Hacker News: tengwar2

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.

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

tengwar2 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:53:40 +0000

DR-DOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS) was reasonably popular, and was a derivative of CP/M-86. I never saw the original OS in the wild, though.

New comment by tengwar2 in "An Obsessive Focus on UX: Pilot's Pressure-Regulating Kire-Na Highlighter"

tengwar2 — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:11:11 +0000

UK: ours usually have a thin serrated metal edge.

New comment by tengwar2 in "The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time"

tengwar2 — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:07:54 +0000

This doesn't look like anything to do with tax. You would definitely need to cover it in the normal tax return in addition to this.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Hindenburg’s Smoking Room"

tengwar2 — Sat, 23 May 2026 11:48:33 +0000

I really wish the ferry over to Norway still ran, but the one I just missed by a couple of years ran from Denmark up to Shetland, then to Faroe and Iceland. I had wanted to ride up to Shetland and then take the bike up further. I think you can still do it as a foot passenger, but there is no vehicle service.

New comment by tengwar2 in "New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated references"

tengwar2 — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:38:54 +0000

Well, I certainly didn't make them up. But it was common to follow a reference and find that there was no paper on the other end.

New comment by tengwar2 in "New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated references"

tengwar2 — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:36:33 +0000

In physics, references which just didn't exist. That could be that the author made it up, but often it's because they transcribed the reference from another paper without reading it - we know because a few people have deliberately introduced fake references to trace how far they would go. The reasons are not the same as for AI, but the problem they produce is the same.

References which don't accurately reflect the quoted material seem more common in other subjects.

New comment by tengwar2 in "New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated references"

tengwar2 — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:46:23 +0000

It's not just AI, though. I did a doctorate in physics about 40 years back, and bad references were a problem back then.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Int a = 5; a = a++ + ++a; a =? (2011)"

tengwar2 — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:43:37 +0000

Not nasal demons in this case (https://groups.google.com/g/comp.std.c/c/ycpVKxTZkgw/m/S2hHd...): thaumasiotes shows that we can expect a numeric answer.

New comment by tengwar2 in "California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws"

tengwar2 — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:09:42 +0000

I've found that in Italy (at least Milan and Turin), not making eye contact is key.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Email could have been X.400 times better"

tengwar2 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:26:37 +0000

I am still trying to forget setting up sendmail.cf in that era.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Email could have been X.400 times better"

tengwar2 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:22:32 +0000

Just looking back, we were using the hybrid ".uucp" pseudo domain in 1995, e.g. see the contact details for the third author on this papes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2291331_Beyond_Hack... (not me, a colleague). For those who don't recognise this, .uucp was an unofficial "TLD" used for UUCP-based email systems accessible via an Internet relay by a dial-up modem. The relay would rewrite jlc@bmtech.uucp to bmtech!jlc, a short UUCP bang-path email address.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Email could have been X.400 times better"

tengwar2 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:10:08 +0000

> We could have had a world without spam

You might have had an American walled garden, but I don't see this being accepted internationally.

New comment by tengwar2 in "It's OK to compare floating-points for equality"

tengwar2 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:02:08 +0000

Could you explain the bit about "all NaNs are equivalent"? IEEE requires that NaN ≠ NaN, but I suspect that I am just misunderstanding what you mean.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Fuzix OS"

tengwar2 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:45:34 +0000

An operating system for munitions? An intelligent distribution panel?

Seriously, it's not that hard for the maintainer to write one sentence describing what the project does.

New comment by tengwar2 in "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark"

tengwar2 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:59:09 +0000

On the last 64 bits, yes. On mobile phones, the first 64 bits may be fixed. This was something I argued against when I was at Vodafone Group, but didn't get any traction. That was a while back, but I'd assume that this is still the case, and that mobile phone addresses can be used for tracking.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)"

tengwar2 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:14:54 +0000

Yes - but that's the gauges you are taking as standard. In fact narrow gauge railways are pretty common, since they are easier and cheaper to put through some landscapes. But as for main line high speed / high load railways, the balance of cost vs utility usually works out the same. Another major effect is standardisation in Victorian Britain (which is why Brunel's gauge on the GWR was replaced). Those engineers went out in to the wider world, and took standard gauge with them, and often the locomotives were manufactured in Britain. Hence the long distance railways often use exactly the same gauge - but the exact measurement was a matter of Parliament deciding on what compromise to draw based on early railway lines, bearing in mind that it was a lot easier to reduce gauge rather than increase it.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)"

tengwar2 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:19:29 +0000

The story about "the width of the backsides of two Roman horses" is just a myth. Which should be obvious if you look at the many different railway gauges in use. You can trace it back to 19C standardisation, and argue over whether Brunel's 7'¼" was better than standard gauge, or if we should all have converted to 3m Breitspurbahn, but that's a different question.