distant ancestors) while also using the latest AI algos.

So, a very wide range of "industrial civilizations" would be expected to leave behind lots of basic natural materials in artificial forms. Their basic natural materials would be about the same as ours because they are found in nature and not very diverse (compared to high tech pharma chemicals or digital algos), so we ought to be finding lots of evidence of pre-human low(ish) tech, even if they were quite high tech.

New comment by SiVal in "Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco"

SiVal — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 20:37:54 +0000

No, it's a demonstration of the mind virus that caused these changes in SF, Portland, Seattle, NYC, etc. If you shift left and things get worse, you should go further left. The problem must be worse than we thought. If things get even worse, you should go even further left. As non-leftists get fewer and things get worse, you blame more and more problems on whatever shrinking "cause" remains. Once you eliminate non-leftists entirely and things are collapsing, it's obviously because of the left---as in, the left who think maybe we've gone far enough to the left. Those people are redefined as right, the cause of all of our problems.

New comment by SiVal in "Morse Code Chat"

SiVal — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 10:55:37 +0000

It's not. Combine a loud emergency whistle with Morse Code, and you have the ability to signal without any electric power over much longer distances than voice.

New comment by SiVal in "Image obtained with high-speed camera shows how lightning rods work"

SiVal — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 19:52:33 +0000

The article says lightning rods don't attract lightning. They just give it a safe path to ground. That makes no sense. Lightning pushes (& pulls) against resistance. Most current will follow the path of least resistance. A lightning rod is installed with two parts: 1) a "rod" that just by itself is designed to attract the strike to a sharpened electric field, and 2) a least-resistance path to ground in order to attract the current to follow that path instead of some other. That bolt in the photo extending upward is current being pulled up from the ground (or pushed down) with low resistance to attract the searching fingers of the bolt coming down from the cloud. The bolts reaching up to connect are going to be the most attractive to the bolt coming down.

So how is it that "lightning rods don't attract lightning"? Maybe they just mean that they won't cause electrical storms.

New comment by SiVal in "Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7"

SiVal — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:07:32 +0000

Can you install it [edit: the .Net 7/8 platform that sounds interesting, not the IDE] for free on a Linux server and get the same benefits? (This isn't advocacy, it's a literal question about something I don't know.)

New comment by SiVal in "Building a second income stream by writing a book"

SiVal — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 02:36:28 +0000

There is some evidence that posting at certain times can help you grab that virility factor

...Or have virality as Plan A and grabbing your virility could be Plan B.

New comment by SiVal in "Common Lisp Implementations in 2023"

SiVal — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 21:10:34 +0000

recent events around Go show why, I am extremely glad that I never payed much attention to Go...

What are you referring to? This is a literal question, not advocacy. I haven't been paying enough attention to know what you mean.

New comment by SiVal in "Why do you want to touch your Mac screen so badly?"

SiVal — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 07:23:13 +0000

I don't ever reach for my Mac screen because I'm not used to interacting with a large touchscreen. But I'll bet I would enjoy being able to use a stylus on my laptop screen when doing a few things such as Photoshop editing.

New comment by SiVal in "Something strange is happening on the sun, and we've never seen it before"

SiVal — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:42:58 +0000

Vice emerged from the hostile takeover of the National Enquirer by Google's Office of Ideological Purification.