Hacker News: bradrn

New comment by bradrn in "Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)"

bradrn — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 13:40:16 +0000

Yep, that’s what I meant; thanks for clarifying the point.

(Though that said, a sibling post linked this interesting talk on limitations in OpenType itself: https://www.tiro.com/John/TypeCon2014_Hudson_DECK.pdf)

New comment by bradrn in "Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)"

bradrn — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 11:06:54 +0000

In Naskh, each letter has only four forms (for the most part — there are a few ligatures etc. but I think ‘only four forms’ remains basically true). The choice between forms is determined almost entirely by position within a word (initial/medial/final/isolated). All the letters are aligned along the baseline and connect to each other in basically the same way.

By contrast Nastaliq is a much more complicated style. Many letters and letter combinations take on several different forms depending on which other letters surround them. Letter joins are usually diagonal, so letters earlier in a word need to be shifted above the baseline by a variable amount. Having to shift letters vertically as well as horizontally greatly complicates other aspects of the style too.

(I recall seeing a nice table some time ago showing all the various different possibilities for letter joins in Nastaliq. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find it again. Still, you might get some idea by consulting the documentation of one of the existing Nastaliq fonts, e.g. Awami Nastaliq: https://software.sil.org/awami/what-is-special/)

New comment by bradrn in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

bradrn — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:33:13 +0000

Just reread the post — it’s much more pleasant to read now! Thank you!

(For what it’s worth, I think your own writing style is quite nice, now that I can see it.)

New comment by bradrn in "Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows"

bradrn — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:02:39 +0000

I like wl-kbptr myself: https://github.com/moverest/wl-kbptr

New comment by bradrn in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

bradrn — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:19:18 +0000

Yes, that would help considerably.

(Also, I suggest clearly acknowledging where AI was/wasn’t used. I like CuriosityC’s suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411968)

New comment by bradrn in "What I've learned about the trombone"

bradrn — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:43:36 +0000

It’s slightly confusingly phrased, but the full sentence is:

> The trombone is the only brass instrument in a classical orchestra […] where the main mode of pitch control is by moving the tuning slide.

Which is correct.

New comment by bradrn in "You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)"

bradrn — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:05:09 +0000

Or, as Terry Pratchett so eloquently put it in The Fifth Elephant:

> “Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.”

> Vetinari looked perplexed. “You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?”

New comment by bradrn in "Shantell Sans (2023)"

bradrn — Sun, 31 May 2026 11:12:06 +0000

Typotheque’s Dash has a very similar variable axis, though they call it ‘Speed’: https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/dash-casual. (For some reason you need to click on the ‘Variable’ box in order to see the full variable range.)

New comment by bradrn in "An Obsessive Focus on UX: Pilot's Pressure-Regulating Kire-Na Highlighter"

bradrn — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:53:59 +0000

Odd, I’ve had the opposite experience… back home in Australia the boxes came with metal edges, but here in the UK (Scotland) they all seem to be plain cardboard. If the metal ones are sold somewhere I’d be very interested to know where I could find them!

New comment by bradrn in "More Whimsical OEIS Sequences"

bradrn — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:05:29 +0000

It looks like that never occurs for Helvetica (A316600) due to the absence of kerning. However, with Arial (A316599) the description notes:

> a(29368) = 111111 is a first notable anomaly, because its bounding box width of 2675 lies between those of a(29367) = 49115, with bounding box width 2655, and a(29369) = 70002, with bounding box width 2681.

New comment by bradrn in "Magnifica Humanitas"

bradrn — Mon, 25 May 2026 10:51:35 +0000

I am immediately reminded of my favourite quote from the Jewish book Pirkei Avot (‘Ethics of the Fathers’):

> It is not your duty to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.

[https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.2.16?ven=english|Mishnah...]

New comment by bradrn in "Book Review: On the Calculation of Volume"

bradrn — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:49:36 +0000

Or, for that matter, what if you happened to be in a spot which had been occupied by a person at the time at which it resets?

New comment by bradrn in "I Miss Terry Pratchett"

bradrn — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:59:43 +0000

I found this comment pretty convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247413

New comment by bradrn in "I keep tripping over "true, false, true""

bradrn — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:13:54 +0000

Also known as ‘boolean blindness‘: e.g. https://cs-syd.eu/posts/2016-07-24-overcoming-boolean-blindn...

New comment by bradrn in "Unsigned Sizes: A Five Year Mistake"

bradrn — Sat, 02 May 2026 21:01:42 +0000

> Part of me feels like direct numeric array indexing is one of the last holdouts of a low-level operation screaming for some standardized higher-level abstraction.

This paragraph reminds me a bit of Dex: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.05372

New comment by bradrn in "New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome"

bradrn — Fri, 01 May 2026 10:09:25 +0000

Persian mersi is actually a direct borrowing from the French [1]. Not sure about the other one, but I guess it’s just a coincidence, as happens so often in language [2].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%DB%8C#Pers...

[2] https://zompist.com/chance.htm

New comment by bradrn in "An open-source stethoscope that costs between $2.5 and $5 to produce"

bradrn — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:39:32 +0000

The linked paper has some pictures: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193087

New comment by bradrn in "Looking at Unity made me understand the point of C++ coroutines"

bradrn — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 11:43:42 +0000

In Haskell this technique has been called ‘reinversion of control’: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2011/10/quick-and-dirty-reinversion-o...

New comment by bradrn in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

bradrn — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:15:44 +0000

> What background do you come to J from? Another programming language?

Yes, I’m very fond of trying out different languages. My main language for personal projects is Haskell.

> How do you like it?

I haven’t used J for a while, actually, but I recall finding it a bit confusing, especially when rank manipuations are involved. It has a larger vocabulary than most array languages, which I felt made it hard to learn. It was great fun though!

New comment by bradrn in "Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?"

bradrn — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:54:57 +0000

It’s not my language, to be clear! In fact I’ve never even tried it… my array programming experience so far has mostly been with J.