Hacker News: merlynkline

New comment by merlynkline in "The End of Handwriting"

merlynkline — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:48:23 +0000

UK: I find all this fascination with "cursive" very odd. I was taught to write indivdual block letters before and in the first year of school, and then like every other pupil, was excited to move on to "joined up" writing, which was (is) very similar, with the letters having small extensions to link them to the adjoining letters in a word, thereby making writing much faster. The way I was taught to write block letters was cleary designed to lead to this - there really wasn't much difference. Reading and writing joined up letters seems pretty normal to me and to my kids.

My handwriting was, and still is, pretty awful but I soon learned to argue that the legibility of one's handwriting is in inverse proportion to one's intelligence, citing doctors as evidence and positing that higher intelligence leads to faster thinking leads to faster writing leads to decreased legibility. Never really had any problems in school (or since) and I will note that when I left secondary education my school still did not have a computer, even in the admin offices. My kids' experience has been very different but with similar outcomes in this regard.

New comment by merlynkline in "Telephone Exchanges in the UK"

merlynkline — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 22:44:14 +0000

Before modern digital electronics, telephone numbers were literal routes - when the turned dial on your phone ran back to zero, a corresponding 10-pole motorised rotary switch at the exchange turned and connected you to one of 10 lines. This connected you to another such rotary switch for the next digit, until eventually you were connected to the final destination. The ingenious Strowger exchange.

New comment by merlynkline in "Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018)"

merlynkline — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 08:17:18 +0000

I love taking photos and realised I had this problem so I spent some effort setting up a server that delivers a random (biased in various ways), labelled photo from my (huge) collection on demand via http, with parameters for size etc, and then set up some rpi based photo frames (using old monitors) that show a random photo every 30s, and similar for desktop background on all the computers in the house. Now I feel like I'm familiar with all my photos. I also have a simple web-based UI that shows the history of the last few dozen photos fetched so if one catches my eye I can find it easily, and a way to tag photos to include them in the "random" rotation more frequently.

New comment by merlynkline in "Why is zero plural? (2024)"

merlynkline — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 11:49:14 +0000

> we can find untold examples of "No star in the sky."

But the original example was "What if there was no star in the sky?" so your example is irrelevant. The original example sounds weird (to me, a native speaker). But "No star in the sky is a triangle" sounds OK and contains your example phrase.

New comment by merlynkline in "Take the pedals off the bike"

merlynkline — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:10:59 +0000

Try that with the handlebars tied immovable. Or actually, please don't.

New comment by merlynkline in "Take the pedals off the bike"

merlynkline — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 17:02:21 +0000

Exactly this. The article has the right conclusion but invents a nonsense explanation. The truth is that bicycles counter-steer at any reasonable rolling speed - to go right, you nudge the steering to the left, which causes the bike to start falling to the right and then steer into that fall. People often find this hard to believe, even experienced riders, but it is easily tested. The problem is that training wheels turn a bicycle into a tricycle, which steers in the opposite way - to go right you steer to the right. So kids learn that and then you take the training wheels off and the first attempt to steer immediately causes a nasty fall because of steering the wrong way. I made this mistake teaching my first to ride, and she hurt herself and never really liked bikes after that. Seeing it happen, I had an epiphany (eventually) and just took the pedals off that bike for my second, who had the experience described elsewhere in this thread and loved bikes thereafter.

New comment by merlynkline in "We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)"

merlynkline — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 17:29:42 +0000

Last year I finished over a decade on very large Perl project, collaborating within a team. When I joined that project it was already over a decade old a most of the code was much like what you are probably imagining. When I left the project, all the parts we had touched were much like any other high quality modern codebase, and we could almost as readily maintain the decade-old parts (that we had worked on) as the week-old parts.

Having worked in many languages over many decades, I've learned that a high quality codebase is built by high quality developers, largely independent of the languages they use. You can build an unmaintainable mess in any language as easily as you can build a high quality codebase in Perl. I would concede that you can more easily build an unmaintainable mess in Perl than in many languages but that's up to you; you can do most things more easily in Perl than in many languages ;)