Hacker News: dustintrex

New comment by dustintrex in "Words that seem related but aren't (2015)"

dustintrex — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 10:12:50 +0000

Seems to be un-deaded now, praise the mods! And on closer inspection there was one naughty word in there, although technically it's a homonym that happens to have the same spelling. (And "homonym" itself is probably best avoided.)

New comment by dustintrex in "Words that seem related but aren't (2015)"

dustintrex — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 10:10:46 +0000

Yes, but this appears to be the origin of the pejorative: bundle of sticks -> an old woman collecting sticks -> a man who acts like an old woman -> homosexual.

New comment by dustintrex in "Words that seem related but aren't (2015)"

dustintrex — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 07:29:37 +0000

> The English word outrage is a loanword from French, where it was formed by combining the adverb outre (meaning "beyond") with the suffix -age; thus, the original literal meaning is "beyondness" – that is, beyond what is acceptable. The rebracketing as a compound of out- with the noun or verb rage has led to both a different pronunciation than the one to be expected for such a loanword (compare umbrage) and an additional meaning of "angry reaction" not present in French.

Brilliant. I'll need to make a point of pronouncing "outrage" to rhyme with "garage" from now on. "It is an oot-RAAZH!"

New comment by dustintrex in "Words that seem related but aren't (2015)"

dustintrex — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 07:27:26 +0000

I posted a comment noting that some words can no longer be used because they resemble offensive words, even though they are etymologically unrelated.

I am ironically amused to note that the comment appears to have offended somebody or something sufficiently to make it disappear, even though it did not contain any actual offensive words.

New comment by dustintrex in "Four-year-old Israeli child tests positive for polio, first case since 1989"

dustintrex — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 06:05:49 +0000

The article does not mention this, but it's quite probably the unvaccinated child in question is from the fast-expanding Hasidic community in Jerusalem, many of whom are strongly anti-vax. This has led to measles outbreaks in the past in NYC as well, and the community was also hit especially hard by COVID.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/my-fellow-hasidic...

New comment by dustintrex in "Words that seem related but aren't (2015)"

dustintrex — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 05:57:50 +0000

An unmentioned subcategory is words that that sound or look like taboo words, but are actually unrelated: "niggardly", "Gaylord", "fag" as in cigarette (from "fag end", unrelated to "faggot"), etc.

New comment by dustintrex in "Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest"

dustintrex — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 02:54:07 +0000

Yup, as long as the tin pot dictator is attacking some country we don't really care about.

New comment by dustintrex in "Cunningham's Law"

dustintrex — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 08:34:26 +0000

Whenever I join a new team and need to inhale a new architecture or complex process, I take a stab at documenting what currently exists, and then share my notes with the team. Corrections immediately pour in, and this "wrong answer" inevitably produces a much better end result than asking any single person to tell me the "right answer".

New comment by dustintrex in "Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’ (1945)"

dustintrex — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 08:09:25 +0000

Sure, the orchestra can fire or not fire the guy, and they can also do so on the basis of whether they think this will fill seats. What really rubs me the wrong way here is the performative "you're with us or you're against us" demand for a written denouncement: AFAICT he has not said a peep either way about the Ukraine invasion, he is just being required to publicly renounce his past beliefs to keep his job.

For what it's worth, you're also doing some pretty selective reading of the link: he's Ossetian himself, claims he never actually signed the Crimea annexation statement, and the Pussy Riot/LGBT stuff is really an irrelevant tangent here.

Finally, no, McCarthyism was not (just) about government persecution, things like the MPAA blacklist on "Communist" actors and directors were private initiatives, and artists bore much of the brunt of that particular witchhunt.

New comment by dustintrex in "Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’ (1945)"

dustintrex — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 06:57:32 +0000

Yes, he appeared for a TV ad for Putin in 2012. Why is this suddenly a firing offence in 2022? Does he bear personal responsibility for what Putin's doing today?

Denouncing McCarthyism in 1950, Truman said, "In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have."

New comment by dustintrex in "Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’ (1945)"

dustintrex — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 06:42:19 +0000

The preface was written at an odd moment in time when the UK and the Soviet Union were allied, for the simple reason that in times of war the enemy of my enemy (Hitler's Germany) is my friend. Two short years later the Cold War began and pointed criticism of Russia became much more palatable.

Meanwhile, it's 2022, and we're firing orchestra conductors because they're Russian and not denouncing Putin sufficiently vigorously.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/feb/28/denounce-putin...

New comment by dustintrex in "The importance of having a personal domain name"

dustintrex — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 01:36:53 +0000

My email is first@last.name. The ".name" domain is oddly underused and often throws people for a loop.

New comment by dustintrex in "Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)"

dustintrex — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 06:40:30 +0000

The Economist is old school liberal: let companies do what they want (US "right-wing"), let people do what they want (US "left-wing"), but unlike US libertarians, also have some regulation and support in place to prevent the worst abuses.

New comment by dustintrex in "The Price of Nails Since 1695"

dustintrex — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:29:59 +0000

ACOUP has a great collection on ironworking and the generally insane amount of labor and fuel that went into premodern iron production, including nails:

https://acoup.blog/2020/10/02/collections-iron-how-did-they-...

Demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPdviIiNAM8

New comment by dustintrex in "Why babies cry in the first three months, how to tell them apart, and what to do"

dustintrex — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 08:28:11 +0000

Psst: co-sleeping won't stop babies from crying, but it makes it way easier for everybody involved to get back to sleep much faster.

New comment by dustintrex in "Words known better by males than females, and vice versa"

dustintrex — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 00:49:13 +0000

Ah yes, a perfect term to image search at work while doing a little Valentine's Day shopping.

New comment by dustintrex in "Last call to voluntarily migrate Java accounts"

dustintrex — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 00:42:21 +0000

> However, the voluntary migration period is closing soon. Starting March 10, 2022, you won't be able to play Minecraft: Java Edition unless you move to a Microsoft account.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

New comment by dustintrex in "How Japan saved Tokyo's rail network from collapse (part 1, 1945-1982)"

dustintrex — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 10:02:23 +0000

The tax base in the Japanese countryside is rapidly collapsing and the public money used to prop up railways at the end of the day comes out of the same pot of taxpayer money that's used to fund schools, hospitals, etc. Personally, I'm a huge railfan, but it's still absurd to spend $3m/year to serve commuters that would easily fit in a single minibus.

New comment by dustintrex in "How Japan saved Tokyo's rail network from collapse (part 1, 1945-1982)"

dustintrex — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 09:04:47 +0000

That's a lovely story, but it's also why JR is bleeding red ink. Here's a typical story about one line that was serving an average of 19 (nineteen) passengers per day and made a loss of about US$3m/year for decades until it was finally axed in 2014 thanks to a providential landslide.

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/minispike-the-en...

New comment by dustintrex in "Facebook loses users for the first time"

dustintrex — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 01:47:12 +0000

Facebook has been primarily displaced by Tiktok, which is considerably more addictive than FB. It's like zonking out in front of cable TV in the olden days, if the cable TV had access to an essentially unlimited content library of short-form dopamine hits, was capable of determining exactly what you like, and showing you exactly that forever.