I'm so embarrassed to say that I read it and didn't notice. But now that you pointed it out, I reread it and you are so right. It is clearly generated.

I have flagged this article on principle. Idk if it it's in the spirit of HN to do that or not, but the button's there, and I'm going to use it.

This actually seem quite flag-worthy to me. Look at the rest of the site, it's not at all trustworthy. The first post says it's by some random 16 year old (if we can actually believe that) and only has a few posts. One of them is a comparison of smart watches which says they tested them in the subheading on the article listing, but then doesn't show anything more than a surface level comparison from AI.

I once programmed my TI-84 calculator to do exactly this! The only missing thing was a circuit to convert the audio jack output voltage into the needed form for an antenna. I had the CS know-how but no EE know-how, so I never got it to work. It was fun to dream about confusing my high school's clocks though. (Sadly, the other obstacle was that the clocks only listened for the signal overnight, which improved their chances of detecting the weak broadcast out of far-away Colorado.)

I didn't know that about the overnight; that's neat. I'm often in my garage before work, and I always assumed the 5am reset time was just because only weirdos are noticing a clock whir its arms around then.

I live just beyond the fringe zone for reception of WWVB on my Casio Waveceptor. Depending on solar conditions, and how I leave the watch overnight (south-east facing window with space to a metal window frame for a coupling effect), I can get it to sync once in a while.

Guessers don't believe Askers are asking in bad faith at all. If Guessers did believe that, it would be way easier for them to say no to Askers. It's precisely because the Guesser believes in the sincerity of the request that it becomes painful to deny it.

Indeed. It's the immediate assumption that since you're asking me, it must be important to you - otherwise you wouldn't be asking in the first place.

I want to be the kind of person that helps others where it matters, and here you are, asking, thus proving it matters. Refusing becomes really uncomfortable, so I'd rather go out of my way to make it possible for me to agree, or failing that, to help your underlying need as much as I can.

I realize now this is a form of typical mind fallacy - I wouldn't ask you for something if it wasn't really fucking important or I had any other option available, therefore I naturally assume that your act of asking already proves the request is very important to you.

I guess I just learned I'm a Guesser :).

That's the really painful part. They ask you for something, you say 'yes' thinking it's important for the person, only to learn that it wasn't that important at all. It's like giving something that you don't want to give to someone that doesn't need it. Really annoying.

So how would you recommend communicating desires that are less strong than "important"?

I try to include the priority level of my requests inside the question itself, personally. As in, "Hey do you think you could xyz if it's not too much trouble? Not a high priority for me, but it would be convenient is all." Do you recommend something like that?

As another guesser, yes, basically something like that. Some kind of clarifying statement on how important it is to you.

The issue is really focused on the grammatical function of the word. The researcher is arguing that it's not ever used as an interjection, which "whoa" always is.

I would say the presence of an exclamation mark, in a context where exclamation marks are rare, is strong evidence of use as an interjection. Unless we're arguing that some other mark was mistaken for an exclamation, generally I would say rare typography is "marked" (noteworthy) rather than being likely mistaken. I think the researcher's position is not likely to hold much sway going forward.

The exclamation mark is added in transliterations of the manuscript because it is believed to be an interjection. If you look at the manuscript, there is no such mark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#/media/File:Beowulf_Co...

Why would you assume the original had an exclamation mark? Indeed the whole symbol was not invented until the 1300s.

The article puts punctuation into its rendering of the original text. That confused me too.

I'll note that it's not this decision is not coming from the newspaper article's writer, it's coming from any common transliteration of the manuscript that you'll find. But it's clearly a transliteration decision made because the people doing this assume it is an interjection, and they're using modern punctuation rules accordingly.

> But it's clearly a transliteration decision made because the people doing this assume it is an interjection, and they're using modern punctuation rules accordingly.

I think that's what I missed.

Yeah, weird to see a couple of linguistic mistakes like this in an article about linguistic mistakes. Another is the misuse of "latter-day". The article uses it to refer to an old thing that is analogous to a modern thing: "[a] latter-day 'yo!'" But "latter-day" actually describes something modern. (E.g., the "latter days" refers to the present age. See "Latter-day Saints".)

See also "latterly".

The article references a forthcoming publication that I can't find a draft of. Here's an older publication on the topic by the same author: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf

Edit: Oh, the PF article is from 2013, so this must be the actual publication after all.

It's a great example of (effective, apparently) passive aggression, and, I would guess, is motivated by all the same reasons as any other kind of passive aggression. E.g., fear of open confrontation, or a desire to create a situation that is just as or more undesirable for them so that the other person actively chooses the thing you want, of their own free will.

Likewise. Thought it'd be pronounced "slang", and thought the semantics would be you define LANG=<name of a language> at the top of the file (like a hashbang) and then write in whatever language you please. $LANG is a neato language because it has all the coolest features rolled into one unified design: polymorphic lifetime borrowing, endofunctor monoid monads, (stacked) coroutines, and even quantum data types.

These are photos of the Indiaman service, operated by Garrow-Fisher starting in 1957. The Wikipedia article conflates details of this service with another one, the Albert, operated by Albert Travel, which started in 1968. I noticed the discrepancy because the photos are of a single-decker bus, not a double-decker.

See here for much better Wikipedia article that keeps the details straight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93United_Kingdom_b...

And Haiti was not, which was a weird inconsistency.

Thanks for playing! Great feedback around the auto-correct.