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sdeer

85 karma · joined December 19, 2017

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sdeer··on Samurai City
Shogun describes the period just before the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. This article describes the system that developed after that, under the Shoguns.
sdeer··on The Nobel Prize and the Laureate Are Inseparable
Thin skinned, self-absorbed? Kaiser Wilhelm II comes to mind.
sdeer··on English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
Scored 87% above native speakers with CEFR level C2 and 21100 word families. I wonder if the study found anyone at the very top of the scale?
sdeer··on Why warm countries are poorer
I am from eastern India, not Brazil. It is definitely too humid to wear robes. Arabia is dry and hot, very different from humid and hot.
sdeer··on Service members deserve the right to repair
Could this be because there were a large number of enlisted persons serving? An all volunteer force might expect all serving troops to be more familiar with equipment.
sdeer··on A Ritzy L.A. Enclave Learned a Bitter Lesson About the Limits of Its Wealth
Right now when I went to their front page I could see a one paragraph summary of several news items. Granted, other front page stories only show the headline but I think that is an adequate substitute for what we got from peeking at the vending machine window.
sdeer··on Calling Strangers Uncle and Auntie
Speaking as a Bengali from India, we are definitely level 3. Also, this extends to grandfathers and grandmothers.
sdeer··on Ask HN: Which RSS reader do you use?
Self hosted miniflux via the excellent web UI.
sdeer··on UK Debt Hits 100% of GDP, Highest Level Since 1960s
UK was actually reducing their debt as percentage of GDP throughout 1960s. It went down below 100% in 1961 and kept going down all the way to 1990 or so. The debt had originally climbed to over 250% as a result of financing the two world wars.
sdeer··on Advice on Reading Homer in Translation
It was Balboa who led the first European expedition across isthmus of Panama and saw the Pacific Ocean and claimed it (yes,the whole Ocean) for Spain. Cortez to my knowledge never set foot in Panama.

The Scottish colony was much later.

sdeer··on The Google Pay app is dead
It is the Google Pay app. The Google Wallet app is separate and (at least in India) do not have payment functionality.

Edited to add: actually the popular app in India is GPay which I think is different from the older Google Pay.

Google's payment apps are very confusing.

sdeer··on A 100x speedup with unsafe Python
Probably because Fortran stores matrices and other multidimensional arrays in column order. Traditionally most numerical computation software was written in Fortran and numpy calls those under the hood. Storing in row order would have meant copying the data to column major order and back for any call to Fortran.
sdeer··on Vernor Vinge has died
+1
sdeer··on An interactive exploration of Boston's subway system
They have not included the Green Line which is underground in the central city but is more like a tram in physical dimensions. It is considered a part of the network.
sdeer··on On Being the Right Size (1926) [pdf]
I think the work on decompression was done by his father? His father did experiment on both himself and his son.

His uncle was the Liberal Party politician Richard Haldane who was the secretary of war for UK just before WWI and carried out some reforms which were pretty important in setting how the British army fought in the early part of the great war.

sdeer··on Doas – dedicated OpenBSD application subexecutor
Even better, add doas-sudo-shim to your system packages and disable sudo:

  security = {
    doas.enable = true;
    sudo.enable = false;
  };

  environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.doas-sudo-shim ];
sdeer··on Garum Masala
Śākya Gaṇarājya translates to English as Shakya Republic and that is actually correct. Kapilavastu was the capital of the Republic/Oligarchy of the Shakya clan. Buddha's father was the elected chief at the time of his birth. This is why one of his epithets is Shakyamuni ("muni" means sage so sage of the Shakyas.)

Strictly speaking Buddha was not a royal price but scion of an aristocratic family. As a comparison think of someone born in a patrician family of Rome when his father is a Consul of Rome. The Wikipedia article has good details about the Shakyas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakya

sdeer··on We asked ChatGPT to write a Sherlock Holmes mystery
There are a couple of original stories where Holmes is the narrator though. These are "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier" and "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane".
sdeer··on Ask HN: What brand of laptop do you use?
ThinkPad T480 with 32GB RAM and dual 512GB SSDs running NixOS.
sdeer··on I just want to run this one Python script
Any reason why he can't use

  #!/usr/bin/env python
here?
sdeer··on Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies (2017)
You are probaly thinking of https://github.com/cfagiani/cotfs which allows ln but not mv or cp.
sdeer··on Excel may have caused loss of 16,000 Covid tests in England
The article says they went over the row limit so the later.
sdeer··on Mayflower 400: the science of sailing across the ocean in 1620
The crew (other than the captain who probably had his own cabin) probably stayed at the lower deck because the gun deck had better ventilation for the passengers. It took a long time after a ship first became visible for a gun battle to occur so the crew had enough time to get ready.
sdeer··on India open-sources its contact-tracing app
The actual source code (android only, for now) is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/nic-delhi/AarogyaSetu_Android
sdeer··on Google Fined Rs. 136 Crore for 'Search Bias' by Competition Commission
Economic Times has a bit more detail: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/cci-issue...
sdeer··on Google Fined Rs. 136 Crore for 'Search Bias' by Competition Commission
For those not familiar with Indian currency, the fine is approximately 21 million in USD.
sdeer··on Outperforming LAPACK with C++ metaprogramming
It is somewhat unclear from his writing but did he compare this metaprogramming solution against OpenBlas or Atlas or just the reference BLAS/LAPACK implementation? If I was trying to do any significant linear algebra computations, I would definitely first try an optimized BLAS/LAPACK solution first.
sdeer··on Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts
Actually one of the attendees at the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry was partially responsible for the first Gerrymandered voting districts and the concept is named for him (and the fact that one of the districts was depicted shaped like a Salamander in a cartoon.)