<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: tsimionescu</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tsimionescu</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:54:00 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=tsimionescu" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Why do you think "Semi is DoA"?<p>They started producing and selling the Semi in 2022 (after its unveiling in 2017, when they started taking pre-orders) and from everything I've dug up with a bit of Googling it seems they have shipped fewer than 200 trucks by 2025.<p>We'll see if this new 50k per year factory will actually have customers to ship to, but I wouldn't hold my breath given the current track record.<p>> The economics of diesel vs electric for heavy haul trucks is a no-brainer. Diesel is much more expensive per kilometer compared to electricity.<p>The economics you need to look at are dollars/hour/kg delivered. If the battery is too heavy or the charge time too long, the economics turn out much worse. We'll see once real world experiences start being published what it actually does.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:44:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473852</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473852</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473852</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Those are common in all of Europe, and they are still based on either biometrics (if using your phone) or the card's chip. They do typically include a transaction value and count limit below which the biometrics or pin don't actually get checked, for ease of use. But, given that this limit is controlled by the user, I expect that the contract terms also prevent you from disputing transactions below those limits - though I haven't read carefully enough to be sure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:18:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433440</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433440</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433440</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Semi is DoA, FSD has been 1 year away for 10 years now give or take, cybercab is flailing, cybertruck same, and China is eating everyone's lunch on lithium cells.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 09:54:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433338</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433338</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433338</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Note that this is highly location dependent. In most of Europe, credit cards are basically all that exists (that is, even "debit cards" are just credit cards with a balance); and regardless of the type of card, because all payments are either chip & pin, biometric based, or verified with some additional 2FA, it's extremely hard to dispute a charge, whether a charge to a credit or debit card.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Jun 2026 08:00:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48422546</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48422546</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48422546</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Science and math are not the same thing, though. The concern is that physics, a science, has been sliding too much into math research - specifically talking about the foundations of particle physics.<p>That is, the concern is that instead of studying the real world, theoretical physicists are spending more and more time studying mathematical constructs and their properties.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:05:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411946</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411946</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411946</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Color charge and the strange and charm quarks are not post-quantum theoretical physics, are they?<p>There's also other areas where a current of picking simple names instead of greek/latin terms was popular for a while at least - Shannon named the smallest unit of information a "bit" after all.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:00:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411850</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411850</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411850</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why do you believe this? Do you believe cats and other animals have no consciousness, so every behavior they exhibit is just instinct? Or do you believe they have some conscious behaviors, but killing birds is not one of them, this thing in particular is just an instinct?<p>For the first position, I think it is quite clear to anyone who studies and spends time with animals that they have something that is at least of the same kind as our consciousness. I just don't see how you can ascribe the wide gamut of complex, situatuonally and mood appropriate but still varied behaviors of animals to being purely instinct driven.<p>For the second position, I would like to see some study or some rationale behind it - especially since cats don't kill <i>every</i> bird they encounter, so if it's an instinct, it must still have some trigger, and hunger is not a viable explanation for most of the killings referenced here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:08:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402356</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402356</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402356</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree that humanity is guilty of all of these, and has done all of them at a much larger scale. I think I was pretty explicit about this in my comment as well.<p>My point was that we call humans who do this "violent" and even "evil". If we want to avoid considering humanity as special compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, as some in the thread were suggesting, then we have to either admit that animals are also violent and evil, or say that humans aren't. Note that I don't hold this view, personally, and think that humans are unique among currently living animals, and that these labels only make sense to be applied to humans. But not because of behavior, simply because humans have a unique level of both understanding and control over their actions - as proven by the many billions of humans who have never in their lives killed a human or even another bird or mammal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:55:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402165</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402165</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402165</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Animals generally have no qualms at all about killing or even just mutilating other animals. It often happens almost by accident - two animals might be playing together, one gets spooked, and it instinctively attacks and perhaps even kills the other one - this is commonly seen with people who befriend large predators, such as tigers in the infamous Siegfried and Roy tragedy, but it also happens a lot wherever animals interact with each other.<p>Specifically in regards to your ant example, anteaters and bears often bring similar levels of destruction to ant nests. And cats and other small predators often hunt just for the fun of it, killing but not eating their prey.<p>On the more purely painful evil side, invertebrates often consume their prey alive, inflicting agonizing deaths with no issues on whatever they may be eating. Plenty of vertebrates kill and consume their babies, especially when frightened. They also often abandon old and weak members of their packs, leaving them to die of hunger or cold or similar deaths.<p>This is not meant as some indictment of the animal kingdom - people do all of this too, of course; and have since time immemorial. It's just to show that, if we apply human moral standards to the animal kingdom, it's fair to call them violent, and yes, even much more violent than the average modern human.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:39:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397230</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397230</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397230</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Every Byte Matters"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sure, but these schemes might have their own drawbacks depending on the exact use case - especially if you have a very dynamic number of monsters and constantly add and remove them (say, some kind of bullet hell style game).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:09:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390096</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390096</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390096</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Every Byte Matters"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The point is that a simple SoA implementation requires this - each field in the monster struct is an item in 20 different arrays. So, removing one monster means removing that item from those 20 arrays.<p>Now, as others have suggested, you can have a more complex implementation, where instead of removing the monster's fields from those arrays, you just mark them as "dead" or whatever and then skip them when consuming the relevant arrays, with some relatively small extra bookkeeping overhead. Of course, this comes with its own drawbacks, especially if the number of monsters is very dynamic and you are memory constrained.<p>The point is not to say that SoA is <i>never</i> good for performance, it obviously and certainly is, probably even in most cases. It's just not <i>always</i> best for performance, this was all.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:06:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390050</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390050</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390050</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Every Byte Matters"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's because removing a monster with 20 fields from an SoA structure means resizing 20 arrays. Removing the same monster from an AoS array involves resizing a single array, which you're going to process in a very cache friendly way.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:00:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385839</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385839</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385839</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>By this standard, there is no current encryption method (except for pre-shared one time pads when used correctly) that is known to be unbreakable. For example, it is not proven that prime factoring can't be done much more efficiently on a classical computer - for all we know, it's <i>possible</i> that tomorrow someone will come up with a novel algorithm that can break RSA in just a small number of operations. Same is true for elyptic curves - we don't have any mathematical proof that it's <i>impossible</i> for a much better algorithm than the currently known ones is possible.<p>However, just like for RSA we know that the problem of efficient integer factoring has been worked on for a long time with no progress, the same is true for quantum computing. We have been trying to figure out quantum algorithms for a great number of problems that are hard for classical computers for a long time now, and we haven't been able to, except for the ones that we have. Mathematicians have also developed certain intuitions for which problems have characteristics that make them potentially easier to solve on a QC and which don't.<p>In general, just like with P=NP?, we haven't proven yet if BQP, roughly the class of problems which have efficient QC versions, is equal or not to P, the class of problems that can be efficiently solved on a classical computer; and we also don't know if BQP=NP.<p>So yes, there is at least a theoretical possibility that the problems used for creating post-quantum encryption will turn out to be in BQP, will turn out to have an efficient quantum algorithm that solves them. But that would come from mathematical research, it is entirely unrelated to creating and tinkering with actual quantum computers. The math of quantum algorithms is currently far ahead of the engineering and physics on building the actual computers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:55:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385774</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385774</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385774</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Consider one basic question: how much high-impact research do you think this would incentivize into global warming? Or is the looming global ecological catastrophe not high-impact enough?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 06:59:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333449</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333449</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333449</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction.<p>The plans for Artemis are public, and they don't include any robotic construction before a manned landing.<p>Neveemind that the idea of a moon base is fanciful, I think it's very unlikely to happen in anything resembling current world climate.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 06:34:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319793</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319793</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319793</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So is Polymarket US, the separate entity Polymarket created specifically for the USA.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 12:37:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308066</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308066</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308066</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Polymarket US is only able to operate in the USA because it is being regulated by the CFTC as a securities market. Otherwise, they would have been seen as a gambling site and would have been banned virtually everywhere.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 08:13:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306122</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306122</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306122</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If they recognize they are betting companies, they have no right to operate in the majority of the states. So, they found the CFTC willing to pretend that these betting contracts are in fact securities, and that is how they can legally operate.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 08:10:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306091</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306091</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306091</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, as the name sort of suggests, it's a stock market. As in, it's a place for people to buy stakes in companies, and occasionally a place for companies to raise money by selling stakes in themselves.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 08:08:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306081</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306081</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306081</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tsimionescu in "Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets?<p>Yes, it is both against the CFTC's regulations and against the companies' T&Cs.<p>> Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market?<p>That's irrelevant, the purpose of these markets is to provide fair bets for entertainment, not information.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 08:06:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306069</link><dc:creator>tsimionescu</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306069</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306069</guid></item></channel></rss>