Hussell

Remnants of the Precursors resembles Stars!, but Stars! doesn't seem to much resemble Master of Orion 1 or 2. Seems to be convergent evolution. If I recall correctly, there were many similar 4X in space games at the time, and Master of Orion 1 didn't stand out much - it was Master of Orion II that was a big hit, relatively speaking (4X in space were/are a bit niche).

"these agents" meaning the people who tried to solve the problem and failed?

Because it isn't clear:

There's one bird on this mural from each of the 243 taxonomic families. That's why there are a lot of unfamiliar species: because taxonomic categories are usually very unbalanced, with a lot which contain only a handful of species, and a few which contain the majority.

The birds on the mural are life-size. The ostrich is about 7.5 feet / 2.3m tall.

One question I have: what's the map projection?

There's one bird per taxonomic family. Eagles, Hawks, and Kites are all in a single family, so there's just one: a Black-and-white Hawk-eagle, in Mexico.

Decisions are made by people in the group, not by a notional single being "the corporation". It's individual people making decisions about whether to go for short-term profit or long-term sustainability. Hold them accountable, don't shift the blame onto a nonexistent entity.

"We" here likely refers to Tim and his current coworkers who were present to see this, not every current and future employee of Microsoft / Github. Try not to think of any organization or institution as a person, but as lots of individual people, constantly joining and leaving the group.

The maximum IQ score anyone can get depends on the total number of people who have taken IQ tests so far. Even if every single person alive today took an IQ test (which is absurd in itself), the maximum IQ achievable would be between 190-197. In practice, I'd guess the maximum is somewhere between 170 and 185 (millions to tens of millions of IQ test results which were recorded).

Even then, you need special tests to distinguish between anyone with IQ higher than about 160 - all those people get the same (perfect) score on regular IQ tests.

So: claiming to have an IQ of 276? Bullshit. The guy whose parents claimed he scored 210 on an IQ test? Also bullshit. To get 210, there would have to have been ~500 billion IQ test results recorded.

The statisticians have a bunch of tricks to transform the formulas into more-easily computable forms, e.g. calculate both the average and the standard deviation in a single pass through the data instead of one pass to calculate the average and a second to calculate the standard deviation. Converting the math in here to efficient code isn't very easy.

The two species share a lot of glue genes, and the properties of their silks differ due to other genes affecting things like the ratios of glue proteins in the silk. Those other genes evolved faster than the glue genes themselves.

The title is technically correct, though misleading.

Nowhere in the paper does it say that individual spiders are varying their silk composition in response to conditions. The selective expression of proteins is a difference between the two species studied, not between individuals within one species.

The title is technically correct: the two species share a lot of glue genes, and the properties of their silks differ due to other genes affecting things like the ratios of glue proteins in the silk, and those genes evolved faster than the glue genes themselves.

The spiders haven't even been shown to change their silk. It's just two species of spiders with two different silks.

Since I happen to know these species: the spider pictured at the top of the article is an Argiope bruennichi (Wasp Spider), a European species which closely resembles A. trifasciata (Banded Garden Spider, one of the two species in the study).

For those who haven't seen this before, the ones you should look at first are:

Falsehoods about Names https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Falsehoods about Time https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

Falsehoods about Addresses https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

Is there an easy way to display a diff which shows all the new links since the last time this was on HN? (Sept. 8th, 2020)

Partial list:

Falsehoods about Airline Seat Maps https://duffel.com/blog/falsehoods-about-seat-maps

Falsehoods about Biometrics https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/falsehoods-programmers-beli...

Falsehoods about Plain Text https://jeremyhussell.blogspot.com/2017/11/falsehoods-progra...

400 hours/minute is 24,000 minutes of video per minute, or 241,920,000 minutes of video per week. Assuming a human can review 8 hours of video per day, 5 days a week (too high, but not by much), and that YouTube engineers can create an algorithm that automatically marks 95% of video (probably low, 95% correct labelling is easy to get; 99% is usually necessary to outdo humans), then you would need 5,040 humans.

Automatically labelling 97.5% would halve that. If employees can only review 6 hours of video per work-day, then it would increase by a third. Both, you'd need 3,360 humans.

Here's another subpixel font called The Flea's Knees: http://www.typophile.com/node/61920

It's 3 pixels tall (not including ascenders and descenders, which are another two pixels each), and uses the full range of colors available instead of just black, white, and the 6 fully saturated colors. I think it's much more legible.

> Real rivers go somewhere. They don't just stop in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah? Have a look at the Morghab River in southern Turkmenistan. It flows from some mountains in Afghanistan out into a desert, where it splits up into a delta and just sort of... stops. The satellite view on Google Maps is striking. (There are several canals connecting to the delta now, but historically the river stopped in the middle of nowhere.)

Rules of thumb like this aren't laws, just patterns which have exceptions. (That said, yes, imaginary maps are sometimes ridiculous.)

Basically: because it has a lot of characteristics in common with all the other, better preserved, asteroid craters we know of. So our hypothetical advanced civilization would have to have deliberately mimicked all the little details of an asteroid impact, not just created a big explosion using some other method. That's possible, of course, and if they did it well enough we'd never know. But it seems much more plausible that it was an asteroid impact.

Eliminating syntactic (not semantic) ambiguity is indeed a noble goal, but I was kind of horrified when I first realized how it's done in Lojban. Practically every type of phrase has both its start and its end marked by a unique word or class of words, with the terminator usually optional in any context where dropping it would not result in any ambiguity. Knowing exactly when dropping a terminator would result in ambiguity is pretty difficult, and in practice is rare enough that seeing a terminator is something of a surprise and usually requires a trip to look it up in the dictionary.

It seems to me that a grammar based on strictly right (or left) branching (that's prefix or postfix notation, or Polish or reverse Polish notation, for the programmers and mathematicians out there) would eliminate the need for all these optional terminators (which are effectively optional parentheses to clarify the order of operations).

That's a problem we already deal with by having labels for the date inputs which explain the expected format. This is especially necessary in Canada, where until recently there was no recommended format, and the government recommendation isn't even well known yet much less universally used. So, depending on what part of the country you live in, you'll expect a different date format, even though you're technically using the same locale.

So, to do what you want, I'd have to make different versions of all the supporting documentation for each possible date format, and then get each version translated.

Also, displaying the dates the user just entered in a different format is a usability problem. (Users will complain. A lot.) So, if I did what you want, I'd likely be asked to display all dates, everywhere on the site, in the format the browser happened to be compiled with. This is possible for dates in the database, but not so much for dates in static content like news releases.

Just to be clear: I have no objection to making it easy for a website to have date input widgets which use the user's locale. I just want it to be equally easy for a website to have date input widgets in a specific locale. For example, how am I to make a website comparing date input widgets for different locales?

I want the content, number formats, date formats, map labels, etc. on my website to all use the same locale. Date input widgets are no exception.

I can't afford to give full support to all locales (translation costs are ridiculous), so detecting and supporting the user's locale seems to be pointless unless they happen to be using one of the limited set I can give full support to (en-CA and fr-CA in my case). It seems like a far better idea to allow the user of my website to choose one of the supported locales, and see everything in the same consistent format than to have a few input widgets on each page decide to configure themselves based on the locale the browser was compiled with.

Edit: also, consider testing. Am I supposed to download a bunch of variants of Firefox to test my locale support?

Sounds like you're one of those people who use Linux.

Here's an example of a 2000s era page with a table about midway down with its own scrolling: http://www.ibacanada.com/site.jsp?siteID=ON001

Does this not work on some modern browsers out there?

There's a minesweeper solver which works out all the probabilities of uncertain squares. http://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/demo/player/

The creator wrote an explanation here: http://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/

I've personally seen a building with a fractional street number, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I've also had to deal with irregular addresses in Canada. Working on a Canada-only program, I was expecting addresses to have the components:

  [unit-number, ]building-number street-name
  city/town, province/territory, country
  postal-code

I was fortunately already expecting characters from the two official languages of Canada, English and French, so I was prepared to deal with accented characters.

Later, I had the opportunity to work in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, which violated most of my assumptions, both explicit and implicit. First, the territory (not province) of Nunavut is a relatively recent creation, having been created by splitting off a part of the Northwest Territories on April 1st, 1999. Before that, the addresses were all in a different territory.

Second, Iqaluit uses a system where every building in the city has a unique number. Currently (2015) the highest number is rapidly approaching 7000, but at the time it was in the 5000s. In addition to their unique number, some buildings also have a name, which is sometimes written only in the Latin alphabet, sometimes written only in the Inuktitut syllabary, sometimes either, and in at least one case both. When a building has both a name and a number, people may use just one or the other. (I haven't found a building without a number yet, but I'm no longer going to assume there aren't any.)

Street names were not introduced until 2003, and when they were, all street signs were labeled in both the Latin alphabet and the Inuktitut syllabary. Since the system of uniquely numbering every building is continuing, most people ignore the street names unless they're actually talking about streets, not buildings. Nonetheless, some attempts have been made to get everyone to change their mailing addresses to include the street. In every case, everyone has agreed that use of the Inuktitut syllabary should be encouraged.

All these peculiarities are in the territorial capital, where almost all the territorial government and law-enforcement addresses are, so anyone dealing with addresses for the Canadian government should be aware of this (but probably isn't).

On a related topic, the US has long had a system of two-letter abbreviations for its states, commonly used in its addresses. Canada eventually introduced a standard set of two-letter abbreviations for all its provinces and territories, being careful not to duplicate any of the US state abbreviations. However, many people still use the traditional abbreviations, which are of variable length, sometimes have completely different French and English versions, and sometimes include hyphens to prevent confusion with US state abbreviations. (So 'T-N' might appear, meaning 'Terre-Neuve', the French name for Newfoundland, with the hyphen mandatory to prevent it from being mistaken for the US abbreviation for Tennessee. Periods and capital letters with accents also appear, e.g. 'Î.P.É.')

Since its introduction, the "standard" two-letter system has seen at least three name changes. Quebec was PQ before 1991 and is now QC, although sometimes QU or QB show up, Nunavut was added in 1999 (previously part of NT, now NU), and Newfoundland changed its name to Newfoundland and Labrador in 2001, and its abbreviation from NF to NL in 2002. Also, the territory formerly known as "Yukon Territory" officially changed its name to just "Yukon" on April 1st, 2003. (What is it with the Canadian territories and changing important stuff on April 1st?) Their postal abbreviation did not change however. It's still YT, not YK, despite the latter being used fairly often and making more sense now.

This matters because not all two-letter abbreviations appearing in the database (this includes your database) are on the standard list, either because they were entered incorrectly, or because they were correct when they were entered, but have since changed, and the database wasn't updated for fear of breaking working code. As a result, a naive lookup-table to get the full province name from the two-letter abbreviation will fail.