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Comment by helb | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remembers NetBSD's wtf?

http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi/man?wtf+6+NetBSD-curren...

    $ wtf wtf          
    WTF: {what,when,where,who,why} the fuck                                                    
    $ wtf bsd          
    BSD: berkeley software distribution                                                        
    $ wtf linux        
    wtf: I don't know what linux means!

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As a non-native English speaker, I need it all the time to follow conversations on Internet. I've also made a a personal acronyms database to read GCC's internals documentation and another to translate errno codes to their constant name and vice-versa: https://github.com/lgeorget/acronymdb?files=1

> As a non-native English speaker, I need it all the time to follow conversations on Internet

I found that installing the google dictionary extension[1] for chrome solved that problem for me entirely.

you just doubleclick on the word and a popup opens with its definition.

This extension is the primary reason I'd loath to ever to switch browsers.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...

I'm trying out switching over to Firefox and this is 100% the biggest thing I miss about Chrome. I keep double-clicking words and waiting a few seconds just for nothing to pop up.

There are many extensions for Firefox that provide the same functionality. Here's one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dictionary-ex...

Also, if you're using Windows, you can use WordWeb (which is a full-fledged app).

And on Mac you can three finger tap on any word to get a definition.

The firefox extension is incompatible with the current firefox version, and the UX of WordWeb is ... incomparably bad.

I maintain my own set of modern internet acronyms for it. Speaking of which, I need to merge a pull request for that.

There was a super helpful Internet jargon list maintained by one of the 3-letter federal agencies, obtained through an FOIA request I believe... I used to refer to it whenever I needed to decipher confusing twitter conversations.

Are you talking about the Jargon File by any chance.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html

The Jargon File is maintained by esr, which is 3 letters, but I don't think he's a federal agency. ;-)

We can neither confirm nor deny that he's a federal agency.

This one?

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nze74k/the-fbi-bu...

I would love to merge that into Arch's wtf, but it is just a collection of scanned images. No text.

https://archive.org/stream/FBIGuideToInternetSlang/Internet%... has OCR-ed text, but the quality is poor.

https://github.com/matthewspencer/twitter-shorthand has transcription of the first 22 pages.

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