Hacker News Reader

halperteron Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few

I think that wealth is pretty much comparative, as you said, but I think that money (which I'm interpreting as an indentifier of worth, tell me if that's wrong) isn't zero sum. Price is (generally) proportional to value, measured in how much you stand to benefit by owning/selling/using an asset as compared to doing nothing. The physical dollar bill may have limited circulation at a moment in time, but value fluctuates. Supply up, value---and then price---down, assuming all other factors are constant. Value can be created and dissolve in weeks as it is intriniscally subjective---think fads and trends. One pair of jeans could be worth a couple hundred one day and be worthless the other. Thus, value and thus money is not zero sum.

halperteron Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few

I think the point hodgehog was trying to make is that overall wellbeing increased. Famine is down, disease is down, wars are down, security up, well-being up. Innovation overall benefits everyone in the long run. Global scales aren't the problem---goods once reserved for the wealthy are being copied and produced at markedly lower prices, with examples such as EVs and drones. I realize that "overall" is doing some heavy lifting but I think it's rather unreasonable to dismiss the entirety of human technological progress as only benefiting the elite.

halperteron The Weight-Loss Revolution People Didn't Want

>It has been ingrained in culture and personal experience that weight loss is supposed to be a struggle.

The social stigma against "the easy way out" is probably due to the romanticization of self-improvement. You're "supposed to" earn a good-looking body through hard work and dedication; the journey is supposed to reflect the desire to improve and a strong mindset and thus it is seen as valuable. For many, is something really self-improvement if there is no improvement on the inside?

I think weight loss drugs will be like plastic surgery; the pipeline from medicine to undesireable modification to commonplace acceptance will likely occur. These cosmetic procedures will become accepted and become our new normal. Perhaps, in the not-so-far future, weight-loss drugs will be as common as braces.

halperteron A Perfect Meritocracy Will Have Limited Social Mobility

It'd be worthwhile to point out that many of these "best and brightest" come from predominantly Western/wealthy countries and are raised in enviroments conducive to learning and technology. They often, but not always, go to excellent colleges in wealthy countries with good education systems and succeed in corpos or organizations based in the same nations. As the article pointed out, the thirst for knowledge, passion, drive, etc., are usually all due to either nature (inhereted from the parents) or nurtute (growing up in an enviroment that encourages said traits). There are certainly people who have beat the odds, but outliers are expected. The general trend is that the advantaged create offspring who are also advantaged. Sure, regression towards the mean exists but someone born in a wealthy nation with an enviroment that supports education is almost always going to be better off than someone born into a poor nation in an enviroment that doesn't value education.

halperteron Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few

Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice.

halperteron IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

This website---naturally, I think---weirds me out. Many of these cameras are in private spaces, with some places you most certainly don't want people to have live feeds of. It's quite disturbing how you can see personal snapshots of people's lives without them knowing. There's a perverse feeling of dread about being able to see into someone's life and being able to paradoxically watch someone eat dinner alone, seemingly so detatched from human connection even with someone watching like some kind of otherworldly spectator.

halperteron How Many Children Learned Mathematics from Kiselev's Textbooks?

The following paragraph: >In a typical American or British arithmetic textbook of the same period — or, frankly, today — the topic “primes” would consist of the definition of a prime, a list of the first few, and perhaps a procedure for testing primality. The infinity of the primes would be asserted, if at all. The proof would not appear, and the argument that no list of primes can be completewould not be made.

I think they meant to imply that "other", maybe western, mathematical education emphasizes learning "facts" over a more demonstrable experience. The author compares how textbooks would frame the multiplication of positives and negatives in the same sense later in the article.

>The point is not that “minus times minus is plus” because some external authority says so. It is that, if we want our rules to give consistent answers when applied to physical quantities that point in two opposite directions, this is what the rules must look like.

halperteron Hospital at centre of child HIV outbreak caught reusing syringes in Pakistan

https://archive.is/a9p1X

Does anyone have alternative archival sites? I want to switch away from archive.today because of the uncivil behavior [1] but can't find any other archival sites that can unpaywall websites.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-might-...

halperteron Finding all regex matches has always been O(n²)

I'm of the opinion that their post is still human-written. They describe in their first blog post that it's human written (which could be a lie, but oh well) and their other blog posts seem to have the same informal lowercase hyphenated writing style. Sentance length varies throughout the posts. Sure, you could prompt this writing style, but I lean towards thinking that the piece is human written.

halperteron Systemd Introduces Birth Date Support for Upcoming Linux Desktop Age Controls

The PR in question: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

halperteron Systemd added birthday storage to comply with Brazil, CA Age Verification laws

halperteron ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

Statement by arXiv: https://tech.cornell.edu/arxiv/

halperteron Zuck#: A programming language for connecting the world. And harvesting it

I don't think I've seen satire in the form of a programming language before :). Neat. Does anyone else have any other examples? All I can think of are languages like Velado (uses notes) and Piet.

halperteron U.S. is withdrawing from 66 international bodies

> American taxpayers have spent billions on these organizations with little return, while they often criticize U.S. policies, advance agendas contrary to our values, or waste taxpayer dollars by purporting to address important issues but not achieving any real results.

>By exiting these entities, President Trump is saving taxpayer money and refocusing resources on America First priorities.

Taking a look at the actual list, many of these organizations deal with issues such as climate change, environmental protection, and education. I think this means two things: One, the U.S. is further breaking away from the rest of the world. Trump's "America First" policies have effectively broke alliances and trust. Two, the current administration is quite heavily biased against clean energy. A majority of the organizations left are governing/advising on environmental issues, namely renewable energy and climate change. Trump frames the decision as "pro-America"; Trump says "our" values, he means his/his party's. I don't think that many people who have put at least a little research into the subject would agree that a) Climate change is not an issue and b) Renewables are (or at least getting to be) a good alternative to our currently climate-change exacerbating sources of power. The U.S. is going to be divided more and more along party lines, and it's going to get harder and harder to stop.

halperteron [dead]

This is a really nice concept. I think that sometimes just seeing the data isn't enough; you need _conversational_ feedback and the other features all seem quite interesting. However, I just have one question about the premium tier.

The premium model offers:

>AI Recovery Strategist

>Predictive Risk Modeling

>Behavioral Anomaly Detection

>Mood & Pattern Correlation

>Financial Impact Analysis

Are these not the things that distinguish this from the other addiction-breaking tools out there? Without these, the basic plan just looks like any other addiction breaker tool/applet thing. What's the purpose of a free plan if the value is in the premium tier?

halperteron HP Reveals Keyboard Computer with Ryzen AI Chip

How does cooling get implemented? I can only really think of a Pi500 as a similar concept, except that the Pi is (likely) much less power intense. If they're using a Ryzen 300, wouldn't heat dissapation become an issue? The keyboard looks too thin for extensive heat transfer. I guess they could use a undervolted Ryzen 300 but it just seems like there is too much power delivery needs inside such a small frame.

halperteron I built a Million Dollar Homepage for text, and it's chaotic

Some beauties:

"I lost the game"

"Python is just executable pseudocode"

"How do I exit vim?"

"My stomach is speaking whale"

"Triforce Collected"

"Why do we park in driveways and drive on parkways"

"I wish I could double jump in real life"

"Why do hot dogs come in packs of 10 but buns in packs of 8?"

The website seems like a combination of shower thoughts, hot takes, and the occasional NSFW material.

halperteron Backing up Spotify

It would be interesting to find out how that has changed with the growth of the music industry over the years. I suspect that many of these <1000 streamed could be artificially generated for monetary purposes but I'm not entirely sure. That being said, there is a lot of good music with less than 1000 streams. I've been looking myslef and I've definitely found some hidden gems.

halperteron James Watson has died

This feels like one of those engagement-farming bots you see on xitter. What a shame.

halperteron State Department Revokes Visas over Charlie Kirk Comments

https://archive.is/jHog0

halperteron Circular AI deals among OpenAI, Nvidia, AMD are raising eyebrows

https://archive.is/E7nGC

halperteron What GPT-OSS leaks about OpenAI's training data

Unfortunately very unlikely in our forseeable future with the U.S. having a "U.S. against the world" mentality to the AI race. Would love to see this but this would get shot down immediately.

halperteron Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander

It may not exist now, but you can make it! It's not that hard to create a mechanical keyboard of your own. You can create the profile in ergogen or if you are comfortable with CAD, you can just model your own case then handwire the switches! There are many examples online and the space is very willing to help out people with their own projects.