AdhemarVandamme

5 ms·

1.
by AdhemarVandamme 1mo ago
Obviously, not everyone on Hacker News shares the same opinion. But, in general, Stewart Brand’s sentiment — expressed during a panel discussion at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, when he said that “information wants to be free” — is
2.
by AdhemarVandamme 3mo ago
I remember that, when I saw text-generative AI (GPT) demonstrated for the first time, I was reminded of this story. Wow, they actually made what Roald Dahl described in the nineteen-fifties! Two further easter eggs that I particularly like
3.
by AdhemarVandamme 4mo ago
Not on the list, yet likely of interest to the Hacker News audience, is the dedication in the first volume of Donald E. Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming”: “This series of books is affectionately dedicated to the Type 650 computer on
4.
by AdhemarVandamme 10mo ago
“ world ” is derived from “ were ” + “ eald ” ( old ), and meant “the age of humans”, which was distinguished from the age of the Gods, when the Æsir and Vanir dominated, and the age of the Jötnar. I find it interesting how the term shifted
5.
by AdhemarVandamme 11mo ago
In Microsoft v. AT&T , decision 550 US 437 (2007), there was discussion about a golden disk , and the terminology changed to master disk during the course of the proceedings, because the disk wasn’t actually made of gold. I rememb
6.
by AdhemarVandamme 11mo ago
I agree with you and the anonymous Reddit commenter that this is a “cool story”, and that it needs “a shitton of paragraphs”. But it also left me somewhat confused. The author’s note at the end states that “[the] story is 100 % fictional, e
7.
by AdhemarVandamme 1y ago
I’m old enough to have used (book) dictionaries and wooden case card catalogues in the local library. So when I learned about hashmaps/IDictonary a quarter century ago, that’s indeed the image that helped me grok the concept. However,
8.
by AdhemarVandamme 1y ago
It was already known to scholars that the length of a (tropical) year is close to 365-and-a-quarter days since at least 238 BC (when Ptolemy III tried to fix the length of the year in the Egyptian calender to 365-and-a-quarter days in the C
9.
by AdhemarVandamme 1y ago
I don’t see why the grammatical cases of Latin and German matter in the interpretation of these abbreviations. The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases t
10.
by AdhemarVandamme 1y ago
How would you argue such claims, geographically and/or accurately speaking? — Other than: that’s how I was taught it is; or that’s how my favourite teacher/book/source-with-some-authority says it is. There is no generally-agr
11.
by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
The prefered canonical name is continent-or-ocean/city-or-small-island because continents and cities are more stable than countries and country names. The America/state/city convention is the exception, not the rule. Some tim
12.
by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
In the same way that an hour is skipped in many places at the beginning of Daylight Saving Time every year (and the offset changes, e.g. from UTC–5 to UTC–4), on this particular instant, in Iceland, 28 minutes were skipped because Iceland c
13.
by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
There’s plenty of room for reasonable discussion and questions, even about human rights. Are all human rights individual rights, or are there collective human rights (peoples’ rights)? Are there limits to free speech, and if so, what are th
14.
by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
> I'm sorry I just can’t find a single source backing you up. As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (
15.
by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
The first factor of the Drake Equation (the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy) has dimension 1/time. The last factor (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space) has dimension time.
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by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
They might be rarely considering code formatting specifically, but the claim that one language is a superset of another really does imply that all valid instances of the latter are also valid instances of the former (and are similarly pars
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by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
Did the idea of emitting Morse code on the keyboard LEDs during kernel panics ever get working, and included in the kernel? I'm thinking of the LWN article “Morse code panics for 2.6.29-rc1” (2003) https://lwn.net/Artic
18.
by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
I like this idea. My first remark is VirtualStorage<T>. As I understand it, T is the type the library user can associate with the items (nodes, files) of the tree. I think this library can be made more useful with VirtualStorage<T,
19.
by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
> The blockchain part is silly, because timestamping services exist without it Yet the timestamping service which I trust the most, is the Blockchain-based one. https://opentimestamps.org/
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by AdhemarVandamme 2y ago
In Firefox, the 24 (with the old-style 4 looking like a turned alpha) is missing from the outer dark band. However, in Edge, the 24 is there.
21.
by AdhemarVandamme 3y ago
> If you KNOW a stock is worth more or less based on information that you currently have but are withholding from me in a trade, that's fundamentally fraud. No, it's not. When A buys stocks from B based on knowlegde that A has,
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by AdhemarVandamme 3y ago
Don’t they? In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014) the Supreme Court did not address and answer whether for-profit corporations are protected by the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Co
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by AdhemarVandamme 3y ago
It’s been done before (sort of): the river Vilnelė is declared to have the constitutional right to flow by everyone, in the very first article of the constitution of Užupis. [0] [0] https://uzhupisembassy.eu/uzhupis-constitu
24.
by AdhemarVandamme 3y ago
Also, are you looking at your phone screen up from above, or screen down from below with the sky behind it? Would the correct orientation be rotated of mirrored?
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by AdhemarVandamme 4y ago
You are judging Damore not by his words, but by how his memo got misrepresented. At no point in his memo, Damore indicated that he would discriminate or called for discrimination against other employees. He did advocate to end affirmative a
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by AdhemarVandamme 5y ago
Along with “herfstschraalte” (autumnal skimpiness).
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by AdhemarVandamme 5y ago
The queen was also historically not such a very powerful chess piece. The rule that the queen roams freely in all directions on the board was established, in her honour, when Queen Isabella I of Castile reigned.
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by AdhemarVandamme 6y ago
The Eysturoy tunnel is an Y-shaped tunnel, connecting three islands of the Faroe. (Edit: Not entirely true, as two of the mouths are actually on different peninsulas of the same island Eysturoy.) I guess they could have chosen to dig 2 diff
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by AdhemarVandamme 6y ago
Swiss people don’t use American date order.
30.
by AdhemarVandamme 6y ago
You’re right that the analogy between elementary-school-multiplication and convolution only works for multiplication without carrying. That still leaves a large amount of possible multiplication instances, for the term “cherry picking” to a

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