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RFCs vs. READMEs: The Evolution of Protocols

https://h3manth.com/scribe/rfcs-vs-readmes/
1•init0•6m ago•1 comments

Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

https://altermag.com/articles/kanchipuram-saris-and-thinking-machines
1•trojanalert•6m ago•0 comments

Chinese chemical supplier causes global baby formula recall

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/nestle-widens-french-infant-formula-r...
1•fkdk•9m ago•0 comments

I've used AI to write 100% of my code for a year as an engineer

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1qxvobt/ive_used_ai_to_write_100_of_my_code_for_1_ye...
1•ukuina•11m ago•1 comments

Looking for 4 Autistic Co-Founders for AI Startup (Equity-Based)

1•au-ai-aisl•21m ago•1 comments

AI-native capabilities, a new API Catalog, and updated plans and pricing

https://blog.postman.com/new-capabilities-march-2026/
1•thunderbong•22m ago•0 comments

What changed in tech from 2010 to 2020?

https://www.tedsanders.com/what-changed-in-tech-from-2010-to-2020/
2•endorphine•27m ago•0 comments

From Human Ergonomics to Agent Ergonomics

https://wesmckinney.com/blog/agent-ergonomics/
1•Anon84•30m ago•0 comments

Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sphere
1•cyanf•32m ago•0 comments

Toyota Developing a Console-Grade, Open-Source Game Engine with Flutter and Dart

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fluorite-Toyota-Game-Engine
1•computer23•34m ago•0 comments

Typing for Love or Money: The Hidden Labor Behind Modern Literary Masterpieces

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/typing-for-love-or-money/
1•prismatic•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A longitudinal health record built from fragmented medical data

https://myaether.live
1•takmak007•37m ago•0 comments

CoreWeave's $30B Bet on GPU Market Infrastructure

https://davefriedman.substack.com/p/coreweaves-30-billion-bet-on-gpu
1•gmays•49m ago•0 comments

Creating and Hosting a Static Website on Cloudflare for Free

https://benjaminsmallwood.com/blog/creating-and-hosting-a-static-website-on-cloudflare-for-free/
1•bensmallwood•54m ago•1 comments

"The Stanford scam proves America is becoming a nation of grifters"

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/students-stanford-grifters-ivy-league-w2g5z768z
2•cwwc•59m ago•0 comments

Elon Musk on Space GPUs, AI, Optimus, and His Manufacturing Method

https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/elon-musk-on-space-gpus-ai-optimus
2•simonebrunozzi•1h ago•0 comments

X (Twitter) is back with a new X API Pay-Per-Use model

https://developer.x.com/
3•eeko_systems•1h ago•0 comments

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

https://github.com/dmtrKovalenko/zlob
3•neogoose•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Deterministic signal triangulation using a fixed .72% variance constant

https://github.com/mabrucker85-prog/Project_Lance_Core
2•mav5431•1h ago•1 comments

Scientists Discover Levitating Time Crystals You Can Hold, Defy Newton’s 3rd Law

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-scientists-levitating-crystals.html
3•sizzle•1h ago•0 comments

When Michelangelo Met Titian

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/michelangelo-titian-review-the-renaissances-odd-couple-e34...
1•keiferski•1h ago•0 comments

Solving NYT Pips with DLX

https://github.com/DonoG/NYTPips4Processing
1•impossiblecode•1h ago•1 comments

Baldur's Gate to be turned into TV series – without the game's developers

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24g457y534o
3•vunderba•1h ago•0 comments

Interview with 'Just use a VPS' bro (OpenClaw version) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU
2•dangtony98•1h ago•0 comments

EchoJEPA: Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Echocardiography

https://github.com/bowang-lab/EchoJEPA
1•euvin•1h ago•0 comments

Disablling Go Telemetry

https://go.dev/doc/telemetry
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•0 comments

Effective Nihilism

https://www.effectivenihilism.org/
1•abetusk•1h ago•1 comments

The UK government didn't want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi...
5•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments

No 10 blocks report on impact of rainforest collapse on food prices

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/no-10-blocks-report-on-impact-of-rainforest-colla...
3•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments

Seedance 2.0 Is Coming

https://seedance-2.app/
1•Jenny249•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

The 3,000-year-old story hidden in the @ sign

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250923-the-3000-year-old-story-hidden-in-your-keyboard
86•andsoitis•4mo ago

Comments

charcircuit•4mo ago
>there is perhaps no character that holds more cultural weight than @

This is a wild claim. Even excluding the 52 Latin alphabet symbols, period has such more cultural weight than the at sign.

Terr_•4mo ago
Question marks and exclamation marks, for starters.
bruce511•4mo ago
I guess it kinda depends on what you mean by "cultural weight". Alphabet characters just make words, periods et al are just punctuation.

@ is somewhat different. It's not punctuation. It's not a letter. It's a symbol, used primarily as an abbreviation, like %. But while % is universal, @ is more regional.

Sure, these days it's part of email addresses. But it has a long history of meaning others things. And it's been used in different ways in different places and times. Growing up in the 80s, it was on my keyboard, but I had no idea what it was for.

If one takes "culture" here to span time, rather than location, then perhaps the argument makes more sense.

IAmBroom•4mo ago
& is older than @, and is likewise a symbolic contraction of a word.

' (apostrophe) is very old as well.

whyenot•4mo ago
I would have gone with 0
adzm•4mo ago
# is up there. It's a huge part of several systems, channels in discord and IRC, hashtags for content tagging, referenced in songs etc
metalman•4mo ago
what?, you must be kidding! :)
astrobe_•4mo ago
The claim is just inept. There's no particular symbol that holds more anything than others. The Greek alphabet [1] as a whole is a cultural cornerstone of the "western" culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

IAmBroom•4mo ago
The period is a relatively new invention. A mid-height stop (like a period, but halfway up the height of the characters) is much older, but different.
card_zero•4mo ago
So 3000 years is a guess at the age of the word "amphora", but @ is from the year 1536.
whyenot•4mo ago
Yes, the headline is a little dishonest. It's a 486 year-old story not 3,000 years.
xandrius•4mo ago
Welcome to the Internet.
pockybum522•4mo ago
Context is important when telling a story. I say the title is fair.
card_zero•4mo ago
3000 years ago is about when the first recognizable letter A was drawn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Canaanite_alphabet

The amphora vessel design is neolithic, so you could add on another 10,000 years if you want to trace the roots of the @ symbol tenuously into pottery. There's such a thing as too much context.

wongarsu•4mo ago
But what if we add the role that harnessing fire had on the development of pottery and the amphora? That easily adds another 770000 years
dhosek•4mo ago
Worth noting is that @ was not the universal separator for host and username. BITNET (and its sister networks) based on IBM’s networking protocols used with word “AT” (separated by spaces) so, back in the olden days I was U12921 AT UICVM. UUCP placed the host name first and used ! to separate the hostname from the user with explicit routing occasionally given by multiple !s to separate a list of machines, e.g., foo!bar!jarthur!dhosek And the DECNET protocol used :: with the host name first (e.g., YMIR::DHOSEK) It wasn’t until the grand unification of all the various academic and commercial networks in the late 80s with the “net of nets” which became the Internet that @ became more universal, although IBM systems retained their “AT” and VMS systems had the awkward IN%"dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu" syntax to allow emailing outside the local DECnet.
ycombinete•4mo ago
The DECNET one is pretty.
j_bum•4mo ago
Agreed.

This is how the R language allows you to explicitly scope functions from packages. I honestly love that syntax.

E.g., `dplyr::filter`, `limma::voom`

a57721•4mo ago
C++ also uses (::), by the way. R probably borrowed it from C++.
p_l•4mo ago
Most likely from Common Lisp due to links between R and Lisp. In CL double colon lets you access unexported symbols from a package, while single colon accesses only the exported ones
a57721•4mo ago
Oh I think you're right and both took it from Common Lisp, which largely predates namespaces in C++ and R.
penchant•4mo ago
In Polish it's called małpa (monkey). I always thought of this as weird — turns out the Poles were not alone in noticing the resemblance :D
leobg•4mo ago
German: “Klammeraffe” (literally: “bracket monkey”)
layer8•4mo ago
Klammeraffe is a genus of monkey, called spider monkeys [0] in English. “Klammer” here means “clinging”, because these monkeys use their long tail similar to their arms to hold on to branches. “Klammeraffe” has no relation to brackets.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_monkey

Nux•4mo ago
In Romanian we used to call it literally "monkey's tail", but most people now just use "at" instead.
dvh•4mo ago
Zavináč in Slovak (like the fish, sprat, curled into small ball)
misterdata•4mo ago
Also “apenstaartje” in Dutch (monkey’s tail)
smitty1e•4mo ago
Rx is possibly the last Egyptian hieroglyph in use.

https://www.history.com/articles/where-did-the-rx-symbol-com...

monocasa•4mo ago
Eh, a lot of of the Latin alphabet ends up coming from Hieroglyphs->Demotic->Proto-sinatic->Phonecian->Greek->Latin.
aiisthefiture•4mo ago
Little mouse. How cute. I can’t unsee it now.
zkmon•4mo ago
It is a common practice in South Indian languages, to wrap letters with a tail or spiral, to mean something more than letter itself. In Telugu, people used to start all of their writing with a "Sri" as a single letter, with a tail wrapped around it. This is mostly seen on post cards, or anything written on paper.

Wrapped letters have special meaning, like goods with a special package.

moreati•4mo ago
Around 1999 I interned at Philips Semiconductor. I worked with one of the first or early engineers of Teletext (aka BBC Ceefax) - a system designed in the 1970s that encoded text pages within an analog TV signal.

The World Wide Web was just getting popular and he was happy to point out he managed to get @ into the limited character set (maybe called a codepage?) all the way back in the 1970s. However many (all?) international variants used different character sets that replaced @ and other uncommon characters with accented characters for their alphabets/languages.

As a result Teletext in the UK (using the english character set) could show email addresses, but not in most (all?) other countries.

manbitesdog•4mo ago
> In Spain and Portugal, the word for @ is "arroba", a term related to amphora that is also a standard unit of weight and measure.

It is in fact still used in certain contexts. For deciding when to slaughter the Iberian pig after feeding it exclusively with acorns in the open, it must weight 9 to 10 @s (an @ is 11.5kg, so 103.5 to 115kg)

pluc•4mo ago
In French it's "arobas" (Canada) or "arrobe"/"arobase" (France). When it started, we'd sometimes call it "a commercial" too.
tirant•4mo ago
I was coming to just also explain that. In my family it was exclusively used for the arroba unit of weight, used to measure the weight of animals, specially pigs and cows.

In itself the word arroba comes from Arab, meaning a quarter of something, which in Spain refers to a quarter of a quintal, that is 11.5kg.

nchmy•4mo ago
Arroba is commonly used in Guatemala and signifies 25lbs (roughly 11.3kg)
r24y•4mo ago
Great article. I had long thought that the official name for the symbol was "asperand", but it seems like this is a recent invention!
quuxplusone•4mo ago
Etymologically, I'd expect "atpersat" ("at per se at"), by analogy to "ampersand" ("and per se and").

Or, as some redditor added, "appersat."

paulmooreparks•4mo ago
I seem to have missed the part of the article that explains how this symbol goes back 3000 years. The earliest date mentioned is in the 1300's.
gompertz•4mo ago
People can say what they want about AI, but I find an LLM is far better at summarizing information. It was obvious a human wrote this article and it was way too verbose.
scoopr•4mo ago
Heh, in Finnish it is often called “miuku mauku”, almost like “meow meow”, or perhaps “meowdy meowdi”. Didn’t see any other cat-themed nick names.