Hacker News: Typhon

New comment by Typhon in "Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency"

Typhon — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 06:50:24 +0000

Dialing 911 in the EU can redirect you to 112, though I don't know how that redirection works. It's worth knowing the local emergency numbers in any case

New comment by Typhon in "People who've received a black bar on Hacker News"

Typhon — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 10:06:06 +0000

Yes, and Dennis Ritchie who died seven days later

New comment by Typhon in "Kevin Mitnick has died"

Typhon — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 07:59:21 +0000

That's not true in the sense that the cancer doesn't have objectives per se, therefore it doesn't have anything to lose in the sense that matters.

New comment by Typhon in "No CSS Club"

Typhon — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 12:29:28 +0000

It reminds me of the extreme advertising meme.

New comment by Typhon in "The Development of the C Language (1993)"

Typhon — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 08:18:36 +0000

Justin Rye's site is now at http://jbr.me.uk/ (and the espe-ranto at http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ )

New comment by Typhon in "Resignations Roil Twitter as Elon Musk Tries Persuading Some Workers to Stay"

Typhon — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 09:58:25 +0000

I am a true prophet. https://twitter.com/TyphonBaalAmmon/status/15911802751865528...

New comment by Typhon in "Twitter, when the wall came down"

Typhon — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 21:23:06 +0000

I think Pinboard is more likely to buy Twitter. And honestly this might not be the worst thing that could happen to it. Not sure if Maciej will be keen however.

New comment by Typhon in "Bird populations declining fast across North America"

Typhon — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 15:46:10 +0000

Organizations (mostly) don't self-perpetuate through sexual reproduction. It's perfectly possible for the VHEMT to expand if they manage to convince enough people.

New comment by Typhon in "Bjarne Stroustrup: “I Did It for You All” (2007)"

Typhon — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 18:07:43 +0000

I thought it would have been obvious to anyone that this is satire, but then again I know that it was explicitly presented as such the first time I read this text so I'm probably biased.

New comment by Typhon in "Ask HN: I feel so shallow and dumb when I see what other smart people are doing"

Typhon — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 21:59:02 +0000

This is one of those things that is both very true, and very much easier to say than do.

New comment by Typhon in "It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you"

Typhon — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 11:05:49 +0000

It used to be the most common lie was "I have read the EULA". Nowadays the most common lie is "we care about your privacy" or possibly "we get it, you hate ads".

Interview with D. Madore, creator of Unlambda

Typhon — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 19:18:28 +0000

Article URL: https://esoteric.codes/blog/david-madore

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319196

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Typhon in "WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore"

Typhon — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 15:08:08 +0000

It's never more about money than when "It's not about the money anymore".

I think that with a stock whose worth at this point is the result of pure dutch-tulip-like speculation, the question is where is the tipping point where money just becomes too good to ignore and when people start collectively selling, making the stock inevitably plummet.

New comment by Typhon in "Haskell is a Bad Programming Language (2020)"

Typhon — Sat, 09 Jan 2021 12:18:40 +0000

The one valid definition of success for a programming language is that it looks pretty and thus the most successful programming language is Piet ( http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html )

I mean, joking aside, it's always fascinating when people can't wrap their minds around the idea that their criteria for success or quality or goodness are subjective and not universal.

New comment by Typhon in "A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)"

Typhon — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:13:41 +0000

This is a rather bad article because it completely misses the real complexity of a spell checker.

A spell checker is not simply a list of words, it's a way to check mistakes according to a standard and to point towards ways to fix these mistakes. This not reducible to a look-up in a hashtable. It requires taking into account some complicated things about the definition of a word and the context in which it is written. You might think that's grammar checking but the boundary is not clear and in any case, any language processing application starts with tokenizing and deciding what counts as words and on what basis.

What is a word even ? Is "CIA" a word ? What about "C.I.A." ? What about C (as in the language) ? What about c (as in the speed of light) ? 2,4-Dinitrophenylhydrazine ? How does the spellchecker handle dashes and apostrophes ? What about proper nouns ?

Really, the example is poorly chosen.

New comment by Typhon in "Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?"

Typhon — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 13:08:16 +0000

The big difference between the American attitude and the Chinese attitude towards ecology is this :

The Americans loudly refuse to do anything, loudly deny that there's a problem, and loudly proclaim their hatred of ecology.

The Chinese say yes to everything but they have absolutely no intention of actually doing anything, they just lie.

Check this out : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/23/china-factories-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/04/china-underrep...

New comment by Typhon in "C Is Not a Low-level Language (2018)"

Typhon — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 02:25:39 +0000

This article quotes Perlis' famous saying that "a programming language is low-level when it calls attention to the irrelevant", and I am reminded of another Perlis aphorism :

« Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones. »

New comment by Typhon in "Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?"

Typhon — Sun, 13 Oct 2019 23:40:28 +0000

There's plenty of small online stores selling all kinds of stuff. Recently I had ordered smoked paprika from Amazon UK because I can't find any where I live (France). I got regular paprika. So I ordered from a specialized online spice store, got my paprika and vowed never to order anything from Amazon ever again.

Wikimedia's sites are “suffering from a large and broad DDoS attack”

Typhon — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 19:07:24 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/StrynWM/status/1170043499045150720

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898778

Points: 20

# Comments: 4

New comment by Typhon in "The internet is an SEO landfill"

Typhon — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 00:39:26 +0000

No, it's just a simple heuristic to get started.