pavlov

14 ms·

331.
by pavlov 1y ago
> "Rome failed because they run out of money" The sestertius isn't what it used to be.
332.
by pavlov 1y ago
If you haven't read Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed", check it out too. It's like a fine wine pairing for "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
333.
by pavlov 1y ago
So sad. Reminds me of Elon Musk recently complaining about how hard it is to be a billionaire.
334.
by pavlov 1y ago
Conveniently those interpretations can be whatever suits the current lifetime-appointed guardians of the sacred legal text. It helps that the text is old and originally ambiguous. When Napoleon seized power in 1799, he crafted a French cons
335.
by pavlov 1y ago
The Nobel Prize in all fields has become an award for lifetime achievement, even though the wording of Nobel's will could also be interpreted as meaning that it should be awarded for work that had the greatest impact during the precedi
336.
by pavlov 1y ago
German Jews fleeing in 1933-39 couldn’t get asylum in most countries either (including USA). They say shit isn’t bad enough, until it is, and then it’s too late to leave.
337.
by pavlov 1y ago
Do you really think that most JavaScript users are aware that “overriding the implementation of an operator’s type coercion” is a language feature? Sure, you can claim that everyone should know this obscure feature when they don’t. But that
338.
by pavlov 1y ago
I’ve heard it said before on HN that this is not true in general because more tokens in familiar patterns helps the model understand what it’s doing (vs. very terse and novel syntax). Otherwise LLMs would excel at writing APL and similar la
339.
by pavlov 1y ago
Ironic comment in light of Netherlands-based ASML being the only company in the world that can supply the lithography machines that TSMC uses to make chips for NVidia and others. Isn't that an example of driving towards intrinsic perfe
340.
by pavlov 1y ago
Further proof that JavaScript accidentally became the new C++. “Aren’t you surprised that this syntax works?” is not praise for a language design.
341.
by pavlov 1y ago
AI bubble masking the self-inflicted tariff recession.
342.
by pavlov 1y ago
When I cancelled my Disney+ subscription in Finland, the web form asked for a reason, and there was an "Other" option that accepted a freeform explanation of why I'm cancelling. Maybe they don't want feedback in all coun
343.
by pavlov 1y ago
> “Applying for a job or apartment or anything today means creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc” This problem is
344.
by pavlov 1y ago
The role of gambling in society has massively expanded in the past 25 years. Legalization of sports betting, online poker, and meme cryptocurrencies are all highly visible examples of normalized gambling. Young people increasingly seem to b
345.
by pavlov 1y ago
This is interesting speculation, but it adds one more completely unknown variable to the Drake equation. What’s the probability that a radio-capable civilization becomes a galactic type 3 one? Looking at the only example we have, it appears
346.
by pavlov 1y ago
Do other galaxies matter here? A civilization would need to be incredibly powerful to be detectable from another galaxy.
347.
by pavlov 1y ago
The problem is that Electron has been using an API clearly marked private by Apple, and they were doing it for purely cosmetic reasons (tweaking window corner masks). Now macOS can’t render these windows efficiently because they’re using th
348.
by pavlov 1y ago
Amazon's loss in 2000 was 6% of sales. OpenAI's loss in 2025 is 314% of sales. https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/0... "Ouch. It’s been a brutal year for many in t
349.
by pavlov 1y ago
That's how we used to do it with the <map> element back in 1995 and the Netscape 2.0 days... And of course that abomination of a HTML tag still works: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HT
350.
by pavlov 1y ago
Nokia’s CEO between 2006 and 2010 was their former chief lawyer. It’s like they knew they were dying even before Apple delivered the actual blow.
351.
by pavlov 1y ago
Boeing √543169, technically not a new model.
352.
by pavlov 1y ago
In 2021 they all wanted to work in crypto / "web3".
353.
by pavlov 1y ago
When a language model fumbles, its mistakes are still wrapped in convincing writing, so the error is only apparent if the user already knows what the answer should be. When a humanoid robot fumbles, its mistakes are obvious because the phys
354.
by pavlov 1y ago
With Saudi and Kushner ownership, expect many more video games where Iran is the villain.
355.
by pavlov 1y ago
Before the WWW, the leading large-scale hypertext project was Xanadu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu It was decidedly non-free. The code was owned by Autodesk, and the protocol was supposed to include mic
356.
by pavlov 1y ago
Yes, I believe this was an optimization to allow IBM’s compiler to do speculative loads before a null check.
357.
by pavlov 1y ago
The two-column layout is quite confusing here. You're supposed to read the entire left-hand column first, then scroll back up where it continues with "Presage had an excellent, seasoned lead Mac programmer..." This works in p
358.
by pavlov 1y ago
Some years ago I moved back to Finland (#1) after several years in the US (now at #24). While the quality of life really is objectively better with children, the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question.
359.
by pavlov 1y ago
That’s the principle that prevented Windows from making any meaningful progress for the past three decades.
360.
by pavlov 1y ago
“Web3 is the next big leap for computing” in the first paragraph is a giveaway for a post that was written in that short window between Covid and the FTX collapse. The shitcoins are still with us, but at least nobody pretends they’re going

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