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hnaccount_rng

805 karma · joined January 17, 2021

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hnaccount_rng··on Stop Killing Games
It's not (only) a cultural thing. It's primarily an economic one! Getting a $THING fixed requires typically:

1) Getting a technician out to identify the fault

2) Order the required replacement part and wait for it to be shipped

3) Getting the technician out again to actually fix the fault

The technician needs to be sufficiently skilled, wants vacations and sick days. We can somewhat trade-off utilisation vs. travel time, but I would be shocked if we can get a single turn out to be reliable below an hour. Even if we are optimistic and calculate with 100 bucks / hour this means the cheapest possible replacement is 200 bucks. That means it's _strictly_ cheaper to immediately throw everything below 200 away. And for everything more expensive we still need to beat opportunity costs and failed-to-actually-fix-the-problem fixes.

If you do these calculations in earnest I'd be shocked if _economically_ it's worth to repair anything below 500 bucks.

hnaccount_rng··on Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B
The point isn't about a change of legality. It's about a change of enforceability! In the normal regulated financial system _every_ entity you can interact with is known to someone who is a) good at keeping paper traces and b) extremely motivated to provide them, given appropriate motivation, i.e. a properly formed request by authorised parties. And that limits the number of times you can do anything scammy to "few" before you need to switch identities

So in your scenario: The 3 billion will reappear at some point and they will raise flags. And at that point there is a convenient rendezvous point between law enforcement and the perpetrators. And we can all quibble about whether the authorisation is appropriate or not (not all "requests" are requests and most won't even need anything close to a court order). But it's damn convenient to follow the money

hnaccount_rng··on Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process
How many tokens did you use up and what did you pay for them?
hnaccount_rng··on They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers
Not sure if that does help you though. A business that only exists because it doesn't have to pay taxes kind of shouldn't exist in the first place. At least not as a business
hnaccount_rng··on Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck
Interesting thought. Yeah.. the whole LLM-generated thing might end up being a boon. It is (reasonably) distinctive. At least for now. And rightly or wrongly it triggers defensive reflexes
hnaccount_rng··on Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck
Came here looking for this comment!

I think we will need to find a way to communicate “this code is the result of serious engineering work and all tradeoffs have been thought about extensively” and “this code has been vibecoded and no one really cares”. Both sides of that spectrum have their place and absolutely will exist. But it’s dangerous to confuse the two

hnaccount_rng··on They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers
It's an interesting video, on the other hand it's also 80$ a piece. And I'm pretty sure they do not recoup R&D with those prices on reasonable compensation rates...
hnaccount_rng··on JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet
The number of photons themselves is not too restrictive (i think the voyager probe still emits 6ish photons per second directed at the receiving dish). And we easily build sensors that detect every photon (far above 99% levels). The tricky part will be differentiating between “source photons” and “background photons” (for Voyager we exactly know what to look for, here we wouldn’t have any baseline for distinguishing)
hnaccount_rng··on The bitter lesson is coming for tokenization
Isn't that a rather trivial result? Or at least expected? Unless you manually encode the "this token consists of those tokens" information those are completely independent things for the model?
hnaccount_rng··on I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck
Do you have numbers for that? Because the higher-end munition also has (rudimentary) steering capabilities? And higher end stuff obviously has the same or better honing software
hnaccount_rng··on I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck
The estimate is 20 FPV hits for one kill right? But sure, the last one kills it
hnaccount_rng··on I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck
Then again the payload of an FPV is much more comparable to the mortar round than to the 155mm one
hnaccount_rng··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
But ambiguity with respect to weapons production has to be taken as a confirmation of an intent to develop weapons of the opposite side. Which makes this equivalent to just having a nuke program. It doesn't even give you a bargaining chip because there is nothing you can do as a step back (since you didn't do anything in the first place)
hnaccount_rng··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
They always immediately stop their conflicts once the building opposite of the one with the nuclear command center blows up. So... it seems to work for them
hnaccount_rng··on Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far
Do you have any source for the "they are loosing customers"? I always thought, that they consciously decided to have that shit of an interface because no one relevant to them (i.e. purchasing departments) cares?
hnaccount_rng··on Apple has announced its final version of macOS for Intel
That and a crap trackpad. Mean people could call those two point more than 90% of the reason to choose a Laptop ;)
hnaccount_rng··on OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%
They don’t need to. It’s totally sufficient that they can correlate your chat history with your identity. That makes other identifiers more valuable, if they can extract your interests
hnaccount_rng··on Why We're Moving on from Nix
I think I got the first part, including and up to

> If this still seems too complicated it would probably be better to just dive in and mess with it so you can physically see what's going on.

And it really seems like NixOS being _the_ correct :tm: solution for what I want from an home server. The problem is that Nix doesn't quite cover (or at least didn't when I first deeply looked) my needs (it lacked a useful Clickhouse package). And I don't even want to say "Nix should be simpler". I don't even think it _can_, it's fundamentally a complicated and complex problem to deal with!

My problem is solely with the Nix community. The amount of jargon-loving and argumentative "you shouldn't attempt what you are attempting in the first place" or "you are holding it wrong" gaslighting is really something :D

I think the point where you fail to grasp the problem is: Nobody is claiming that Nix can't do a thing. My complaint is: There is no way to find _the_ way to do the thing. And there seem to be multiple _incompatible_ ways to achieve any given state. Without any way to distinguish those (let's call them) camps for a new person. In this way it's everything Unix but dialled to eleven! You don't need to argue (for me) that anything _can_ be done. I'm getting that from "Turing complete". My problem is only the practice: How do I get there?

edit: I think my immediate problem is: How do I get the series of "commands" that a nix derivation will invoke? Kind of like "what's the receipt, that is being executed?" That's missing for a sensible repl-loop for me. I'm sure I'll be getting there. The capability that Nix offers is extremely appealing. But at the same time the documentation and community are unhelpful to the extreme

hnaccount_rng··on Why We're Moving on from Nix
I spend significant parts of my PhD maintaining the packaging and deployment infrastructure of our group. But yes, I have close to no computer science and reasonably little intrinsic interest in the problem space (though I have a deep appreciation). Still I think I have a better than average understanding of the packaging space..
hnaccount_rng··on Apple has announced its final version of macOS for Intel
I had one of those for a bit.. It has like half a day of battery power. And in about 50% of the cases it didn't hibernate properly. That being said: It's probably one of the better Linux laptops. Which says about everything that needs saying :/
hnaccount_rng··on Why We're Moving on from Nix
I’m very sorry. But for a person that tries to get into Nix this reads like pure gaslighting. I haven’t even found an official description of what Nix vs NixOS vs nixpkgs tries to achieve vs what they do not want to achieve.

There is a near infinite collection of blog posts what people use Nix for. All full of Nix-internal jargon derisively critiquing alternative (that do in fact actually work) without ever coming out and laying the groundwork for what the underlying problem is _and what the solution to that is_.

I think that I would end up liking Nix in principle. I really did enjoy the Spack package management system and I do think Nix is doing things reasonably similarly (everything is Nix, all inputs are securely provided, reusing things as much as possible).y current problem is taking a homelab server into “production” and all I really want is a way to write down a state I want the services on it to be in, have that in a git repo and be able to regenerate this server after loosing it (in a first step without any data backup). I’m still, after 2 months (wall clock, call it maybe 3 days actually getting into this project), not sure if that’s a thing Nix tries to cover! (I think it does, but..)

hnaccount_rng··on Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
Isn't the problem the "labelling" of "privacy-sensitive" in the first place?
hnaccount_rng··on Webb telescope helps refine Hubble constant
The irony of course being that Hubble's original data is, at least in modern scientific analysis, very well compatible with "no expansion". There is _a lot_ of community flavour involved in how we talk about measurement results
hnaccount_rng··on Webb telescope helps refine Hubble constant
Or a common unchallenged assumption. Orthodox errors are always only obvious in hindsight
hnaccount_rng··on The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
That’s a difficult example. I don’t think anyone would reasonably expect the engineering artifact twitter.com to break. But the business artifact did break. At least to a reasonable degree. The Ad revenue is still down (both business news and the ads I’m experiencing are from less well resourced brands). And yes, that has to do with “answering emails with poop emojis” and “laying off content checkers”
hnaccount_rng··on John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
But that resonance is a form of surprise. You are just using different words for the same context. At the same time: You are correct in the sense, that this "surprise" is completely ignored by today's LLMs. They only use this in training mode and not for continuous learning. Whether one can find a sufficiently useful definition of "surprise" to use auxiliary "learning systems" (vector DBs or system prompts) has yet to be shown
hnaccount_rng··on AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected
There is an interesting analogy that my Analysis I professor once said: The intersection of all valid examples are also a definition of an object. In many ways this is, at least in my current understanding, how ML systems "think". So yeah it will take some superposition of examples and kind of try to interpolate between those. But fundamentally it is - at least so far - always an interpolation, not an extrapolation.

Whether we consider that "just regurgitating Stackoverflow" or "it thought up the solution to my problem" mostly comes up to semantics

hnaccount_rng··on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation
Basically none of modern optics would exist without astronomy (well at least astronomy is a convenient cover for military/intelligence interests funding better optics). Most of statistics and efficient cameras originate in astronomy/astrophysics (mostly because you have to count all the photons and you are never getting a second relevant measurement point)

There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded. Results are often spun out into companies, but there is no institution that can fund experiments that require timelines of multiple decades (even things like fusion power is nearly completely government funds)

And those are the only two parts where I actually have some competence. So yeah.. I wouldn't buy

hnaccount_rng··on Europe launches program to lure scientists away from the US
I'm not sure if you can separate this as easily. In Germany for example a lot of funding comes through Max Planck institutes (and Fraunhofer and Leibniz centres and I' forgetting one), not sure if those are counted as government, but they are basically on par with the US national labs (but less military contacts)
hnaccount_rng··on The future of solar doesn't track the sun
Installation costs dominate largely due to one-off things (getting the contractor/customer, roof access, adapting to bespoke roof layout, etc) which are disproportionately larger for smaller installation sizes. However for new construction those things are essentially free. So yes, I’d absolutely expect that solar will be added during larger rebuilds. But that is not an effective way of “deploying solar”
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