MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by breuleux | 2025-09-04 17:06:31+00:00
> we don't need to simulate physics faster than physics to make accurate-enough predictions to fly a plane

No, but that's only a small part of what you need to model. It won't help you negotiate a plane-saturated airspace, or avoid missiles being shot at you, for example, but even that is still a small part. Navigation models won't help you with supply chains and acquiring the necessary energy and materials for maintenance. Many things can -- and will -- go wrong there.

> In other words, why are we assuming that agents cannot shape the world

I'm not assuming anything, sorry if I'm giving the wrong impression. They could. But the "shapability" of the world is an environment constraint, it isn't fully under the agent's control. To take the paper clipper example, it's not operating with the same constraints we are. For one, unlike us (notwithstanding our best efforts to do just that), it needs to "simplify" humanity. But humanity is a fast, powerful, reactive, unpredictable monster. We are harder to cut than trees. Could it cull us with a supervirus, or by destroying all oxygen, something like that? Maybe. But it's a big maybe. Such brute force takes requires a lot of resources, the acquisition of which is something else it has to do, and it has to maintain supply chains without accidentally sabotaging them by destroying too much.

So: yes. It's possible that it could do that. But it's not easy, especially if it has to "simplify" humans. And when we simplify, we use our animal intelligence quite a bit to create just the right shapes. An entity that doesn't have that has a handicap.
by NobodyNada | 2025-09-04 17:06:46+00:00
I don't think that's necessary. Hollow Knight is a game whose appeal comes from exploring a massive, beautiful world and and discovering its secrets -- using a guide would take away a lot of the fun, at least for me.

Yeah, HK is a huge game and Silksong is probably bigger; it'll take a while to play through both. But that's a good thing. Play these games for the experience of playing them, no need to rush through them just to check them off a list.
by RobRivera | 2025-09-04 17:06:59+00:00
I find my favorite YT animators to be SO INSPIRING specifically because they get pretty darn good and their impetus is their passion. They are fueled by merch and patreon these days, so I am happy to see they can make it work, however when industry trends to a race to the bottom, to the point where many layers of contracting lead to illegal North Korean labor being part of the process (the whole INVINCIBLE affair) it leaves a vacuum for upstarts and its awesome.

THE BALANCE!
by bkcooper | 2025-09-04 17:07:11+00:00
It is very much worth playing but you could probably skip it. As others have alluded to, the storytelling is very influenced by Fromsoft (Souls games, basically) and is pretty oblique. But, even without following it exactly, the gameplay itself is still great, and the music and art do an excellent job setting up a melancholy vibe. The different zones have a lot of personality.
by aetherson | 2025-09-04 17:07:37+00:00
I agree with your historical analysis, and I'm also uncomfortable with the total surveillance, but I'm not sure I buy there exist effective legal solutions. The truth is that everyone carries a camera, that all vehicles have cameras and will to a greater and greater degree be using those cameras all the time. I don't know what kind of limits we can put on the lack of privacy there that aren't incredibly intrusive attempts to control everyone's behavior or stop all technology.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-04 17:07:40+00:00
> Calling someone a dickhead in any professional environment is unprofessional

The fuck it is. There is a while bunch of preconditions that need to be met first. (for example, if you're working as a teacher, its probably unproffesh, but as an engineer[a real one, not a software engineer], you need to call a spade a spade.)

You can't have "professionalism" as a mask to allow abuse or general degrading treatment at work.

crucially the person in question used dickheads non-pejoratively, it wasn't an insult. However the employer didn't follow procedure either.
by pdonis | 2025-09-04 17:08:00+00:00
Capitalism is not the same thing as a free market. A free market means all transactions are voluntary. That's how wealth gets built--by voluntary cooperation among productive people through specialization and trade.

Capitalism is just the view that one should try to accumulate more capital, by hook or by crook. And there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve any kind of productive work, much less building wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. Buying government favors, for example, which is how most big-time "capitalists" in US history did it (for example, the railroad barons who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes). Today they do it by buying regulations that favor them.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-09-04 17:08:10+00:00
It's an abuse of the system so I'm not advocating it, but there's a temptation to add my residential subdivision to the map.

I have to be honest: I don't really want people who wish to avoid police tracking in my neighborhood. I don't care why you don't want to be tracked; I suspect that some subset of those who don't want to be tracked may be criminals, and there's zero loss to me from reduced vehicular traffic, so why not? Why not take advantage of the perceived threat to privacy? It's like putting signs up on one's home or business windows that advertise surveillance cameras are in place — it's either neutral or a win to me no matter why the existence of said surveillance bothers someone.
by waterheater | 2025-09-04 17:08:24+00:00
Some years ago, I snagged a great deal on some Sennheiser HD600s. After also acquiring a Schiit stack (Magni + Modi) and finding high-quality audio sources, I would close my eyes, lay down on the couch, and just listen...actually, I'll call it perceive the music. No other audio experience compares, just like a huge screen which fills your vision is truly the best way to experience a movie.

Virtually all people on the planet perceive the world with their eyes but push the other four physical senses into the background. There's good reason for this reality, of course: of our five physical senses, the eyes are capable of providing the richest information. And yet, most discussion around increasing perceptual abilities are vision-centric. Learning to perceive with your ears, smell, touch, and taste in addition to eyes should also be learned.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-04 17:08:29+00:00
The overly dynamic Flash animation style kind of worked for the era Flash was really popular in. I think it is sort of a late gen-X/early Millenial thing. Tools and sharing became so much more accessible as we were growing up, so part of the joke was this self-deprecating thing where the creators (who were amateurs and barely knew what they were doing) were just turning on every toggle, and uploading the results. The line between incompetence and self-parody is blurry, it works.

The joke doesn’t make any sense on cable TV though, because there’s no real reason for stuff on TV to have ever sucked in that way.

Compare to stuff like Harvey Birdman or Sealab 2021, they make a lot more sense because they were parodying the medium they existed in.
by jimt1234 | 2025-09-04 17:08:56+00:00
I used to say, "If you're gonna commit crimes, leave your cell phone at home." [1] However, now it's, "If you're gonna commit crimes, leave your cell phone at home at cover your license plates." ... But seriously, just don't commit crimes.

[1] I was a juror on a case years ago, maybe 2010 - some dudes robbed a jewelry store early in the morning. It took the cops about 15 minutes to figure out who did it because the crooks all brought their cell phones, and it was early, so they were the only cell phones in the area at the time. The accused looked shell-shocked during the trial when the cops explained this. Oh yeah, it didn't help that they told all their friends what they had done, and they tried to pawn the jewelry to a former cop.
by pc | 2025-09-04 17:08:57+00:00
There are lots of crypto skeptics on HN (and we ourselves were disappointed with crypto's payments utility for much of the past decade), so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind over the past couple of years: we started to notice a lot of real-world businesses finding utility in stablecoins. For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America. We're currently adding stablecoin functionality to the Stripe dashboard, and the first user is an Argentinian bike importer that finds transacting with their suppliers to be challenging.

Importantly, none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit. They're performing real-world financial activity, and they've found that crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante.
by nickff | 2025-09-04 17:08:59+00:00
People have been getting more risk-averse, as well as nosier over time. Both of these changes increase the push for surveillance. I agree with your intuition that people shouldn't have to worry about being constantly monitored, but if you look at the recent internet pile-on after both the Coldplay concert and tennis match incidents, I am not sure the (voting) public agrees.

>"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

-H. L. Mencken
by jstummbillig | 2025-09-04 17:09:09+00:00
Unironically excited to learn: Why is this a blockchain? Why could stripe not just do this (maybe better) without the blockchain bit?

I am actually optimistic that, finally, there could be a convincing answer, because stripe does not strike me as the type of company that would do this without a very good reason. (I am slightly less optimistic, because the page itself does not offer an answer to this question, and instead argues for tempo against other blockchains. But only slightly.)
by hungmung | 2025-09-04 17:09:33+00:00
I strongly suspect that the net zero thing is at least half bullshit anyway, and probably more like 90%. We have forests on paper that have no basis in reality, either because of wildfires or because they just planted seedlings in summer and they died immediately. Those carbon credits don't get negated though. But now you get a forest of carbon in the atmo + whatever emissions those credits justified, while "conscious consumers" pat themselves on the back for choosing net zero products.

Where there is a layer of abstraction involving money, there is always bullshit.
by integralid | 2025-09-04 17:09:51+00:00
"Let's not trivialize firing someone because they (verbally) abused someone"? Are you OK with mobbing in the workplace? They may be "just words" but the can actually have a huge mental negative effect on someone, especially if sustained.

I'm not saying this level of seriousness is what happened here, but you exaggerate in the other direction.
by bflesch | 2025-09-04 17:10:02+00:00
This is off-topic to their grand blockchain adventures, but I need to mention it:

I would love for stripe to start paying appropriate VAT on transactions between their merchants and EU citizens, I've been on their ass about it for nearly a year now. I've reported multiple merchants to them which simply refused to provide an VAT invoice for any transactions. Legally, merchants outside EU are required to pay VAT on their B2C transactions if their EU transaction volume goes above a certain limit, and provide VAT invoice for B2B transactions (but with 0% VAT because it is B2B).

But unfortunately Stripe doesn't seem to have the technology to do a SUM(*) in their database, or check if an email address ends in '.de' or '.it' when they take the payment. So they simply do not give a damn if their merchants provide an invoice with the transaction or not.

Oftentimes it was the problem to actually get an invoice document which has company name, company registration number, street address, city, and tax ID. Extremely basic information which is required on all EU invoices. Many times I have submitted invoices from Stripe merchants to my tax accountant and my tax accountant told me that those are not proper invoices and to please reach out to the merchant to get EU-legal invoices.

Stripe has the technological capabilities to implement proper compliance checks, but they choose to let their merchants send you rubbish self-made PDF invoices with a big red "paid" stamp without any information or "official" Stripe invoices with total fantasy names and fantasy company information. You never know if your merchant is sitting in an embargoed country or is just some schmuck from San Francisco trying to hide their ties to a website.

If other HN users from the EU have been fighting Stripe to get EU-compliant VAT invoices for their B2B or B2C purchases, please feel free to reach out. I've been doing a big stink about this and to me it feels like a deliberate pattern of enabling their merchants to ignore EU VAT obligations.

It's really sad that my extremely positive impression of Stripe has been deeply tainted by this kind of experience across various purchases and subscriptions with Stripe merchants. I had to spend so much time pleading with them to provide proper invoices.
by garbthetill | 2025-09-04 17:10:04+00:00
it says its an evm clone, so it may not be like solana. Im shocked they didnt go the l2 route like many seem to do. They might pull a bsc with a limited number of validators and just make the stake requirements stupidly high and wink wink the company or entities close to said company, have acquired the majority of said tokens to become a validator and you would need to pay a gazzilion dollars to enter the pool
by Lerc | 2025-09-04 17:10:12+00:00
That flow chart seems pretty reasonable to me. The big one is

"Are the entities with write access having a difficult time deciding who should be in charge of the data store"

The vast majority of pointless blockchaining come from organisations that have already decided that they are going to be in charge. Which is just great for them, but it doesn't induce others to join them. I wonder how much of promoting blockchains is to project the illusion of relinquishing a degree of control. I guess all the ones doing it just because others were doing it are looking at AI now.
by brunohaid | 2025-09-04 17:10:18+00:00
It’s a hilarious definition of “fix” but the basic argument is that when you mandate stablecoins to hold treasuries and they start seeing actual adoption, you create demand/sink for a couple extra trillion dollars of treasury bonds.

Eg if Australian locals suddenly switch transacting cocaine at scale in Tether instead of AUD, the US government can borrow more money by providing that collateral to Tether.

Edit: Izzy Kaminska recently had a, as always, solid and less snarky summary at https://www.financialsense.com/blog/21379/redollarization-an...
by CLEARrecruits | 2025-09-04 17:10:39+00:00
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by bobbiechen | 2025-09-04 17:10:41+00:00
Recently came across this:

>People pay money to go to the gym, run marathons and take part in events like Iron Man and Tough Mudder – activities that previous generations would have thought were insane.

>Some people alive today are probably fitter and healthier than any in history. And some people are not, and there is a huge range in between. Liberating people from physical toil has led to a much wider range of physical fitness.

>Maybe something similar will happen with intellectual fitness. Cognitive games and puzzles and competitions will become very popular. Adults will employ personal tutors and coaches to help them win. Who knows what the intellectual equivalent of Tough Mudder will be.

>Some people will end up smarter and cleverer than any in human history. Some will not. And there will be a huge range in between.

>(from https://substack.nomoremarking.com/p/are-we-living-in-a-stup...)

And my first thought is that puzzle hunts are already here for those who are looking for a challenge!
by pdonis | 2025-09-04 17:10:53+00:00
> because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control.

No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people.

Advocates of free markets, like me, don't advocate them because we think they solve all problems. We advocate them because, given the fact that humans are shit at governing, free markets are the least worst of the alternatives open to us. Big market players who still have to make money through voluntary transactions do less damage than governments run by humans who are shit at governing. That's the lesson of human history. Unfortunately most of us still haven't learned it, and continue to cling to the foolish belief that somehow calling a bunch of humans a "government" magically makes them no longer shit at governing. It doesn't.
by koliber | 2025-09-04 17:11:23+00:00
> My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise

We're fully aligned. The original point I was trying to make is that advertising can be done well, in a way that is compatible with this objective. Unfortunately, in many cases they aren't.

> In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to

I thought about this a while back, and I think being bombarded with requests for consent is worse than being bombarded with ads. Cookie consent banners convinced me.

> My kids should come home with a flyer for it.

Fliers are ads.

> I will actively seek out and research a car.

Probably in some classified ads.
by tramcaseht | 2025-09-04 17:11:34+00:00
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by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-04 17:11:57+00:00
>Politicians do what they think voters want them to do. Thus talk to your neighbors about this and point out that they could have good transit service

With what money? Because everyone wants things right now and my city is broke from mismanagement(corruption) and most companies here have had mass layoffs so money is going to welfare now.

And history proves the west has started to suck at building rail infrastructure on time and on budget. By the time any rail would be built here, we'll have flying cars. Plus then you have nimbyis who don't want rail next to their homes.

So then isn't it normal that people still prefer to keep their cars instead of waiting decades for fictional rail that might not happen? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
by canucker2016 | 2025-09-04 17:12:00+00:00
Bill Gates wrote the initial BASIC interpreter using Paul Allen's PDP-10 assembler macros so they could run the generated interpreter on a PDP-10, while also extracting a native binary for the targeted CPU/OEM hardware.

from Paul Allen's Idea Man biography:

... It gathered steam with the release of the 6502 chip from MOS Technology at an unheard-of $25. For each new microprocessor, I created a new set of development tools on the PDP-10, while Ric [Weiland, 2nd new-hire, 4th employee] helped with the BASIC interpreter rewrites.

Bill Gates was involved with the business-side of the company at this point, trying to sign new clients for the BASIC interpreter.

So Ric Weiland would have done much of the 6502 BASIC interpreter.
by dperfect | 2025-09-04 17:12:33+00:00
Exactly. The only way for this to deliver on its goals would be for it to not be public or permissionless. And if that's the case, then it should really just be a database and/or a shared protocol between financial institutions.

Once it's truly "open", you can't have any sensitive identifiers in there, so you need another protocol/system for correlating opaque identifiers with real-world entities (thus defeating the purpose).

And if financial institutions are involved, they'll want the ability to do what they do now: rewrite history whenever they feel the need (or are compelled by governments). Another strike against using blockchain.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-04 17:12:53+00:00
> A quick update to the procedures that calling someone a dickhead is a fireable offense is all that is needed.

Nope, needs to be reasonable. If you're doing something unusual, then it needs to be telegraphed and backed up so that if you are taken to court you can give evidence as to why that clause was needed.

> have something generic like "verbal abuse"

you would need to have a policy that defines what verbal abuse is, and a way to record and catagorise it. its also a hard task to prove that one instance of verbal abuse where using "dickhead" as a term of endearment without any other connotations (sexual or otherwise) is gross misconduct, especially as the reply was "you can fuck off"
by pdonis | 2025-09-04 17:13:06+00:00
> And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control

Nonsense. It was because the government had control, and could force people to accept that it was giving special privileges to certain players. For example, the railroad barons in the late 19th century US who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes. The people had no choice about accepting that. In a free market, there would have been competition, and that would have ended up resulting in better service. How do we know that? Because that's what happened until the government stepped in and gave special privileges to certain players.

In other words, your view is exactly backwards to what has actually happened.
by srean | 2025-09-04 17:13:23+00:00
I see. Today I learned about piiru from you.

I do dislike the fact the libc sin takes argument in radians. For two reasons. One, the angles in the application are rarely in radians, so they need to be converted before the function call. Two, I would like the standard angles, such as the multiples of 15 degrees to have an accurate representation in 32 bits (or 64 bits).

Anyhow this is way off topic.