8 ms·

First comment on the answer: > This is quite the most extraordinary stack exchange answer that I've ever seen. And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing

by WJW 3y ago

First comment on the answer: > This is quite the most extraordinary stack exchange answer that I've ever seen. And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN.

saaaaaam 3y ago
I’ve just read a dissertation about a plastic ball. I’m not sure what I think about that. It’s a mixture of impressed, horrified and bemused…
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  To me it felt like a new season of Serial
laborcontract 3y ago
In this case, only checking the comments on HN brings about a feeling of dismay at the sad state of comments on HN. People should indeed read the top answer. I assumed it ended after the first paragraph and only after your comment read the rest of it. Quite a rabbit hole and great investigation!
primitivesuave 3y ago
I wholeheartedly agree as well. The only nitpick I'd have on this incredible dissertation is on the "U" association with "U-boat" - this is an anglicized form of the German word "Unterseeboot" (undersea boat) which was itself shortened to "U-boot" (presumably the etymology of the Swedish "ubåt"). The first known use of the term "U-boat" is 1914, while the Germans and Swedish armed forces were commissioning submarines around a decade prior (in 1906 and 1904 respectively).
- lolinder 3y ago
  It looks like it could also be an anglicized version of the modern Swedish word for submarine, which appears to be Ubåt [0]. In the US we definitely usually associate the word U-boat with the Germans, but I'm not sure how else one would anglicize Ubåt. [0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t
  - primitivesuave 3y ago
    The primary sources are hard to find on this, but the common year of first usage in English (1914) seems to coincide with the first sinking of a ship by a German submarine-launched torpedo [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Pathfinder_(1904) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Pathfinder_(1904)
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Right, I didn't meant to imply that English got the word from Swedish, just that the author chose a reasonable anglicization that their readers would recognize.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  I assume the author knows why they're called U-boats, but the fact is that modern English speakers don't call them U-boats unless they mean very specifically German World War II submarines and maybe not then. I would use "U-Boat" but only in the same way I'd use "Boomer", to indicate a specific type of vessel in a particular context, if I meant a submarine, such as in a simple drawing, I'd say "submarine" and so would other English speakers I know.
  - primitivesuave 3y ago
    You're right, I didn't put that together, and now find myself descending down the rabbit hole of Navy slang :) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_U.S._Navy_slang#B https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_U.S._Nav...
  - croemer 3y ago
    And probably also German WW I submarines which were a factor drawing the US into WW I but might be less discussed as the war had less impact on the US and was longer ago
- Tistron 3y ago
  Swedish probably got the word from German, but u-båt is short for the Swedish word undervattensbåt, which is pretty much a straight-forward translation of submarine boat or Unterseeboot. The U- is not from German.
Jun8 3y ago
No, although this answer is awesome and very well researched, it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions :-) : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open.... BTW, I got curious about the highest scored answer and this meta answer explains how to find it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570. The highest scored answer is this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-an-unsorted-array/11227902#11227902 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processi... (of course this is related to teh size of the community)
- bazoom42 3y ago
  The famous answer is wrong though, since the question is about tokenization of XHTML (not parsing into a tree) which is indeed possible using a regex. This is why none of the condescending answers suggest a better way. There isn’t one.
- mgaunard 3y ago
  I can't say that comment about regular expressions is particularly good -- it isn't even true. (Some variants of regular expressions can implement arbitrary context-free grammars).
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  The HTML parsing question is an annoying meme that people laugh along with to feel part of nerd culture. This one is an extremely thorough attempt at answering the question. Not comparable at all.
- antegamisou 3y ago
  > it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions Man people on SE are cringe af ngl
- dotancohen 3y ago
  Have you read this one? It's got the HTML parser answer beat by a lap and a half. The only comparable answer I'd ever seen was something on Seasoned Advice, the culinary SE. I'll have to go dig that up.
qiqitori 3y ago
Here's another question with an answer that blew my mind just the other day; not nearly as long though: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/283546/does-hagrid-ever-deduct-house-points https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/283546/does-hagrid...
- dools 3y ago
  Did you notice in the comments that someone found the newspaper from the background? https://i.imgur.com/gAHYUW7.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gAHYUW7.jpg
viraptor 3y ago
If you're into this kind of content, https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/ may be fun. There's lots of trivial stuff, but you can find many deep investigations like in this submission too.
TheEaterOfSouls 3y ago
I feel like this video about the Casio VL-1 demo melody has a similar vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZCwrdseXKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZCwrdseXKI The fact that people do this much research/investigation to find answers to questions like this is pretty cool.
londons_explore 3y ago
In a way it is disappointing... Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask. Yet, while everyone might be only 6 handshakes away from everyone else (on average), we do not have sufficient human connectivity to locate this person, even with hundreds of people putting at least a little thought/effort into identifying the artist.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  I think it's not unlikely that if it were actually important (someone's life depended on it, or a serious amount of money was at stake), this person _could_ be located. It would almost certainly require someone who speaks fluent Chinese to go to China and investigate in person, though.
- CRConrad 3y ago
  > Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask. But the artist who drew the pic wouldn't necessarily -- I'd go so far as to guess probably doesn't -- know how it ended up on that ball; who copied it from where and what word (or letter) that person thought it illustrated.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  I'd pay good money to watch a cinema verité documentary capturing the moment when the graphic artist encounters the StackExchange page and reads each comment in turn, while the camera slowly zooms in closer and closer on their eyebrows as they alternately furrow and rise up in surprise.
  - xxs 3y ago
    I am quite positive none of that happen, or would happen. Mistakes do happen, including picking the wrong clipart and publishing it.
    - 3y ago
BLKNSLVR 3y ago
Led me to this, previously unknown-to-me, pot of gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  That stood out to me too. > The humour largely arises from Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation A tradition I really enjoy and deliberately keep alive. For some reason portuguese is incredibly amenable to this no matter the source language.
  - Zircom 3y ago
    I like saying "Soy espalda" to my Spanish speaking friend, bugs the hell out of him. It means "I'm back" but uses the Spanish word for the body part instead of someone's presence.
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      I really like preserving english word order and just swapping out words for their lowest string distance portuguese equivalents, especially false cognates. I also forcefully transform english -ing and -er words into portuguese equivalents or completely new words if necessary. Everything comes out hilariously backwards and almost but not quite nonsensical, tortured yet parseable with mental error correction, like some portuguese newspeak. I especially like rendering book, movie and video game titles this way, especially to my english speaker friends who consume all this content in native english and aren't used to or look down on their translated portuguese versions. I also really enjoy assembling portuguese words out of japanese phonemes. The pronunciation of japanese and portuguese is remarkably similar and I often find that even the most innocuous japanese vocabulary sounds like portuguese slang or swear words. Sometimes they sound like complete portuguese sentences. The full names of actual japanese people can sometimes be literally transcribed into extremely unfortunate portuguese sentences. Just imagine the amount of bullying targeted at Brazil's immense japanese immigrant population. At least one japanese word -- shoppai -- sounds to me like an english verb but with portuguese conjugation and my brain can't decide whether the radical is shop as in buy or shop as in photoshop, and it's such an archaic imperative first person plural conjugation I can't help but mentally imagine a catholic priest commanding his flock to digitally edit images during a church sermon. And that's the least offensive example I remember off the top of my head. There used to be a website that would repeatedly pass a body of text through machine translation back and forth until it stabilized on some hilariously distorted result. I wish I could remember the domain name.
xxs 3y ago
Trying to force a research/speculation on a mistake hardly deserves the most extraordinary answer. A better approach: the ball, likely, can be traced to the company producing it. The toys for very young kids tend to be regulated, hence expensive. Contacting the company would be a direct approach, significantly improving the yield to provide a correct answer.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  Did you read the entire answer? Because they did exactly that.
  - xxs 3y ago
    >they did exactly that. Yes, much much later (many edits later). Also I meant the original poster.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dlandis 3y ago
> And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN. And in classic fashion, of course the moderators locked it as "off topic".

by WJW 3y ago

saaaaaam 3y ago

I’ve just read a dissertation about a plastic ball. I’m not sure what I think about that. It’s a mixture of impressed, horrified and bemused…

ajmurmann 3y ago
To me it felt like a new season of Serial

laborcontract 3y ago

In this case, only checking the comments on HN brings about a feeling of dismay at the sad state of comments on HN. People should indeed read the top answer. I assumed it ended after the first paragraph and only after your comment read the rest of it. Quite a rabbit hole and great investigation!

primitivesuave 3y ago

I wholeheartedly agree as well. The only nitpick I'd have on this incredible dissertation is on the "U" association with "U-boat" - this is an anglicized form of the German word "Unterseeboot" (undersea boat) which was itself shortened to "U-boot" (presumably the etymology of the Swedish "ubåt"). The first known use of the term "U-boat" is 1914, while the Germans and Swedish armed forces were commissioning submarines around a decade prior (in 1906 and 1904 respectively).

lolinder 3y ago
It looks like it could also be an anglicized version of the modern Swedish word for submarine, which appears to be Ubåt [0]. In the US we definitely usually associate the word U-boat with the Germans, but I'm not sure how else one would anglicize Ubåt. [0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t
- primitivesuave 3y ago
  The primary sources are hard to find on this, but the common year of first usage in English (1914) seems to coincide with the first sinking of a ship by a German submarine-launched torpedo [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Pathfinder_(1904) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Pathfinder_(1904)
  - lolinder 3y ago
    Right, I didn't meant to imply that English got the word from Swedish, just that the author chose a reasonable anglicization that their readers would recognize.
tialaramex 3y ago
I assume the author knows why they're called U-boats, but the fact is that modern English speakers don't call them U-boats unless they mean very specifically German World War II submarines and maybe not then. I would use "U-Boat" but only in the same way I'd use "Boomer", to indicate a specific type of vessel in a particular context, if I meant a submarine, such as in a simple drawing, I'd say "submarine" and so would other English speakers I know.
- primitivesuave 3y ago
  You're right, I didn't put that together, and now find myself descending down the rabbit hole of Navy slang :) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_U.S._Navy_slang#B https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_U.S._Nav...
- croemer 3y ago
  And probably also German WW I submarines which were a factor drawing the US into WW I but might be less discussed as the war had less impact on the US and was longer ago
Tistron 3y ago
Swedish probably got the word from German, but u-båt is short for the Swedish word undervattensbåt, which is pretty much a straight-forward translation of submarine boat or Unterseeboot. The U- is not from German.

Jun8 3y ago

No, although this answer is awesome and very well researched, it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions :-) : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open.... BTW, I got curious about the highest scored answer and this meta answer explains how to find it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570. The highest scored answer is this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-an-unsorted-array/11227902#11227902 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processi... (of course this is related to teh size of the community)

bazoom42 3y ago
The famous answer is wrong though, since the question is about tokenization of XHTML (not parsing into a tree) which is indeed possible using a regex. This is why none of the condescending answers suggest a better way. There isn’t one.
mgaunard 3y ago
I can't say that comment about regular expressions is particularly good -- it isn't even true. (Some variants of regular expressions can implement arbitrary context-free grammars).
School-Cotton 3y ago
The HTML parsing question is an annoying meme that people laugh along with to feel part of nerd culture. This one is an extremely thorough attempt at answering the question. Not comparable at all.
antegamisou 3y ago
> it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions Man people on SE are cringe af ngl
dotancohen 3y ago
Have you read this one? It's got the HTML parser answer beat by a lap and a half. The only comparable answer I'd ever seen was something on Seasoned Advice, the culinary SE. I'll have to go dig that up.

qiqitori 3y ago

Here's another question with an answer that blew my mind just the other day; not nearly as long though: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/283546/does-hagrid-ever-deduct-house-points https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/283546/does-hagrid...

dools 3y ago
Did you notice in the comments that someone found the newspaper from the background? https://i.imgur.com/gAHYUW7.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gAHYUW7.jpg

viraptor 3y ago

If you're into this kind of content, https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/ may be fun. There's lots of trivial stuff, but you can find many deep investigations like in this submission too.

TheEaterOfSouls 3y ago

I feel like this video about the Casio VL-1 demo melody has a similar vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZCwrdseXKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZCwrdseXKI The fact that people do this much research/investigation to find answers to questions like this is pretty cool.

londons_explore 3y ago

In a way it is disappointing... Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask. Yet, while everyone might be only 6 handshakes away from everyone else (on average), we do not have sufficient human connectivity to locate this person, even with hundreds of people putting at least a little thought/effort into identifying the artist.

School-Cotton 3y ago
I think it's not unlikely that if it were actually important (someone's life depended on it, or a serious amount of money was at stake), this person _could_ be located. It would almost certainly require someone who speaks fluent Chinese to go to China and investigate in person, though.
CRConrad 3y ago
> Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask. But the artist who drew the pic wouldn't necessarily -- I'd go so far as to guess probably doesn't -- know how it ended up on that ball; who copied it from where and what word (or letter) that person thought it illustrated.
shermantanktop 3y ago
I'd pay good money to watch a cinema verité documentary capturing the moment when the graphic artist encounters the StackExchange page and reads each comment in turn, while the camera slowly zooms in closer and closer on their eyebrows as they alternately furrow and rise up in surprise.
- xxs 3y ago
  I am quite positive none of that happen, or would happen. Mistakes do happen, including picking the wrong clipart and publishing it.
  - 3y ago

BLKNSLVR 3y ago

Led me to this, previously unknown-to-me, pot of gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."

matheusmoreira 3y ago
That stood out to me too. > The humour largely arises from Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation A tradition I really enjoy and deliberately keep alive. For some reason portuguese is incredibly amenable to this no matter the source language.
- Zircom 3y ago
  I like saying "Soy espalda" to my Spanish speaking friend, bugs the hell out of him. It means "I'm back" but uses the Spanish word for the body part instead of someone's presence.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    I really like preserving english word order and just swapping out words for their lowest string distance portuguese equivalents, especially false cognates. I also forcefully transform english -ing and -er words into portuguese equivalents or completely new words if necessary. Everything comes out hilariously backwards and almost but not quite nonsensical, tortured yet parseable with mental error correction, like some portuguese newspeak. I especially like rendering book, movie and video game titles this way, especially to my english speaker friends who consume all this content in native english and aren't used to or look down on their translated portuguese versions. I also really enjoy assembling portuguese words out of japanese phonemes. The pronunciation of japanese and portuguese is remarkably similar and I often find that even the most innocuous japanese vocabulary sounds like portuguese slang or swear words. Sometimes they sound like complete portuguese sentences. The full names of actual japanese people can sometimes be literally transcribed into extremely unfortunate portuguese sentences. Just imagine the amount of bullying targeted at Brazil's immense japanese immigrant population. At least one japanese word -- shoppai -- sounds to me like an english verb but with portuguese conjugation and my brain can't decide whether the radical is shop as in buy or shop as in photoshop, and it's such an archaic imperative first person plural conjugation I can't help but mentally imagine a catholic priest commanding his flock to digitally edit images during a church sermon. And that's the least offensive example I remember off the top of my head. There used to be a website that would repeatedly pass a body of text through machine translation back and forth until it stabilized on some hilariously distorted result. I wish I could remember the domain name.

xxs 3y ago

Trying to force a research/speculation on a mistake hardly deserves the most extraordinary answer. A better approach: the ball, likely, can be traced to the company producing it. The toys for very young kids tend to be regulated, hence expensive. Contacting the company would be a direct approach, significantly improving the yield to provide a correct answer.

tourmalinetaco 3y ago
Did you read the entire answer? Because they did exactly that.
- xxs 3y ago
  >they did exactly that. Yes, much much later (many edits later). Also I meant the original poster.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

dlandis 3y ago

> And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN. And in classic fashion, of course the moderators locked it as "off topic".