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082349872349872on Is being bilingual good for your brain?

As a US emigrant, the joke I was told when I first arrived (with B2 german and nearly nonexistent french and italian) in my adoptive country went as follows:

Q. What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? A. Trilingual Q. What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? A. Bilingual Q. What do you call someone who speaks 1 language? A. American Q. What do you call an American who speaks multiple languages? A. CIA

082349872349872on Rock, Paper, Scissors that learns how you play using Markov chains

082349872349872on The Algebra of Patterns (Extended Version)

I prefer a slightly different algebra of patterns, which works nicely[0] as long as sets of clauses are simplicial[1], which is to say that if any two clauses have patterns that properly intersect, the intersection also occurs as a pattern in the set of clauses: clauses match if their pattern, and no more precise[2] patterns, do.

    isWeekend : Day → String
    isWeekend(x)            := show(x) ++ " is not on the weekend"
    isWeekend(x & (Sa||Su)) := show(x) ++ " is on the weekend"

In exchange for that complication on the structure of well-formed sets of clauses, we get the following simplifications: (a) default need not be special, but is expressed by _[3], and (b) the programmer need only use positive patterns[4].

[0] as with Dijkstra's def'ns of if..fi and do..od it's possible to extend the order-independence/commutativity to non-simplicial sets of clauses without losing runtime determinativeness but at the cost of introducing arbitrariness.

[1] this is not quite accurate to the geometric use; does anyone have a better adjective?

[2] pedantically speaking, a pattern P is more specific than a pattern Q iff P is congruent to P & Q.

[3] as all clauses, not just default, exclude more specific matches

[4] negative patterns might still be useful for codegen, but they needn't be part of the developer experience. I still need to look at https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/262314/ to see how it relates to all this...

082349872349872on Floats Are Weird

I'll see those eyebrows and raise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BMNqQQ-0as

082349872349872on Floats Are Weird

Fig 6! (guess there's a lot to be said for "like taking coals to Newcastle")

082349872349872on Floats Are Weird

beats the best I've had so far: "now is the winter! of our discotheque"

RCA?

082349872349872on Video shows 1975 military jet landing on motorway

or 2024: https://www.srf.ch/play/tv/tagesschau/video/kampfjet-landung...

082349872349872on Floats Are Weird

(I'm impressed that my laptop font supports 𰻞𰻞 — or at least I'm guessing it does, because at these point sizes it pretty much renders as a blob)

Exercise: construct the character table for the point group of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Hong_Kong#/media/File:...

GoF to me means {Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides} so until I followed your disambig link I would've metonymed with {IBM, MSFT, UIUC}

...made glorious summer by these sons of dork?

EDIT: grandsons of pork, if one subscribes to the Steve Blank hypothesis for the origins of VC-backed tech ventures

(would the major firms of the Industrial Revolution have been the sons of torque?)

082349872349872on Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

082349872349872on Floats Are Weird

short: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43728056 then https://unnamed.website/posts/

082349872349872on Princetonians Saved 'The Great Gatsby'

Oops! Indeed I had confused them.

St Benjamin and St Luke imply that Tatooine, instead of a trinity, has a "Big Four": the father, the two suns, and the holy ghost...

082349872349872on Princetonians Saved 'The Great Gatsby'

Dexter Green may be on a different side of the law from Bobby Quine and Jay Gatz, but not only does Ginevra add a note of autobiography, with regard to the end of DG's caddying* days there's always FSF's resignation: "...I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp."

* TIL Jordan Baker was modelled on "the fairway flapper" friend of Ginevra's

EDIT: I'm not sure if Hubert is a wise choice to be the patron saint of opticians (being famous for a visual aberration, after all?)

082349872349872on Princetonians Saved 'The Great Gatsby'

Gatsby's juvenile schedule and resolutions never fail to remind me of the HN front page. (come to think of it, Burning Chrome's Rikki has a bit of déclassée Daisy to her as well)

082349872349872on Hand-counted images of rallies yield significantly smaller numbers

Less accurate, but much less laborious: divide into blocks and estimate crowd density per block by comparison with a set of reference photos (as found in textbooks) of scaled, known densities.

082349872349872on Sampling Signals on Meet/Join Lattices [pdf]

pun, as in Jordan blocks? or did you have something else in mind?

082349872349872on Sampling Signals on Meet/Join Lattices [pdf]

(2019) but they're still at it; eg from 2024: https://acl.inf.ethz.ch/publications/icassp24-time-series.pd...

082349872349872on 3D Printed Mechanical Digital Clock

surtout 6m50+ mdr

082349872349872on Yann LeCun, Pioneer of AI, Thinks Today's LLM's Are Nearly Obsolete

if conceptual thinking is manipulating abstract concepts after having been given concrete particulars, I'd say it relies heavily upon projection, which, as generalised "K" (from SKI), sounds awfully like calculation.

082349872349872on NASA's Curiosity rover has found the longest chain carbon molecules yet on Mars

TIL; it seems like a common protocol:

> MtBSTFA derivatives are 104 times more stable to hydrolysis than their corresponding TMS derivatives and produce easily interpreted mass spectra for GC/MS.

https://www.registech.com/derivatizing-reagents/silylation-r...

EDIT: Derek Lowe: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alkanes-mars

(thx to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43548673 )

082349872349872on Talkin’ about a Revolution

Your third option sounds suspiciously similar to golden-age DARPA, which had been created in response to the launch of Sputnik in 1957?

082349872349872on George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father

I've read 1984 as a poorly-drawn frame story meant to convey* Orwell's sincere argument, in the form of Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which baldly states that even without colonialism in the picture, you ("the Middle") probably will still have to live with the extremely corrupt rich locals ("the High") and the poor mob who are easily misled ("the Low"), etc. etc.

* or at best to provide a motive filling in the implicit blank left by TaPoOC's truncation: "deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists..."

082349872349872on Scientists break down plastic using a simple, inexpensive catalyst and air

wonder if it's salient that /b/ and /p/ are both labials...

Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knigh...

082349872349872on NASA's Curiosity rover has found the longest chain carbon molecules yet on Mars

JPL's article: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-curiosity-rover-detects-...

082349872349872on Parsing to IR and Lvalues

Interpreting APL has a similar case: where a more verbose language would write something like:

    a+a where a=2

the terser APL expression is:

    a+a:2

(in which the left `a` is in scope of the right `a:`, which serves as both an lval for 2 and an rval for `a+`)

I don't know how APL did/does it, but when attempting to handle this syntax in a right-to-left operator evaluator I also wound up adding an ephemeral lvalue case.

(note also that C can be nearly as terse; it would express the above as:

  (a=2,a+a)

assuming [unlike either of the above] that a has already been declared)

082349872349872on Scientists break down plastic using a simple, inexpensive catalyst and air

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamucium#Etymology

082349872349872on Scientists break down plastic using a simple, inexpensive catalyst and air

looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_eruption#:~:text=Ther... suggests that if a goal is to avoid eruptions, low-water content golden rings would be preferable to the bags of mostly water that are live human beings.

082349872349872on Vibe Coding in Common Lisp

from the followup post:

> Just mimicking some syntax you found on the web (which is ultimately what the AI is doing) will not get you very far at all.

I wonder if this syntax-driven phenomenon might also explain why many natural intelligences bounce off of lisp?

082349872349872on Show HN: I built a website for sharing drum patterns

looks like the original TR-808 handled triplets, see p.15 of the manual: https://cdn.roland.com/assets/media/pdf/TR-808_OM.pdf ; for example, the SHUFFLE and BOOGIE on p.13 of the sample patterns at the end of the manual.

082349872349872on Peano's Axioms

to get well acquainted with these axioms, try playing the "natural number game": https://adam.math.hhu.de/#/g/leanprover-community/nng4

082349872349872on Show HN: I built website for sharing Drum Patterns

the maracas channel toggles to handclap

(look just under the stylised-R of the Roland logo on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_TR-808#/media/File:TR-8... for the pair on the original front panel)