Hacker News Reader

evv555on Tech takes the Pareto principle too far

I don't really disagree but if you look at the most played games on steam many of them are now old. There's a growing inventory of games that are turning into classics.

evv555on Narcolepsy is weird but I didn't notice

>The dream can be either vivid or fuzzy, but it plays out in just the same manner as when I'm asleep, just kind of superimposed upon my normal waking senses. I guess this is a combination of "I just thought this is how it was for everybody," as well as "I never stopped and paid attention to what was actually happening, and once I did I noticed how weird it was."

This was the primary effect I got from theta wave binaural beats. Superimposed but at same time not easily accessible as a memory even though it was happening at the moment. Like with a regular dream once a bit of the dream was recalled the rest of it would come back to memory.

evv555on Personality Basins

You can accept that "personalities" have a state space without falling into reductive explanations. They're not mutually exclusive.

evv555on Full text search over Postgres: Elasticsearch vs. alternatives

bm25 is often used along side vector search with a reciprocal rerank algorithm.

evv555on The Genomic Code: The genome instantiates a generative model of the organism

It was just the less controversial direction. You would be accused of anthropomorphizing and teleological thinking if you suggested evolution is a search process towards some optimum. Good luck talking to an orthodox biologist about evolutionary processes with constructs like agents and intelligence.

evv555on The Genomic Code: The genome instantiates a generative model of the organism

>The encoder being evolution is an idea that has been developed by Sui Huang and numerous others.

Parallels between evolutionary systems and hill-climbing algorithms have been floating around for a long time at this point.

evv555on Share of total health spending, by percentile

Is this over a lifetime or any given year? If it's the latter it's just a different 1 percent every year which will eventually include you. Clickbait framing of data.

evv555on Evidence for global cultural diffusion

I lean towards the "convergent evolution" explanations of perennial philosophies as well. However paleolithic humans have also gone through geographical and population bottlenecks. If there are convergent features in culture you would expect them to also be the ones highly conserved after going through such a bottleneck. I don't draw the same conclusions as the author but the idea of paleolithic story telling as being an ancient memory preservation mechanism is compelling.

evv555on Better RAG Results with Reciprocal Rank Fusion and Hybrid Search

Llamaindex rerank module

evv555on The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin

>If you just look at plant morphology and animal anatomy then evolution is kind of obvious.

Before evolution this was the "great chain of being" ontology which tried to explain the continuous gradation of structures in the world. Ideas like "missing link" appear within this worldview before Darwin's theory[1]. It's mostly accurate to say evolutionary theory is the great chain of being worldview with an added temporal dimension.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being#Scala_Nat...

evv555on Google Genie lets users generate AI outputs resembling video games

The images are great for memes/sh*tposting. These are still curated content though.

evv555on 28-ton, 1.2-megawatt tidal kite is now exporting power to the grid

>Tidal energy is wasted by natural coastlines all the time

Erosion is a major part of Earth's carbon cycle[1]. It's not a given that you can scale this technology without impact.

1. https://carbonclaire.com/the-carbon-cycle/#:~:text=The%20geo....

evv555on It's time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life

>Genes, proteins and processes such as evolution don’t have goals, but a person certainly does. So, too, do plants and bacteria, on more-simple levels

If we're expanding the scope of what we consider to have agency and goal directedness why stop there? Evolution is analogous to a hill climbing algorithm which also has the same properties.

evv555on Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it

Speaking in the context of thinkers like Harris this is the reason why awareness is differentiated from consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to grasp the world "out there". Awareness is the blank canvas where consciousness is experienced. The analogy here is a movie projected onto a movie screen. Consciousness is the movie being played. The screen is the blank space of experience where the movie is projected. I think the confusion is there is no logically consistent differentiation of concepts like intelligence, consciousness, awareness in the sciences and they end up being used interchangeably.

evv555on Why liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds

In critical theory liberalism is synonymous with colonialism, capitalism, and all the other isms that are meant to be deconstructed. The antagonism is a core component of postmodernism.

evv555on Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

1) Yes why would you assume a a GenX would not know how to navigate algorithmic filter bubbles?

2) The low quality content on the fyp is actually representative of the state of affairs for many youth. Media and data literacy is not a strong point of GenZ. The amount of ridiculous conspiracy theories(both left and right) going viral is a parallel universe of the infamous boomer political chain emails.

evv555on Anger as some Google cloud customers locked out of files

Its a good start but still falls short of the 3-2-1 principle. You should have an additional backup that is air-gapped.

evv555on US Housing Supply – What happens when all the boomers die? (2017)

Ahh I see. Blackstone and friends are pricing out regular people from shelter out of concern for the environment. This must be a big boost for their ESG score.

evv555on Bitwarden is down with blank screen under Linux OpenSuse

Most of these managers have a keepass export option. Best option

evv555on BlackRock and housing: Setting the record straight

https://archive.ph/k73O1

"Companies also tout their ability to push rent and fees higher and higher, even as they market themselves as providers of affordable housing. Founded by Blackstone Group, a private equity giant, Invitation Homes raised its average rent in the Atlanta market 37% from $1,336 in 2016 to $1,836 today, according to public filings. It raised rent 11% in 2022 alone."

"Large investor purchases have accelerated since then. During one 12-month stretch beginning in July 2021, investors bought one out of every three homes for sale in metro Atlanta."

evv555on BlackRock and housing: Setting the record straight

Blackstone represented a quarter of all SFH purchases in my city during the COVID price run up. They priced out alot of normal people

evv555on The brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside (2020)

>It really doesn’t explain anything beyond that point.

I think taking a macroscopic view like this points at interesting types of analysis. Evolution is analogous to a hill climbing algorithm navigating towards local optima in a probability field. Macroscopic evolutionary trends give a low resolution peek into the underlying probability distributions.

evv555on The brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside (2020)

Putting this particular theory aside the generalization that evolution is a nested hierarchy of structures is pretty obvious on the macroscopic level. Traits like breathing oxygen, having symmetrical bodies, backbones, limbs. These are all examples of structures building on top of one another sequentially and conserved across species. Sure each of these subcomponents continues to specialize but the core functionality remains largely the same.

Going back to your analogy saying visual cortex of frog is wildly different from a human visual cortex. That's similar to saying a frog backbone is wildly different from a human backbone. Sure that's true but there's also a shared common core functionality largely conserved across time

evv555on The US is building factories at a fast rate

The apples to apples comparison that pops to mind is a tech consultant. Where you own a client funnel and have some potential to scale and delegate. How hard is it to create this client funnel in IT vs manufacturing?

evv555on In China, Germany’s foreign minister does not hold back–and is still welcomed

>On really crucial industries, we don't have anything, especially not in China: Social networks with billions of users, AI, computer chips, raw materials, PV cells - nothing. We couldn't cut them off from anything critical because we don't have it.

From what I have heard Chinese factories use alot of German engineering. It's been a key component of China's ascent and the current leverage they have over western interests.

evv555on Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

>Ultimately this question is the question of why the universe isn't completely isotropic in all directions with a completely uniform distribution of matter and energy.

I don't think it's a self-evident given that going against the grain of increasing entropy leads to complexity. The obvious but naieve opposite of increasing entropy is going towards something like relatively simple crystal structures.

evv555on U.S. home prices are the most unaffordable they've been in nearly 100 years

Another factor here is the rising costs and complexity of zoning/permits. In my area it will cost you 6 figures just to put down a foundation with the paperwork. This puts a floor to how cheap a house can be and what is financially viable to build.

evv555on The Holocaust shouldn't be a catch-all metaphor for hate

>Something similar exists for slavery (and Jim Crow) in the US, but we as a nation do not have the fortitude to confront our past in a way the Germans have.

Germans have no such fortitude. It was imposed on them through a victory that cost tens of millions of lives. Even then for many Germans its a surface level confrontation for the sake of political correctness.

evv555on What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

True yet most natural ontologies are represented as a poset at the fundamental levels.