skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Took US Dollars ostensibly to purchase bitcoin. A year later when bitcoin had appreciated, I asked for them to sell the bitcoin and give me US dollars back.

They said "no" and said that I fundamentally misunderstood what an exchange was. It exchanges US Dollars into Bitcoin, it does not convert Bitcoin into US dollars.
All you are describing is every human organization throughout history.

Pretty sure groups are still paramount to our future.
> the vast majority of cryptocurrency use is speculation, not purchase transactions

That doesn't deny its purpose though. I've gotten paid via XMR for programming tasks. Anonymously, even. The fact people treat cryptocurrencies like stocks doesn't nullify that.

The truth is the true source of all problems in this space is the exchanges themselves. They are literally unregulated banks in disguise. Cryptocurrencies should not be regulated at all but exchanges definitely should be.
The paradox about this is that even though our sensor technology keeps getting vastly better we still only have evidence at the extreme edge of it. Never any really conclusive proof -- spaceship lands and aliens get out and get caught on video. And then there's this guy who just knows about a secret government program, but hasn't seen any of it.

It sort of reminds me of the "God of the Gaps" fallacy.
What is it about the US that makes aliens always crash land there?

It’s not even the biggest country by land area. And it’s only a small percentage of the total land area of earth.

And while we’re at it, why do aliens always crash land where the number of witnesses is close to one?

It almost makes you think that all these phenomena are observer dependent.
If you want that immersion, I think $3500 is totally reasonable. I paid more than that for my two additional monitors.

The problem for me is that I like monitors better. I like the feeling of real space around me. I cannot conceive of wearing googles on my head all day. I just don’t want to.

And I definitely don’t want to be separated from other humans by googles. It just not attractive to me.
Conformal Cyclic Cosmology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology
Spaghettification is just the extreme effect of tidal forces. IIRC, objects made of normal materials falling into a stallar-mass BH will be ripped apart lengthwise (and compressed widthwise) before they cross the event horizon. The same object falling into a supermassive (galaxy-center) BH won't be ripped apart until some time after it passes the event horizon. Or an "object" which is a loose cloud of dust will be "ripped apart" much farther away (at the Roche limit). But the tidal force increases without limit as you approach the center of the BH, so no matter what the object is, it'll eventually be ripped apart.
In practice, there is such a thing as "more or less sound" and there are no perfect circles. None of these things bother me.

I responded to you because it seemed (no snark intended) that "more or less sound" things existing bothers you. The person who mentioned "more or less sound things" was referring to those things that exist in practice. The local discussion was (I thought) about type systems that exist in practice in the sense that a real practical C compiler has one. I think OP was justified in talking about this here, even if the article does not, because the theory exists at least in part to inform practice.
"Manga style drawing" would be generally understood to mean looking like 188/190 of the pages of a manga rather than looking like 2/190 of the pages of a manga.
> reddit hasn't changed that much

It's changed dramatically, but many of the visible changes are for the worse!

To error is human but to really screw things up requires significant manpower.
What confidence do we have that we'd actually observe these probes? If one was orbiting, say, Saturn or Jupiter (or one of their moons) right now, would we definitely have seen it? Or if it were something in a wide solar orbit?

And then there's the general time scale. I agree that half a million years (or even 10 million years) isn't much in the grand scheme of things. But it matters to us: what if this alien civilization sent them out 50 thousand years ago? They may not have gotten to us yet. Or what if they were sent out 100 million years ago? It's unclear if they'd still exist today, or if they would have broken down, their repair and replication systems failing after all those years; even if they are still around, maybe the civilization that sent them out doesn't exist anymore.

Also consider that building these probes is pretty much at or beyond the limit of our technological capabilities right now. We might be able to build enough of them as a seed fleet if we devoted tens of trillions of dollars to the project. And accelerating something to 0.1c is nothing to sneeze at either. Remember that they also have to decelerate from that speed in order to find targets for mining in order to fuel themselves and their replication systems, or even just to enter orbit around a planet or star. They'd require some pretty advanced software to run them, too.

I've seen quite a few articles and videos on Von Neumann probes, created by people I respect, but even many of them acknowledge that building these and sending these out would not be a small undertaking. A civilization that did so would have to be at a point where they've solved most of their problems at home (or be in dire need of finding a new home, but at the same time able to wait thousands or millions of years to find one) before they could justify taking this on.

(Remember, the person upthread isn't talking about the mere existence of aliens. They were talking about the improbability of us having some evidence or experience of their existence.)
That was my thinking. They don't always nail down accessibility issues right away, but I think they're fairly highly regarded in terms of getting to things eventually.

(I say "I think" because I have not actually used their accessibility features)

With all of the new paradigms in VisionOS it seems perhaps unavoidable that accessibility features might take some time to catch up. Engineers and designers have to wrap their minds around the new stuff.
First thought, oh, so he's been reading Neal Stephenson lately.
I hope someone keeps an archive of these comments.

HN is in for quite the gut punch. All of this is happening because of the 2023 NDAA provisions where congress invalidated all NDAs blocking disclosure (to congress, not the public).

Not saying this guy is 100% legit, but hang on…
This is pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI
Simple example is that if governments control finance you can't coordinate if the government is your opposition. If you start sharing resources as a means of coordinating, governments can always just compel the banks to shut down your account.

Governments can't shut down crypto nearly as easily due to its decentralized nature.
Aliens are notoriously bad drivers. Have you seen those videos where they just hover in the sky and then zoom off? Homeboy's gonna catch an intergalactic DUI.
> It's upsetting when I go to McDonald's and there's an elderly person at the window. They're not happy.

I would agree that most of the time, this is true.

Every now and then, though, there's an elderly person doing it because all their friends have passed away and they're still healthy and it's the only way to interact with people on a regular basis.
If people in the DoD at that level exhibited such a degree of incompetence, wouldn't you want to find out before it's too late?
Hmm, how is that relevant?
Entirely serious question: is this something that can be trained? That is, after a long enough time of use and strengthening of the appropriate muscles and neural pathways, the headaches and such go away?
Trespassing on Edith Wharton
If true, what would be even more remarkable than alien spacecraft is the secret actually being kept. I have zero confidence the US government, let alone in conjunction with other governments, would be able to keep a secret like this.
> It would permanently have assigned its own segment of the global system address space

We’ve been moving away from this for security reasons with ASLR and position independent executables.

Fixed targets are dangerous for security reasons.
> jfc you're clearly one of the folks who was a problem if that's your opening position

I don’t think “jesus fucking Christ” complies with the HN guidelines, but anyway:

I was recently banned and accused of secretly being a Russian spy by the moderators of a politics subreddit, for my liberal, but not far left views. I am active on at least two subreddits of invading Russian soldiers dying so I would’ve thought it would have been clear that I dislike the Russian government.
How would one implement locale-aware strtod() all by yourself from scratch?
Not really a paradox. The public only has minimal evidence. While the US government has mountains of data and recordings.
I agree not to drink the apple copium, but they do excel in accessibility by a large degree.

Honestly, I think a large part of the industry taking into account accessibility in a more serious ways comes from the competitive advantage apple has created.

Doesn’t mean accessibility hasn’t been done in the past. By no means. But it’s a market segment they have on lockdown
While I do enjoy me some MKBHD, I'd like the opinion of someone who's not fully bought into the Apple ecosystem already. This is a good perspective to have, but it's an incomplete perspective.

And I'd like to know how realistic this thing is for "not apple users". It's a VR headset, can I use it with Windows to play MS Flight Simulator or Star Citizen? Can I use it on Linux to get wall-to-wall emavs? More real world testing is required.
I posted the link to see if there were any plausible theories, or concrete information.

Clearly it’s not an exact-attention transformer - perhaps some sort sparse / approximate attention, or recurrent-transformer-ish-thing like RWKV?

Their twitter announcement[0] does say it’s a novel architecture they’re calling a “Long Term Memory Network”. But who knows what that actually means.

[0] https://twitter.com/magicailabs/status/1666116949560967168
The problem here is that most Reddit moderators care very much about the bad experience, because it makes their unpaid jobs more onerous. And Reddit can't function with moderators.
So after claiming the T-Mobile-Sprint merger would create jobs, it's going to result in a loss of about 11,000 jobs?

https://www.geekwire.com/2023/3-years-after-sprint-merger-t-...
You are correct. The pricing model guarantees this. Pay per compute vs pay for uptime (during which you could have more compute for cheaper)
Why didn't Apple just use mold?
From what exactly?
HN discussion quality has been declining for years, ever since dang took over and changed the moderation priorities (though it's not necessarily causal). Crypto is just the leading edge of that.
The dystopian future has a bustling physiotherapy and occupational therapy industry.
> but it turns out UCS-2 wasn't the future, UCS-4 (approximately UTF-32) is way too bloated to be reasonable, and so we're all going to speak UTF-8 which ironically C was already at least somewhat suitable for.

For UCS-4 I think it's less about the bloat and more about realizing that it's a hard problem. Not only was going to 16 bits not a golden bullet, no size is a golden bullet because of various forms of code point combining. 2 bytes per character when we started preferring UCS-2 was a lot more expensive than 3-4 bytes per character when we stopped preferring it.
The real part of the market does care, the bounce is it being pumped back up.
There's a group called "The Browser Company of New York" building a new web browser called arc in swift and they're targeting Windows first.

How were building the ARC windows all with Swift - https://youtu.be/Xa_fNuaSE_I

https://github.com/thebrowsercompany
VR gaming is a flop. Lots of people bought headsets, played with them for a day and now they're all gathering dust. Apple is right to ignore it.
The story you mention is probably "The Immortal Bard" [1] by Isaac Asimov.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Bard
But the Apple Vision has LiDAR.
Is it me or a16z completely destroyed their reputation as a reputable VC after the crypto frenzy? I just can't seem to read this with a straight face.

They keep trying to find the 'next world wide web,' and either are late or it fails to meet the hype. It's not gonna happen again. That was a once in a century event in which scrappy inventors and investors could get in on the ground floor with tiny sums of money, on what was soon to be the biggest technology boom ever. Nowadays, everything is too big and expensive and instantly-saturated.
No, I'm not. You have mentioned an armistice and nothing further. Does your solution have more than just that? If not, how do you resolve my question?
It's Bloomberg.

They probably polled the kids of rich parents.
My sense is that you could remove Steven Greer and it would be something else? Sorry I have a rather pessimistic take.
I don't agree. You're right that this article really focuses only on the positive. That said, it is indeed true that technology has changed the world for the better. If one were to somehow prove that "facebook is net bad for young children", it still doesn't mean the web, advertising, and everything that makes up that product should be destroyed.
We should not let the Earth overheat
Terraforming Earth.
Keyhole, AEGIS, and classified hydrophone systems have trans medium craft entering theater at LEO and dropping below sea level.

It’s not the fucking Russians, if they could do that we’d be glass
Have you considered examining why you feel the need to project false moral superiority onto, obliquely insult, and psychoanalyze strangers? Do you think this suggests a sober self-awareness and firm grounding of your principles -- qualities I'm sure you feel you possess and believe you're projecting?
Magnasanti scores very well in SimCity. I wouldn't rank it very high in cities to live...
He says it's a custom site: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

That said, you can have something identical to this with Obsidian with a few plug-ins and their hosting service.

https://obsidian.md/

https://github.com/deathau/sliding-panes-obsidian
The truth of the matter is that some dude in the military once told a journalist something like "it's hard to control an LLM: if you tell it to kill people, and then an operator tries to override that, it might kill the operator or go for the comms tower" and the journalist reported it as "Air Force drone kills operator if told to stop; destroys comms tower".

Given that, we know there's a lot of people who will claim extraordinary things. So, chances are that some sucker (of which the military will have a whole bunch on account of being so large) completely misinterpreted something completely inane and decided that aliens are here.
I take issue with something about crypto "causes us to lose our minds?". Couple points:

1. At this stage of the game, there is not a lot new under the sun to discuss that is likely to alter people's opinions. I would say that I did think there were some good comments in some of the other posts about what constitutes a security by the legal definition, and helped me understand better the specific points of the SEC's argument. This story, though, is just about the SEC wanting to freeze Binance US's assets. To be frank, I don't think there is a lot of substantive things to discuss about this particular story.

2. I feel the need to roll my eyes whenever I see the "Well, it's well known HN hates crypto..." lamentations. I will only speak for myself, but I don't "hate crypto". On the contrary, I remember reading the Bitcoin whitepaper early on and thinking how brilliant it was. As time has gone on, however, I've simply come to the conclusion that most crypto technology has very little actual utility. I believe the primary thesis of crypto enthusiasts, that it can somehow "escape" the legal frameworks of human beings (the "code is the law" stuff), is just fundamentally wrong and misguided. I think things like NFTs are just dumb. All this coupled with the fact that the crypto "ecosystem" has drawn in the scummiest set of characters I can think of, and that I think its net utility over the past decade has been negative, just leads me to believe that most crypto technologies deserve to die. This isn't some irrational "I hate crypto" take. This is my (fair, in my opinion) assessment that crypto has little overall utility. I also think this is highlighted by the fact that the amount of real crypto utility that its backers can point to is extremely limited.

In general, I think the HN community is by-and-large quite rational when it comes to evaluating and discussing new technologies. I'm not saying it is always "right", and of course you always have fan boys on all sides, but I do think that reasonable, insightful comments about crypto still bubble to the top.
Regarding the last part, I was wondering if an AR UI would maybe start a trend back to a more 3D/skeuomorphic design (in the sense of NextStep/Windows 95), which then would also have a comeback on the desktop. That's mostly just wishful thinking on my part, though. ;)
I mean OpenCV is C library, lots of well tested algorithms, Python binding, lots of users, docs, examples, you name it

To be considered as potential use, it should either do something which OpenCV is not doing, or do things (a lot) better.

I mean, I used OpenCV, shall I move to that lib? OpenCV is pretty much standard C imaging library, anyone working with images knowns about OpenCV
On this question please check out the work of Peter Kingsley (like ‘Reality’)
he said crypto can be used for micro payments for artists. it's like that already exists. it's called Cash App, Venmo, Square, PayPal, etc.
In my experience, people who randomly bring up complaints about J. K. Rowling in discussions about other topics tend to be trans-activists rather than gender critical people.
There was controversy about the LHC possibly creating small black holes with disastrous consequences. However

* The LHC probably doesn't have the energy density to do that,

* If it did, such a tiny black hole would be so small, and presumably so hot, that it would have a hard time actually taking in any matter as it careens through the earth,

* There are cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere that are far more energetic than anything the LHC can do, so if there were some disaster waiting here, it would already have happened long long ago.

(You might also have run across headlines breathlessly talking about laboratory black holes in metamaterials or whatever — those are not black holes in the gravitational sense, but are metaphorically similar because of the way they can trap light/sound/whatever.)
7 days later, it's been DMCA'd. The notice mentions the music, which is weird because I didn't hear any music in the gameplay videos posted here.
the receiving person thinks that I am trying to get them to buy something.

You're calling them a "lead" - and you _are_ trying to get them to "buy" something: you're trying to get them to trade their time and effort for whatever it is your tool might be able to do for them.

One could argue that I should build up the conversation more

If you don't want people to think you're only talking to them to sell them something, declaring non-sales conversations "not scalable" is a rough place to start from.
I don't know what "discourse" you are talking about. I've been reading about crypto on hacker news before bitcoin hit one dollar. Other than r/buttcoin and yahoo groups, this site has been one of the most anti crypto places you can visit, to the point of being an absolute embarrassment.

It has been a lesson to me about humans and intelligence since that time.

Still love the place though, but I learned never to let comments be the source of the things I need to investigate.
I sometimes wonder is layoff just for show for the investors. A company the size of reddit couldn't possibly care about saving salary of 90 people to take bad PR. Instead they could have simply moved people around and fire 90 over period of a year or so easily as part of performance review. Similarly I know a company whose yearly attrition rate is 30%, and they fired 10% of the people with 4 months reverence.
The only thing that I can think of about dynamic languages is fast-paced development and productivity; in other words, deliver an MVP within hours, if you are an experienced user of <X> framework of your choice.

With a static typed programming language, there's always a cost of compilation time and expected problems with linking libraries.

I cannot tell you how many times I have started a project with a specific cause to solve a particular problem, only to find myself trapped in a massive trap of unknown, cryptic error messages in C++ madness that I had to decipher...until I have realized I have completely forgot what I was even doing!

Now with a dynamic language, I solve all my problems in no time, I deliver a prototype quite fast, and whenever speed is necessary, I can always fix it in multiple ways, for instance what Python currently offers me; in other words, I optimize my performance only when it becomes a bottleneck.
Is your username your (old) phone number?
you don't have to guess - I bought a Quest Pro which allows side loading

As far as this goes ...

> it won't have the same level of investment.

Meta is constantly mocked for how much they have invested. You can argue about how much it paid off, but they certainly invested.
Nope it was crafted that the above critters should be killed quickly and humanely and say not boiled alive or chopped in little pieces and eaten raw by humans while still alive. Chickens and other birds definitely fall under their sentient species law.
The "material-based renderer" sounds... fluff? Most any system should have it so that rendering a menu is a single line of code. Same for toolbars and other. Those are typically simple registrations of ("name" "description" handler). Anything more that that, and you are doing tailored menu/toolbar and are straying on purpose.

That leads, then, to the spatial windows and APIs that go with them. And... quite frankly, I have zero faith that anybody can pull off a V1 for that API. Expect churn and capability growth.

For the process isolation on eye-gaze tracking... assuming you can get "hover" events for things you are gazing at, than I fail to see how they can keep you from reading the gaze. I expect they will try and lock down abuses of that, but as soon as you enable coding against what a user is looking at, developers will find a way to leak that.

And if they expect that the primary way I will interact with an application is by looking at it.... that feels very very sad, all told. I don't want to just look at things, I want to manipulate them. And for that, I am almost certainly going to want some haptic/tactile interaction. Such that this won't live on its own.

Happy to be proven wrong, of course. And, for what it is, this does look impressive. I just don't buy the marketing spin on it, at the moment. Way way way too "dreams work, bro!"
The definition of the EH is that no such orbit exists within.