ameminator (u/ameminator)

ameminator commented on Arabic document from 17th-cent. rubbish heap confirms semi-legendary Nubian king phys.org/news/2026-02-ara... · Posted by u/wglb

xrd · 10 days ago

I just love the sounds in sentence "...Arabization of Dongola in the Funj period."

Dongola in the Funj period sounds like the place to be!

ameminator · 10 days ago

Uh, probably it would have been a place to be avoided for a non-Arab

ameminator commented on UK, Canada and Australia formally recognise Palestinian state theguardian.com/politics/... · Posted by u/ath3nd

toast0 · 6 months ago

Recognizing Palestine as a state is an act of diplomacy that certainly has no specific benefit for the people of Palestine.

But it makes incursions into Palestine by Israel explicitly of an international nature. Palestine is and has been considered occupied territory, but without recognizing Palestine as a state, what soverign country's territory is occupied?

Perhaps now that there is a recognized country whose territory is being occupied, the recognizing countries may oppose the occupation in more specific ways. Perhaps, the same sorts of protestations without specific action as in years past.

Real (positive) change for Palestinians would start with Israel withdrawing from the occupied territories[1], and that needs more than a declaration of statehood, but a declaration of statehood may be a tiny step towards that goal.

[1] It's not strictly required, but I suspect it's more likely for Israel to withdraw than it is for Israel to radically change how they interact with the occupied territories.

ameminator · 6 months ago

I don't disagree with you, but I think it's hard to convince the Israel government, since the last time Israel withdrew from Gaza (in 2005), a terrorist organization was elected and it resulted in multiple wars and waves of violence, leading up to the current conflict.

ameminator commented on UK, Canada and Australia formally recognise Palestinian state theguardian.com/politics/... · Posted by u/ath3nd

EnPissant · 6 months ago

> Israel is a primarily Jewish country surrounded by neighbours who won't stop kicking each other regardless, and to whom Israel is a common enemy due to religion. Your analogy ignores the neighbours being racist sociopaths that will punch Israel at any opportunity and have done so historically repeatedly.

You make a good argument why a European people should not have established a country there. Doubly so considering it was already populated.

ameminator · 6 months ago

First, 60-70% of Israeli Jews are of Arabic descent, not European.

Second, while it's possible to complain about the circumstances of the creation of Israel, I'm not sure that doing so now, in context, offers anything constructive. It seems that by most reasonable definitions, Israel is a country, if a small one. Do you suggest that Israel be eradicated? If so, what happens to all the Israelis, who likely wouldn't be welcome in the area after the country's destruction? Is it any more justifiable to ethnically cleanse one group from the area than another?

I don't have an answer to this conflict, but it isn't clear to me that suggesting "this country shouldn't have existed at all" is an answer either.

ameminator commented on Airbnb's Devastating Effect on Canadian Housing thewalrus.ca/airbnbs-cana... · Posted by u/pseudolus

throwaway5752 · 2 years ago

absolutely unhinged

It seems less than ideal, or maybe even illogical, but calling it "absolutlely unhinged" feels a bit dramatic. I'm not from Canada - how does Canada currently relate housing and immigration policy, and how would you propose they change it?

ameminator · 2 years ago

Currently, housing availability is not a factor in immigration policy. Canada allowed over 1.2 million new residents last year. There were approximately 200k new houses built in that same time frame. Interpret this as you will.

ameminator commented on Airbnb's Devastating Effect on Canadian Housing thewalrus.ca/airbnbs-cana... · Posted by u/pseudolus

fsargent · 2 years ago

Articles like this are supremely annoying. The devastating effect is caused by the fact that they aren’t building enough housing. The problem is not the demand for housing, it’s the supply.

Don’t blame Airbnb when you refuse to build enough housing, the markets going to figure out how to market.

ameminator · 2 years ago

Canada is in the top end of the OECD when it comes to building housing. The problem is that the rate of new house construction has been severely outpaced by population growth. Canada has the highest rate of population growth of any developed nation and it is largely spurred by immigration.

ameminator commented on CNC lasers for cutting and engraving jacquesmattheij.com/cnc-l... · Posted by u/jacquesm

ameminator · 2 years ago

As a supplement to this excellent breakdown of laser cutting, can I recommend the Guerrilla Guide to CNC [0]. To this day, it's the best reference I've ever read on small volume fabrication with a CNC machine and/or 3D printer. If you enjoyed the original post, you may enjoy this as well.

[0] https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/

ameminator commented on Ternary circuits: R=3 is not the Optimal Radix for Computation (2019) arxiv.org/abs/1908.06841... · Posted by u/danny00

asimpletune · 2 years ago

Yeah, I mean until we have ternary transistors, emulating ternary circuits will be less efficient than actual binary circuits. If we ever have ternary transistors, then ternary circuits will be an improvement over binary ones.

Here's a little ternary logic riddle for the HN community:

Two people are sitting at a restaurant, deciding what to order. Neither had communicated with one another when the waiter appears and asks one of them "Is everyone ready to order?". They reply "Hm, I don't know". The other person immediately then says "Now we are." Why?

(As in, how did the second person know?)

ameminator · 2 years ago

Spoiler:

If the first person did not want to eat, he would have answered "No, we are not ready". Him not being ready is enough to negate the whole thing. He doesn't know if the both of them are ready to eat though, because he doesn't know that the second man is ready or not (the second man hasn't revealed his state yet).

Therefore, the second man knows that the first is ready to eat, since the first's answer is "I don't know". Since the second man knows that he himself is ready to eat, he can answer: "we are both ready to eat".

ameminator commented on Is my plane a 737 MAX? ismyplanea737max.com/... · Posted by u/jacksoncheek

jmward01 · 2 years ago

Aviation is safe. An issue happened and appropriate steps have immediately happened and in the end an already incredibly safe industry will be even safer. If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone, but a plane has an issue and we panic. Yes, panic. This is not rational or helpful and is a huge reason why aviation is so antiquated. You want flying cars? Stop panicking at statistically minor issues. Panic and fear are why it was easier to heavily modify the already massively modified 737 design to create the 'max' instead of just designing a new plane. It is nearly impossible to bring innovation to market because of panic and fear. Over reporting and sites like this are increasing fear and panic when we should instead be celebrating a system working as it should.

ameminator · 2 years ago

Aviation in general is very safe. However, there is clearly something wrong in Boeing's design and manufacturing process that's persisted for many years. I would not feel comfortable flying in any of the new 737 MAX's and will avoid flying in one as much as possible.

ameminator commented on Bad scientific code beats code following "best practices" (2014) yosefk.com/blog/why-bad-s... · Posted by u/luu

jampekka · 2 years ago

And you can't fix any of this as long as "software quality" (the "best practices") means byzantine enterprise architecture mammoths that don't even actually fix any of the quality issues.

ameminator · 2 years ago

There are crazy over-engineered solutions with strict requirements and insane dependency management with terrible trade-offs and compromises. I've worked in the aerospace field before, so I've seen how terrible this can be. It's also possible to have unit tests, have a design and have documentation without the above and would go a long way to solve the original 3 issues.

ameminator commented on Bad scientific code beats code following "best practices" (2014) yosefk.com/blog/why-bad-s... · Posted by u/luu

jakobnissen · 2 years ago

I'm a scientist programmer working in a field comprised by biologists and computer scientists, and what I've experienced is almost exactly the opposite of the author.

I've found the problems that biologists cause are mostly:

* Not understanding dependencies, public/private, SCM or versioning, making their own code uninstallable after a few months

* Writing completely unreadable code, even to themselves, making it impossible to maintain. This means they always restart from zero, and projects grow into folders of a hundred individual scripts with no order, depending on files that no longer exists

* Foregoing any kind of testing or quality control, making real and nasty bugs rampant.

IMO the main issue with the software people in our field (of which I am one, even though I'm formally trained in biology) is that they are less interested in biology than in programming, so they are bad at choosing which scientific problems to solve. They are also less productive when coding than the scientists because they care too much about the quality of their work and not enough about getting shit done.

ameminator · 2 years ago

> They are also less productive when coding than the scientists because they care too much about the quality of their work and not enough about getting shit done.

You can't solve the first 3 issues without having people who care about software quality. People not caring about the quality of the software is what caused those initial 3 problems in the first place.