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retrac

HN member
Joined
Fri, May 03, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC
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12,537
Public activity
4,199 items

About retrac

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Recent public activity

  1. comment
    Comment #49224162

    You are correct: Latin vowel length is usually only indicated in educational material, dictionaries, etc. > just a side-effect of teaching Latin as a dead language where you never …

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    Comment #49218126

    Modern editions usually use modernized spellings. There are no breathing marks in the oldest manuscripts; they are a classical innovation (circa 400 BC) several centuries after Hom…

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    Comment #49217621

    Using either spaces or miniscule letters, is anachronistic for both classical Latin and Greek. They only had a single case in antiquity and didn't usually mark word boundaries. For…

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    Comment #49191857

    A symmetric cipher is: ciphertext = data XOR key. XOR is reversible: plaintext = ciphertext XOR key. If the key is a set of truly random numbers the same size as the ciphertext, th…

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    Comment #49186947

    Generative AI could synthesize a plausible commit history, too.

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    Comment #49179367

    I recently learned that most of the western zodiac constellations have names which are Mesopotamian in origin, the same as in the Sumerian star catalogs thousands of years ago. Tau…

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    Comment #49147009

    > Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation.…

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    Comment #49135977

    You know how people learn Ancient Greek to study Homer in the original language? Gilgamesh deserves that. I'm only a beginner but the refinement of the poetry is already obvious ev…

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    Comment #49055015

    Emphasis should be placed on "everything we call culture and civilization". There is a thought experiment that might help. Imagine we had a time machine, and no scruples, and we co…

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