Hacker News: tengwar2

New comment by tengwar2 in "A Dying Art: The last of the morticians"

tengwar2 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:48:37 +0000

Yes - in Ireland (both the Republic and Northern Ireland, and irrespective of religion), the funeral is usually within three days. I'm based in England, the south-eastern part of the UK, and here funerals are typically 3-5 weeks after the death, and getting later. This is partly because of needing to get a slot at the crematorium (though this is largely a manufactured problem in my view). However the main reason for delay is additional checks after a serial killer doctor was discovered in 1998.

New comment by tengwar2 in "About the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.6"

tengwar2 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:58:13 +0000

15.7.8 is out today as well, with these security fixes: https://support.apple.com/en-us/128071.

For context, there have been issues with MacOS 26 which have led many people to defer upgrading until MacOS 27 is available, and MacOS 15 is the previous version.

New comment by tengwar2 in "A Dying Art: The last of the morticians"

tengwar2 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:54:16 +0000

Interesting. This is one of the things that differs hugely between countries. I've taken about 550 funerals in the UK (I have what you might call a "portmanteau career"). I've only had one open-coffin funeral, and that was for a Caribbean family. It's not uncommon for the immediate family to visit the body before the funeral, but I haven't heard of restoration being used for that and I think embalming is quite unusual as well. In fact I was at the National Funeral Exhibition recently, and I didn't see anyone doing restorative services.

New comment by tengwar2 in "The World's 2,400 Castles"

tengwar2 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:06:32 +0000

For England as well, assuming a conservative definition like: Norman or later, mortared stone construction with remaining walls at least 4m high, not something like a fortified farm house for a single family. If you include Iron Age hill forts, the number becomes absurd.

New comment by tengwar2 in "NoiseLang: Where N = 5 is a Dirac delta"

tengwar2 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:50:18 +0000

Just checked, and it's gone from the list. Did you happen to find out what the problem was?

New comment by tengwar2 in "NoiseLang: Where N = 5 is a Dirac delta"

tengwar2 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:09:47 +0000

Firstly, I'm not intending any slight on you personally! In fact this might be more of an issue for you interacting with the site than for people just reading an article.

There are multiple versions of the list. The authoritative site appears to be https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists, and making a fairly random choice, I used the "medium" version of the "Threat intelligence feed", and specifically the one marked "Link" for AdBlock. That took me to https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/hagezi/dns-blocklists@latest/adb..., and manualmeida.dev does appear in that list.

The software I'm using is Little Snitch on a Mac, but since the entry is in the list, that's not the problem.

New comment by tengwar2 in "NoiseLang: Where N = 5 is a Dirac delta"

tengwar2 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:03:56 +0000

My system is blocking that site as it is on the HaGeZi blocklist. I don't have any further information, and I'm not expressing an opinion on the site. An alternative might be https://noiselang.com, which is not on the blocklist.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

tengwar2 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:52:32 +0000

They have, but antiquity is not necessarily a good argument. I attended a university which required examinees to wear a black suit, white bow tie, bands, and a gown. I don't recommend it.

But this is missing the point. The issue is not that people in general can't write by hand for hours, but that these particular people may have difficulty.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

tengwar2 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:13:07 +0000

Nothing to do with weight. It's a cramp in the muscles of the hand from holding the pen and making fine movements for hours. I'm guessing you are from a generation after keyboard use became common, so you haven't encountered it.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

tengwar2 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 23:15:17 +0000

I'm 60+. I'd be more concerned about the student's physical ability to write for several hours continuously. Writer's cramp used to be a problem, and that was when we were used to hand-writing everything. Legibility is also a consideration: I have to hand-write a lot(keyboards would not be socially acceptable for some of my work), and even with decades of practice and a hand that I designed for legibility, sometimes I have difficulty reading my own writing.

New comment by tengwar2 in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

tengwar2 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:09:44 +0000

81k - which is interesting, because last time I did something similar, about 20y back, it was 50k. I'm not sure if I've improved.

New comment by tengwar2 in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

tengwar2 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:07:44 +0000

Yes - a very marked step rather than a gradual increase, I thought.

New comment by tengwar2 in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

tengwar2 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:06:02 +0000

It's probably more meaningful to force a guess, since you may guess on the basis of word elements that you do know. At worst, it's possible to compensate for a 25% chance of getting the right word by chance.

New comment by tengwar2 in "I hate compilers"

tengwar2 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:14:28 +0000

Yup, and I suspect that even if OP is honest in this respect, if proof-of-work gets established as a normal practice for web pages, it's going to be used this way.

But just taking this as-is, what is the environmental impact likely to be when multiplied up by the number of users? Proof of work is a bad idea.

New comment by tengwar2 in "But yak shaving is fun (2019)"

tengwar2 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:49:44 +0000

Different species, similar niche. Highland cows are a breed of small cow bred to thrive in the rough conditions of the Highlands of Scotland, but sometimes kept in England for interest. Very hairy, and placid enough that they are always allowed to keep their horns. Yaks are a small domesticated bovid bred to thrive in the Himalayas. Very hairy, and apparently placid enough to ride.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

tengwar2 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:42:13 +0000

And if those requirements include the need to supply passport information, that's a reason not to host in Germany.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

tengwar2 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:53:15 +0000

Credit card is a largely fixed risk of financial loss, with some legal safeguards for recovery, and the ability to get a replacement card with a different number. Passport carries an open long-term risk of impersonation and you can't just get a new passport because some company has a copy. Just the financial side of that risk can have much greater impact. Unless a company has a legal requirement to "know your customer", e.g. a financial institution, this is a red flag.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

tengwar2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:30:52 +0000

Or English has only two tenses (present and past perfect) and everything else is done with modifiers.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

tengwar2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:29:34 +0000

This happened with more than one letter. For instance the Scots language had a letter yogh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh), which was written somewhat like a rounded "3" but lower on the line. Early printers had only the characters of the English language, and since this character looked like a hand-written z, that is what they used in its place. Hence the name "Menzies" is pronounced "Ming-is", since that isn't actually a z.

Welsh suffered more: it used to be full of "k"s. When the first Welsh Bible was printed, the English printer did not have enough "k"s, and substituted "c", and the language now does not use "k" at all. Apparently the printer's note on the matter still exists.

New comment by tengwar2 in "CP/M-86 & MS-DOS Cross Development Environment"

tengwar2 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:00:57 +0000

I'd say the last versions of CP/M for the Z80 - particularly on the Amstrad CPC128, PCW256 and PCW256. We had a whole lab using PCWs as standard equipment, including one sitting at a 3000V DC offset in a perspex cage (controlling part of a C14 accelerator). CP/M 3.0 did bank-switched memory, so the graphics were switched out and you could copy the user-space utilities in to a RAM disk on startup. It was reasonably easy to write RSXs (analogous to TSRs on MS/DOS), which can be handy on a single-tasking OS.