Hacker News: madcaptenor

New comment by madcaptenor in "Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)"

madcaptenor — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:25:13 +0000

Well, they wouldn't call it a "projection", but whatever drawing of the map they use.

New comment by madcaptenor in "Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)"

madcaptenor — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:55:18 +0000

I didn't know that. Makes more sense than a rectangular projection at least.

New comment by madcaptenor in "Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)"

madcaptenor — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:17:58 +0000

Over water, probably something like the entire 60th parallel south.

Over land, I think you want to start near the westernmost point of the African continent and thread the needle of the Isthmus of Suez, and stay south of the Caspian Sea. At least in the projection gcmap.com uses (plate carree - essentially the x-coordinate and y-coordinate are just raw longitude and latitude), this keeps you south of Lake Baikal and allows you to get very far east in far eastern Russia. Something like 17.5 N, 16 W to 69 N, 178.5 E seems to work:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=17.5n16w-21.79n0.21e-26.08n16.4...

Of course this depends on the projection you use!

This is different from the Portugal-to-China path that is the longest over land in reality, which a flat-earther would have crossing the Mediterranean.

New comment by madcaptenor in "France's tax agency got hacked (in French)"

madcaptenor — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:45:52 +0000

I would think the person committing piratage would be called a pirate.

New comment by madcaptenor in "Explain it to me like I'm ten"

madcaptenor — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:18:57 +0000

Franklin couldn't predict the future. It was Twain, saying you'd never go wrong attributing a quote to Franklin.

New comment by madcaptenor in "Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)"

madcaptenor — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:58:19 +0000

(2016) but still worth the read

New comment by madcaptenor in "Seven books I keep close because I love them"

madcaptenor — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:02:44 +0000

He didn't carry the stone tablets around all the time.

New comment by madcaptenor in "Seven books I keep close because I love them"

madcaptenor — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:02:12 +0000

I tried to read it at the height of the pandemic, inspired by the plague framing, and couldn't get into it. Might be time to give it another shot.

New comment by madcaptenor in "50k Boat Names"

madcaptenor — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:10:09 +0000

Except there is no such place. Perhaps you're thinking of Intercourse, PA?

New comment by madcaptenor in "Dates That Don't Exist (2015)"

madcaptenor — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:13:05 +0000

I get what you're saying, but if the government repealed the Gregorian calendar (and went back to Julian) that wouldn't change the day of the week. The day of the week is historically independent of the day of the month. Catholics and Protestants agreed on this in the calendar change. The original papal bull that set up the Gregorian calendar has Thursday 1582-10-04 followed by Friday 1582-10-15; Great Britain and colonies (if we're taking the US perspective) followed Wednesday 1752-09-02 with Thursday 1752-09-14.

New comment by madcaptenor in "Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones"

madcaptenor — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:44:09 +0000

and brown is just dark orange.

New comment by madcaptenor in "Dates That Don't Exist (2015)"

madcaptenor — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:55:46 +0000

I assume there is a way to handle this in modern contract law. Surely people have forgotten how long the various months are and written contracts referring to April 31.

New comment by madcaptenor in "Show HN: How far do I have to go to run into 100k people?"

madcaptenor — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:39:28 +0000

I think the rays are straight but you're comparing them to the US-Canada border, which is curved. (No, it really is! A parallel of latitude is not a great circle.)

New comment by madcaptenor in "Terence Tao: Mathematics in the Age of AI [pdf]"

madcaptenor — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:25:17 +0000

You're right, but:

- he works in Germany (https://vedran.miletic.net/files/cv-vedran-miletic.pdf)

- the original author is Till Tantau (https://www.beamer.plus/Introduction.html) who is German (https://www.tcs.uni-luebeck.de/en/mitarbeiter/tantau/cv/)

New comment by madcaptenor in "Terence Tao: Mathematics in the Age of AI [pdf]"

madcaptenor — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:58:21 +0000

I believe the software was written by a German.

New comment by madcaptenor in "OpenStreetMap: Admin_level for All Countries"

madcaptenor — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:04:00 +0000

I'm guessing this is a coincidence, though; the Capitol is also, famously, on a Hill.

New comment by madcaptenor in "OpenStreetMap: Admin_level for All Countries"

madcaptenor — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:30:31 +0000

Wait, so it was actually believed that the Washington meridian just happened to fall exactly on an integer number of degrees (120-43 =77) west of Greenwich?

New comment by madcaptenor in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

madcaptenor — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:56:38 +0000

I need to remember that this is okay. I didn't do it because of concerns about resale value... but recently I sold books for the first time in a while and got so little money that I realize this is not worth worrying about.

New comment by madcaptenor in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

madcaptenor — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:24:07 +0000

ai;dr

New comment by madcaptenor in "Bonnie Tyler has died"

madcaptenor — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:53:02 +0000

Every now and then HN falls apart