Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E

motherboard.vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 134 posts

Re: Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E

#61

Post by nebabyte »

schoen wrote: post #42
Programmatic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that using a word such as "spacx" is in spirit.

You could point to Mr. Musk by using his South African origins, but also with circumlocutions such as: Zip2 collaborator X.com collaborator (by and by, part of PayPal, of which a principal and also a primary joint stock-holding guy, and so an original PayPal Mafia "mafioso") Mars colony instigator, for which aim's promotion also principal of orbital propulsion firm with first major victory involving launching an orbi…

But for fact that said individual was said prior, and that I am slightly in a similar domain to him, I would not know which (singular) particular individual half of that points to

Re: Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E

#62

Post by nebabyte »

pacaro wrote: post #57
biot wrote: post #48

Translation of posting without using 'E': It's Similar to That Bird Social App, But Without a Fifth Symbol Mastodon has an app with particular quirks and many humans find it joyful. Mastodon boffins did it again. A particular boffin going by initials M.R. works as a digital craftsman at a corporation with initials I.A. (that has http archival capability), did craft a social app oulipo.social with an odd quirk: said a…

Rhymes with quay

What, gay?

(I wasn't going to, but skimming his words, I can't spot what this is a followup to; so I thought I'd ask, though with that initial jocular quip.)

Re: Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E

#63

Post by nebabyte »

schoen wrote: post #22
Programmatic wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a mutual thought of a non-abstract individual aids in a lot of situations.

Most difficult is accounting for, and introducing into a chat, folks wholly unknown to anybody you talk to. A trick is to try to say how you know of such folks, finding a path or paths along which you can form a link, such as "my dad's mom's son" or "my pal's husband's pal" or "a woman who knows my boss from an old job" or "I know of a particular lady's writings from a class I had at school". This social platform's a…

I was okay with using "imo" and "lol" in words in this discussion as full forms also lack taboo glyphs, and I concur that such with said glyph is tantamount to a violation.

Re: Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E

#65

Post by nebabyte »

j4_james wrote: post #19
SlySherZ wrote: post #14

This website is slugish as hell. Every time I scroll my cpu usage jumps to ~30% and I have ~2FPS, using the latest version of Firefox. On Chrome the CPU still spikes, but it's no nearly as bad.

If you're willing to turn off JavaScript, you can have all the same content, but with silky smooth performance. On the "downside", though, you miss out on the social media sharing buttons, and auto-loading of the next article when you get to the bottom of the page.

> you miss out on the social media sharing buttons

Oh, sad day... :)

Re: Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E

#66

Post by tyingq »

tjr wrote: post #18

Also of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

Now I remember where I'd heard of that Gadsby book before.

It's referenced in one of the exercises in the Think Python book:

Write a function called has_no_e that returns True if the given word doesn’t have the letter “e” in it.

http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/html/thinkpython010...

Re: Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E

#67

Post by thr0waway1239 »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #36
nightski wrote: post #30

So just lav out the "e"? The human brain would b prfctly capabl of undrstanding it.

Y dn’t vn prtclrl nd vwls n gnrl, bcs cnsnnts hld mr smntc nfrmtn.

dpnds n th lngth f th wrds. vr shrt wrds r t hrd t rd

Re: Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E

#68

Post by pacaro »

nebabyte wrote: post #62
pacaro wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rhymes with quay

What, gay? (I wasn't going to, but skimming his words, I can't spot what this is a followup to; so I thought I'd ask, though with that initial jocular quip.)

While "rhyme" unfortunately contains the letter "e", although not the sound; "quay" doesn't contain it, but does have the sound (it's pronounced "key") I couldn't think of another word that rhymes with e but doesn't contain it.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quay

Re: Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E

#69

Post by noam87 »

nightski wrote: post #30

So just lav out the "e"? The human brain would b prfctly capabl of undrstanding it.

Interesting puzzle: one can leave out one letter, then another, and measure at what rate does understandability decrease for people (until eventually it's complete gibberish). Also, given a large enough audience, one could try different combinations of letter-removal orders and distribute those randomly, and measure the same... the question being:

* Which letters are the most vital to understanding written English? or

* Which combinations of letters? Are the letters the same in all the combinations of a certain rank, or do they differ? (where certain letter combinations themselves make each other more necessary) -- etc.

Alternatively: the same experiment, but where all words submitted by a user must match to a dictionary of real words. To that one may even add a grammar checker! (Which sets of sub-alphabets lend themselves best to proper English? Which allow for the shortest subsets? -- etc. etc.)

This would be utterly useless and I have no idea how it could be done.

The thing is, the hardest part of solving this puzzle, if one were to try, is not designing the experiment and writing the code, but figuring out how the hell to convince a massive audience large enough to collect the significant data to subject themselves to this experiment in the first place (or trying to design an AI that could be subjected to it -- and evolve the AIs themselves until they excel at deducing unintelligible text -- Would the results be the same for people and AIs?)...

I like this puzzle because it's so utterly stupid yet it would probably take an incredibly gifted person who has off-the-charts OCD to actually solve.

If I were a multi-millionaire I would hire a crack-team of engineers and mathematicians to work non stop on this particular problem; just for the hell of it.

Post reply on HN