Hacker News: gumboshoes

New comment by gumboshoes in "It's a shame what's happened to radio"

gumboshoes — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:40:41 +0000

I don't want to hear morning show hijinx. I will gladly listen to well-produced news and features.

New comment by gumboshoes in "It's a shame what's happened to radio"

gumboshoes — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:46:20 +0000

I still work in radio and have for more than 30 years. Perhaps I'm an outlier, but I never cared about the DJs, never felt a connection, never wanted their Morning Zoos or their Tammy and Frankie in the Morning junk, with the fake callers, the forced laughs, the crappy contests, the gossip lifted from other uncredited sources. All I ever wanted was lots of unrepeated music. Or, failing that, lots of intelligent talk and news.

New comment by gumboshoes in "Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata"

gumboshoes — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:27:00 +0000

Mr. Baby Paint owes at least a mention to KidPix, that Mac OS 9 program that got there first for kid-focused computer art.

New comment by gumboshoes in "How We Made IPFS Content Publishing 10x Faster"

gumboshoes — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:11:55 +0000

Am I the only one who has never managed to get an IPFS file to successfully download?

New comment by gumboshoes in "Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself"

gumboshoes — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:47:04 +0000

Journalism has been talking about the future of journalism for fifty years or more. It is literally always the same answers, none of which are both feasible and realistic. All the problems boil down to this: journalism is a product, not a public utility. And the product isn't in the information category; it's in the entertainment category.

New comment by gumboshoes in "On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand (1880) [pdf]"

gumboshoes — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:15:39 +0000

Here's the article as it originally appeared in the journal "Nature": https://archive.org/details/nature221880lock/mode/2up

New comment by gumboshoes in "The Future of the Con Is Here, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed"

gumboshoes — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 15:07:46 +0000

The author may really like "The Sting" but the movie was a rip-off of a book by David Maurer, and all of the con mechanisms in the movie were lifted without permission from his book. The theft was later settled privately for a huge sum.

New comment by gumboshoes in "Hacker News but for independent blogs"

gumboshoes — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:32:15 +0000

Waiting for the inflection point that all social sites go through: When a social site's top content stops being about itself, then it is probably going to be successful.

A second corollary: When a social site's top content stops being about the internet, then it is probably going to be even more successful.

New comment by gumboshoes in "Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You"

gumboshoes — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 13:18:57 +0000

"The eyespots on a peacock’s train are super cyan, so when the peacock spreads its train feathers it is going super saiyan super cyan." Haha.

New comment by gumboshoes in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

gumboshoes — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 12:44:06 +0000

The 171,476 figure from OED is used inaccurately in a way that shows a gross misunderstanding of dictionaries and language. The number 171,476 refers to the number of full entries for words in “current use” as defined in the 20-volume Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It does not represent words. It also does not include all the OED's variant spellings, inflected forms, phrases or run-ons (sub-entries derived from the main entries). Additionally, the OED is by no means a complete inventory of English. In fact, it's probably millions of words short, especially as it has an incredibly slow update cycle. Source: I am a dictionary editor and lexicographer, use OED daily, and know the people who make it.

New comment by gumboshoes in "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows"

gumboshoes — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:16:17 +0000

You are not a good person.

New comment by gumboshoes in "A dumpster arrived behind my university's library"

gumboshoes — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:51:55 +0000

"Almost across the board" is a damning statement, not a remark that supports careless deaccessioning. I work in the margins of my field, and literally thousands of books are unavailable to me through interlibrary loan. I have to buy them or fly to libraries around the world, at a cost of many thousands of dollars I do not have. (One of my colleagues was fortunate to get a large inheritance; they almost exclusively use it to acquire or travel to books they need for their subject.) And mine is not even an esoteric field, nor esoteric subject. It's just that too many books were deaccessioned on the baseless idea that someone else would surely have the book and make it available to scholars.

New comment by gumboshoes in "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows"

gumboshoes — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:30:30 +0000

This has been circulating for many years and at this point is so widely spread as to be considered ordinary and unremarkable.

New comment by gumboshoes in "macOS needs its grid back"

gumboshoes — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:00:09 +0000

Forget all that. I want my stuff in text-based lists. Showing icons and file previews is way slower and less informative.

New comment by gumboshoes in "Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop"

gumboshoes — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:15:35 +0000

Posted here many times https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/localsend

New comment by gumboshoes in "North American English Dialects"

gumboshoes — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:26:42 +0000

Yes, this is being done, and has been done. A variety of linguistic atlas projects record audio and make written phonetic transcriptions: https://www.linguisticatlasproject.org/ There are also many dialect and accent arechives, such as https://www.dialectsarchive.com/ and https://accent.gmu.edu/.