HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Ste_Tokyo

-14 karma · joined July 15, 2023

submissionscomments
Ste_Tokyo··on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
The Gazans voted for Hamas as their leaders knowing their genocidal policy towards Jews. The October 7 attack was popular among Palestinians including Gazans at first. Less so now. It is fair then to say that the Gazans bear some responsibility for the attack. Also, the IDF are targeting Hamas, not the Gazans as a whole. Additional civilian deaths are caused by the cowardly tactics of Hamas to use human shields. The Gazans knew that Hamas used these tactics when they voted for them. Again, you reap what you sow.
Ste_Tokyo··on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
Almost all Israeli land was granted by the UN or won in wars started by the Arabs, not stolen. You can criticize Israel for building settlements on the West Bank in contravention of international law. And because Israel is a democratic state with the rule of law, and free speech, many Israelis do express opposition to the building of illegal settlements on the West Bank.

Meanwhile, the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza have chosen people to govern them whose only goal is to destroy Israel and murder all Jews there. These people are possessed by an extreme Islamist ideology which has driven them insane.

The Arabs and Jews of Palestine were in essentially the same position in 1947. Look at them now. The Jews have built a successful modern state, while the Arabs are using all their resources to build tunnels to try to get in to Israel and murder Jews randomly. Clearly, the Arabs of Palestine have made stupid mistakes and should have just accepted the state in 1947.

Ste_Tokyo··on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
The state was not as a fact imposed on the Palestinians. After centuries living under empires, they were offered a state for the first time ever by the UN in 1947 but turned it down. Instead they decided to go to war to destroy Israel and have been trying to do so ever since. That was their choice. It has worked out very badly for them because they keep making the same stupid mistakes driven by Jew hatred.

The current war was started by Hamas and they knew exactly what the outcome would be - thousands of deaths of their own people. They sacrificed their own people to use it as a political tool by which they aim to get the political support of useful idiots like you against Israel. It is a sick policy carried out by sick people. This is not genocide; it is a war, started by Hamas who wanted the results we see.

Ste_Tokyo··on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
The Palestinians are in the situation they are in because of their own choices, not because of some Greater Israel plan which the poster seems to think is the reason. The German people and the Japanese people suffered similar privations in WW2 - shouldn’t have attacked Poland and Pearl Harbor then. Choices have consequences. Do you see this rather simple point now?
Ste_Tokyo··on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
Apparently, it is true that the Likud manifesto of 1977 called for only Israeli sovereignty “from the river to the sea”, but this is already de facto the case as Israel are occupying the West Bank. And they don’t appear to have killed all the Arabs of the West Bank in fact. Hamas changed their charter in 2017 from a struggle against Jews to a struggle against Zionists for cosmetic reasons, by which they are presumably referring to all Jews in Israel at least, as I stated; and they have not repudiated their old charter which targets Jews not Zionists. And as a matter of fact, Hamas spent several years and used all their resources to carry out the October 7 attach in which they brutally massacred all the Jews, sorry Zionists, they could get their hands on; including deliberately targeting babies, pregnant women and families. This shows what Hamas would do if they had the wherewithal - they would murder all Jews in Israel to the last one. They have shown themselves to be literally genocidal.

Israel is responding to an attack on its people according to, above the standards of even, international law. I don’t see you calling the Ukrainians bad for fighting back against Russia. This stance is pure anti-semitism, though you may not realize or intend it.

Ste_Tokyo··on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
Has that happened?
Ste_Tokyo··on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
The stated objective of the Final Solution was to murder literally every Jew in Europe, thus the “Final”. The stated objective of Hamas, voted into power by the Arabs of Gaza, is to murder literally every Jew in Israel. I don’t think that anywhere in the Likud manifesto for the democratic elections of the democratic state of Israel it states that genocide of the Gazans is a policy. Do you see the difference between a democratic state with the rule of law and a gang of self-declared genocidal terrorists? Obviously not.
Ste_Tokyo··on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
And what Native American tribes sometimes did to each other was genocide. There were lots of actors in the fight for the American land mass - the US , the British Empire, the French Empire, Mexico, the Japanese were even having a look. So I don’t think it is as simple as saying the US committed genocide of the Native Americans, who were actually many different tribes often warring with each other. Their way of life was bound to largely die out once the modern world arrived.
Ste_Tokyo··on On the Double-Slit Experiment and Quantum Interference in the Wolfram Model (2020)
Of course it contains GR as a low-energy limit. Where it can be physically checked, it is equivalent to the existing successful theory; where it makes new predictions, it can't be checked and so is almost certainly wrong. To make progress in physics you need to apply yourself to a real open problem (like "Dark Matter") or get new data (from quantum computers or primordial gravitational waves, maybe). The only good thing that can be said about Wolfram is that he is not paid with my taxes, because plenty of cranks in physics are.
Ste_Tokyo··on On the Double-Slit Experiment and Quantum Interference in the Wolfram Model (2020)
Does the "Wolfram Model" allow easier analysis of certain physical situations like the Hamiltonian does? Thought not. So what's your point?
Ste_Tokyo··on Linear Algebra Done Right – 4th Edition
Clearly the goal of a first course in linear algebra is not mathematical maturity. If you don't set up the notation consistently from the start, once you start introducing change of bases formulae or proving row rank = column rank, etc., some students will get confused. See all the questions from confused students on Maths Stack Exchange about this point. The way this particular author has handled the issue is perverse: first he writes vectors as row vectors, then he introduces a mapping M(v) which maps the vector v to its representation as a column vector. Also, as I tangentially noted, he misses out the brackets for a function writing T(0,1) instead of T((0,1)), which is just incompetent. The book should be titled "Algebra Done Shite" not "Algebra Done Right" ;)
Ste_Tokyo··on Linear Algebra Done Right – 4th Edition
The book starts out writing vectors as row vectors (1 x n matrices), then later introduces the matrix of a vector as a column vector.

Just represent vectors as column vectors from the start, define R^n as R^n,1 (in the notation of the book) and then there's no confusion and you get matrix multiplication of column vectors as students learned in high school: M.x where M is an m x n matrix and x is an n x 1 column vector, with product an m x 1 column vector. Stick to this all the way through a first linear algebra textbook and undergrad tears can be avoided. e.g. example 3.32 in the text: T(1,0) = (1,2,7). Just write these as column vectors and the matrix multiplication is easier to visualize. (Also, T acting on a real number was written T(x) with brackets so T acting on a vector should really be written T((1,0)). Inconsistencies in notation like this lead to pain.)

Then, for example, when you want to show that the rows of a matrix are independent, you can use a row vector to write succinctly x.M = 0 => x = 0 where x is now a row vector. And it's clear we're doing something other than transforming space vectors here as we've used column vectors for vectors representing points in space.

For undergrad textbooks you want to decide on a convention, one that matches what was done in high school preferably, and stick to it.