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Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
193•theblazehen•2d ago•56 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
679•klaussilveira•14h ago•203 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
954•xnx•20h ago•552 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
125•matheusalmeida•2d ago•33 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
25•kaonwarb•3d ago•21 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
62•videotopia•4d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
235•isitcontent•15h ago•25 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
39•jesperordrup•5h ago•17 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
227•dmpetrov•15h ago•121 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
332•vecti•17h ago•145 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
499•todsacerdoti•22h ago•243 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
384•ostacke•21h ago•96 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
360•aktau•21h ago•183 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
292•eljojo•17h ago•182 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
21•speckx•3d ago•10 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
413•lstoll•21h ago•279 comments

ga68, the GNU Algol 68 Compiler – FOSDEM 2026 [video]

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
6•matt_d•3d ago•1 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
20•bikenaga•3d ago•10 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
66•kmm•5d ago•9 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
93•quibono•4d ago•22 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
260•i5heu•17h ago•202 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
33•romes•4d ago•3 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
38•gmays•10h ago•13 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1073•cdrnsf•1d ago•459 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
60•gfortaine•12h ago•26 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
291•surprisetalk•3d ago•43 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
150•vmatsiiako•19h ago•71 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
8•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•0 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
154•SerCe•10h ago•144 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
187•limoce•3d ago•102 comments
Open in hackernews

Egyptian Hieroglyphic Alphabet (2015)

https://discoveringegypt.com/egyptian-hieroglyphic-writing/egyptian-hieroglyphic-alphabet/
40•teleforce•4mo ago

Comments

antihipocrat•4mo ago
School left me with the impression that hieroglyphs were primitive constructs - purely logographic and ideographic. It was a shock to later learn that they are also alphabetic and phonetic.

The opportunities for creative expression are amazing in such a system

jhbadger•4mo ago
Yes, the system is reminiscent of written Japanese in that way in that a word is sometimes spelled out phonetically, sometimes with an ideograph, and sometimes both for good measure if one or the other isn't viewed as clear enough.
Pet_Ant•4mo ago
I have heard it described as not quite an "alphabet" but more like a rebus[1] using an alphabet.

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

glimshe•4mo ago
Very few, if any, real world writing systems are purely ideographic.
RataNova•4mo ago
No wonder the scribes were so highly regarded
cwnyth•4mo ago
That website is a super simplistic breakdown. There is so much more to actual hieroglyphs. You get semi-alphabetic, bi-consonantal, tri-consonantal, determinative, and logographic functions all in the same system, and the order you see it isn't always the order it's read.
WalterBright•4mo ago
The Egyptians were evolving from picture to phonetic alphabets, because picture languages don't work very well. (What's the picture for "slow"?)

In modern times, our alphabet is devolving into a picture language, due to a disorder called "iconitis".

downboots•4mo ago
๑ï
maxbond•4mo ago
Those darn Lombards! I'm going to stick it to them in this marginalia.
thaumasiotes•4mo ago
If you believe people who have no idea what they're saying, it's "慢".

I like yours though.

In the actual development of writing, it isn't likely that a picture of a snail would be used to represent a semantically related word. Even in the earliest systems, where you could use a picture of a snail to represent the word "snail", it would be limited to (a) the word "snail", or (b) some other word that was pronounced identically. This is how it worked in Egyptian, Akkadian, and Chinese.

For example, 慢 is the Mandarin word for "slow", and it's pronounced "màn". There is a logic to its appearance: the component on the left, 忄, represents that it is a mental state† (I'm not sure why this was felt to be true of "fast" and "slow", but it was), and the component on the right, 曼, just so happens to be pronounced "màn".

(Most sound indications in Chinese characters are no longer that exact. They used to match better, but many centuries of language change followed. 丁 is dīng; 打 is dǎ.)

† Some more typical characters in the same category: 情 "feeling" (n.), 怕 "fear" (v.), 懂 "understand" (v.), 恨 "hate" (v.).

nradov•4mo ago
In a few decades we'll probably see emojis showing up in formal writing like textbooks, news articles, and scholarly journals. Our descendants will find it odd and quaint to read English texts without them.
WalterBright•4mo ago
No, they won't. Nobody will remember 10,000 emojis.

I used emojis for a while on phone texting. I eventually realized they were juvenile and stupid, and stopped.

Save the artwork for wonderful things like the illustrations in the Pooh books.

RataNova•4mo ago
Maybe we're not devolving so much as looping
nuc1e0n•4mo ago
The Latin alphabet that we use is itself an evolution of Heiroglyphics. The linked site also says we have no knowledge of how the ancient Egyptians reached their mathematical conclusions.

That's not true. The Rhind mathematical papyrus documents worked mathematical problems. Matt Parker of the youtube channel "stand up maths" did a collaboration video recently with Ilona Regulski of the British Museum about it.

RataNova•4mo ago
Fascinating how something so visually intricate also served such a functional role in record-keeping and language. I'd always assumed hieroglyphs were mostly decorative or ceremonial