Hacker News Reader

qwertygnuon Minecraft beat Minecraft after 2B years

Cool idea. The way the video explains how he used probabilistic models to simulate when an action is expected to happen doesn't feel the same as it actually happening (whatever tf "happen" means in a simulated game to begin with).

It feels like saying some specific sequence of head and tails is 99.9% likely to occur after 3 million tosses, therefore let's pretend that it did occur. Though I'm not sure where the game footage came from so maybe there was some legitimate game engine running or I'm misunderstanding.

qwertygnuon Discovery Loop

That sounds like just playing further and further into the game of the corrupt leaders. Who do you think would profit off that 5x margin? Would that margin come more likely from a scientific breakthrough of via some new exploitation of natural resources or human labor?

It's yearsss past time that our leaders should have changed policy.

qwertygnuon Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

> % of U.S. adults who say they think the impact of AI on __ over the next 20 years will be positive or negative

Blank | Negative | Positive | Equal | Not sure

Society | 40 | 16 | 31 | 13

Them, personally | 31 | 23 | 27 | 19

---

Probably as much a commentary on the fallacy that bad things won't happen to us, personally, as much as a commentary on AI. But I found the difference interesting.

qwertygnuon Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

Unfortunately it's already time to remove the "going to be" part of this.

qwertygnuon Asian governments roll out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis caused by war

I think we saw during covid that we most certainly can see the benefits in our lifetime if we took it more seriously.

qwertygnuon I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

I wonder what would happen if you tell the LLM to have no/less bias. What would the 1913 one say

qwertygnuon New iPad Air, powered by M4

I feel like you're wrong about this and small phones. Perhaps you're the one in an "everyone on HN must be in a bubble" bubble.

qwertygnuon Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock

Googled "radio controlled clock" and seeing results from $20-$200, lots of inconsistency in what the product is.

qwertygnuon AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

Look at the user lists that the band/album is included in. The title of the list should give you a good idea of what else you'll find on it.

You can also click on any one of the band/album's genres and look at the charts.

qwertygnuon If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

How does more pollution/waste equal higher consumer cost? Do you mean because we'll have to pay more taxes because we'll need more publicly funded resources to clean up the excess waste? Or because corporations would pass the price of the fines for violating environmental regulations onto consumers?

qwertygnuon Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

True, but there's probably many ways to do this and unless AI content starts falsifying tons of its metadata (which I'm sure would have other consequences), there's definitely a way.

Plus other sites that link to the content could also give away it's date of creation, which is out of the control of the AI content.

qwertygnuon You should write an agent

Very early in TFA it explains how easy it is to do. That's the whole point of the post.

qwertygnuon Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

As you seem to understand, creating something that generally fits a description is the walking for AI. Following exact directions is the running. It may just feel reversed because of the path of other technology.

qwertygnuon Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US.

It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.

qwertygnuon The day Return became Enter (2023)

A lot of people talk like this too. I'm sure I'm a little too literal, but IMO most people are too clickbait-y.

qwertygnuon Face it: you're a crazy person

Very unrelated, but when I clicked that link the image immediately appeared on my screen. It actually confused me for a second. Going to any webpage, even tiny images, takes at least a split second to happen these days, or is delayed by a new tab opening animation/load time. What a world.

qwertygnuon Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes

holy shit dog, you make over $533,000???

qwertygnuon What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)

> The functions are self contained in that their dependencies/inputs are the arguments provided or other pure functions and the outputs are entirely in the return type.

Is this just a fancy way of saying static functions?

qwertygnuon Mixxx: GPL DJ Software

You're looking for a DAW (digital audio workstation). Ardour is open source and works on Linux. It's not one of the "main" players but I'm sure it has all the important features. You can google "how to mix music" and apply pretty much any tutorial to any DAW.

qwertygnuon Tldraw Computer

I found the demos just under My Projects under the Examples section

qwertygnuon The shrimp welfare project

Responses to animal welfare articles are sad. There are mountains of evidence[0] that many animals experience emotions (including suffering) in much the same way that we do. It's tough seeing people say, without hesitation, they'd kill millions of animals over a single human.

> Shrimp are a test of our empathy. Shrimp don’t look normal, caring about them isn’t popular, but basic ethical principles entail that they matter.

I think we'll be looking back in the not-so-far future with disgust about how we treated animals.

[0] RTFA

qwertygnuon Please stop the coding challenges

There's no need to be shooting for 7 figures. Get a life

qwertygnuon 555 Timer Circuits

Whoa that's a really cool application! Another example of limitations begetting creativity.

qwertygnuon Ask HN: Determine sound quality of a file, objectively?

Looks like there's a pretty big jump at 56 in the first version as well.

qwertygnuon Justice Department to file antitrust suit against Live Nation

Apologizing on behalf of exploitation is unbelievably weak.

What do you like to do?

Bike? What if one company controlled all bike sales and bike lanes, bikes costed $20,000 and you needed to pay every time you go on a ride?

Programming? What if one company controlled all computer sales and internet access, they costed $50/hour to use and each program is another $10/hour and it costed another $200/month to host anything publicly?

qwertygnuon The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws

Can confirm, I've tripped a sawstop twice. Both times were because of the material, not flesh.

Not to say it isn't good technology, just that - anecdotally - it's more often a $150 mistake than a finger saving feature.

qwertygnuon Show HN: htmz – a low power tool for HTML

ha, I'm working on a dev-side version similar to this (mostly just for me, but hopefully publishable). I opted for an entirely pre-deplopyment build tool, where you just put

  <custom-tag custom-param="value"></custom-tag>

in your HTML, run the build and it outputs the filled in file somewhere else. I know its functionality is very similar to many web frameworks (e.g. React, handlebars) but it does one thing.

qwertygnuon Finding a new software developer job

I don't question that is takes hard work, even for more senior devs like the author, but 30 apps leading to 3 offers is a dream. Most early-career people are probably at >100 app with maybe a few interviews and hopefully one offer.

qwertygnuon How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

I don't disagree with your first sentence but your last paragraph...uhhh.

1) Do you think there's nothing to say about this (or any other album) than "fans of the genre will like it and others will not"? There's plenty of insightful things to say both to familiar audiences and others.

2) Do you think this Tool review was the first (or even first larger scale) criticism of metal fans?

qwertygnuon In loving memory of square checkbox

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myriad

There's actually a whole paragraph dedicated to explaining why "a myriad of" is just as correct (if not more).