Hacker News: clw8

New comment by clw8 in "Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems"

clw8 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:59:14 +0000

They first of all overestimate the trustworthiness of all their information sources, and then can't properly distinguish highly reliable sources like an official datasheet from random Github code.

New comment by clw8 in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

clw8 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:51:59 +0000

I imagine a current generation high school English class would be giggling right from the first line about gooning while on pilgrimages.

New comment by clw8 in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

clw8 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:37:31 +0000

Also why the non-rhotic American accents are all by the East Coast, they were influenced by the non-rhotic British visitors while the inland areas were spared.

New comment by clw8 in "Coursera to combine with Udemy"

clw8 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 23:40:51 +0000

Stanford's Youtube channel is also a goldmine. There's actually a lot of professors that put their lectures on Youtube, you just have to look (or watch enough that the algorithm finds them for you).

New comment by clw8 in "How bad can a $2.97 ADC be?"

clw8 — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:54:25 +0000

For regular readers of this blog, that would be like defining USB for a general tech audience. Other articles by this author expect the reader to also know terms like I2C and SPI.

New comment by clw8 in "ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair"

clw8 — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 20:08:52 +0000

The governor of Utah used similar language:

“For 33 hours, I was praying that if this had to happen here that it wouldn't be one of us — that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country… Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for… But it did happen here, and it was one of us.”

New comment by clw8 in "Show HN: I built this to talk Danish to my girlfriend – works with any language"

clw8 — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 14:58:07 +0000

A long time ago, before SEO spam, I would Google parts of what I had written phrase by phrase (with proper nouns removed or generalized) and if the number of results was under a certain threshold, I'd assume I was wrong.

New comment by clw8 in "Whole-genome ancestry of an Old Kingdom Egyptian"

clw8 — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 21:03:36 +0000

I believe they are basing that on the spread of genes from the Natufian culture that built the earliest settlements corresponding to the spread of Afroasiatic languages. Similar to how Turkish people have low levels of Turkic ancestry.

New comment by clw8 in "Launch HN: Vassar Robotics (YC X25) – $219 robot arm that learns new skills"

clw8 — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 15:43:01 +0000

Are there any affordable robot kits you recommend for learning control, CV, RL etc.? I was budgeting for the SO-101 so I think I'll get OP's device and then something that's not an arm for variety.

New comment by clw8 in "Why Did Thomas Harriot Invent Binary? (2021)"

clw8 — Sun, 21 May 2023 00:00:20 +0000

Claude Shannon's master's thesis in 1937 is the one that proved the usefulness of Boolean algebra and binary for digital circuits.

https://harrymoreno.com/assets/greatPapersInCompSci/3.2_-_A_...

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

New comment by clw8 in "What did ancient languages sound like?"

clw8 — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 05:23:41 +0000

Portuguese did not retain the Latin nasal vowels, it was an independent development after the Latin nasal vowels had been lost.

New comment by clw8 in "The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and challenges of reversal (2020)"

clw8 — Sat, 08 May 2021 01:35:18 +0000

The Turkic and Mongolian languages all came from the area around south Siberia and Mongolia. So ironically it is those Turkic people in Siberia who are the ones that stayed closest to home!

The Huns might have been a Turkic group, but that's hard to prove or disprove since we don't have any records of their language beyond names and a few words that were probably borrowed anyway.

New comment by clw8 in "Biomarker of Alzheimer's found to be regulated by sleep cycles"

clw8 — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 03:07:59 +0000

I have DSPS and 10 mg melatonin works very well for me too.

New comment by clw8 in "Show HN: I Rebuilt MySpace from 2007"

clw8 — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 21:07:06 +0000

Same with me and my Geocities page from 1997 :(

New comment by clw8 in "Segway ends production of its original scooter"

clw8 — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 08:52:50 +0000

Hmm, I never even give a second glance to people taking the Segway tours in my city (Chicago). But whenever I see one in my neighborhood, 7 miles from downtown, hoo boy is it hard to not stare.

New comment by clw8 in "Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings"

clw8 — Wed, 29 May 2019 20:40:50 +0000

I think it makes a lot of sense for Uber Pool, at least, because shitty riders make the experience worse for other riders. The last time I took a Pool, we picked up someone who booked the ride for one person but had a friend with her. She tried to argue and say she would give the driver a tip at the end, etc., while the driver tried to explain that it doesn't work that way. Wasted about 5 to 10 minutes of my day because of that.

New comment by clw8 in "The Rise of Edible Insect Farming"

clw8 — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 02:54:32 +0000

It's really ironic that Westerners are disgusted by fish heads but Asians will fight over them at communal meals. I spent time in Japan and China and I'm a convert too. The heads are full of delicious fat. Whole fish in spicy Sichuan sauce is my absolute favorite splurge item at Chinese restaurants.

New comment by clw8 in "Everyone Wants to Go Home During Extra Innings, Maybe Even the Umps"

clw8 — Sun, 22 Apr 2018 22:25:48 +0000

They also need to play fewer games. The Cubs' star Anthony Rizzo said he would gladly take a pay cut. Teams play 162 games a year. That's just insane considering how demanding the sport is and how frequently players get injured.

New comment by clw8 in "Talk to Books"

clw8 — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 22:56:22 +0000

I'm just an armchair historical linguist but the 19th century books and dictionaries written by British missionaries dispatched to China, that are freely available in abundance on Google Books, are just as fascinating as the cutting-edge monographs of the past decade. They lacked proper training but their observations are fascinating. For example, the pronunciation guide in a dictionary of Shanghainese notes that older people would say Beiging (I'm going to avoid linguistics jargon and true Shanghainese pronunciation for the sake of understandability) and younger people would say Beijing. So we know exactly when this sound change (palatalization) spread to the Shanghai area. The author didn't call it as such and seemed to have the attitude of "kids these days don't talk properly" which makes it really amusing to read.

New comment by clw8 in "Mike Beedle, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, passes away"

clw8 — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 18:24:35 +0000

Horrible tragedy. When news first broke a week ago with the only details being the time and place (for non-Chicagoans, the location is filled with bars and very drunk bros) of the murder, people assumed it was a bar fight that escalated. Turns out he was murdered by a homeless man during a presumed robbery.