Recent submissions

Comment · 12 days ago
Math is more like a treasure hunt than a chess game. Once the treasure is found, it's over. You can try chasing other treasures of course, but now you deal with superhuman competition (which will only become better with time). I can understand this is devastating and depressing
Comment · 3 months ago
I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case. People who ridicule wikipedia policies should at least acknowledge that the modern internet is a very low trust society with millions of bad actors trying to push their agenda at the expense of others. And now with AI bots running amok the headache increases tenfold. What can an open contribution encyclopedia do in this low trust environment other than enforcing strict, rigid rules?

People seem to focus in the particular case but miss the general case. An example tweet from the article by Casey Muratori: I tell Jimmy Wales that JangaFX was written in Odin. He asks for a source. A JangaFX founder replies to him and confirms that it was. Jimmy ignores his (and my) response, while replying to later posts in the thread:

Maybe the JangaFX founder is a very trustworthy fellow, sure, but does this reasoning work for EVERY founder and CEO of a company? Can it become a general policy? Another tweet talks about github stars...

Comment · 6 months ago
A fun excercise but lots of corner cases not covered. For example the words ακριβός (expensive) and ακριβώς (exactly) would have exactly the same spelling
Comment · 7 months ago
I don't like a$$holes but they do exist and they are part of our species, ergo intelligent. My opinion of them doesn't change the fact
Comment · 7 months ago
You don't have to be empathetic and nice, just good at navigating society.
Comment · 7 months ago
How well you interact with other members of a society increases your chances of procreation, survival, knowledge acquisition, ie. it makes sense as a measure of intelligence
Comment · 7 months ago
Social cognition: processing and interpreting social information and responding appropriately in social situations

Is social cognition really a measure of intelligence for non-social entities?

Comment · 10 months ago
You forget network infrastructure, high frequency trading, ASIC prototyping and emulation. These are not hobbyist or government markets
Comment · 1 year ago
What would be the evolutionary pressure to grow wheels? They are useless without roads
Comment · 1 year ago
A truly unique game that after decades it still evokes feelings only a piece of art can. Thank you Eric Chahi
Comment · 1 year ago
It seems it's more complex than that. Greece and Portugal are also getting the Polish treatment (Tier2), so are Iceland, Switzerland and Israel
Comment · 2 years ago
On a tangent, what is astonishing to me as an outsider is the cultural stagnation. Even in times of economic decline Britain was a cultural powerhouse. Modern music, theater, cinema, tv, literature, sports, etc. were permanently shaped by post-war Britain (especially in Europe). Whatever the cultural norm dictated by the behemoth that is the USA, Britain always had something new, something fresh to give. There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.

What happened in the last 15 years is a mystery to me. I doubt it's economic stagnation (been there before) and I doubt it collapsed under the weight of US culture (which is still enamored with anything British). Maybe the modern internet and social media diluted everything. I don't know, but I miss it. (sorry for the off-topic)

Comment · 2 years ago
I'm not talking about kids, I'm talking about adolescents (as is the quoted paragraph). I strongly believe that an adolescent's well being is tightly coupled with social interactions. If a restriction is not protecting them from life threatening situations, then alienating them from their peers is probably worse.
Comment · 2 years ago
An excellent point. Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option (lets' be real, they'll find a way to circumvent your efforts anyway) and moving the burden of restriction from society to individuals is not fair.

So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.

I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.

Comment · 3 years ago

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton