Hacker News Reader

shmageggyon The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas (2022)

So true. This tweet of his really drives home the point (https://twitter.com/pontifier/status/1559080834057097219?s=2...)

> Ants, flies, termites, cockroaches, mice, rats, mosquitoes, thieves...

> They all want what you have, and make life miserable.

> Will I ever have peace? I'm so tired of everything, and don't see an end to it.

There's a very simple solution to this problem my dude...

shmageggyon 'We are essentially in a new Gilded Age'

Are you looking at the right report? The one linked, "How do the largest US corporations contribute to inequality?: Oxfam's Corporate Inequality Framework" [1] has labeled axes, includes a sizable appendix with links to data sources, and covers much more than DEI topics, which are only a subset of one of four pillars ("People"), which also covers workplace conditions, human rights, etc. The other pillars being "Power", "Profits", and "Planet".

[1] https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/research-publications/c...

shmageggyon The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary

The organization that grants these titles, DarkSky International, bases them more on local policy towards light pollution rather than the absolute magnitude of darkness. It's more about whether the local municipality has committed to good lighting ordinances etc.

shmageggyon Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and Indigenous

The cut-down title hides the whole point and contents of the article, which is a really interesting piece about indigenous sovereignty.

Original title: "Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and undeniably Indigenous"

shmageggyon A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments

The "foundation for technology like SIMA from Google" is more likely all of the other RL + games work that Deepmind did before and after that DOTA project.

shmageggyon The Best Essay

Not to mention that "best" is subjective, so there is no single ordering, but "How to write Paul Graham's favourite essay" wouldn't get as many clicks on HN (ironic for a site with anti-clickbait rules).

shmageggyon The algebraic structure of Infinite Craft

Combined with the hyper-edges, I agree that's what's unusual here. Some Googling for "commutative but not associative" gave (besides some abstract math examples) the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors and the average function as two intuitive examples.

shmageggyon I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

Anyone familiar with C++ willing to speculate what about the language feature (or things people have written about it) that may have triggered the safety guardrails? Something like a blog post cheekily titled "C++ concepts: adult supervision required"?

shmageggyon US spends billions on roads rather than public transport in 'climate time bomb'

The article focuses on the adverse consequences for climate, with a mention of safety and livability of communities, but it neglects the effects roads have on biodiversity. There is a recent book that exposes how devastating roads are for nature (https://www.bengoldfarb.com/crossings). Expanding highways will only worsen it.

shmageggyon Working with Purpose, Forever

As mentioned in the article. Anything to add?

shmageggyon Starving to Death on a Full Stomach

> All we can really do is each do our best on an individual level to reduce our carbon footprint.

No, that's not all we can really do. We could also choose to reform political and economic systems that make western-style societies so un-ecological.

shmageggyon I Spent a Week with Gemini Pro 1.5–It's Fantastic

It's a valid concern, and there is research into this. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/06/09/ais-growing-car... is one article, but lots more to be found via Google. Currently AI training is very small relative to agriculture and industry, but of course it's trending upwards.

shmageggyon Graphic Presentation (1939)

These are fairly easy to find using HN search (https://hn.algolia.com)

Here's one from 1584: Natural Magick (1584) 67 points by brudgers on Oct 8, 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180895)

I'm sure you could easily go back further

shmageggyon Encoding tic-tac-toe in 15 bits

Not every transition, but all of the optimal ones https://xkcd.com/832/

shmageggyon The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

> I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated.

Like which ones? I tried Tidal and music discovery sucks just as badly there too. I'm really craving a music discovery experience that brings back the humanity. Even when an algorithm suggests a good song, it still feels hollow and divorced from any cultural context.

shmageggyon YC: Requests for Startups

> We have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change if startups offer commercial solutions to decarbonize society or remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Either this is sloppily phrased, or the SV techno-optimist kool-aid is way stronger than I would have thought plausible. Does anyone seriously believe that a reasonable solution to climate change has exactly one thing on the list and it's "more climate tech start-ups"? Of course climate tech has to play a role (we need everything we can throw at the problem), and start-ups will certainly provide a subset of that tech, but claiming that this alone provides "a fair chance" is extremely revealing of certain bias (and ignorance)

shmageggyon Half Earth: A Planetary Crisis Planning Game

Me: Force everyone to go vegan and ban cars

The Authoritarian: Grr! You're not being authoritarian enough!

More seriously, this is a nice game to get thinking about the incredible task ahead of us to fix our society. However it's far too easy. They could have made a stronger statement by making it truly difficult to navigate the competing priorities and conflicting interests. It's not going to be easy.

shmageggyon Are we visible to advanced alien civilizations?

> Apparent FTL is at least theoretically possible under our current understanding

That's news to me. Source?

shmageggyon Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search

Dedicated chess computers were hitting 2000 ELO with an 8-bit 6502 running at <10MHz in the late 1980s. The Novag Super expert had 96KB of ROM, which also included the opening book, so yeah, quite a bit smaller.

https://schach-computer.info/wiki/index.php?title=Novag_Supe...

https://www.schach-computer.info/wiki/index.php?title=Mephis...

shmageggyon Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search

Yeah, they need to compare against the latest BT2 policy head. It's probably about the same performance.

shmageggyon The New Work-Life Balance: Don't Have Kids

Was anyone able to actually read this article? I was greeted by a barrage of popups and overlays that even broke the back button

shmageggyon Infinite Craft

teenager + apple pie = pregnancy

shmageggyon Learning Universal Predictors

I think you've got it backwards: LessWrong was saying these author's words. Hutter has been publishing about this topic for almost 25 years.

shmageggyon Ancient City Found in the Amazon

Without the GPT-speak:

> Archaeology has historically assumed that European civilization was more significant and advanced than others, a view possibly rooted in ethnocentrism and racism, but findings like these challenge that assumption.

Please just say what you want to say without pasting a bunch of fluff from a chat bot.

shmageggyon NASA selects a plan to "swarm" Proxima Centauri with tiny probes

> There's abundant precedent of accelerating to high speeds in space

But there's zero precedent for slowing down once you get somewhere (in 10,000 years)

shmageggyon Are roads the biggest driver of ecological destruction?

"Noise is really a form of habitat loss."

This really resonates. It's kind of obvious once it's stated, but the aural environment is part of the habitat. I bet the examples they give, such as owls listening for the sound of mice, are only a tiny subset of the ecological disruption caused by the noise of civilization, which is primarily road noise. Hopefully there will be more studies in the future like the phantom road noise experiment they mention.

shmageggyon We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

But think of the maintenance cost. It must be dollars per year!

shmageggyon A chess TUI implementation

What's a half-block and how do I use one?

shmageggyon A chess TUI implementation

This gets the correct aspect ratio but the glyphs (on my terminal) look stretched :(

shmageggyon A chess TUI implementation

It has always bothered me that there are no Unicode code points for the left/right halves of chess pieces, which would enable a nearly square board using two characters per square.

This is a nice solution, but it makes for a rather big board.