News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

grandpa

Re:Claude Haiku 4.5 on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @10:02PM (#45600685)
Claude Clause.
The title is "Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of isopropyl bromide?"

https://archive.org/details/gergel_isopropyl_bromide

Re:Solving NP-hard puzzles with the oldest trick in the book on Thursday October 14, 2021 @08:04AM (#28863171)

  git clone --branch start https://github.com/djkoloski/anima_solver
  Cloning into 'anima_solver'...
  fatal: Remote branch start not found in upstream origin
Re:Arabian Nights on Thursday April 01, 2021 @09:47AM (#26660471)
The opening of Borges' essay is absolutely brilliant writing:

> AT TRIESTE, IN 1872, in a palace with damp statues and deficient hygienic facilities, a gentleman on whose face an African scar told its tale — Captain Richard Francis Burton, the English consul — embarked on a famous translation of the Quitab aliflaila ua laila, which the roumis know by the title, The Thousand and One Nights. One of the secret aims of his work was the annihilation of another gentleman (also weatherbeaten, and with a dark Moorish beard) who was compiling a vast dictionary in England and who died long before he was annihilated by Burton. That gentleman was Edward Lane, the Orientalist, author of a highly scrupulous version of The Thousand and One Nights that had supplanted a version by Galland. Lane translated against Galland, Burton against Lane; to understand Burton we must understand this hostile dynasty.

Borges also admires Burton's footnotes:

> Thus Volume Six (which I have before me) includes some three hundred notes, among which are the following: a condemnation of jails and a defense of corporal punishment and fines; some examples of the Islamic respect for bread; a legend about the hairiness of Queen Belkis’ legs; an enumeration of the four colors that are emblematic of death; a theory and practice of Oriental ingratitude; the information that angels prefer a piebald mount, while Djinns favor horses with a bright-bay coat; a synopsis of the mythology surrounding the secret Night of Power or Night of Nights; a denunciation of the superficiality of Andrew Lang; a diatribe against rule by democracy; a census of the names of Mohammed, on the Earth, in the Fire, and in the Garden; a mention of the Amalekite people, of long years and large stature; a note on the private parts of the Moslem, which for the man extend from the navel to his knees, and for the woman from the top of the head to the tips of her toes; a consideration of the asa’o [roasted beef] of the Argentine gaucho; a warning about the discomforts of “equitation” when the steed is human; an allusion to a grandiose plan for cross-breeding baboons with women and thus deriving a sub-race of good proletarians. At fifty, a man has accumulated affections, ironies, obscenities, and copious anecdotes; Burton unburdened himself of them in his notes.

Re:Big Pile of Vim-Like on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @05:27AM (#21701059)
With `. ranger`, if you change directory and then exit, the shell's working directory changes to where you left off in Ranger.

  $ pwd
  /home/grandpa
  $ ranger
  [ ... change directory ... ]
  $ pwd
  /home/grandpa
vs

  $ . ranger
  [ ... change directory ... ]
  $ pwd
  /home/grandpa/src
Re:Show HN: TeXnique – A LaTeX Typesetting Game on Thursday August 29, 2019 @03:25PM (#20832743)
This is really good fun! But it would be nice if I could finish up the problem I'm on when the timer runs out. Currently, it just gets taken away abruptly.
Re:The ‘Real You’ Is a Myth on Thursday September 27, 2018 @07:55AM (#18083615)
You could test this by looking at whether pairs of fraternal twins are as similar on personality traits as pairs of identical twins. If they are more different, then genes are the cause.
Why "infamous"?
Re:Fast wildcard searches with trigrams on Thursday August 20, 2015 @07:20PM (#10095181)
I think this is the same technique as Russ Cox used to search Google Code: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html
Re:Dependency parse tree visualization on Thursday August 20, 2015 @07:12AM (#10091068)
It parses "fruit flies like a banana" the same way as "Time flies like an arrow".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_frui...

Re:Oxford University Machine Learning Course on Friday August 14, 2015 @05:49PM (#10063173)
Definitely, but I think Oxford University is more interested in teaching the underlying principles than tracking what's popular in industry.
Re:A different cluetrain on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @10:39AM (#9107201)
The "cluetrain" in the title refers to the Cluetrain Manifesto from 1999: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/95-theses.html
There's a difference, though: QuickCheck randomly tries a large-ish number of possible inputs to try and disprove a postcondition, whereas formal methods prove the postcondition for all inputs. Practically, if the number of possible inputs is huge compared to the number of failure cases, it's unlikely that QuickCheck will find it. I strongly suspect - and this would be an interesting experiment - that QuickCheck wouldn't have found this particular bug, since Timsort has been in use for years without anyone noticing it.
Utilities should be happy about this. One of their biggest problems is uneven load on the grid - low at night, too high during a heatwave - and this has the potential to make that problem a lot easier.
Re:Pronouns matter when psyching yourself up on Monday February 09, 2015 @08:22AM (#9020993)
The paper described in the article is available as PDF here: http://cpl.psy.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Kross-et-a...
Re:Ruby DSL Handbook on Friday February 06, 2015 @02:15PM (#9010934)
Spoiler: the second bit of advice is "Step 2: No, seriously. Don't"
Re:Benefits of Writing a DSL in Ruby on Wednesday October 01, 2014 @09:28AM (#8394150)
> Also, capturing blocks and instance_eval are notoriously slow.

...and, in this case, are evaluated once, at startup. It's so fast that you couldn't possibly notice a difference.

Re:AutoJS – JS library for textarea lookahead on Monday November 25, 2013 @10:20AM (#6794459)
This is what happened when I tried typing the first sentence on your web site: http://i.imgur.com/jQGHwQc.png
Re:The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements on Saturday July 20, 2013 @03:06PM (#6076149)
Using Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html), your first paragraph is DH2 (responding to tone), and the rest is DH1 (ad hominem). Do you have any arguments relating to the points being made?
Re:Police May Know Exactly Where You Were Last Tuesday on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @05:56PM (#6060384)
I don't think you are taking the word "infinity" seriously. If parents believed that, why are they recklessly endangering their children's lives by taking them to a public place where they could be shot and killed, instead of hiring a personal shopper? Why did they put them in a car when auto accidents are the number one cause if child deaths? Why are they living in America when child mortality is lower in several other countries?

The answer, of course, is that while losing a child is unspeakably awful, children are not infinitely valuable to us - at least if you go by what we do rather than what we say. And public policy needs to reflect that.

Re:Police May Know Exactly Where You Were Last Tuesday on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @01:22PM (#6058901)
I don't think negative infinity is a reasonable number for this. If it were, then I would expect you to gladly pay someone all your income for the next 20 years to stand guard over your children night and day to ensure that none of them are kidnapped and killed. Anything less would be negligent parenting.
Re:NSA's Talking Points Defending NSA Surveillance on Saturday June 15, 2013 @08:00AM (#5884812)
From the Hacker News guidelines:

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re:Dennis Ritchie's first C compiler on Github on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:36PM (#5751984)
This is the compiler's printf(), not the one that gets linked in with compiled code. As long as the compiler itself doesn't have more than 9 substitutions, it's OK. Your code will link with a different one.
Re:Blocking China IP Address Blocks on Saturday February 23, 2013 @09:41PM (#5272518)
Perhaps this will one day be so widely implemented that the great firewall of China will become obsolete, and the censors' dream will be realized.
Re:Never Trust what Recruiters Say on Saturday February 02, 2013 @12:58PM (#5156706)
If it's an interesting fix, please consider doing a post like "What I learned from getting slashdotted by Hacker News".
Re:Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday in the U.S. on Thursday January 24, 2013 @01:01PM (#5111009)
I couldn't figure out from the article what exactly it is that's illegal. Which of these situations cause me to break the law as an American?

1. I travel to Canada, unlock my cellphone there where it is legal, and bring it back to the U.S.

2. My Canadian nephew unlocks my phone while I am not looking.

3. I unlock my phone, but then never turn it on so it never connects to a carrier.

4. I buy a phone in New York, then move to Canada never to return. On arrival in Canada, I unlock my phone.

If it's really true that "unlocking cellphones is illegal in the U.S.", then only 3 should be illegal.

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a debate over what Godwin's law says approaches 1.

Older »