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“I just chose words carefully”

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Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#211

Post by 1718627440 »

Biganon wrote: post #128
wombatpm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Widows are when the final line of a paragraph starts the next page. Orphans are when the first line of a paragraph ends a page.

Funny because "fixing an orphan" is hard in real life (assuming they've lost both their parents, you have to find them a foster home) but easy in typesetting (just add an empty line before), whereas "fixing a widow" is easy in real life (just remarry) but hard in typesetting.

How is finding one person suitable to be a parent (to make them a foster parent) differently hard, than finding another person suitable to be a parent (to marry them)?

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#212

Post by zkmon »

Skillful people did amazing things in the past because of 3 reasons - they have ample time available (slow world), don't have the basic struggle such as thinking about next meal (must be in a peaceful country), no technology to divert their attention (no need of learning new stuff on daily basis).

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#213

Post by 1718627440 »

seszett wrote: post #169
Kootle wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Japan they have the abbreviation “NG” (“not good”) that’s often used as the opposite of “OK”. I always liked how, when I worked for a Japanese machine learning company, classifiers would be between “OK” and “NG”. Maybe semantically “okay” and “not good” are not great opposites, but I always liked how having textual alignment makes the contrast immediately obvious

It's not unusual in France to use OK and KO. I never liked it much because it's too easy to confuse and no semantically a good opposite either, but visually it does look very balanced.

What does KO stand for?

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#214

Post by lproven » 

    4 leading spaces, is that right? Let's see...

    I used to write all my online posts like this in my early days of having
    own personal email address. My primary email is from 1991 and I used it,
    and DOS-based tools, to go online from 1991 until the late 1990s. At 1st
    I ran DOS tools from a floppy, then on my own PC with OS/2 2, then under
    Win95, then under NT 4. Gradually all the tools that were current at the
    time became Windows-based, so I switched. It just became too hard to not
    use Windows, and that meant proportional fonts, and that meant that folk
    couldn't see that I was writing fully-justified text... so I stopped.

    If this works (it looks all right in the editing window to me) then this
    is the first time in a decade that I've tried writing justified text. At
    the time when I did it constantly, it barely slowed me down. It helps if
    you have a good vocabulary and you can just substitute longer or shorter
    words on the fly.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#215

Post by 1718627440 »

pmontra wrote: post #131
AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #109

In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.

Ah, but I use a normal proportional font in my editor so same and diff have different widths. That was the fun comment. The serious ones: 1. I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience. 2. Nobody ever complained that my source code is a = 1 ab = 2 abc = 3 instead of a = 1 ab = 2 abc = 3 3. No tables or diagrams in comments of course but I think that I could…

> I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience.

I'm the opposite, I prefer non-proportional fonts even for prose.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#216

Post by lproven »

lproven wrote: post #214

4 leading spaces, is that right? Let's see... I used to write all my online posts like this in my early days of having own personal email address. My primary email is from 1991 and I used it, and DOS-based tools, to go online from 1991 until the late 1990s. At 1st I ran DOS tools from a floppy, then on my own PC with OS/2 2, then under Win95, then under NT 4. Gradually all the tools that were current at the time beca…

    Heh. It worked. Maybe I should start writing all my HN responses like
    this. :-)

    In the early '90s I occasionally wrote circular messages, and once, I
    recall spending a good chunk of an hour composing one in the shape of
    a Christmas-tree: stacked triangles, gradually getting wider from the
    top to the bottom of the "tree". One letter wide at the very tip, and
    then 2 at the top of the next triangle. The bottom of each triangle 2
    letters wider each time, I think. You get the gist. I widened the top
    as there are not many 1-letter words in English and few 2-letter ones
    to choose from.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#217

Post by dbdr »

edanm wrote: post #183
AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #109

In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.

I wonder if that was part of the reason that some programming languages use constructs like "if / fi" "do / od" etc. (Note: After writing the above, I checked with ChatGPT, it claims that the main motivation was to make it unambiguous which which "opening word" a "closing word" belonged to.)

This tracks with an old convention in languages like Pascal, which uses begin / end keywords for all blocks, where people would add "end (* if *)" as a comment to make it more explicit which block is being closed.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#218

Post by dash2 »

I dunno man, on the one hand this is blooming awesome. On the other hand could he have spent some of this time writing better prose? I sure would not want to read 1700 words of that, let alone 17,000!

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#220

Post by dash2 »

1718627440 wrote: post #211
Biganon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny because "fixing an orphan" is hard in real life (assuming they've lost both their parents, you have to find them a foster home) but easy in typesetting (just add an empty line before), whereas "fixing a widow" is easy in real life (just remarry) but hard in typesetting.

How is finding one person suitable to be a parent (to make them a foster parent) differently hard, than finding another person suitable to be a parent (to marry them)?

Fewer people want to foster than to have their own kids?
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