AdhemarVandamme

Obviously, not everyone on Hacker News shares the same opinion.

But, in general, Stewart Brand’s sentiment — expressed during a panel discussion at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, when he said that “information wants to be free” — is broadly shared here.

His full quote was: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable… On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Steve Wozniak famously responded: “Information should be free, but your time should not.”

Even among those on HN who believe that copyright serves a societal purpose, many still want copyright terms to be drastically shortened (back).

So I’m skeptical that the hostility toward AI companies is primarily based on their training on, and profiting from, the world’s knowledge without licensing it. I suspect it is rather based on their doing so without making that knowledge accessible in return. In the recent news of their destroying books, it even means reducing the chance that that knowledge will ever become open.

Yes, opening the world’s knowledge can lead to good and bad uses — just like free software can be used for great as well as for nefarious purposes. We’re generally too techno-optimistic to judge technology solely by its worst possible outcomes. But for such a benevolent view to be justified, the potential benefits need to be also clear.

I remember that, when I saw text-generative AI (GPT) demonstrated for the first time, I was reminded of this story. Wow, they actually made what Roald Dahl described in the nineteen-fifties!

Two further easter eggs that I particularly like about this story:

* This story appeared in Someone Like You, published in 1953 by Alfred A. Knopf. The similarity between the publisher’s name and the character’s name Adolph Knipe is likely not a coincidence.

* How very meta is the following fragment:

“For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

“Where?”

“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

Not on the list, yet likely of interest to the Hacker News audience, is the dedication in the first volume of Donald E. Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming”:

“This series of books is affectionately dedicated

to the Type 650 computer once installed at

Case Institute of Technology,

in remembrance of many pleasant evenings.”

“world” is derived from “were” + “eald” (old), and meant “the age of humans”, which was distinguished from the age of the Gods, when the Æsir and Vanir dominated, and the age of the Jötnar.

I find it interesting how the term shifted from a (mythical) temporal concept to a spatial concept, to now often a social concept (e.g. the Fourth World).

In Microsoft v. AT&T, decision 550 US 437 (2007), there was discussion about a golden disk, and the terminology changed to master disk during the course of the proceedings, because the disk wasn’t actually made of gold.

I remember that Justice Antonin Scalia objected: “I hope we can continue calling it the golden disk. It has a certain Scheherazade quality that really adds a lot of interest to this case.”

<https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...>

I agree with you and the anonymous Reddit commenter that this is a “cool story”, and that it needs “a shitton of paragraphs”.

But it also left me somewhat confused. The author’s note at the end states that “[the] story is 100 % fictional, except for all the parts about the EU AI Act having no enforcement teeth, which are unfortunately 100 % true”. The story chronicles a paper describing a solution, and the reaction of the main character who wishes he should have thought of this himself first. The solution is laid out high-level: AI self-awareness of potential problems, auto-pause until human review at first sign of potential problems, coupled with blockchain auditability.

So what is this story? An invitation for researchers to work out the details, and actually write the (thus-far fictional) 47-page paper? A teaser that such a paper might be forthcoming? A hope that this solution might materialize? Or just a fictional tale to vent some professional frustrations?

I’m old enough to have used (book) dictionaries and wooden case card catalogues in the local library. So when I learned about hashmaps/IDictonary a quarter century ago, that’s indeed the image that helped me grok the concept.

However, the metaphor isn’t that educationally helpful anymore. On more than one occasion I found myself explaining how card catalogues or even (book) dictionaries work, only to be met with the reply: “oh, so they’re basically analogue hashmaps”.

It was already known to scholars that the length of a (tropical) year is close to 365-and-a-quarter days since at least 238 BC (when Ptolemy III tried to fix the length of the year in the Egyptian calender to 365-and-a-quarter days in the Canopus Decree).

However, due to a mistranslation the Roman pontifices got it wrong at the introduction of the Julian calendar. The Romans counted inclusively, which means: counting with both the start and end included. (That is why Christians say in a literal translation from Latin that Jesus has risen on the third day, even though he died on a Friday and is said to have risen two days later, on the next Sunday.)

In the first years of the Julian calendar, the Roman pontifices inserted a leap day “every fourth year”, which in their way of counting means: every 3 years. Authors differ on exactly which years were leap years. The error got corrected under Augustus by skipping a few leap years and then following the “every 4 years” rule since either AD 4 or AD 8. See the explanation and the table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Leap_year_erro...

Also note that at the time, years were mostly identified by the names of the consuls rather than by a number. Historians might use numbers, counting from when they thought Rome was founded (Ab urbe condita), but of course they differed among each other on when that was. The chronology by Atticus and Varro, which placed the founding of the city on 21 April 753 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, was not the only one.

I don’t see why the grammatical cases of Latin and German matter in the interpretation of these abbreviations.

The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.

So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).

How would you argue such claims, geographically and/or accurately speaking? — Other than: that’s how I was taught it is; or that’s how my favourite teacher/book/source-with-some-authority says it is.

There is no generally-agreed-upondefinition for “continent”, in the same way that there was no generally-agreed-upon definition of “planet” prior to the IAU 2006 General Assembly.

Continents are identified by convention (and there are a few competing conventions) rather than any strict criteria.

I was taught (in Europe) that there are 6 continents, 1 of which close-to-uninhabited: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, America, Antarctica. This convention is the same as the one for the UNSD “continental regions”. The five interlocking rings of the Olympic flag represent these five inhabited continents.

There’s another convention that considers Eurasia to be a single continent. And another that even considers Afro-Eurasia to be a single continent.

The prefered canonical name is continent-or-ocean/city-or-small-island because continents and cities are more stable than countries and country names. The America/state/city convention is the exception, not the rule.

Some timezone identifiers have changed, e.g. Asia/Calcutta to Asia/Kolkata in 2008 and Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv in 2022. But the TZ DB maintainers are rather reluctant to make such changes, and require “long-time widespread use of the new city name” in English before deciding so.

The naming conventions for timezone identifiers are written out at https://ftp.iana.org/tz/tzdb-2022b/theory.html#naming

In the same way that an hour is skipped in many places at the beginning of Daylight Saving Time every year (and the offset changes, e.g. from UTC–5 to UTC–4),

on this particular instant, in Iceland, 28 minutes were skipped because Iceland changed from the offset of Reykjavik’s mean solar time, rounded to the nearest minute (UTC–1:28) to the offset of Reykjavik’s mean solar time, rounded to the nearest hour (UTC–1).

So only from that moment on, Iceland was using UTC–1.

There’s plenty of room for reasonable discussion and questions, even about human rights. Are all human rights individual rights, or are there collective human rights (peoples’ rights)? Are there limits to free speech, and if so, what are they? Are liberties more fundamental than rights that require taxpayer expenditure? Is paid holiday really a human right (UDHR art. 30)? Does the expansion of the concept of human rights weaken fundamental human rights?

> I'm sorry I just can’t find a single source backing you up.

As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (consumer good) prices (“price inflation”).

At least in modern economic literature and usage, the term “inflation” (without modifier) is more often used to denote price inflation rather than monetary inflation.

The insistence that the term “inflation” ought be primarily rather used for “monetary inflation” goes back to at least Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1912:

“In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.”

The first factor of the Drake Equation (the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy) has dimension 1/time. The last factor (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space) has dimension time. The other factors are unitless ratios.

So yes, the Drake Equation is dimensionally sound.

It is also a true equation. Not observed to be true, but reasoned to be true. The right hand side is the left hand side multiplied by some non-zero factors, and divided by the same factors, and rearranged (into the multiplication of a time rate, 5 ratios, and a length of time).

There’s still a lot of uncertainty about the numerical value of some of the factors — but the math is sound.

Therefor I wouldn’t put the Drake Equation in the same category “mathiness” that the original article is talking about.

They might be rarely considering code formatting specifically, but the claim that one language is a superset of another really does imply that all valid instances of the latter are also valid instances of the former (and are similarly parsed).

The old spec of YAML 1.2 section 1.3 explicitly said:

YAML can therefore be viewed as a natural superset of JSON, offering improved human readability and a more complete information model. This is also the case in practice; every JSON file is also a valid YAML file.

The revised spec 1.2 revision 1.2.2 (2021-10-01) no longer contains that sentence; but still says, in section 1.2:

The YAML 1.2 specification was published in 2009. Its primary focus was making YAML a strict superset of JSON.

and in section 6.8.1:

Note that version 1.2 is mostly a superset of version 1.1, defined for the purpose of ensuring JSON compatibility.

Given all these claims, Patrick Stevens’ observations that YAML really isn’t a superset of JSON, because YAML can’t handle all JSON number literals, and tabs as whitespace, really is surprising. At least to me.

When previously JavaScript/ECMAScript 2018 was found not to be a JSON superset, at least it was about unescaped occurrences of little-used characters U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR and U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR in string literals. And even that got fixed (by allowing the unescaped characters) in ECMAScript 2019.

[YAML 1.2]: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2-old/spec.html#id2759572 [YAML 1.2 revision 1.2.2]: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/ [ECMAScript 2019 feature Subume JSON]: https://v8.dev/features/subsume-json

Did the idea of emitting Morse code on the keyboard LEDs during kernel panics ever get working, and included in the kernel?

I'm thinking of the LWN article “Morse code panics for 2.6.29-rc1” (2003) https://lwn.net/Articles/21858/

I like this idea.

My first remark is VirtualStorage<T>. As I understand it, T is the type the library user can associate with the items (nodes, files) of the tree. I think this library can be made more useful with VirtualStorage<T, U> where U is a type you can associate with the directories of the tree.

VirtualStorage<T> is then equivalent with VirtualStorage<T, some-dummy-unit-type>. (If I'm not mistaken, F# allows unit where a type parameter is expected, but C# does not allow void.) The use case I have in mind has been mentioned in other comments as well: keep a representation of a file system in memory. For such use cases, you could then use VirtualStorage<System.IO.FileInfo, System.IO.DirectoryInfo>

But also in other use cases, associating information at the directory level might be very useful.

Going even further, maybe a third type might be associated with links as well?

> The blockchain part is silly, because timestamping services exist without it

Yet the timestamping service which I trust the most, is the Blockchain-based one. https://opentimestamps.org/

In Firefox, the 24 (with the old-style 4 looking like a turned alpha) is missing from the outer dark band. However, in Edge, the 24 is there.

> If you KNOW a stock is worth more or less based on information that you currently have but are withholding from me in a trade, that's fundamentally fraud.

No, it's not. When A buys stocks from B based on knowlegde that A has, A is under no obligation to find out whether B has that knowledge as well and has understood what that knowledge entails to the same degree as A does.

Buying stocks based on non-public or not-yet-publicly-dissiminated knowledge is mostly perfectly legal. Only when such knowledge has been acquired by being an insider to the company, or through personal relations with insiders from that company, does one run into insider trading laws.

Don’t they? In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014) the Supreme Court did not address and answer whether for-profit corporations are protected by the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but the Court did recognize a for-profit corporation’s claim of religious belief (equal to the belief of its owners), sufficient for such a corporation to be exempt from a regulation that it (or its owners) religiously object to, if there is a less restrictive means of furthering the law’s interest, according to the provisions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

It’s been done before (sort of): the river Vilnelė is declared to have the constitutional right to flow by everyone, in the very first article of the constitution of Užupis. [0]

[0] https://uzhupisembassy.eu/uzhupis-constitution/

Also, are you looking at your phone screen up from above, or screen down from below with the sky behind it?

Would the correct orientation be rotated of mirrored?

You are judging Damore not by his words, but by how his memo got misrepresented. At no point in his memo, Damore indicated that he would discriminate or called for discrimination against other employees. He did advocate to end affirmative action (“Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races”), but that is not the same as advocating for discrimination. It is the opposite, in fact.

In his reply to public response and misrepresentation, Damore did write:

“I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.”

Along with “herfstschraalte” (autumnal skimpiness).

The queen was also historically not such a very powerful chess piece. The rule that the queen roams freely in all directions on the board was established, in her honour, when Queen Isabella I of Castile reigned.

The Eysturoy tunnel is an Y-shaped tunnel, connecting three islands of the Faroe. (Edit: Not entirely true, as two of the mouths are actually on different peninsulas of the same island Eysturoy.)

I guess they could have chosen to dig 2 different tunnels, but that would probably have been more expensive because of the increase in kilometers, seeing how long they dig under land at the mouths in order for the tunnel to be deep enough at the banks/shores.

Swiss people don’t use American date order.

You’re right that the analogy between elementary-school-multiplication and convolution only works for multiplication without carrying. That still leaves a large amount of possible multiplication instances, for the term “cherry picking” to apply here.

You’re wrong to suggest that elementary-school-multiplication and (discrete) convolution are so dissimilar that the analogy is so unhelpful that it only adds to everyone’s confusion. Maybe to yours, but not to everyone’s.

If I understand your objection correctly (other than the already conceded fact that the analogy does not work in case of multiplication with carrying), you already have internalized that convolution is an operator on 2 functions, resulting in a function. And since you have already internalized that, the analogy with any operator on two natural numbers resulting in a natural number confuses you — although I assume you can see the similarity in the sliding operation.

For people who have not internalized what a convolution is, the visualisationg of the sliding operation, and the analogy with elementary-school-multiplication is the helpful bit.

To clarify why the operations are really similar: consider a natural number as a function that takes a natural number as argument, and returns the digit (between 0 and 9 inclusive) for that decimal position.

So f = 2 031 is considered to be: n → f(n) = if n = 3 then return 2 else if n = 1 then return 3 else if n = 0 then return 1 else return 0 (end if).

And g = 320 is considered to be: n → g(n) = if n = 2 then return 3 else if n = 1 then return 2 else return 0 (end if).

What is then the discrete convolution f ∗ g?

It’s f ∗ g = n → (f ∗ g)(n) = f(3) × g(n – 3) + f(1) × g(n – 1) + f(0) × g(n)

= n → if n = 5 then return 6 else if n = 4 then return 4 else if n = 3 or n = 2 then return 9 else n = 1 then return 2 else return 0 (end if).

This is how we consider 649 920 = 2 031 × 320.