In Dutch culture, among school children we had (have?) this funny thing where you can type in 707, which upside down reads "LOL", which in Dutch actually means "fun" (which funnily enough kind of corrolates with the internet slang abbreviation "lol"). Then if you calculate 707 + 707, so lol + lol, you get 1414, which reads as "hihi", which is an alternative, more giggly version "haha". Actually it kind of works in English too now that I think about it.
Cool, in Czech "haha" (the regular one) and "hihi" (the more giggly/playful/naughty one) have the same relationship. I wonder what other languages use it.
Actually, in English it is pronounced the same as in Czech and Polish: /hɛhɛ/ or /hihi/ (as far as I know). Both are written respectively as "hehe" and "hihi" and are valid expressions for denoting laughter in Polish (and as I assume, it works similarly in Czech).
I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and pretty much everyone else in the (admittedly quite small) classes either had Dutch ancestry or was an art history graduate student auditing so that they could learn to read primary sources about Dutch painters as part of their research. Early on in my first semester, we learned how to explain in Dutch why we decided to take Dutch, and I had the distinction of being the only one taking the class "voor de lol", which even today still makes me chuckle due to how similar it is to the common English meme phrasing.
Neat list but I’m confused: Why do many of the words on the left use what appears to be a zero character for the letter “O”. I understand why the zeroes are on the right, they just seem out of place on the left. Some of the words (e.g. GLOBS) use a regular letter O but some seem to use a zero (0) (e.g GL0SS)?
When I was growing up, my family used my mom's college typewriter, which did not have numeral 1 or 0 keys. Instead, you typed a lowercase L and an uppercase O. It was one of the typing habits, and you didn't even think about it.
When she took a computer programming class, around 1979, the terminals had all of the numerals, and of course she was constantly mixing them up, causing errors. A year later she became the teacher of that class, and completed the requirements for a CS major by staying a semester ahead of her students for a few years. She always reminded her students: "Computers are stupid. They will do exactly what you tell them."
The typewriter that I got for college had all of the numbers. Of course I used it for about a year before ditching it for a word processor. But everybody kept an old typewriter around for many years after that, because you might need one for filling out a form.
A calculator with a "flip display vertically" button can be very interesting! I mean, you can press that button to show tricks like this to your friend. But it can also be used by service staff (think insurance people, car sales people) to do the calculation on their calculator and then just press the button to flip the result and show the result to you. You don't have to turn the calculator upside down because the button can flip the output!
Or a calculator with two displays. One for you, and one for the customer. I think many cash registers already have something like this. Segment displays are cheap, so it makes sense.
In case anyone's curious, the longest word with unique letters (as well as the most distinct letters) is "obliges".
If we forbid 0, we get "bilges" and "sleigh". Both of which strike me as great opportunities for an extremely obscure Easter egg in an adventure game ...
Idk what I feel about they choosing 6 (which upside down becomes 9) for 'g', instead of 9 (becoming 6) for G.
If we look at the translation table we see that most of them can be interpreted as both major and minor caps, while only 4h is locked to lower caps, and 3E, 7L, and 8B is locked to upper.
I guess 6g kind of brings a balance, but I would prefer 'it's all caps, except 4 which we try to ignore'.
In discussions where HN has truncated/mangled a title, people have indicated that you can edit your submission after the fact to fix it. I don't know whether that's accurate, or whether there's a time limit.
Last month I was curious about how many words it was possible to express using hex digits with some obvious letter substitutions. Here is the result: https://github.com/melted/hexwords
