Hacker News Reader

panarchyon A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

Canada is so lucky to have someone like Michael Geist. He's been reporting on and doing in depth investigations on privacy invasions for about 2 decades now.

panarchyon CrankGPT

Looking forward to cranking one out.

panarchyon Why are large language models so terrible at video games?

I actually really miss all the research being done on having (reinforcement learning) AIs beat Atari games and the like. Or the one that stopped at a TV playing random images instead of continuing through the level. Has there been any progress in that field? It seems like LLMs came around and all the projects stopped completely.

panarchyon Dithering with CSS

Amusingly I found the colour (Whaddaya at? Are you from the cold or wet, eh?) bleed the most interesting part for potential artistic effect.

panarchyon Backpacks got worse on purpose

Or more likely consumers aren't paid enough to buy quality.

panarchyon Costco sued for seeking refunds on tariffs customers paid

Hacker News is a court of law now?

panarchyon Qt45: A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself

Quinozyme

panarchyon Gemini 3.1 Pro

I had it make a simple HTML/JS canvas game (think flappy bird) and while it did some things mildly better (and others noticeably worse) it still fell into the exact same traps as earlier models. It also had a lot of issues generating valid JS at parts and asking it what the code should be just made it endlessly generate the same exact incorrect code.

panarchyon There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

https://thecottonwoodpost.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/emi...

https://thecottonwoodpost.net/2019/12/10/modern-climate-chan...

panarchyon The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

I think there's someone that wrote about what is to be done, but I can't remember who. /s

panarchyon The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

We can't say for sure that the current feedback loops will be identical to those that did or did not exist in the past. Differences in the initial state could result in different outcomes.

For example was there as much methane trapped in the arctics during the last time CO2 was high?

Does the rate of the increase of CO2 and temperature have an effect? Because it's currently getting hotter far faster (absurdly so) than any other period we have records for.

panarchyon Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

The problem with (3D) CAD I've heard is that the Open CASCADE CAD kernel is a huge mess. So as much as they update and fix FreeCAD (and they've made a lot of good progress, but it's still very rough around the edges) they're always going to be hampered by that. And making a new CAD kernel is a massive undertaking.

panarchyon Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

And then by the time they do get around to fixing the UI it seems the codebase is horribly bloated and littered with tech debt and now updating the UI would basically require a whole application rewrite. Which I have seen happen and work, but I also swear I've seen where teams spread themselves thin trying to make an updated UI version concurrently with their main branch only for the updated UI version to fall so far behind on features (or get worked on so rarely) that they abandoned it to fix it later...

panarchyon Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

Other open source projects should take note. It seems like UX is a complete afterthought for most and any suggestions for QoL improvements are met with hostility by the small fervent community telling everyone to go fork themselves.

Somewhat relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/

panarchyon Canada's Carney called out for 'utilizing' British spelling

It usually means rich people care about stirring up pointless outrage and/or getting clicks from people making a stir about the frivolity of it.

panarchyon Canada's Carney called out for 'utilizing' British spelling

Everyone should use Canadian spelling as it's the intermediary between both British and USA spelling it makes the most sense for the Americans and Brits to adopt it.

panarchyon Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content

Maybe we should take the definition from the mouth of an expert on fascism, Mussolini, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

panarchyon Nested Learning: A new ML paradigm for continual learning

I've been waiting for someone to make this since about 2019 it seemed pretty self-evident. It will be interesting when they get to mixed heterogeneous architecture networks with a meta network that optimizes for specific tasks.

panarchyon Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices

The stochastic part is who is doing it (random people being incited) vs an organized cell who has members engaging in random acts of violence

panarchyon Unions?

When a corporation extracts surplus value from a laborer so the company gets its dues (so the execs can get a yacht) it's good

When a union extracts some dues from laborers to be able to organize the union and payout partial wages during a strike giving workers a sliver of power with which to negotiate with for a more fair share of the profits taken by those same execs (or more reasonable working conditions) it's bad.

panarchyon Kagi News

Pretty nice so far. I enjoy the very visible categories (as in the "astronomy" label in the Science category, not the science, technology, etc ones) that make it easy to see if an article is relevant to my interests at a glance.

A save feature to keep track of interesting articles would be nice.

Having more news (or more filtered for quality) would also be nice. Right now at 12 the lists seem to be mostly taken up by trendy low-quality news that will be irrelevant and less news that doesn't make waves but will probably have more impact in the long run. Actually this might just be a lack of the number of places being scraped. Not an actual example from the site but consider how much an article of someone saying the latest comet is actually alien technology trends (but is completely irrelevant) vs a scientific paper reporting on the measurements of the atmospheric composition of a bunch of exoplanets.

panarchyon The American Nations regions across North America

"There's a Canada outside of Toronto?" - Torontonians

(all in good jest)

panarchyon Ask HN: Is America Going to Become an Autocracy?

The rise of autocrats and tyrants is often bulwarked by people saying everyone else is engaging in hyperbole and that it won't be that bad and that there's always been people like this through history so it's no big deal now. Plan accordingly @baby.

panarchyon Cardboard-Box Demand Is Slumping. Why That's Bad News for the Economy

I would be interested to see the rate of use for bubble mailers and the like over the same time period.

panarchyon Ask HN: Is America Going to Become an Autocracy?

The point of no return was likely electing someone that attempted a coup (fake electors plot) back into office. If they didn't want to leave peacefully or legally the first time what made anyone think they would the second.

PS this site is filled with people who downvote and flag any post that makes Trump look bad so good luck with yours.

Germans were 'simply' worried about their jobs and dealing with the 'violent left', homeless, and rounding up people that they viewed as invaders poisoning their way of life.

They were even largely quite happy with Hitler. He didn't take Germany against its will (technically he did, but the people fell in line and reported liking him after it happened, except for those "communists and antifa"), he was the manifest will of those who felt scorned by how society had changed around them. It wasn't until the fallout of the aftermath of their desires and evidence of the evils that they were perpetrating did they start to realize they were played and even then the sunk cost fallacy was too strong and many Germans went to their graves believing Hitler was right.

panarchyon [dead]

Yes I'm sure they're the issue with your reputation and not the friends you kept.

Just another sign of a healthy democracy. Nothing to see here. /s

panarchyon President says broadcasters should lose licenses for criticizing him

Back in my day hackers were anti-authoritarian

panarchyon U.S. sees 5.7M more childless women than expected

Don't feed the troll.

panarchyon ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair

"You could not get more blatantly corrupt than this."

Oh I'm sure they'll figure it out.

panarchyon ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair

Also be sure to get them sooner rather than later, before the government decides they need to start burning books again.