Hacker News Reader

SiValon Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more

Yes, Dick has been a nickname for Richard for about 800 years but only got its modern slang meaning in probably late-19th or early 20th century. It seems to have come out of the British military from the phrase "Tom, Dick, and Harry", which were such common names that the phrase meant every ordinary man. (Tommy was already slang for "British soldier".) And from there, one more evolutionary step for mankind....

SiValon Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more

The English form of daughter was also -dottir, but it was not common.

SiValon Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video, demonstrated on ThinkPad X230

Would a bit of Post-It Note (for minimal adhesion) damage the screen coating if left on most of the time? Would even that much thickness stress the screen when opened and closed thousands of times? Is there a better (self-service) material?

SiValon The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

It's a little sad, but you're right of course that many books no longer make business sense now that everything they offer is online and free. Well, when the AIs put us all out of business and we're home all day in our rabbit hutches, we'll have plenty of time and free content to read.

SiValon The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

Ah, I thought your name sounded familiar! In 2008, I bought "Reading Japanese with a Smile" on a trip to Japan and loved it. It was very well done and perfect for me. I ended up buying two copies and for years I kept checking on Kinokuniya visits hoping it would become a series. No such luck, but my guess is it was just too much work for too little reward. But you should know that a HN reader still remembers your work fondly after 16 years.

SiValon Claude for Desktop

Is this for the paid version? I'm using the free version, and it hasn't asked me for a phone number, but if the paid version requires a phone number, my reaction would be the same as yours: sorry, no.

SiValon AM radio law opposed by tech and auto industries is close to passing

I would love to see kids given the materials and taught how to build makeshift emergency radios in science class every couple of years. Then they could take them home, stick them in a closet or drawer somewhere, and in case of emergency, they would be everywhere.

SiValon Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

Does Apple charge 15% for each dollar up to a million plus 30% for each dollar above a million, or when you cross a million (in a year), do they suddenly jump to 30% of everything? IOW, if I have earned $999,999 so far this year, I have to pay Apple about $150,000. If I then make another $1 sale, do I owe a few cents more or another $150,000?

And once your rate goes to 30%, does it stay there the following year, or does the whole system reset to zero each year?

SiValon Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

I understand that some businesses might want to take the hit from a cost surge because they get an even higher revenue surge. But a large fraction of sites aren't like that and would prefer a loss of service to a cost overrun. Service providers should always offer a "maximum out-of-pocket cost" service option. Those that don't aren't suitable vendors for most customers and customers should be warned about them.

SiValon Ask HN: Local Mac Wysiwyg HTML Editor? (for “Lo-fi” website)

I'd like the same but with one more deployment option: create a (simple) static site that doesn't require any web server. I started an old relative on Dreamweaver about 25 years ago thinking that simple HTML files would make a good, open, archival rich-text alternative to plaintext. He wrote many articles that can still be double-clicked and viewed on any platform today and are among the most likely doc formats to still be readable a century from now (if any still are).

I had hoped that simple HTML would become a better choice than PDF or MS-Word for ordinary people writing for posterity, but unlike old Dreamweaver, almost all HTML tools today produce docs that must be served by a web server (and consist of separate HTML, CSS, JS, img files that get scattered.)

SiValon Ten years of “Go: The good, the bad, and the meh”

I completely agree. The wonderful speed of the compiler allows for quick small-change, test, small-change, test development. In theory. They then sabotage it by making "unused" warnings into errors, which forces you to waste the time the fast compiler could have saved, making temporary changes (ex: commenting out/in) that aren't needed for the test and won't be needed for production.

SiValon Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

If they were so advanced that they left the ordinary material world behind, then anything is possible. Otherwise, they would probably be like us in the sense that their in-use technologies would span every level from lowest to their own highest. As our tech improves, we continue to use the wheel and shaped stone and conrete, iron, steel, glass, knives, ceramics, etc. We still use things that are pulled out of the ground (like our distant ancestors) while also using the latest AI algos.

So, a very wide range of "industrial civilizations" would be expected to leave behind lots of basic natural materials in artificial forms. Their basic natural materials would be about the same as ours because they are found in nature and not very diverse (compared to high tech pharma chemicals or digital algos), so we ought to be finding lots of evidence of pre-human low(ish) tech, even if they were quite high tech.

SiValon Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco

No, it's a demonstration of the mind virus that caused these changes in SF, Portland, Seattle, NYC, etc. If you shift left and things get worse, you should go further left. The problem must be worse than we thought. If things get even worse, you should go even further left. As non-leftists get fewer and things get worse, you blame more and more problems on whatever shrinking "cause" remains. Once you eliminate non-leftists entirely and things are collapsing, it's obviously because of the left---as in, the left who think maybe we've gone far enough to the left. Those people are redefined as right, the cause of all of our problems.

SiValon Morse Code Chat

It's not. Combine a loud emergency whistle with Morse Code, and you have the ability to signal without any electric power over much longer distances than voice.

SiValon Image obtained with high-speed camera shows how lightning rods work

The article says lightning rods don't attract lightning. They just give it a safe path to ground. That makes no sense. Lightning pushes (& pulls) against resistance. Most current will follow the path of least resistance. A lightning rod is installed with two parts: 1) a "rod" that just by itself is designed to attract the strike to a sharpened electric field, and 2) a least-resistance path to ground in order to attract the current to follow that path instead of some other. That bolt in the photo extending upward is current being pulled up from the ground (or pushed down) with low resistance to attract the searching fingers of the bolt coming down from the cloud. The bolts reaching up to connect are going to be the most attractive to the bolt coming down.

So how is it that "lightning rods don't attract lightning"? Maybe they just mean that they won't cause electrical storms.

SiValon Understanding the .NET ecosystem: The evolution of .NET into .NET 7

Can you install it [edit: the .Net 7/8 platform that sounds interesting, not the IDE] for free on a Linux server and get the same benefits? (This isn't advocacy, it's a literal question about something I don't know.)

SiValon Building a second income stream by writing a book

There is some evidence that posting at certain times can help you grab that virility factor

...Or have virality as Plan A and grabbing your virility could be Plan B.

SiValon Common Lisp Implementations in 2023

recent events around Go show why, I am extremely glad that I never payed much attention to Go...

What are you referring to? This is a literal question, not advocacy. I haven't been paying enough attention to know what you mean.

SiValon Why do you want to touch your Mac screen so badly?

I don't ever reach for my Mac screen because I'm not used to interacting with a large touchscreen. But I'll bet I would enjoy being able to use a stylus on my laptop screen when doing a few things such as Photoshop editing.

SiValon Something strange is happening on the sun, and we've never seen it before

Vice emerged from the hostile takeover of the National Enquirer by Google's Office of Ideological Purification.

SiValon Cargo airships could be big

But diamond foil is brittle, and if it cracked, all of your vacuum would leak out.

SiValon MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

Oh, please don't let anyone at Apple hear you complain about "thicker". I'm still not back to trusting them after years of downgrades pretending to be upgrades: "We've made the thinnest, best-looking Mac ever while removing less functionality than we've removed in most previous upgrades!"

SiValon Drought emergency declared for all Southern California

What I don't understand is how lawns remain legal in California. Drive through a Silicon Valley neighborhood at midnight when the sprinklers are spraying and maybe one in fifty of the sprinklers, run over by some gardener, are spouting a fountain into the air that's just running down the storm drains, and you'll see what I mean. Yes, it's now usually partially treated (not quite drinkable) water, but it's not seawater. I don't understand why they don't mandate desert landscaping, like Arizona, and divert landscaping water indoors.

SiValon We’re Drowning in Old Books. But Getting Rid of Them Is Heartbreaking

Two great arguments for digital readers for people like your mother and me: vision and size & weight.

You love to read, but it gets physically more difficult as your eyes age. With a digital reader, every book is a "large print edition" with good lighting.

And when you travel, you have to take several books because, well, duh! You have to have books when you travel. Obviously. But carrying heavy books is a (literal and literary) pain. And airlines are getting so stingy about baggage limits that I'm surprised they aren't yet charging extra if you want to wear shoes. You can put a whole library in a reader the size and weight of a shoe and take it when you travel.

Of course some books are precious physical artifacts (to me) for whatever reason. I MUST keep those, but they are a minority. Most of the books I want to keep are wanted for their content, not their physical form, and those I'll get rid of if I can keep the content in digital form.

SiValon US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

Iron is always spoken of as the dividing line, but I'd like to know whether iron is exactly on the line, on one side (which?), or it depends. IOW, does fusion of iron atoms release energy (hydrogen side of the line), absorb energy (uranium side of the line), neither, or either (depending on conditions)?

SiValon Show HN: A Japanese learning app focused on efficient vocab/grammar acquisition

Chris, I'll second the pricing feedback. It sounded interesting, so I went to the App Store. FREE. Yay! But with in-app purchases. Oh. Okay, I guess that's how they all do it these days. Could mean you don't really need to pay for most features. Or you can't realistically use it without paying $2. Or maybe $200. Or maybe $10/month forever. Who knows? The App Store policy is to hide all but the initial price, so developers' policy is to make that zero and hide the actual cost in "in-app".

But, the website will explain what you get for how much, right? The website explanation is that you potentially get lots of great features, and if you want to know which features cost how much, go to the App Store and "buy" it for "free" and see what happens.

So, I figured maybe I would read some reviews. Later. Too busy now. If it was impulse purchase price, I would have just bought it, but I can't tell, so I'll put it on my mental "check it out someday" list. For now, I just shrugged and moved on, but since you're participating in the discussion here, and I'm a small dev too, I figured I'd just give you some feedback from the "usability lab", FWIW.

SiValon Show HN: A Japanese learning app focused on efficient vocab/grammar acquisition

Not to mention the huge amount of subtitled media available online.

Where are some of the best places to find it?

SiValon Performance comparison: counting words in Python, C/C++, Awk, Rust, and more

I'm with you with both shell pipelines and Perl "one-liners". The latter was a wonderful step up from the former back in the 1990s: a modern programming language designed around paving the cowpaths of shell pipelines. The power of both has always been inspiring. So many useful, one-off tasks can be accomplished with a single line in a terminal. So much potential power.

But my problem with both has always been that I needed them often, but not quite often enough to remember them without looking things up (again). Over the years, as my memory of these commands has strengthened, I've needed them less often. We don't use computers the same way we did back then. It's like a spaced repetition system where the spacing is set to guarantee forgetting.

SiValon Google destroyed my Play Developer Account and my work for the last 2 years

For decades, a foundational principle requiring frequent reminders was, ALWAYS back up your work. We have another just like it these days: NEVER rely on Google.

SiValon Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

If there are fundamental philosophies in a programming language (and there usually are), tutorials ought to begin with lots of tiny example programs that exemplify those fundamentals. They should continue with examples of gradually increasing complexity, but ALWAYS using those same fundamentals in various combinations to show how those fundamentals are intended to work together in all sorts of ways.

If the tutorials aren't deliberately built up from the language's own defining philosophical fundamentals introduced singly and then in combination, then someone like me will just re-use the fundamentals I learned in whatever other languages I know that feel most similar to the new one. Most languages can be used in roughly parallel ways with just a change in syntax, even if that's not how they are supposed to be used, and if I (like most of us) have to get up and running ASAP in some new tool and don't have a quick on-ramp to establish the preferred patterns right from the start, I'll just have to re-use as much as I already know and just get on with it.