Hacker News: wolfram74

New comment by wolfram74 in "A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't"

wolfram74 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 16:59:02 +0000

The engine is written with mods as first class citizens, the core game itself is formally just a mod the engine accepts.

New comment by wolfram74 in "Show HN: Automatically detect and patch walking-dead states in Sierra games"

wolfram74 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:43:02 +0000

I'm not sure how it became the norm in text adventure games, but for platformers part of it was a hold over from games being designed to be quarter eaters in arcades. Kids that played those became adults that made the next ones. I /suspect/ that a similar thing has happened with the kids that grew up on the N64 and gamecube had four player local coop as the ceiling and now lots of games that probably could have more than 4 players at a time (albeit with balance probably thrown out) are capped at 4. Looking at you, concerned ape :|

New comment by wolfram74 in "The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)"

wolfram74 — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:47:53 +0000

The CIA didn't read his contract carefully enough. He snuck it into one of the rider clauses.

New comment by wolfram74 in "The secrets of the Shinkansen"

wolfram74 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:44:03 +0000

Though even if you're getting an hybrid assist bike, if you're paying much more than 1500$ for a commuter, probably overpaying [1200 from the manufacturer]

https://www.aventon.com/products/soltera-2-5-ebike?variant=4...

New comment by wolfram74 in "25 Years of Eggs"

wolfram74 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 11:59:51 +0000

I suppose if we had access to a public data set like this receipt bank, programmers could time themselves setting up a solution with off the shelf OCR algos. If they could clock in at under 10 hours they could advertise themselves as being "just as good as an LLM, but significantly cheaper." Downside for the managerial class that wants generative algos for the complete lack of legal protections.

New comment by wolfram74 in "25 Years of Eggs"

wolfram74 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 11:36:25 +0000

I mean, at over 1000% the cost, the machine solution doesn't scale either?

New comment by wolfram74 in "The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else"

wolfram74 — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 13:26:18 +0000

Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you, we're getting better and better at dealing with them.

[0]https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...

New comment by wolfram74 in "EV-1 for Lease (1996)"

wolfram74 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:28:05 +0000

Also, not like it just keels over and dies, that's just the 80% performance criteria. Most people wouldn't need to replace the batteries at that point.

New comment by wolfram74 in "EV-1 for Lease (1996)"

wolfram74 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 13:02:03 +0000

this[0] page makes it seem 500~1000 cycles till 80% starting performance is common. So if you were charging it every other day from a 40~50 mile round trip commute, after 3~5 years you'd go to charging it every day.

[0]https://www.batterystuff.com/kb/articles/battery-articles/pr...

New comment by wolfram74 in "Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction"

wolfram74 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:20:13 +0000

Do you think it's odd you only listed companies with already existing revenue streams and not companies that started with and only have generative algos as their product?

New comment by wolfram74 in "Ford Has Steered Its Former EV Truck and Plant Plans in to a Ditch"

wolfram74 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 18:58:03 +0000

/Owning/ the truck would be imaginary/aspirational as you imagine yourself using it often enough to justify the expenditure. If it's for trips that are 3~4 times a year it probably makes more sense to rent.

New comment by wolfram74 in "Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study"

wolfram74 — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 20:31:18 +0000

Fortunately other chemistries are making their way down the learning curve lithium's been on, and after a few moment reflection it would be astounding if the same types of storage that are optimal for mobile consumers also happen to be optimal for grid balancing, as daily grid balancing can be done pretty reasonably with a c rating[0] of about .2 or even .1, and as long they aren't so heavy they need to be placed on massive foundation piles, weight is not really a factor. Just need to make it as cheap as possible.

[0] battery c rating is what fraction of the battery can discharge in 1 hour https://wikibattery.org/en/wiki-us/battery/charging-rate-cha...

New comment by wolfram74 in "Anti-aging breakthrough: Stem cells reverse signs of aging in monkeys"

wolfram74 — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 01:22:40 +0000

What, did you read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time recently?

New comment by wolfram74 in "Vertical Solar Panels Are Out Standing"

wolfram74 — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 16:07:46 +0000

I'm juggling a baby approaching lunch time at the moment, so I can't go into too much depth on this paper[0] I found 40 seconds ago, but the conclusion seems to think that solar panel EROIE in siwtzerland is somewhere between 7 and 10, which as a proxy for carbon intensity, /probably/ means it will actually result in net carbon reduction.

[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

New comment by wolfram74 in "New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil"

wolfram74 — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 11:58:09 +0000

It has some elements of standard tragedy of the commons, suppose nearly everybody is following the same rotation scheme, and holding some antibiotics out of rotation entirely as emergency last resort type of deal. Anybody who isn't playing along can be quite confident they're the only person using the emergency drugs and that they'll work quite well.

New comment by wolfram74 in "The Bluesky Dictionary"

wolfram74 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 12:31:58 +0000

You got me wondering. Supposing the average post is 10 words, and a typical page of text is 250 words, that would only be ~50 pages of text a day over the last 10 years. Which I don't think I manage, but over 20 years I am probably in that window.

New comment by wolfram74 in "Six months into congestion pricing, more cars are off the road"

wolfram74 — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 14:13:59 +0000

People without cars subsidize street parking and parking minimum mandates by forcing all other uses for land to be more expensive.

People without children subsidize public schools. Healthy people subsidize sick people's insurance. Part of living in communities involve subsidizing services you don't use, that it occurs is not a problem, you need to argue that it should not be subsidized in the first place, and moving people by bus is better than moving people by car in a variety of ways.

New comment by wolfram74 in "Fossil fuels fall below 50% of US electricity for the first month on record"

wolfram74 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:24:50 +0000

No, it's definitely shifting, based on [0] the carbon emissions per kwh globally are down from 542 g/kwh to 481 g/kwh in the last 10 years, that's over a 10% reduction. Countries that are staying flat are the exception, not the norm.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

New comment by wolfram74 in "Hydrogen vs. Battery Buses: A European Transit Reality Check"

wolfram74 — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 12:13:24 +0000

My impression is it's auto and fuel companies putting out this unworkable alternative to current technologies so they can appear to be concerned about climate change without having to actually stop making money, also if it does work they can crack the petro chemicals to get hydrogen out and people who point out it's basically as dirty as ICE engines will look like pedants.

The scientists are just there because if you give them the opportunity to work on hard technical challenges, they'll take it. The morality is much greyer than the ones being paid to contrive models with the initial goal of "higher CO2 is actually good for everybody."

New comment by wolfram74 in "Wait. HOW MANY supernova explode every year?"

wolfram74 — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 13:04:30 +0000

I would imagine the supernova rate to be higher in the early universe, as we've already passed peak stellar formation rates and the heavier (and shorter lived) stars were more likely to be formed earlier when the average density of the universe was higher.