HappMacDonald

Given that the abundance will be predictably hoarded by those in power — leaving everyone else even fewer table scraps than we already get — should however remain a concern.

After all, its not like some benevolent super-AGI will be deciding who the spoils get divided amongst, they will remain tools to perpetuate and intensify every incumbent power imbalance.

While that may be true in reality no such externality consequences appear to be baked into the game theory of the experiment.

It's like having people or neural networks choose door 1 from door 2 without clear advantage to either of them and without making it clear that one door somehow represents "donating blood" while the other represents "kicking puppies".

This one is my favorite:

https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/ncw1/pr...

Dear Hackernews:

It is not good security practice to publish your random word passphrases as the title of an article.

Thank you for your time

On the other end of that spectrum I cannot _stand_ back button on the mouse and always disable the feature immediately because it is often too easy for me to click those fiddly side buttons without meaning to (either while grabbing or while re-adjusting my hand position on the mouse)

So I usually only map middle click to such a button, as that button is at least 90% of the time relatively safe to accidentally trigger.

There exists a floor to how "idiot-proof" Motor vehicles are since they do require a skill test and a licensing protocol to legally operate that do weed out some number of humans not competent enough to operate them (and even beyond that insurance qualifications can weed out some more: crash or commit infractions too much and you lose and/or get priced out of your ability to legally drive). And rightly so due to the unique hazards that they pose: but for want of those things one may easily still have to try to support their software for users incapable of gainfully handling a motor vehicle.

Automobiles and the international road network have also had well over a century to standardize themselves over a glacially slowly changing set of expectations while we're writing drivers for 400GBE chipsets that only got invented last Tuesday and building agent management harnesses for styles of neural networks that literally weren't even a twinkle in the milk-man's eye yet as recently as fidget spinners being in style.

I can't pop outside to check, I'm too busy filling Russel's Teapot from this von Neumann Kettle.

Perhaps this archive.org snapshot will work for ye?

https://web.archive.org/web/20250329043544/https://invention...

Interestingly all of the snapshots newer than this one appear to be blocked by cloudflare as well :P

You replied to: "The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477559#49481711

There's a big difference between "letting the facts guide the path" and tilting at strawmen built out of straw nobody else even brought into the discussion.

If you'd like to make the point that "cost of panels" can be misleading when supporting components and interconnects begin to take up the lion's share of costs then that sounds like a noble thing to remind folk of, but ideally not as a segway into shilling more fracking which includes untold environmental costs as externalities.

I have been lead to believe that blue scrub jays have a lot of different vocalizations but the only sounds I've caught out of them over the past 15ish years of paying attention have been the raucous shouting shrieks they seem so fond of doing. I perceive this as their species equivalent of cursing xD

I prefer to believe that the building-climber was happy :D

Is alt-left to go back a bad keyboard shortcut for you? It's what I use.

It's also far less likely to be accidentally typed while trying to fill in a form and fumbling the tab navigation.

Nono, that should close the window xD

I am almost 50 years old and I struggle to imagine anyone younger than I am being any more familiar with what cash is than with what a landline is

For one of my projects the important advantage was "lossless compression similar to Webp and Avif (far better than PNG)", while ALSO supporting > 16kpx dimensions where Webp and Avif appear to max out

File explorer support, thumbnails, local image viewers and editors, import into other media software like slideshows, video editors, 3d modeling software, etc etc.

Rolling the clock backwards toward the big bang, it is not matter which is directly compressed, it is the fabric and metric of space itself. Matter being compressed is merely a side effect of the fact that "all of the locations that the matter occupies" are also compressed (though again, remain aware that calling it "compression" only makes sense when you rewind time in our cosmological model backwards).

So it is not as though you and the Andromeda Galaxy are made out of matter that got flung out of a point explosion long ago so that now you have traveled a very long distance away from one another, it is more like "both you and the Andromeda galaxy sat still for 13.8 billion years but space expanded between you in that time, so originally you were right on top of each other along with everything else".

We can rewind the model until the entire observable universe was as small as a Planck volume, but we have abundant evidence that the universe is indefinitely larger than that so even "that time when our 98gly diameter patch of space was almost indistinguishable from a mathematical point" means little when even that "point" was still just one pinprick out of the smooth manifold of a larger universe which could have been stupidly large or infinite even that early on.

Once you pass the event horizon, every direction leads to the singularity in your future. Directions "away" from the singularity may still visibly show what things looked like outside of the event horizon before you fell in, but that is from your past. Heading in that direction will not get you back there anymore, you will only find the singularity along that path in your future.

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest we all have garages but nobody parks their cars in them. Cars wind up parked in front of the garage or on the street, garage winds up being filled with storage junk.

As long as I have reliable climate control I prefer not having windows or "natural light".

I presently live in a townhouse triplex with like 5 huge windows to the outside world and everyone in my household has them permanently blackout-curtained like nobody's business.. and there is still way too much light getting in each one of them. :(

Perhaps there are vampire-like demographics which could be served by some of the interior-space of such buildings?

Plus, depending how folks feel about it it might be interesting to user fiberoptic cable to transport natural light about wherever one desires, not least of which because that ought to prove quite simple to be able to switch on and off at will.

Looney Toons / Merry Melodies also bear out this connotation quite well

Time to steer my horseless carriage onto the Information Superhighway! :D

I would posit that the null hypothesis should be that uncoerced human sleep patterns and historical sleep patterns are similar to A: modern human sleep patterns, and B: the sleep patterns of a majority of diurnal mammals and especially those primates most closely related to us: namely "one big stretch of sleep while it is dark a majority of the time when not disturbed by external stimuli or illness".

If historical evidence does not do much to disambiguate this from the alternative hypothesis, then the null hypothesis would be the default presumption.

Not allowing theft would be a form of regulation, though ;)

The go-to example of a failure state in the golden rule that I am aware of is "thirsty person wants everyone else to jump their bones, thus the rule suggests that they should jump everyone else's bones".

The take-home being, as long as peoples preferences are different, the rule has some failure states based upon that.

And the wider example that this points to is that as long as everyone's values are different.. the rule loses a lot of it's luster. The more different another person's values are, the less you can rely on projecting your own values as a method to gainfully interact with them.

In place of that biblical aphorism (born from a monoculture no less), there is a lot of room available for us to build something more robust and sophisticated and the AI alignment problem offers a fine excuse to get cracking and try to formalize something already! ;)

I know it's off topic: but I am curious and this sounds both challenging to search for and likely to not get a straight answer from an LLM. Do you happen to know if this means that water may tip from neutral to slightly alkaline or acidic at different temperatures or pressures?

I have always found it .. peculiar that water just so happens to (as you aptly put it) "have all the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions equal" :)

Yet it remains relevant that "being liable for one's editorial decisions" is a good idea, and that differentiating between platforms which do and which do not exercise autonomy over how information gets prioritized and sorted may very well be relevant to this discussion.

> Let's say I build a product that is better than others in the market.

This sounds like the same song as Evolution: the winner is not "the best", the winner is "good enough" and dethroning "good enough" with "better" absolutely requires a sufficiently strong advantage, not just any incremental advantage.

If the incumbent is not "good enough", then they won't get great reviews and whoever does try them will be looking for an alternative right away, so you have your foot in the door on either front.

If the incumbent is good enough, then you just cannot market "being very slightly better": you target a demand that is not already sated. You could be cheaper.. by a large enough delta and without sufficient loss in quality to drive away demand, or you could begin by targeting whatever portion of the market is not satisfied by the incumbent for whatever reason.

Marketing is hard (and harder still when one is aiming to be ethical and a good steward of the market instead of constantly scamming and cheating and ruining everyone's trust), and "paying to force your message in front of unsolicited eyeballs" is not the only game in town.

> There is a good language buried underneath C++ somewhere

Well.. "C".. though I wouldn't go so far as to call that a good language, either.

But it may have been after amortization.

The conceit is similar to "ordinary plates vs paper plates".

Nobody is arguing that a single ordinary plate is "cheaper" than as single paper plate, but one can still argue about how TCO of a set of ordinary plates vs constantly buying a stream of new paper ones just to throw them away after each use.