Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it mattered so much for print, but in the early days of the internet you would hear people on the TV laboriously reading out "haich tee tee pee colon slash slash double-u double-u double-u dot contoso dot com".

This is why a friend of mine has the email address "dot at dot at dot at". Yes, that's uniquely parseable back to one valid rfc822 address that works.

I have occasionally wondered about programming language syntax that might take reading aloud into account. Puncutation ends up sounding like Victor Borge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf_TDuhk3No and of course Python's indentation is very at risk of ambiguity.

View on HN

After years of people mistyping "jasonmill" for "jasomill" in my (originally university-assigned) email address, I registered jasomill.at so I could receive email as "jasomilldot", because I guess turning the simple act of giving out my email address over the phone into an Abbott and Costello routine sounded like a good idea at the time.

Oh, and you don't need special syntax to write code to be read aloud, to wit,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl

> turning the simple act of giving out my email address over the phone into an Abbott and Costello routine sounded like a good idea at the time

Hah! I've been dealing with that for a few years now -- my email is most of my username and spelling it out is fun for neither party.

I've considered getting the shortest, most phonetic-friendly email possible specifically for phone calls; something like a3gx@gmail.com but also want to self-host. It's a hassle!

I have an address specifically for that—it's just one letter and a few digits, redirecting to the main account. Works like a charm. Especially when the native alphabet in the country is not Latin and laboriously explaining which letter is which is a meme from the phone calls era. Whereas I can just call digits by the names in the local language, and everyone is familiar with hearing them.

Meanwhile, with my main-ish addresses, I've been told that they look like a random jumble of letters or a password. And once I've given one of them over the phone, took ten minutes easily—with confusion as to even how many letters are there.

With my domain name, I've been using a one-letter address for humans but have found it often confuses people; it doesn't fit the pattern they expect. So, I've been thinking of switching to domain@domain.tld, which is still obviously "special" but matches the regular pattern better (and I don't have to spell out <domain> twice).

A family member has firstname@firstnamelastname.com, which is super nice, but unfortunately my name and most variants are taken.

And Sharon still denies she wrote Black Perl. (It was Larry.)

My GP is not very tech savvy and any time we call the surgery there is a lengthy unskippable message about Covid with the receptionist reading out https://111.nhs.uk/covid-19 down to the last colon.

Does it say 'slash' or 'forward slash'? Pet peeve of mine...

Fun to help someone via phone map a Windows share who doesn't know the difference/'what's a backslash?'

If you don’t know, how are you supposed to know whether forward slash has to have it’s upper or lower end forwards?

Or if you do know that, how do you know if "forwards" is to the left or right?

It's called a virgule if you want to stop the forward slash confusion. Of course nobody will know what you're talking about.

I recollect something similar. I used to have an email id that was: at . 80 @ atdot . at

Fun times reading it out!

> "haich tee tee pee colon slash slash double-u double-u double-u dot contoso dot com"

"WWW" is one of rare acronyms where it's easier to pronounce the full phrase. :)

Why did "triple-double-u" not catch on?

dub dub dub

Reminds me of "E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone"

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-it-woul...

+1 just for the Victor Borge reference. Maybe his first ever appearance on HN? Who knows?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10281306

.. which is also me :)

One could e.g. read lines at a loudness proportional to their indentation.

I imagine it would help to make code less indented should the author be required to read their work aloud.

"By 'rockstar' we really did mean 'somebody who could shout really loudly', sorry"

Victor Borge's solution for any nebulousness around punctuation for Alexa and other voice-activated devices is sheer genius! ...And, so funny and cute! Having seen this little bit reminds me that I have not seen/enjoyed nearly enough Victor Borge material! Thanks for sharing this video!!!

Common Lisp symbols and naming convention takes reading aloud into account well.

Yes, the naming convention does but the source code itself does not lend itself to it greatly with all the parentheses.

     open paren sum open paren tick one two three close paren close paren

That's not how you say it.

How do you say it?

You elide the parenthesis. They are as unnecessary when speaking Lisp code aloud as saying "comma", "period", or "question mark" are in everyday conversation.

9/10 times they would really mess it up and just go "whatever if says on the screen, go there" or something similar :)

My only hardship with this is about half the population doesn't know the difference between a slash and a backslash, which is probably not their fault because they wouldn't have encountered them outside of typesetting or computing. Which is fine until you hear the TV person above do it wrong. Luckily most browsers figure it out.

I like to tell people slash is the one you put in a date.

The only place a non-programmer user would encounter a backslash is in Windows (nee DOS) file paths, right? Yet another thing Microsoft has made worse in the world ;)

Can we talk about gboard, Google's default keyboard for Android for a moment?

On my phone at least, the backslash has an clearly and easily accessible shortcut (long press 'w'). Meanwhile, to enter a forward slash, one has to not only tap into the special symbols page, but actually tap again into the SECOND PAGE of that.

Does anyone have any insight as to just what these galaxy brains at Google are thinking?

Hashtag include open-angle-bracket ess tee dee eye oh dot aitch close-angle-bracket...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com