Hacker News Reader

balsamon Gezellig – a word that encompasses the heart of Dutch Culture

It’s a family of North Sea words at various stages of commercialization/gentrification: koselig,gesellig,hygge,cosagach,cozy.

balsamon Gezellig – a word that encompasses the heart of Dutch Culture

Can always move on to Koselig, even shorter distance to ‘cozy’

balsamon The End of Matter (1906)

The essay seems to be predicated on the mistaken notion at the time that the electron has no mass (the proton had not been discovered yet). Of course today philosophers of physics might make similar arguments using gluons; see that other hot thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35432918

RIP M Poincare was a great man.

balsamon The Priest in the Arena

According to eternally recurring themes in myth-legend-history the next one in the sequence is: the engineer/developer/artist in the arena.

From the Aesir/Vanir, the Titans/Olympians to the French & Russian revolutions.

“The ultimate structure of the myth, then, is that the three estates of Proto-Indo-European society were fused only after a war between the first two against the third...”

(The third being not those who engage in (corporate) warfare or (rhetorical) magic, but those who working with concrete stuff (modern day fertility cults))

From the wikipedia article on the aesir-vanir war.

For the decentralized subculture, perhaps “the persons above the arena”

balsamon 2023 Abel Prize: Luis A. Caffarelli

Think of it as an upgrade from no bels to a single bel. The next milestone is weird, ten bels.

balsamon Three Body, a review: Chinese production beats Netflix to the screen

From the banner it looks like Zhang Lennon plays the lead.

balsamon CEO behind ChatGPT says his tech is ready to beat capitalism

https://archive.is/pH4xK

balsamon Three Body, a review: Chinese production beats Netflix to the screen

https://archive.is/EbhE9

balsamon Eton and all the murder (2019)

>He beat the nanny, Sandra Rivett, to death with a lead pipe.

One wonders if the Etonians of earlier decades were hit as hard by lead poisoning as by a misplaced sense of impunity.

balsamon Knot Portal to Narnia in VR, Inspired by Bill Thurston

Code: https://github.com/mosuem/knotportal

balsamon Sorry, What's Going on Here?

Do YC no longer pay the mods’ salaries? That’s odd, I was under the impression that HN exists to serve the interests of YC. If you look carefully at the behavior of the largely negative _oinbas_ thread given its #upvotes and recency it shouldnt be so quickly off the front page compared to others now on it. Not to mention the regular job postings. EDIT— this post too, perhaps its an automated system?

balsamon Piero della Francesca's symbolic egg (2013)

In the comments:

“Ostrich eggs are a spider repellent (this is such common knowledge that authors may not feel a need to clarify this detail) and spiders are sacred in Islam because a spider saved Mohammad's life. As a matter of fact, the modern mosques in Istanbul also have ostrich eggs.”

Hmm, shouldn’t these facts make ostrich eggs kind of unholy? Anybody has a resolution?

balsamon One man’s two-decade quest to let the ‘Irish Giant’ rest in peace

Sadly, he enjoyed only one year of voluntary fame before passing away, at age 23. Of what exact causes I do not know, but it is said that he was an alcoholic.

balsamon The Californian Ideology (1995)

Likewise, freedom (blue) is made in multiple flavours, some uniquely (Northern) Californian vintage

balsamon The Californian Ideology (1995)

https://reason.com/2009/02/06/a-whiff-of-grape/

https://whiff-of-grape.ca/about/

Carlyle & David Starr Jordan, pantheoners (and creative citationists) of the Californian Ideology

balsamon Five mildly anti-Buddhist essays

Now that you mention it, Christianity is Judaism stripped for export. And that’s discounting the BBC take that Jesus was a Buddhist monk.

balsamon The Californian Ideology (1995)

That’s the whiff of freedom (probably no grapes involved)

https://web.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeche...

balsamon The Californian Ideology (1995)

>Somehow I don't think "the European artist-engineers"[0] ever did construct a cyberspace[1] which is inclusive and universal.

Otlet & La Fontaine came close when they tried to get Le Corbusier (quite the artist-engineer) to build a version of the Mundaneum. They intended it to be public and electric, even somewhat decentralized. The surviving bits of it is fully wheelchair accessible.

balsamon Google researcher, long out of math, cracks devilish problem about sets

The randomized version of nerd-sniping, nerd-bombing.

balsamon The infrastructure behind ATMs

Physicists like to call this kind of sum “finite”, to make it sound closer to infinity, which sounds better than “nonzero”, which makes it sound too close to zero.

balsamon Lula Becomes Brazil’s President, Bolsonaro Flees to Florida

Paradise

balsamon AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

I think WorldCoin is more popular with the Third World, who simultaneously are more willing to spam and less concerned about rights. Should have called it ThirdWorldCoin. The prophet having renown away from home etc /s

balsamon AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

Hey, you folks who are willing to pay to be part of a vetted community? Looks like Sam Altman’s WorldCoin, which is about verifiable identity, might just become a viable business. ChatGPT’s role in that strategy makes more sense now.. remember Altman is behind OpenAI? If this is part of his strategy to monopolize internet comments, then his next step is to have ChatGPT recognize its own outputs. (To deal with those WorldCoiners who abuse ChatGPT, for example.)

balsamon Unbundling Tools for Thought

Uh yeah.. also a hint of “Ozark” in there, to make it uh .. taste like nepotism

balsamon Unbundling Tools for Thought

True artists ship to real artists..“Make things that people who’d like to make things people want want” (Like this Website). The unreasonable effectiveness of higher order recommendations.

balsamon Unbundling Tools for Thought

His roommate the successful artist Paul Gauguin? Tried to borrow Sunflowers but

“Van Gogh was upset and replied that Gauguin had absolutely no right to make this request: "I am definitely keeping my sunflowers in question. He has two of them already, let that hold him. And if he is not satisfied with the exchange he has made with me, he can take back his little Martinique canvas, and his self-portrait sent me from Brittany, at the same time giving me back both my portrait and the two sunflower canvases which he has taken to Paris. So if he ever broaches this subject again, I've told you just how matters stand".

balsamon Unbundling Tools for Thought

I am glad that Van Gogh didnt have a user feedback mechanism? Or maybe God was his only User?

balsamon Unbundling Tools for Thought

Feel like the fresh take is really that you can’t just synthesize new ideas by rearranging the ideas that you suck up from the inter-nets, no matter how much offline fermentation you put them through. Similar to how “publish or perish” merely results in incremental, nearly worthless ideas being sold as breakthroughs. Maybe people need to internalize twitter as a source of jokes amd entertainment, not insight. Maybe alcohol and psychelics need to be seen as brain damaging instead of vision inducing.

balsamon Unbundling Tools for Thought

You might have just stumbled upon the Ozic secret of the Silicon Valley. Most of the guys who have made it rich so far did so on the ideas of others (while those who had grand ideas didn’t ship them).

When a core tenet is making things other people want, you tend to uplift folks who have no great thoughts of their own to sell.

I can imagine an Orwellian doublespeakessay on Steve Jobs called, “Saying No As The Only Act of Creation”.

Manager, meet thy Master.

PS: Was reading some Thiel approved Girard today, he mentioned something about the nihilism in society in which the secret of success being all about signaling success.

balsamon Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – Bad Writing

Rian Johnson based the central character on Elon (amongst other billionaires), but admits that the portrayal turned out to be closer to Musk than he intended:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/12/26/glass-onio...