HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

neerd

164 karma · joined November 20, 2022

submissionscomments
neerd··on Europe's Ultra-Rich Could Fund a Substantial Part of the EU's Budget
> The sad reality is that as soon as the EU introduces this, these families won't be Europe's Ultra Rich anymore. They'll soon be the UK/Swiss/Dubai/Israel/US Ultra Rich.

Yeah, but the physical assets they own can’t move freely. The EU can still tax or seize assets within the EU.

neerd··on The Perry Bible Fellowship
I didn’t realize PBF was posting again. I remember it from an older age of the internet where catching the newest xkcd, SMBC, or PBF was something I looked forward to. Now I suppose going to individual sites for content has been supplanted by the Reddit feed.

Thanks for the the dose of nostalgia :)

neerd··on Jimmy Wales trusts the process
Ehhh, I think he’s earned it given one of the “founders” has had basically zero input on anything modern Wikipedia has become.
neerd··on ICE director envisions Amazon-like mass deportation system
I’m not the only one who gets a chill down their spine when they hear this, right?

I hate to invoke Godwin's law on the very first comment on a post, but the industrialization of deportations seems to have alarming parallels to the mass murder Jews and other minority groups in 1930’s and 40’s Europe. I read “Ordinary Men” by Christopher Browning a couple months ago and the thing that stuck out to me is that when the Nazi’s started killing people, they didn’t immediately jump to death camps. The initial steps of the holocaust began as a “deportation” scheme and it was a continual ramping up of the scale of murder.

They initially claimed they were going to deport these people to Madagascar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

I’m not American so I may be missing some nuance here, but this seems a little terrifying to me.

neerd··on C++ Standards Contributor Expelled for 'The Undefined Behavior Question'
There has to be extra context here. There is no way we’re getting the full picture. If it really is just as simple as including “question” in the title of a paper then there is some serious mismanagement occurring.
neerd··on LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns
I think in most of my use cases the limitation in waiting for is speed and cost. 4o is good enough for most tasks it’s just slow and expensive.
neerd··on The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)
Hey! First I loved PA. It was such a great game. Second, I’m curious how you simulated combat. Was it simply every every server tick you updated all units or was it something smarter?
neerd··on During a year of extremes, carbon dioxide levels surge faster than
If this really is the start of a run-away greenhouse effect, realistically how does someone ride out the worst of the coming horrors without being a billionaire with a bunker.
neerd··on The end of the dark universe?
How does this new theory explain the evidence for dark matter from galaxy collisions?
neerd··on Rich people are more likely to steal from self-checkout. Why?
Stealing from a self checkout is a cheap and easy thrill if you’re rich enough to pay for legal representation. For a poor person it represents a much larger threat and most lower paying jobs are much less tolerant of needing to take time off for things like a court date.
neerd··on Water-injected 2.0-liter hydrogen engine makes 410 horsepower
It’s dangerous because it can enter the body through your skin
neerd··on Northern summer was hottest on record by a significant margin
The downsides of not doing anything are far, far larger. We risk the total collapse of our biosphere if we don’t stop.
neerd··on Get your staff's consent before you monitor them, tech inquiry warns
> Most programmers aren't HN level

Oh boy, the self importance here is hilarious

neerd··on Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
Rule 113 has some interest implications. The Fernegi are a true patriarchy, women aren’t allowed to wear clothes, let alone own businesses. So, in Ferengi society the boss is always a man. That would mean 113 is tacit implication that homosexuality is part of Ferengi society.
neerd··on Geoffrey Hinton: “We're toast. This is the actual end of history”
Except in the case of a squirrel or cockroach, what you are seeing is the result of millions of years of “pre-training” by the evolutionary process.
neerd··on We Have Discovered Spherules from the Path of the First Interstellar Meteor, IM1
So, they dragged a magnet across the bottom of the ocean and found signs of non-naturally occurring materials… why is the first reaction that it is anything other than more human waste?
neerd··on A Love Letter to Driving Alone
Set and setting is a good framework to have a healthy experience with any drug (including alcohol)
neerd··on Sunk boat had not moved for hours, data suggests, contradicting Greek officials
I feel like this current migrant “crisis” in the Mediterranean will pale in comparison to the mass exodus that will occur in the coming decades as more equatorial countries experience extreme weather events.
neerd··on Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way
> As it may be difficult to manually release the buoy, or the compartment where the buoy controls are located may have been flooded, the buoys were arranged with automatic releases, in the event of a fire or internal flooding. Such automatic sensors proved unreliable and buoys were sometimes released unexpectedly. Accidental release of a buoy would have been a hazard during wartime operations, or even during exercises. There is some indication that unreliable buoys were welded into place. This may have been a factor in incidents such as the Kursk sinking, where the buoy was not released and it was difficult to locate the wreck.

I see so many parallels to bad devops patterns I’ve seen. You build your incident response protocols around a metric alarm (bouy being released). However the alarm is noisy so people either ignore the alarm or suppress it (welding the bouy in place). And then when an actual accident occurs your response is ineffective.

neerd··on Four alarming charts that show just how extreme the climate is
Please explain then the Scripps CO2 trend line? These measures are taken at some of the most remote places on earth. I would know because I personally collected atmospheric samples at the Alert, Nunavut sample point. The fact is we have drastically changed the composition of or atmosphere to include more CO2 and the physics is clear on the effect that has on the amount of heat retained.
neerd··on Donated Blood or an Organ? Police Shouldn’t Have Easy Access to Your DNA
Other than vote, what can the average person do to push back against what seems like a perpetual erosion of personal privacy. I know “literally 1984” is a meme, but it does feel like there are people in positions of power who would be ok with some of the big-brother policies. It is an awful feeling to feel helpless. Even if we do keep sliding deeper into the hole I’d like to go knowing I’d done everything I could to try and help.
neerd··on Reddit CEO Spez AMA Overview
Man, the tone in some of these replies is so hostile. Why did anyone at Reddit think this AMA was a good idea?
neerd··on WWDC 2023 Livestream
“Apollo for Reddit” that one isn’t going to age well
neerd··on British Telecom to cut 55,000 jobs with up to a fifth replaced by AI
Yeah, my gut feeling is the rich see the writing on the wall. If they can keep a grip on things for a couple more decades then they can just replace all the poors with robots and either stick us all in UBI slums or find a more final solution.
neerd··on Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
Yeah, but we live in a capitalist society all the benefits of complete automation will go entirely to the capital class who control the AI.
neerd··on Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
I feel like on our current trajectory we will end up in a situation where you have millions of people living at subsistence levels on UBI and then the ultra-rich who control the models living in a post-scarcity utopia.
neerd··on MIT engineers “grow” atomically thin transistors on top of computer chips
Yes, the human have no idea
neerd··on Ask HN: Anyone else see GPT-4 access as unfair?
Weird, I got API access pretty much next day and I’m just a solo dev playing around with it for personal projects.
neerd··on US Air Force to divest a total of 310 aircraft in 2024 including 32 F-22A Raptor
The F-35 suffered from each branch wanting the plane to be something different. The same airframe has to support radically different internals and flight characteristics on the A, B, and C models. The program had a myriad of issues but if each branch had just developed its own the cost would have been overall lower.
neerd··on I wish GPT4 had never happened
If this is not decoupled how do you propose people survive when automation makes the vast majority of people permanently unemployable?
Page 1 of 2Next →