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Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248558. Switched domains since then.

Slightly related: I am an Arab who speaks Arabic and reads Arabic and the only place I ever see the unicode character ﷽ is by programmers giving an example of "unicode is too hard".

Perhaps as a graphical element at the beginning of books, too.

It is a part of the Arabic Presentation Forms block which explicitly is for supporting legacy encodings and should not be used.


The whole phrase is one character?

It's one codepoint, U+FDFD, with the name "Arabic Ligature Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Raheem".

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+FDFD


It’s one code point that’s (in theory) meant to hold the ligature of the whole phrase. As it stands it’s only used as a demonstration of Unicode difficulty.

﷽ translates to "In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."

But it is indeed just the single character (U+FDFD)


Doesn’t it just call `less`?

Yes. It calls the default pager (or whatever you specify).

Inspired by Ghuloum's book is this really nice book by Nora Sandler: Writing a C Compiler https://norasandler.com/book/

Another recent book inspired by Ghuloum is Essentials of Compilation: An Incremental Approach (which publishes Python and Racket versions) https://github.com/IUCompilerCourse/Essentials-of-Compilatio...

How does the application apply the same lighting setting to all photos if applying the same lighting settings in Lightroom is not suitable for all images? What magic is being done here?

(and what advantage does it have over using `magick`?)


I too am interested in these questions. also how do you deal with culling photos?

Because that’s the rule. There doesn’t have to be a rational reason.

... and if it weren't the rule, it'd make a lot of mid- and late-game play much safer for the player with the advantage. As it is, it's something they have to watch out for, which constrains them somewhat. You have to win, but not the wrong way, and your opponent can attempt to force you to "win" the "wrong way" (resulting in a stalemate).

This is really nice.

Incidentally, there is an actual 1D game that is one of the most popular games on the planet: Backgammon.


Good observation. Considering stacking of pieces maybe 1.5D though.

Chess has different pieces, which has higher entropy than a true 1d backgammon or 1d checkers with only one piece a field.

You could play with pieces that have a value of 1..N instead. Starting with 2,3, and 5 value pieces, and splitting them as needed. Making it one-dimensional again, while keeping 100% of the rules.

Final verdict, therefore: backgammon is 1D, not 1.5.

We could pretend that the second dimension was not playing a role in tactics back then, since it was very recently invented, like the brothers Wright invented the third dimension a hundred years ago. Or some hot air balloon at a world faire did it.


The "dimensions" in these board games isn't a mathematical/topology thing, is it? Normally one dimension = one real number space. Every board game ever would fit in 1D then, "2D" chess included.

I'm fine calling Backgammon 1.5-D. Physically you focus on a single dimension, and the second one matters too but it's not the same.


That's a good point, you could surely model full chess in a single dimension, it would just be that each pieces' movement rules would be more confusing

E.g. a pawn can move exactly 8 squares towards its opponents end (16 on its first move if no piece occupies 8 squares away), but can only capture 7 or 9 squares forward (with some extra modulo math to prevent wrapping)


Yeah and it'd be even worse if you want to flatten out the piece colors and types into the 1D array.

Backgammon, the game everyone's seen and at the same time nobody knows how to play :P

My brother and I once took a train trip from L.A. to Omaha and back for a friend’s wedding and played backgammon for most of the trip. For weeks afterwards, I saw backgammon everywhere (most notably when reading dialogue-heavy books with lots of 1-line paragraphs).

Solitaire and Hearts too. Well I actually know and love Hearts, but most people seem to know it as "that game in Windows where you play random cards"

You’d be surprised – take a Backgammon board to a table in at a cafe in a popular area and chances are someone will sit down to play with you. Can be a good way of meeting people in a new area. (or new people in an old area!)

It was a good way to while away the time at jury duty back in the days when you had to physically be there until you were called. I encountered a tournament player who beat me maybe 4 times out of 5. I also played in a chess tournament where my opponent was considerably stronger and faster and quickly put me in a position where I had to think long and hard to try to avoid disaster (fruitlessly in the end). She would make her move, wait a few seconds to see if I would reply, and then get up and disappear into a back room where, I found out later, she was playing backgammon. I looked her up and learned that she was a rapidly rising women's chess star but was better known as a semi-pro backgammon player.

I learned to play backgammon because it was one of the three games on my Nokia phone circa 2001 :P

There are tons of 1D games. Somebody else mentioned Mancala, and I'd also mention the venerable Game of Goose, which can become anything from Candyland to sophisticated things like Kramer and Kiesling's That's Life or Parlett's Hare & Tortoise. Hell, Monopoly is also 1D if we're willing to allow circuits like Mancala.

Goose/ Snakes and Ladders can be played with no human players at all. There is no interaction, just randomness.

Ludo/Parcheese could have been more played among Southern Europe/Latin American people.

Mancala is roughly 1D too!

I am very decidedly above average (1800ish on lichess) and my memory is blank.


If you had to pick 1-2 things, what would you consider key skills that put you ahead of players a tier below you?


I am above average (by a small margin) on Lichess, and it sounds trite but to be average at chess you have to not make blunders.

Things like not leaving a piece hanging undefended, not falling into one move tactical traps (forks/pins etc.), and learning how to check mate.

You can achieve all of that by playing slower games, and doing some puzzles.


Like the other comment said, usually being careful not to hang pieces and capturing hanged pieces takes one a long way. The most applicable advice is to count attackers and defenders in a particular square (or piece) and if you have more attackers than defenders then it is safe to move there, generally.

I was being (slightly) flippant. As in any other discipline you do need to actually learn some things: tactics practice, basic endgames, basic opening principles.

But that's different from opening theory and what people usually mean by memorization. It is almost all pattern recognition and rules of thumb, and all the opening theory memorization in the world won't help you if you dont understand the ideas behind them. All the top players are extremely sharp tacticians long before they do any memorization.


I am curious, which editors allow different typefaces for different code elements? (XCode, I think, but what else?)


I use Emacs.


I’ve been using Monaspace with Neovim for at least a year.


Also terminal apps like Ghostty, Wezterm.


Input is a proportional font.

Monaspace is a monospace font that uses contextual alternatives: it changes how letters look depending on surrounding letters.

They are nothing alike in their approach to this problem.

(Also this is a marketing piece. Contextual alternatives is not a new tech.)


> Input is a proportional font.

it is also a monospaced font


Yes there is a version of Input that is a monospaced font and doesn't solve the problem tackled by Monaspace and the proportional version of Input and is therefore as relevant to this discussion as .. I dunno .. Courier New.


I’m not sure why you think this conversation is about the proportional variant.


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