quuxplusone

Not quite. A "thin space" is thinner than an ordinary interword space, which in turn is thinner (or at least less stretchy) than an intersentence space. The space in "No. 12" or "Fig. 7" or "Mr. Jones" or "cf. page 5" is by definition an interword space! The problem is that HTML renderers tend to prefer to set it as an intersentence space instead, because they think "." always indicates the end of a sentence. Using   can help; that's like "~" in TeX. TeX also supports a breaking-but-never-intersentence-sized space via "\ " (backslash space), which is what you'd probably want to use in "cf.\ page~5." AFAIK, HTML/Unicode have no equivalent of that.

It’s also probably been read by the majority of Americans, or at least the story is well-known.

Read by, yes. Story well-known, I doubt. What is the story of The Great Gatsby, in a few words? (But then again, what is the story of the Iliad, anyway? Something about the wrath of Achilles, right?) [I should clarify: to answer that the Iliad is about "the Trojan war" or "Achilles dragging the body of Hector" seems insufficient to me in the same way it would be insufficient to say that Gatsby is about "a guy who throws parties" or "a murder in a swimming pool."]

Twain is the obvious "American Homer" not just because his name pops immediately to mind, but also because his two best-known works (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) stand in the same relation to each other as the Iliad and Odyssey: a minor character in one becomes the protagonist of the other. As someone above already commented, too, both works are episodic and have given us many pop-culture images: I dare say only Tom's painting of the fence is proverbial, but the cave adventure, the feud, attending one's own funeral, and probably several more episodes are embedded in American pop culture to the same extent as the Cyclops, Circe, and the Lotus-Eaters. Gatsby is a great novel, but what has it given to our collective unconscious? The green light and... beautiful shirts?

What does it say that there have been three adequate film adaptations of Gatsby, while there have been (as far as I know) none at all of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, the Iliad, or the Odyssey?

(Side note: About 15 years ago I read Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned and thought it was very good and inventive; I recommend it. These days Wikipedia tells me that "many Fitzgerald scholars typically consider The Beautiful and Damned to be among the author's weaker novels," so maybe something excellent is waiting for me if I ever get around to reading This Side of Paradise or Tender is the Night.)

It's easier to just use your eyes, isn't it? The photo in the article is here: https://cdn.labrujulaverde.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2026/07...

There are two standing figures to the right (correctly identified by ChatGPT), and at least two kneeling figures with upraised arms stacked toward the left (ChatGPT puts the bottom figure's arms inside the "legs" of its bunny-shaped green circle).

Scroll down in the article to see a close-up on the kneeling figures.

There is no text visible in the photos from the article, although if you go on to read the text of the article you learn that text was found elsewhere in the tomb, such that we can confidently identify the owner's name (among other things).

(2025)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...

Interestingly, DST itself had been standardized by the Uniform Time Act of 1966 less than a decade before that!

IMHO seems like permanent standard time would have been the more logical route (apparently it could have been done at the state level under current federal laws), but "more logical" doesn't always mean "easier to accomplish."

Wiktionary:

Plutarch tells us in Lysander 17 that, in early times, nails (ὀβελοί (obeloí)) were used as money, six of which made a handful (δραχμή (drakhmḗ)), and that the name was changed to ὀβολός (obolós).

In the (legendary) Spartan version of this, though, the currency was more cumbersome and deliberately less practically useful. You don't want people coveting money for its intrinsic utility — it's bad enough they'll covet it for its trade value! So the Spartan iron money was (allegedly) quenched in vinegar to ruin its intrinsic value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelanor

It's unlikely that the legend corresponds to any ancient reality, though.

"Two weeks of warranty" jumped out at me. That's like "you have two weeks to find the thing we broke, or else we aren't responsible for it." In my experience, a good bug can hide for months more than two weeks! My codebases are definitely not in the target demographic for this service, though, and maybe if I were in the target group (bunch of LLM slop, trying to dig out of the hole, presumably no shipping product or existing userbase yet) the proposition would appeal to me.

Sounds like you're thinking of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem . Wikipedia quotes David Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature" 3.1.1 as follows:

In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with [...] the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning [...] when of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead of the usual copulations of propositions is and is not I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not.

A two-hour interview between discoverer Marc Shepherd and Utopia Opera's William Remmers is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwVXI1lfs_Q

You might make a wrong guess add a little penalty time to the clock.

I agree that the "share" representation should include the number of bonus words found. Or just the triple of "total words / tries / wall-clock time."

It would also make sense to share some kind of metric for "how early did you find the longest word."

And “kashida” is a persian word not Arabic, the Arabic one is probably “maddah”.

I thought it was "tatwil". I could be wrong, though. An interesting article on Arabic typography, whose correctness I can't judge:

https://www.khtt.net/en/page/1821/the-big-kashida-secret

Or ask the agent to visit a web page, or load an image, whose URL involved the secret? Or ask it to install a new .authorized_keys and then go get the contents of the machine themselves? From the post it sounds like a lot of people were just trying to get the LLM to write them a reply email — which it had been told not to do.

I see there's a "log" at https://hackmyclaw.com/log but (maybe because I'm on mobile?) I can't actually click through to view any of the table entries.

+1. It felt very mechanical running through "bard, card, hard, lard, nard, pard, sard, ward, ware, care, dare, fare, hare, mare, nare, pare, tare, bare, bark, dark, hark, lark, mark, nark, park, sark,..." Definitely feels like something a computer could do better than a human. (And the leaderboard confirms it.)

But switching the traversal order to "bard, bare, care, card, hard, hare, dare, dark, hark, hart, cart,..." doesn't seem to make it any more fun.

My suggestion would be to add an "enemy AI" following its own trajectory toward you; your job then is not just to walk around as long as possible, but to stay at least one step ahead of the enemy for a long as possible.

The enemy might not move just one step per turn; it might do something like "stand still for 3 turns, then change 2 letters in a single turn."

Showing the enemy's words to the player would also increase the "discoverability" of paths in the game. The player could say "Oh, apparently NARD is a valid word! I'll remember that for next time."

Or bait (or probably baht or batt).

The other day I learned that the command line interface (or whatever) to Antigravity goes by the abbreviated name "agy", which is awfully close to "agi" as in "artificial general intelligence." I strongly suspect they did that on purpose.

And "Stanley and Stella in: Breaking the Ice" (SIGGRAPH 1987).

https://archive.org/details/stanley-and-stella-in-breaking-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zork&diff=prev&ol...

might be a more informative link to the specific change, btw.

From my read of the article, this isn't a problem "in DNS." OP runs an uptime monitoring service that purports to check whether DNS can resolve your domain — but today OP learned that because he's hitting his ISP's recursive resolver, he doesn't notice downtime until the TTL of the previous response expires.

Solution (which everyone else does, and OP has now implemented): don't use your ISP's recursive resolver! Run your own instance of bind9 or whatever, with the cache disabled. Or it seems like `dig +trace` would probably work, too.

"Cached resources remain visible for their whole TTL, even if the original becomes unreachable or changes" seems like one of the very first principles someone should learn when deciding to go into business selling an uptime monitoring service.

It's not a "ghost domain," it's a Time-To-Live field!

"Just to be clear, you are saying you manage a hedge fund, right?"

"Yeah, a henge fund."

"Hedge fund."

"Henge fund."

"Hedge."

"Henge."

"...I think we're on the same page."

As a banner or something, maybe. But I'd much rather see a broken-looking site on mobile than see nothing at all on mobile.

In the same category: websites that display nothing but a splash screen "This site requires Internet Explorer X" or whatever. Don't nanny me, just feed my browser the HTML! Whether my browser can render it properly is my problem, not yours.

In the middle of this too-long-and-rambling piece, there's a sketch of an interesting sequence: look for the text "universal winner." Let a(n) be the size of the smallest "coin-matching player" DFA that eventually matches the output of its n-state opponent no matter the identity of that opponent. a(1) is obviously 2 (right?); Wolfram indicates a(2) <= 10; what is a(3)?

This is different from the problem of identifying the opponent, which obviously requires at least as many states as there are opponents.

Is this sequence in the OEIS? Is a(3) even known?

Yep. (Discussed more than once on HN, which is why I know this link exists:)

https://nmap.org/movies/

The reason I'd want "frozen-size vector" is to replace pairs of data members of the form `T* foos; size_t foos_len;` without paying another 8 bytes to store a useless capacity that's never going to change.

But I don't think that makes such a container worth adding to the STL. So far, it hasn't even been worth writing in our own code. But that's the reason I've thought about writing it.

FWIW, I believe that's not a mistake, just a consistent use of (novel?) jargon. From context I infer that the paragraph is distinguishing between the _hard requirements_ of the traits (quote: "the language contract says they cannot become unsafe") and the behavior human programmers would naturally _expect_ of the traits ("the social contract").

And yes, looking at https://docs.rs/misfortunate/latest/misfortunate/index.html and Ctrl+F'ing for "social contract," I see that usage very consistently. The entire point of Misfortunate is that its types correctly implement the language contract, while violating the "social contract" in various surprising ways. For example, causing a hash collision on every operation is a perfectly cromulent implementation of Hash, but violates the "social contract" of Hash. For another example, look at LoadLetter — throwing an error on every operation is a valid implementation of Read, but still violates the "social contract" of what a human programmer would naturally expect from something readable.

...Ah, `heap_sort` is used only for trivially copyable types. So my complaint about not distinguishing copy from move is essentially unimportant (matters only in pathological cases that we shouldn't worry about).

But it's perfectly possible for a type to be "trivially copyable" without being "default-constructible." An example of such a type from the STL: `std::reference_wrapper<int>`.

Anyway, looks like a quick fix for this would be to just extend the list of traits on which blqsort is gated (currently `is_trivially_copyable` and `sizeof(T) <= 16`) by adding `is_trivially_default_constructible<T>::value` also.

It's unfortunate that the C++ version of the code assumes the type T is default-constructible (and that the default constructor is cheap). It also assumes that the type T is copy-constructible; at a glance I can't tell if the algorithm depends on making a copy in every place that it does make a copy. E.g. in the `heap_sort` helper we have

    T k;                       // default-construct
    if (i > 0) k = left[--i];  // copy-assign

    T swbuf[SMALLPART];

All of my "I don't knows" and "I'm not sures" are due to my own lack of digging into the code; I'm sure one could find out if one really looked.

None of that matters if you're just sorting `int` or the benchmarked `struct entry`. But it matters a great deal if you're taking the README literally and trying to sort "types with higher copy costs [...] (such as strings)".

The Wikipedia article on "meteor air burst" has an explanation that basically matches yours, although they do use the word "explosion" to describe it. Which makes sense to me: whatever one chooses to call it, it's a nearly instantaneous spontaneous disassembly that is very bright, very hot, and very loud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_air_burst

Is it something about using Chrome? My wife's Gmail was showing the "Press / to help me write" prompt last week and we couldn't figure out (1) how to turn it off nor (2) why _I_ wasn't seeing any such prompt in _my_ Gmail, despite all our Gmail settings being the same as far as I could tell.

We both use Chrome (she on Windows, me on Mac), but I could totally believe that I've turned off some shiny AI feature _in Chrome_ that she hadn't.

Anyone care to confirm or disprove the hypothesis that there's some setting in Chrome itself that will disable this Gmail feature?

An interesting idea I saw long ago in some book (I thought it was K&P's "Software Tools," or my second guess was K&R1, but neither of those panned out — a strong Mandela effect) was the clever idea of a whole-document spellchecker that works purely probabilistically, by histograms: you feed it a document, it tallies the trigraphs, and any trigraph that appears only rarely is flagged as a likely typo. This approach lets through unknown-but-realistic words like "antithematory" while flagging unrealistic words like "prisencolinensinainciusol" (because of its unlikely "ciu" and "ius" clusters) and "antthemaory" (because of "ntt" and "aor").

To make this approach work better, feed it a bunch of English text (or whatever language your document is in) before the document you really want to "spellcheck."

Essentially this isn't a spell "checker" so much as a spell "linter" — it looks for antipatterns statistically associated with bugs, and reports the patterns for further investigation.

If anyone knows where this trigraph-based "spellchecker" was first presented, I'd love to find out again.

Likewise "Russia" is shown in Siberia, but everyone in Russia lives near the European borders thousands of km west.

Yes, and "Love's Labour's Lost" specifically pairs/ contrasts "Russians" with "Muscovites": the "Russia" of St Petersburg is pretty far west of "Moscow."