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Ah, The Design of Everyday Things is a wonderful book, and the source of one of my favorite epithets:

It probably won an award.


The one I love is Microsoft's project manager, MS...

...wait for it...

...Project.

Was charged with managing a department-wide installation about fifteen years back, now. You want to have fun looking for relevant docs, try a search on "Microsoft Project". Good times!

I think the one exception to Microsoft's generic naming convention is Excel. Visio probably qualifies, too, but they bought that from someone else.

Oh, and I guess PowerPoint, too.


No kidding!

The FIRST thing that came to mind when I read that headline was Hofstadter's Contracrostapunctus in THAT book!

Check it out! Read it! And if you DON'T find the WHOLE hidden message, read it again, because it's spelled out RIGHT in the dialog!

Happy hunting!


Quite right.

An article referring to:

{e ∈ GEB|HN: e := article referring to GEB}

... might be considered rather self referential (especially if I have got my rather dodgy notation right). Note how I leave out several important definitions and leave them to your imagination. I will resort to hand-waving as required.

Hmmm: FIRST, THAT, DON'T, WHOLE, RIGHT. I speak en_GB you monster!


This reminds me SO much of Atari's "Graduate Computer" attachment for the 2600.

Unfortunately, I can't find an accessible link from where I am right now. Maybe when I get back home...



Thank you for stepping in, Evan!

My original post was from work, and when I tried to find a reference, I was blocked from following any links! Think they recently instituted a policy...

So I finally do the lookup from home, and what do I find at the bottom of the first page, but a link to YOUR REPLY!

We're Google famous!


I first read about this back in the 1980s, in an issue of Science Digest. Couldn't find a link or reference on short notice, but here's something from the American Academy of Ophthalmology that explains the phenomenon, with an experiment to see the blood vessels in your eye:

https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/experiment-se...

Apparently, the brain tends to ignore visual stimuli that don't change over a short period of time, which allows you see "around" the blood vessels passing through the middle of your eye. By closing your eye, and moving a penlight around against your eyelid, you can make the vessels cast a shifting shadow on your retina that makes them visible.

The reason you usually see everything out in front of you is that various actions cause your eye to shift about just a little, just enough to cause the image on your retina to shift about enough for the brain to notice.


Easily defeated by arranging the images vertically.

Or at least, makes it a LITTLE bit harder.


Starting from March also sets up a neat pattern that can be used to generate accurate month/day values from day-of-year numbers, IF you number them from zero. You can also go back the other way.

March through July follow a simple two-month cycle of 31 days, followed by 30, repeating at May and July. August breaks the cycle with 31 days, but it essentially restarts, and runs a second five months before it breaks again, at January (the 11th month, since we started from March). The third run obviously runs out after February, ending prematurely, but this doesn't really break the cycle, either. You just restart again with March!

This allows you to write some (relatively) simple conversions using just a few divisors, along with some conversions from 1-based to 0-based numbering, and back. 153 days every five months, 61 every two, and of course 31 for a single month. Divide the remainder from each prior division by the next divisor, and the final remainder is your (0-based) day of the month. The month itself (taking 0 = March) is then the sum of each quotient multiplied by the associated count of months.

Reversing the process, I'll leave to the reader.


Kind of wish you could drop a list in there, and have it step through.


That's it.

If I EVER go so crazy as to buy one of THOSE trucks

the plate is going to read 'LOPOLY'

I don't even care who gets it, or doesn't.


My workplace doesn't even allow us to plug in (unapproved?) USB devices, so even this workaround likely wouldn't fly here.


Same here.

I once plugged my personal phone into the USB port of a random machine in the office to get a quick charge, and a guy from Information Security showed up in under ten minutes ready to have a heart attack.


Easy to spoof a whitelisted device. Of course this might risk your future employment…


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