Hacker News: willismonroe

New comment by willismonroe in "Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs"

willismonroe — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:08:42 +0000

I'm stuck on the usage "mulle times a week" which shows up twice in the context of the Claude team editing or contributing to a CLAUDE.md file. Is this an AI-generated artifact?

New comment by willismonroe in "Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust"

willismonroe — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:29:42 +0000

My colleagues and I wrote a programming language (really just a python wrapper on unicode characters) in cuneiform. The novelty was that we tried as much as possible to use actual mathematical concepts from 3rd (and early 2nd) millennium BCE Mesopotamia. We published it in Sigbovik 2024 (https://www.sigbovik.org/2024/proceedings.pdf) as well as a full neural net implementation using the language.

New comment by willismonroe in "Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)"

willismonroe — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:14:11 +0000

This article makes wildly erroneous claims about a genuinely very interesting ancient object. I've worked a bit on this (PhD in Babylonian Astronomy/Astrology) and published articles talking about it. It's a fascinating object but more so as a product of scholarly thinking about the heavens rather than actual observations. Even if it did record observations they would date to the Neo-Assyrian period (when/where the object was found) not to an even more ancient past.

Notably the article linked here doesn't even show the object! It only reproduces images of badly made replicas.

New comment by willismonroe in "Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)"

willismonroe — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:11:35 +0000

The tablet has been translated for the better part of a century. The problem is that many of the popular depictions of it don't give it's museum number or any other (correct) identifying information, often erroneously referring to it as a "Sumerian" object.

If you search for the museum number K. 8538 you'll find quite a bit (some still bad). That said, this article is wildly off-base.

New comment by willismonroe in "Digital public archaeology: Excavating data from digs done decades ago"

willismonroe — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 12:55:35 +0000

The CAD PDFs are searchable; parsing the PDFs, on the other hand, is more of an issue with custom fonts etc...

New comment by willismonroe in "Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition"

willismonroe — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 15:06:51 +0000

I think you might be conflating two camps of academics. There have been folks for a while now who were vehemently against online education, and there are also those pushing digital pedagogy forward. The former were stuck in a rut when classes moved online this spring, and the latter were there to pick up the slack and start organizing workshops and trying to make all university teaching better online.

New comment by willismonroe in "Roman mosaic floor found under Italian vineyard"

willismonroe — Wed, 27 May 2020 19:50:23 +0000

I'm really curious about how you came to the conclusion that Turkey doesn't allow digs (not criticizing!). Like, I'm just wondering where the failure in PR was for archaeologists working in Turkey that it wasn't self-evident.

Perhaps I'm biased (certainly) but Turkey often seems to be in the news for spectacular finds from archaeological digs across the country (focused mostly in the west though). I worked on a site in the SE for seven years, and there was a ton of activity every year many foreign but also Turkish digs working in every province.