Hacker News: quuxplusone

New comment by quuxplusone in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

quuxplusone — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:13:52 +0000

TFA includes a link to an archive of John Carmack's .plan updates, 1996–2010:

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/tree/mast...

(1) Looks like great reading. (2) Who compiled the archive, and how? This feels like one of those situations where a person records the evening news onto VHS for decades; except here they were running finger every day for decades? (3) Is there a more mobile-friendly way to browse it?

New comment by quuxplusone in "Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years"

quuxplusone — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:21:57 +0000

That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...

New comment by quuxplusone in "Möbius-Strip Crosswords"

quuxplusone — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:09:57 +0000

Oops! Should be fixed now.

New comment by quuxplusone in "Möbius-Strip Crosswords"

quuxplusone — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:09:23 +0000

(Author here.) Oops! and thank you. Should be fixed now. Happily I used SVG for those images, or it'd have been harder. :)

New comment by quuxplusone in "Building an LLM Agent to Play Dwarf Fortress"

quuxplusone — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:13:53 +0000

The submission is AI slop.

New comment by quuxplusone in "Parsers don't have to be complicated"

quuxplusone — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:45:35 +0000

Hm, but I think he's right. The problem comes when you try to break down the authority portion into host and port; TFA's parser treats the first colon as introducing the port, which is wrong.

https://github.com/bkaradzic/bx/blob/0b001f5f36579e8aea07efa...

The 11 Types of Washington, DC, Metro Station Architecture (2018)

quuxplusone — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 03:35:14 +0000

Article URL: https://ggwash.org/view/68565/metro-has-11-types-of-station-architecture.-learn-them-all-with-this-map

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164121

Points: 62

# Comments: 21

New comment by quuxplusone in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

quuxplusone — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 20:32:00 +0000

... which started with "Night of the Living Dead"... :)

RFC/The future of Abstract Wikipedia

quuxplusone — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:39:51 +0000

Article URL: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/The_future_of_Abstract_Wikipedia

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145102

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by quuxplusone in "Manual: •.,:;…!?·"

quuxplusone — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:31:46 +0000

> to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark ([filtered out])

IMHO that's an old-school-ism: I've never seen that in the post-Unicode world, but I recall its being common in the days of PC-compatibles, when square root was one of the ~256 characters you got, and checkmark wasn't, so you made do. In the same bucket with "using eszett (ß) as a lowercase beta (β)" or "using upper-half-of-integral (⌠) as a long S (ſ)." In fact Wikipedia's footnotes mention all three of these substitutions. (Or "using hyphen-minus (-) as a minus sign (−)." ;))

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

[2] - https://knowware.dk/dos56/norton-commander-1.shtml — see the last two screenshots on this page, from Norton Commander

New comment by quuxplusone in "Better to Beg Forgiveness"

quuxplusone — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:59:51 +0000

> it doesn't make sense to spend hours papering over a legal agreement with someone who wants to sell seven copies of a book at an anarchist book-fair

Huh, you're right. That's not at all a correct use of the phrase "paper over." There are three more uses, too, vaguer and thus less obviously wrong. I wonder what the deal is.

In this particular sentence, "going over" would fit.

However, in general I think Cory is (mis)using the phrase as if it means "legitimize" or "associate a paper trail with": not just to review the wording but to come up with the wording in the first place. (Not just "going over" but "working up.") I could just barely believe this is the jargon of some lawyerly (sub)culture.

New comment by quuxplusone in "How old is Ann?"

quuxplusone — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:38:18 +0000

Indeed,

> (A writer to the Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser of 1903-10-24 points out that you can get the apparently-most-common wrong answer if you read the puzzle incorrectly as “She was twice as old as Ann was when Mary [sic] was as old as Ann now is.”)

New comment by quuxplusone in "How old is Ann?"

quuxplusone — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:34:31 +0000

> Dozens of people declare solemnly that Mary and Ann are twins, though the slightest attempt to "prove" this shows it does not fulfil the conditions of the problem. [...] "About Mary and Ann, I think they are eight years old," says a woman, disregarding the first words of the question, which state that Mary is twenty-four.

[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn88085488/1903-10-31/ed-1/?sp=...

New comment by quuxplusone in "How old is Ann?"

quuxplusone — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:27:00 +0000

Not the Flynn effect; just people having fun, and selection bias. I (the blogger) deliberately left out many boring responses, except for linking to the Evening World's letters page of 1903-11-11.[1] I filtered out scores of replies from schoolchildren walking through the algebra to get the correct answer, and dozens of (usually short) replies from people of various ages giving wrong answers with and without reasoning, some almost certainly joking, some almost certainly not. But that's what you should expect from a Letters to the Editor section on any given math meme! Our discourse hasn't changed that much over 120 years. See my other post,[2] linked at the bottom of the current one, on "What is 8÷2(2+2)?" — that's not as fair a question, but the discourse is pretty much the same in unfiltered Letters-to-the-Editor sections: "I think it's X. Well, I think it's Y."

The whole point of this kind of meme is for the populace to perform disagreement about the answer! (See also: the Monty Hall problem; sports; comments sections.)

[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030193/1903-11-11/ed-1/?sp=...

[2] - https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2019/08/01/what-is-8-divi...

New comment by quuxplusone in "An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan"

quuxplusone — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:42:54 +0000

You mean the new, worse, Dune movies. The David Lynch Dune movie was pretty colorful, right? So Dune itself was... Dunkirk-ified?

New comment by quuxplusone in "Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI"

quuxplusone — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:40:17 +0000

> Combined with a TikTok account of a person who is clearly participating in the attention economy, I am skeptical.

Yep, from the context, 100% this is fake. Also, while this Jason Gibson claims to be a history professor at Alcorn State University, it seems to me that Alcorn State doesn't have a history department, and no "Jason Gibson" appears anywhere in the faculty list of Alcorn's College of Arts and Sciences. https://www.alcorn.edu/academics/schools-and-departments/col...

Maybe I'm sheltered, but I've never seen a university professor without a departmental web page and a list of publications. Or a RateMyProfessors.com listing.

New comment by quuxplusone in "ChatGPT convinced an Alabama woman to end her life to fulfill a divine prophecy"

quuxplusone — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:21:08 +0000

The complaint quoted in the article is here, in PDF form: https://webapps.sftc.org/ci/CaseInfo.dll?CaseNum=CGC26637986...

(Click "Documents," then "Complaint and demand for jury trial.")

New comment by quuxplusone in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

quuxplusone — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:53:08 +0000

One of your snails is clearly a chambered nautilus instead. :)

New comment by quuxplusone in "Show HN: Justif – Knuth-Plass justification and microtypography for the web"

quuxplusone — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:42:48 +0000

Not quite. A "thin space" is thinner than an ordinary interword space, which in turn is thinner (or at least less stretchy) than an intersentence space. The space in "No. 12" or "Fig. 7" or "Mr. Jones" or "cf. page 5" is by definition an interword space! The problem is that HTML renderers tend to prefer to set it as an intersentence space instead, because they think "." always indicates the end of a sentence. Using can help; that's like "~" in TeX. TeX also supports a breaking-but-never-intersentence-sized space via "\ " (backslash space), which is what you'd probably want to use in "cf.\ page~5." AFAIK, HTML/Unicode have no equivalent of that.

New comment by quuxplusone in "Who Is America's Homer?"

quuxplusone — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 01:06:50 +0000

> It’s also probably been read by the majority of Americans, or at least the story is well-known.

Read by, yes. Story well-known, I doubt. What is the story of The Great Gatsby, in a few words? (But then again, what is the story of the Iliad, anyway? Something about the wrath of Achilles, right?) [I should clarify: to answer that the Iliad is about "the Trojan war" or "Achilles dragging the body of Hector" seems insufficient to me in the same way it would be insufficient to say that Gatsby is about "a guy who throws parties" or "a murder in a swimming pool."]

Twain is the obvious "American Homer" not just because his name pops immediately to mind, but also because his two best-known works (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) stand in the same relation to each other as the Iliad and Odyssey: a minor character in one becomes the protagonist of the other. As someone above already commented, too, both works are episodic and have given us many pop-culture images: I dare say only Tom's painting of the fence is proverbial, but the cave adventure, the feud, attending one's own funeral, and probably several more episodes are embedded in American pop culture to the same extent as the Cyclops, Circe, and the Lotus-Eaters. Gatsby is a great novel, but what has it given to our collective unconscious? The green light and... beautiful shirts?

What does it say that there have been three adequate film adaptations of Gatsby, while there have been (as far as I know) none at all of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, the Iliad, or the Odyssey?

(Side note: About 15 years ago I read Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned and thought it was very good and inventive; I recommend it. These days Wikipedia tells me that "many Fitzgerald scholars typically consider The Beautiful and Damned to be among the author's weaker novels," so maybe something excellent is waiting for me if I ever get around to reading This Side of Paradise or Tender is the Night.)