The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock (boat.horse)

As a Show HN (40 points, 15 days ago, 27 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571401

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What a ridiculous idea. As hard to read as it is dumb!

For a senior engineer like myself with decades of experience it is trivial to see how to fix this to make it much more readable.

1/ pick a sunny day

2/ at each hour, measure the bearing to the sun

3/ encode as a dict[str, float] e.g.

    {“twelve”:180.00}

4/ sort the hours by dict.get

Voila.

As an added bonus, for some reason this ends up sorting the minutes and seconds too. (“# wtf?!”)

For now, I was only able to fix the hours when I could see the sun (eleven, twelve, and two to eight — I don’t get up very early and I like lunch). Patches form the arctic circle welcome :P

I also need to tilt my head a bit as eleven is at the top instead of twelve. Other than that I would say it’s a considerable improvement on the OP’s rather naïve implementation! Scoff!

Imagine the mechanical gears behind this if it was an analogue watch. So many funky curved gears in there.

Syntax is wildly continuous with semantics, what’s the problem?

I love the fractal nature of this, where the big shape of one two three four... is then roughly repeated both on a slower scale (twenty thirty forty...) and on a narrower scale (twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four...).

I'm now wondering the hausdorf dimension of the graph of alphabetical numbers <n, and how other languages might compare.

Could someone please explain the minute hand? It says it’s Nine : Twenty-nine but the minute hand is pointing at the word Twelve.

> Accursèd

For those who don’t know, the accent indicates that the -ed ending is pronounced as a separate syllable, I.e. “a-curse-ed”. For that extra mysterious, old-timey feel!