There's more than one good way to define "esoteric" but it gave me cognitive whiplash to hear the term used about lambda calculus.
I can understand that perspective, there are plenty of purpose-built esolangs which are very close to the OG lambda calculus, and depending on your background the whole thing might seem bizarre and unfamiliar and ancient and irrelevant.
At least logically I see that could happen, but my heart disagrees. I see lambda calculus as a root of the conjoined tree[0] which supports all of modern programming. It feels to me like calling written English esoteric because some people get by without reading and writing!
(I'm certainyl not saying you're wrong, but just that it's fascinating how different two valid perspectives can be.)
Coding used to be about learning about the mathematical underpinnings of computation and then learning a specific mapping from the math to the software implementation. These days we don't teach that to undergrads (or maybe they get it in passing in a survey class.) We don't teach parsing. It seems we teach a list of features you should expect in your Python implementation or Linux version. Maybe you get a class on SQL. It's astonishing to me that kids today can get a CS degree without learning what Lambda Calculus (or even Pi Calculus) is (are). I got a PHYSICS degree and took a course on the mathematical underpinnings of computation so I would understand why all that FORTRAN code I had to maintain looked as funky as it did. As best I can tell, our 4 year research institutions are a weird mix between day care facilities and trade schools. Just once I would love to meet a recent undergrad who had taken a compilers class or understood the difference between s-expr's and m-expr's.
When Microsoft bought GH it was already the most popular forge by far, which is why it was bought in the first place.
> But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.
That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.
I’ve had the same thought about crypto. The anonymous p2p financial system where the only realistic way for the average person to participate is to send photocopies of government issued IDs to one of the few remaining large exchanges who will happily provide any government with your identity and a paper trail of your actions upon request.
Git is designed so that you always have the full code you're working on copied to your local machine. Github being down for a short time from time to time should be only a minor inconvenience.
Sure, but GitHub is much more than a git repository. Otherwise companies wouldn't pay for it.
As the centralized git repo, it allows devs to collaborate, by exchanging code/features, tracking issues and doing code reviews.
It also provides dependencies management ("Package") and code building/shipping (GH Actions).
Sure, if you usually spend one day or more writing code locally, you're fine.
But if you work on multiple features a day, an outage, even of 30 minutes, can have a big impact on a company because of the multiplier effect on all the people affected.
> If outages [...] stop whole companies in their tracks
They should fucking learn how to code because no one in their right mind would depend on such an external service that can be easily replaced by cloning repos locally or using proxies like Artifactory. Even worse when you know that Microsoft is behind it.
Yes, most companies don't have good practices and suck at maintaining a basic infrastructure, but it doesn't mean GitHub is the center of the internet. It's only a stupid git server with PRs.
How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?
There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum.
They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end.
I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.
Even though Git is decentralised, people like having a simple client-server model for version control. So with Github being the most funded free Git hosting service it grew to being the biggest. They also built out the extra services on top of git hosting, the issue tracker, CI/CD, discussion board, integrated wiki, github-pages, etc.
I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.
If you travel back to 2018 and ask random software engineers "are git and github developed and owned by the same company", a fair number of them would say yes, just like today.
I am of the opinion that it wasn't critical infra, but it was at least unique infra. Similar to LinkedIn, which MS acquired. It wasn't that LI was critical it was because it was unique.
And since the acquisition, they have built it out to be critical. Similar to what META did with Instagram. Instagram wasn't critical when META purchased it, but now it is the cornerstone of any business's online presence as it has been built out.
If GitHub were to close tomorrow, you'd lose out on the social part temporarily, but there are effectively dozens of providers and solutions that could replace it.
The same could not be said for Figma, where if lost, you'd end up looking at the company that tried to buy it. That's what those laws are for.
No, Adobe/Figma was stopped because it would severely reduce competition in a market where there are already very few relevant players. That's all they can block.
They were allowed to buy it because GitHub is not licensed with an FOSS licence. How on earth did we all settle on such a propietary piece of tech infrastructure? No wonder Microsoft bought it.
Critical piece of tech infrastructure. Which is absolutely is.
When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!
It's probably easy to self-host Gitlab for a small team working on a limited number of projects.
It's definitely not easy to self-host Gitlab for hundreds of devs working of hundreds of projects.
Especially if you use it as your CI/CD pipeline, because now you have to also manage your workers.
Why company chose to pay GitHub instead of self-hosting their Gitlab instance?
For the same reason they pay Microsoft for their emails instead of self-hosting them.
Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.
> As of 2025, there were 41 members in SEPA,[2][3] consisting of the 27 member states of the European Union, the four member states of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), the United Kingdom, as well as five EU candidate countries.[4][5][3] Some microstates participate in the technical schemes: Andorra,[6] Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City.[4] As of 2025, Albania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia are the five countries negotiating to join the EU that are included in SEPA.[2]
Few of SEPA members have autonomous regions which are them selves not members of SEPA, I do wonder if making transactions between the autonomous region and the rest of the country, as well as to a different SEPA member is any harder. For example I can’t imagine it would be difficult to make a transaction between Thorshavn in the Faroe Islands and Hirtshals in Denmark proper, or to Oslo or Reykjavík for that matter. But a transaction between North Nicosia to Nicosia in Northern Cyprus and Cyprus respectively may be a different matter.
Here's a fun timeline to walk through how it developed and why it's been, while not trivial, implemented with a kind of structural uniformity to keep the problem space contained.
> I'm one of the deeply silly cofounders of Mullvad
Cool.
Also funny, but it would be nice if you addressed the specific objection. Here are some of the new ads: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyon... . Do you think they appeal more to consumers who are seeking "it keeps me vaguely secure", or it helps me watch Venezuelan Netflix and avoid some kinds of targeted advertising personalisation?
Advertisement targeting is a risk. Even just leaking your IP to various services introduces risks and being able to build profiles on your activities online introduces risk.
Usually the risk is you spend money you wouldn't have otherwise spend, but those profiles can also be used for future nefarious reasons. You're basically just relying on everyone running analytics to be good people, forever. Remember, anything on the internet is forever. And, even if they are, you're still relying on them having perfect security, forever. If a database breach happens and people now know everything data brokers and analytics services know... that's a problem.
IMO, nobody should browse the web without a reliable and trustworthy VPN, at all.
> it would be nice if you addressed the specific objection
I'm pretty sure I did. I'll happily answer yours as well.
> Do you think they appeal more to consumers who are seeking "it keeps me vaguely secure", or it helps me watch Venezuelan Netflix and avoid some kinds of targeted advertising personalisation?
Between those two options, definitely "it keeps me vaguely secure". None of the ads you link to are intended for customers that want to circumvent geographical restrictions. We don't market to that customer segment.
> Then Pharaoh also called for the wise men and the sorcerers, and they also, the magicians of Egypt, did the same with their secret arts. For each one threw down his staff and they turned into serpents. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.
- Exodus 7:1-12 (NIV)
Many moons ago I had a girlfriend who worked on an nationally broadcast afternoon show where they often had guest chefs demonstrating dishes, so I would come home from my thankless PhD work to eat Michelin-starred food from a lunchbox. Overall not so bad.
Not sure what the quote has to do with anything here, but it's a as good an opportunity as ever to say that large parts of the "Old Testament" draw most of its inspiration from the code of Hammurabi ("an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"), the Epic of Gilgamesh (which gave us, notably, the story of the deluge, and the dark role of the serpent) and Ancient Egypt, to which it owes, among many others, the concept of eternal life and the idea that man was made in God's image.
To be "in God's image" was one of the titles of Pharaoh.
And about the staff: early depictions of Jesus often have him holding a magic wand [0], as he was considered by followers and ennemies alike to be a magician. The "Three Wise Men" or "Three Kings" (?!) that show up at his birth are just "magi" (magicians) in the original text [1].
"Magi" were priests of Zoraster. It is true that our current word for magic is derived from this root but that doesn't mean that the text is saying they were _magicians_.
That's the etymology of the word, but there is no indication in the gospel of Matthew (the only one to even mention this) that it's a reference to Persia.
That would be like saying when anyone who mentions "algorithm" is really talking about Uzbekistan, because al-Ḵwārizmī means 'the man of Ḵwārizm' (now Khiva).
AFAIU, in Ancient Greek culture Magi were often considered like Plato's Philosopher Kings. Greeks didn't have an accurate understanding of Zoroastrianism or the structure of Persian government, but for some reason they saw Persian leaders, and Magi in particular, as possessing a synthesis of political, religious, philosophical and scientific virtues. For example, they thought Persian leaders' grasp of astronomy meant the laws they promulgated were what we might call today, science-based. Magi represented idealized leadership rooted in reason, similar to the way today people of one country like to point at some other country du jour as an exemplar of rational governance, especially when critiquing their own government or society.
Aristotle and others specifically said that the Magi did not practice metaphysical sorcery. They believed the Magi could, for example, divine the future, but doing so through their study of astronomy (i.e. their science-y astrological knowledge).
The biblical account of the Magi and the star they followed perfectly matches the mythos of Persian Magi in Greek culture. The story itself tells the reader not only that those rational leaders over yonder were convinced about the importance of Jesus, but that they knew because "science" revealed it to them.
I don't think there was a distinction between science, magic and religion (or rather, cults, since there were no organized religions in the modern sense).
Well, modern science wasn't a thing, per se; would have been part of natural philosophy and not well delineated. But philosophy, religion, and magic were broadly speaking understood as distinct, similar to today, at least from the perspective of the learned, and notwithstanding some esoteric cults (which also exist today). This is fairly obvious from the works that have survived, from Plato, Lucian (Syrian satirist), and many others, because they distinguish them similar to how we do today. Even atheists likely were also somewhat common, though it definitely wasn't something discussed as heavily as today. Plato specifically and literally mentions atheism--in Laws he says it's a typical phase for young adults, though it may be more fairly understood today as shirking, loose disbelief, or agnosticism. It's a fair deduction that Lucian was an atheist as we understand that term, and the popularity of his work strongly suggests atheism, or at least skepticism of religion and magic, were widespread.
Point being, while our particular categories aren't perfect fits for the ancient and classical worlds, the general human and cultural dynamics were quite similar. They weren't unsophisticated rubes blind to their own ignorance; not much more, if at all, than we are today. What really distinguishes us is our wealth, and how a much larger fraction of our society has the opportunity to study and debate ideas like patricians and philosophers of yore.
I don't know about ancient philosophers, but for ordinary folks there was no distinction between a religious scholar and a scientist (both were learned men who read books). This still happens today, when many people mix history and genetics with religion and politics.
If you have some relevant references that would be helpful.
It's difficult to know specifically what ordinary folks believed, let alone the literati. But as you said, even today people mix religion and politics even when they at least superficially understand them as distinct and separable. I think starting from the assumption that people today, at a fundamental level, think and behave the same as people from millennia ago, is a good starting point, just as it's a good starting point when understanding different cultures and ethnic groups today. When we depart from that initial assumption, even with good intentions (e.g. some other culture is more rational, etc), prejudice rapidly creeps in. But it's a choice, nonetheless, and can lead in different directions.
AFAIU, many historians believe, at least tacitly, that atheism wasn't a thing in the ancient world, and therefore that religious and mystical ideas were unconsciously and hopelessly intertwined and melded with other knowledge and beliefs, at least much more than today (assuming they even admit we still do it today). Probably because they understand atheism, and implicitly agnosticism and religious skepticism, as a modern ideology; which, as an "ideology", it is, but that's skipping ahead a few steps. They look for evidence to refute that assumption, and it's relatively scant (though not non-existent), for all the reasons most of history is lost to us. But if you start from the opposite assumption, that people think and behave similarly, I think the evidence strongly supports that the same intellectual dynamics were at play, certainly among the learned. Emphases and perspectives are different--even today each generation is more interested in certain questions than others. And of course literacy and, presumably, exposure to diverse ideas was less common (that was my point about wealth). But AFAICT and IMHO all the same threads are there, the distribution is just different. If you were teleported to 100 BC, I'm confident you could find people with very modern ideas and perspectives, they'd just might be more difficult to locate. But I think even the general milieu wouldn't be too foreign, depending on time and place. (If you teleported to the US during one of the Great Awakenings, the milieu would be much more religious than at other earlier and later times.)
What definitely stands out in the surviving works is that atheism was generally cast in a negative light. While there's often open derision of magic and aspects of foreign and cult religions, religion was generally understood as an important element of a healthy polity. Though, in Plato's works its arguably (IMO conspicuously) ambiguous whether sincere belief is necessary, or just tacit acceptance and active participation in rituals. But none of that is unlike the situation until 50-100 years ago in the modern Western world.
The two concepts were often one in the same—a "magician" was simply any art that "we" considered to be not in keeping with "our" religious practices. The label was slung about freely for some thousand years.
There are some philosophers who attempted to divide miracles from magic. They tended to classify the latter as esoteric science confined entirely to the natural world with no supernatural elements, and the former as invoking the aid of some confirmed divine being. When one considers souls and demiurges to be part of the natural world, however, even this most imaginative delineation is an inherently blurry one.
These depictions can probably be dismissed, just as any other depiction of Jesus. That painting has been made long after his death. The only clues to his likeness are deductions from biblical texts and historical context. For example, he most likely didn‘t have long hair (1. Corinthians 11), and he also wasn‘t European looking (should be obvious).
> he also wasn‘t European looking (should be obvious).
Spaniards, Egyptians, Greeks and Levantines all look very similar and Jesus was definitely of the Levant. I hope you won’t deny Spaniards and Greeks are European.
In this context, "European" means "white." Jesus probably did not look like the bearded white hippie commonly depicted in Western (primarily American and British) iconography.
Spaniards, Egyptians, Greeks and Levantines may or may not look similar (seems a bit broad, like the geographical definition of "European") but they also don't often look like "white people." Especially not in Egypt or the Levant.
Generally the matter is one of blood purity, as with all racism. Southern Spain, Italy, and Greece were all occupied at one time by Arabs, which contributed certain hair textures, skin tones, and facial features to the local gene pool. Those with no knowledge of history or civilization tend to be terrified of acknowledging the artistic and cultural contributions of al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire. As you probably know, the northern reaches of Italy are more German than Romance, on account of those pesky invasive Lombards.
Of course the true absurdity of all this comes when two people from the same parents end up with different physiognomical and racial labels; since these traits are rarely as simple as idealized Mendelian characteristics, it is entirely possible for them to be passed on a couple of generations before re-coalescing. (The case of Summer on The Sopranos comes to mind—while her parents both have fairer skin than she does, the result is otherwise not all that unrealistic.)
>As an European, I find the definition of European that excludes Spaniards super weird.
Because you are, as I suspect many people will, intentionally misreading the context of my comment.
I am implying that the use of "European" herein does not literally refer to the geographic region known as "Europe," but rather that in the context of a statement about the likely physical appearance of Jesus it should be understood as a statement about race and ethnicity whereby "European" is a politically correct descriptor for the common set of physical traits often described as "white," as is represented in Western depictions of Jesus, particularly where traits like skin color, eye color and hair color are concerned.
1.) Look, Spaniards are Europeans by any reasonable definition. They are part of Western Europe.
2.) Traditional western depiction of Jesus looking like Spaniards would be no exception. Traditional western depiction of Jesus tend to look sorta kinda like locals do.
3.) Europeans do have wild range of eye colors and hair colors. The eye color and hair being some specific colors even for whites is weird, because even whitey whites have all kind of hair colors and eye colors.
> "European" is a politically correct descriptor for the common set of physical traits often described as "white,
No it is not and to the extend it is, it is absurd whistleblowing attempt - the one that ends up redefine Western Europe as a place that excludes Spaniards.
99.99% of the population of the Mediterranean basin at the time Jesus lived were white, almost certainly more given that the trans-Saharan slave trade was a creature of the camel and post dated the Arab conquest of North Africa.
“White” didn’t exist at that time and the people of the Mediterranean certainly didn’t think of themselves as one homogeneous group. The various peoples had prejudices about each other which only consolidated into a hierarchy when the trans-Atlantic slave trade needed to legally define who couldn’t be property. Prejudices by, for example, the English or American against Greeks or Italians lasted into the 20th century.
> Prejudices by, for example, the English or American against Greeks or Italians lasted into the 20th century.
Which is a bit funny, considering how they asdmired the ancient Greeks and Romans. Why did they consider their culture and statecraft as so ideal, if they considered the people that originated them as so inferior?
From what I’ve read, there was a lot of thought about them having fallen from their ancestors. Some of the eugenics types wrote about this as a cautionary tale about mixing with other races or letting them share power. The reasoning only makes sense if you start with the conclusion and work backwards trying to make it fit.
Just because you never heard it doesn't mean it didn't happen. For example, Irish people were heavily discriminated against in the US and were considered at one point to not be "white"
There are at least 2 ancient pagan flood stories: The Gilgamesh Epic and the Atrathasis Epic, both originating in ancient Mesopotamia. Because both sources predate the source of Noah's story, many scholars have concluded that Noah's flood story was borrowed from these. However, consider the following objections:
- When a historical event is retold to different audiences over time, the story generally becomes more mythical and embellished, and poetry and exalted language are used. It is the opposite when Noah's and the pagan stories are compared. Noah's story is simpler and told in a straightforward narrative, while the pagan stories are told in a more mythical and embellished style.
- Noah's story is monotheistic, and the characters are ethically moral. The pagan stories are polytheistic, and the characters are ethically capricious. The pagan gods are implied to be selfish, jealous of each other and lie to each other. Moreover, in the Atrathasis Epic the gods discover that due to the flood, they have wiped out their only source of food (people's sacrifices) implying that they depend on humans.
- The shape of the ark in Noah's story is the only one that can be considered seaworthy, being rectangular and in dimensions similar to more modern cargo barges. The pagan stories describe an ark that is round or cubic, which would make an ark less stable for floatation and also more vulnerable to damage/overturning by wave impact.
It is therefore more likely that Noah's story with its later source is faithful to the actual historical event; while the pagan stories are versions modified to suit the polytheistic religion/culture of their audiences. At the same time, it is remarkable that the pagan stories confirm that a history changing flood did occur.
I understand you saying that a flood actually happened, and that Noah's story is based on that. Well that may be, but with a quibble: that flood is prehistorical. We have no records to say when and where it happened. Unless I'm behind on research.
To me, flood stories serve to show how powerful gods are. The stories are likely based on several floods experienced by different people over time.
Imagine you see the Nile flood your general area every year with varying intensity. It's easy to worry that one year it just won't stop rising. To people living in those times, a flood story is gripping in ways we don't follow today.
How is it ethical to drown every single human, including children, because you're displeased with what they do?
And how is it ethical to also destroy "the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground" which have nothing whatsoever to do with human wickedness??
This is exactly what a Bond villain would say. Today, Bond villains are usually considered the acme of evil.
While the serpent had a dark role in the Epic of Gilgamesh too, it is extremely sad how the Genesis has twisted completely the beautiful story of how Shamkhat has civilized the wild Enkidu, whom God had made from clay (by showing him the pleasures of a city, as opposed to the harsh life in the wilderness: eating bread, drinking beer, being massaged with oil and making love), into the ugly story of how Eve has committed the unforgivable sin with Adam, of seeking knowledge on par with God, and her descendants shall be for ever punished for it.
I don't know if it's sad; it's a different story, it's a kind of riff on the same themes.
In Genesis III, it's necessary for Adam and Eve to acquire knowledge and leave the garden, because in so doing they have sex and make children. While in the garden, they didn't know they were naked, and presumably didn't have sex or reproduced.
Also, when God finds out, he fist asks the man, who accuses "the woman you gave me". So then God turns to the woman, who says the snake deceived her. But here God stops his inquiry. We know the snake can talk because he talked to the woman, so why didn't God ask the snake why he did what he did?
An interpretation is that the snake ("the most clever of all animals God had made") is in fact God's instrument. He works for the boss.
It is a different story but which is without any doubt derived from the Enkidu story and modified to suit different conceptions about the role of women in society and about what is valuable for mankind.
While in the Enkidu story the role of the woman was positive, because she has taught Enkidu about the advantages of civilized life, making him leave the wilderness where he lived since being created by God, in the Genesis story Eve was despised for the same thing, i.e. for teaching Adam more than his creator did.
I certainly side with the anonymous author of the Old Babylonian story about Enkidu and not with the editor of the Genesis book who has transformed it.
Like Pandora's box, it's a just so story about why women are the source of all mens' problems and why patriarchy is just and necessary. And why women have pain in childbirth. And why people are afraid of snakes. And why we die. But mostly about why women suck (from the point of view of ancient Hebrew culture.)
And that attitude transfers to Christianity in 1 Timothy when Paul says women should not be allowed to teach or have authority over men, but should remain quiet because it was Eve who was deceived by the serpent, and who then deceived Adam.
Yes but in Genesis 3, 20 (at the end of this very story), it is said: "Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living." That's not dismissive at all. It can be argued that Paul brought his own prejudices to a text which was much less prejudiced than he was.
If truth is defined as beliefs which lead one to make decisions that cause you/your society to thrive, this is a good thing (that the Old Testament has similarities to other major works). Implies a kind of evolutionary algorithm for truth. Likely implies these stories are more true because they’re more tried and tested. Societies who believed them became strong.
If truth is about repeated experimentation or journalistic records (a very new concept in history of writing - less than 500 years), then perhaps this is of concern.
I accept both definitions, but when they’re in conflict, the former tends to be more end-to-end, while the latter tends to overfit to the moment. Mostly because data is scarce and life is a very complex distributed system. On the other hand, the former changes slowly while the latter perhaps keeps up with the pace of change.
Except the point of life is probably to thrive more than to collect a list of facts. So when in conflict, I lean towards the former. Personal choice tho. I expect most of HN leans the other way.
> If truth is defined as beliefs which lead one to make decisions that cause you/your society to thrive
This is 'metaphorical truth' to be precise.
But it's only a part of the virality of memes, not the whole.
Propagation can occur not just due to usefulness, but to other factors such as simplicity/replicability, human susceptibility / 'key in a lock' etc.
If survival was purely metaphorical truth, then all surviving lifeforms would be 'the most true' (including viruses being 'true' to us). Which can be argued, at a philosophical level - But then we've expanded the definition so much as to lose relevant meaning at the pragmatic level.
Nice comment! I had forgotten about metaphorical truth. Sent me on a nice rabbit hole.
I think 'metaphorical truth' is correct but slightly too narrow. Pragmatic truth includes metaphorical truth but is slightly wider.
And while I agree with your assertion in the short run, I'm inclined to doubt its correctness in the long run. Most things eventually have consequences.
I gave up tablets and pills of all kinds a long time ago now, but, at the time, if god himself had popped up to tell me something, it wouldn't have been a huge surprise.
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