HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

willismonroe

13 karma · joined June 12, 2018

submissionscomments
willismonroe··on Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades
I like using http://neverssl.com/ for that... easy to remember (although I guess example.com was as well).
willismonroe··on Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs
I'm stuck on the usage "mulle times a week" which shows up twice in the context of the Claude team editing or contributing to a CLAUDE.md file. Is this an AI-generated artifact?
willismonroe··on Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
My colleagues and I wrote a programming language (really just a python wrapper on unicode characters) in cuneiform. The novelty was that we tried as much as possible to use actual mathematical concepts from 3rd (and early 2nd) millennium BCE Mesopotamia. We published it in Sigbovik 2024 (https://www.sigbovik.org/2024/proceedings.pdf) as well as a full neural net implementation using the language.
willismonroe··on Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)
This article makes wildly erroneous claims about a genuinely very interesting ancient object. I've worked a bit on this (PhD in Babylonian Astronomy/Astrology) and published articles talking about it. It's a fascinating object but more so as a product of scholarly thinking about the heavens rather than actual observations. Even if it did record observations they would date to the Neo-Assyrian period (when/where the object was found) not to an even more ancient past.

Notably the article linked here doesn't even show the object! It only reproduces images of badly made replicas.

willismonroe··on Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)
The tablet has been translated for the better part of a century. The problem is that many of the popular depictions of it don't give it's museum number or any other (correct) identifying information, often erroneously referring to it as a "Sumerian" object.

If you search for the museum number K. 8538 you'll find quite a bit (some still bad). That said, this article is wildly off-base.

willismonroe··on Digital public archaeology: Excavating data from digs done decades ago
The CAD PDFs are searchable; parsing the PDFs, on the other hand, is more of an issue with custom fonts etc...
willismonroe··on Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition
I think you might be conflating two camps of academics. There have been folks for a while now who were vehemently against online education, and there are also those pushing digital pedagogy forward. The former were stuck in a rut when classes moved online this spring, and the latter were there to pick up the slack and start organizing workshops and trying to make all university teaching better online.
willismonroe··on Roman mosaic floor found under Italian vineyard
I'm really curious about how you came to the conclusion that Turkey doesn't allow digs (not criticizing!). Like, I'm just wondering where the failure in PR was for archaeologists working in Turkey that it wasn't self-evident.

Perhaps I'm biased (certainly) but Turkey often seems to be in the news for spectacular finds from archaeological digs across the country (focused mostly in the west though). I worked on a site in the SE for seven years, and there was a ton of activity every year many foreign but also Turkish digs working in every province.