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alephnerdon The startling 1960s theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer

sarcasm (noun) - the use of words that mean the opposite of what one intends to say especially in order to insult, to show irritation, or to be funny : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on ironic and usually bitter and caustic language often directed against an individual or idea.

alephnerdon 1960s theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer

> Would be pretty stupid to spend all this energy erecting stones just for the view of it

I think the same way looking at medieval cathedrals or Roman and Greek era theatres, collesiums, and agoras...

At least the Ottomans used the Parthenon as an arms depot, giving those stones some meaning.

(This is sarcasm)

alephnerdon I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

There are a couple hundred US armed forces bases each with commissaries that would be managed by DeCA.

An attack like the author hypothesized would require a LOTL modus operandi, and doing so on 14 locations wouldn't justify completely blowing up an entire LOTL operation, because it exposes indicators, registers, and tradecraft that is then shared amongst all security vendors.

The way it's framed is clickbait at its worst with the added issue of limited security experience, but the same can be said of HN in general.

alephnerdon Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

Thanks mate! Got my weekend reading material!

alephnerdon Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

Honestly would love to deep dive into Sumerian literature. Sadly much of it is still untranslated or in the annals of UChicago.

alephnerdon Hollywood's Video Game Era Is Here. Will It Be Any Good?

> What group are you in

Too young to really remember 9/11 but old enough to remember watching the airstrikes on Baghdad in 2003 and the Indian Ocean Tsunami. So I guess I'm technically GenZ or a very very young Millenial.

Essentially, I grew up during the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, Xbox360, Wii, and PS3 era.

Basically, I'm old, but HNers tend to be a decade or two older.

alephnerdon Hollywood's Video Game Era Is Here. Will It Be Any Good?

Okey Dokey

---

Much of Fallout's success is also because Bethesda also puts effort into worldbuilding and supporting a community.

Contemporary boomer game franchises like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, etc just don't have "heart". They were games that were created as technical demonstrators but with no care or input for story writing aside from being edgy for the sake of being edgy, and as a result were unable to age well.

Meanwhile, Fallout and Half Life are both products of the same era that were also technically demanding (especially Half Life) yet they have actually been able to stand the test of time.

alephnerdon Hollywood's Video Game Era Is Here. Will It Be Any Good?

> Except you CAN! Doom and Quake films are begging to just be reskinned Aliens

That's my point. The fact that you need to pitch these kinds of games as a knockoff of a better movie shows why they simply aren't viable IP.

Nerdy boomer nostalgia ain't cutting it for IP whose entire value was derived from being edgy and shock+gore driven.

alephnerdon Hollywood's Video Game Era Is Here. Will It Be Any Good?

> These had a lot of blood sweat and tears poured into them

It goes both ways. Both the video game and the film/tv IP need to have some sort of deeper meaning and writing. You just can't write a cohesive story for a cynical multiplayer FPS like Quake, Wolfenstein II, Doom, etc whose whole appeal in the 1990s and 2000s was gore and shock value.

There's a reason people my age (below 35) have never played and oftentimes haven't even heard of Quake or Doom or Wolfenstein but have heard of Fallout or Half Life.

> Most Hollywood game adaptations are the same as the Disney live actions. They have their hands on an IP, they want to flip it into easy money...

I've given a list of the majority of video game movies created this past decade. They made bank and were well written and have mass appeal.

alephnerdon Hollywood's Video Game Era Is Here. Will It Be Any Good?

The Last of Us [0], Fallout [1], Wreak It Ralph [2], Pokémon Detective Pikachu [3], Sonic the Hedgehog 3 [4], Sonic the Hedgehog 2 [5], Sonic the Hedgehog [6], Mortal Kombat 2 [7], Gran Turismo [8], etc.

Cynical content from the 90s and 2000s that lack "heart" like Quake, Doom, and the like are difficult to tie a cohesive story with because there was no story or plot underlying those IPs.

[0] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_last_of_us

[1] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/fallout

[2] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wreck_it_ralph

[3] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pokemon_detective_pikachu

[4] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sonic_the_hedgehog_3

[5] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sonic_the_hedgehog_2

[6] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sonic_the_hedgehog_2020

[7] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mortal_kombat_ii

[8] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gran_turismo_based_on_a_tru...

alephnerdon Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022

It is harrowing. It also explains why the villages in my ancestral region in India (JK, HP, UK) with close cultural and ethnic ties with Nepal used to build them at the upper portions of the sides of mountains/hills and only shifted to building at the bottom of those kinds of valleys when motorized roads became a thing in the 20th century.

Rescue operations in Nepal are in good hands, but this is sadly because those same response orgs had to respond to a similarly brutal cloud burst floods back in 2013 [0], 2021 [1] and 2025 [2].

It also shows the very real and brutal effect climate change is already having, and will only get worse.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_North_India_floods

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Uttarakhand_flood

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Kishtwar_district_flash_f...

alephnerdon How much of HN is AI?

But Fortran goes skrt skrt (Gen Z/Zillenial for fast).

Honestly love Fortran as a language but really worried about how it's both the foundation of most core packages like Numpy and Scipy and is increasingly underresourced outside of physics departments.

alephnerdon How much of HN is AI?

Some lobsters. Some blind. Some BookFace. Some BlueSky. Some back to X. But mostly IRL in the core tech hubs.

The ones who rely solely on HN have fallen out of the loop.

alephnerdon How Universities Should Prepare Founders

Other way around from personal experience. Harvard is louder because Harvard and alums from middle class backgrounds like I beat the drum.

Harvard has also offered non-traditional open-entry bachelor degrees for over a century and whose endowment became the precursor for WGBH and therefore PBS, and those of us from other schools don't treat them any different. The only other ivies with large dedicated non-trad programs are Columbia (Asimov was a product of that) and Penn.

Yale, Dartmouth, and to a lesser extent Princeton is blue blood af.

alephnerdon How much of HN is AI?

Pour one out for the poor saps in econometrics departments and logistics industries still using SPSS.

alephnerdon How much of HN is AI?

Yeah. There's nothing wrong with 1-indexing, but it's interesting to notice it go from being the norm to being something only a handful of us do now.

There used to be a time when some HNers used to kvetch over not using 0-indexing and that kind of pedantry should have been cracked down.

alephnerdon How much of HN is AI?

If they are so be it. Knuckedraggers and bots act the same way. At with some bots are kinda creative.

alephnerdon Anthropic tells staff to work from home due to possible security team strike

Exactly. And honestly, most of us in white collar industries and managerial roles are aligned with SEIU organizing Allied Universal - their "security guards" are undertrained, underpaid, and are basically left to fend for themselves by AU. They absolutely need to be unionized.

alephnerdon Anthropic tells staff to work from home due to possible security team strike

The only relation Allied Universial employees and Anthropic has is that Anthropic is temporarily subleasing this specific office in Rincon Hill from another F500 before moving to nicer digs a couple blocks down, and that F500 has a contract with Allied Universal.

Like HOW HARD is this to get for everyone on here?!? When you take out a temporary sublease, what the management company's vendors do completely outside your negotiating scope.

All this is showing is further proof that almost no one on HN is from the Bay anymore.

alephnerdon Anthropic tells staff to work from home due to possible security team strike

Contractually, you cannot depending on the sublease, which is between the original owner (a F500) and I think JLL or CBRE, and even then is specifically veteeen JLL and Allied Universal.

Anthropic is anyhow leaving this specific building.

alephnerdon Anthropic tells staff to work from home due to possible security team strike

You can't in most cases. These buildings are owned by larger conglomerates and are out of scope of landlord-leasee negotiations especially as it's a sublease.

Allied United is one of the larger security augmentation firms in the nation, which makes is harder. For example, my Alma mater was secured by Allied Universal as well as a dedicated PD because the dedicated PD didn't want to be bag check for a library when they have been dealing with real crime (eg. A comrade in their sister PD across town's was shot by the Boston marathon bombers).

alephnerdon Anthropic tells staff to work from home due to possible security team strike

Ik the building intimately - it's not Anthroptic but the building's security company (which Anthropic does not own and is subleasing). SEIU is working to organize Allied Universal in California.

Support SEIU organizing them (their fighting the good fight in this case), but this specific article is clickbait.

alephnerdon How Universities Should Prepare Founders

This is a common approach (very close to the norm for the most successful startups and companies I have worked with in my career), but I strongly disagree with this: "go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management)".

You will learn all of that on the job by the time you make it to Principal Engineer, Senior Sales Engineer, Staff Product Manager, or Enterprise AE in the American/Israeli/Indian and Chinese startup and BigTech scenes and especially in Enterprise SaaS, Cybersecurity, Hardware, AI/MLOps, Infra, and other high domain expertise but high revenue and exit potential heavy segments.

Also, a plurality of VCs in the segments I mentioned above tend to have learnt on the job and later switched to VC after successful exits and/or head-hunting.

If you do consider going back to school - only do a graduate research driven CS, EE, CE, or ECE degree program like Stanford, UIUC, CMU, GT (their online program is as good as on-campus with the right courses), UT Austin (their online program is as good as on-campus), and a handful of others.

alephnerdon EuroHPC Launches 6 Quantum Calls with €119M in Funding

Because individual EU states now have no choice. The alternative is to accept being a contested beach ball squeezed between the US and China, and with other regional powers taking advantage.

The EU had already lost the initial race in HPC and AI by 2011-16 when EU institutions and state-level institutions failed to support the kind of public-private collaboration that was happening contemporarily in the US and China. I remember noticing on visits how EU nationals were often working on or closely with the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center in large part because capital that could monetize fundamental research dried up due to the Eurozone crisis.

Similarly in Quantum, barely 15 years ago, a large portion of China's current leading quantum researchers like Pan Jianwei were still working closely with European researchers like Anton Zellinger at institutions like Wien, Geneva, INRIA, and the Max Planck Institutes to close knowledge gaps that remained. While the gap has now been reversed, it can be managed because having some sovereign capabilities at least helps reduce the risk of being at the mercy of export controls.

Basically, the EU and individual EU states have one last chance to recapture the frontier lest it's gone.

alephnerdon EuroHPC Launches 6 Quantum Calls with €119M in Funding

There is a lot of interesting work in the space (I recommend checking out the Wyant College of Optical Sciences) but you will need a deep Physics and Materials Science background. Same with semiconductor fabrication and packaging.

Leetcode ain't cutting it. If you want to do cool shit, hit the books and learn real engineering. Arizona [0], Rochester [1], UCF (Florida) [2], and CU Boulder [3] are the best distance learning programs in this space, but all expect a deep background in Physics to succeed.

Additionally, most private sector employers in the space remain in the US, Canada, China, and France (but increasingly integrated with the US thanks to the CQE).

[0] - https://optics.arizona.edu/prospective-students/graduate-pro...

[1] - https://www.hajim.rochester.edu/optics/graduate/ms-home.html

[2] - https://creol.ucf.edu/academics/graduate-programs/masters-pr...

[3] - https://www.colorado.edu/ecee/academics/online-programs/ms-e...

alephnerdon EuroHPC Launches 6 Quantum Calls with €119M in Funding

> Why pile so much public money into quantum computing where there are (afaik) barely any useful algorithms, while Europe could instead invest in catching up on GPU infrastructure...

Because if you do not become competitive on the frontier you are doomed to perpetually play a game of catch-up. This is what happened to the EU with battery technology, renewable technology, AI, digital services, and semiconductors.

GPUs require sub-7nm design, fabrication, and packaging - all of which is nonexistent in Europe today, and would take 10-20 years at which point the EU-27 would have fallen behind the frontier again.

Europe cannot be competitive in bleeding edge and legacy packaging in 2026-36 given how heavily subsidized and tightly integrated the Asian and American cluster is (eg. I can get 0-1% interest rate loan terms with tax holidays and subsidizes in the 9 figure range in much of Asia and the US). Europe CAN reinvest in 2D packaging, materials, and metrology (which is critical for quantum).

Europe cannot be competitive in bleeding edge fabrication in 2026-36 given how heavily subsidized and tightly integrated the Asian and American cluster is (eg. I can get 0-1% interest rate loan terms with tax holidays and subsidizes in the 9 figure range in much of Asia and the US). Europe CAN be competitive in legacy (28nm and above), power, and compound semiconductor fabrication (this also had a downstream impact on quantum).

Europe cannot be competitive in chip design in 2026-36 given how heavily subsidized and tightly integrated the Asian and American cluster is. It CAN work on building the next generation of tooling needed to design quantum circuits and conduct metrology.

Quantum applications of Sensing, Optics, Communication, Key Distribution, Computing, Packaging, and Hardware Design are all greenfield segments that everyone is at a roughly equal starting point at. All these technologies have directly relevant applications in telecommunications, defense, semiconductor packaging, and computing.

And this is what can help some EU states regain relevance in the competitive frontier. There's a reason France has been working heavily on this for a decade.

alephnerdon Where did all the public bathrooms go?

> I never really understood the economics of public restrooms in America. Who pays for them?

Local sales, income, and/or property taxes.

Municipalities, counties, state, and the federal government all have the power of taxation in the US.

alephnerdon Why older tech is sometimes safer from hackers

> I understand BBC may not have the technical background...

This is BBC Future - the BBC's tech clickbait publisher - not BBC News.

BBC consists of the non-profit news bureau as well as at least a dozen for-profit clickbait and listicle publishers. BBC's ad-free mandate is only for the UK.

> in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes

Yep. One of our PortCos has unrestricted access to Anthropic and GPT models. With whitebox testing, it's trivial to identify vulns in legacy environments. With blackbox testing, it takes some effort but it doable with the right steering.

alephnerdon How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

> Did everyone actually read the law or is this a game of telephone

It's HN - everyone did the latter.

alephnerdon How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

The bigger issue in OP's case is they are dependent on de minimis.

The de minimis crackdown [0] and EPR [1] are both being rolled out because Chinese conglomerates like Pinduoduo (Temu) and SHEIN took undue advantage of that while ignoring European regulators on issues such as environmental regulations on packaging [2], dark patterns [2], breaching the Digital Services Act [3], and gacha/addictive engagement mechanisms [4].

All of OP's proposals directly conflict with the goal of de minimis taxation and the EPR.

Seems European HNers are fine with European regulations until it hurts their niche interests or pocketbook.

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/102e18d7-d06b-4405-a347-97bb3c373...

[1] - https://www.vereev.com/news/europe-faces-trade-conflict-is-e...

[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/ef72f186-2a02-4c51-927d-2c01ddece...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-says-temu-breach-r...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-probes-shein-over-...