MountDoom

6 ms·

1.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
I find it weird that you single out Bush. After 9/11, a military conflict was pretty much politically inevitable. The decision to expand to Iraq was stupid, but did it really shake up the post-1991 neoliberal consensus? Or was it just
2.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
Oh come on. Quanta Magazine basically writes for HN. They have very little online footprint elsewhere, but they feature here multiple times a week and I'm sure they know it. The titles are almost always in this mold, implying some prof
3.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
> One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry. That's a complete non-sequitur.
4.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
Yes, and many German scientists went to great lengths to surrender to Western forces. I think von Braun was one of them.
5.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
> It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe Th
6.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
Did this article travel forward in time from the year 1999? In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a good number of techies who were in control of the infrastructure and believed that as long as you don't mess with oth
7.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
The honest answer that applies to almost everyone here is that as a kid, they liked playing computer games and heard that the job pays well. It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty much need a plumber parent or a frie
8.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
The regulatory landscape here is pretty funny. In all likelihood, the worst RFI offenders in your home are LED lights, followed by major appliances. Both of these are regulated less than something like a computer mouse. For lightbulbs, I th
9.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is tha
10.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
People say that, but the sales didn't really change anything. The site still looks pretty much the way it did back in the day. I think the main thing is just that Slashdot "belonged" to the BOFH / sysadmin subculture tha
11.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
I get your joke, but the thesis here isn't that Neanderthals were exposed to more lead. Instead, the claim is that we might have evolved a mutation that protects our brain against lead to some extent.
12.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
HN as an aggregator of geek news is exceptional. It's not the first of its kind - Slashdot was quite similar - but perhaps because it's associated with the SF Bay Area, it managed to stay relevant while Slashdot withered away. HN
13.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
> I think you could make AGI right now tbh. Seems like you figured out a simple method. Why not go for it? It's a free Nobel prize at the very least.
14.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
> TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society. Inform about what? Would you tune in to hear a daily report about how many old people people died of cardiac issues today? I doubt the breakdown here is different for NPR. Or BB
15.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
> These are cheap, relatively fast, and not particularly good. While they sport impressive-sounding 12- and 16-bit readouts, the effective number of bits (ENOB) is usually around 8 or 9. I don't think that's quite accurate for
16.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
> Nothing new to see here. Eh, I don't think that's a productive thing to say. There's an immense business pressure to deploy LLMs in such decision-making contexts, from customer support, to HR, to content policing, to rea
17.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
I remember people making the exact same argument about asking LLMs math questions back when they couldn't figure out the answer to 18 times 7. "They are text token predictors, they don't understand numbers, can we put this no
18.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
It would seem so. Looking at their website, they're not made out of graphene. For example, their flagship jacket is described as nylon + polyurethane underneath. It looks like they're using "graphene" as a pigment in the
19.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on. When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on tha
20.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
Google market cap has grown over 50% in the past six months. Nvidia was up nearly 70%. Tesla was in the same ballpark, I can't imagine why. Heck, Meta was up 35%, for no conceivable reason. So the headline here should be probably less
21.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
Sort of. There are many confounding factors here. For one, they're harder to find because the number of personal websites doesn't scale as quickly as commercial content and SEO spam. It's also a bit of a vicious cycle, becaus
22.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
This article is almost certainly AI-generated.
23.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
The idea of not clicking on links is frankly preposterous. The company pays you to click on links in emails; it's the nature of your job! And it's also core to how we use the internet in our spare time.
24.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
> At least it's not Musk's forever "next year". The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out i
25.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
I don't think it's malicious, it's just that Qualcomm offered a big payday to people who have been working on the project for a very long time and are probably on the verge of wanting to go something else in their life. And t
26.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
But why? You can have the same chip for much less. The "toolchain" is just a bit of syntactic sugar around existing languages and tools, but more to the point, nothing stops you from using it with your own hardware. I'm not d
27.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
> Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices. Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation w
28.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
There's a simple counterpoint to your argument: there are places that were selling physical gold for $2000 a decade ago, that were selling it for $3000 back in 2024, and that are now selling it for $4000. I don't see any of them g
29.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
Gold price in 1973 was around $60, so if your thesis is that "something must happen", it might be worth asking why the same thing didn't happen when it crossed $200, $500, $1000, $2000, or $3000.
30.
by MountDoom 11mo ago
The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a big player gets involved, they think they can change this. A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day wi

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