News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

thefringthing

This reminds me slightly of Milne's interpolation theorem for classical propositional logic, which says that any proof can be re-written so that the first use of the law of the excluded middle occurs after the last use of the law of non-contradiction.
Re:Em dashes are fucking amazing on Friday July 24, 2026 @12:36PM (#49038121)
> 5.2.1 Use spaced en dashes – rather than em dashes or hyphens – to set off phrases."

– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

Re:A Brief History of Fish Sauce on Monday April 20, 2026 @01:21PM (#47837563)
At my local Asian grocery store, Red Boat costs about four times as much as the other brands, so I'll be sticking with my old standby of "random bottle whose ingredients list contains only anchovies and salt".
Re: on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @01:02PM (#47236217)
I bought a handmade arcade-style SNES controller from this guy one time. He should go back to making those, I guess.
Re:Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @01:42PM (#46964760)
> The core objective was to determine if a high frequency of HBEs causally links to a high rate of crashes. We employed negative binomial (NB) regression models [...].

A negative binomial regression fit on observational data cannot establish that a statistical relationship is causal.

Re:Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025 on Monday December 22, 2025 @12:12PM (#46356076)
If you had asked me to list ten books that would be mentioned frequently on HackerNews, I think I'd have gotten at least eight of the top ten here.
Selling at a loss can also be a monopolistic practice: a firm with enough capital can sell at a loss to capture the market, and then buy out their now-flailing competition.
Re:I Wasted 8 Years of My Life in Crypto on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:10PM (#46194827)
It's a store of value in the sense that it has a non-zero price at any given moment, but when people say that one of the functions of money is to be a store of value, they mean that its value must be reasonably stable so that its future usefulness is predictable.
Is there a simple way to turn a set of hcker.news feed settings into an RSS feed?
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide does not require that perpetrators are successful in reducing the population of the targeted group, only that they "intend to destroy [it], in whole or in part" and take any of five specific categories of action with that intent.
Re:My Truck Desk on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @01:33PM (#45814336)
The causes and mechanisms of ADHD are reasonably well understood. Perhaps whatever other traits you have in mind are not.
The article addresses this.
French spelling is sometimes described as "one-way": it's almost always possible to pronounce a written word correctly, but very difficult to spell a word you've only heard.
Kingsley Read went with something like an artificially rhotic midcentury RP when designing the Shavian alphabet. It works reasonably well for me, a Standard Canadian English speaker, except that distinguishing all the open vowels (father/bought/bot) can be a struggle,
Re:Bayesian Data Analysis, Third edition [pdf] on Monday September 29, 2025 @11:27AM (#45415014)
I would include Richard McElreath's _Statistical Rethinking_ here after, or in combination with, _Bayes Rules!_. A translation of the code parts into the tidyverse is available free online, as are lecture videos based on the book.
Grammar problem: "In 3D space, we position objects by setting its coordinates" should read either "their coordinates" or "an object".
Re:Why English doesn't use accents on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @07:57AM (#44499166)
The article touches on this, but there have been countless attempts to restandardize English spelling or replace the Latin alphabet with one more suited to English. But English is a global language with no central authority responsible for deciding what is correct, making coordinated change nearly impossible.

To my mind, the best such attempt was Kingsley Read's, made at the behest of G. B. Shaw: https://www.shavian.info

Re:The Who Cares Era on Friday May 30, 2025 @08:29AM (#44135526)
> They put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears, and what did they get? No thank you, just more work.

Don't be ridiculous. They got a pizza party and $20 gift card to a mall store.

Re:Denmark to raise retirement age to 70 on Monday May 26, 2025 @08:45AM (#44096955)
If Denmark wanted to fund the same number of retired years per person as the US did when Social Security was established, the retirement age would be about 68, based on the 1935 and 2025 actuarial life tables for the USA and Denmark respectively.
My understanding is that the whole history of basketball is explained by the fact that they won't make the court bigger and the nets higher to account for the fact that the players are seven feet tall now.
Re:Buy European Made. Support European Values on Thursday March 06, 2025 @11:09AM (#43281785)
Title II, Article 11.
Re:Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce on Sunday January 05, 2025 @12:33PM (#42603353)
Boil long pasta in a skillet, not a pot.
Re:Crokinole on Sunday October 20, 2024 @07:34PM (#41899420)
There are people who design new abstract tactical games in the style of chess, go, hex, draughts, etc. as a kind of art form or mental exercise, but almost none of them are developed into commercial products.
Re:The Best $4 Ever Spent on Saturday September 28, 2024 @11:44AM (#41680935)
> Kids get excited about things that are very different from those of adults.

The very first sentence of this post is ungrammatical.

It's often said that if you want to get away with killing an American, first give them a bicycle. Drivers just say "they came out of nowhere" or "the sun was in my eyes" and that's that.
Re:What you can get out of a high-quality font on Friday September 13, 2024 @01:39AM (#41528283)
English is a language, Cyrillic is an alphabet, and Greek is both. The alphabet one finds in the range U+0000 to U+007F is called "Latin", not "English". If any alphabet has a claim on being "English", it's Shavian. (Found at U+10450 to U+1047F.)
Re:Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex on Sunday July 21, 2024 @11:27AM (#41025785)
Just don't try to put a footnote in a heading. I'll keep using LaTeX until Typst is less buggy.
> Can you point to the relevant statutes?

This is about sound recordings rather than books, but one of the more insane features of US copyright law is that the copyright status of sound recordings made before 1972 is governed by state rather than federal law, and many states are thought to have no applicable statute. Some of these states determine copyright status for these works by deferring to federal law, which does not cover them.

One "nice" thing about NF is that it has only two axioms/axiom schemes: 1) sets with the same members are the same, and 2) any stratifiable property corresponds to a set off all the things which have that property. And the definition of "stratifiable" isn't very complicated.

ZF, by contrast, has eight rather ad hoc axioms/axiom schemes.

Older »