Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | cookiengineer's commentslogin

> Great detective work

"Haussystem Didot" in the article's referenced typesetting catalog refers to the typesetting of the Didot family's printing agency. And they used that symbol 1700 and onwards in their map navigation descriptions in these books:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...

I am gonna repeat myself, but search for the Gallica links in each of those books to find the scans. There you can see earlier usage and evidence that as I pointed out in other - downvoted comments - that this was commonly used for sextant navigation instructions.


The image referencing "Haussystem Didot" is an example of a catalog not containing the Angzarr symbol in question.

I did not find any evidence for earlier examples in any of the very few scans I looked at, nor does a search through the Google Books scans give any indication for words that seem related to the concept.

This would be such a fantastic find! Could you point out a specific example?


Fascinating links, but I could not find an example of the glyph in question? My point was that a sextant is not (and cannot be) used to measure azimuth. It primarily measures the angle between a celestial body and the horizon (i.e. altitude). It can also (theoretically, very rarely) be used to measure the horizontal angle between two or more landmarks, but that is not azimuth in the accepted sense of the word. I am happy to be corrected though; my experience of sextants may be too narrow or modern for this context.

I didn't know that this is a mystery?

A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.

This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.

I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.


The typographic symbol was the element in question, not what "Azimuth" is.

Okay, but what does any of that have to do with knowing that the glyph at U+237C originated as a symbol for azimuth?

Because that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?

The article quotes the Didot system, specifically, which focused on printing travel maps and is known not only in the French speaking world for its timely accuracy [1] as it was also using that very same map system.

Maybe read the article next time?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family

[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...


I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment at all. The linked article does not refer to Didot, nor does the Wikipedia page for the glyph in question.

Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages. In fact, any occurrence of the symbol would pre-date the current earliest known example (1963) by 200 years, and that would be a great find. If you have an actual reference, please let us know!


Check the photos in the article, specifically this one [1]

"Haussystem Didot", the title of the catalog, refers to a letter setting by the printing agency Didot, which is the one I linked on wikipedia.

The Gallica scans are linked in the wikipedia article. Each of those chapters has hundreds of pages.

I highly doubt that you eye scanned thousands of pages in French handwritten and mixed typesetted ... within less than a day. You definitely must be lying, they take months to read.

[1] https://ionathan.ch/assets/images/angzarr/Berthold%201900.jp...


> The Gallica scans are linked in the wikipedia article. Each of those chapters has hundreds of pages.

I went through a bit of it and saw no instance of the symbol. If it's in there, would you mind saying which chapter and which page? Or some hint about what context people could find it in? The maps I saw (maps were pretty easy to find, too, since most of the page numbers for them are "NP") didn't seem to use this symbol.


Neither did I read all these pages nor did I pretend to.

> Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages.

You have linked these two Wikipedia pages[1][2], implying that they confirm your extraordinary claims of how obvious and well-known this symbol is. I could in fact check within a single day that the symbol does not appear on any of the 15 images linked in these pages.

So unless you can produce evidence for your claim that "that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?", it is quite disingenuous to expect anyone to take it seriously. Expecting someone else to read "thousands of pages" to confirm or deny YOUR claim makes it even less worthy of consideration.

If you do have actual, material evidence for your claims, everyone in this thread would very much like to see it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...


That's great and all, but the point is that there still isn't a single known (to the community of people trying to find the origins of that symbol, so, safe to say, the vast majority of people in general) appearance of the character in the actual text (i.e. used for its purpose), so if you have an example of a map/book/anything where this character was used, providing the link/scan/photo would be very appreciated.

> The article quotes the Didot system

Yeah but did any of the four previous articles say anything about it?


You should instead check out Plasma Mobile devices. They're _very_ close to releasing something for daily use and the whole KDE stack on mobile has come a long way.

I have no idea about the state of ModemManager though, because that has been historically always painful to use.

I'm currently betting personally on a Hackberry Pi variant. It's a Wi-Fi only device, so doesn't have a SIM without a breakout/addon board though. But at least it's fully open source and not whatever SailfishOS is. To me, SailfishOS is the same kind of fail like the "ZTE Open" with FirefoxOS, which, contrary to its name, was not open at all.

[1] https://plasma-mobile.org/


I am kind of put off by your description of your psychiatrist.

No, it's not a great psychiatrist when they subscribe you drugs to "fix" things. Drugs should be the very last resort. A psychiatrists' role is to help you with self debugging your memories and to help you put them into a context that you can understand easier. They should be a guide for dealing with emotional trauma and help you process and understand the loops that make you feel helpless, and to help you understand the moments that were out of your control.

Please, OP, find a psychiatrist where you feel safe to share, and that helps you to deal with the emotional loss. Swallowing it up because society expects you to be a "man" is unhealthy behavior, and carrying over trauma into your next relationship is unfair to the other/next person in your life.

Other than that, my advice would be to write a list of things you always wanted to do. And just do them. Find out what you are passionate about and what makes you happy.

Find a sport to keep your biological machine maintained, and find the thing you care about the most. There is a lot of problems in our society to get involved with. If there is no community around the things you care about, then found one and invite others to join.

You are not as alone as you think, you just stopped reaching out.


Maybe they invested too much in VaultCorp?

Every time I read these types of Go issues, I think I am reading a writeup of a highschool debate club. It's like there is debate just for the sake of debate.

I understand the defensiveness about implementing new features, and I understand the rationale to keep the core as small as possible. But come on, it's not like UUID is a new thing. As the opener already pointed out, UUID is essential in pretty much all languages for interoperability so it makes sense to have that in the standard language.

Anyways, I'm just happy we'll get generic methods after 10 years of debates, I suppose. Maybe we'll get an export keyword before another 10, too. Then CGo will finally be usable outside a single package without those overlapping autogenerated symbols...


It's an open Github issues thread. What do you expect?

I guess open debate and productive discussions?

You must be new to this.

Which is why I changed from being on Gonuts during pre-1.0 days to only touch Go if I really have to.

However I would still advocate for it over C in scenarios easily covered by TinyGo and TamaGo.


I mean that's pretty common in most OSS projects just because you have free entry to the debate.

If you want to see go-uniquie highschool debate club, look at Go team attitude to fixing logging, where community proposed multiple ways of solving it, Go team rejected all of them and then made massive navel-gazing post that could be summed up "well, there is multiple proposals THAT MEANS PEOPLE ARE UNSURE ON THE ISSUE so we won't do shit"

...then removed every question related to go logging (that were common in previous ones) in their yearly survey


It's called bikeshedding. It's highly annoying, but unfortunately every public mailing list or tracker is prone to it.

The maintainers did the right thing by just saying "no."


I kind of wanted to confirm that. At that time I was still using a Compaq business laptop on which I played Guild Wars.

The Turion64 chipset was the worst CPU I've ever bought. Even 10 years old games had rendering artefacts all over the place, triangle strips being "disconnected" and leading to big triangles appearing everywhere. It was such a weird behavior, because it happened always around 10 minutes after I started playing. It didn't matter _what_ I was playing. Every game had rendering artefacts, one way or the other.

The most obvious ones were 3d games like CS1.6, Guild Wars, NFSU(2), and CC Generals (though CCG running better/longer for whatever reason).

The funny part behind the VRAM(?) bitflips was that the triangles then connected to the next triangle strip, so you had e.g. large surfaces in between houses or other things, and the connections were always in the same z distance from the camera because game engines presorted it before uploading/executing the functional GL calls.

After that laptop I never bought these types of low budget business laptops again because the experience with the Turion64 was just so ridiculously bad.


In answer to your question: I think the underlying problem is that because of how transformer models are built. We need neural net designs that have a dedicated write only output layer and a read only input layer. How to use backpropagation on them: no idea.

Maybe a stricter descriminator/generator training loop could lead towards that goal? Maybe we should go back to DNCs and the idea of vectorized memory layers?

But the current designs always lead to the assembly problem. As long as there is no difference between control flow and data, data can always be used as control flow.


Nitpick: MacOS wasn't released first, OS/2 was. Apple System 1, however, was released the earliest.

And some of the questions are redundant because there's no list of already answered questions. I liked the questions though, they were fun to answer.


Nitpick: The "Light Speed Equiv" of the "Voyager 1 Progress Tracker" appears meaningless

Thanks I'll kill it. you're right.

^ this comment is more relevant than people might think. HP regularly deploys broken BIOS updates and literally bricks your laptops. Happened in 2023 I think 7 times that year, and one time even right in the next week. Our IT got so fed up and ditched any HP laptops because of it.

Never update your BIOS unless you have a specific bug that needs fixed.

I remember a Thinkpad BIOS update ended up destroying both undervolting and overclocking, and required a "chip-clip" programmer to revert.


That advice doesn't hold up very well when in recent years we've had multiple instances of a BIOS update being necessary to deal with the problem of "the CPU gets fed too high a voltage and dies prematurely". That's happened to both Intel and AMD desktop CPUs.

It's a real problem that BIOS updates for consumer systems never come with a meaningful changelog, so evaluating whether a particular update is a good idea or not is basically impossible.


I would strongly advice against buying HP laptops if you want to install linux because MX linux worked well on mine pre-owned HP, Zorin OS worked well but somehow I could not install AntiX linux and secure boot of HP troubled me too much and I could install OpenBSD on it but each time I would restart then it would kernel panic and I would havento reinstall. Combined with a long holiday when I left it at home. Now my HP is practically bricked. It is not starting

That advice holds up very well when taken along with "don't buy the very first major release".

I built a tower several years ago and it had CPU temp issues from the start. I RMA’d the cooler, reapplied the thermal paste a couple times, reassembled the whole build, etc. It wasn’t my main machine, but every time I sat down to use it the CPU would run hot and thermal-throttle. It’s an i9 with P/E cores, so I just chalked it up to Linux power management woes. A couple months ago I was on the brink of selling it for parts, but updated the BIOS as a Hail Mary. Totally fixed it.

I guess I did “ have a specific bug that needs fixed”; I just didn’t know it!


People don't have a choice to update their BIOS, as updates like this are automatically installed, by both Windows and the underlying Intel ME tools.

(And I'm trying to avoid talking about microcode updates, which is a whole other story of fuckups)

Regarding Thinkpad BIOS: I have a Raspberry Pi Zero and a self soldered RP2040 programmer [1] in my travel kit for a reason. When travelling, a lot of the Cellebrite rootkits rely on an OEM BIOS, so they typically reflash your BIOS in the "we gonna check your laptop" phase.

[1] would totally recommend serprog, it's awesome: https://codeberg.org/Riku_V/pico-serprog


Most of the laptop BIOS updates are now for CVEs and other security fixes, from my experience. You don't have much choice but upgrade.

These are for "security" against the user, to be fair.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: