Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

Some time ago I wanted to mass produce new inventions so I generated list of random phrases in form of adjective-adjective-noun and start reading. Most of it was nonsense, occasionally there was something viable, in rare occasion some interesting new idea. Then I stumbled upon this gem:

"Creepy wet uncle"

and I giggled. I kept reading and once in a while there was something funny. After a while I realized that 3 random words can make me laugh, but no 3 random words made me cry.

Before I thought that laughter and crying are equal but opposite emotions, but they are not. Crying is much deeper and requires more emotional attachment. To make someone laugh all you need is 3 random words.

View on HN

> Crying is much deeper and requires more emotional attachment.

I dunno, there's probably a fair number of people who might cry at something like "Unused baby shoes" (obviously cribbing off the apocryphal Hemingway story.)

So once upon a time the startup I was working for did a promotion at a big gaming conference. We printed a bunch of business cards that had individually unique promo codes people could redeem. I used 3 random words from a dictionary off the internet as the promo codes cuz that seemed more ergonomic than some random characters.

Let's just say the phrases on some of those cards were quite choice. Thankfully everyone had a sense of humor about it and it wasn't a big deal.

In science we say "Ahah!"

In comedy we say "Hah!"

In art we say "Ah!"

All three are expressions of the experience of making novel connections or seeing things from a new perspective.

Nice! Seems like "Aha!", "Hah!" and "Ahh!" would be more symmetric since they're (almost) all anagrams. More pleasing for both the scientist and the artist ;_)

The original is pleasing in that it's removing the first letter each time.

I like that too.

I've started wondering if people cry when they have no other way to express what they're feeling. It's not limited to just feeling sad for instance. And crying seems to happen more often when people (especially children) are confused by their own emotions.

I did the same but for some activation codes. I used a dictionary of swear words to keep it clean but still got interesting results. Had to make sure the word Jew did not appear as that came up in a phrase that would have not been well received!

Random fact about that word: The scrabble dictionary has a redacted and unredacted version. "jew" is one of the redacted words because scrabble disallows proper nouns, so the remaining usage (as a verb) is offensive.

Verb or adjective?

transitive verb - To bargain shrewdly or unfairly with. Often used with down.

https://www.wordnik.com/words/jew

edited (I got the whole M Jackson backwards, removed it)

Thanks for explaining. Transitives never occur to me.

I had almost exactly the same situation happen. I had to produce activation codes just before Christmas. I was on my break, chilling at home when I got a text message asking if they could email me the bit of script so I could change it to remove the vowels. I complied and when I got back to the office after Christmas asked why.

Turns out that when you generate over a million random letter sequences some of them are rather fruity words. In fact my original code was being referred to as "the random f*k generator" lol

My solution to this was to pull down some lists of swear words and then forbid every single digraph that appeared on the lists. It eliminated something like 25% of the randomly generated tokens, but the ones that passed this check were pretty reliably un-wordlike.

You don't really need the vowels. I remember a windows license key that started with FCKGW.

Thanks for sharing this little anecdote:)

> After a while I realized that 3 random words can make me laugh, but no 3 random words made me cry.

Attributed to Ernest Hemingway though there is some doubt, supposedly written in response to a challenge to write a very short story:

  "For sale: baby shoes, never worn"

My first guess at this would be that the parents bought boy's and girl's shoes, and sold the pair they didn't need. Nothing to cry over.

Or a place that, you know, sells baby shoes.

Personally, I'm partial to:

"For sale: baby shoes, just hatched."

but that's back to laugh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoes,_never_wo...

Maybe in Hemingway’s time shoes were so rare they wouldn’t go unused?

lmao so random

There are many different types of laughter, but no-one is naming them because it "kills the vibe" or "ruins the moment"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com