Hacker News Reader

Fascist Italy supported the Catholic Church and made it their state religion. Same thing for francoist Spain.

A better example would be the chinese cultural revolution and their campaign against the Four Olds.

alephxyzon My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

Isn't that exactly the Chinese room argument though? The human/computer in the room doesn't need to understand Chinese or English to translate?

alephxyzon Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles

It's performative art. A critique of social constructionism by taking to its extreme.

alephxyzon Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

>reliable TV or movie critics

>critical drinker

alephxyzon Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Content made for disengaged viewers is disengaging.

alephxyzon How types make hard problems easy

>Changing our database schema should cause us to see errors in our frontend code.

I shuddered.

alephxyzon Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

> Generally the field declaration/migrations system in Django feels to me designed to lead people down a garden path towards bad and dangerous behavior. If I had my druthers I'd enforce a policy in our Django app of "never run makemigrations, all migrations must be manually written SQL".

`makemigrations --dry-run` is helpful to see if your manual migrations are complete but besides that I agree

alephxyzon Python with Rizz

Yes but it's in Java

alephxyzon React 19

I don't think so. Comments about PyTorch or llama are always extremely positive.

alephxyzon Training myself to run farther with Strava's API and an IoT dog feeder of M&Ms

Garmin estimates it using heart rate, body weight and power output. It also adjusts for temperature and altitude if possible. In my experience it still varies a lot depending on which conditions I exercise in but it's a decent tool to see your progress if you're able to test it under similar conditions every time.

alephxyzon More than 300 game developers lost their jobs in one day, weeks before Christmas

Yep. Tencent (Fortnite) and Activision/Blizz (overwatch + COD) are printing money while publishers who missed the battle royale train almost all killed themselves trying to release a bunch of failed overwatch clones.

alephxyzon The Porsche Macan EV is being recalled because its headlights are too bright

Adaptive driving / glare-free lighting is legal in the US and Canada now and is supposed to reduce that problem

alephxyzon Hackerrank was broken – but now it's harmful

>Since everyone started using AI, more candidates started clearing the first round with flying colors. The platforms had to recalibrate to let in their target percentage.

Is there any proof or data on this? Not saying it's wrong but I'm curious how big the effect actually is.

alephxyzon Every Boeing and Airbus engine is held onto the wing by only 2 bolts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut

Although I'm not an aerospace expert I think OP is a bit confused. Most engines are mounted using a front and a rear bracket (and a third for bigger engines), and each bracket uses 4+ bolts.

alephxyzon A common urban intersection in the Netherlands (2018)

The dreaded multi-use path where pedestrians, joggers, dog walkers, parents with strollers, bike commuters, e-scooters, roadies, kids with training wheels and older folks on 4 wheel scooters are forced to share the same 2.5m strip of asphalt, while cars get 2 lanes to drive and 2 for storage

alephxyzon Steam drops Windows 7 and 8 support with the latest client

Okay here are the first few that come to mind:

- displaying a full screen dialog on login asking me to enable OneDrive with options being: yes/remind me in 3 days/remind me in a week;

- ads in start menu;

- using MS Edge + bing for searches from the start menu, disregarding the default browser;

- ditto but for Outlook links (at least this one can be disabled)!

- different pop up/dialogs that prompt you to switch to Edge/Edge+copilot every few weeks

alephxyzon Steam drops Windows 7 and 8 support with the latest client

The big issue with Win10/11 is that it contains malware marketed as features

alephxyzon Boeing Wonderland: The Fake Cities on America's West Coast (2013)

Strategic and cruise missiles are meant to operate in doomsday scenarios without active guidance and instead use a combination of inertial navigation, celestial navigation and terrain matching.

alephxyzon ChatGPT Search

Not just lyrics. Searching for quotations or text excerpts is much harder and double quotes to only get exact matches also returns unrelated results.

On the other hand, chatgpt 4o-mini and 3.5 will just make up source material which is amusing but not very helpful.

alephxyzon Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

That's why you pre-fire around corners and through doors

alephxyzon IBM's new SWE agents for developers

>That score places the IBM SWE agent high up the SWE-bench leaderboard, well above many other agents relying on massive frontier models, like GPT-4o and Claude 3.

They're not even in the top half of the leaderboard. Almost half the score of the first place agent.

alephxyzon Bike Manufacturers Are Making Bikes Less Repairable

AFAIK you can extract the bearings from the bottom bracket with generic tools. So they should've been at least able to regrease or replace those. You can also find custom made bottom brackets online for 2-400€ if it comes down to that. But for an 8yo model from a big manufacturer you can find mass produced ones for a reasonable price. Maybe they just really wanted you to buy a new bike from them.

alephxyzon Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

IIRC Cabot was trying to raise money for an expedition at the same time as Columbus and did reach continental America before him.

alephxyzon DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville

>The conclusion followed comparisons of DNA samples from the tomb with others taken from one of Columbus’s brothers, Diego, and his son Fernando.

>The knottier question of the explorer’s precise origins will be revealed in Columbus DNA: His True Origin, a special TV programme shown on Saturday 12 October, the date when Spain celebrates its national day and commemorates Columbus’s arrival in the New World.

So if we've had DNA samples of his brother what was stopping us from finding out his "precise origins" earlier?

alephxyzon Generate pip requirements.txt file based on imports of any project

I'm not gonna dig up someone's history to figure out what you mean. If you're going to make a throwaway account to insult someone at least be explicit about your accusations.

alephxyzon Generate pip requirements.txt file based on imports of any project

Source? Never heard of it until today

alephxyzon Why use metaphors in conflicts? Because understanding is remembering in disguise (2009)

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

alephxyzon Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

Unlikely: >We don’t use posts or comments with an audience other than Public for these purposes.

alephxyzon We built the city of Colombo in Cities:Skylines

You can download a height map file from https://terrain.party/ or https://heightmap.skydark.pl/ and start a new game with the unlimited money cheat. Then it's just a matter of placing roads, utilities, public services and zoning the rest (that's the fun part).

alephxyzon Michael Phelps is 14 feet tall

Too low quality, I think it's just a crappy content farm and not an LLM (e.g. using "he did' instead of "he was" in the intro and the lactate threshold diagram is wrong)