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thwave

66 karma · joined February 4, 2018

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thwave··on The Accountability Problem
they could have seen tusks themselves, and relied on verbal descriptions for the rest of the animal.
thwave··on A non-standard book list for software developers
> Proclus (ca. 335 BC)

Proclus, whose quote opens the section on Euclid, lived more than 700 years after this date, well into the 5th century AD. Euclid himself wasn't born till about decade after, in 325 BC.

thwave··on Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
There's always inference.
thwave··on Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
Unless gratefulness is actually binary (x is grateful for y), and directing this gratefulness towards someone is completely optional. (One might argue that the object of gratefulness is optional as well, and you can be grateful simpliciter, in an unqualified way. But to them I'd say there's an implied, general, object: the world, life, existence, or something like this.)
thwave··on Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
There are still some scholarly work written in Latin. For example see Terence O. Tunberg's book from 2013[0].

I highly recommend this[1] blog post about contemporary Latin knowledge.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/rationibus-colloquendi-Supplementa-Hu... [1] http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora...

thwave··on Sayings of Spartan women
Correct. The translated sentence ("my son was a gude and honourable mon, but Sparta has mony a mon better than him.") does ends with two distinctly Doric words: τήνω (there, i.e. in Sparta) κάρρονας (stronger/better), instead of the Attic ἐκεῖ κρείττονας.
thwave··on Sayings of Spartan women
This footnote refers to Sayings of Kings and Commanders[0], another text of Plutarch, but is not related to the translation.

[0] https://www.loebclassics.com/view/plutarch-moralia_sayings_k...

thwave··on Thomas Aquinas' works with English and original Latin presented in parallel
Perseus Digital Library has a quite a few, in Greek as well. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Pe... https://scaife.perseus.org/library/
thwave··on How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
My piano teacher used to say "It's not a video-game, you don't go back to the beginning of the level every time you lose."
thwave··on A century ago Ludwig Wittgenstein changed philosophy
There's a very interesting comparison to be made between Wittgenstein and Spinoza, but saying something like "basically just a rehash" completely missed the point. Saying that Spinoza is "just a rehash" of Stoic ideas is a bit more correct, and still not very interesting outside of a very specified discussion.

The title "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" was not Wittgenstein's idea, but Moore's.

thwave··on Ignoring Docker updates is a paid feature now?
> not brew, that one is also spyware

how is brew spyware?

thwave··on Bitoduc: A French dictionnary for CS related words
The Latin for eight is octo.
thwave··on Ozymandias

  my nam is King
  of ancient land
  and haf my face
  is under sand
  
  and on a stone
  it can be read
  “the World is mine”
  but now I’m ded
https://alexicon-art.tumblr.com/post/159203577946/ozymandias
thwave··on Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?
Very cool! Why do you need the Arduino for the heart-tempo? Can't you connect the pulse-sensor directly to the computer?
thwave··on Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies
What is and isn't evidence is for people to decide by themselves based on facts?
thwave··on Markdown Tutorial
Markdown has no reasonable support for RTL.
thwave··on Surface Go 2, Surface Book 3, Surface Headphones 2 and Surface Earbuds
just a nitpick: the proper plural is "caveant emptores".
thwave··on Selfie 2 Waifu
Dennō Coil[1] is a wonderful and innocent take on this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil

thwave··on Esperanto, an International Language
Conlang Critic's episode on Esperanto is worth watching, if only for his criticism of Esperanto's phonology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sao9mCLy3Xo
thwave··on NymphCast: Casual attempt at open alternative to Chromecast
It also just means "a young wife", or "a marriageable maiden" in ancient Greek.
thwave··on Interslavic Language
It's not "average Germanic", but you should look at Anglish.
thwave··on The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild
I've tried it now and got 22k, which seems not so bad for a foreigner ("Top 6.53% Your vocabulary is at the level of professional white-collars in the US!"), but I feel like I cheated: most of the more fancy English words are just misspelled Latin, and having even a modest Latin vocabulary (I'd don't think I know more than 4k Latin words) makes their meanings pretty obvious.
thwave··on Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice
The best advice I ever heard: Every text you read is both an advice how to write and an advice how not to.
thwave··on The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit
There's a nice parallel in Ancient Greek, and from there to modern philosophical parlance: Eristic[0]. Here's Plato, for example: "it is on the purely verbal level that they look for the contradiction in what has been said, and employ eristic, not dialectic, on one another." (Republic V 454a, translated by Reeve)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic

thwave··on Ask HN: What tech stack would you use to build an open-source Google Keep clone?
Partly OT: I've checked a whole lot of note-taking, personal-wiki, bookmarking, outliners, et cetera, and none support Bidi[0] or RTL properly. Markdown editors fail most miserably, of course.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-directional_text

thwave··on Show HN: BitHubLab, Search for projects on all the major Git platforms
Very nice. Maybe you should include stars and last commit date in the search results, or even as filters.
thwave··on China’s Censors Ban Winnie the Pooh and the Letter ‘N’ After Xi’s Power Grab
Solon[1] is my favorite example, and how I think a benevolent ruler should act; Write a good constitution and take a step back. I think Juan Carlos of Spain did something similar: "Expected to continue Franco's legacy, Juan Carlos, however, soon after his accession introduced reforms to dismantle the Francoist regime and begin the Spanish transition to democracy" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Carlos_I_of_Spain

thwave··on The Origin of the word Daemon (2002)
A bit more about the etymology: δαίμων (daimon) in ancient greek is simply a god, or a divine spirit [1]. It appears earliest in the Iliad (1.222), and is probably related to the the root da: "from PIE dai-mon- "divider, provider" (of fortunes or destinies), from root *da- "to divide."[2]. Classical Latin trascribed it as daemon, because "ae" was pronounced "ai". Some years had passed, and Latin-speakers stated saying "e" instaed of "ai"[3], and writing "demon". English, as was mention in the article, borrowed the word twice, in both spellings.

I think that since there's a gap in the meaning and writing of the two words, we might as well pronounce them differently, and so I follow the Greek and say "dai-mon".

[1] LSJ Greek-English Lexicon: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... [2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/demon?ref=etymonline_crossre... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_spelling_and_pronunciati...