MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-11 21:12:21+00:00
Sam Earle's fractal neural network approach (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.03896)
is exactly this kind of thing.

His key trick: recursive weight-sharing in
fractal convolutional blocks, so each column of the network acts as a
continuous-valued cellular automaton ticking different numbers of times.
The deepest column gets a 33x33 receptive field -- enough to connect power
across an entire 32x32 map in one forward pass.

The agents discovered power-plant + residential pairing, road placement
for density, zone clustering by type, and traffic-avoiding road layouts.
When stuck at local optima, a human player could intervene (deleting power
plants) to force re-exploration -- and the agent would improve its design.

The paper was 2019, before LLMs were doing this kind of thing. Different
paradigm (RL on tile grids vs. LLMs on coordinate text), same hard problem.
by criddell | 2026-02-11 21:12:23+00:00
Your right! I found this[1] which says it was $10 at launch.

So you paid $10 and helped support indie developers launch what, in time, evolved into an almost universally beloved app.

That should feel pretty good. Your tiny investment helped create something great!

[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2010/04/13/netnewswire-for-ipad/
by frogperson | 2026-02-11 21:12:27+00:00
There simply is no solution to this problem. We would all need to stop driving, flying, and eating meat. Most families (in the US, anyway) would suffer unemployment and starvation if they couldnt drive to work.

Humans will continue to do whatever is needed to survive,, and that currently involves driving, flying, and eating meat. They will only stop when those behaviours are either not possible, or hinder survival.
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-11 21:13:05+00:00
Sam Earle did exactly this with RL agents trained via quality-diversity
methods on Micropolis: https://github.com/smearle/gym-city

For running locally, I'd recommend the MicropolisCore repo over the one
linked in the original post. MicropolisCore is a clean C++ rewrite that
compiles to WASM -- runs headless in Node or in any browser:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore

The Raspberry Pi wall display idea is great. The simulation is lightweight enough for that.

The simulator runs and I've written a tile rendering engine in TypeScript/WebGL, but I haven't finished the user interface. (But the Space Inventory works!)

Live demo: https://micropolisweb.com

Here is a video demo of how it works:

Micropolis Web Demo 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlHGfNlE8Os

For fun, I added all the classic tile sets, and it can run a couple of cellular automate rules as well as the game simulator. Here's a video to some original music by Jerry Martin, who composed the music in The Sims and SimCity (see the above video and the keyboard shortcuts in the help window to understand what's going here):

SimCity Micropolis Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata To Jerry Martin's Chill Resolve:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI

Here's more about my plans for making a multi player version of Micropolis with time travel, branching, and merging, by using github as MMPORG platform (when it's not down ;):

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/sims/s...

MOOLLM's "micropolis" skill is still in the design stages, but here's what I've started, which starts by describing the multi player version of SimCity I released in 1993:

SimCityNet announcement (1993):

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement...

Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA

micropolis skill README:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/micropo...

micropolis skill prototype:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/micropo...

More context about what MOOLLM is:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm

And how it extends Anthropic Skills with 8 important features:

MOOLLM: A Microworld Operating System for LLM Orchestration:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/LEELA-...
by Reason077 | 2026-02-11 21:13:26+00:00
> “My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.”

I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer.

There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
by lutusp | 2026-02-11 21:13:34+00:00
> I doubt anyone could make a reply to this comment that would make me feel any better about it.

You may be right, but just to have said it : the Fast Fourier Transform requires complex numbers. One can write a version that avoids complex numbers, but (a) its ugliness gives away what's missing, and (b) it's significantly slower in execution.

Oh -- also --

e^(i Ⲡ) + 1 = 0

Nevertheless, you may be right.
by woah | 2026-02-11 21:13:36+00:00
The Mission Local is a good source for hyperlocal Bay Area news, but it does have a strong SF leftist/progressive political tilt in most of its articles, and Gary Tan is a favorite boogieman for these types. Here's what they have to say about his malign influence in the article:

> But the operation is also a media venture: Garry’s List started with a blog pillorying public-sector unions as “special interests,” attacking the ongoing teachers’ strike, and denouncing the proposed billionaire tax.

- Public sector unions are special interests. This is a plain fact.

- The current teacher's strike in San Francisco, even if it succeeds, will only push the district into insolvency, prompting a state takeover. The state will then cut much more aggressively. Maybe this would be a good thing though, although probably not what the union intended. Advocates of the strike are literally demanding the district spend its reserves on a couple years of raises.

- I'm certainly no billionaire, but the proposed tax will do nothing more than push the extremely small and mobile group of billionaires to take their business elsewhere. It's unlikely to raise tax revenues over the long run.
by rasengan | 2026-02-11 21:13:38+00:00
I don't know if I agree or not with his views, but the fact that he's moving from complaining about something, to doing something about his beliefs, has convinced me to move from a negative to a significantly positive view of him, as a person; to reiterate, regardless of whether I agree with said views.

The will to fight for what one believes in - I think we can all agree that is an admirable human trait that would result, for those who do follow his views, in him being labeled as a hero and defender of people's rights.

Bravo, Garry.
by pibaker | 2026-02-11 21:14:33+00:00
There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.

But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.
by gorjusborg | 2026-02-11 21:14:37+00:00
> It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it.

Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.
by kadabra9 | 2026-02-11 21:14:53+00:00
Everyone loves deciding what their "fair share" of other people's net worth (not even income!) is.

Sorry, but the state just confiscating 5% of someone's net worth (unrealized or not) is absolute madness, and rightfully opens up questions about slippery slope, how "temporary" they claim this to be, and so on.

It's not surprising they are leaving the state or using their resources to try to stop it.
by jonmb | 2026-02-11 21:14:57+00:00
> You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research.

I've often had thoughts like this, but had to just accept that people often don't do basic research. For another example, consider how many people work full-time (160+ hours per month) to make money, but have never bothered to take even a 2-hour course on how to manage it well. They spend all that time making money but no time on how to use it wisely. And then they make obvious mistakes. Unnecessary debt, lack of investments, complain that they never learned this stuff in school, etc. Not trying to sound judgmental, but I always found that surprising.
by nilkn | 2026-02-11 21:14:57+00:00
“What I’m taking about” is that they are not easy to conceptualize intuitively.

If I were a skeptic of real numbers, I’d tell you that talking about an infinite decimal expansion that never terminated and contains no repeating pattern is nonsense. I’d say such a thing doesn’t exist, because you can’t specify a single example by writing down its decimal expansion — by definition. So if that’s the only idea you have to convince a skeptic, you’ve already failed and are out of the game. To convince the skeptic, you’d have to develop a more sophisticated method to show indirectly an example of a real number that is not rational (for instance, perhaps by proving that, should sqrt(2) exist, it cannot be rational).
by crazygringo | 2026-02-11 21:15:24+00:00
> under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism

I think we can be more charitable. Don't you see, even here on HN, people constantly asking for software that is less bloated, that does fewer things but does them better, that code is cost, and every piece of complexity is something that needs to be maintained?

As features keep getting added, it is necessary to revisit where the UX is "too much" and so things need to be hidden, e.g. menu commands need to be grouped in a submenu, what was toolbar functionality now belongs in a dialog, reporting needs to be limited to a verbose mode, etc.

Obviously product teams get it wrong sometimes, users complain, and if enough users complain, then it's brought back, or a toggle to enable it.

There's nothing to be cynical about, and it's not something we "should be over by now." It's just humans doing their best to strike the balance between a UX that provides enough information to be useful without so much information that it overwhelms and distracts. Obviously any single instance isn't usually enough to overwhelm and distract, but in aggregate they do, so PM's and designers try to be vigilant to simplify wherever possible. But they're only human, sometimes they'll get it wrong (like maybe here), and then they fix it.
by rtpg | 2026-02-11 21:15:32+00:00
The plastic bag is sold to businesses! If every supermarket in the world decided to never buy another plastic bag then they would no longer be produced!

There can be a futility to it all in that the “ideal option” simply isn’t produced of course.

I find boots theory is often a bit too convenient in this topic though. There is unlikely to be magic structural solutions that allow every part of your life to remain as convenient. At one point our lives will have to change in structure.

EDIT: to be extra clear, I think systemic coordinated changes is needed. I just think the “it’s the corporations doing this!” narrative to obscure the needs for reorganization of daily life on top of systemic change
by goatlover | 2026-02-11 21:15:55+00:00
For how long though? Solar and wind are very competitive now, electric cars have been good enough to transition to for over a decade, other industries can be decarbonized with the right incentives and enough investment. It's not like there aren't any ideas for how to farm or produce steel cleanly. And nuclear reactors can be made safer and cheaper now.

Seems more like a lack of political will with powerful lobbying interests opposing it and misleading the public. Fossil fuel companies could have listened to their scientists in the 1970s and changed their business models for a transition to cleaner tech a lot sooner.
by fabianholzer | 2026-02-11 21:15:57+00:00
I find this knee-jerk reaction, that everything that shows certain stylistic choices is put under the suspicion of "might be generated", to have become a tedious cliché.

Unless the author had live-streamed the writing process, how could we know? Humans have been exposed to LLM generated texts on nearly all channels for more than three years, so by now it would be a surprise if there had not been a reciprocal reaction. Writers imitate what they read, the tools we shaped might have started to shape us.
by usrnm | 2026-02-11 21:16:00+00:00
> Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not

Plastic is absolutely the best packaging material ever created, it's so good, it feels like magic. It's light, it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable and doesn't just decompose, it comes in a miriad shapes and forms and so on. There is a reason it's everywhere
by sudomateo | 2026-02-11 21:16:01+00:00
Hey! It's nice to see others excited about Oxide. Hubris is an area of the stack I'm not intimately familiar with, but I'll do my best to answer your questions from my perspective.

> From the inside, is Oxide a place where a fresh grad can actually be useful? Or is the "complexity floor" of hardware/software co-design so high that you really just need a few decades of experience to be effective?

I believe Bryan spoke about this publicly on podcast episodes in the past but the answer really is no and yes. Generally, the things we're working on at Oxide require a both depth and breadth of knowledge in various areas of the stack that early career folks don't yet possess. We also have limited bandwidth to assist early career folks because of our small company size. I know this sounds like gate keeping, but mostly everyone at Oxide wants to support early career folks. Unfortunately, the general consensus has been that we just don't have the bandwidth for it and it would be a disservice to a candidate to hire them and not support them the way they would need to be supported. That being said, we're getting bigger and will likely have more bandwidth to change this stance as time passes. If you see a role you'd be a good fit for I do recommend applying. The application process itself is valuable for the applicant.
by akramachamarei | 2026-02-11 21:16:21+00:00
It's also worth distinguishing uncoordinated markets from ungoverned markets. Markets exhibit vast and sophisticated organic coordination without state prodding. I don't just mean to pick at this word "uncoordinated" but more deeply at the particular issue of near- or far-sightedness. Has it actually been established that organic economic coordination does worse at protecting "the future" than some particular alternatives?
by roenxi | 2026-02-11 21:16:25+00:00
> I suspect most who go by YIMBY would also oppose this.

Well I'm not sure what you're proposing but if it can be characterised as "mass public housing" it sounds like a terrible idea on the face of it, and most people would probably oppose it on that ground. But the YIMBYs would have to agree that you're allowed to try it if you want, otherwise they'd be NIMBYs, on the basis that they are telling other people they can't build on their land.
by tarsinge | 2026-02-11 21:16:40+00:00
> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.

No, it's more like some folks like me are passionate about building/creating things that are useful or enjoyable, not about the tooling itself. I learned to use computers because I wanted to make things with them, like music. I got into programming because I wanted to create video games and apps. I enjoy programming because I'm passionate about the end result, but not about programming itself. Look at other engineering disciplines, do civil engineers complain that they are not paving the roads themselves?

I don't find it's a new mentality on Hacker News, to me it was always about broadening the hacker mentality outside of programming. Maybe it's more like the Venn diagram of people passionate about computers and programming for the sake of it and software engineers and builders used to completely overlap, but it is starting to drift, so the fact that we belong to different crowd is becoming more apparent.
by bayarearefugee | 2026-02-11 21:16:55+00:00
> But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked.

None of these were done via capitalism, they were done in opposition to it.

And I know you weren't claiming they were, but the problem is all the power centers behind global capitalism have captured government (at least in the US) completely and are doing everything in their power to strip existing regulations and make sure the only new ones aren't in the name of the common good, but only to build moats for themselves.

It is great that we solved these problems in the past, but we are increasingly not doing that sort of thing at all anymore.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-11 21:17:03+00:00
> Apart from eating less beef, every single suggestion in the post your are responding to is about infrastructure and advocacy, not individual habits.

Exactly. That's why it's ineffective to evangelize this as individual effort. If you want to live in a multifamily home, they have to be zoned, funded, and built. That requires lobbying the government, moral rectitude.
by sli | 2026-02-11 21:17:13+00:00
Every single website on the internet just says "whoopsie doodle, me made an oopsie" instead of just telling me what the problem is. This so-called mistake is so widespread that it has been the standard for at least a decade.

I agree it's a mistake, but I don't believe that it's viewed that way by anyone making the decision to do it.
by vaylian | 2026-02-11 21:17:15+00:00
The climate system in those prehistoric times was in a different stable state. The world that we live in has different ecosystems that are well-adapted to the current stable state and we will likely face a mass-extinction event once the ecological scales tip over.

The problem is also the speed in which the CO2 levels are rising. Such a massive change in such a short geological time is very unusual.
by bwestergard | 2026-02-11 21:17:38+00:00
I am not a vegan. My social world in D.C./NYC has many secular, left-wing, vegans. Many of them are friends or loved ones. They demonstrably speak their mind in front of me on countless issues on which we disagree.

I have dined with them countless times at restaurants where they order vegan and I don't. I have never once been "snapped at" about my dietary decisions. Some of these people have dedicated years of their life to non-human animal rights activism.

So I am very skeptical that this shaming occurs at any appreciable scale. I suspect it is mostly psychological projection: one doubts the morality of one's decisions, judges oneself harshly, but experiences this as the judgement of others.
by davidw | 2026-02-11 21:17:44+00:00
None of this "lulls" involved people, nor lets anyone off the hook.

These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on today in a country like, say, the US, where the federal government is in the hands of evil people and is not going to be doing much in terms of climate change in the near future.

The federal government may be a lost cause for the moment, but your city or state might provide an avenue to get some things done. Those things won't fix the whole problem, but they're still progress, and the connections you make while doing those things will be useful in future, bigger fights.
by smadge | 2026-02-11 21:18:11+00:00
It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale. Probably tragedy of the commons.

Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels.

If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others).

If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap everything, more economic growth than others).

People, nations, corporations, etc don’t stop using fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors don’t.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-11 21:18:23+00:00
Thanks, sounds like a recent development. I don't use macOS, but on other peoples macOS computer it was always there, even when they are not developers. But it could very well be that these computers are ten years old.

I mean technically MS Windows 10 is ten years old, but the big upgrade wave to 10 only happened like 4 years ago, which is quite recently. Maybe that is similar to macOS users, I don't know that.
by thesuitonym | 2026-02-11 21:18:33+00:00
The amount of fossil fuels that a working class individual burns are a rounding error compared to what big companies burn. How many private jets are in the air right now? Even if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever produced, run your home HVAC at max, and buy gasoline just to burn in your back yard, you will never measure up. It's like saying we need to dry the oceans, so you should stop peeing in it.
by aoeusnth1 | 2026-02-11 21:18:42+00:00
I'm an environmentalist and I agree with this framing. The solution is going to be painful and must increase prices on products and services that fossil fuels are currently the cheapest solution for. If you're not willing to personally sacrifice anything to reduce fossil fuel consumption you can see why carbon taxes are not popular, right? France's protests against them, for example, are a good example of a populist reaction against attempts to regulate the economy to have less emissions.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-11 21:18:47+00:00
STFU right now because the more you bring this up the more likely it'll happen.

Similarly, STFU about the stuff that can give LLMs ideas for how to harm us (you know what I'm talking about, it's reptilian based)

The whole comment thread is likely to have been read by some folks at Anthropic. Already a disaster. Just keep on with the "we hate it unless it gets cheaper" discourse please!!!
by EGreg | 2026-02-11 21:18:49+00:00
No, what we wanted for decades is for cars to shift to the free market of electric energy, just like every one of our other appliances have for decades. Electricity is a free market - can be generated by hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, even nuclear. If tomorrow they invent clean fusion power then electric cars would be able to benefit.

The cars being locked into fossil fuels is the result of fossil fuel subsidies from the government. Otherwise, OPEC raising prices would have long ago led to improvements in battery technology and electric cars. But the federal government shields the fossil fuels companies to make sure the “price at the pump” is small.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnUY6V2Knk

We should be raising pigovian taxes on fossil fuels at the point of extraction, and redistribute it to all our citizens as a UBI. Alaska has been doing this for decades and they have almost the lowest GINI index of all states year after year.

Just like we want bottling and clothing companies to shift from plastics to bidegradeable materials. But you like to keep individuals distracted and blame them for using a straw and a bag, as if THAT is the main cause of pollution. And plastic recycling was a total scam designed to keep people distracted from forcing change on corporations pollution and unsustainable practices upstream.