skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I'm bullish on 3d interaction because I own company related to this, so my opinion might be a bit colored.

What surprised me the most is how fake and forced the conversations and interactions looked. It reminded me of those first blue screen effects you see in these old movies from the sixties. I would assume that Facebook/metaverse spent an enormous budget on it, but nevertheless the outcome still looks creepy. In my opinion we have mostly figured out how to avoid the uncanny valley for rendering, so I'd guess improving conversations and interactions are up next. Until the techniques are on par with what we need, I'd heavily avoid trying to model a real world representation in a virtual world. (Think about the early Pixar movies: instead of trying to create the most realistic world possible, they embraced their current constraints and turned them into a feature that made their movies instantly recognizable.)

This being said, I see one big use case for AR/VR adaptation during the next decade: digital twins with simplified, tailored representations for development, marketing, education and operational purposes, as well as amusement. My best guess and personal bet is on this space.

And even though we've had VR and more recently AR getting more accessible to the consumers, it's still at least 5 years too soon for mass adaptation; most people still consider it a novelty.

In my experience interactive 3d will emerge next in the mass-market. Up until now I had the best conversion ratios by having a conventional 2d GUI/wizard and some very conceptually simple 3d drag and drop to create simplified 3d representations of products one could buy (think sheds, carports, verandas etc). First consumers will have to get familiar with 3d annotations, before we can make them interactive as well...

So yes, I see a future for (some version of) the metaverse, but the implementation they showed right now was a bit meh, because they tried to model it just like the real world, and the techniques to do so properly still aren't there yet...
>The United States has been a stable democracy with absolute freedom of speech for two and a half centuries.

By freedom of speech you might consider that law enforcement does not take actions against someone speaking its own mind.

But if companies and activist groups are retaliating against someone by denying employment, conducting business, acquiring goods, home rental, even instigating against that individual to the point of asking for violence, because he expressed his thoughts, then "free speech" might be pointless because very few will dare to speak their minds.

If authorities aren't going to punish someone, then some groups will.
Higher dimensional spheres are weird, especially 10+ dimensional:
https://youtu.be/mceaM2_zQd8
Super off-topic but national differences in washing lines vs dryer use are fascinating. In an early attempt to replicate the Japanese line-drying time forecast[0], I looked around for English-language articles about clothes drying, and the predominant advice was to always use a clothes dryer, because line-drying takes too long, encourages mould and mould is deadly and to be feared. Which seemed weird as I’d never owned a dryer.

Props on sticking to your guns for so long with cloth nappies, I know some couples who couldn’t make it work and felt they’d let themselves down.

[0] https://tenki.jp/lite/indexes/cloth_dried/
Exactly what I had in mind. Underrated movie. Maybe metaverse will end up somewhere between the currently envisioned one and like the surrogates physically existing and people at their homes interacting with the world via them, where tech companies even give the main unit for free but sell unlockable content for their surrogates.
Nice title, although he refutes himself with the correct assertion that we already live in the metaverse, the internet itself is another reality, and people curating their profile and likes are already curating an avatar. I mean just look at us

> We've been playing games and chatting for decades! What do we truly have to gain by trying to merge all entertainment into one giant Ivan Ooze of content?

There are some uses for which gaming will be important commercially going forward, as things turn remote. gaming mechanics are going to be useful with:

- remote work, where the 3d representation gives occasionally a sense of immersion with the team, permanence/continuity, and a graphical sense of "where is everyone"

- remote education, where kids will be lured by avatars and follow interactive demonstrations of things, making it a lot more engaging.

VR is not needed for any of this, but a bit of gaming environment and mechanics are the natural evolution of texting.
Singapore housing prices are in no way "reasonable". There is a large public housing component (80%), but those have also been increasing in price compared to median income, and decreasing in size. For the private market, average prices are now 15x the median yearly salary. [0]

Singapore is facing the same issue every other locality is with housing prices: prices have no fundamentals any more and are just inflating upwards out of reach from the median buyer. One can compensate slightly with smaller homes, but that has an impact on fertility rates and other quality of life indicators.

[0]: https://www.straitstimes.com/business/invest/property-no-lon...
One reason folks can't move to more affordable cities is the companies seem stuck in each others gravity well and keep bunching up in just a few unaffordable spot.
> I've seen occasional British reference to blue as an adjective for pornographic movies. Usually not 'blue movie', but "that's too blue for me" or something.

Try this in America and you'll get confusion and guesses that by 'blue' you mean 'sad'.
Scotland first in world to use new diabetes test
I am mostly the same way but when I bought my first Sleepnumber, I was really struggling to sleep. Personally, I’m glad I made the switch to their mattresses though I’m back to a latex foam mattress now (after relocating) and so, I no longer know what a good night’s sleep feels like.
> News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.

Try prefixing text with 15 lines of advertising text that you must read, and people will prefer video quickly. In the current world, I don’t click on 30s video quotes because it is prefixed by 30s of ads.
True, but nevertheless Ada is an important language in the history of programming languages.

After 1970, there were less and less innovations in programming languages, in the sense of features that have not existed in any earlier languages.

Many new languages have been introduced since then and some of them might be better than most previous languages, but usually the new languages offer only new combinations of features that have previously existed in different languages and not anything really new.

Ada is important, because in 1979 it included a few features never provided before. Some of those features have been introduced only recently in more popular languages, while others are still missing from most languages.

For anyone who wants to create or improve some programming language, Ada is on a long list of mandatory programming languages that must be understood well, before attempting to do anything that is intended to be better. Sadly, there are many examples of ugly misfeatures in recent programming languages, which demonstrate that their authors were not aware about which was the state of the art 40 years or 50 years ago, and they solved again, but badly, problems that were solved well already in the distant past.

Unfortunately Ada also had defects, some of which were mandated by the Department of Defense requirements.

The defect that is most universally accepted is that it is too verbose.
I dunno man, if Ferrari drops their car into the game then that’s going to be more awesome then I can ever model on my own.

Even if I can drive a square block by designating it a car, it’s not really a car I want to drive in.
Russia existed throughout the 1960s (and indeed, for quite a while before that). It was a member of the USSR, but that didn't stop it from existing. Like how Scotland exists, despite being a part of the UK.
Asking to 503 people why they have deleted news subscriptions
I'd love to see an IntelliJ benchmark/test. As I speculated earlier, the faster IDE startup times may have a lot to do with the much faster disk read speeds.
It's not even their worst attempt. In France, those fringe "woke" people are advocating a forked version of French which is written with a lot of dots everywhere to display genders simultaneously. For example: "Bonjour à tou.s.tes les étudiant.e.s." which is very hard to read even for non-dyslexic people. The normal people are fighting it but they succeeded to promote that crap via a ministry and lot of universities are writing their emails like that.
>You can introduce as much complexity as you are comfortable with.

Reading HN, people still have complexity issues due various reasons.
What we need to counter this insane trend toward unnecessary graphical representations, is to double down on a plain-text knowledge graph version of the Internet. Something that is completely devoid of formatting, with only semantic markup (hyperlinks, emphasis etc). Something that is composed of small, single-purpose units of text smaller than current "documents" or pages. Something that can be fetched, composed and rendered entirely based on the client application's requirements (yes, I'm familiar with Xanadu).
> if detonated

The article is a brilliant piece of writing, but scattered through it, you can gather the bits and pieces of math that would describe why it's not strategically practical.

- Bomb weight / size scales roughly linearly with bomb yield. How are you going to get that massive bomb over to France? The aircraft required to haul it over would be exceptionally vulnerable. If you want to use a rocket, you'd need something on the order of the Apollo Saturn-V rocket to lob it over (especially for 1960's technology), and that rocket would as well would be vulnerable on the launch pad. Good luck hiding it while you fuel it up. Defending nuclear weapons (cough silos / subs cough) was/is no small task.

- The troposphere (which accounts for the main density of the atmosphere) is only about 13 miles in height, on average. It's thinner near the poles and thicker near the equator. But anyhow, past a certain yield, you literally really do blow a hole in the atmosphere. At that point, the atmosphere acts like a tamper, channelling much of the additional yield into outer space.

To which end, Sakharov was right. The big bombs were massive publicity stunts, and to the degree that the Soviet leadership pursued them, they were wasting money on propaganda projects.
I really like the idea of applying comparative advantage to dev management. I think it's generally a good idea, and something useful to keep in mind.

On the other hand, the original application of comparative advantage -- to economics -- is so widely misinterpreted that one can safely assume that anyone invoking it is probably wrong.

Ricardo's original example goes as follows. Assume England and Portugal are producing wool and wine. Portugal is more productive at both, but the difference is more pronounced in the case of wine. Then, under some circumstances, it can be better for Portugal to focus exclusively on wine, and this is the best outcome for both countries.

Many ECON-101 courses then jump to the conclusion that global trade is good for all involved.

It should be obvious for anyone having touched operations research or game theory that it depends (on the actual productivity numbers, on demand, on supply constraints, etc.), and that under some other circumstances England goes bankrupt.

The funny thing is that Ricardo fully realized that fact, and his example was an interesting paradox -- one that can be used to design effective trade rules.

(See the talks by Ralph Gomory on trade for how this misinterpretation affects us today.)
Here are all the replies for every news provider: https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/expensive-boring-and-wrong...
That’s very much my fear. It will happen, regardless of my feelings towards it, but I want no part in it.
Attempted to get through Neuromancer, but (minor spoiler) when they started to switch persons around it got too confusing and I realized that it might have worked for a movie, but not a book. I also realized that I was only reading it because it was such a famous book, not because I was getting anything out of it, so I stopped.

Just putting this out in case anybody else feels the same pressure.
Type Query: jQuery Style Type Manipulation
Nazi-themed host bars are still opening in Japan
One thing that is very bullshit about the metaverse and also twitch/YouTube is the hype behind "creators". At some point "content" got dropped from "content creators", and people who have this particular hobby or job, rather than others, are elevated to the role of "creator".
I think the way the actual sausage is made is that they don't care who they platform. They'll deplatform anyone if enough people make enough noise and threaten their bottom line, but no one makes enough noise about Taliban terrorists or the Burmese military to threaten them politically.

I don't think they're even trying to consolidate power. They appear to be in the very unenviable position of hosting half the internet's public verbal diarrhea, with no freakin clue how to deal with it. No sympathy here for the devil, but this is basically inevitable whenever anyone tries to grab the brass ring and take over a totally chaotic system.

Facebook is essentially a failed state.
The thing that increases in value the most is the land underneath the house. It doesn't make a lot of sense for house to increase value as it gets older. But even the house is a subject to inflation and the effect of "back in my days we could buy a toilet bowl for $20" can be seen even here.

City centers exist, just look at tourism and public transport. It's more valuable when you can rent out apartment as AirBnb, it becomes more valuable when tourists can't drive, distance from museums and shopping malls increases value and possibility that the land you own could be bought out for development of high density building is what drives the value up.

Housing is not a bottle of water you can buy in groceries. Housing is one of the few things most of us buy on debt. If you increase the amount of debt people can take by lowering risks for banks, the price will rise.

Also there are many other factors like that cities that complain about high cost of housing mostly have draconian municipal building codes and zonings. Even racism has a play in it, it's truly interesting topic to study.
Communist regimes made orders of magnitude more victims and forbid free speech for much longer for much more people than nazis ever dreamed of.

And yet all the countries who forbid and condemn nazi speech tolerates the communist speech.

Source: I spent part of my childhood in a communist country.
sure, for information density, text is always king.

But real-time chatting is not dense, it s in fact very reduntant with lots of information being discarded left and right, and avatats can still text each other. The idea of 3d stuff is just an evolution of that imho, a messenger with extra stuff

We have this stuff already btw, second life users do that every day, but Zuck didnt even mention it.
> DO NOT use the migration assistant tool, especially not from an Intel mac. I found it frustrating to track which apps were universal and which needed updates. It also completely messed up my homedir permissions. I couldn’t even ls my Downloads folder.

Yikes, I wonder if this is a universal problem or just an anecdotal issue.

I have a lot of preferences and such built up over the years, and if I didn't use the assistant, I'm not sure how I'd thoroughly migrate everything.
When the talk is about Snow Crash, it is reasonable to say it is poor, if you believe that to be the case.
I'm patiently waiting for the desktop metaphor to die. I'm a very happy user of i3 (tiling) window manager and it's beautiful how efficiently it uses space. Meanwhile in the "desktop metaphor" world, interface designers have settled on fullscreen applications (skype, even music players) and tabs. Because no one wants to bother moving application windows around with mouse.

i3 is explicitly for power users, but someone will eventually take the idea of tiling window managers and make something with a low learning curve. And that will be the end of desktop icons and movable windows.
My all-time favourite slashdot post, worth a re-read a long time later.
Hopefully not to live in Missouri.
You might not know this, but Second Life was not, uh, a wide success. And Second Life is the one we remember from that era. There are dozens of these metaverse things from the mid-90s through the 2000s, none of which achieved the notoriety anywhere near Second Life. Off the top of my head:

Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Lively (2008), PlayStation Home (2008)

It was such a tired cliché by then that even Homestarrunner was making fun of it in 2007 [0].

Go look back at some of the early VRML hype from the mid 90s, it's like watching history replay itself. Most of it is before the era of the Wayback Machine, but there's a few good articles out there still [1] [2]. I can't even find any news writeups of SGI WebSpace, just screenshots, despite it being the VRML plugin for Netscape back then.

[0] https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147
[1] https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html
[2] https://community-place.neocities.org/
> I love it when articles have random units of measurements like that!

That's not really a random unit of measurement. It's the only use of helium the audience can be expected to be familiar with.
Amen :)

The metaverse is poorly communicated. Revolutions start at level 1, but communication sometimes start at level 25.

level 1 for smart phones: Read email/chat while waiting for the bus

level 25 for smart phones: A large economy with global behemoth corporations built on the premise that everyone has computers in their pockets

Level 1 for metaverse: You can now work from your couch/porch/beachhouse/bustop as you don't need your screens

Level 25 for metaverse: Everything running in 2d on computers now gets translated to 3d in the metaverse, a new set of global behemoth corporations. Massive implications for code, data and anything big or complicated (think structural blueprints)

Whether revolutions succeed or not is decided by teens and twenty-somethings, not the 30+ crowd (parents dont get it, not now, not ever)

The real challenge here is creating hardware that is cheap and good enough that teens can and will buy it, just like with the smart phone revolution, if you get 90% penetration with the teens then the rest of the world will follow.

Quest2 costs about the same as one decent screen.

I am not a business analyst, but from where I am sitting it seems like they've at least got traction.
It is an ORM, but I wouldn't call it just an ORM. I don't have experience with NHibernate, but most ORMs I have experience with feel like just a way progammatically build queries. I found EntMutator to provide nice abstractions to couple data changes with business logic like mutation triggers and observers. Again, all the additional tooling built around the Ent framework adds to the value.
I bought my first house at 31. I moved to a slightly cheaper area outside of the city and worked remotely for the same salary. I also made sure my partner made similar money as me. I’m clearly not a boomer. What’s your excuse?
> why funnel the money into existing cities?

Among other reasons, we should because the existing cities are the most resource-efficient and lowest-environmental-impact living places we have at scale, and typically subsidize the infrastructure of other places.
What makes you believe Java apps after early 2000 are any better? Spring apps = Factory pattern apps on steroids. But why pick even Java? Any backend landscape of scale looks like that, mostly because kids want to pad their resumes with cool shit, or so they think. Eg. everything has to be fluent/reactive/async for some reason now - not a problem you could blame on "managers".
Lucky you.

Any tips how to get the kids to appreciate the real world more? It's not like I am not trying, but I also don't want to deprive them of computer games.

I basically grew up gaming and hacking on computers (starting with an Atari 800), and I liked it.
The connection is that both are instances of people paying real money for imaginary goods. I don't know how I feel about that, but intuitively it doesn't seem a smart thing to do.
I think it is socially acceptable in US to discriminate against Asians and Caucasians.
> I was there a few years ago

> Imagine if such amazing tools could be used at actually ethical companies.

Glad you stood by your principles and left when you discovered they stood against your values. Honest question: did you return all the salary/equity you received while you were there?
I will second this. At some point a few decades ago I assisted on studying EU policy plans regarding sustainability. The idea was that city and town design was supposed to have "kernels" of social activity accross their boundaries e.g. shops, schools, businesess including specifically large businesses mostly on the services sector.

Also in the EU country I live in schools are managed centrally and equally, so there is no such thing as a "good school district" I read happening in other countries, which seems to expand inequality and cause financial hardship to their population for no reason other than the ideological assumption that central planning is to be avoided.
> These aren't "races" per se but they are a valid and interesting taxonomy of people.

The thing about groupings like this is that they only exist in the statistics.

If you take two populations of otherwise identical people and then isolate them from each other, they'll diverge over time. Maybe the land is different, or the weather, and some genes are better adapted to one place or the other so they become more common there.

That's just averages. Originally 50% of the combined population had trait A. Over time, it becomes the case that 30% of the first population has it and 60% of the second population. You can measure the difference in the average. But the people in the first population who have the trait are the same as the people in the second population who have the trait. It just happens to be the case that that trait is better adapted to the place where the second population lives. If you want to talk about something, talk about people who have the trait or don't, rather than where their ancestors lived.

> When we're talking about IQ, asking "why is does it differ across identifiable groups of people?" seems to be a very controversial question to ask or attempt to answer, often getting you lumped in with the Nazis, which was my original point.

Oh, absolutely. And if that's true, it's true whether you want to hear it or not.

The salient point is that the Nazis are still wrong even if it is. Because it's all still just averages. If there is some gene that makes you smarter and 55% of "white people" have it and 45% of "black people" have it and as a result the averages are different, the conclusion obviously isn't that all white people are smarter than all black people, so Nazis are still wrong.

There is also no concrete proof that that's the case rather than the disparity being a result of nurture rather than nature. It's legitimately hard to separate them out even when it's not as politically charged as this.