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BalinKing

I don't know if it's the same technology, but I had a microcontroller toy as a little kid where you'd 1) write the programs on your computer (or in my case, type them in from the tutorial book, without actually comprehending any of it) and then 2) transfer the compiled program to the device itself via (IIRC) this little puck-shaped thing with a blinking red light. It was pretty cool, I wonder if I still have it stashed away anywhere.
Re:We Took over ChatGPT Accounts on Sunday November 01, 2026 @10:07AM (#50326356)
To defend against the accusation of cherrypicking: I don't actually think the original punishments were objectively morally wrong (even though they certainly feel harsh to my modern sensibilities)—sin is no joke. At the same time, I also don't believe that the punishments (or even all of the crimes, i.e. the liturgical ones) were intended to apply to all polities throughout history. Admittedly, my argument would be primarily theological in nature[1], so I don't expect it to be convincing... we may have to agree to disagree :-P

[1] Namely, "ancient Israel is the only divinely instituted theocracy in history, so many things just won't generalize to more 'normal' polities". And/or, see Jesus' treatment of the Mosaic Law in the gospels (and the New Testament more generally).

Re:We Took over ChatGPT Accounts on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:19AM (#50322911)
I'd argue that the moral principles of the Levitical law (e.g. "adultery is wrong") are not inherently bound to the specific punishments (e.g. "adultery is a capital crime") prescribed for ancient Israel.
Re:We Took over ChatGPT Accounts on Saturday October 31, 2026 @12:32PM (#50317620)
On the contrary, many (including myself) would argue that "the victim's amount of money/power" has absolutely no ethical relevance: "You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly" (Leviticus 19:15).
I agree that "you must give away all your wealth" is not a command binding on all Christians (based on other passages in the New Testament), but generosity is commanded pretty often IIRC: Matt. 6:19–21 and 6:24, 1 Tim. 6:17–19, James 2:15–16, etc.
Thanks for the thoughtful response!

> while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denies that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are benign?

I don't think this states it strongly enough (sorry for not being clearer originally): In the gospels, Jesus is very black-and-white, e.g. "he who is not with Me is against Me" (Matt. 12:30a). In my reading, the New Testament pretty emphatically denies the existence of "benign" ideological differences, and instead it's a pretty binary you-either-actively-accept-God-or-actively-reject-Him (cf. John 3:16–20 [1], James 4:4 [2], Romans 1:16–32 [3], or Luke 16:19–31 [4]).

Re: your second point about strawmen, I'm a Christian myself and so I suppose I'm gonna have a different take on things :-) Specifically, I think the Bible is true as a matter of fact (e.g. instead of being just a collection of arbitrary books as compiled by the "theological winners" of history [5]). So, I disagree a priori with viewpoints that look at it through a purely political/historical lens. Certainly it's true that the Bible is applicable to politics, and it is a historical document after all, but for me there's not much point in trying to divine the (so to speak) "true motivation" behind it, instead of just taking it at face value. (I'd say something similar about the so-called "historical Jesus", since for me the one presented in the four canonical gospels is the Jesus of history.)

Now, with that said, I do think there's a bit of internal evidence against the idea that the church just wanted to create a vague bogeyman. For one, I think that a literal reading of the relevant passages implies that there is a single (big-A) Antichrist at the end of history. Some Protestants disagree—some denominations consider the Antichrist to be allegorical, while some Lutheran denominations consider the office of the Pope (but not necessarily the person himself) to be the Antichrist—so I'm not claiming that my interpretation is entirely universal, but it is at least fairly common. And so, if there really is only one Antichrist per se, it's harder to apply it to the enemy du jour without looking really silly in hindsight fifty years later (of course, not that this always has stopped people from trying...).

More generally, and here my Protestant bias is showing, I think the Bible warns against the idea of the church being a single earthly institution that gets to set a 100% all-encompassing "party line" for its members: Jesus criticized the Pharisees for making their own arbitrary traditions (Matthew 15:1–7 [7]) and the apostle Paul repeatedly urges Christians to be tolerant of some amount of doctrinal or behavioral differences (e.g. Romans 14 [8]). Now, it is also true that the Bible draws red lines, e.g. the Jesus-denying antichrists as previously mentioned, or those who preach a different gospel (Galatians 1:6–9 [9]). So there certainly are times when I think Christians should take a stand and say that some things are just plain wrong and dangerous—Jesus was not a moral or religious relativist, and the Bible is clear on many things. But, the idea that the institutional Church is this domineering thing, with inherent authority on all aspects of faith and morals, is very much not a universal Christian belief. (And, historically, a tremendous amount of evil has been done in the name of such a belief.)

Now, I readily admit that this doesn't quite defeat what you said, since you very well might define "the Church's line" to even include core theology like "Jesus is God". But to be honest, in general I think it's difficult to defend against accusations of the form "the Bible only says that you're for or against God for rhetorical reasons, to make it easier to convince people to agree with it". I certainly understand the argument, and I myself would apply it (or at least something vaguely like it) to other religions (e.g. how Jehovah's Witnesses shun those who leave). Still, I think the argument has the problem that it's unfalsifiable, at least when considered in a vacuum: If the Bible is false, then perhaps it makes sense that it would present itself as the exclusive way to God, but isn't that also the case if the Bible is true? Like, if Jesus really is "the way, the truth, and the life" and "no one comes to the Father except through" him (John 14:6), I'd certainly hope the Bible would go out of its way to tell everyone for their sake.

[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2012:30...

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%203%3A16-2...

[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=james%204%3A4&v...; N.B. "friend of the world", AFAICT, isn't used in the sense of being friendly with most everyone (which is a good thing and indeed repeatedly commanded in the New Testament), but rather in a deeper sense of e.g. going along with the morality of one's environment rather than the law of God.

[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans%201%3A16...

[4] This one's a bit more of a stretch, but IMO one of the "morals of the story" is that unbelief is not mere dispassionate skepticism: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2016:19-31...

[5] I'm not sure what the current secular scholarly consensus is on the biblical canon. However, many Christian (specifically, Protestant) scholars would argue that the canon was organically decided, rather than being imposed by some top-down institution (even the Catholic church didn't "infallibly" declare its version of the canon until the 1500s, as a response to the Reformation). I recently read Canon Revisited by Michael Kruger and it seemed pretty convincing to me, but I'm also just some random guy on the internet, so what do I know :-P

[6] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%207%3A13&v...

[7] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2015:1-...

[8] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%2014&ver...

[9] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=galatians%201:6...

EDIT: Updated a sentence to be more specific.

FWIW I think the parent comment is incorrect (unless I misunderstood it, of course); I responded in more detail here [0] but the tl;dr is that the Bible does describe the (big-a or little-a) "antichrist" as more-or-less entirely opposed to Christ. (Not to mention that Jesus himself warned about copycat "Christs", in Matthew 24:23–27, and calls them "false" and says that they "deceive".)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50243942

I agree with you re: antipopes, but I don't think it applies too well to how "Antichrist" is used in the Bible, which definitely is in a "good vs. evil" sense. Small-a "antichrists" is a somewhat generic descriptor used in 1 John 2 (one of the criterion being that they "[deny] that Jesus is the Christ"), and so it seems to refer to those who actively oppose Christ.

Separately, that passage also refers to "the antichrist" (emphasis mine), who is traditionally identified w/ the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the "beast" in Revelation. And this figure is pretty unambiguously evil ("man of lawlessness"; "son of destruction"; makes himself out to be God; violently persecutes Christians; makes people have to worship him if they want to buy or sell anything; etc.)—even by secular standards, he's a megalomaniacal despot.

AI-edited or -generated comments are disallowed by HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated. I don't think any such restriction exists for submissions themselves, so that's my guess as to why the comment but not the submission has been flagged to death.
AI-generated or -edited comments are disallowed on HN, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:14PM (#50124834)
Your comment is—at best—misleading. See the last two paragraphs of the article:

> The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws.... Many of the other cars that ranked highly on the list have also been given high ratings for safety by the likes of IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, as well....

> “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities”....

Re:Show HN: XY Music Notation on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @02:40PM (#50076548)
What does "isomorphic" mean?
Re:The designer lamps in my house on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @02:57PM (#49982546)
For the benefit of other readers, this is (to my deep chagrin) just a coincidence. Some other fun false friends (i.e. w/ no actual etymological connection), some sillier than others:

- そう sō, "so"

- 名前 namae, "name"

- 乱暴 rambō, "violence"

- 被る kaburu, "cover"

- 孫 son, "descendant"

- 銭 sen, "one hundredth of a yen" (sounds similar to "cent")

- 買 (meaning "buy") can be read as bai

- はず hazu, "has to"

- 鈴 rin, "bell" (sounds similar to "ring")

- おい oi, "oi"

- 陰気 inki, "gloomy" (sounds similar to "inky")

And just for fun, one from Old Japanese:

- 女 womina, "woman"

Re:The designer lamps in my house on Monday October 05, 2026 @10:13PM (#49973357)
I'm not sure that it's true, sadly—my dictionary, at least, only gives the illumination-related definition for akari.
Re:Anatomy of a Lean Proof for Software Engineers on Saturday October 03, 2026 @02:12AM (#49941757)
IMO the experience of learning to use and understand a proof assistant gives one a pretty good foundation for then going deeper into logic and proof theory. I'm specifically thinking of Logical Foundations [0], which doubles as an introduction to Rocq and also an introduction to intuitionistic logic (and also type theory!).

Some specific disagreements:

- "Proof trees" on Wikipedia redirects to the page for analytic tableaus, which I don't think is particularly relevant to Lean. I think natural deduction [1] would be infinitely more useful.

- Why is Gödel incompleteness necessary for one to understand how Lean works?

- Why is compactness necessary knowledge? In my experience, one can use and understand any modern proof assistant without knowing anything about model theory.

[0] https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/lf-current/index.h..., and see also its sequel Programming Language Foundations [1].

[1] https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/plf-current/index....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_deduction

Re:Turbo Haskell on Friday October 02, 2026 @02:22AM (#49930388)
Only tangentially related, but I'm reminded of Frege[0], a Haskell dialect for the JVM that I stumbled across at one point and thought looked really cool.... I see recent commits but the releases are all really old, so I can't tell what the state of the project is.

[0] https://github.com/frege/frege

Re:America.gov – Whatever you need from government, start here on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @06:05PM (#49901378)
I don't think the parent comments were arguing that America.gov is illegal for having a chatbot, just that it's a bad idea.
Re:America.gov – Whatever you need from government, start here on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @05:24PM (#49900831)
At least as I see it, it would be just as unacceptable for a "normal" government website to be dangerously outdated.
Re:macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @12:25PM (#49895977)
I'm honestly very puzzled by all the positive comments I've seen about Golden Gate, it's strictly worse in my experience (i.e., I can't think of any old bugs that don't bother me anymore, but there are annoying new ones). For example, I can report the same menubar bug as the author: as I'm typing this very comment, my Firefox menubar has two menus permanently "selected" [0]. I use the Hiding option for the Dock, but ever since I upgraded the Dock randomly switches into an unhidden state (but it still thinks it's hidden, so I have to disable Hiding and then re-enable it to fix the behavior). I now have to semi-regularly `sudo killall coreaudiod` to fix the audio randomly cutting out on my AirPods (this would occasionally happen before, but it's gotten way more frequent). I'm left very unimpressed with whatever's going on at Apple.

I just checked and 27.0.1 is out, so here's hoping it fixes anything....

[0] https://imgur.com/a/5i5TlzQ

EDIT: Actually, one bug that I haven't noticed on Tahoe is the weird lack of vertical padding that some System Settings screens used to have. Credit where credit's due.

It's an HDR image, I think.[0] At the moment, only some browsers show it as brighter—Firefox on macOS, for example, doesn't support HDR images and I had to open the page in Safari to see it for myself.

[0] see, for example, this submission from the front page a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402521.

Re:7 out of 9 Planetary Boundaries are breached on Monday September 21, 2026 @08:20PM (#49795226)
Rats, there goes the Eighth Planetary Boundary....
Re:Good people refuse to do bad things on Monday September 21, 2026 @01:35PM (#49790488)
[Disclaimer: I believe that morality is objective (and that our consciences are generally reliable guides, albeit ones we can suppress or even change), so any strong statements I make below are implicitly coming from this perspective.]

I strongly disagree, I think this is instead true for those who have an image of themself as "good". IME, someone whose identity involves their "goodness" (and I certainly include myself here) will be willing to do a whole lot to maintain that perception (whether it's a self-perception or an external one). In particular, I think that someone already motivated to feel good about themselves is going to be easier to mislead by slick arguments. See the unfalsifiable longterm-ism of modern-day EA ("you can do an incalculably large amount of good with comparatively minimal effort"), much of today's political violence/radicalism, or the religious persecution all throughout history, whether against the religious (many of last century's authoritarians) or by the religious: cf. Jesus' warning about this in John 16:2 ("They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God."), or even just the Bible's very many warnings against pride (e.g. Proverbs 26:12 [0]) and self-righteousness (e.g. Romans 10:2-3 [1]).

(Of course, sometimes people have no way of knowing a priori that they're being misled. I'm exclusively talking about cases where, deep down, one could/should have known that the situation wasn't actually on the up-and-up... which I'd argue is much more common than we often like to think.)

On the other hand, I'd argue that someone who is truly doing what is good is, by definition, unable to be swayed from that (for then they wouldn't be doing good things anymore, no matter what words they want to use to describe themselves or others). Relatedly, I don't agree that someone can be a "good person" in the absence of actually doing good. (Naturally, this is an extraordinarily high bar, and I'd argue an impossible one to perfectly meet.)

I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis's famous quote:

> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

[0] "You have seen a man wise in his own opinion— there is more hope for a fool than for him."

[1] "For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For not knowing about the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God." (emphasis mine)

Re:I didn't sign the Fields medallists' letter on Thursday September 17, 2026 @07:42PM (#49748321)
I only just skimmed the referenced essay, but a priori I don’t think “problem-solving” as Gowers uses it has anything to do with real-world practicality. The problems under consideration are entirely theoretical, regardless of which “culture” a mathematician belongs to.
Re:I didn't sign the Fields medallists' letter on Thursday September 17, 2026 @07:38PM (#49748286)
(minor nitpick, but it’s “Navier–Stokes”)
Re:LG responds to TV spying allegations on Saturday September 12, 2026 @02:50PM (#49675798)
> If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV?

1. The introduction says that Smart TVs are not included in this ToS ("not including Smart TVs").

2. Where do the terms say anything about "sensitive" content? The closest thing I see is section 4.d, but that's just about wiretapping/privacy laws in general.

Re:Logo Programming Language on Friday September 11, 2026 @02:20PM (#49662934)
Re:Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom on Thursday September 10, 2026 @04:30PM (#49649754)
> But it, and the piano black keys with it, are definitely not optimal. It makes playing in C easy, and playing in anything else hard.

I don't think this is true—I was under the impression that, at least on piano, keys other than C major are sometimes chosen specifically to make things easier on the fingers.

Re:ChatGPT Images 2.5 on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @05:21PM (#49617242)
You made a specific claim (~100% of ChatGPT image use is non-organic), and they asked you to support your claim. That is not sealioning.
Re:Recreating Minecraft Is Not a Benchmark on Sunday September 06, 2026 @03:59PM (#49590274)
I'm not sure myself, there are a lot of comma splices and other such grammar mistakes. Maybe just edited with AI?
This is incorrect, downvotes are "allowed" for mere disagreement; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314.

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