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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

Ø is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sami languages. (Wikipedia)

It’s not an unused letter that you can snap up as a cool way to write zero. People will read it, some will recognize it and assume it has meaning, because it has. That’s how letters work.

There are zeroes with dashes through them, but if you look closely they almost always take care to keep the dash inside the (non-)circle zero to make the difference clearer.

I realize most people in the world won’t care about this, but with Northern European eyes, this looks stupid.

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The ∅ symbol (U+2205 in Unicode), even though it's inspired by, is not the same as the letter Ø (U+00D8 in Unicode), and has been, for almost a century already, the "correct" way to represent an empty set in mathematical notation (alongside {}).

That is the meaning everyone that does not primarily use the Northern European alphabet (aka most people in the world) assume it has.

Maybe suppress your instinctive outrage next time, or if you really need to be angry at something, at least direct it at the right place: the dead mathematician who proposed it [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Weil

I copypasted the character from their website, which is why I know it’s not U+2205 being used. They’re also easy to tell apart.

Maybe suppress your instinctive correction next time until you know that the person you’re correcting is in fact mistaken. Or just use a nicer tone to begin with.

Perhaps an intern used the wrong character when updating the website?

Incidentally...

> The Ø in ZeroMQ is all about tradeoffs. On the one hand this strange name lowers ZeroMQ’s visibility on Google and Twitter. On the other hand it annoys the heck out of some Danish folk who write us things like “ØMG røtfl”, and “Ø is not a funny looking zero!” and “Rødgrød med fløde!”, which is apparently an insult that means “may your neighbours be the direct descendants of Grendel!” Seems like a fair trade.

https://zguide.zeromq.org/docs/preface/

Because I'm sure more than one person is wondering, the literal translation of "rødgrød med fløde" is "red porridge with heavy cream", not an insult but a traditional danish dessert.

Edit: missed an s in dessert.

I saw that, and it doesn’t do anything for me personally than paint the authors as petulant. Clearly “some danish folk” are the obvious other here and they themselves can’t be bothered because they don’t read the character. If they want to refer to the mathematical character as mentioned in other comments, why not use that instead of one from an actual alphabet? They’re free to do whatever they want but anyone familiar with the character is also free to see them as being not a little US-centric.

I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be a joke. Also the main dev is not American but Belgian.

And they say us Germans lack a sense of humor...

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