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

Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

english.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 309 posts

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#161

Post by kelnos »

codetrotter wrote: post #19

> I think the manufacturer of your son's ball mixed in a Swedish word I found this super unconvincing at first. But they just kept goin. And going. And going. And the more I scrolled and the more I read, I started to think that they are right. And by the end I was fully convinced! Well worth reading. Thanks for sharing, OP!

Same! But then I read another answer further down that suggested it might be a Chinese word for axe, romanized in pinyin as yuè (for 鉞). Since the knock-off ball seems to have been made by a Chinese company, that seems more likely to me.

That doesn't explain the weird u-boat thing, though.

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#162

Post by krapp »

mikepalmer wrote: post #146
krapp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't a yurt. It doesn't look even remotely like a yurt, even a yurt with a chimney. It's obviously meant to be an axe. It has a clearly depicted edge and the 'smoke' would need to be be coming out of the side at a really weird angle. It doesn't even have a door.

100% yurt. Yurts in cold climates is a thing. Sometimes they just have a smoke hole in the roof instead of a chimney. All the pictures are at weird angles, they're printed on a ball! :-) https://www.google.com/search?q=yurt+smoke&sca_esv=599339112...

The geometry of the ball isn't relevant - the "smoke" as depicted is going out of the side of the "yurt" at a right angle and continuing in that direction. That's not how smoke works. And the "yurt" itself is clearly depicted as a wedge. With the "smoke" attached to it as a cylinder.

If it's supposed to be a yurt, one has to ask why someone went through obvious effort to make a yurt look as much like an axe as possible.

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#163

Post by lockdown »

callumprentice wrote: post #32

I don't think that's an axe, I think it's a (poorly drawn) tip of a tube of YELLOW paint.

I think that's what it's supposed to be. Probably one artist's initial sketch was handed off to another artist who misinterpreted it as an axe and rendered as such

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#164

Post by lifthrasiir »

behnamoh wrote: post #135
Jun8 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, although this answer is awesome and very well researched, it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions :-) : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... . BTW, I got curious about the highest scored answer and this meta answer explains how to find it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570 . The highest scored answer is this one: https://stack…

My favorite is this one: A bear falls into a well. The depth of the well is 19.617 meters, and it takes the bear 2.0000 second to reach the bottom of the well. What is the color of the bear? https://qr.ae/pKqzpC

I don't really like that because it's obviously a troll question. Its wording and a large number of significant digits clearly demands the acceleration of gravity to be reverse-engineered, so it can't be a real question even by a chance. One thing to consider if it's indeed real: how much water is in that well?

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#165

Post by matheusmoreira »

lolinder wrote: post #70
Jun8 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, although this answer is awesome and very well researched, it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions :-) : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... . BTW, I got curious about the highest scored answer and this meta answer explains how to find it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570 . The highest scored answer is this one: https://stack…

The best part about that RegEx answer is the moderator's note at the bottom. > Moderator's Note > This post is locked to prevent inappropriate edits to its content. The post looks exactly as it is supposed to look - there are no problems with its content. Please do not flag it for our attention. From back in the day when Stack Overflow was fun.

I miss those days. I tried to go back there now and discovered things had escalated up to Wikipedia tier deletionism.

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#166

Post by dang »

Related:

Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382164 - Sept 2020 (2 comments)

Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22685058 - March 2020 (4 comments)

“Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14670306 - June 2017 (158 comments)

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#167

Post by dang »

nuclearnice1 wrote: post #128
lolinder wrote: post #8

Apparently this was discussed here while the investigation was ongoing, and an HN user (thedrake) was responsible for finding the ball on alibaba: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14672359

Be sure to read that link with showdead. thedrake’s victorious final comment “ SOLVED!!!!!! I spent several hours looking for an axe or a hatchet or an Ubåt…” is dead. Possibly because of a heuristic aimed at killing spam posts with too many links.

Thanks! it's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673626 and I've unkilled it now.

(It was killed because of the lmgtfy link btw)

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#168

Post by ximeng »

kelnos wrote: post #161
codetrotter wrote: post #19

> I think the manufacturer of your son's ball mixed in a Swedish word I found this super unconvincing at first. But they just kept goin. And going. And going. And the more I scrolled and the more I read, I started to think that they are right. And by the end I was fully convinced! Well worth reading. Thanks for sharing, OP!

Same! But then I read another answer further down that suggested it might be a Chinese word for axe, romanized in pinyin as yuè (for 鉞). Since the knock-off ball seems to have been made by a Chinese company, that seems more likely to me. That doesn't explain the weird u-boat thing, though.

That’s an uncommon historical term for axe. A Google image search will show it doesn’t resemble the picture. There are more common characters with pinyin starting with y, like 月 for “moon”.

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#169

Post by marzetti »

gweinberg wrote: post #104

It's not a really really badly drawn ax with a weird wavy yellow handle, it's yellow paint coming out of a paint pot. The reason the "ax" looks nothing at all like an ax is that it isn't supposed to be an ax.

The term 'paint pot' is perhaps confusing, the drawing represents the end of a 'tube of paint' out of which yellow paint has been squeezed. The 'y' word is indeed 'yellow'.
Post reply on HN