Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | gdavisson's commentslogin

"Grue" has a surprising variety of meanings:

Obsolete/dialiectical English: to shudder with fear, or a shudder (related to "gruesome")

Computer games: in Zork, a monster that eats adventurers in the dark [0]

Linguistics: an English translation for words that cover the entire green-blue part of the spectrum (in languages that don't distinguish blue from green) [1]

Philosophy: a color name that is equivalent to green until a specific future time, at which point it becomes equivalent to blue (used to raise questions about how to validly extrapolate into the future) [2]

[0]: https://zork.fandom.com/wiki/Grue

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction#Grue_a...


It also means crane in French, both the construction kind and the bird. When I first saw the name I guessed there must be some relationship to cranes.


Others:

French: grue may also crane both as the bird and the construction machine.

Italian: gru also means crane (bird).

Norwegian: grue may either mean the verb "to dread” or a noun meaning fireplace/hearth.

Gheg Albanian (dialect): grue means wife/woman.

Primarily Scottish but also Northern English (regionalism): (1) ground-gru / grue means a half-liquid snow or ice that forms and floats on the surface of a river, sometimes thought to have risen from the riverbed. (2) a tiny bit or particle, e.g. He hasn’t a grue of sense.

Similar words:

Latin: grus may mean a crane (bird) or a type of siege engine / war machine bearing similarity to the neck of a crane (bird).

Catalan: grua - same as French.

Esperanto: gruo also means crane (bird) or machine.

Swiss German (dialect): grüezi means "God greets you".

Romanian: grâu means wheat.

English: GRU is term for Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie).


Except that sometimes chasing these unicorn entitles leads to... finding the unicorn entities.

That's basically what happened with the neutrino. Neutrinos were originally proposed in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli to solve apparent violations of energy and momentum conservation in beta decay. He suggested that the missing energy and momentum were being carried off by some additional -- undetected and mostly undetectable -- particle. For a while, it looked like these proposed ghost particles might never be detectable, but Fred Reines finally managed it... in 1956, 26 years later.

So don't write off unicorn particles. Sometimes they're real, even if you have trouble detecting them.


You're refuting a strawman. The junk DNA claim is not, and as far as I can see never had been, that all non-coding DNA is junk. It's that most of our genome -- around 90% -- is junk[1][2]. But since the genome is over 98% non-coding, that implies that something like 8% is functional non-coding DNA, which is several times the amount of coding DNA. Finding small amounts of additional functional non-coding DNA does not significantly challenge this[3].

[1] https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2022/08/junk-dna-vs-noncoding-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA#History

[3] https://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/154553548091/long-nonc...



That's not correct; you cannot use a double-slit test to check for entanglement. Running a photon through a double-slit setup always just produces a single dot, not a any sort of pattern. To get a pattern, you need to run a bunch of photons through it and see if a fringe pattern appears [1].

(BTW, you never get a two-line pattern in a decent setup. This is an incredibly common mistake, but it's simply wrong. The interference (which produces fringes) only happens where the separate patterns from the two slits overlap, so if you want a lot of interference, you need them to overlap a lot. So in the no-interference case, you won't get two separate lines with a gap between, you'll get a single merged wash (with probably some fine structure due to diffraction within each of the slits, but that'll also be there when there is interference, on top of the two-slit interference fringes).)

You might think "ok, I'll do this with a bunch of photons, measure/not measure all of their twins, and see if the bunch of them show fringes." This is more-or-less what's done in the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment, but it doesn't work out in a way that allows communication. What happens is that you always get the no-interference pattern. In order to see interference fringes, you need to split the individual photons' dots up based on the result of the measurement you made on their twins. Based on those measurements (if you made them), you can split the photons up into two groups, which'll have fringes with equal-and-opposite patterns (i.e. each will have bands where the other has gaps [2]).

If you didn't measure the twin photons (or made some other measurement on them instead), you can't split them up, so you won't see the fringes. But that's not because the measurements were different, it's just that you can't split them up afterward to see the fringes. And even if you did measure the twins, you can't split them up until you get a list of which twin got which result -- which can't be sent faster-than-light.

Net result: no, you can't send information via entanglement, you can only get correlation.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Electron-Fringe-Pattern-...

[2] https://algassert.com/quantum/2016/01/07/Delayed-Choice-Quan...


Brackets are used in shell wildcard ("glob") expressions. For example, if you try to use "[bar]" as a command, the shell will first look for files named "b", "a", and "r" in the current directory, and if it finds any it'll use the first one as the command name and any others as arguments to it.

But as far as I can see, using a close-bracket as the first character in a command is safe, since it cannot be treated as part of such a pattern. Open-bracket (without a matching close-bracket) would work in many shells, but will get you a "bad pattern" error in zsh.


True, but since everyone in the study -- both those with and without diagnosed COVID-19 infections -- had been subject to this, it shouldn't affect the results. Essentially, they're comparing people who were just trapped indoors vs those who were trapped indoors and also had diagnosed COVID-19 infections (and they also broke the infected group down by severity of infection, what variant was prevalent when they were infected, etc).


Photons are their own antiparticle, so this is not an issue.


Photons are the means for transfer for all energy sources at some level, so using that as a comparison for the actual generation method seems a little pointless.


echo -n is not safe, because some versions of echo will just print "-n" as part of their output (and add a newline at the end, as usual). In fact, XSI-compliant implementations are required to do this (and the same for anything else you try to pass as an option to echo). According to the POSIX standard[1], "If the first operand is -n, or if any of the operands contain a <backslash> character, the results are implementation-defined."

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/e...


Thanks - I wasn't aware that echo was that problematic as I target bash (usually v4 and above) from my scripts.

I just tested it out with:

  sh /bin/echo -n "test"
  /bin/echo: 3: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
I didn't realise until recently that printf can also replace a lot of uses of the "date" command which is helpful with logging as it avoids calling an external command for every line logged.


> printf can also replace a lot of uses of the "date" command

Very cool (but bash-specific). Manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#index-pri...

> sh /bin/echo -n "test"

This is gibberish -- it's trying to execute /bin/echo as if it was a shell script. Maybe you meant:

  sh -c '/bin/echo -n "test"'


I (vaguely) remember playing games with terminal echoback on physical terminals back in the early-mid 1980s when I was in college. This was on a VAX/VMS system.

Someone (I don't remember who did what here) discovered that they could get `SHOW SYSTEM` (roughly analogous to unix `ps` command) to display their name in reverse video by adding escape sequences to their process name. So a bunch of us started experimenting to see what else we could embed in there.

Most of the terminals attached to the VAX were Zenith Z-19s, which mostly emulated DEC VT-52s but with some added features. One of those added features was an enablable 25th line (in addition to the regular 24x80 display) that functioned as a sort of status line. We found we could enable that, write something into it, then use the "transmit 25th line" escape sequence to send its contents back to the VAX. I remember having to work around limitations like it sending an escape sequence before the 25th line (which confused VMS), and I think it didn't send a carriage return at the end... or something like that.

I don't think we ever got it to do anything terribly interesting, but it was fun to play with. And then IIRC a VMS update blocked control characters in the `SHOW SYSTEM` listing.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: