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Apple vs the Law

https://formularsumo.co.uk/blog/2025/apple-vs-the-law/
102•tempodox•1h ago•52 comments

OpenFront: Realtime Risk-like multiplayer game in the browser

https://openfront.io/
34•thombles•2h ago•7 comments

Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? (NBER)

https://www.nber.org/papers/w33989
11•jmsflknr•43m ago•4 comments

Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
229•miloschwartz•10h ago•39 comments

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-listen-notify-does-not-scale
424•davidgu•3d ago•173 comments

Batch Mode in the Gemini API: Process More for Less

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/scale-your-ai-workloads-batch-mode-gemini-api/
94•xnx•3d ago•27 comments

LLM Inference Handbook

https://bentoml.com/llm/
51•djhu9•5h ago•1 comments

The ChompSaw: A Benchtop Power Tool That's Safe for Kids to Use

https://www.core77.com/posts/137602/The-ChompSaw-A-Benchtop-Power-Tool-Thats-Safe-for-Kids-to-Use
161•surprisetalk•3d ago•97 comments

Btrfs Allocator Hints

https://lwn.net/ml/all/cover.1747070147.git.anand.jain@oracle.com/
10•forza_user•1d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Interactive pinout for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2

https://pico2.pinout.xyz
42•gadgetoid•3d ago•6 comments

What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#What_is_Realtalks_relationship_to_AI
252•prathyvsh•17h ago•84 comments

Series of posts on HTTP status codes (2018)

https://evertpot.com/http/
37•antonalekseev•2d ago•6 comments

FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

https://foks.pub/
226•ubj•19h ago•48 comments

Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language

https://flix.dev/
267•freilanzer•18h ago•126 comments

Graphical Linear Algebra

https://graphicallinearalgebra.net/
239•hyperbrainer•16h ago•18 comments

Show HN: Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones

https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus
143•HenryNdubuaku•13h ago•55 comments

Apple-1 Computer, handmade by Jobs and Woz [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBKuBhdZwg
51•guiambros•2d ago•16 comments

Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough

https://apnews.com/article/tidal-energy-turbine-marine-meygen-scotland-ffff3a7082205b33b612a1417e1ec6d6
171•djoldman•18h ago•155 comments

Show HN: I built a playground to showcase what Flux Kontext is good at

https://fluxkontextlab.com
51•Zephyrion•1d ago•14 comments

Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide

https://stylepedia.net/style/
203•jumpocelot•17h ago•88 comments

Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/
315•simonw•8h ago•166 comments

Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

https://www.browseros.com/
217•felarof•15h ago•77 comments

An almost catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it

https://despairlabs.com/blog/posts/2025-07-10-an-openzfs-bug-and-the-humans-that-made-it/
6•r4um•2h ago•0 comments

Orwell Diaries 1938-1942

https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/page/2/
107•bookofjoe•14h ago•60 comments

Foundations of Search: A Perspective from Computer Science (2012) [pdf]

https://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/publications/SFR09_16%20Marshall%20&%20Neumann_PP.pdf
23•mooreds•3d ago•0 comments

Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
601•dheerajvs•16h ago•396 comments

AI coding tools can reduce productivity

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown
157•gk1•9h ago•148 comments

eBPF: Connecting with Container Runtimes

https://h0x0er.github.io/blog/2025/06/29/ebpf-connecting-with-container-runtimes/
53•forxtrot•13h ago•7 comments

Matt Trout has died

https://www.shadowcat.co.uk/2025/07/09/ripples-they-cause-in-the-world/
190•todsacerdoti•1d ago•57 comments

Analyzing database trends through 1.8M Hacker News headlines

https://camelai.com/blog/hn-database-hype/
143•vercantez•3d ago•74 comments
Open in hackernews

Square Theory

https://aaronson.org/blog/square-theory
750•aaaronson•1mo ago

Comments

lisper•1mo ago
Aargh! I hate it when people quote text as images because it makes it impossible to cut and paste.

> Jet black/Jet Blue ... catnap/dognap

My favorite examples are how prepositions can change the meanings of idioms. For example, to be "down for" something and "down with" something mean the same thing, but to be "down on" something means the opposite. (And going down to X means something very, very different from going down on X. That last example is also interesting from a geeky HN point of view because the preposition imposes a type constraint on the binding of X, which is why I had to use "X" instead of "something" :-)

robinhouston•1mo ago
> I hate it when people quote text as images because it makes it impossible to cut and paste.

That's much less true than it used to be! I don't know what device you're using, but on my iPhone I can seamlessly copy the text from that image.

lisper•1mo ago
I'm using Firefox on a Mac.
layer8•1mo ago
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/text-recognition

Doesn’t this work?

lisper•1mo ago
Not for me. No idea why. Maybe this doesn't play well with NoScript or AdBlock.
layer8•1mo ago
There’s also TextSniper. I’m not a Mac user; Microsoft PowerToys provide that feature on Windows.
bee_rider•1mo ago
Down for lunch?

Down with lunch!

(Breakfast food is yummier).

kps•1mo ago
> I hate it when people quote text as images because it makes it impossible to cut and paste.

Yes. In this case the text is in the ALT tag, which would help if browsers exposed it.

teach•1mo ago
And "down for" something is very nearly synonymous with "up for" something. (:
keeganpoppen•1mo ago
what a lovely Baader-Meinhof for Ricki Heicklen's delightful "Unparalleled Misalignments", which showed up on HN not too long ago!
lblume•1mo ago
https://rickiheicklen.com/unparalleled-misalignments.html
aleph_minus_one•1mo ago
> what a lovely Baader-Meinhof

Which attractive terrorists?

Aachen•1mo ago
It's a cryptographic mechanism that allows you to see what was there in plain sight the whole time. Merkle-Dåmgard, Diffie-Hellman, cryptographic mechanisms are often named like this
kens•1mo ago
The link to the HN discussion, by the way, is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43891128
jakupovic•1mo ago
This is pretty cool. I wonder what logic/math describes it?
BoiledCabbage•1mo ago
While it doesn't fully describe it, his category theory diagram reference seems relevant to me.

The stricter of the squares seem to be a homomorphism. But the "looser" ones which don't "preserve structure" after the transformation but "find a new structure" are some of the more interesting ones.

AaronAPU•1mo ago
Semantic Bayesian hyper-graphs where each of the percepts have strong correlation between each other.

I’d argue you could bind them tighter by giving the corners strong relationships to each other as well.

We find these sorts of dense correlations pleasing because it’s the natural way we discover meaning. Even though in this case the meaning is fairly superficial.

oliwary•1mo ago
> If you’ve ever tried to construct a crossword, you’ll find that the framing of a crossword grid under square theory feels right. When you’re nearing the end of the grid-filling process, finding valid crossings of words to fill that final corner of a grid, there’s a satisfying “clicking” feeling—a sense of magic—when it all fits together, analogous to the wrapping-around feeling of completing the square.

If you enjoy this feeling, I think you would like my word game https://spaceword.org. The goal is to arrange 21 letters in a square that is as tight as possible. No one has achieved a "perfect" pattern yet, but people are very close, often leaving only 3 spaces blank!

JoshTriplett•1mo ago
Do you have a version of spaceword that's not a "daily" game? I'd be interested in trying it if so.
oliwary•1mo ago
There is a weekly mode with 63 letters, thinking of adding a monthly mode as well. Or would you prefer puzzles that are always open?
JoshTriplett•1mo ago
Puzzles that are always open is exactly what I mean, yeah.

Some "daily" games call this kind of generated puzzle a "practice" mode. But whenever I encounter a daily game, I go straight for that mode, which is what most games would just present as the game itself.

oliwary•1mo ago
Fair enough! :) I'll look into adding a practice mode.
JoshTriplett•1mo ago
Thank you very much! I really appreciate it and look forward to trying it!
JoshuaDavid•1mo ago
Fun game! Though I dispute that people are "very close" to achieving a perfect pattern.

To get a "perfect" pattern you'd need to find three 7 letter words that can stack on rows adjacent to each other to form a 3 letter word in each column. Such arrangements do exist, for example:

    o p e r a t e
    a r r o w e d
    r e s e n d s
but they are very rare - I estimate something on the order of 0.002% of combinations of three 7-letter words have any valid arrangements. Assuming that you're using standard ETAOIN letter frequencies, the typical bag of 21 letters will usually have just a handful of combinations of three 7-letter words so a given puzzle has a << 0.1% chance of having a perfect solution.

But there are 12,000x more ways to rearrange 21 tiles within an 8x3 grid, and the word choices are more forgiving as well (if you draw 7 letters from the etaoin frequency distribution, those 7 letters in order are much more likely to form a 3 letter word followed by a 4 letter word than they are to form a 7 letter word). Pretty much every puzzle should have at least some solutions fitting within an 8x3.

Additional note: 3 blank spaces is the best non-perfect arrangement, since the grid is only 10 tiles wide. One blank space could only be achieved by a single 23-letter-long word, and two blank spaces could only be achieved by a 10 letter word next to an 11 letter word, and an 11 letter word would not fit inside the 10x10 grid.

oliwary•1mo ago
Glad you like it! :) And thank you for your comments, super interesting! Excellent point about the rarity of the perfect arrangement. Perhaps I should throw in a few lettersets that do have a solution, I am intrigued to see if people would discover it.

My other game, https://squareword.org focuses exclusively on perfect 5x5 squares, but here the goal is to uncover it wordle-style rather than arranging it from scratch. There are surprisingly few combinations that have ten unique, common words in a 5x5 letter square!

cjameskeller•1mo ago
I struggled on a few days' puzzles under the assumption that there _was_ a perfect solution possible -- It may be worth noting in the "help" that not all lettersets can be solved perfectly.
isodude•1mo ago
My first initial thought when I saw the game: spaceword golf.

Like any golf, you start with the smallest square possible and increase it with each level. You get less points for how perfect the the square is.

KolibriFly•1mo ago
Oh wow, Spaceword is hitting that exact same brain-itch as square theory
kelseyfrog•1mo ago
I'm a big fan of killing time on long drives with friendly word games. One of my favorites is a mix between rhyming and square theory. Here's how it works: one player picks two words that rhyme perfectly. Then, for each of those words, they choose a clue word, usually a synonym, but any kind of related word is fair game. They say those two clue words out loud, and the other players have to guess the original rhyming pair.

What makes it fun is trying to reverse-engineer the original rhyme from the clues. It's like solving a little logic puzzle. It's easy to come up with new puzzles, but cracking them can be surprisingly tricky. Still, the structure gives just enough to keep it solvable most of the time.

1. Somewhat described here https://bestlifeonline.com/jeopardy-rhyme-time-opera-version... It's actually quite difficult to find a description of the category many of us are already familiar with.

cooperaustinj•1mo ago
Do you know any unfriendly word games I can try?
kelseyfrog•1mo ago
You could add the additional constraint that the words have to insult the guesser based on their unique psychological vulnerabilities. Hope that helps!
stronglikedan•1mo ago
Perhaps give the Argument Clinic a call.
hypertexthero•1mo ago
FYI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_Clinic
deadbabe•1mo ago
Freestyle rap battles
kragen•1mo ago
You're right, that's the canonical unfriendly word game!
kragen•1mo ago
Posting on HN counts.
Someone•1mo ago
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang: “The construction of rhyming slang involves replacing a common word with a phrase of two or more words, the last of which rhymes with the original word; then, in almost all cases, omitting, from the end of the phrase, the secondary rhyming word (which is thereafter implied)”
jamiek88•1mo ago
Yep, ‘that’s pony’ means ‘that’s crap’. From pony and trap. You omit the actual word that rhymes.

Nice whistle mate! (I like your suit, from whistle and flute).

It’s fun to figure them out.

finnh•1mo ago
My family calls that game "pink mink"!
jacobolus•1mo ago
As far as I know the most common name is "hink pink", if anyone wants to look this up (or sometimes "hinky pinky"). Here's a 1981 book, https://archive.org/details/hinkpinkbookorwh00burn/ and here's a short description from the 50s, https://archive.org/details/realbookofgames0000unse/page/134... Searching further, apparently Hink Pink was the name of an 18th century pirate ship; I'm not sure if there's a relation to the game.

According to this 1941 Life Magazine issue, teenage girls in Atlanta were making up rhyming pairs like this at the time under the name "stinky pinky". https://archive.org/details/Life-1941-01-27-Vol-10-No-4/mode... Webster's Dictionary from the 60s has the game listed under that name, https://archive.org/details/webstersthirdnew0000phil_l0b1/mo... and that name also seems to continue to today, e.g. by the radio show Loveline.

kelseyfrog•1mo ago
Thank you! What a fantastic find. This is exactly the kind of book I would have checked out at the library as a child.

It's possible I found this decades ago and the origin of how I learned this game was lost to time :)

staffordrj•1mo ago
I made a daily game version of this https://rystaf.github.io/hinklepinkle/
sings•1mo ago
Love the idea but today’s was not a good one.
SamBam•1mo ago
Today's was... the same word, spelled once with the US spelling and once with the British spelling?
genewitch•1mo ago
for the record, i can't find any combination of those words in my transcriptions of loveline shows, although i don't have them all, and it is possible there are up to 50% transcription errors. there is 1 reference to "Stinky Linky" but it appears unrelated, "what's the linky?" "freckles" - i got excited that i found it but looking at the context it was in vain.

i have five clean references to "as a mason jar" so my collection is fairly complete ;-)

note: ripgrep 4.079s wall; ag (silversearcher) 5.916s wall; grep 6.940s wall

jacobolus•1mo ago
I am only barely familiar with the show, but people online mentioned it several times in connection with the game; apparently they played it as a commonly recurring segment with its own theme song. A web search turns up e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxA2J5W1A7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhdl_iKrVEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clmPQPvPkTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5ciP_ZRMng
genewitch•1mo ago
Oh, then i concur with your prior statement that it "continues [...] today"; i define "LoveLine" differently. Someday i'll find the time to get "fills" - i only have 5.5 years fully transcribed.

Sorry about that.

jonny_eh•1mo ago
We call it Awful Waffle, based on a Board Game called Brain Strain. They had "Awful Waffle" as an example.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8785/brain-strain

I made a proof-of-concept daily game: https://awfulwaffle.jonabrams.com/

mattclarkdotnet•1mo ago
Is the example meant to rhyme, or is it an example of a subtle category of "words that only rhyme in some English accents"? "Offle Woffle" is somewhat standard American English, while "Orful Warful" would be British English.
gostsamo•1mo ago
My personal recommendation is this game1. Not for travel, but a very good in forcing interesting associations and making you mad at your partner, which is a certified sign of a good game.

1 https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/178900/codenames

gms7777•1mo ago
If you like codenames, you might also enjoy decrypto [1], it scratches a very similar part of my brain. There's a set of secret words, and the codemaster needs to give clues that are specific enough that if you know the secret words, you can make the connection, but vague enough that you can't guess the secret words.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/225694/decrypto

vunderba•1mo ago
Our family plays "Match Three" during long drives where one person comes up with three words and whoever correctly answers with a word that can complete or precede any of them becomes "it" and chooses the next set.

Homophones and proper nouns are considered acceptable.

So for example: (Fox, Lone, Crossed)

The answer would be: Star

  Star Fox - a well known rail shooter originally on the SNES

  Lone Starr - the only man who would dare give a raspberry to Dark Helmet

  Star Crossed - a Shakespearean reference to two people whose relationship is doomed
kelseyfrog•1mo ago
Love it! Does the person who comes up with three words have the connecting word in mind from the beginning, or no?
vunderba•1mo ago
Thanks yeah it's a very fun game! When you're creating a new "match three" on the fly, I find it's easiest to start with a common word and work your way backwards until you've got three that fit.

There have been occasions where the answer was not the intended one, but it still fits all three and that's considered fair game!

kindkid•1mo ago
For example: "out fox", "loan out", and "crossed out"?
bdr•1mo ago
Stinky Pinky! https://www.nosupplies.com/play/stinky-pinky
Agentlien•1mo ago
A few years ago I did something similar in a group chat with some friends. No rhyme, but video game titles reworded using rough synonyms.

Here are some examples with answers in rot13:

Strange, this reunion = Zntvp gur Tngurevat

Boat pork refuge = Nexunz Nflyhz

Donkeybutt taverns gospel = Nffnffvaf Perrq

Caring for the elderly = QBGN

Belongs to me create = Zvarpensg

Superclock = Birejngpu

Top Stories = Ncrk Yrtraqf

Skyline no morning = Ubevmba Mreb Qnja

KolibriFly•1mo ago
That game sounds like a total brain teaser in the best way
ahazred8ta•1mo ago
Philip K. Dick's word game had gems like "The male offspring in addition gets out of bed. By serious constricting path." (earnest hemming way)
joshhug•1mo ago
The part about dad joke square theory got me thinking about this classic scarecrow joke, which feels like an example from some higher order version of square theory:

"Why was the scarecrow given an award?"

"He was out standing in his field."

The fact that a scarecrow's job is to be "out standing in his field", and that excelling at one's job can be phrased as being "outstanding in his field" is an incredible linguistic coincidence.

cdkmoose•1mo ago
Also, My friend accidentally drank a bottle of invisible ink... she's at the hospital now, waiting to be seen.

"Waiting to be seen" having slightly different meaning with respect to hospitals and invisible ink.

genewitch•1mo ago
In 1903 there was a proposal to inter corpses into crystal caskets.

The success of that initiative remains to be seen.

Is what you reminded me of. Technically first it was "fuckin' Mitch!" Because Hedburg sprayed reappearing disappearing ink on someone's shirt.

simianparrot•1mo ago
For some reason this old saying popped into my head reading that. I know it's not related but:

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

yojo•1mo ago
My favorite part about that quote is the broken symmetry between the double meaning of the second sentence and the single meaning of the first.

It begs one to consider the possibility of little “time flies” snacking on arrows. Which I guess completes the square?

anyfoo•1mo ago
Gosh, after all those years I've only just realized the double meaning of "fruit flies". Thanks!

Before that, I just thought it was more of a non sequitur, but still amusing. There was just something inherently funny about imagining a banana hurling through the air in an awkward tumbling motion, right after the sagely abstract concept of time and its elegant arrow metaphor.

geodel•1mo ago
This is hilarious. I never thought of a flying banana and now I can't un-see it.
akoboldfrying•1mo ago
"Fruit flies like a banana" is arguably the quintessential example of ambiguity in English grammar. It shows that the grammatical structure of a sentence (which words are nouns, which are verbs, etc.) cannot be reliably recovered even if we know the meaning and possible grammatical categories of every word.

Both ways to parse it are grammatically sound:

(Fruit) (flies) (like a banana)

(Fruit flies) (like) (a banana)

To decide which meaning was likely intended, the listener needs to make a value judgement about the speaker, based on detailed knowledge of the everyday world.

abhpro•1mo ago
I assume stuff like this is why some languages or script can never be deciphered
frogulis•1mo ago
Even spoken aloud, there's a natural-sounding stress pattern that is ambiguous. Love it.
Aachen•1mo ago
Would marking compound words resolve this? As in germanic togetherwriting of things that form one whole, as in English' noun-that-they-modify-preceding adjectives, or as in some other language: some way of signaling this?
akoboldfrying•1mo ago
It would definitely help with written English, but I can't see it helping with spoken. (Is there some rule in German that disambiguates togetherwritten nouns when spoken?)
Aachen•1mo ago
I actually wrote about speech but thought it distracted from the question and removed it again

No, in speech we seem to get by without spaces, and that's in every language that I'm aware of, but then we also don't have commas, parentheses, apostrophes, or capital letters. Somehow, intonation and emphasis must replace these (or rather, writing encodes our speech somehow) but I'm not sure how they map exactly. Question marks indicate a rising tone for example, that's about the extent of what I know

As a child learning to write, I had a phase where I put whole sentences together because that made sense to me as the next step after we learned to write letters together to form words. It took quite some convincing before I believed that adults don't secretly do this and they're only telling us to add space because they think we're not ready for the next step. I guess I innately thought words belong together and we only add a pause between sentences

There is one speech pattern where spaces can be heard though. Like in English, when you enunciate very clearly because the person isn't understanding (for example, if their English is very poor, or when you're shouting across a long distance), similarly in germanic languages I'd add time between each word, and nearly none if it's a compound word. Like how you'd pause between "get" and "out" if you want to make yourself extremely well understood, but afaik not/barely between "handy" and "man" or "quag" and "mire" because the parts haven't the same meaning, or aren't understood at all anymore, in isolation

Now I'm curious actually, might English native speakers also add less time between compound nouns/adjectives in this speech mode? So not like "quag" and "mire" but something that's commonly written apart, like "bottle cap". Do they (you?) identify and indicate things that form one concept also by separating them less, and only the written encoding is different between the languages, or do they feel like the words are fundamentally separate things in the same way that "go" and "home" are separate parts of speech?

akoboldfrying•1mo ago
The only pattern I know for sure is that compound words in English tend to begin their lives in hyphenated form (news-paper, life-style, e-mail) and then the hyphen gradually disappears over time. Old enough newspapers still show these words with hyphens in.

I think the hyphen removal follows the typical speech pattern in which the syllables are rushed together just like the syllables of other words, but I'm not sure.

hydrolox•1mo ago
I think this is an example of a Garden Path Sentence[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence?wprov=sfl...

j2kun•1mo ago
The classic, "why did the chicken cross the road" also fits into this genre, but nobody seems to understand that "get to the other side" means "to cross over from life to death." Every time I explain this to someone they are shocked that they never knew this meaning.
Upvoter33•1mo ago
That is funny. We finally figured out this double meaning a few years ago and I have been on the same quest since.
gwd•1mo ago
That's a failure of the joke not to set it up -- one of the "top corners" of the square is missing. Chickens normally don't make an effort to get to the "other side" (as far as we're aware anyway).

To make the square you'd have to do something where the context of "the other side" means past life into death. e.g., "Why did the spiritualist put his ear towards the road? To hear from the other side."

jagged-chisel•1mo ago
If you cross the wrong person, they just might send you to the other side.

I don’t know how to make the chicken crossing the road use this meaning, but … well, there it is.

wavemode•1mo ago
My understanding is that that interpretation is an urban legend.

Wikipedia attributes the joke to an 1847 article, which is phrased in a way that clearly isn't intended to have some deeper meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_did_the_chicken_cross_the_...

j2kun•1mo ago
TIL, thanks!
albedoa•1mo ago
You should keep smugly explaining it to people as if you didn't know about or otherwise have access to google before May 27, 2025.
albedoa•1mo ago
> Every time I explain this to someone they are shocked that they never knew this meaning.

You might have taken this as a hint?

dyauspitr•1mo ago
Seems arbitrary. Why does “get to the other side” mean to cross over from life to death. You’re saying it like it’s obvious.
j2kun•1mo ago
It is easy to find references [1]. I always thought it referred to the Greek mythological river Styx, where crossing the river meant going to the underworld.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/other_side

dyauspitr•1mo ago
Sure, but it could also be humorous due to how obvious/deadpan the response “to get to the other side” is.
notfed•1mo ago
Is it a coincidence though? You could have started with the phrase "outstanding in his field", recognize the double entendre, and simply consider whether it's anyone's actual job to "stand in a field". Scarecrow is one of many possibilities.
thejohnconway•1mo ago
I think the meanings are pretty close though? Not coincidental: to be prominent in an area.
preciousoo•1mo ago
If you use TikTok, search up “to the untrained ear”. You’d love those. Maybe they’re on YouTube too
KolibriFly•1mo ago
Square theory might call it a diagonal overlay
agos•1mo ago
did you read about the new corduroy pillow? it's been making head lines!
adammarples•1mo ago
It's pretty straightforward, top left "outstanding", bottom left "out, standing" connected as homonym, and then field on the right also homonyms. Both horizontals are phrases.
winwang•1mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_diagram
noqc•1mo ago
Commutative diagrams are to these squares what category theory is to analogy.
gowld•1mo ago
noqc, can you diagram your comment?
ogogmad•1mo ago
There's a mapping there, however it's not natural.
Garlef•1mo ago
I think Double Categories [1] would be a more appropriate setting: In a double category, the vertical and horizontal arrows are of different types. In usual commutative diagrams, they are of the same type.

[1]: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/double+category

ogogmad•1mo ago
Why don't some phrases arrive at the same meaning? They don't commute.
SamBam•1mo ago
This is clever, and I want to spend some more time thinking about it. In a sense, I think this is basically saying that you can put the standard SAT-style analogy questions ("Lumen : Brightness = Inches : Length") in a square, and that most crossword clues could be represented as weird SAT analogies. Or maybe I'm stretching the analogy.

But I think that the "Diagonal" that the author suggests for the connection between "Donkey" and "Elephant" and "Party" isn't quite correct. The key is that both the Donkey and the Elephant are a "Party Animal." You can't ignore the "Animal" part, it describes them: they are each the animal that represents their party, the "party animal."

I'm not sure the correct way to represent this in "Square Theory," but it's not just linking "Party" to the animal in question.

varjag•1mo ago
Leibnitz once famously said, "Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting". Perhaps solving crosswords is the pleasure mind experiences from doing group theory.
wttdotm•1mo ago
In "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat," there's a chapter where Oliver Sacks makes a similar argument about music stemming from the case of two autistic twins who couldn't do arithmetic but played a game with each other where they named increasingly large primes. Basically says that music/harmony is a kind of innate appreciation of the numerical relationship between sounds, much like naming primes is an appreciation of the _lack_ of a numerical relationship between numbers. The experience of a resonance between two different things (frequencies, numbers, and in this blog's case words) can exist extremely strongly outside of the ability to operate on those things in the first place. Interesting read.
vanderZwan•1mo ago
I've read that music and dancing memory is mainly handled in the cerebellum, which is separate from many other types of memory. This is also theorized to mostly explain why playing familiar music can help "stabilize" people with dementia who otherwise feel lost (funny enough also something Sacks has talked about[0]), because the cerebellum is typically less affected than the neocortex by whatever process is causing the brain to break down.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HLEr-zP3fc

KolibriFly•1mo ago
There's something deeply satisfying about making all the pieces fit under a hidden set of rules
falcor84•1mo ago
This brings to mind the classic article "Explanation as Orgasm" [0].

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008290415597

cshimmin•1mo ago
My favorite example, which was an honest translation error from a non-native speaker friend: Hand job (he meant to say manual labor)
lubujackson•1mo ago
Heard from a non-native speaker watching a missed basket in a basketball game: "Another rim job!"
zahlman•1mo ago
Something similar once famously happened with a Japanese vtuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeQ5K5DQiDI
emmelaich•1mo ago
To save everyone a click .. it was 'handjob' for 'handwriting'
keepamovin•1mo ago
I think in Chinese this is literal for hand made (手工) - the gong 2nd character can also mean work or job I think - but the sex term of art I guess is different there. Haha
tclancy•1mo ago
There’s a joke in The Jerk that uses this same intentional misunderstanding.
nojonestownpls•1mo ago
I've also heard people jokingly call manicures handjobs.
paulddraper•1mo ago
There are a number of comedic sketches based on the linguistic similarity of "booty call" and "butt dial."
munificent•1mo ago
What a lovely post.

The "Grubhub" square fits some other alternatives: "Grubclub", "Bitesite", or "Eatmeet" (but eww).

dleeftink•1mo ago
Kind of exciting to see Algirdas Greimas' semiotic square derived from (game) first principles!

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotic_square

gowld•1mo ago
> However, there’s nothing about the square structure that dictates the edges must represent phrases and synonyms.

I got there and thought "Category theory", and, lo, that's the next paragraph.

> Let’s talk about Scrabble, one of the seven most important games [link to review of Seven Games book] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/books/review/seven-games-...

Seven Games was mentioned in another HN discussion last week, by 'danvk talking about his Boggle solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44084022

HN hasn't yet taken an interest in that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

rossant•1mo ago
Same. I couldn't help seeing a commutative diagram before he had a chance to say "category theory".
mellosouls•1mo ago
Nice article! It feels like there should be something AI-zeitgeist-related in there referencing word2vec or similar.

OT: Going by the url, link here on HN and slightly adjacenty vibe I got to the bottom and signature before realizing this wasn't Shtetl-Optimized finally made mobile-friendly.

jacksnipe•1mo ago
Wordcels discover category theory lol
pwdisswordfishz•1mo ago
Category theory has always been a wordcel concept.
bitcurious•1mo ago
I came up with a (lambda? Triangle?) loop a few days ago.

Read until sleepy. Sleep until ready.

underyx•1mo ago
The author of this post would love the video game Lingo:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1814170/Lingo/

astrolx•1mo ago
How can someone hate "étui" so bad !?
tclancy•1mo ago
Do a million crosswords and find out. Accepting Crosswordese is the process one pays for the hobby.
RupertEisenhart•1mo ago
Great article, but I can't believe it didn't mention the sator square!

SATOR

AREPO

TENET

OPERA

ROTAS

(Very easy to commit to memory too since most of the letters are right there in the name!)

scubbo•1mo ago
GNU Terry Pratchett
zem•1mo ago
one of my favourite english curiosities follows this structure - "outgoing" and "retiring" are both perfect antonyms (enjoying or not enjoying socializing) and perfect synonyms (leaving a political office or job)
nssnsjsjsjs•1mo ago
Fun read. As they say in New York, Arigato!
geodel•1mo ago
Huge fun. Besides mixing/matching like this I mix across languages and that give an extra dimension to create such fun phrases.
akoboldfrying•1mo ago
GrubHub is certainly a good name, but if I came across an app actually named "Food Central-Place" I would have no choice but to install it on the spot. It just has a certain anti-ring to it.
AStonesThrow•1mo ago
Next time you're in NYC, try searching the web for "Thai Food Near Me"!

https://www.thaifoodnearmenyc.com/

There was a local food-truck operator named "Phở King" and eventually they established a storefront ... well, I see one closed, and another opened up. Formerly known as "Phở King Kitchen" and now there's the "Phở King Eggroll" place.

Fred Armisen did an SNL bit about this, too.

Not far from me, there is a ghost kitchen cluster. It's tucked away in a commercially-zoned neigborhood, and it serves all the food delivery services. Apparently, you can walk in too. I only accidentally patronized them once, when they had some great larb on offer. I think the report says there's 15 different menus and "virtual kitchens" in the building, just turning out food-to-go.

ehonsey33•1mo ago
A matrix is a matrix, namely two triangles reflected about a diagonal. No wonder they are frequently used in computer science and general problem-solving ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
noirchen•1mo ago
This reminds me of the so-called "heartless couplet" (无情对) in Chinese. Every pair of words in the couplets are synonymous or anonymous, and yet the meanings of the couplets are completely unrelated, often in a humorous way.
andriamanitra•1mo ago
The obvious question to ask is could you take it to the third dimension and make a cube out of double-doubles? What about other shapes, perhaps a pyramid or a tetrahedron? Squares are simple enough that it's still easy to come up with examples, but I think a graph with higher edges-to-vertices ratio would be even more satisfying.
rlonn•1mo ago
If any good frontend/mobile devs here like crosswords, I need a good frontend for picture crossword designer/generator https://crosswordcomputer.com
KolibriFly•1mo ago
Definitely gonna be mentally yelling "THAT'S A SQUARE" every time I see a clever pun or a satisfyingly constructed theme from now on
vanderZwan•1mo ago
> But here’s what I think makes squares special: a square is the simplest polygon that has non-adjacent sides. In a triangle, each side is adjacent to the other two sides. But in a square, opposite sides have no points in common, which makes any connection between them feel surprising, like a coincidence. In pentagons and beyond, this still holds, but the extra sides add complexity that make them feel slightly less elegant. Nevertheless, other shapes can be interesting too, but I see them as the exception, not the rule.

I bet that you could fit the "clever bits" of writing of quite a few literary classics into more complex shapes. Especially when it's the ons that only people who really like literary classics like. Like, say, a story with five main characters who all turn out to be connected in one way like how one might create a five-pointed star with one piece of string and five push-pins, and in a completely different unrelated way like a pentagon made by the same arrangement of push-pins.

idk1•1mo ago
This feels a little over blown, but on the other hand, you've got to have an angle and I think this is the right angle.
Thorrez•1mo ago
Something similar is going on with https://xkcd.com/1645/ . They even both mention platonic solids:

>Platonic solids for my real friends and real solids for my platonic friends!

mikhailfranco•1mo ago
This is not surprising at all if you know:

1. Cryptic crosswords (1920s) - the only interesting crosswords.

2. "Metaphors We Live By" Lakoff & Johnson (1980), or perhaps just "Roget's Thesaurus" (1805) long before that (synonyms, antonyms), and obviously homonyms.

3. A little bit of Category Theory, but not too much, just the amount that occurs to you after 1 & 2. An alternative entry point might be knowledge graphs (1990s).