Social networking in a clam shell.
Or reality TV
Futurama was right, about the future of TV being in hypnotic frogs and the like.
Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other
191–194 of 194 posts
Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
octopi arises because people have learned Latin 2nd declension masculine nouns, by accident or repetition, where pluralizing (nominative case) turns the -us to -i. It's a pattern matching phenomenon. It would be less weird if there were not spelling irregularities, since the -pus is meant to be foot (like pes, pedes...in Latin, or pos, podes,... in Greek). Basically, the spelling irregularity triggers a sensible patt…
Maddeningly, it doesn't even apply to all Latin -us nouns. For instance, the plural of apparatus should be apparatūs if we're applying the Latin rules. Apparati, as it might seem, makes no sense! So even when the pattern match correctly identifies the language, it can be misleading. --fellow Latin nerd
apparatus is a past participle from apparare, so as an adjective plural would follow second declension, not fourth, i thought.
used as a noun, it's an (implicit thing) prepared (which preparatus would describe, but i guess we don't have any other word in English other than apparatus.
i don't have a Latin dictionary though
Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maddeningly, it doesn't even apply to all Latin -us nouns. For instance, the plural of apparatus should be apparatūs if we're applying the Latin rules. Apparati, as it might seem, makes no sense! So even when the pattern match correctly identifies the language, it can be misleading. --fellow Latin nerd
apparatus is a past participle from apparare, so as an adjective plural would follow second declension, not fourth, i thought. used as a noun, it's an (implicit thing) prepared (which preparatus would describe, but i guess we don't have any other word in English other than apparatus. i don't have a Latin dictionary though
apparatus is first/second as a past participle. I suppose it could be used as a substantive, but there is also a fourth declension noun with the same lemma meaning implements, tools, etc.: https://logeion.uchicago.edu/apparatus
Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you worked on Google's crawl scheduling, HN would be one of the sites you used to test out ideas for better scheduling heuristics, right? I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP rate limiting, don't re-check any page for updates too often, don't wait a crazy long time before re-checking any page, etc.), it was a bunch of arcane black magic heuristics to schedule…
Can you give an example of "arcane black magic heuristics"? I cannot imagine, what weird rules you could even come up with, aside from the normal "sensible" ones you already listed.
I was on a different team, but my third-hand knowledge from 20 years ago (notably, before deep learning became mainstream, even at Google) was that Google crawl scheduling had a bunch of heuristics to guess at the update frequency of a given page. The probability that a page has changed since you last crawled it is an important factor in the expected utility of crawling it now.
As I mentioned, I expect that even more arcane heuristics, in the form of ML models, has largely or completely replaced the hand-written heuristics.