skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heavily regulating a market massively constrains supply thus spectacularly increasing prices for in-demand products. Basic economics.
…and when one isn’t working on one’s lawn, there are always cast iron pans that need seasoning.
> Until a country decides to stop making policy to support this notion

Which policy? You mean government charters for e.g. Fannie Mae that were established in part to combat behavior like redlining, which excluded certain ethnicities from loans for certain neighborhoods based on the loan applicant's skin color?
VR is great for video games, sure. What if I don't like video games though?
Forget about what other people who have nothing in common with you do.

Its a trap to focus on it. Many have resources, energy and no sense, taste or imagination. You cant blame them. Its like complaining to a cactus for not producing strawberries. Or yelling at swampland for not turning fertile.

What you can do is shift focus, and focus on what you and people like you are working on, and keep the focus there no matter what.
Now that I'm reading the rest of it, I see his point and he's not stupid. But yes, it does matter who runs it and how it looks and no, second life isn't the fuckin metaverse although it was a really, really nice attempt that he dismisses out of hand as being 'centralized'. Well guess what's centralized now? No, most people don't get a vastly wider experience because the web is so much more than a central 'verse these days. The problem is that the vision they're all locked into is so petty, generic, short sighted and dull.
Got an oculus quest 2 this week. Better than last time I tried one, but still not great. Often going out of focus, and I have problems with fog.

I tried all the things, from VR experiences to porn. Kind of neat, but I still very much prefer the real world. I guess I will play through resident evil 4 and half life alyx, and then the thing will collect dust in a corner again.

One thing that felt quite dystopian was the giant house you can get as your home environment. I can see people living in a tiny apartment with no access to beautiful nature using this to escape from the real world, as soon as the quality gets a bit better.

Regarding NFTs: I don't get it, but I also don't dismiss it completely as a scam. There is of course a large FOMO / get rich quick component, but also an underlying desire for digital ownership and agency.
Probably most Tor exit nodes are run by agencies trying to snoop on traffic.

I wouldn't trust Tor to solely protect my identity since there might be ways to attack it. But it can be an useful asset in a "pipeline" designed to protect one's identity.
why does the outcome have to be due to the design of government policy? Why can't it just be a consequence of the free interaction of people?
Please don't do this on HN. This is breaking almost every comment guideline there is and just makes the thread a worse place.
I'm inclined to think a lot of people only live near cities because 1) they work in it and have no choice but to live nearby, otherwise suffer a nightmarish commute and 2) it's the only city near them. Why isn't building new, smaller cities a viable option? Surely building something from scratch also comes with advantages, like being able to plan and build infrastructure optimally from the start, rather than trying to retroactively update ancient infrastructure piecemeal. If we're going to go with a state or federal level approach anyway why funnel the money into existing cities?
If the metaverse is truly a decentralized, collaborative space, how can we add these limitations without others breaking them? If all that's stopping them is code, why wouldn't everyone have all the most powerful items, all the time? If the metaverse ever becomes a reality, I promise I will publish a blog post for people to copy/paste some code to make their own custom overpowered equipment and free food and break the whole economic system.
Quite interesting read about how timescaledb turns a row store (psql) into a column store.
The FAA and the EPA have conflicting missions here. Unfortunately the public is more scared off death by air crash than death by pollution, even though air pollution is a bigger killer. This means if there’s a conflict, the FAA is probably going to win over the EPA.
Haha. Seems like a "Bruce Almighty" kind of film.
Thanks I'll start with exactly. It looks like my kind of book.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
The difference in operational regime is true, although it's my impression that automobile engines are pushed through some very severe tests as part of their development. For example, this movie, https://youtu.be/GNPB3RtHN2M, claims that KIA tests their engines for 300 straight hours at full throttle.

As for reliability, I'm not convinced. In practical terms, I think automobile engines are far more reliable than aircraft engines. When was the last time your automobile engine broke an exhaust valve, cracked a cylinder head, or had a magneto come apart?
It's not even a question. We're long overdue to exit online and return back to the real world. It's a struggle but it's doable. Meet other real people IRL. Go to bars and shows. Have sex instead of watching porn. Marry. Have kids. Have real, physical hobbies instead of computer games and scrolling instagram all day. Exercise. Play sports with other people instead of watching them on TV. Sleep well. Read paper books that you actually own. Cook instead of buying premade processed garbage. Buy durable physical assets instead of renting or buying subscriptions, or buying cheap trash you don't even need. Build lasting relationships and things that matter, not something that will be obsolete within 30 seconds.

As a side bonus piss off Big Tech by not participating in their extractive, and increasingly authoritarian surveillance capitalism and brainwashing.
Personal experience with my kids shows the opposite.
I hate to tell you this, but in most driving games, the center of gravity is so low that it's below the ground. That keeps you from rolling the simulated car.
Central banks are creating new debt at unprecedented pace in history. That in turn lower bank loan interest rates has increased home prices. More persons can afford a larger home loan.
> When you buy a flat in the center of town, it's supposed to increase it's value for being in the center while town is expanding.

If the town is expanding then the supply of housing goes up along with the demand and prices stay the same, i.e. proportional to the cost of constructing new housing.

Once you reach a certain point you have to build taller buildings which are more expensive to build and then housing prices would reflect the higher construction cost, but this only applies to urban areas and the costs only get really high when the buildings get really tall.

If you converted some of the suburbs to three story buildings that filled the lots, the cost per square foot wouldn't be much higher than it is for single family homes, but there would be ten times more housing per acre. Doing this is prohibited by zoning, which is the real reason why housing is unaffordable.
But how do we know that complaints of law enforcement and spying agencies are not fake? Maybe they are made just to mislead their targets.

Even if Signal operators can't provide them metadata, maybe they found ways to snoop on traffic.
people dont hoard food to make the supply on the market less though.

throughout history. society has not been kind to people who tried this. scalping staple foods usually leads to bread riots. and because food is absolutely biologically required to survive, those usually turned very violent.
> The metaverse is bullshit because it already exists, and it's called the internet

You may be right, but here's an anecdote: David Brevik did a post-mortem on Diablo[0] on GDC. He first mentioned they accepted the contract for developing Diablo for Blizzard for $300000 which was extremely underpriced for a team of 15, so they have to look for other revenue such as accepting other contracts developing lame football games for $1 million.

As they were busy shipping Diablo, Sabeer Bhatia came to them with an idea of "making the email over the Internet", he replied, "dude this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard! What're you talking about - I've already had my email over the Internet!". Sabeer insists this is a big idea, and offer them 10% of the company, only for an empty office in the back which they're not using in return. But David was stressing out because they were about to ship Diablo, so he turned him down because he want no distraction, ..plus "it's the stupidest idea ever".

And the company of Sabeer was called Hotmail. 14 months later the 10% would become $40 million...

[0] https://youtu.be/Mlrrc_vy79E?t=2046
My kids play roblox and don't have any access to steam. Which is probably very common.

Also, a lot of roblox playing is with tablets and phones. Those kids can't move to steam even if parents allowed it.
Yeah but grandma is reluctant to use that when she stays over. Something about her hip.
bruce willis surrogates anyone?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263
> I don't think you understand how the value of these assets is supposed to rise. When you buy a flat in the center of town, it's supposed to increase it's value for being in the center while town is expanding.

Why is it "supposed" to be this way?

It doesn't work this way in a lot of Asia. People don't want old, used homes and they lose value over time. 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.

When American cities expand, they build more houses farther away but further condense business in the downtown core. But that's a problem that's politically invented and not so much a problem elsewhere.
> There are entire classes of financial instruments in use today that could not exist in the tradfi ecosystem.

Such as?
> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I?

Flying? I hope I can teleport as easily as I can jump to a web page by clicking a bookmark or typing its URL.

Second Life had teleport. I walked, drove a car, went flying only for the fun of it or for very short distance movements.
If everybody is making cars that handle much better than they do in the real world, wouldn't this result in an arms race of upping the "cheese" of the mechanics to heighten the intensity? And this only works until people recognize the grift -- once they know the actual car experience and the demo experience aren't related, suddenly it won't be a useful ad anymore.
A good way to do this (once zoning is fixed to allow new construction) is to provide tax incentives for new construction. Then the price at which new construction is viable goes lower and so does the cost of housing.
Thanks for spurring this thread. This has been pretty great.
I'd much rather rent a house from an established financial institution than an amateur landlord.

The institution will have a realistic expectation of return and will usually carry-out it's responsibilities in a professional manner and, if not, can be held accountable in the courts. I also doubt the CEO of Lloyds will popping round on Saturday mornings to meddle with something or other?
Epic

Tim Sweeney has been talking up a technically reasonable vision of the Metaverse for several years now. But Epic hasn't shipped much. You can load new game maps into Fortnite. That's about it. Unreal Engine 5 doesn't have much in the way of support for a world where users can change almost everything. It's still based on a model where you do massive optimization during build time.
They do, to varying degrees, just not enough to be noticable. Commodities traders buy and hold all the time. The thing about free markets is that you need a hell of a lot of collusion to do what you're suggesting because someone always stands to gain from misguided speculation.

This is actually exactly the issue with housing. The market is controlled by municipalities who are elected by NIMBYs. The only reasonable thing to do in these conditions is to buy as much housing as you can, since your assets are protected from competition (local densification) by the government. We've literally regulated ourselves into this crisis. The solution can't be more regulation.

Edit: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing
I think a chair does, in it's full life cycle.
I suppose a single example can't contradict "a lot of people," but I am one such person. I live in the city, because I like cities.
SF board of supervisors just voted unanimously against turning an old barely used church into 300 small shared-kitchen studio apartments, because it’s not “family friendly” enough. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-supes-say-no... (This will of course instead force 300 people who would live in those to awkwardly pair up and live as unrelated roommates in 150 scattered 2-bedroom flats, taking them off the market and contributing to high rents throughout the Bay Area.)

The board also just voted against turning a parking lot into a 500-unit apartment building, citing the recent Florida condo collapse as justification, and worrying that it will “gentrify” the corner of 6th and Market (!). https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/State-investigating-S...
> The problem is that there is a growing proportion of people that cannot.

As housing prices rise at a faster rate than their annual earnings they watch their ability to ever own a home get further and further away from them.
None of this stuff exists, so it's impossible to predict how it will go. But the last 20 years has seen a closing and re-centralization of the internet and computing in general. Concepts like right-to-repair, first sale, and ownership itself are under attack on various fronts. I'm pessimistic that these trends will generally reverse. Given this, why wouldn't an avatar shop be a tightly-controlled and monetized affair? Meta (or whoever) can always offer the excuse that they can't open up access because they need to curate the content to prevent sexually explicit, or otherwise offensive avatars.
For what its worth (and I know it's not much...) you wrote an EXCELLENT article, here. It's a truly great piece, and you're a talented writer. You mentioned having a GED, but you write like somebody who has a lot of experienced... You have a great voice.

You clearly have a lot to offer the world, so fuck Flexport. You'll find someplace that values you, properly. Keep your chin up, man.
I just noticed that my jaw dropped for the first time in recent memory. Wow. Slow clap. UK, US, China... just wow
Not entirely related, I wonder if they have simulations out there for the primordial soup and accelerating it (evolution) so that it hopefully gets to a human brain.
If I have to pay for food and transportation to go to a metaverse location to pay my taxes I'll go to the good old web site for free and a fraction of the time.
I really like this lecture format. What is he drawing on?
Thanks for sharing the challenge and so cool to see the follow up and your actual answer.

Here's a linear solution I came up with, before I took a look at the rest of the thread:

1. Think of the 100x100 as pixels on a black background, all set to 0, i.e. all open space.

2. Now, draw a white square border all the way round by setting all the outer pixels to 1. No one can get in.

3. Leave a pixel gap and draw another square border within and then another and so on, like Russian dolls, with a pixel passage way between them. No one can get in.

4. Now, for each square border choose 1 random pixel and open it up by setting it back to 0. Now we're guaranteed of a solution, but it's too easy.

5. Let's make it a little harder, so between each square border let's drop a single pixel of "rubble" to block each passage way at one point. Provided we don't drop it directly in front of an opening in the adjacent square borders, I believe (unless I made a mistake somewhere!) we know the maze remains solve-able, and we don't need to do any iteration or "walk through the maze" to check that.

6. So far the runtime is pretty good. Nice and linear in the number of pixels drawn. We know the maze can be solved. And it's not too easy and not too hard.

7. (optional) We can make it harder still by tentatively dropping another pixel of rubble in a random passage way, and then walking through the passage to check that we can still reach the next inner opening. This is still better runtime than solving the whole maze, and can be tuned by the difficulty factor.

The insight is simply not to attempt to explore paths at all, i.e. not to try and "solve the maze" but only to "generate the maze", unless 7 is chosen, but that's probably not essential to the challenge.
I think local CPU is underutilized in these cloudy days. For many SaaS, the size of all your tenant data minus media is quite small. Most cloud apps have terrible experience with large tables, searching, and general perf. We trade this away for collaboration features.
The Metaverse is the Web
> This is why there should not be a single entity that runs the network. Make it fully decentralized with economic incentives for node operators.

Just make the network work based on open protocols, where anyone can run a server that interoperates with others. (Matrix.)

For the non-developer end-user, they can use one of the existing servers, who in theory could charge their users.

Yes, it would be hard to maintain branding cohesion, and the product/service would lose to a centralized service. However, transitioning to heterogenous social/messaging landscape (from current oligopolies) could make smaller services like that competitive.

IMO it’s not clear we should treat a legal/political issue with technical workarounds, it doesn’t seem sustainable.
In Medieval Latin the adjectives were more frequently close to their nouns, because the writers were influenced by the word order from their native languages.

In Classical Latin, e.g. in Caesar or Pliny the Elder, the adjectives may be located either before or after the nouns and frequently with several other words interposed.

In poetry, having adjacent nouns and adjectives is more an exception than the norm.

In ancient languages, poetry was highly valued, being important both for entertainment and as a mnemonic aid for utilitarian texts.

Unrestricted word order was most useful for poetry, allowing any rearrangements of a sentence that were needed to match a desired rhythm.

The transition to a constrained word order, accompanied by the loss of many of the grammatical means used to mark the roles of the words, which became redundant with a fixed word order, went in parallel with the diminished importance of poetry.
The Metaverse is definitely bullshit. It will fail for the same reason that Amazon never managed to beat Barnes & Noble, that the internet failed to become popular, and that nobody ever bought a PC. Just ridiculous.
Hey now, you wouldn't download a car
That seems quite comprehensive. Does the Ada support build on the Pico C/C++ SDK or is it something from scratch?
LOL could not of summed it up better in the least amount of words possible.
Acidify your tap water with cooking vinegar - it helps.
Let me be honest: the metaverse may or may not be bullshit. But the Zuck is a doer. Y’all are talkers. Your opinion counts for as much as it did back when you cheered FB down to $13.

Y’all don’t have a clue. Blind men trying to describe why color doesn’t matter. Less memory than a nomad. No insight. Lame.
Owning your own property goes back further than our founding. It has to do with staking out your rights.

Quite the opposite of what some comments here suggest, encouraging home ownership keeps life affordable. It is one way to stave off an oligarchy of property owners.

See, for example, Fannie Mae's mission,

> Our mission is to facilitate equitable and sustainable access to homeownership and quality affordable rental housing across America. We continue to innovate and promote a stronger, safer, and more efficient housing finance system to support more opportunities for homebuyers and renters in communities throughout the nation.

https://www.fanniemae.com/about-us/who-we-are

Finance people who make loans take issue with this since they have to match prices with a "government-backed" business, although it's only a charter which isn't the same as govt-backed. Plus, tons of businesses were supported by government in 2008 and 2020-2021 so that point is moot.
I think it’s somewhat closer and you probably shouldn’t include taxes. Dutch median income (per-tax) is: 36’500 (2020)

5.4 times that is about 200k. Avery’s Dutch houses are now 400k (and growing 10%+ y/y). So there’s definitely a gap, but more like 2x than 10x.

This still means the median person can’t afford to live in the city center one of the big cities, but rural areas can be relatively affordable.
It's not a surprise that companies won't compete unless they are forced to. I'm glad they choose to make a more open platform their competitive strategy.
Well you have to admit it doesn’t sound great, right?

Without activists, bad things don’t go away. I’m not gonna list things because we can both think of some terrible things that were brought to light, ended, or significantly reduced thanks to activists. Sure, there are activists who I would argue are trying to make the world worse, or activists who can be offensive, or just plain bad at being an activist.

But what I hear when people say “I don’t like activists” is “I’m fine with the way things are”, which sounds bad because “the way things are” can be so, so horrific for so many people and animals. (I’m on of those vegan animal rights activists you hate so much ;)
They have no plans to own this asset in perpetuity. They'll then sell it back to you for 10x the price in inflated currency. Banks didn't even want houses they already owned during 2008 housing crisis - during more normal times they are, strictly speaking, a depreciating asset that is a pain in the ass to maintain, so a lot of foreclosed homes just rotted empty. But we are not living in "normal times" at this point. We're in uncharted waters.
> fusion bomb without the need for an atomic bomb primary. This would be a weapon with no radioactive signature

Freeman Dyson in "Disturbing the Universe" says they worked on this concept but didn't achieve it, and it didn't look feasible, at least when the book was written. The device in the article had an atomic primary.
I have two cars - a 1980 Datsun and a Fiat Spider. They're both a "test of skill". There's no reason it wouldn't be massively fun to play with lots of other cars on tracks or in all kinds of conditions in VR. "Fun test of skill" is the whole point. The original, like, Stephenson-ish "metaverse" was somewhere people fought with swords. This was getting directly at the idea that skill and challenge were more valuable than raw code. [edit: "entertainment"]

Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?
Pinterest’s Moves to Kubernetes