HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dghf

1,760 karma · joined February 22, 2014

Arts grad & business analyst with a broad interest in (but no deep knowledge of) things technical.
submissionscomments
dghf··on If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious
May I ask why? If one can suffer, one by definition can have subjective experience. And I understand that for you, that is not sufficient for consciousness, which is fine: one of the biggest problems of the whole consciousness debate is what is actually meant by the word. But it does indicate that there is something going on inside rabbits that isn’t going on inside rocks (assuming that rabbits can indeed suffer and rocks cannot).
dghf··on If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious
Can a rabbit suffer? I don't think a rock can. I doubt slime moulds can either (though I admit I don't know a huge amount about how their internal makeup). But I suspect rabbits can.
dghf··on That's a Lot of YAML
> snarky comments

How was my comment snarky? The YAML maintainers may have intended YAML to be a superset of JSON, but failed by not incorporating some obscure feature of it that bore on whether it was streamable or not.

dghf··on That's a Lot of YAML
YAML is (or at least, is declared by its maintainers to be) a superset of JSON, making any JSON document also a valid YAML document.

So surely if YAML is streamable, JSON must be too?

Or are the YAML maintainers incorrect?

dghf··on A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
The right to a trial by jury in civil suits where the sum in dispute is greater than US$20 is a universal natural right?
dghf··on England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
Point of pedantry: federation usually implies a federal government, and the UK is a unitary state.
dghf··on England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
1) Most Commonwealth countries are republics, not monarchies.

2) The monarchies in the Commonwealth countries are ruled by different crowns; but, for historical reasons, most of those crowns are worn by the same physical head. (But not all of them. The King of Malaysia is a different natural person from the King of the UK, for example.)

dghf··on England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
The Scottish NHS has always been a separate organisation, even before devolution, created under a separate Act of Parliament. It's just that it used to be answerable to the UK government (specifically to the Secretary of State for Scotland, rather than the Secretary of State for Health), and now it's answerable to the Scottish government.

Why it was done like that, I'm not sure, but I suspect it was a combination of Scotland having its own legal system and laws (guaranteed by the Acts of Union of 1707) and existing ministerial division of responsibility (where public health in Scotland fell within the purview of the Scottish Secretary, along with Scottish education and a bunch of other areas that had their own distinct Cabinet ministers for England and Wales).

And while the Welsh NHS was originally part of the same NHS as operated in England, control over the NHS in Wales passed from the Health Secretary to the Welsh Secretary with the creation of the Welsh Office in 1969, and then to the devolved Welsh government in 1999.

Northern Ireland already had devolution (or to be precise, home rule) when the NHS was created in 1948, and the Northern Irish equivalent -- the Health and Social Care service -- is a direct creation of the Parliament of Northern Ireland rather than of the UK Parliament.

dghf··on This blog is written in en-GB
No, that's en-GB-Yamyam.
dghf··on Dostoyevsky isn't difficult
According to Wikipedia:

- Jehan (Old French form of "John") -> Jan

- Jan -> Jankin (diminutive)

- Jankin -> Jackin

- Jackin -> Jack

dghf··on Dostoyevsky isn't difficult
Traditionally, yes; these days, perhaps not so much.

The author Jack London was originally John London. John F. Kennedy was familiarly known as Jack ("Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy"). The British racing driver John Stewart is far more commonly known as Jackie Stewart. In Patrick O'Brian's naval fiction, Captain John Aubrey is almost always referred to as Jack.

dghf··on They’re made out of weights
Apologies, didn't notice when I got the link from YT's "Share" button. Won't make that mistake again.

Comment is now to old to edit: for convenience, here's the link without the parameter -- https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec

dghf··on They’re made out of weights
> a compelling story about a sentient toaster

"Howdy-doodly-doo! Anybody like any toast?"

https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=YbQfnZbrCe01Bicy

dghf··on I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline
I keep on meaning to try these out: https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/
dghf··on The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map
Yes, it seems to be promoting the idea, popular in New Age writings, that Celtic Christianity was a separate denomination (or what Rome would have considered a heresy); and that just doesn’t seem to have been the case.
dghf··on The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map
But was it doctrinally different from Chalcedonian Christianity to justify its own colour on the map. Wikipedia suggests no, which chimes with my understanding: some local minor differences in practice, but nothing like the Christological disputes that caused the rift with the Church of the East, nor like the row over papal supremacy etc. that led to the Great Schism between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
dghf··on The Spread of Christianity Animated
But the graphic suggests that Celtic Christianity was in some sense theologically distinct from Chalcedonian Christianity, and that doesn't seem to have been the case. The main ways that the Christians of Ireland and Britain differed from those of continental western Europe seem to have been in the shape of the monastic tonsure and the calculation of the date of Easter; and in the latter, at least, British and Irish Christians were in conformity with Rome by the end of the eighth century. (There was also an emphasis on penance and absolution as a private rather than public rite, but this was ultimately adopted by the wider church.)

There doesn't seem to have been any doctrinal disputes, nor any suggestion that British and Irish Christianity was in any way separate from the Church of Rome.

dghf··on The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map
What is going on with Celtic Christianity? Was it really as distinct from Roman Catholicism (and for as long) as the graphic suggests?

Also, why no Cathars/Albigensians in the south of France during the 12th & 13th centuries?

dghf··on Michael Keating has died
One of the only episodes of Blake's 7 I really remember is "Orbit", in which Avon and Vila play a game of cat-and-mouse aboard a shuttle that's been stripped back to the wiring but is still doomed to crash into the planet it's trying to launch from unless another 70 kg can be ejected: as Orac helpfully points out to Avon, this is more or less exactly Vila's body mass. The respective faces pulled by Avon and Vila as Orac announces this tell you everything you need to know about their characters.
dghf··on New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
The manuscript is ~1200 years old, but the poem was composed earlier. The Venerable Bede, who died in 735, includes it and the story of its composition in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People: according to that story, it was composed while Saint Hilda was abbess of Whitby, c.660-680.
dghf··on The Mushroom That Makes People Have the Exact Same Hallucination
I was under the impression that the "machine elves" were very different from the tiny people described in this article.
dghf··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
The Wannadies had to go with "You & Me Song" https://youtu.be/t_e_45Szprk?si=4JVZHZzguqm3SFHN
dghf··on The road signs that teach travellers about France
The ones in the UK are much more minimalist: logos and symbols rather than detailed drawings.
dghf··on Apple Just Lost Me
That mentions app stores, but I can't see anything about device-level age-verification there.

Also, does Ofcom have the power under the Online Safety Act to mandate app-store verification (or device-level verification, for that matter)? Or would it require secondary, or even primary, legislation?

dghf··on Apple Just Lost Me
> it is fundamentally the UK’s fault by requiring such draconian measures

It would appear the UK doesn't:

> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.

-- https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...

dghf··on Apple Just Lost Me
To counter your downvoters:

> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.

-- https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...

dghf··on Apple Just Lost Me
> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.

https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...

dghf··on Is it a pint?
Apologies, I was specifically replying to your last sentence, "Every other drink has to use in metric."
dghf··on Is it a pint?
Many Americans do claim to use imperial units. They’re wrong, but they do claim it.
dghf··on Is it a pint?
But that just means the quantity has to be expressed in metric units, possibly in addition to imperial, correct? E.g. I currently have a carton of milk in my fridge that’s labelled “2272ml 4 pints”.
Page 1 of 26Next →