Viewing profile — AdhemarVandamme

I remember that, when I saw text-generative AI (GPT) demonstrated for the first time, I was reminded of this story. Wow, they actually made what Roald Dahl described in the ninetee…

Not on the list, yet likely of interest to the Hacker News audience, is the dedication in the first volume of Donald E. Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming”: “This series of b…

“ world ” is derived from “ were ” + “ eald ” ( old ), and meant “the age of humans”, which was distinguished from the age of the Gods, when the Æsir and Vanir dominated, and the a…

In Microsoft v. AT&T , decision 550 US 437 (2007), there was discussion about a golden disk , and the terminology changed to master disk during the course of the proceedings, becau…

I agree with you and the anonymous Reddit commenter that this is a “cool story”, and that it needs “a shitton of paragraphs”. But it also left me somewhat confused. The author’s no…

I’m old enough to have used (book) dictionaries and wooden case card catalogues in the local library. So when I learned about hashmaps/IDictonary a quarter century ago, that’s inde…

It was already known to scholars that the length of a (tropical) year is close to 365-and-a-quarter days since at least 238 BC (when Ptolemy III tried to fix the length of the year…

I don’t see why the grammatical cases of Latin and German matter in the interpretation of these abbreviations. The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always follo…

How would you argue such claims, geographically and/or accurately speaking? — Other than: that’s how I was taught it is; or that’s how my favourite teacher/book/source-with-some-au…

The prefered canonical name is continent-or-ocean/city-or-small-island because continents and cities are more stable than countries and country names. The America/state/city conven…

In the same way that an hour is skipped in many places at the beginning of Daylight Saving Time every year (and the offset changes, e.g. from UTC–5 to UTC–4), on this particular in…

There’s plenty of room for reasonable discussion and questions, even about human rights. Are all human rights individual rights, or are there collective human rights (peoples’ righ…

> I'm sorry I just can’t find a single source backing you up. As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“moneta…

The first factor of the Drake Equation (the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy) has dimension 1/time. The last factor (the length of time for which such civilizations rel…

They might be rarely considering code formatting specifically, but the claim that one language is a superset of another really does imply that all valid instances of the latter are…

Did the idea of emitting Morse code on the keyboard LEDs during kernel panics ever get working, and included in the kernel? I'm thinking of the LWN article “Morse code panics for 2…

I like this idea. My first remark is VirtualStorage . As I understand it, T is the type the library user can associate with the items (nodes, files) of the tree. I think this libra…

> The blockchain part is silly, because timestamping services exist without it Yet the timestamping service which I trust the most, is the Blockchain-based one. https://opentimesta…

In Firefox, the 24 (with the old-style 4 looking like a turned alpha) is missing from the outer dark band. However, in Edge, the 24 is there.

> If you KNOW a stock is worth more or less based on information that you currently have but are withholding from me in a trade, that's fundamentally fraud. No, it's not. When A bu…

Don’t they? In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014) the Supreme Court did not address and answer whether for-profit corporations are protected by the free exerc…

It’s been done before (sort of): the river Vilnelė is declared to have the constitutional right to flow by everyone, in the very first article of the constitution of Užupis. [0] [0…

Also, are you looking at your phone screen up from above, or screen down from below with the sky behind it? Would the correct orientation be rotated of mirrored?

You are judging Damore not by his words, but by how his memo got misrepresented. At no point in his memo, Damore indicated that he would discriminate or called for discrimination a…