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Archelaos

Re:Why Were Victorian Elites So Effective? on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @06:47PM (#49999807)
The answer is easy: The others did the work. Until the party was over and the money spent. The more interesting question is: why has so much from the Victorian era survived in Britain to this day, whilst it disappeared in most other countries?
Re:Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines on Friday October 02, 2026 @09:59AM (#49933631)
A small addition: With effect from 1 August 2021, the German legislature has amended copyright law to explicitly mention pastiches.

  § 51a Karikatur, Parodie und Pastiche

  Zulässig ist die Vervielfältigung, die Verbreitung und die öffentliche Wiedergabe eines veröffentlichten Werkes zum Zweck der Karikatur, der Parodie und des Pastiches. Die Befugnis nach Satz 1 umfasst die Nutzung einer Abbildung oder sonstigen Vervielfältigung des genutzten Werkes, auch wenn diese selbst durch ein Urheberrecht oder ein verwandtes Schutzrecht geschützt ist.
See: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51a.html

Translation:

  Section 51a Caricature, parody and pastiche

  It is permitted to reproduce, distribute and communicate to the public a published work for the purpose of caricature, parody and pastiche. The authorisation under sentence 1 includes the use of an illustration or other reproduction of the work used even if this is itself protected by copyright or a related right.
See: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_ur...
Re:Burning Man Death Rates – A Short Lesson in Statistics on Thursday October 01, 2026 @07:44AM (#49920417)
Isn’t there a simple explanation for the discrepancy in mortality rates: if someone is seriously ill, they typically don’t participate in the first place.
Re:America.gov – Whatever you need from government, start here on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @03:43AM (#49905717)
> What do you need help with today?

Greenland

> ...

> I did not find an executive order that officially renamed Greenland.

> ...

Re:Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later on Sunday September 27, 2026 @03:32AM (#49864267)
There is a small ambiguity in the article:

> in January 2025, the German state of Baden-Württemberg implemented a new LVT

More exact: On 4 November 2020, a law was enacted in the state of Baden-Württemberg which shall apply for the first time to real estate tax for the calendar year 2025 and constitutes a form of LVT.

The text of the law can be found here (in German): https://www.landesrecht-bw.de/bsbw/document/jlr-NNLBW00007EB...

Some brief information on the Web-site of the State of Baden-Württemberg (in German): https://fm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/de/service/presse-und-oeffe...

Re:We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians on Saturday September 26, 2026 @09:46AM (#49856517)
A major school of German sociology places this at the core of its theory. According to this theory, modern societies are characterised in particular by the fact that individual subsystems of society reduce the complexity of their own (sub)system to the other systems to enable them to act at all; they fulfil what is called an "Entlastungsfunktion" (relief function). Prominent representatives of this school of thought are Max Weber, Arnold Gehlen and Niklas Luhmann.

In their view, it is modern institutions (public and private) which, as supra-individual entities, have long since become autonomous systems. The fact that the individual office-holders are human beings, meanwhile, is of little significance.

Hannah Arendt, in her theory of totalitarianism, attributed the effectiveness of both Nazi and Stalinist policies of extermination to the largly moral indifference of bureaucracy as a system.

In this sense, the task of controlling AI is a variation on the problem of harnessing a complex society consisting mainly of autonomous subsystems. This is a problem which has increasingly challenged humanity already for quite a long time. And it has been very difficult so far, even without AI ...

Re:Teleoperated Humans on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @02:03PM (#49805558)
> The classic picture of AIs doing things in the world is robots, but I think a more realistic picture of the near future is computers telling people what to do.

As a purely qualitative description, this does not strike me as anything particularly new. Machines had been doing something like this long before the computer age. For example, as early as the late Middle Ages, mechanical wheel-driven clocks with striking mechanisms were used to call people to prayer.

Any process in which a person reacts to a machine can be characterised in this way. Every till that calculates how much one has to pay, every traffic light, every other machine-generated signal. When a warning light comes on in the car, we are prompted to do something: release the handbrake properly, fasten our seatbelt, visit a garage, ...

We are already so deeply embedded in such cycles that AI seems to be merely a new variation on them than a fundamental change.

The deep sense of unease regarding AI does not stem from a machine telling us what to do, but from the risk of losing control over the situation as a whole.

Re:Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids on Friday September 04, 2026 @06:52AM (#49562867)
Yep. Poisoning the planet with nuclear wast for a million years. 40,000 generations of our children will be happy and thankful.
Re:A better SQL in 11 lines of code on Saturday August 29, 2026 @06:24PM (#49493830)
How does it compare to Linq?
Re:Should you wash your solar panels? on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:56AM (#49070618)
I would generalise this a little: The problem with buying a complex item is information inequality. The seller knows more about it than the potential buyer. When inspecting the item, the buyer therefore looks for signs of hidden defects or for evidence that the item is in good condition overall. In this way, cleanliness becomes a proxy for the general condition of the object. Similar mechanisms are at work elsewhere too. Take job applications, for example. A sloppy application is a red flag, even if the applicant’s references are excellent.
We are looking at 75,000 years. You forgot the %.
The authors claim that he spent "9,600 euros to start a company" is misleading. Since he wants to reduce his liabiliy and therefore the risk of his customers as much as possible, he opted for a complex solution that involved founding two joined companies.

In addition, he counted 2,000 € of shared capital as an expense, which it isn't. He did not opt for a "cheap" UG which requires no up-front capital, because of its bad reputation.

He also includes a bill for accounting software of 426.97 € into his calculation. This has nothing to do with founding costs, but are operational expenses.

As the author states that he set up the company through a law firm, I wonder which of the figures includes the cost of this service. To be fair, this should be listed separately, as such costs can vary widely or be omitted entirely if the company is incorporated solely through a notary.

Also the information about the minimum deposit when founding a GmbH is incomplete. He states: "A GmbH wants 25,000 euros sitting in a bank account before it is allowed to exist." Fact is that you need only deposit half of it upfront into the GmbH; you only have to deposit the rest of the money if the company is in trouble. The company can also immediately lend the deposit back to the founder at market rates. If the company’s articles of association permit it to hold shares in other companies, the company may also use the contributions to purchase shares or similar financial investments. His law firm should actually have advised him on this matter.

The main differences between a standard GmbH and a GmbH & Co KG lie in their somewhat different tax arrangements.

So all in all, the author paid 7,227.74 € to found a rather complex company structure. Judging by his reasoning, presumably for the wrong reasons.

When I found a GmbH in 2019 without the help of a law firm, it cost me about 2,000 euros (if I recall it correctly).

Re:Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants on Thursday June 18, 2026 @03:17PM (#48590166)
The pro-nuclear propaganda in this discussion reminds me of the tobacco companies that claimed smoking was harmless, or of Monsanto, which insisted that its pesticides were safe, and so on. It is always the same pattern: obvious facts are denied, doubts are exaggerated, legitimate concerns are downplayed, and blatant lies are spread. I wonder how many undercover lobbyists for the nuclear industry are active here on HN.
Re:How to make your text look futuristic on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @08:58AM (#48121309)
Raumpatrouille Orion also from 1966 used a similar font style:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumpatrouille_%E2%80%93_Die_p...

I reckon this style originated much earlier from the fonts used on the covers of science fiction books and magazines.

> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally.

Also I wouldn’t want to disagree with you outright, there are still a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.

What Siemens exemplifies is that the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery. While Siemens and most of its spin-offs are doing somewhat okay, the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.

Re:Ti-84 Evo on Friday May 01, 2026 @08:04PM (#47981930)
On 9 July 1537, Martin Luther wrote in a letter to Wolfgang Capito about a lost golden ring: "Pro annulo aureo gratias tibi agit mea Catharina, quam vix unquam magis indignatam vidi, quam ubi sensit, cum vel furto sublatum, vel sua negligentia (quod nec mihi verisimile est, licet usque ingerenti) amissum, quod persuaseram ei, hoc donum esse felix omen et augurium ei missum, tanquam nunc certum esset, vestram Ecclesiam cum nostra suaviter concordare; id mire dolet mulieri."[1]

When Luther's house in Wittenberg was excavated about 20 years ago, a golden ring[2] was found that must have been deposited there before 1540. It is therefore quite likely that this is the ring mentioned by Luther in 1537.

[1] See WA, BR 8: no 3162 -- https://archive.org/details/werkebriefwechse08luthuoft/page/...

[2] Here is an image of the ring: https://www.zum.de/Faecher/G/BW/Landeskunde/rhein/geschichte...

Re:A.I. is creating engineers who can't think without it on Monday April 27, 2026 @08:29AM (#47920727)
Socrates never wrote anything. At least, not as far as we know.
Re:Your hex editor should color-code bytes on Thursday April 23, 2026 @05:24AM (#47873714)
This article made me think how I could use similar techinques to colour code the data in database tables. Has anyone here tried that and has some recommendations where to start, etc.?
Polar bears can have furtile offspring with grizzly/brown bears. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly%E2%80%93polar_bear_hyb...

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