s-phi-nl
Joined 17 years ago
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251
Member since
Jun 5
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=s-phi-nl
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Comment · 2 years ago
If they did that, everyone would worry about registering all the domains with a Levenshtein distance of 1 from theirs, in case of typos.
Comment · 2 years ago
A paragraph from the previous essay by the OP comes to mind:
> Less sardonically, there is a lesson here: systems which intermediate between cultures are useful. Intermediating between cultures is a thing the world urgently needs and is extremely prepared to pay for.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/financial-systems-tak...
I don't think decentralized currency will actually solve the issues travelers have with this, at least without reproducing much of the infrastructure already in place for traditional currencies.
Comment · 2 years ago
Mandatory citation of XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/
Comment · 2 years ago
It sounds like the symbol "≹" just means "incomparable", which is a well-known concept in math. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparability
This symbol for it may be useful, but it's the concept that matters.
Comment · 3 years ago
The Logic Alphabet (linked to above at http://www.logic-alphabet.net/images/flipstick_2347_2.jpg), which has a similar concept, seems to have better support: it can represent twelve of the symbols using Latin letters (o, p, b, q, d, c, u, s, z, n, h, and x, although z, u and n seem a bit forced) and the others seem to have decent Unicode equivalents (ɔ or ⊃ (superset), μ (Greek letter mu), ɥ or ч, and maybe ʎ).
Comment · 4 years ago
A bit late to the party, but you have written excellent documentation at https://hubris.oxide.computer/reference/. It immediately answered the questions I had after reading 'Animats several comments on IPC. This is particularly impressive since "right now we are laser focused on shipping Oxide's product": I, at least, often don't prioritize documentation.
Comment · 8 years ago
There's a (10 year old) post saying it could support utf-8.
Comment · 8 years ago
Point taken, although there, of course, is at least one exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands_sovereignty_r...
Comment · 9 years ago
I once sent him a letter (snail mail) addressed to Donald Knuth, c/o Stanford Computer Science Department (address at bottom of http://www-cs.stanford.edu/). He got back within a couple of weeks, so it seems to have reached him fairly efficiently.
Comment · 9 years ago
FiveThirtyEight had an interesting piece on how politicians have stronger incentives to provide relief after disasters than prepare for them before hand.
You can read it at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/disaster-politics-can-g... .
Comment · 9 years ago
Do you know of any source that compares the coefficients for bubble sort, insertion sort, and selection sort? This sounds interesting.
Comment · 9 years ago
Anecdotally, the professor of my algorithms class had us all sort cards manually and asked us to describe the algorithm we used when we began studying sorting algorithms. Most of us used either selection sort or insertion sort.
Comment · 9 years ago
That's true, but many users are still affected by that Python 2 remains the default. Any user can install a tool for Python 2 with pip install --user but the user might need root privileges to install a tool for Python 3 if the system administrator never intentionally installed it.
Comment · 9 years ago
Your untrained eye took the # for comments, but I'm not sure that generalized to anyone's. Plenty of languages use # for other things: Smalltalk uses them for symbols, Clojure uses them for reader macros, OCaml uses them for method calls, Haskell can use them as an arbitrary operator, Lua uses them for length, C and C++ use them for compiler directives. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#In_computing for a list.
Admittedly, Python, Bash, Perl, and Ruby use # for comments, so you do have a point, especially since Python is such a common teaching language.