mjd

Something in the main game page runs my Firefox process up to 100% CPU.

I know your comment wasn't. What do you feel you're bringing to the conversation? Are HN readers going to see your comment and say “Good thing this anonymous rando spoke up or I would have wasted my time!”

The author is a mathematician, so when he says “it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code” he does not mean it is completely impossible to find bugs. He means only that it is not possible to find all bugs or even any particular bug.

In “The Origin of Consciousness” Julian James argues that human consciousness substantially predates language and even writing.

For example he contrasts the language in the Iliad (which he claims was written before the development of consciousness) and the Odyssey (which came after).

I've been having fun getting better at understanding where the letters begin and end. Something like this is easy for me now:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-516170388361w7xlt8c...

Next I'm going to learn the rest of the letters and try to start reading menus.

I think you left out an important technical advance: A theory of parsing was developed, parsing was systematized, and automatic parser generators were developed.

Parsing in 1992 was very much a solved problem. In 1974, writing a parser was still hard.

One of the reasons I was so interesting to find this thing I had written was that things had (in some ways) changed so little in thirty years.

Today I was re-reading Donald Knuth's 1974 paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” where he says:

“At the present time I think we are on the verge of discovering at last what program- ming languages should really be like. … My dream is that by 1984 we will see a consensus developing for a really good programming language (or, more likely, a coherent family of languages).”

Hoo boy, was he ever wrong.

Not from the chatbot. From me. I'm the one who sent the message.

And it wasn't inauthentic. I wanted to be polite and inoffensive, but I didn't know how.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but yes, I believe there is. Your own personal preferences are not universal.

As I mentioned, I'm hard of hearing and phone calls are difficult for me.

Your use of the phrase “undeserved politeness” suggests to me that maybe you aren't someone I should look to for advice on how to behave.

Two sentences in recruiter register, yes. I'm really bad at it and I do need help.

I would never use AI for something where I need my own voice, say a blog post or a personal letter.

But I'm not ashamed to say that I used it last week in a chat conversation with a recruiter to turn this:

    1. I just said I'm hard of hearing and prefer text.
    2. If it's only two minutes you can darn well send email.

    As I mentioned, I'm hard of hearing and phone calls are difficult for me —
    I find I miss things and it's frustrating for both sides. If it's just a
    couple of minutes' worth of information, an email works great and I can
    give you a thoughtful response. Happy to go from there!

If it makes James Bach think I'm a liar, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

Better. But I think we still are much better at building tools than at using them.

You left out perhaps the most widespread and important example! Many western European cultures, going back I think to Charlemagne, had a monetary system in which a pound was divided into 20 shillings / solidi, and each shilling was divided into 12 pence / denarii. This system persisted in England into the 1970s but it was widespread before the 20th century. For example, in France each livre was divided into 20 sou, and each sou into 12 denier, until 1795.

Leonardo of Pisa's famous book "Liber Abaci" spends a lot of time showing how to do arithmetic on these complicated mixed units, and has an interesting notation for them. If you're interested see https://blog.plover.com/math/liber-abaci-fractions.html .

Thanks for the callout to my Telugu fractions article!

If you enjoy ৪ being four and ৭ seven you will probably enjoy the thousand-year-old magic square inscribed at the Parshvanatha temple in Madhya Pradesh.

https://blog.plover.com/math/magic-square-puzzle.html

Shreevatsa R. tells me that the digit symbols are probably Nagari, which predates Devanagari.

That's an interesting theory but I don't think I find it plausible. Say we're cutting bars like you said. With the obvious strategy I have to cut the three bars into a total of 9 pieces of sizes no less than 1/3 bar each: I cut two of the bars into pieces of 3+3+1 and one bar into pieces of 3+2+2. Then I give five of the people the size-3 bars, and the other two people each get 2+1.

The two people getting the 1/7 + 2/7 pairs can easily verify they are not getting shortchanged, simply by putting their next to one of the 3/7 bars to make sure they add up to the right length.

(Someone dividing 7 sacks of grain among 3 people can do something similar. Maybe they compare two shares of grain on a balance.)

But if you're trying to give everyone a 1/4 bar, a 1/7 bar and a 1/28 bar, sure, it's “trivially obvious to be fair” if you believe you can divide a 1/4 bar into seven exactly equal pieces. But you can't, some will be a little bigger and some will be a little smaller. Seriously, have you ever tried to cut something us unmanageable as a metal bar into seven equal pieces?

Thanks, I think they raised the limit in the last few years and I forgot.

I have definitely gone over the limit for single documents in the past, although I've never been over the quarterly waiver limit. Judicial opinions and hearing trancripts often exceed 30 pages.

PACER fees are waived if they are under $15 per quarter.

That's about 150 pages of material.

Best of luck with this. About twenty years ago there was a website that displayed play-by-play of games in progress with a much more minimal display than yours: just a scoreboard, balls and strikes count, and an indication of who was on base.

MLB crushed them with a copyright infringement lawsuit, claiming copyright over the plain factual description of the play-by-play. It was bullshit, of course, since simple factual descriptions aren't protected by copyright. But website guy couldn't fight MLB in federal court.

Sorry I don't remember the name of the site. I hope it turns out better for you than it did for them.

I've added a short paragraph to the beginning to explain what is going on.

I didn't think about this before, but it must be hard to understand what's going on for someone not already familiar with Egyptian fraction notation.

It was something really silly: I asked Claude to help me think of a snide emoji for every U.S. President.

I hadn't been able to think of one for Zachary Taylor, because, you know, he's Zachary Taylor.

Claude proposed the cherries emoji, because it's said that Taylor the war hero died a ridiculous death from eating cherries and ice milk too greedily on a hot day. It was perfect, just what I had been looking for.

Claude gave me a couple of others, and we workshopped a few more. It was the workshopping that was most striking. I really felt like I was having a conversation with someone else.

https://blog.plover.com//tech/gpt/presidential-emoji.html

tl;dr

Same, I'd never heard of this product or company before, and know I know how many people on HN say they tried it and said it didn't work!

The comment I was responding to asked for examples of “lotteries you don't see, because you're used to them, and they're just part of how the world works, like this one is to the people in the story”. The comment wasn't asking for “deliberate deaths caused by adherence to some tradition”.

“She Faced a Life-Threatening Miscarriage. Under Arkansas’ Abortion Ban, Even Calls to the Governor’s Office Didn’t Help.”

That's from this morning, reported in ProPublica.

https://www.propublica.org/article/arkansas-abortion-ban-mis...

Hit-and-run vehicle collisions.

Innocent bystanders of gang violence.

Factory workers killed by industrial machinery.

That chemical tank in Los Angeles that is about to explode.

Woman in Arkansas with ectopic pregnancy. (Abortion is illegal in Arkansas.)

Now you think of one.

This sort of theoretical result is not always as clear-cut as you suggest.

Computers are finite machines. There is a theorem that although a machine with finite memory can add, multiplication requires unbounded memory. Somehow we muddle along and use computers for multiplication anyway.

More to your point there is a whole field of people who write useful programs using languages in which every program must be accompanied by a proof that it halts on all inputs.

(See for example https://lean-lang.org/ or David Turner's work on Total Functional Programming from about 20 years ago.)

Other examples are easy to find. The simplex algorithm for linear optimization requires exponential time in general, and the problem it solves is NP-hard, but in practice works well on problems of interest and is widely used. Or consider the dynamic programming algorithms for problems like subset-sum.

Theory is important, but engineering is also important.

The Hacker News guidelines say “Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. ‘Did you even read the article? It mentions that’ can be shortened to ‘The article mentions that’.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html