Hacker News Reader

kleiba2on Poisson Disk Sampling

Possibly interesting post from Casey Muratori, regarding random placement of grass in games: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0013, using blue noise.

kleiba2on The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks

Too broad a statement, and without substantiation, to be taken serious, sorry.

kleiba2on Gemini-3.5-Transcribe

And which company better to send samples of your voice to than Google?

kleiba2on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

Traditionally, for heating your house, you had the choice between coal, oil, and gas. Electric heating wasn't a widespread alternative, esp. because of the price of electricity. Even today, heat pumps consume a fair amount of electricity. Solar panels can offset the cost but in many parts of Europe, the panels are not producing enough power in the winter, which is when you naturally want to run a heater.

And regarding ACs in cars: you will certainly agree that cooling the inside of a car for the duration of a drive vs. the inside of a whole house (or even just selected rooms) for the whole day differ from each other by orders of magnitude regarding the energy required.

kleiba2on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

> But I have to say, AC is not "banned" anywhere in Europe

Exactly, the whole premise of the article is a bit of a strawman. In fact, where I live, the demand for AC installation is so high that you have to wait months for a company to install a unit for you.

These extreme heat waves are a fairly new phenomenon, summers in central Europe just didn't use to get so hot for such a long stretch of time even a few decades ago. Now that they've become the way they are, people are doing what? Correct, installing AC units. Imagine that.

But let's not forget that energy is also on average a lot more expensive in Europe than in the US. The cost plus environmental concerns, which seem to fair less high in the public conscience on the other side of the Atlantic, have also been reasons why people were not keen on AC units in the past.

kleiba2on Fences, Not Sandboxes

Read this review on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198009905262/recomm...

kleiba2on Wiped out: US faces surging toilet paper prices amid trade war with Canada

That's okay, I still have tons left over from COVID.

kleiba2on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

Although by "average" you usually refer to the mean, not the median.

kleiba2on Queryable Executables

What if I'm running multiple instances of the same binary?

kleiba2on New EU-wide product repair rules come into force

This is more like a "right to have repaired" than a "right to repair", unfortunately.

kleiba2on Flat Chair by Sara Paculdo

Except that I just don't subscribe to the idea that flatpackedness should be the guiding principle of furniture design.

kleiba2on Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

> you absolutely cannot know what it's like until you actually have them

kleiba2on Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)

Not sure that's technically actually the same logic...

kleiba2on Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)

The same government should sue all new mothers: how dare they deliver babies into this world completely naked!!!

kleiba2on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

> The government has moved to make use of this surplus solar energy, including by offering free power in the early afternoon to homeowners in Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia, regardless of whether they have solar panels on their roof or not. The goal is to spur more consumers to run appliances or charge electric vehicles during this window.

Taking the term "1st world problems" to new heights!

kleiba2on Eclipse: The Xiaomi 17 Ultra Confuses the Moon and the Sun

Living in a post-factual world.

kleiba2on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities

What actually is "scaling post-training"?

kleiba2on k-Coloring is Faster than Computing the Chromatic Number

Nice!

OT: Do you happen to know anyone in the Melbourne area who works on this kind of stuff by any chance?

kleiba2on Why I'm leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

To me, this reads as an attempt to raise easy investment money.

kleiba2on Europe's fires are just the start

Right. That's why 50 years of searching has not been enough in Germany.

kleiba2on JEP 401: Value Objects (Preview) merged to OpenJDK master

> Someone said: java to JavaScript is like car to carpet.

You mean the sibling who commented five minutes before you?

kleiba2on Europe's fires are just the start

Unlike the states, Germany is densely populated and does not have vast uninhabited areas. Where do you suggest should they store their nuclear waste? Germany has been looking for an appropriate place for the last 50(!) years and does not expect to come to a conclusion any time soon:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-scrap-deadline-...

In the mean time, they're keeping they're using the sites of their former nuclear power plants as temporary storage locations for the nuclear waste produced while the plants were still running.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/What-now-for-Germany-s-re...

On top of all that, there's new challenges like this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/urban-infrastructure/energy-infras...

kleiba2on Europe's fires are just the start

I don't know exactly what you mean by "like Germany", but singling out Germany seems a strange choice given that the main global offenders are orders of magnitude worse in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is currently producing more than half of its electricity from renewables.

Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emissions (in Mt):

    | China         | 5,565 |
    | United States | 1,737 |
    | India         | 1,395 |
    | Russia        |   536 |
    | Japan         |   492 |

In comparison, the whole of the European Union (consisting of 27 individual countries, including Germany) is emitting 587 Mt.

All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU does not fare too bad.

[0] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...

kleiba2on Kill The Cookie Banner

> it’s well-understood that very few people actually read those things, they just want to get them out of the way.

This is a jaw-drop moment for me every single time I observe someone else using the web and quickly clicking "accept" on every single cookie banners that pops up, without ever wasting a second even reading what they're accepting. It's mind boggling to me. Sure, I'm in IT, so surely I'm more aware of data mining, profiling, and other privacy-related aspects. But in many cases, you could just click "reject" and the banner would also disappear...

To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.

kleiba2on Emacs Is a Lispboard

If the "super app" is modular - like Emacs is - you basically get the best of both worlds.

kleiba2on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting

Thanks for your great input. But you might have mistaken what I was trying to get at - certainly not that there's no difference between a computer program and a person.

kleiba2on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting

Non sequitur.

kleiba2on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting

Maybe it's just me, but when I was younger one reason that got me into AI research was the idea that one day we would have these seemingly intelligent entities that we could talk to and interact with just like we do with humans.

Now that we have that, everybody hates it.

Except me. I still like this. There might still be room for improvement, yes, but I think this is a cool attempt to making AI agents part of the team.

I think what could help make this better is investing into giving agents actual personality, instead of them being just sycophantic clones of each other. AI agents as team members should have clear aspects of distinction both in their abilities and behaviors.

kleiba2on 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

High prices might be an incentive for piracy but it cannot be a justification.

It's a bit like saying it's okay to sneak into a movie theater because the prices for movie tickets are too high.

To me, I feel it's an integral part of a democracy that if there is a law you don't like, you have means to get it changed, but it always involves convincing others that your viewpoint is the one everyone should adhere to. Likewise, it is a part of this system that you accept and adhere to the laws as they are until they have been changed. I don't system a society can work where everybody takes laws and regulations as mere suggestions and picks the ones they like to follow.

When a providers offer something at a certain price and you don't like the price, but you would still really like the thing they're offering, you have two options: you either suck it up and pay the price they're asking or you simply move on and do without that thing. I find the idea of "these prices are outrageous, so I'm entitled to getting this thing without paying at all!" not ethically justifiable.

kleiba2on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs

> There is a world of difference between "here's a problem that I'm really concerned with and poured all my expertise to solve it" and "I told Claude to fix it for me and now I'm gonna abandon it as soon as I'm done with the HN advertising"

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