Hacker News: interiorchurch

New comment by interiorchurch in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

interiorchurch — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 19:05:51 +0000

This is sort of a just-so story that isn't completely true. Stalin pushed "socialist classicism" [1] as an aesthetic, and it wasn't until his successors took over that modernist architectural ideas imported from the West became a hallmark of actually-existing socialism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture

New comment by interiorchurch in "Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?"

interiorchurch — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:35:55 +0000

Former classicist here. When I taught Homer in translation, I always used Butler's prose versions. You have to turn Homer inside out to render him in English verse like most of the popular translations do, and I don't consider the results worth the effort.

New comment by interiorchurch in "Schizophrenia study finds new biomarker, drug candidate in mice"

interiorchurch — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:07:58 +0000

I remember reading in Courtenay Harding's (now very old) book, Recovery from Schizophrenia: Evidence, History, and Hope, that populations with a higher prevalence of bipolar tended to have a lower prevalence of schizophrenia, and vice versa. The implication was that the same thing was being expressed differently in differing contexts. I would be curious if more contemporary studies bore this out.

New comment by interiorchurch in "What if Python was natively distributable?"

interiorchurch — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:14:48 +0000

There used to be a roguelike game called Angband, which was written in C. There was a vibrant community around it, many of whom produced Angband variants by hacking the text config files and the C code. One developer got the idea of making most of the game scriptable in Lua, over a C core; which would, in theory, make even more people be able to hack at the game and produce variants.

What happened was the Angband community imploded, and the number of variants went way down.

I don't know if this is a generalizable example and there may have been other factors at work, but it is a cautionary tale.

Angband is still around btw, and is still excellent. But I believe it's C and text config files again now.

New comment by interiorchurch in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

interiorchurch — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:45:30 +0000

> However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two.

The gradient is where you start to consume a lot of carbon unnecessarily.

New comment by interiorchurch in "Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults"

interiorchurch — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 19:23:56 +0000

HN is full of people with a) probably decently good homes and b) a high level of self-motivation on work and hobbies. I suspect sentiment here doesn't generalize well to the population at large.

New comment by interiorchurch in "New Linguistics Technique Could Reveal Who Spoke First Indo-European Languages"

interiorchurch — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 19:27:03 +0000

> With more DNA data, we wouldn't necessarily need linguistic characteristics to chart language ancestory, we could also look at the DNA evidence.

DNA evidence tends to favor the Steppe hypothesis.

> We know that the romans borrowed heavily from the greeks. That rome and greeks were closely related is well known. Everything from law to literature to religion. Not sure about the Rig Veda.

There are in fact some instances where Archaic Rome is closer to Vedic India than it is to Greece - the horse sacrifice, regulations around high priests and kings, etc. You can dismiss the similarities between Greece and Rome as due to borrowing, but you can't do the same with Rome and India.

> That describes a lot of cultures.

I specifically said those discrete elements weren't sufficient to convey the "vibe", so yeah.

New comment by interiorchurch in "New Linguistics Technique Could Reveal Who Spoke First Indo-European Languages"

interiorchurch — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 13:24:02 +0000

As a former philologist (but not a historical linguist) I think for me the primary argument for a shallow (Steppe) as opposed to deep (Anatolian) dating of PIE is vibes-based. I agree with the other counterarguments raised in the article about sound shifts etc., but the main thing for me is that when one reads Homer, the Rig Veda, and the Twelve Tables side by side, one gets the distinct hard-to-articulate impression that these texts were produced by closely related cultures. I could point to discrete things like how patriarchal they were (even by ancient standards), the importance attached to herding and poetry, etc. But the vibe is more than that, and it's really hard to convey unless you've done work in the original languages. So, this comment is probably pretty unhelpful.

New comment by interiorchurch in "A buried ancient Egyptian port reveals connections between distant civilizations"

interiorchurch — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:51:23 +0000

"Muslim empires preserved Greek learning" is a half-truth, because the medieval Latins traded more with the Arabs than they did with Byzantium. Thus when they got Aristotle etc. it tended to be from Arab sources, even though Constantinople had much better copies.

New comment by interiorchurch in "Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]"

interiorchurch — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 13:23:32 +0000

This would be sort of a death blow to much of postmodernism, no? "Reality is structured like a language and the free play of symbols reigns over all"-style thinking was very popular at one time, but this would rule against it.

New comment by interiorchurch in "A Rosetta Stone for Mathematics: André Weil's 1940 letter"

interiorchurch — Tue, 07 May 2024 19:10:52 +0000

> As a layman who's only familiar with Hilbert's work as it pertains to Godel and CS, I'm curious what makes expressing these proofs using some sort of formal logic so difficult.

For one thing, they'd be much longer, and likely not human-readable.

New comment by interiorchurch in "My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)"

interiorchurch — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 17:17:38 +0000

Question: TASP, a related summer program, has recently gone through some painful convolutions related to race and inequality[1]. How much if at all has Deep Springs been affected by currents like this?

[1] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/a-c...

New comment by interiorchurch in "Marcus Aurelius: The Man Who Solved the Universe [video]"

interiorchurch — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 18:37:06 +0000

Seriously, if stoicism is so good for mental health why did so many of them suicide? And why was Marcus Aurelius specifically such a poor father? Seems like a bad track record to me. I'd rather party with the Nietzscheans.

New comment by interiorchurch in "15-150: Principles of Functional Programming"

interiorchurch — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 19:23:28 +0000

As my mother used to say, we'll see...