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Curiositry

3,470 karma · joined August 28, 2015

I write and build things.

Essays on technology, philosophy & amateur neuroscience:

www.autodidacts.io

A portfolio of sorts, listing some of my web projects:

www.curiositry.com

@curiositry on GitHub/SourceHut and Twitter.

submissionscomments
Curiositry··on Swearing Is Dumb
This is unfortunately the case, which is why I start the essay with caveat that it hopefully applies to people with my cultural background who swear, and may not apply beyond that.
Curiositry··on Swearing Is Dumb
I'm only trying to convince those that are open to the possibility of being convinced.
Curiositry··on Swearing Is Dumb
There certainly are.

I address the study referred to by the CNN article you linked in the section[1] on the research on swearing:

"The vocabulary study (Jay and Jay, 2015) indicates that those who can list the most swear words can also list the most non-swear words … but knowing lots of swear words is separate from how much someone uses swear words. The correlation isn’t surprising. Anyone who is well-read is bound to have run across just about every offensive word in common use, and a number of archaic ones besides. The study insinuates that people who know lots of swear words are verbally fluent. But I think what’s actually happening is that you can’t become verbally fluent without learning lots of swear words."

The scientists say swearing is a sign of intelligence, but the science itself doesn’t necessarily.

I also self-administered the CWAT test from that study, just for fun, as described in the Citizen Science Report section.

[1]: https://www.autodidacts.io/swearing-is-dumb/#theresearchonsw...

Curiositry··on Ask HN: Tools for working with Vim regex?
Thanks for your reply!

I had tried using :perldo, and thought it hadn't worked (I was distracted by the "Variable length lookbehind is experimental in regex" warning, and didn’t notice that it had in fact run silently).

However, in this case I expect there to be false positives, and need to run it interactively; perldo it replaces globally without confirmation. Is there any way to get match-highlighting & confirmation with perldo?

Curiositry··on Ask HN: I miss CTRL+ALT+DELETE, what's the Linux equivalent?
Ah, thank you!

I use SysRq to REISUB my machine — but I haven't found the SysRq key on Macbook keyboards; and haven't had the nerve to enable SysRq on friend's computers (which I often end up troubleshooting), since I didn't know much about it, what the security implications are, and whether 1 is an advisable value for kernel.sysrq

Those sysctl options could make a big difference; I've wondered about something like that, but assumed the optimal default was built in. Thank you! I'll try tinkering with those values.

Curiositry··on Ask HN: I miss CTRL+ALT+DELETE, what's the Linux equivalent?
Do you know of a more low-level solution for when when my system is frozen, and the keystroke to open terminal (and run htop or "killall APPNAME") doesn't do anything?
Curiositry··on Ask HN: Most Efficient Handwriting Font?
Thank you! I’m enjoying going through the archives.
Curiositry··on Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI
Perhaps this could be adapted?

https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech-examples/blob/master/m...

Curiositry··on Tell HN: Heroku alternatives with generous free tiers
Idea: give an option for developers to qualify by proving ownership of an active GitHub/GitLab/Sourcehut profile?
Curiositry··on Ask HN: What's a go-to introductory article for those who've never heard of RSS?
For anyone who ends up finding this post in the future: I didn't find an existing article to send to friends and family, so I wrote one:

https://www.autodidacts.io/what-is-rss/

Curiositry··on Blog.txt
Yes! Is any work being done in this direction?
Curiositry··on Blog.txt
Haha, excellent! It seems that the content is now searchable in the browser, though, making it less useless than it once was :)

P.S. Thanks for making 1mb.club (of which I am a member)

Curiositry··on Blog.txt
You get your money back.

Now I remember running across that before. I had forgotten about it. The character limit is a bit troublesome, though, and if you have room to paste a link that long, why not just paste the contents?

Curiositry··on Blog.txt
Thank you montroser.

This is something that really bugged me, when I (belatedly) tested it on mobile. I had to chose between optimizing for mobile, and optimizing for desktop, and I chose the latter.

To have a good experience on mobile, you have to use landscape mode, or reduce your font size. Since it is still readable on mobile, I figured that the people who were interested in the content would know how to — and take the time to — rotate their phone so the images such would display properly.

I switched to shorter hard wrapping, so that phones with wide screens would look OK. But I found that a standard smartphone has so little horizontal screen space that no matter how short I wrapped it, it would overflow (and look just ridiculous on desktop). Also, I couldn't wrap it as much as I wanted to, because of the image I had chosen, which is fixed width.

Admittedly, wrapping on mobile — and fixed-width images in specific — is one biggest issues with this "idea" :)

Curiositry··on Beautiful Racket v1.0
Unfortunately, no: http://beautifulracket.com/about-the-author.html#faq
Curiositry··on Ask HN: What book do you recommend everyone should read?
A Guide to the Good Life, by William B. Irvine
Curiositry··on Interview with John O'Nolan of Ghost
There’s a lightweight clone written in Go, Journey [1], which uses Ghost themes. It got a fair amount of attention at one point, but development doesn’t look very active at the moment.

[1]: https://github.com/kabukky/journey

Curiositry··on Show HN: Diaeresis.js – wield diæreses like C̶h̶u̶c̶k̶ Mary Norris
Good point — I should have specified english-language publications, since the diaeresis is still common in other languages. (Unfortunately, I can’t edit my original comment.)
Curiositry··on Show HN: Diaeresis.js – wield diæreses like C̶h̶u̶c̶k̶ Mary Norris
GitHub Link: http://github.com/curiositry/diaeresis

More about the diaeresis, and why it’s useful, in the New Yorker (one of the few publications that still uses it): http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-t...

Curiositry··on Ask HN: How do you make use of traffic surges from sites like HN and Reddit?
Sounds like we have a similar experience. I noticed HN and ProductHunt resulted in more press than Reddit, even though they drove far less traffic to the site.

But maybe success on Reddit / HN / PH could be used as social proof when pitching journalists?

Curiositry··on Ask HN: How do you make use of traffic surges from sites like HN and Reddit?
Thanks. That's the impression I got, too: I looked at the numbers and decided running on ads wouldn't be worth it until I was getting far more steady traffic.

Do you know how the visitors:dollars ratio for less intrusive methods -- such as affiliate links or donation buttons -- compares to the ratio for display ads (~1000:1)?

Curiositry··on Ask HN: How do you make use of traffic surges from sites like HN and Reddit?
1. I do charge for products — just not the more interesting open-source ones that tend to do well on HN & Reddit. (Also, my income from client web design & writing is probably loosely affected by the success of my blogposts and open-source side projects.)

2. I don’t run ads (at the moment) for both practical and philosophical reasons. (Practical: most of my sites don’t get enough steady traffic to generate much revenue. Philosophical: ads are annoying and I block them, targeted ads invade privacy, and ads are designed to get people to buy things that they (probably) don’t need.

3. I’ve considered affiliate links in that past, but haven’t used them yet: like ads, the benefits don’t yet seem to outweigh the costs. Aside from Amazon, which seems to be the most popular, what affiliate networks would you recommend?

Curiositry··on Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
Any plans to do short stories as well?
Curiositry··on Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
Very, very cool! I’m teaching myself Spanish, and I’ve been looking for something like this for ages.

I’d be curious to know more about how it’s built, and where you found the source texts. It it open-source?

Curiositry··on Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
Thanks :) That’s a good idea — each rule has real-number examples, but there’s nothing to solve. It would be fun to add test problems to use the rule on.
Curiositry··on Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
http://algebrarules.com

It’s simple, useful, and I learned a lot while I was building it. And people use it (which is always a plus).

Curiositry··on Show HN: Flarum – Delightfully simple open-source forum software
Great job Toby & Franz!

I’ve used PhpBB (spam magnet), NodeBB (too buggy), and am now on Discourse, which is great but eats server space for breakfast.

Flarum look very cool — I’ll give it a spin as soon as it’s stable.

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