8,933 karma · joined March 16, 2009
> …you’re arguing against someone who believes they are.
when actually it says
> …you’re arguing against who someone believes they are.
(meaning “you're arguing with someone against who they believe themselves to be” or something like that.)
Prediction: Android will roll out a flow for “experienced users” that they promised in November with “in the coming months” (https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...), which will allow “experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified”. And even then people will still complain Google is being too controlling by making the warnings too scary / the process too onerous, etc. (I don't expect installing apps from source via adb connected to laptop to go away!)
- From Dec 2024 there's https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/general/2915570/state-g... and https://theinvestor.vn/thai-govt-collaborates-with-google-to... which list some efforts done in “collaboration between the Digital Economy and Society (DES) Ministry [of Thailand] and Google”. It mentions “The initiative started in April, providing the Google Play Protect feature”, which “blocked attempts by criminals to install apps more than 4.8 million times on more than 1 million Android devices”. And https://www.nationthailand.com/blogs/business/tech/40036973 is from earlier (Apr 2024), about the introduction of the Google Play Protect feature.
- From April 2025 there's https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl... a blog post from a “VP, Government Affairs & Public Policy”, which mentions “people in Asia Pacific feel it acutely, having lost an estimated $688 billion in 2024” (I think this may be across all scams?) and ends with “Combatting evolving online fraud in Asia-Pacific is critical” after listing a bunch of random things (unrelated to Android) Google is/was doing. This suggests to me that Google was under some criticism/pressure from governments for enabling scams, and eager to say “see, we're doing something”.
- The developer verification announcement came four months later in August 2025: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-...
> In early discussions about this initiative, we've been encouraged by the supportive initial feedback we've received. In Brazil, the Brazilian Federation of Banks (FEBRABAN) sees it as a “significant advancement in protecting users and encouraging accountability.” This support extends to governments as well, with Indonesia's Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs praising it for providing a “balanced approach” that protects users while keeping Android open. Similarly, Thailand’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Society sees it as a “positive and proactive measure” that aligns with their national digital safety policies.
This shows that it was a negotiation with the governments/agencies in Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand that were breathing down on Google to do something.
- The fourth country where this developer verification is rolling out first is Singapore, and https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/android-malware-sc... is from Sep 2023 while https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/google-android-dev... is from Feb 2024 which mentions that a certain upgrade to Google Play Protect (blocking apps if they “demands suspicious permissions such as access to restricted data like SMSes and phone notifications”) was first rolling out in Singapore.
- And the most recent https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de... from November 2025 (which promised the “students and hobbyists” account type and the “experienced users” flow “in the coming months”) also has a “Why verification is important” section that mentions the “consistently acted to keep our ecosystem safe” and “common attack we track in Southeast Asia” and “While we have advanced safeguards and protections to detect and take down bad apps, without verification, bad actors can spin up new harmful apps instantly”.
The overall picture I get is less of “Google to suddenly abandon these iterative security improvements” but more like: under pressure from governments to stop scams, Google has been doing various things like the things you mentioned, and scammers have also been evolving and finding new ways to carry out scams at scale (like “impersonating developers”), and the latest upcoming change requiring developer verification on “certified Android devices” is simply the next step of the iteration. It sucks and feels like a wholesale lock-down, yes, but it does not seem a jarring disconnect from the previous steps in the progression of locking things down.
> 320 print "(brmmmm-brmmmm-putt-putt-vraow-chatter-chatter bye mr. fibonacci!)"
> The symbol ∈ only is a viable solution in a portion of the use cases. For instance, an assertion such as O(n)⋅O(n) = O(n²) would not be correctly describable as O(n)⋅O(n) ∈ O(n²). Perhaps O(n)⋅O(n) ⊂ O(n²) would be defensible, but now one has to devote a non-trivial amount of thought into deciding which of the connectives =, ∈, ∋, ⊂, ⊃ to use in a given context. For instance the assertion “Since sin(y) = sin(x) + O(|y−x|), we have sin(x+O(1/n)) = sin(x) + O(1/n)” would now become “Since sin(y) ∈ sin(x) + O(|y−x|), we have sin(x+O(1/n)) ⊂ \sin(x) + O(1/n)”. Using the equality sign for all of these use cases instead is more intuitive and corresponds more closely to how the verb “is” (“to be”) is actually used in mathematical English.
and
> … Nevertheless most of us still often think in mereological terms rather than set-theoretic or first-order terms […] without requiring translation to set theory or first order logic; indeed, such a translation would only serve to slow that mathematician down as he or she would usually have translate it back into mereological form in order to wield it effectively. Because of this, I think it is worth adjusting our notational conventions to more closely align with our actual thought processes… I don’t see much advantage in interpreting each instance of the O() notation in the exponential type bound f(n) = O(\exp(O(nᴼ⁽¹⁾))) or the calculation (1 + O(1/n))ᴼ⁽ⁿ⁾ = \exp(O(1/n)⋅O(n)) = \exp(O(1)) = O(1) (for n sufficiently large), in terms of ideals.
HN discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907481
> From When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy by Beronda L. Montgomery. Copyright © 2026. Available from Henry Holt and Co., an imprint of Macmillan
Usually this means that the article is actually a book excerpt (often the first chapter of the book), and in this case we can find online the book's table of contents:
Preface
Introduction: Life as Testimony
1. Pecan Trees and the Roots of Stolen Botanical Knowledge
2. Sycamore Trees as a Path to Freedom
3. The Secret Lives of Willow Trees
4. Poplar Trees Bear Strange Fruit
5. The Sweeping Promise of Mulberry
6. A Haven for Community in Historic Oak Trees
7. Cotton Shrubs and Seeds of Subversion
8. The Gift of Apple Trees
Conclusion: Black Botanical Legacy Reclaimed
It's really short and would fit in a comment here, but quoting just some fun bits:
> A vertical organizer would have scooped this stuff up, and put it in a file to retrieve later. Had I done this, there would be a bare spot on my desk. These bare spots are the mark of vertical organizers. They are a dead give away.
> […] The fact is, I am a horizontal organizer. I like all the thing I am working on spread out on a surface in front of me, where they can beckon me to continue working on them. When I put something in a file, I never see it again. The problem isn't that I can't find it (although that has happened), but that I don't look. I am constitutionally incapable of opening a filing cabinet and fishing out a half-finished project to resume working on it.
• (29 seconds long) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0WtBFEfAyo
• (59 seconds long) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elpQPbJXpfY
It’s perfectly adequate for writing on, but so far I’ve almost never used the fact that it has (a rudimentary set of) colours, though.
> I'm a big fan of binary numbers, but I have to admit that this convention flouts the widely accepted international standards for scientific prefixes.
He also calls it “an important issue” and had written “1000 MB = 1 gigabyte (GB), 1000 GB = 1 terabyte (TB), 1000 TB = 1 petabyte (PB), 1000 PB = 1 exabyte (EB), 1000 EB = 1 zettabyte (ZB), 1000 ZB = 1 yottabyte (YB)” in his MMIX book even before the new binary prefixes became an international standard.
He is merely complaining that the new names for the binary prefixes sound funny (and has his own proposal like “large megabyte” and notation MMB etc), but he's still using the kilo/mega/etc prefixes with decimal meanings.
To the contrary, I'm pretty sure it is more than symbolic. Surely it matches their temperament (respectively) and thereby their philosophies.
So yeah the moral I guess is, tooling may take longer than you expect, but you must at least be trying to get away from it and back to writing. :)
It would be interesting to consider the differences between the Charlie Brown and Arthur Dent character archetypes.
One difference seems to me exactly the undying earnestness and optimism you mentioned: in a way, Charlie Brown and other American characters like him are simply not touched by failure (even if bad things happen to them), because of their optimism[1]. This makes them lovable: we appreciate them for this quality that we (most of the audience) do not have.
[1]: (or lack of self-awareness, in some other cases mentioned here like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin)
Arthur Dent, on the other hand, is not gifted with undying optimism. He's constantly moaning about things, starting with his house and his planet being destroyed. This makes him relatable more than lovable: he's not a “lovable loser” (and for the right audience, does not seem a “loser” at all), he is just us, “my kind of guy” — we feel kinship rather than appreciation. We relate to the moaning (if Arthur Dent were to remain unfailingly optimistic, he'd be… different), whereas if Charlie Brown were to lose his optimism or if Homer were to say "D'oh!" to complain about big things in life rather than hurting his thumb or whatever, they would become less of the endearing American institutions they are IMO.
• It is not merely a string of independent adjectives; there's a progression of ideas from one morpheme to the next, just as in any compound. Try here: https://dharmamitra.org/?target_lang=english-explained&input...
> nirantarāndhakāritā-digantara-kandaladamanda-sudhārasa-bindu-sāndratara-ghanāghana-vr̥nda-sandehakara-syandamāna-makaranda-bindu-bandhuratara-mākanda-taru-kula-talpa-kalpa-mr̥dula-sikatā-jāla-jaṭila-mūla-tala-maruvaka-miladalaghu-laghu-laya-kalita-ramaṇīya-pānīya-śālikā-bālikā-karāra-vinda-galantikā-galadelā-lavaṅga-pāṭala-ghanasāra-kastūrikātisaurabha-medura-laghutara-madhura-śītalatara-saliladhārā-nirākariṣṇu-tadīya-vimala-vilocana-mayūkha-rekhāpasārita-pipāsāyāsa-pathika-lokān
It's not actually the longest though; e.g. here's someone asking how to get TeX to hyphenate a routine compound that would be about 1361 characters long in transliteration: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/404690/how-to-make-a...
> Is there really a 797 character long word in Sanskrit?
> Yes its ! Some times even the book completely will be like this. What is the solution?
It's interesting that the editor didn't know the author of one of the articles in their magazine!
> This article from Datamation is by someone from ADR - the name might be Moore. (It wasn't meant to be anonymous; that was accidental). A lot of people who knew me thought I wrote it. I wish I had!
> I particularly like his definition of a bad programmer. (My personal record is about 12 years.)
The scan comes from Knuth's personal collection scanned by the Computer History Museum. Many of the documents have similar notes by Knuth, so I assumed this was by him too. Though on closer look, I'm not so sure the handwriting is the same. (It would be ironic if a note about misattribution gets misattributed.) How do you know the note is by Chuck Baker?
Thanks also for making it open-source. I used it for a blog post about a story I remembered from my school textbook :) https://shreevatsa.net/post/bazin-letter-box/ -> https://shreevatsa.net/bazin-letter-box/
Stephen Walton's translation is actually my favourite! I omitted it here because this is HN and likely someone would complain the translation is clearly incorrect because it talks about “Your neighbor’s car gets hit in a parking lot”. But to include it too just for completeness :) https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:e,ec,twh,twr,gl,...
You are right that it is undesirable to be a slave to one's emotions, to keep having emotional outbursts or “expressing” all emotions impulsively. But at the other extreme if you try to address this by building a habit of dissociation and “ignoring” your feelings (as you propose), that is also not good, and not how Stoicism or meditation address it. (To use an analogy: it would be bad for a parent to be a slave to their children, or for a charioteer to be led by their horses instead of controlling them. But ignoring them isn't great either!)
Stoicism addresses this preemptively, building a practice of having a proportionate response to things outside our control. Meditation also addresses this by, as you said, noticing emotions when they arise, recognizing them for what they are (creating some distance), and letting them pass instead of indulging them. Ignoring your emotions or letting them burst out are both different from letting them pass/seeing them through.
- The first part says: if you shrug off someone else's cup being broken as just an accident, you should also do the same when yours gets broken.
- Then he clearly says “Apply now the same principle to the matters of greater importance.”
- The last part says that if you respond to someone else's bereavement with platitudes like “Such is the lot of man” or “This is an accident of mortality” (this does not preclude some amount of sympathy and compassion preceding those statements!), then you should respond the same to yours, rather than thinking of yourself as uniquely wretched and unfortunate.
The main point is about being consistent in how you view others' fate and yours: not that you should care equally about someone's wife and yours (or that you should be indifferent to either), just that the story you tell about life and fortune should be the same.
[He's also obviously distinguishing the cup situation (a simple everyday thing where the principle is easy to see and follow, given as an establishing example) from the wife situation (a situation where the principle is harder to apply), by saying “greater things” / “higher matters” / “matters of greater importance”.]
> I particularly like his definitinon of a bad programmer. (My personal record is about 12 years.)
here?
The natural-language statement of the problem is (from https://www.erdosproblems.com/728):
> Let C>0 and ϵ>0 be sufficiently small. Are there infinitely many integers a,b,n with a≥ϵn and b≥ϵn such that a!b!∣n!(a+b−n)! and a+b>n+Clogn?
The Lean-language statement of the problem (which can be done either by hand or by AI) is (from https://github.com/plby/lean-proofs/blob/f44d8c0e433ab285541...):
∀ᶠ ε : ℝ in [>] 0, ∀ C > (0 : ℝ), ∀ C' > C,
∃ a b n : ℕ,
0 < n ∧
ε * n < a ∧
ε * n < b ∧
a ! * b ! ∣ n ! * (a + b - n)! ∧
a + b > n + C * log n ∧
a + b < n + C' * log n
(There's also an older formulation at https://github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures/blob/f... but the new one is more in the spirit of what was intended: see the discussion starting at https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/728#post-2196 which gives a clear picture, as of course does Tao's thread in the OP that summarizes this discussion.)
- It took me a minute or two of clicking around to figure out that the (only?) way to use it is to create an API key, then start aristotle in the terminal and interact with it there. It could be more obvious I think.
- Your profile links to http://www.cs.stanford.edu/~tachim/ which doesn't work; should be http://cs.stanford.edu/~tachim/ (without the www) (I think Stanford broke something recently for the former not to work.)