Hacker News: kleton

New comment by kleton in "Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek"

kleton — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 06:21:57 +0000

Carl Darling Buck (A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages) and Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch) are just a few of the philologists who have posited this "dead water" hypothesis

New comment by kleton in "Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek"

kleton — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 05:50:35 +0000

It is probably not a substrate word, but more likely coming from "dead" water, as in not a moving river.

New comment by kleton in "Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek"

kleton — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 05:25:09 +0000

> because the Proto-Indo-European language arose in the landlocked steppes, it had no need for—and has no securely reconstructable word for—‘sea’.

No, it is mori, attested in marine, muir, maryadah, mal, morje, etc in farflung IE tongues today.

New comment by kleton in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

kleton — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:56:28 +0000

It is perhaps a blessing that the climate of the Papua lowlands makes the potato impossible to grow. While the potato would grow in the cooler highlands, this village to village transmission mechanism would not get the potato past the hot lowlands where plants would rot in the ground. The potato yields a lot more calories per hectare than the sweet potato, and when introduced to New Zealand, fueled massive wars.

New comment by kleton in "'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet"

kleton — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:26:20 +0000

Nominative determinism- first author's name "Mutlu Yıldız" means "happy star"

New comment by kleton in "Reverse engineering my ADHD test"

kleton — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:32:00 +0000

There's a well-known issue of "construct validity" in neuroscience.

New comment by kleton in "When fruit is scarce, these monkeys hunt animals"

kleton — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:37:21 +0000

It's not uncommon for cows to get a taste for chicken eggs and start seeking them out

New comment by kleton in "When fruit is scarce, these monkeys hunt animals"

kleton — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:19:52 +0000

Once a horse gets a taste for baby chicks, it's hard to convince them they aren't omnivorous.

New comment by kleton in "Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI"

kleton — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:55:07 +0000

> Well they have to destroy them after scanning, else it is a copyright violation.

I think this is the "an undercover cop has to tell you they are police if you ask them" of AI law

New comment by kleton in "Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo"

kleton — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:29:28 +0000

> The water thing

It’s amazing how Karen Hao managed to graduate from MIT without learning the difference between m^3 and L

New comment by kleton in "Agatha Christie's Disappearance: Amnesia, Suicide, or Despair?"

kleton — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 05:46:44 +0000

Maybe she just liked giving people mysteries

New comment by kleton in "How to pack ternary numbers in 8-bit bytes"

kleton — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:48:27 +0000

Would this imply that the matrices should have dimensions of multiples of 40?

New comment by kleton in "Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database"

kleton — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:38:09 +0000

About 15% of the UK's land parcels are not in any land registry database, because recording there only became compulsory in 1990, so if an event like a sale/morgtage didn't happen to a property since then, it might not be registered. Regardless of the land registry, the ownership can still easily be proven.

New comment by kleton in "GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance"

kleton — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 22:49:57 +0000

Clearly they are batching reasoning inference in a few multiples of 512 tokens as a throughput optimization

New comment by kleton in "Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers"

kleton — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 16:04:03 +0000

> Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire.

That might be a bit generous to assume that he has this theory of mind

New comment by kleton in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

kleton — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:23:07 +0000

> only my friends' status updates

I think that is the Feed's tab, though I have not used the blue app in a long time

New comment by kleton in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

kleton — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:14:50 +0000

hellottec is down but a cdn mirror of the product: https://ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/tesancdn/hellottec/2_BH_...

New comment by kleton in "Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism"

kleton — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:12:47 +0000

The real problem with Magnifica Humanitas is that it will be impossible to produce the first sentence of the canonical Latin version in which the first two words are "Magnifica humanitas" but carries the same meaning as the first sentence in the English version published.

New comment by kleton in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

kleton — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:04:22 +0000

It's amazing how Karen Hao's (Empire of AI) confusion of cubic meters with liters of water for datacenters continues to get amplified, even after this error was publicly revealed.

New comment by kleton in "Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia"

kleton — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:39:02 +0000

> The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses.

The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.