Hacker News: stan_rogers

New comment by stan_rogers in "Americans are rethinking where they want to live"

stan_rogers — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 04:36:22 +0000

...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)

New comment by stan_rogers in "A ghostly galaxy lacking dark matter"

stan_rogers — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:17:12 +0000

MOND has very little to say about gravity. It claims that f=ma breaks down at sufficiently low values. That, in turn, implies that the rules should still be consistent with these modifications, and that galaxies with apparently different proportions of dark matter (as it's understood) shouldn't exist - all galaxies with similar visible sizes and structures should be essentially identical in gravitational behaviour, and that simply hasn't been demonstrated to be the case.

New comment by stan_rogers in "The Invention of Chinese"

stan_rogers — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 01:12:42 +0000

The lingua franca wasn't "the language of the Franks", it was an elaborate pidgin used for Mediterranean trade that encompassed a lot of broadly Romance features with a vastly simplified grammar and a vocabulary core that could be described as most closely resembling a mixture of Occitan southern France and Savoyard (which are both, admittedly, umbrella terms that incorporate rather a large number of dialects). The term lingua franca has gone on to mean any (usually simplified) language that's used to communicate between groups - like Swahili in large parts of east Africa (it is by far the simplest of the Bantu languages, and has only a relatively small population of native speakers).

New comment by stan_rogers in "I didn't say that. In fact, no one seems to have, according to Google"

stan_rogers — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 16:35:36 +0000

The most familiar attribution, original or not, would have been Yogi Berra.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]"

stan_rogers — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 15:35:24 +0000

Coke was Abraham Darby's doing (around 1709-1710), and that was mostly to corner the market for cheap pots and kettles. There was no way for the charcoal crowd to compete on iron, and the bronze bunch - the norm for that sort of thing up to that point - was left forever in the dust.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]"

stan_rogers — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 13:04:09 +0000

That series still isn't over. It just got interrupted a couple of times. The first interruption was explained in Episode 10 - that was the discovery that the way one of the wheels was divided in the remaining teeth likely indicated that the mechanism was based on a lunar rather than a solar calendar, and that part needed to wait for the peer review and publication of a paper before the series could continue. The next interruption had more to do with Chris's real passion of watch and clock making - he had access to a couple of decorative engines (a straight-line engine and a rose engine), probably temporarily, since they would in no way both fit into the little closet he has for a shop, and he did some rather impressive guilloché and enamel work with those. When the series picks up (if it does), the hard parts are yet to come, like the planetary dial and its crapload of pointers.

One thing Chris has done that people like Michael Wright didn't was to assume that anyone who was building something like that, with its obvious signs of not being a rough prototype, would have made some sort of jig for some of the parts rather than, say, laboriously walking off tooth spacing for every single gear, and that some sort of lathe, which was known to exist and be used for wood from illustrations both contemporary with and far preceding the device, would have likely been used to make round things out of soft metal.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals of CS"

stan_rogers — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 16:35:48 +0000

I found them extremely accessible, and I was a high-school dropout. (Admittedly a very late dropout, but a dropout nonetheless.) That was back when volume 4 didn't even exist as listicles yet. And, let's face it, the sheer size (and cost) of the thing, even then, was a bit intimidating, but there's nothing in it that can't be followed with a bit of algebra and the barest hint of what the kids these days call "pre-calculus". While it may be a bit of a slog to listen to Knuth, his writing is about as clear as it ever gets, things are laid out in a clear progression, and nothing jumps out at you suddenly without a clear buildup and foundation.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Sarco suicide capsule ‘passes legal review’ in Switzerland"

stan_rogers — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 19:53:38 +0000

And they don't always work. Look up intractable pain.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Sarco suicide capsule ‘passes legal review’ in Switzerland"

stan_rogers — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 19:52:22 +0000

And what of the excruciatingly painful existence that doesn't come with a near-term "inevitable death". What you're advocating is long-term inescapable torture.

New comment by stan_rogers in "“UnGoogley”? Worker says she was fired for questioning no holiday pay"

stan_rogers — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 15:47:39 +0000

Time in lieu.

New comment by stan_rogers in "The Church of the Clocked Screws (2019)"

stan_rogers — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 14:57:21 +0000

Torx rather sucks in comparison. Sorry if the truth hurts.

New comment by stan_rogers in "The Church of the Clocked Screws (2019)"

stan_rogers — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 13:17:11 +0000

It is the One True Screw, amen.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Ask HN: Are there any 4K “dumb” televisions?"

stan_rogers — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 21:11:35 +0000

It's literally called a dummy load - to the 'lectrics, it acts like an antenna, but it doesn't radiate or receive.

New comment by stan_rogers in "A father comforts his son on deathbed. The photo that changed the face of AIDS"

stan_rogers — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 03:20:22 +0000

Actually getting condoms used to be a highly stigmatized pain in the ass back in the "caveman" days in large swaths of the world (especially in large swaths of the US). You came up in a very different environment.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Why are German numbers backwards?"

stan_rogers — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 20:46:51 +0000

"Fourteen" (four and ten) would have been from "scoring numbers", where you get to twenty (a score), keep track of the scores separately, and start over. Up to twelve, we used a duodecimal/dozenal system (a separate word for each number). That was also common in other non-Germanic Indo-European languages, notably the Brythonic Celtic languages (and various versions of Brythonic scoring numbers are still used in parts of Britain, depending on the pre-English dialect spoken in the area and changes over time, especially in children's games). French numbering still shows signs of "scoring", especially in the 60/70 and even moreso in the 80/90 region.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Today’s Disneyland is a price gouge, not a magical experience"

stan_rogers — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 20:07:39 +0000

He never said most of the things he said.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Euler’s number pops up in situations that involve optimality"

stan_rogers — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 23:16:56 +0000

It made a difference long before Casio calculators, when tables were your main source of values (that would be this old fart's day). You could argue that as long as you stuck to the same table set, it doesn't really matter - but tell that to the decibels.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Hamilton teen embroiled in FBI probe, fingered in $46M cryptocurrency theft"

stan_rogers — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 01:06:15 +0000

True, but the separation between grand theft and petty theft exists in pretty much every common-law country, and has for centuries - it's not a peculiarity of Canadian law.

New comment by stan_rogers in "Hamilton teen embroiled in FBI probe, fingered in $46M cryptocurrency theft"

stan_rogers — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 20:41:26 +0000

It's not just in Canada. Have you ever heard the term "grand theft auto"? There have been two levels in almost every jurisdiction for a very long time: petty (small) theft and grand (large) theft. The dividing line in England used to be a shilling, for which you could be hanged or transported. Sixpence would get you a short-ish time in gaol/jail.

New comment by stan_rogers in "British F-35B crash possibly caused by 'rain cover' left on during launch"

stan_rogers — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 19:55:34 +0000

...and flagged. It shouldn't just be a panel/plug, there should be a ginormous length of red webbing attached with a "you can't miss it" "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT" text in white (on both sides of the webbing) as well. It's not like we haven't been doing that for fifty-plus years or anything. That was old news when I was in the service [mumble] decades ago and our quaint training films on type were nearly twenty years old at that point (which should be a clue right there that I'm Canadian).