skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the biggest disconnect between the vision and the reality of the metaverse is that the vision includes a “locality” that does not exist on the internet.

There might be interesting reasons to simulate distance in the metaverse that correspond to real world phenomena like latency. Probably not IMO but who knows.

But “traveling” in the metaverse has always been a dumb idea; what’s the point? Anyplace you want to go is at most seconds away; the idea of “moving” to get there doesn’t add any value.
>This is the paradox of tolerance.

What does rights have with tolerance? ACLU were trying to protect the rights. Now they do it only if that isn't interfering with their moral standards.

I see this as a change of scope. Once their scope was rights of all, now it's rights of a particular group.
> Cities often don't have one specific point in the center (America's zoning is absolutely horrendous and forces this to happen) and so businesses, restaurants, shopping, activities, and so on are fairly equally spread across towns.

That is absolutely not true. There's a reason why it is called center in the first place. Amsterdam, for example is completely flooded by tourists in the center and not so much outside of it.
What on earth does the NFT part add here? WoW can add unique, auctionable items at any time using their existing tech. It's already a centralised platform, so decentrilisation doesn't add much...
With all the complaints I'm seeing here about lack of documentation, calling it an "IDK" feels like some sort of meta joke.
Metamphetamine.
You're doing exactly what I am talking about.

The actually contents of this article is just Assange's own lawyer complaining that it is difficult to meet with a client who is on remand in a high security prison. As far as I can see the phrase "denied access" is not even used. The only actual quote is "obstructed".

This is not what "UK has denied Assange access to a lawyer" means. You are deliberately using the language of more serious issues in order to confuse people.

I am sure you know full well the meaning of "denied access to a lawyer", it is something that people around the world actually experience regularly. This does not apply to someone who has met regularly with his world class defence team.
What's "not accelerating" about going in an ellipse? Doesn't that imply constant (and varying) acceleration?
The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console
I think this is the first gaming console every made and also what the name voxodyssey arrived from. All the details on could find on it are on this page.
Zuck stole one idea, a good idea, and ran with it.

Everything since has been damage control, copying, and buying.

Zuck is a determined person at the right place at the right time. Nothing wrong with that. But a 'doer' or even idea guy? We'll see.
>Yeah, the "absolute hell" of billionaires investing lots of money to create fun and immersive entertainment options for the rest of us. Truly the worst dystopia imaginable?

Yes, the "circuses" part of "bread and circuses".

Superficial appeasement doesn't really outweigh the all the many other unethical actions made by billionaires - in this case, vying for be the proprietary controllers of the literal reality of the future.
While terrifying, some kids would also recognize that as a terrific financial windfall if you're crooked enough to sell the excess.
You're just describing multiplayer video games. We've already had those for more than 20 years.
The article totally misses thevpoint imho. A big upfront design is exactly what makes project fail.
Even if it's true that MVP is not always the way to go, and design steps can be a good thing, it is true that systems can be constantly refactored, redesigned, even if it's costly, but at least you havent designed a detailed plane when the customer wanted a car. You just start with the engine, by choosing the size.
Agile only tells you to do that design phase not too early, to engage yourself when needed, and not like every software project is the moon landing. In facts, your software building may not be efficient, but you can monetize it earlier, making that money work for the project itself.
There is too much hate on Agile evangelists, but the Agile principles are not bad. People just don't like to be force-fed with them, but it doesn't mean they are bad.
Yea, the major problem with this take by the OP author is it assumes that a cynical attitude and some questionable analogies means there is nothing new left to invent in how we use the internet.

This seems extremely dubious to me and also shows a severe lack of humility. There are many very smart people at these companies and Mark Zuckerberg has consistently shown himself to be a canny and innovative founder (even if you dislike him for whatever reason).

It may end up being BS but dismissing it out of hand seems extremely foolish.
Secret dev tools for every code newbie
Fine, you're right. I'm deleting it.
Ironically, Compound suffered a even bigger issue (money wise) a few weeks ago:

* https://rekt.news/compound-rekt/

* HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716979
Some of them own multiple houses and rent them out as literal rent-seekers.

Our tax code should give benefits for houses lived in for 35% or more of the year, but classify as a completely different category investments; and tax them accordingly harshly.
I appreciated this other perpsecitve. It also helped me think about building codes and how old homes in the US can get grandfathered into old codes, not having to update to many of the new codes.

But what if they did? What if our governance said old homes must be updated? Then old homes would probably be worth less because it costs a lot to retrofit sometimes.

I may have some or many of those details wrong, just thought it was another example of how political decisions drive housing prices one way or the other.
This is a well-studied area, and the preferences are clearly biological.

Boys “thing-orientation” and girls preference for “faces and dolls” show up in, for example, (a) neonatal human babies, (b) young rhesus monkeys and (c) chimpanzees babies. Also seen in a bunch of other studies.

For the people who are disturbed because this doesn’t match your world-view; remember that this is two bell curves with different medians. There is significant overlap at the individual level, but also large differences in tails, which explain the reality we see around us (some occupations dominated by women or men respectively).

https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/female-chimps...
Somewhat tangential: It’s a reflection of how weak family ties in the west are. Politics almost never rends families apart in the rest of the world.
I still have the Apple USB modem, they made it until 2009 or so. Doesn't work on modern Macs anymore but tried last year on Windows 10 and Debian and worked like a charm

https://web.archive.org/web/20090121071149/http://store.appl...
> In Japan, supply and demand meet, and a new 3 bedroom house in Tokyo is like 400K USD [edited for current data] - right around the cost of construction.

Uh uh, apartment, not a house.

There's a huge difference.
I'm failing to see how this could be useful to anyone.
They don't have to share the same label. 64 bit floating points have 2^52 different NaN values. Even Float16 has 1024 which should be more than enough for all the indeterminent forms.
It might be skewed a little bit since the average person probably lives in a city (or very close) and the average standalone house is probably not found in a city, so the comparisons are a bit misleading. If you look at the price of homes in cities, the multiplier is likely higher than 5.4x.

Taking Cambridge, MA as an example (though it's certainly more expensive than average) - median house is ~1.4M in 2018 (probably higher now), and median _household_ income is ~75K USD per year - for Cambridge, giving a multiplier of something like 20x (household income, not counting taxes - not individual)
The properties themselves lose value over time but the title or lease to the land under the property still increases in value exponentially.
who would win: company burning $10,000,000,000 trying to create a brand new capitalist techno-utopia, or 1 GitHub repo boi
I thought modeless was wrong and that you weren't discounting the experience of driving, but rather the experience of driving a mediocre car. However, with your followup comment, it seems you're discounting the experience of driving.

Suffice it to say that plenty of people genuinely love driving, both in video games and in the real world.

Flying won't make driving obsolete any more than mountain biking has made hiking and trail running obsolete in places that are accessible to mountain bikes.
I agree other than facial tracking being super expensive or not commercially available, because you can get it right now[1].

[1] https://www.vive.com/us/accessory/facial-tracker/ & https://www.hp.com/us-en/vr/reverb-g2-vr-headset-omnicept-ed...
Web apps provide stronger sandboxing, and protect the user more. There's a reason that Twitter and Reddit nag you about "installing their app" whenever you visit them in a mobile browser.

> Every website without fail that ever wanted me to allow push notifications did it just so they could spam me.

I think this is mostly due to iOS/Safari not supporting notifications. The more serious actors who want to provide actual value to the users have been strong armed by Apple to create a native mobile app.
Conversely, if the only browser allowed on iOS actually supported push notifications, you would see more legitimate prompts for using the tech.
If those assembled people are armed and dressed for fighting, must I support them to be considered a supporter of freedom of speech?
> No principle says everyone should be able to live in San Francisco.

This. I don't understand why people think that it's their fundamental right to live somewhere where they want.
> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.

How many people watched game of thrones? How many people read all of the published books in a song of ice and fire? The book might be better but movies and TV are a lot more popular.
> You can make a low end VR headset out of a $100 smartphone and a $5 plastic box today

That's not low end VR, it's pain and frustration from knowing you just wasted 105 bucks.

It sounds to me like you never tried a setup like this. Because in reality you mainly spend time adjusting the lenses because focus is so bad you can't even tell which setting is better. The pixel grid is so huge that reading any form of text (like menus) is near impossible. The latency is bad and your view constantly drifts over time because the phone sensors don't cut it, so you better sit on a rotating chair.
Oh, and if you've all that covered somehow you'll realize mediocre VR video players and bad rollercoaster demos are pretty much the best phone VR can offer.
> This year I invested in pumpkins. They've been going up the whole month of October, and I've got a feeling they're going to peak right around January and BANG! That's when I'll cash in!

("Homer vs. Patty and Selma", Simpsons S06E17)

H. J. Simpson was doing this back in 1995, though to be fair he was in futures, rather than the raw asset.
> There is nothing you can use to believe a human's claims over the text-to-speech's claims

Of course there is. The human facing me looks similar to me so I can interpolate its claims with my own experience of being an human.

I thinks it’s also for the same reason that we have variable degrees of empathy against animals : the more the animal looks like us (that can be size, number of members, physically, in terms of effective communication…), the more, on average, we have empathy for them.

This can go to the extent that people commonly feel « something » about their cars and their human-face-like designs combined with their single ability to move.
Maybe I'm old, but I don't see what advantage this has over video conferencing unless the focus of the discussion is on things - like documents, schematics, or 3d models - rather than people.

Avatars would feel like creepy cartoons because your brain knows the voice of the person but your eyes see a cartoon image.
As someone who has implemented a lot of low level functions using all the tricks of Floating point math, I have very mixed thoughts on Floating Point. Nan and -0.0 both seem like aggressively bad ideas to me. I can totally see why it was believed at the time that they would be good, but they just add a ton of special cases if you want to do things right that slow everything down. IMO, it would have been much better if we got errors instead of NaN (like we do for integer division by zero).

That said, the ability to use double-double schemes to extend precision is wonderful and makes things much easier than they are in most of the Floating Point alternatives that have been proposed (eg Posits).
Genuine question, why can't "sys-admin" or are you overloaded with work?
I'm willing to take this further:

The CLOUD is bullshit because it already exists, and it's called the internet
> Were the atomic bombs really all that different from the systematic fire bombing of Japanese cities?

No, same thing from a military perspective as using the 4,000 B-29's the US had. Note that for decades, US peaceniks claimed Hiroshima was a peaceful city, yet it was a major naval port and subs/torpedos were made there. (The US Navy docked there after the explosion to study it.)

The US arguments in favor of using the atomic bomb were to avoid a large-scale invasion, and if they didn't use it, resulting in mass US casualties, the President would have to justify that to the American people after the war.

> common sense in the emperor

The Emperor was a world-class marine biologist (scientist) and understood what an atomic bomb was. He recorded his radio speech in case he was assassinated by the military, which they tried to do.

Both Japan and Germany had programs to build a bomb, but the US outspent them by more than 1000x. (The US program was a national program, so you could argue they spent a million times more, using 15,000 tons of silver from Fort Knox, 1% of the nation's electricity, and construction of multiple cities.)

Note that Japan didn't really acknowledge a surrender. The official who signed the document was #10 in the government, and the Emperor did not use the word "surrender", he said "bear the unbearable."

The US insisted on an occupation to avoid a similar situation to Germany after Versailles, where everybody denied losing since Germany hadn't been occupied. But the US also wanted to avoid a Soviet occupation or Communism taking hold in Japan because of a failed economy. (Japan struggled against Communist elements for a couple decades, which was only rejected after violent protests discredited it as a desirable ideology.)

None of the WW2 Axis leaders cared about the lives of their citizens, aside from the Emperor.

Source: I study WW2, focusing on the Pacific War.
It's mostly from scratch. The linker script and crt0.S are derived from pico-sdk and register definitions are generated from pico-sdk's SVD file. Everything else is Ada.
I wonder if this has it backwards.

Cars are a symbol of status and people will want to have that status wherever they are - look at how much people will pay for a skin in Fortnite.

I think it’s more likely car manufacturers (the expensive ones) will only let you drive their car in the metaverse if you buy it for real in the real world.

If this metaverse really does come to pass, it will be just as (if not more) valuable as a place to be than the real world.

I know that sounds mad to most of us, but by the time it happens we’ll all be 10 years older and not the main market for it anymore. Everyone else will have grown up paying for Fortnite skins and NFTs and it will all seem a lot more… normal.
I'm guessing by that Hyperreality video you mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs – it's not nearly mentioned enough!
Yeah yeah and Elon Musk is a PR guy, Bill Gates couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag, Steve Jobs taped four iPhones together and made a (max)iPad lolz etc etc

Zero information content article.

Ideas can’t be stolen, man. They can only be copied.
Roblox will be looked back upon as the MS-DOS of metaverses, yet people go gaga over any vehicle you can make. They (mostly kids) spend an absurd amount of hours just jumping from one place to another to prove they can without falling. They spend real money just to turn their hat a new color. Entire genres of games and activities exist basically to just move around, jump on a few things, see numbers get bigger, and see things change colors.

With all that, I truly think yes... people absolutely will drive a car in VR.
Why do you doubt they were built in Silicon Valley move fast style? Because it's old? It was released in 2004, the same year as Facebook (both of them had different names originally)
>There are probably more trolls pretending to be Nazis than there are actual Nazis.

"We are what we pretend to be." --- Kurt Vonnegut
I’ve found it depends on the position mainly. The more you thrust vertically (cowgirl, etc), the less satisfying due to less bounce. On the other hand, foam is better for digging in for horizontal thrusting (doggy, missionary).

This is why about 65% say foam is worse for sex than springs, while ~35% say it’s the same or even better.

That said, I just prefer foam for sleeping. Much more comfortable and I wake up feeling more refreshed with no back pain. We keep a separate guest spring mattress bed for sex (and obviously guests). We bought it a year ago and our sex life has never been better but ymmv!
As someone who was born in Yugoslavia I have a feeling that science was more trusted.

In 1972 Yugoslavia had a smallpox outbreak and it was dealt with quickly. It was a different kind of disease, but still.

Now my country is richer than Portugal, but has 33% less vaccinated people.
I think the only BS is the way we.all talk about this stuff, same way the cloud is all hyped up.

AR and VR are great tech, when it gets good enough that it's a simple comfortable accessory to wear, and it incurs no strain on your eyes, it'll definitely find many uses.

And for sure we'll pursue the tech for better full body tracking, walking in-place, simulated touch, and all that, and if all that one day works similarly well, you can bet lots of people will start using it all too.

So now imagine you have this tech all figured out, what would the software look like? Obviously you're talking 3D UX, logically you'll start building virtual worlds to inhabit, eventually you'd want some things to if possible transfer from one app to another, and where all apps are virtual 3D spaces that might mean some of that stuff needs to transfer over.

It can even be simple things, if I can now whiteboard virtually, and use my own hand writing on the board, and now I'm in another app, and I'd like to pull up that whiteboard I did? This is equivalent to say Slack letting you send photos or files over.

I don't think any of this is far-fetched, it is just a matter of getting the tech to a point where it is easy, comfortable, convenient and all around pleasant to use.

Now calling it all a Metaverse, that's in the same league as calling a bunch of remote servers the Cloud.

And yes, the article is right, we all have this stuff already, but we have it in 2D, using 2D interfaces like flat monitors, stereo sound, physical keyboards and mouse. Now you're talking what if we had a surround 3D monitor? Surround 3D sound? Full body tracking with milimeter precision? You'd just take all we currently have and upgrade it to be full surround 3D as well. That's all it is.
They specifically said cities in Asia

Look at the real estate market in Singapore or Tokyo where housing prices are more reasonable
Strange view of the world. Everything someone wants to succeed will succeed? You could come up with magnitudes more ideas that failed than succeeded, just because that's how the world works.

But I guess some rich assholes pushing it makes it more legitimate.
What do you like?
I think, one aspect mostly overlooked is the media aspect of the Metaverse.

We love media. A medium is a type of projection of a perceived reality and/or an imagination. The important word here is "projection": This includes distortion, bias, texture, it's never lossless, it introduces artefacts, it's also a kind of hashing as we transgress dimensions, projection comes with boundaries and constraints, and by this creates a specific horizon. We love that sort of thing. (For the programmers out there: This is also true for programming languages: these provide a specific projection as a medium for functional thought. It's ok to like or dislike a language.) Creating and loving media is one of the most human things I can think of. But it only works, because there's a variety to it: if there was just one artist, projecting her specific mediality onto innumerable works of art, art and arts in general were quite boring.

And here comes the problem: By mashing up all media in a more general one, by generalising them in the frame of a super-projection, the Metaverse also puts an end to media, as an immeasurable plurality and variety of specific projections. The Metaverse is just boring, because it is the same Metaverse, always. It may be a capitalist's dream, but it's also the consumer's thermal death of interest.
Well, yeah. Honestly, a massively multiplayer GTA V or Red Dead 2 would basically be the whole Metaverse concept. The only differences would be:
(1) You aren't there to complete missions; there's no storylines and it's totally open-ended. There are no writers, and
(2) The spaces and content are created by anyone, not a central company, and
(3) You can go from GTA world to Red Dead world to tons of other worlds without changing missions or skins or avatars or whatever; they're part of the same huge space you can traverse without leaving VR.
(4) You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities.

So, like, yes Stephenson's metaverse is similar to a lot of video games we have now, but it's critically different because his characters are "heroes" in that universe specifically because they coded their own avatars and their own environments.

Which is another way of saying that it rewards thought, code, and creativity -- exactly the things that video games steal people away from.
Then you quite literally kill general aviation, and a lot of smaller scale commercial aviation, because there are no other engines approved for the airframes.

If that's your goal, fine, but don't pretend it's anything else.
This fellow cuts through a lot of the bullshit on his blog/newsletter.

https://www.gardenmyths.com/

Unfortunately, there’s often a lack of good evidence except from industrial agriculture.
That doesn't follow from your premise. You could justify any number of absurd theories with similar reasoning.