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One Plus One Equals Two (2006)

(blog.plover.com)
76 points lemper | 1 comments | 22 Oct 24 08:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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cubefox ◴[22 Oct 24 14:58 UTC] No.41914942[source]▶
Oh, so the λ in lambda calculus was just a poor man's circumflex.

Unrelated, but why doesn't Hacker News have support for latex? And markdown, for that matter?

replies(1): >>41915234 #
gabrielsroka ◴[22 Oct 24 15:26 UTC] No.41915234[source]▶
It supports https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
replies(2): >>41915316 #>>41915802 #
yjftsjthsd-h ◴[22 Oct 24 15:33 UTC] No.41915316[source]▶
Sure, but that's it's own not-quite-markdown thing, which is extra annoying because it's just close enough that people think it is markdown and do things like writing code blocks with ```. IMHO it'd be much better to just actually do markdown, or at least a strict subset.
replies(2): >>41915959 #>>41916012 #
wholinator2 ◴[22 Oct 24 16:31 UTC] No.41916012[source]▶
Yeah but could it even be changed at this point? I'd imagine that once the ball gets rolling, changing any kind of formatting rules for a site with over a decades worth of (hundreds of thousands, tens of millions? ) of posts would be pretttty hard to get past committee
replies(2): >>41916119 #>>41917640 #
1. yjftsjthsd-h ◴[22 Oct 24 16:44 UTC] No.41916119[source]▶
I would strongly favor writing a script that went through the database and rewrites existing comments from the old to new syntax; I believe in this case that's doable. And you would want to message it ahead of time of course. But with those things done I think it'd work fine, especially because I suspect virtually anyone who's gotten used to the HN formatting codes is already familiar with real markdown so it'd be a relatively painless transition.