Archelaos

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).

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.

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.

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...

Socrates never wrote anything. At least, not as far as we know.

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...

If an old coin is deemed to not be historically significant, it probably belongs to the landowner.

According to § 984 BGB, a historically insignificant find belongs to the finder and landowner in equal shares.[1] If the find is so important that it is considered a "cultural monument" (Kulturdenkmal), the law of the individual German state determines who owns it and whether or how much of a compensation is payed to the finder.[2]

[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__984.html (in German)

[2] For details see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schatzregal#Deutschland (in German)

In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year

Why not outsource this to a cheaper country? For example, here in Germany salaries are about half of that, and the talent pool is excellent.

German citizen here. I find this attitude horrible and threatening. You are working on sacrificing yet another part of our digital sovereignty to a US company. There are trillions of better things to do with your life.

Can the experiment be summerised by saying that training the model is a kind of probabilistic pre-calculation that converts the Stockfish expert system into a different, rather distinct representation that is worse than Stockfish, but still quite good?

It is a very visible indicator of the quality of the whole. If the spelling is frequently not correct, which a reader can detect relatively easily, how many more mistakes are hidden in the content, which a reader can not detect easily? Are these completely independent variables? I do not think so. Therefore, I also assess the reliability of an article based on the frequency of careless mistakes.

What is an even larger warning sign, are cliches used to spice up an article. Ars Technica is hardly to blame here, but the Smithsonian magazine is full of it.

Quite unlikely. For an army on the move, especially one that had to cover such a long distance, a considerable portion of the troops was assigned to procure provisions anyway.

Bret C. Devereaux has written a series of three blog posts on the topic of pre-modern army logistics that explains that in detail. See: https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...

Is it legal in the USA to point them on public ground?

Why should the army leave a dead elephant on the road? They would butcher it themselves and take the meat with them (and the tusks). The locals may have found some large bones for their living room decorations (and may be some skin, if they were lucky).

What exactly are the "neighborhood cameras" mentioned in the article?

chat control

The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.

For the conservative (and sometimes not so conservative) non-experts things like this sound like an easy win. So every new generation of politicians has to be educated about it again.

chat control

The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.

The odds are very low. It all depents on the people. So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive. The European institutions are characterized by a huge devision of power. There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people. If people turn away from liberal democracy, that's another matter. But then everything is lost anyway.

In C# I use the 'checked' keyword in this or similar cases, when it might be relevant: c = checked(a - b);

Note that this does not violate the "Parse, Don't Validate" rule. This rule does not prevent you from doing stupid things with a "parsed" type.

In other cases, I use its cousin unchecked on int values, when an overflow is okay, such as in calculating an int hash code.

Strong static type checking is helpful when implementing the methodology described in this article, but it is besides its focus. You still need to use the most restrictive type. For example, uint, instead of int, when you want to exclude negative values; a non-empty list type, if your list should not be empty; etc.

When the type is more complex, specific contraints should be used. For a real live example: I designed a type for the occupation of a hotel booking application. The number of occupants of a room must be positiv and a child must be accompanied by at least one adult. My type Occupants has a constructor Occupants(int adults, int children) that varifies that condition on construction (and also some maximum values).

To add to this: I think that what appears to us to be stagnation in scientific interest was due to the fact that Ptolemaios was so brilliant. Contrary to popular belief, the empirical quality of his cosmology in terms of predictability was not surpassed by Copernicus, but only by Kepler about 100 years later.

There were some minor discrepancies, that bothered experts in the late middle ages, which let to Copernicus. But even he could not convincingly solve them. (In his theory the Sun is not at the center, but the mean Sun, as is the center of Ptolemaios deferent not exactly the Earth.)

With Ptolemaios, however, cosmology had stabilised to such an extent that the fundamental questions had found their answers and astronomers turned their attention to practical issues and refinements, such as calendars and the related problem of the very odd movements of the moon. (You need Newton and gravitation to solves this, more or less.)

In recent weeks, one of my clients has seen a significant decline in conversions from Google ads, leading him to suspend most of his advertising campaigns.

Have others here observed the same thing? What exactly is going on here? Where is online advertising heading? Will we soon see AI overviews with explicit or hidden advertising?

This problem is not specific to AI, but a matter of social policy.

For example here in Germany, the Gini index, an indicator of equality/inequality has been oszillating about 29.75 +/-1.45 since 2011.[1] In other words, the wealth distribution was more or less stable in the last 15 years, and is less extrem than in the USA, where it was 41.8 in 2023.[2]

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1184266/

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA

What about "Linux"? It is also a registered trademark.

Most of you have mentioned is not investment, but consumption. Investments means to use money to make more money in the future. Global investment rates are around 25 % of global GDP. Avarage return on investement ist about 10% per year. In other words: using 1% or 2% of GDP if its leads to an improvement in GDP of more than 0.1% or 0.2% next year would count as a success. I think to expect a productivity gain on this scale due to AI is not unrealistic for 2026.

In 2024, global GDP was $111 trillion.[1] Investing 1 or 2 % of that to improve global productivity via AI does not seem exaggerated to me.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD

I am using something inbetween 2 and 3, a hosted Web-site and database service with excellent customer support. On shared hardware it is 22 €/month. A managed server on dedicated hardware starts at about 50 €/month.