70 Unique Ways to Encode ＜ | Hacker News Reader

70 Unique Ways to Encode ＜

gist.github.com

44 pointsbikeshack21 comments

Ironic because the headline isn't even <

It's FULLWIDTH LESS-THAN SIGN: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/ff1c/index.htm

Is that supposed to be some kind of HN easter egg? I mean, who has quick enough access to that character to accidentally write it instead? And if he's using some esoteric layout, I'm sure he knows his keyboard well enough not to mix them up!

No, it's likely deliberate on the part of the submitter, since HN stupidly strips stuff which looks like HTML.

If you have a Japanese or Chinese input method installed, full-width characters are readily type-able.

I know that "unique", which became a synonym of "unusual" years ago, has now also become a synonym of "distinct", especially in tech contexts, like "unique hits", but it still grates on my ears (or eyes, in this case). Languages are fluid, and change is inevitable, but I'm sad when those changes are careless and cause a loss of precision of expression.

What do you even mean by this? What did the word originally mean?

"etymology: unique" on Google gives http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=unique and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unique#Etymology.

With definitions "forming the only one of its kind" and "being the only one of its kind". I don't have a trillion unique bits of memory on my SSD, as they are all interchangeable.

What are better words to use?

Would it matter if the audience is international or if the audience mostly has English as a first language?

"70 Different Ways to Encode〈"?

“Distinct” would do, I suppose, as surrender to the language prescriptivists.

"70 Distinct Ways to Encode <" would be the traditionally correct way to say it. I should have made that more clear in my original rant. My objection to using "unique" in this context is that doing so further erodes the original, narrow meaning of "unique" as "one of a kind". I suppose that makes me a prescriptivist and I'm okay with that.

Perhaps the concept of "uniqueness" itself is dying, rather than language being watered down.

"Everyone is unique." with the watered down version of the word "unique" just means "Everyone is distinct."

Perhaps people are beginning to collectively believe that nothing is irreproducible.

"70 Ways to Encode <". It's concise and loses no meaning here.

> StoneCypher: All of the entities missing semicolons are incorrect.

> aprilthemoo: are you autistic or something StoneCypher?

Quality discussion right there.

Is this the quality of github comments in general?

Well... at least if you're trying to detect/remove HTML tags, the only one that works is the first in the list, as far as I know, thank goodness.

All the others actually render the character, someone please correct me if I'm wrong?

aka Why IDSs are practically useless, here's a NOP slide AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Complex systems always fail.

Wow, it's like a little piece of postmodern art.

I give you mine, Untitled 7 (solidus on web page):

Can someone explain lines 49-52?

So what

Here's another: \\546

and another: %%

etc.

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