MountDoom

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 its final flex - "with this one trick, we can finally fix the Middle East"?

I think Russia deserves a lot of credit. It started long before Crimea. They had a military incursion into Georgia, secured a pro-Kremlin dictator in Belarus, nearly got away with the same in Ukraine and some other neighboring republics - all while buttering up the EU with energy deals. I think the European and American (non-)response to that was the death knell of that "rules-based" worldview.

While Russia acted belligerently, China played the long game to cement its geopolitical influence and make itself "too big to fail".

If there was a domestic inflection point in the US and in the EU, I think that was actually the housing crisis / the sovereign debt crisis around 2007-2009. That really undermined the optimism about supranational institutions.

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 profound yet vague discovery. Some real, recent examples:

  - "Researchers Discover the Optimal Way to Optimize"
  - "Origami Patterns Solve a Major Physics Riddle"
  - "A simple way to measure knots has come unraveled"
  - "The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves Crashes Into View"

I don't necessarily mind it, even if I don't find the articles very informative. But it's certainly fair game to nitpick this borderline-clickbait style.

> 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.

Yes, and many German scientists went to great lengths to surrender to Western forces. I think von Braun was one of them.

> 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

They also had an extensive industrial espionage program. In particular, most of the integrated circuits made in the Soviet Union were not original designs. They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs. They had pin- and instruction-compatible knock-offs of 8086, Z80, etc. Rest assured, that wasn't because they loved the instruction set and recreated it from scratch.

Soviet scientists were on the forefront of certain disciplines, but tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.

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 other people's toys, you should be allowed to roam freely online. But even then, this wasn't the universal consensus. You would still get shown the door for certain behaviors on the Usenet or on web forums. And many ISPs would still drop you for hard porn, gore, or piracy.

But today, the consensus is that tech companies are the guardians of morality. You can get deplatformed quite easily from all the major platforms just for saying things that others disagree with. Your private files in the cloud (and sometimes on the device) get scanned for contraband. Search engines and LLMs are carefully engineered to never say or encourage the wrong things, and to flag certain things for human review. You'd be hard-pressed to find an online platform or a Western ISP that doesn't bow to social pressures.

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 friend to get you interested in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star", except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna be disappointed.

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 think the manufacturers just self-certify.

I guess there are two ways to look at it. Either the regulation was wildly successful, so the problems persist only in the less-regulated spaces. Or we spend a lot of effort chasing the wrong problem.

> 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 that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism.

In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.

Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.

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 that's largely gone. In my younger years, that was the tech career to aspire to. Nowadays, kids want to work at OpenAI / Google / a billion-dollar future unicorn, so the SF Bay Area ethos is dominant.

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.

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 as a commenting community is markedly more hit-and-miss. We often comment without reading the articles, we are sometimes gratuitously negative for the sake of negativity, and there isn't any other place where I've seen so many people being confidently wrong about my areas of expertise. I think we'd be better off if we were more willing to say "this is okay and I don't need to have a strong opinion about it" or "I'm probably not an expert on X, even though I happen to be good with programming".

> 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.

> 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 BBC, or whatnot.

It's not a failure of capitalism, it's just what we crave.

> 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 reasonably modern MCUs. You can typically shake 10+ bits out of them, but you need to take a lot of precautions, such as providing very stable external reference voltage and shutting down unneeded subsystems of the chip.

They're still not as good as standalone ADCs, but they're at a point where you can actually use them for 90% of things that require an ADC.

In cases where you need more bits, there's a lot more that must go into the design, which is what gives me a pause about the article. There's nothing about the PSU the author is using or how he managed the MCU noise and RFI. So I don't know if the findings here are that these are knock-off devices with worse specs, or if his overhead LED lamp is causing a lot of interference.

> 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 real policing. Further, because LLMs are improving quickly, there is a temptation to assume that maybe the worst is behind us and that models don't make too many mistakes anymore.

This applies to HN folks too: every other person here is building something in this space. So publicizing failures like this is important, and it's important to keep doing it over and over again so that you can't just say "oh, that was a 3o problem, our current models don't do that".

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 nonsense to rest."

The whole point of LLMs is that they do more than we suspected they could. And there is value in making them capable of handling a wider selection of tasks. When an LLM started to count the numbers of "r"s in "strawberry", OpenAI was taking a victory lap.

It would seem so. Looking at their website, they're not made out of graphene. For example, their flagship jacket is nylon + polyurethane underneath.

It looks like they're using "graphene" as a pigment in the plastic, and I'd wager this probably means "99% conventional black dye and 1% graphene", because why would that matter either way...

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 that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go. I set them up using a throwaway email account, turned off almost all notifications, and added just family and real-world friends. I think this served me well for nearly two decades. I really only use my phone for maps, photos, and maybe 2-5 messages a day. I honestly never found myself in a situation where I thought to myself, "gosh, I wish I could read my e-mail right now".

But in the past five years, there's been this mounting pressure from app vendors to make sure I can no longer enjoy that. Every other time a friend sends me a web link, I get a popup that detects I'm on mobile and demands I install an app. And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.

If you work for a place that does that, I just hope you stub your toe every morning.

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 about a small 5% hiccup in that Bitcoin-like trajectory, and more about why the heck is so much money pouring into the sector - including Tesla and Facebook, which aren't on the forefront of anything right now.

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, because if your website is less likely to be read by anyone, why bother writing it in the first place?

But for the most part, the very people bemoaning the current state of affairs then go back to scrolling through TikTok / Instagram / Facebook / Reddit.

This article is almost certainly AI-generated.

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.

> 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 in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought.

You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. And then some guys came up with a novel architecture and all of sudden, you can ask your computer to write an essay about penguins.

Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.

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 then they're gonna force them to navigate the Kafkaesque bureaucracy at BigCo to get an approval for every blog post, conference talk, etc. Expense reports, headcount planning, performance management, you name it. After a year or two, they're gonna be thoroughly cooked and leave.

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 doubting you, just sincerely curious.

> 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 without a steep learning curve. This was a notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the same chip and write some code in C (or Rust). Or the pro tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified breakout board.

Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating some of their lunch.

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 going out of business. Online, Apmex and dozens of others seem to be doing just fine.

So evidently, there is healthy retail demand for gold at these price points. Futures markets can get weird, but they're ultimately rooted in demand for commodities. I can't sell you futures on something that no one is willing to buy.

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.

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 with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI.

If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that.

And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing.

I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community, but if they wanted that, there's a million better ways. Starting with making documentation, SDKs, and toolchains accessible and easy to use. There's a reason why you see Microchip, STM, RPi, and Espressif chips in every other DIY project.