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Comment by Grustaf | Hacker News Reader

Monoliths are supposed to be made of stone, hence the name...

I think stele would be the right word maybe?

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

Probably not. Solid metal objects at that scale have not been a feature of human history for particularly long, they probably don't have a name that's normally used in an archaeological context.

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

that’s super cool!

In fact there is an art-historical precedent, dating back half a century, for calling modern vertical land art pieces "stele." Michael Heizer did it.

http://legacy.earlham.edu/~vanbma/index/121299heizer-art.htm

http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/city

So lith, from Greek lithos, stone. Problem is there's no straight equivalent for a metal bar - perhaps rávdos/rabdos, meaning ingot/rod.

So, "Monorabd"?

Big hunk o' metal

"Sideros" (roughly) is iron in Greek.

Monosider?

métallon is probably the most analogous word to líthos. unfortunately "monometal" just sounds kinda dumb.

Not for a metal band that refuses to jump on the "stereo" hype!

MÖNÖMETAL

Monoum https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ium

What is metal, if not refined rock extract?

Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

Also correct for the musical genres.

Also: hardcore.

Haha brilliant!

Perhaps but the term lithography refers to a printing technique that can use stone or metal.

Most of the ones I've seen over my career are made of spaghetti.

Or mashed potatoes?

"This means something..."

UHF! I caught that reference.

It took me years to understand that reference fully. When I saw UHF originally it bugged me that I knew it was a reference to something but I didn't know what. Finally, a decade later I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I finally put two and two together.

probably the weirdest comment on HN to which I've ever thought "me too!"

I saw close encounters as a kid. I don't know how much I enjoyed it, but it at least gave me a deeper appreciation of UHF and the Simpsons.

Due to my age when I watched UHF I had not seen many of the movies that it referenced: Conan the Barbarian, Rambo, Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Close Encounters - only over time did I come to appreciate it.

It was meant to be a direct reference.

I've only seen one part of UHF - Michael Richards' scene w/"The FIREHOSE!!"

You're missing out. UHF is packed with hilarity.

For those of us who don't know: what does "UHF" stand for here?

it's a comedy movie starring Weird Al Yankovic

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098546/

The Weird Al movie from the 80s.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f9/f7/bd/f9f7bd6cd80f1db36a07...

Or mud

Should we call them monoghetti?

Spaghlith

That sounds more like something from Lovecraft's mythos.

Spaghettilith

Or code

They got all that iron out of one really big piece of ore.

I think its named after the space odyssey 2001 version

I have a Monolisp.

I have a lisp - but I am very monotonous.

Most monoliths I've dealt with are 20,000+ line legacy C files

Ha! I once reduced a 10,000 line module in a Broadcom 802.11 driver to one page - a template to construct a message. Calls to the old code (5-6 lines) went to nothing - simply pass your structure to the message API.

But that was an eggregious driver. Previous version: ~15 modules. Rewritten by some purist: 900(!) modules. I kid you not.

Please tell me more! How come the calls to the old code went to nothing? It does not surprise me but I wonder how it happened in this specific instance.

Who did the 900 modules rewrite?

Instead of declaring a message and creating it with a call to the (now obsolete) module specific to the structure being transmitted, one simply passed the structure to the message-send api. The conversion template to 'Message' automatically rewrote the structure argument as a message argument.

I was re-writing the driver as a simple C++ set of pure virtual objects and implementations for my hardware. So when I scavenged code to send a certain structure as a message, I simply didn't make the old calls. I remember I did (for some reason) edit all the old modules to use the new API, to prove it still worked I guess. A long afternoon of search and replace.

The (Korean?) company that owned the driver must have had a team or something. It was extremely brain-dead code for every element of an 802.11/ethernet abstraction as a separate module, done twice (once for the driver; once for the module firmware). Double structure definitions for everything.

My team wanted a walk-thru of the existing driver. I scheduled two hours, one before lunch and one after. I opened with "I've brought just the 500 most significant modules today, and we're going to walk thru a connection and message send". Proceeded to open dozens of nested module references on a very long path from triggering a connection attempt to exchanging the first message for negotiation. The hour was up.

Nobody came to the 2nd hour after lunch.

> Double structure definitions for everything.

I wonder if that's because two different teams worked on the two different abstractions.

> Nobody came to the 2nd hour after lunch.

I guess that the pain of that first hour convinced them that your rewrite was trustworthy.

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