Hacker News: stewbrew

New comment by stewbrew in "What the debate about Neanderthals reveals about us"

stewbrew — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 05:26:39 +0000

I assume you are from the US with little knowledge of history. Neander (ever wondered where the Neanderthals got their name from) was German. Early anthropologists were German or French. So yes, early anthropologists were all (really) white Europeans.

BTW I'm actually surprised you wouldn't think of Jews as "white". But I'm not familiar with US American raceology. Are you from the white supremacy fraction?

But all of this misses the point of my statement.

New comment by stewbrew in "Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites"

stewbrew — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 06:36:20 +0000

Funny comment. You should tell this the Austrian chancellor.

New comment by stewbrew in "Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites"

stewbrew — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 06:35:33 +0000

You should add conglomerates. In Austria, the grocery market is effectively dominated by 3 companies. They rarely compete directly, i.e., by having stores next to each other.

New comment by stewbrew in "Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates"

stewbrew — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 03:38:08 +0000

But don't expect them to check whether the Chromebooks are still useful after an update. E.g., the original Lenovo duet turned into an oversized paperweight after one of their later updates.

New comment by stewbrew in "USENET rises again?"

stewbrew — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 20:28:53 +0000

I assume they dropped it because they couldn't monetize it, i.e. spam you with personalized ads and the like. Probably the same reason why RSS News feeds were dropped.

New comment by stewbrew in "Seven Sins of Writing"

stewbrew — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 04:42:02 +0000

I don't think you got the last sentence right.

I once noticed that people who are used to quickly read tons of texts often don't get the meaning of more winded sentences right. (I assume chatgpt would have the same issue.) But the fault was mine of course, since I did not distinguish between texts written to convey information and "literary" texts written for amusement.

In the age of LLMs it makes you wonder though, if all this writing advice isn't out of date. Concise texts are for AIs, wordy texts are for humans.

New comment by stewbrew in "No Markdown support in Google Drive after all these years"

stewbrew — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 11:27:31 +0000

Get yourself an old-fashioned web-space, setup a nextcloud instance ... profit.

New comment by stewbrew in "Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid"

stewbrew — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 06:10:49 +0000

Of course it could be a scientific to estimate the probability that ...

New comment by stewbrew in "Why do cats knead?"

stewbrew — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 18:37:11 +0000

They knead before they sit down. If you lived in grass land with the gras being higher than you, you'd probably knew why.

New comment by stewbrew in "AI will save the world?"

stewbrew — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:44:04 +0000

My comment doesn't have anything to do with AI per se but with the hybris and inhumanity of people in the AI bubble.

New comment by stewbrew in "AI will save the world?"

stewbrew — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 16:27:24 +0000

Love, respect, and humility have a small chance to save the world. AI? I don't know. I have my doubts it will improve human interaction.

New comment by stewbrew in "27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)"

stewbrew — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 10:04:08 +0000

There are several devices like that. But I guess most people use their phones + bt keyboard.

New comment by stewbrew in "The Diaries of Franz Kafka"

stewbrew — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 03:38:00 +0000

While "In the Penal Colony" actually is really funny and readable, I don't think much humor could have been lost.

New comment by stewbrew in "Albert Camus"

stewbrew — Wed, 31 May 2023 04:46:47 +0000

I don't think you use the word autistic in any meaningful way.

New comment by stewbrew in "Pixel Tablet"

stewbrew — Fri, 12 May 2023 04:17:24 +0000

They still don't manage to sell their devices world-wide. Even in Europe. Clicking on the above link I see only their useless nest devices.

New comment by stewbrew in "How did the chess pieces get their names?"

stewbrew — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 17:17:58 +0000

That would be a horse, which is seemingly used in some other countries.

New comment by stewbrew in "How did the chess pieces get their names?"

stewbrew — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 17:15:26 +0000

But in many countries, it isn't a knight.

New comment by stewbrew in "Higher-order functions in Go"

stewbrew — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 17:03:30 +0000

IIRC lisp was already called "functional" in the 1980s. It was in contrast to purely procedural languages. I cannot comment on the 1970s.

New comment by stewbrew in "Parquet: An efficient, binary file format for table data"

stewbrew — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 14:50:35 +0000

Parquet is cool. What isn't so cool is that, e g., partitioning isn't supported on all platforms out of the box. Hence, reading a set of files created in one language may require extra work in another language. Partitioning should be supported in all languages.

New comment by stewbrew in "The Worlds of Italo Calvino"

stewbrew — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 05:20:31 +0000

Calvino was a member of oulipo. Other than Vonnegut (whom I admire too), he had a concept of literature as art. You should take him serious.