Hacker News: dghf

New comment by dghf in "If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious"

dghf — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 20:28:35 +0000

May I ask why? If one can suffer, one by definition can have subjective experience. And I understand that for you, that is not sufficient for consciousness, which is fine: one of the biggest problems of the whole consciousness debate is what is actually meant by the word. But it does indicate that there is something going on inside rabbits that isn’t going on inside rocks (assuming that rabbits can indeed suffer and rocks cannot).

New comment by dghf in "If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious"

dghf — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:30:25 +0000

Can a rabbit suffer? I don't think a rock can. I doubt slime moulds can either (though I admit I don't know a huge amount about how their internal makeup). But I suspect rabbits can.

New comment by dghf in "That's a Lot of YAML"

dghf — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:39:31 +0000

> snarky comments

How was my comment snarky? The YAML maintainers may have intended YAML to be a superset of JSON, but failed by not incorporating some obscure feature of it that bore on whether it was streamable or not.

New comment by dghf in "That's a Lot of YAML"

dghf — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:44:48 +0000

YAML is (or at least, is declared by its maintainers to be) a superset of JSON, making any JSON document also a valid YAML document.

So surely if YAML is streamable, JSON must be too?

Or are the YAML maintainers incorrect?

New comment by dghf in "A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare"

dghf — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:26:22 +0000

The right to a trial by jury in civil suits where the sum in dispute is greater than US$20 is a universal natural right?

New comment by dghf in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

dghf — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:49:27 +0000

Point of pedantry: federation usually implies a federal government, and the UK is a unitary state.

New comment by dghf in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

dghf — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:44:08 +0000

1) Most Commonwealth countries are republics, not monarchies.

2) The monarchies in the Commonwealth countries are ruled by different crowns; but, for historical reasons, most of those crowns are worn by the same physical head. (But not all of them. The King of Malaysia is a different natural person from the King of the UK, for example.)

New comment by dghf in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

dghf — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:02:24 +0000

The Scottish NHS has always been a separate organisation, even before devolution, created under a separate Act of Parliament. It's just that it used to be answerable to the UK government (specifically to the Secretary of State for Scotland, rather than the Secretary of State for Health), and now it's answerable to the Scottish government.

Why it was done like that, I'm not sure, but I suspect it was a combination of Scotland having its own legal system and laws (guaranteed by the Acts of Union of 1707) and existing ministerial division of responsibility (where public health in Scotland fell within the purview of the Scottish Secretary, along with Scottish education and a bunch of other areas that had their own distinct Cabinet ministers for England and Wales).

And while the Welsh NHS was originally part of the same NHS as operated in England, control over the NHS in Wales passed from the Health Secretary to the Welsh Secretary with the creation of the Welsh Office in 1969, and then to the devolved Welsh government in 1999.

Northern Ireland already had devolution (or to be precise, home rule) when the NHS was created in 1948, and the Northern Irish equivalent -- the Health and Social Care service -- is a direct creation of the Parliament of Northern Ireland rather than of the UK Parliament.

New comment by dghf in "This blog is written in en-GB"

dghf — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:44:56 +0000

No, that's en-GB-Yamyam.

New comment by dghf in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

dghf — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:25:25 +0000

According to Wikipedia:

- Jehan (Old French form of "John") -> Jan

- Jan -> Jankin (diminutive)

- Jankin -> Jackin

- Jackin -> Jack

New comment by dghf in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

dghf — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:22:34 +0000

Traditionally, yes; these days, perhaps not so much.

The author Jack London was originally John London. John F. Kennedy was familiarly known as Jack ("Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy"). The British racing driver John Stewart is far more commonly known as Jackie Stewart. In Patrick O'Brian's naval fiction, Captain John Aubrey is almost always referred to as Jack.

New comment by dghf in "They’re made out of weights"

dghf — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:38:42 +0000

Apologies, didn't notice when I got the link from YT's "Share" button. Won't make that mistake again.

Comment is now to old to edit: for convenience, here's the link without the parameter -- https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec

New comment by dghf in "They’re made out of weights"

dghf — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:39:11 +0000

> a compelling story about a sentient toaster

"Howdy-doodly-doo! Anybody like any toast?"

https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=YbQfnZbrCe01Bicy

New comment by dghf in "I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline"

dghf — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:22:29 +0000

I keep on meaning to try these out: https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/

New comment by dghf in "The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map"

dghf — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:33:32 +0000

Yes, it seems to be promoting the idea, popular in New Age writings, that Celtic Christianity was a separate denomination (or what Rome would have considered a heresy); and that just doesn’t seem to have been the case.

New comment by dghf in "The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map"

dghf — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:21:28 +0000

But was it doctrinally different from Chalcedonian Christianity to justify its own colour on the map. Wikipedia suggests no, which chimes with my understanding: some local minor differences in practice, but nothing like the Christological disputes that caused the rift with the Church of the East, nor like the row over papal supremacy etc. that led to the Great Schism between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

New comment by dghf in "The Spread of Christianity Animated"

dghf — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:16:56 +0000

But the graphic suggests that Celtic Christianity was in some sense theologically distinct from Chalcedonian Christianity, and that doesn't seem to have been the case. The main ways that the Christians of Ireland and Britain differed from those of continental western Europe seem to have been in the shape of the monastic tonsure and the calculation of the date of Easter; and in the latter, at least, British and Irish Christians were in conformity with Rome by the end of the eighth century. (There was also an emphasis on penance and absolution as a private rather than public rite, but this was ultimately adopted by the wider church.)

There doesn't seem to have been any doctrinal disputes, nor any suggestion that British and Irish Christianity was in any way separate from the Church of Rome.

New comment by dghf in "The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map"

dghf — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:33:48 +0000

What is going on with Celtic Christianity? Was it really as distinct from Roman Catholicism (and for as long) as the graphic suggests?

Also, why no Cathars/Albigensians in the south of France during the 12th & 13th centuries?

New comment by dghf in "Michael Keating has died"

dghf — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:26:39 +0000

One of the only episodes of Blake's 7 I really remember is "Orbit", in which Avon and Vila play a game of cat-and-mouse aboard a shuttle that's been stripped back to the wiring but is still doomed to crash into the planet it's trying to launch from unless another 70 kg can be ejected: as Orac helpfully points out to Avon, this is more or less exactly Vila's body mass. The respective faces pulled by Avon and Vila as Orac announces this tell you everything you need to know about their characters.

New comment by dghf in "New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome"

dghf — Fri, 01 May 2026 09:22:07 +0000

The manuscript is ~1200 years old, but the poem was composed earlier. The Venerable Bede, who died in 735, includes it and the story of its composition in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People: according to that story, it was composed while Saint Hilda was abbess of Whitby, c.660-680.