Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Side note: This is an interesting headline for dating a person. My instant/initial thought when I read "I turned an old phone into a NAS" was to picture a rotary phone somehow modded with ethernet and hard drives. "Old phone" to me means a rotary phone. After a few seconds I realized "old phone" to many people now could still mean something that's running Android.

That said, this is really cool. I love clever ways to re-purpose older-but-working phones!

View on HN

In a similar twist of misinterpretation, when you said it "is an interesting headline for dating a person" I was thinking of romantic courtship.

I couldn't figure out what dating had to do with this either.

"hey baby, want to come back to my place and watch a pirated movie off my NAS phone?"

Your usernames add another layer of humor and coincidence.

Dial M for Movies

> In a similar twist of misinterpretation, when you said it "is an interesting headline for dating a person" I was thinking of romantic courtship.

That's exactly how I interpreted their sentence as well.

Because today, people do indeed write headlines and profiles when trying to get a date.

Same

I did so too, and still had to reread and reinterpret the original comment after having seen yours. I didn't think twice about it, because if I would have my first date with someone and they would tell me they had this project running, I'd be immediately interested, knowing I found someone from "my tribe".

You can also ask someone to mime answering a phone call. Some people will extend their pinky and thumb, but younger generations will just hold their palm to their ear or position their hand like they're gripping a flat device.

I never understood this, though, because never even with old rotary phones, did we need to position our hand with our pinky and thumb like that

I've thought of it like an approximation of where the functional parts of the phone were. Thumb is the transmitter and the pinky is the receiver.

That's how Inspector Gadget answered his phone.

More seriously, people picking up the receiver of a Western Electric Model 500 would grip the receiver tightly; extending your thumb and pinky from this grip gets you the "pretend phone" hand mime. Otherwise it just looks like you're holding your fist to your ear. People grip a cellphone quite differently, generally with their fingerpads or the middles of their fingers.

Holding ones fist up to their ear, as if holding a rotary phone handset, may come across as overtly aggressive.

Or sexual depending on the angle and tightness of fist.

I don't think it is replicating have position, it is just the convenient way to shape the hand so it (sort of) stretches from mouth to ear.

It is common to cartoons and TV shows so some people will have learned it from there, but I'd guess the mine predates those shows. Maybe it when predates TV being common in people's homes.

Or the very modern pose of holding your smartwatch to your ear during a call, vs. Mr Burns listening if his mechanical watch was still ticking.

You young whipper-snapper!

Why back in the day, we didn’t have ‘em new-fangled rotary phones. We had to tell the operator who to call!

Where 'old' = > 2 years

Reply on news.ycombinator.com