...those who deplore the "treasures" destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a comma
Not very profound, really. Sure; no one else will see the exact permutation I saw, but what does it matter? The graph had no meaning attached to it; the values were 'random'. If there was a datapoint with information meaningful and pertinent to my own life on this page, then I'd be blown away. But instead I have a squiggly graph.
I thought this was going to be a post about anonymity and internet privacy. It's pretty fair to say that the combination of content, scripts and headers for almost any page you see on the internet has been uniquely crafted for you and your browser. Sure, there are some super static sites out there, but the vast majority of pages that normal people view every day are instrumented to the hilt with little nuggets of personalized tracking cookies, personalized JavaScript beacons and everything else that helps marketers and traffic analysts happy.
That's a good point. It's not really where I wanted to go with this article though but it's an interesting perspective to think about !
Also I see a lot of people saying that they expected something else from the title.
I want to say that this was exactly my intention, as I'm getting kind of fed up of having 90% of HN frontpage occupied by NSA stories (I mean it's a big deal, but that doesn't mean we can read anything else, does it?).
I couldn't help but notice the highlighting of the website is weird. If you start highlighting somewhere on the text then everything except the paragraph you clicked on will be dimmed, and there is a slight background difference on the actual highlighted text.
Gimmicks like this put me off websites straight away.
I actually thought that was really clever, I often highlight the current section of what I'm reading to help me keep track of my progress, and this certainly helps do that.
Seems like this guy's site is designed more like a portfolio and less like a blog.
uggggg... i truly hate when people that don't understand statistics jump on a soapbox and spout out lies.
a very good example of your flawed logic can be demonstrated with birthdays. with 366 potential birthdays, it doesn't take a room full of 366 people before 2 people share the same birthday. after you get over 40 people, it's almost guaranteed that 2 people will share a birthday.
What if we take the birthday "paradox" into account ?
Unfortunately Wolfram Alpha refuses to calculate the result for very big N.
Also: I'm the only one seeing this Hacker News page because it says "kaoD" at the top-right, and I'm the only one who knows my password (or at least I hope so).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.htm...
The OP page is far from unique in its uniqueness.
Also I see a lot of people saying that they expected something else from the title. I want to say that this was exactly my intention, as I'm getting kind of fed up of having 90% of HN frontpage occupied by NSA stories (I mean it's a big deal, but that doesn't mean we can read anything else, does it?).
Gimmicks like this put me off websites straight away.
Seems like this guy's site is designed more like a portfolio and less like a blog.
I'm still not sure of what I want to do with this website, but for now it's part portfolio, part blog, part experimentation.
a very good example of your flawed logic can be demonstrated with birthdays. with 366 potential birthdays, it doesn't take a room full of 366 people before 2 people share the same birthday. after you get over 40 people, it's almost guaranteed that 2 people will share a birthday.
nice squiggly line.
Unfortunately Wolfram Alpha refuses to calculate the result for very big N.
Also: I'm the only one seeing this Hacker News page because it says "kaoD" at the top-right, and I'm the only one who knows my password (or at least I hope so).