Hacker News Reader

the_lonely_roadon Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

You will have a hard time being heard over the hoards content to tear down their houses out of anger that they are not palaces.

the_lonely_roadon Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate

Are the same people saying both things? “Anti Biden” people are a wide swath of Americans and not required to agree with one another on any specific point.

the_lonely_roadon Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts

When did the discourse become so childish? Official acts is pretty clear and all of the fascination with the new standard will be derived from the gray area where reasonable adults disagree but the president can’t just order a bombing run on Toronto or murder political opponents now anymore then he could last week.

the_lonely_roadon New seafloor map only 25% done, with 6 years to go

Atlantis is 15 meters under the sea bed at this point. This doesn't put that myth to rest at all.

the_lonely_roadon What made Earth a giant snowball 700M years ago? Scientists have an answer

Ahh yes famously American media like Squid Games and Alice in Borderland are so filled with gory violence I can barely handle it. And American movies are famous for having so few steamy sex scenes in them that people are not constantly rolling their eyes at the “sex sells” mantra to explain their frequency.

the_lonely_roadon Emmet Shear statement as Interim CEO of OpenAI

user: How to make a White Russian?

AI: I’m sorry due to the ongoing conflict we currently don’t provide information related to Russia. (You have been docked one social point for use of the following forbidden words: “White).

Or maybe more dystopian…

AI: Our file on you suggests you may have recently become pregnant and therefore cannot provide you information on alcohol products. CPS has been notified of your query.

the_lonely_roadon We Investigated Roblox: Your Kid’s Favorite Game Is Exploiting Them

Quite contrary to the above take I find the article quite bad and uninteresting. Most of it is bad takes spinning rather mundane things in the most nefarious light possible. The only part of the entire article that was actually potentially damning was the accusation that children can be gambling for real money that they can cash out of the game. That is so damning that I find it hard to believe but would want the entire game shut down and prison sentences if it’s true.

the_lonely_roadon What’s wrong with billable hours

I clicked on you because I was curious and noticed your bio says you live in Nevada still if you care.

the_lonely_roadon Sag-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry

One of the most popular add ins for World of Warcraft released in recent memory is one that adds voice acting to all of the quests that were previously text only. No voice actors were hired as part of its creation. I doubt a return to silent protagonists is what we will see in this space.

the_lonely_roadon Someone bought 52,000 acres in the Bay Area. No one knows who they are

Probably something boring like a new theme park but its fun to come up with more elaborate conspiracy thinking.

the_lonely_roadon Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

That’s a common story on HN but not at all a reflection of real life. Be careful letting the internet convince you of something without doing your research. There are lots of us with deep tenure at a single employer. It would not surprise me to find it’s still the majority of professionals.

the_lonely_roadon Stable Diffusion XL 1.0

I used this: https://learnwithnaseem.com/best-playground-ai-prompts-for-a...

I just took the ones I liked and then deleted out the words that were specific to that image and left the ones that were providing the style of the image. So for example on the first one I would delete "an cute kitsune in florest" but would keep "colorfully fantast concept art". Then I just added a comma separated list of the of the features I wanted in my picture. It took a lot more trial and error than I thought and adding sentences seemed to be worse than just individual words. I am sure I barely scratched the surface of interfacing with the tool correctly but the space is moving so fast its not the kind of thing I want to spend my time learning right now just to have that knowledge deprecate in 6 months.

the_lonely_roadon Stable Diffusion XL 1.0

https://playgroundai.com/create

Not affiliated in anyway and not very involved in the space. I just wanted to generate some images a few weeks ago and was looking for somewhere I could do that for free. The link above lets you do that but I suggest you look up prompts because its a lot more involved than I expected.

the_lonely_roadon A world where people pay for software

I usually consider myself a decently smart individual but damnit this has me questioning that...

I read through your landing page and your how-it-works page and I am still...confused. That it ends on a hand wavey "we haven't solved this part yet" statement does not inspire confidence.

As best I can tell you are going to take a lot of open software and gatekeep it behind a paywall but each user only has to pay once...to someone...and then they can access all of the software behind that gate. So you are trying to make an ecosystem of software that can only be accessed by people that have paid some money at least once?

the_lonely_roadon Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?

As the site grows the number of people interested in any specific tech gets smaller while the number of people interested in lifestyle posts (politics being a major category of those) grows. Ruby and or Rust specific posts get much less upvotes and lifestyle posts get much more upvotes and the frontpage with its limited real estate becomes less and less specific tech related. The problem will only continue to get worse as the population of users grows.

AI is new and of interest to lots of people so its closer to a lifestyle post at this point than it is a pytorch post that most people would not even click on.

the_lonely_roadon A functional cure for diabetes is now available in the US

A large number of people working in specific areas of disease research and study, especially at the pharma companies, are doing it because they or someone they love dearly suffers from or died from the disease. How would all of these people be kept quiet?

the_lonely_roadon How the new Threads app is made

Porn adjacent material. Technically SFW usually but not the kind of thing you want your coworkers seeing you look at.

the_lonely_roadon Wash trading gone wrong – how a $100M/day crypto exchange bankrupted itself

Yes it does. Where we live at least.

the_lonely_roadon Pixar was never a masterpiece factory

Weird because of those three movies I would say Inside Out was the most beautiful masterpiece they have created in the last 10 years hands down.

the_lonely_roadon ‘His ideas resonate’: how the Unabomber’s dangerous anti-tech manifesto lives on

He was a sympathetic villain. Hollywood writers would struggle to develop one as good. Like all sympathetic villains you are supposed to read the first half of his story (what happened to him) and come away feeling bad for him and understanding his desire for revenge. You are then supposed to look at what he did to achieve that vengeance and hate him. It’s a step over the line from an anti-hero. Had he targeted CIA offices and politicians that supported them we would consider him an anti hero more like the punisher, Gerald Butler in Law Abiding Citizen, or John Wick. Instead he chose to kill random people that had nothing to do with his tragic origin story so he is just a sympathetic villain that needed to be put down. Of course there is a segment of society that would put down anti heroes as well as sympathetic villains so your position on the topic it really more a judgement statement about your moral stance than an objective statement.

the_lonely_roadon An America-Less Internet

Not sure why this comment is downvoted. It works the same even within the United States. There are 50 of them after all despite all conversation focusing on Florida, California, and Texas. We all know San Francisco and Austin but I couldn't name much more than that with a gun to my head despite knowing there must be dozens of cities in each of those states.

the_lonely_roadon Four children found alive in Amazon 40 days after plane crash

Here is a good historical reference from a western viewpoint.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_children_in_the_m...

I am less familiar with other regions of the world but understand it to be common place in some of them to this day.

the_lonely_roadon Apollo Back end just made public

The most charitable reading of your comment still leads one to question what you would consider the right if Elon is far right. I am pretty sure he is a moderate leaning both ways on differing topics.

the_lonely_roadon Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

It’d also highly possible they did nothing wrong and the guy wanted to tank the interview for another reason. A favored candidate, opposing the team expansion, racism/sexism/ageism etc.

the_lonely_roadon Meta has started its latest round of layoffs, focusing on business groups

Eh even those Americans are doing pretty well in the grand scheme. We know that we are importing a bunch of illegal immigrants and using them as manual labor in our disgusting factories and brutal fields. We are not paying them the minimum wage nor giving them any kind of retirement benefits or even the basic human decency of being able to visit their loved ones in the hospital without severe risk. And yet we allow this situation to persist with minimal hand waving dedicated to the issue. If we are going to assign serfdom to anyone surely it would be this invisible class of Americans. Then again, they are here by choice, risking much in the process, because ultimately its a better option for them then they had elsewhere so does it really make sense to even compare these people to the brutality of histories serfdom? Doesn't seem so.

the_lonely_roadon Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

It’s a political issue not mired in reality but instead in a desire to affect policy. They do it because it works. This discussion is an example of it’d effectiveness. People who will look to the statistics for context in other situations are quick to dismiss them here. There is no rational reason to be anymore concerned about school shootings in America than any other cause of premature death in children and quite a bit of reason to be less concerned. If you want to protect your children focus on drugs, cars, and military recruiters.

the_lonely_roadon Minetest: An open source voxel game engine

If you like the genre you should check out Colony Survival! It’s a fun voxel game with a tight gameplay loop based around how high can you make number go up though observation.

the_lonely_roadon LAION, a high school teacher’s free image database, powers AI unicorns

That doesn’t seem like cultural context at all. That just seems like the arbitrary decision of the person who created the captchas. I am, presumably, from the same culture as them and would have agreed that pole was part of the traffic light.

the_lonely_roadon Stop irreversible damage to the Amazon

Who is guarding the land? Does it have cameras on it that you can use to see how the land looks? Feels like a waste of money if the authorities can’t protect the land.

the_lonely_roadon SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

The article you posted doesn't really support calling him "outright anti-trans". From the article you used as support:

Twitter’s modified policy is a step back for the platform, especially when Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube don’t even maintain the same protections for trans people that Twitter once had. Last year, GLAAD gave each of these platforms fairly low scores in regard to LGBTQ safety, privacy, and expression but noted that Twitter and TikTok were the only two platforms out of the bunch that had specific policies against deadnaming and misgendering trans users.

So now the only major platform that has this policy is TikTok...famously 'woke' (silly term these days) companies like Google don't even seem to have this policy. The policy was only in place for the past few years at Twitter, so this in fact seems like its just a reversion to the mean rather than some kind of direct attack on trans rights.