lisper

> Newcomen, Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont ... and Hero of Alexandria

Thomas Savery too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery

Actually, it's even worse than that: the design of the clock makes it so that the cesium atoms doing the actual time keeping are in free-fall while they are being observed. So it is physically impossible for any gravitational influence to change the accuracy of the clock.

A chicken is an egg’s way of making more eggs.

These claims are bullshit. You can get technical details about the clock first-hand at this link:

https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-re...

and you can see a photo of the actual installation here:

https://www.denver7.com/news/front-range/boulder/new-atomic-...

As you can see, the room is clearly not filled with asbestos. Furthermore, the claim is absurd on its face. Asbestos was banned in the U.S. in March 2024 [1] and the clock was commissioned in May 2025.

The rest of the claims are equally questionable. For example:

> The actual port for the actual clock ... isn't actually hooked up to anything ... they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer

It's hard to make heads or tails of this, but if you read the technical description of the clock you will see that by the time you get to anything in the system that could reasonably be described as a "card" with "ports" you are so far from the business end of the clock that nothing you do could plausibly have an impact on its operation.

> You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is.

This claim is also easily debunked using the formula for gravitational time dilation [2]. The accuracy of the clock is ~10^-16. Calculating the mass of an object 1m away from the clock that would produce this effect is left as an exercise, but it's a lot more than the mass of a human. To get a rough idea, the relativistic time dilation on the surface of the earth is <100 μs/day [3]. That is huge by atomic clock standards, but that is the result of 10^24kg of mass. A human is 20 orders of magnitude lighter.

---

[1] https://www.mesotheliomahope.com/legal/legislation/asbestos-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation

[3] https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/3278.pdf

The difference being that stocks and real estate have at least a tenuous connection to actual production. Crypto has none.

> The response.getheader method in urllib has been deprecated since 2023 because the response.headers dictionary is what should be used instead.

Then response.getheader should just do that. There is no reason to expose the implementation to the user unless performance is critical.

Literally! :-)

I don't think AI is comparable to cars. The problem with cars is that they necessarily use the commons. The more roads you build, the less space you have for trains, parks, housing, etc. AI isn't like that. I can continue to think for myself and look for ways to add value as a human even if everyone around me is using AI. And if that fails, if I can't find a way to compete with AI, if AI really is capable of doing everything that I can do as well as I can do it, why would I not want to use it?

It's much worse than "designed for cars." It's more like "not survivable without a car." It's the same with apps on my phone. I don't want to use them, but sometimes there simply is no alternative in today's world.

We may end up building a world where AI is similarly necessary. The AI companies would certainly like that. But at the moment we still have a choice. The more people exercise their agency now the more likely we are to retain that agency in the future.

> who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them

Me. I never use AI to write content that I put my name to. I use AI in the same way that I use a search engine. In fact, that is pretty much what AI is -- a search engine on steroids.

I have not had anything explode, but I have had Macbook batteries expand on me on two separate occasions to the point where the case was visibly warped. Both times I was away from home, so it was extremely inconvenient.

Which of course is 0 mod 2.

Ron's second law: the hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is.

Fair point.

Yes, but then they also said:

> hopefully design your language semantics to discourage cycles

thus expanding the scope of their comment beyond that specific use case.

A general graph is not exactly "narrowly tailored". Graphs are pretty common.

OK, then I'll pick a different example: a general graph.

A fair point, but then you're still putting the burden on the programmer to figure out where a weak reference is appropriate.

But then I'll just choose a different example, like a general graph.

> you only trace when you hit cycles

How do you tell when you've hit a cycle?

> hopefully design your language semantics to discourage cycles

Why? Cyclical structures can be very useful. For example, it can be very handy in many situations for a contained object to have a back-pointer to its container.

[UPDATE] Two responses have now pointed out that this particular case can be handled with weak pointers. But then I can just point to a general graph as an example where that won't work.

> anticipating mistakes before I get into a conversation

How is that not thinking before speaking?

That is an excellent point. Recognizing and accepting things you can't control is a critical life skill. But either way, "Maybe you're not trying" is not a helpful framing.

I think the "maybe you're not actually trying" framing is not very constructive. The author did try, making decisions and taking actions that seemed appropriate for her situation at the time. The problem was that because her attempts to solve the problem failed -- again and again and again -- she stopped trying. Which is a not-entirely-unreasonable thing to do.

I would frame it more like: just because you have tried and failed doesn't mean you can't succeed, even if you have failed again and again and again. Circumstances change. New solutions become available. New resources or new insights present themselves. Sometimes just doing nothing and letting time pass actually produces progress. But the only thing that guarantees failure is to give up altogether.

Do you really need me to explain the distinction between "circular" and "recursive", and the nature of HN comments as an informal medium with an audience that generally does understand these things and does not need to have them explicitly called out?

> "your parents and your parents' ancestors"

That's recursive, not circular. These are not the same thing despite being closely related. Recursive definitions are useful. Circular ones are not.

I don't understand them. None of the introductory materials I've read on them ever made any sense to me. I kinda sorta understand "state" and "maybe" but the general idea that links these two things together and (I am given to understand) leads to other cool stuff just eludes me.

I thought of that. I'm on a Macbook Air and initially I had Night Shift on but even after I disabled it I still couldn't tell the difference.

> I decided to use colors rather than numbers or letters to identify each basic set, though I didn't use the same colors Newton did; mine are equidistant in the hue circle.

"Lawn green" and "medium spring green" look completely identical to me. Maybe I have a really obscure kind of color blindness?

I often tell people without irony that laziness is my super power. Laziness motivates me to put my efforts into finding ways of getting things done with less effort, to the endless annoyance of those around me who work a lot harder than I do.

> One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking

Oh, so true.

> That's just incorrect though

Quite possible. But that's in no small measure because I have yet to find an actual cogent definition of "tensor" that distinguishes a tensor from an array. (I have a similar problem with monads.)

> So what I mean when I talk about the reality of the tensor I mean whatever it is the tensor is expressing in the physical universe

OK, but then "the reality of a tensor" not depending on the coordinate system has nothing to do with tensors, and becomes a vacuous observation. It is simply a fact that actual physical quantities don't depend on how you write them down, and hence don't change when you write them down in different ways.