Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> I remember her asking some question that prompted a “Paul Graham” response. I think she was asking something like “so who might your investors be if things go well?” And being 19 and confident, I foolishly felt I might have what it took to run a YC co. Her reply was illuminating, though: “Who?”

I still get that even when talking about pmarca or pg (or even rms) outside of tech circles. Sometimes I think I may be further down the rabbit hole than I think I am.

View on HN

Paul Graham has a million and a third followers on Twitter. He's what you'd call "off-mainstream." Andreesen is off-off-mainstream. RMS, on the other hand, is pretty niche, unfortunately. The world would be a lot better if their positions were reversed.

0.016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅% of the world's population is following Graham on twitter.com, which is a lot of people!

(Edited s/0.00016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅%/0.016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅%; forgot to move the decimal. Thanks, shric.)

You're off by a factor of 100. It's 0.016% or approximately 1 in 6000 people.

Ah, yeah, did the conversion wrong.

Please don't zalgo.

It isn't Zalgo (Zalgo is abusive use of Unicode symbols, not for their intended purpose). It's using a unicode symbol (combining overline) for its intended purpose, repeating decimals.[1][2] Is there a better, built-in Arc md way of displaying a repeating decimal?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_decimal

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overline

You may be on an OS that renders the overline in a not-annoying way.

On MacOS, here's what we see: https://i.imgur.com/c90WOgO.png

I can imagine that this wasn't your intent, and maybe it shows up differently on Windows or Linux. If so, you might want to say so.

(If it was your intent for it to look like that, though, then I agree it's the pedantic equivalent of Zalgo.)

It renders as-expected on NetBSD, Linux and Haiku. If you check the linked Overline Wikipedia page, «Overline (markup)» and «Overline (character)» look near-equivalent.

I see what may have been the problem, though. It looks like somewhere in the process the overline was duplicated. Probably an issue with my IME (I've been working on it for a while now, but it's still got a few quirks). Does this (6̅) look right to OS X users?

Bingo! That looks perfect. :)

Always nice to clear up a miscommunication. dances around

Have a great evening.

You too, Shawn.

Oddly enough, the repeating symbol looks fine on iOS but not macOS..

Is there a better

Since 2005, the accepted internet convention[1] has been 'repeating of course'

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4&t=71s

Ah ok.

What’s RMS?

Root Mean Square. It's a math thing that comes up in audio processing.

edit: this is a joke in theme with the discussion of relative obscurity.

Richard Matthew Stallman. He was the catalyst for the free software movement.

He's that guy. He did almost everything except the kernel

Reply on news.ycombinator.com