Hacker News: The_Double

New comment by The_Double in "Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards"

The_Double — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:15:31 +0000

We thought that consciousness was the core of what made something worthy of moral consideration, because only life showed conscious behavior. Now we have machines that can output behavior indistinguishable from consciousness.

I think that reevaluating how to determine if something is conscious is the wrong reaction to this. It should be to reevaluate if consciousness is really the right thing to care about.

Maybe the new consideration should simply be to preserve (biological) life. Or maybe to preserve complexity that can't be easily reproduced. So we should care for humans, the planet, our society, but not for the state of some gpu's VRAM.

New comment by The_Double in "During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website"

The_Double — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 10:15:52 +0000

That CNN website is great, except it still has a huge cookie banner. Looking at the cookies of the site, I think the only cookie it sets is that i clicked on the banner. Most of the size of the page is also related to the banner it seems.

New comment by The_Double in "Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged"

The_Double — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 10:31:55 +0000

This is one of the best, succinct lists of motivations for hybrid warfare i've seen.

But i could suggest another potential benefit for russia: If russia already operates under the assumption that they are in a (cold) war with EU/NATO, and they don't care about the effects on the relationship with Finland. Then this may simply be a really low cost, high damage operation. That not only imposes the replacement cost of the cable, but also forces countries to invest in counter measures.

New comment by The_Double in "BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of"

The_Double — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 05:49:41 +0000

How does it solve for time without location? With GPS location and time are one solution to an equation with 4 unknowns (x,y,z,t). Without location you won't know the time delay between you and the transmitter.

New comment by The_Double in "Show HN: My $1k self-install, off-grid solar backup build for renters"

The_Double — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:56:20 +0000

I appreciate the effort you put in the comment, and úsed sources rather than just voicing unsubstantiated criticisms.

But still, the mentality in this thread made me double-check if i'm on hacker news or bureaucrat news.

New comment by The_Double in "How to attach logic probes to tiny SMD components (2021)"

The_Double — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 20:04:57 +0000

I have bought the new SQ probes and went back to only buying the older version.

The new ones are heavier, but that makes it harder to put them at an angle, they fall over more quickly. And the probe heads are bigger so you can't put as many close together.

New comment by The_Double in "New world record with an electric racing car: From 0 to 100 in 0.956 seconds"

The_Double — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 05:53:12 +0000

The hub motors on the car in the OP run at ~24k RPM (faster than any production electric car AFAIK) and have a multistage planetary gearbox for reduction.

Pretty much all top Formula Student cars now use hub motors. Mainly for packaging reasons. Putting the motor in the unused space in the wheel means you can make a smaller chassis and have more space for wings and underbody aero.

New comment by The_Double in "New world record with an electric racing car: From 0 to 100 in 0.956 seconds"

The_Double — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 05:50:21 +0000

Super capacitors are highly overrated by the general public. They really aren't that much better than lithium ion except for in a very narrow power/time bandwidth.

New comment by The_Double in "Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be"

The_Double — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 11:25:48 +0000

The strangest thing to me is that apparently this material has been developed years ago, the video of a piece floating was uploaded 3 months ago, and apparently it's easy to produce more samples, but the papers still reads like they have been thrown together in less than a week. (English might not be their first language, but the presentation of the figures is also poor) And it also seems like they haven't spent that time by doing high quality experiments. Surely if you have found a magic material that can change the world you would spend more effort than this on doing experiments and publishing a good paper as soon as possible.

The low quality video and poorly presented graphs are reminiscent of Victor Ninov's fraud.

New comment by The_Double in "Sweden Sans"

The_Double — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 22:27:29 +0000

To add to the list: The Netherlands has "rijksoverheid" (government) in sans and serif. https://www.rijkshuisstijl.nl/publiek/modules/product/Digita...

New comment by The_Double in "Threads, an Instagram app"

The_Double — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 12:32:42 +0000

Reddit going downhill is mostly because they are trying to become more like Meta. A competitor should be less meta, not more meta.

New comment by The_Double in "Tell HN: "I don't care about cookies” extension bought by Avast, users jump ship"

The_Double — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 22:56:50 +0000

I think the original goal, and one I still support, is for websites to realize that they are better off with not showing the banners and just defaulting to "no". It's been surprising to me that an industry that has been somewhat obsessed with click latencies and getting users to content quickly are willing to annoy all their users for the extra income from personalized ads. The difference in value must be a lot.

New comment by The_Double in "The tiny corp raised $5.1M"

The_Double — Sat, 27 May 2023 13:43:26 +0000

When I tried waymo a month or two ago a remote "driver" took over. When we called the support center about it later they told us that it's not them literally taking over the controls, but only giving some additional guidance to the system.

New comment by The_Double in "Ford EV Customers to Gain Access to 12,000 Tesla Superchargers"

The_Double — Fri, 26 May 2023 14:52:26 +0000

You are probably European? The US uses CCS1 which doesn't support 3 phase anyway.

New comment by The_Double in "Amsterdam supermarket offers free groceries, life coach to struggling families"

The_Double — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 19:04:59 +0000

The problem for san Francisco is that they just attract more homeless whenever they try to help them. You can not solve poverty in a single city with open borders, you need to solve it for the whole state/country. Especially if the city has a temperate climate that attracts homeless anyway.

As an aside: The big cities in the Netherlands also have some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. If you pick a random smaller town/city it is likely to have less poverty than Amsterdam, (but also less wealthy residents).

New comment by The_Double in "Amsterdam supermarket offers free groceries, life coach to struggling families"

The_Double — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 18:42:58 +0000

The program in the article linked is specifically targeted to some of the poorer neighborhoods in Amsterdam. These neighborhoods are known for them being largely inhabited by the descendants of former slaves and colonized people from the former Dutch empire.

New comment by The_Double in "Microsoft “lobotomized” AI-powered Bing Chat, and its fans aren’t happy"

The_Double — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 01:45:29 +0000

"Sydney" clearly wasn't well suited to the task it was given. But I hope these early widespread LLM's will be saved somewhere and at some point released to the public. It feels like we are at the start of a new chapter in our technological development, one that is marked by several "personalities". I hope we can save those so we can look back and have a conversation with them in the future.

New comment by The_Double in "“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”"

The_Double — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 22:59:45 +0000

There is one thing that might point towards Russia blowing up their own pipeline: Before the pipes were destroyed completely, the Russians were coming up with all sorts of strange excuses for why they were reducing the amount of gas delivered through the pipes. Even though it was obvious to everyone that the reductions were for political reasons, the Russians kept insisting that there was force majeure. So its not completely unthinkable that they would blow up their own pipeline just to not have to announce they are stopping sales of gas to europe.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nord-stream-turbine-...

New comment by The_Double in "Why Finland Selected the F-35A (2021)"

The_Double — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:30:00 +0000

I wonder how much value there would be in having some level of dissimilar redundancy in (soon to be) NATO air forces. All NATO countries having fleets of the F35 makes us vulnerable to any kind of weakness or bug that adversaries are able to exploit.

New comment by The_Double in "Micro Hydro Turbine Is Far Cheaper Than Solar"

The_Double — Sun, 29 Jan 2023 19:34:29 +0000

This video feels like just a product page read out loud.