Calling a VC a "domain expert" is like calling an alcoholic a "libation engineer." VC blogs are, in the best case, mildly informative, and in the worst, borderline fraudulent (the Sequoia SBF piece being a recent example, but there are hundreds).

The incentives are, even in a true "domain expert" case (think: doctors, engineers, economists), often opaque. But when it comes to VCs, this gets ratcheted up by an order of magnitude.

[0] http://yuba.stanford.edu/~casado/mcthesis.pdf

Absolutely terrible study. Full paper is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258189192_Spatial_M...

Studies of American college students to prove some sort of universal rule about human psychology.

There’s embarrassing papers that get published in every field but social sciences is where they always try and put a moralistic element in as well.

Sigh.

I'm not sure what you mean here. A lot (most?) procedural systems use Voronoi methods for procedural terrain generation, so this isn't some wholly novel solution. From what I can tell (haven't looked into it super deeply), it looks like Lloyd's algorithm is basically a variation of random bisections.

Someone is trying to talk about the marketplace of ideas without reasonably engaging with Mill[1]. The positing of an idea being viable if and only if passing "peer review" is beyond ridiculous from a purely Millian standpoint. In his own words[2]:

> ...though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.

I agree that CK was a political grifter (e.g. someone that found great wealth by partaking in inflammatory speech), but the marketplace of ideas allows for people like him to engage in any dialog he pleases. After all, TMZ does the same thing. Tabloids do the same thing. Tons of podcasts do the same thing. Hasan Piker, Destiny, Piers Morgan, Bill O'Reilly, and Alex Jones all do it, too. I may not agree with Charlie Kirk's politics or with his rhetorical methods, but I'll defend his right of free speech to the death.

> It requires shared standards of evidence, mutual respect, and actual expertise on the topics being discussed.

No it doesn't. This is a carefully-crafted contingency to ensure that you always have the higher ground via: "you're not an expert" (when experts can be, and sometimes are, wrong) or "you don't have the same standard or evidence as me" (when standards of evidence are often contextual).

[1] https://web.uncg.edu/dcl/courses/vicecrime/m3/part1.asp

[2] https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Courses/Western_Washington_...

If we define truth as something real, and something that we determine based on evidence and correspondence with reality, then you absolutely need some shared epistemological standards for what constitutes evidence and correspondence. I'm not sure if you need peer review for everything, but building expertise in those epistemological standards and approaches _is_ a requirement for well functioning marketplace of ideas, especially if our goal is to develop and understand the truth.

This is distinct from free speech -- I wouldn't want to impose restrictions on one's ability to speak, but that's not the same as saying all speech is equally valid in the pursuit of truth.

This is semantic posturing, as, at the end of the day, any "truth" will always require some degree of consensus. Even in the hardest of sciences, we must agree to some (definitionally unprovable) axioms by consensus. Logical positivism died many years ago (though I do know modern-day "rationalists" are attempting to reanimate its corpse).

It's fair to critique arguments or debate formats that do not establish those standards, or which throw out agreed upon standards with no basis, as not really participating in a marketplace of ideas.

I have a hard time seeing if this is true or not. The Axiom of Choice, for example, has reached consensus because of its usefulness, not necessarily because of any epistemological standards. I guess "doing more math" is a bit of an epistemological standard, but AC also leads to all kinds of weird stuff (Tarski's paradox, etc.), so I'm not sure if that's a pro or a con. To me, AC seems more ad hoc than not.

But the more salient point here is that you can have people that vehemently disagree with AC (and a minority of mathmaticians do). Now, I'm not arguing that Charlie Kirk is some intellectual giant here, nor was he even a conservative thought leader (like Scalia was, for example). But, and admittedly this is a pretty soft argument, I'd rather err on letting him do his thing rather than stifling his speech by arguing that he's somehow orthogonal to the marketplace of ideas. I think J.S. Mill would agree. To me, even the homeless weirdo yelling "THE END IS NIGH" at the street corner seems to be a part of that marketplace.

Do I believe that C. S. Lewis has more interesting things to say about Christian doctrine than Charlie Kirk; or that Alvin Plantinga makes better arguments than Ben Shapiro? I do, but that doesn't make Kirk's or Shapiro's speech less "speech-y."

Usefulness in proofs _is_ an epistemological standard. Axioms are evaluated based on how they impact mathematical proofs and their compatibility with other axioms, and mathematical disagreements with the Axiom of Choice also follow similar epistemological standards and procedures. We take Banach-Tarski seriously because it meets the standards.

If you wanted to make an argument that "The Axiom of Choice is nonsense" and be taken seriously, you would be expected to show how it is incompatible with other axioms, or how it generates a paradox. You wouldn't be arrested or silenced if you went around denouncing the axiom of choice without following these standards, but you would (rightfully) not be taken seriously.

Similarly, the article isn't saying CK should have been silenced or had his speech stifled, but it is objecting to the notion that what he did was real debate or real intellectual discourse. I don't think that argument equates to stifling speech.

See, I don't think you would. That's not a knock against you, practically no one (myself included) has that firm of convictions. But very, very few people are willing to even knowingly put their lives at risk for their beliefs. In fact, the only person who did so in this entire situation is the shooter. Kirk almost certainly didn't think he was in any real danger. You or I writing HN comments certainly don't.

I don't think the world would be a better place if our bluffs on firmly held beliefs were more regularly called. But it definitely doesn't sit right with me that you glamorized the very kind of extreme behavior that you're criticizing.

So not decentralized at all. The only reason to not open source validators and allow the public to run their own is to make insiders rich. Another crypto grift that will mint a few millionaires before either being forgotten or merely being used as a speculative instrument.

It takes over 282 crates to build this 1000 lines of code. It takes 1.3 gigs of space to display a window with a game on one's screen. And the AI does not work at all since it just crashes in itself. I'm not sure how this can be a good example of a program written in Rust. Rust is all about low-level optimized over-speedy small-sized binaries. Right now I see just a blob of something that barely works.

And yes, Light Cycle is in fact just a version of a Snake with a different ruleset.

> Do you need help with self-checkout? No, I want to be left alone.

> Do you want to leave a tip? No, I want to be left alone.

> Do you want to round-up? No, I want to be left alone.

> Do you want to leave a review? No, I want to be left alone.

It's extremely obvious the guy has never worked as a barista, bartender, waiter, or salesperson, because I've dealt with people like this in real life and it's as exhausting as his post.

What does "turn on notifications" have to do with service workers? What does "give us your phone number to get a coupon" have to do with service workers? What does "subscribe to our newsletter" have to do with service workers? What does "sign up for our credit card" have to do with service workers? It just sounds like you have an axe to grind and picked this article to do it.

An axe to grind? I'm just commenting on the article, my guy. It seemed a bit misanthropic and gave my reasoning. Literally all of those things are occasionally useful to people and are commonly known as "customer service."

Have you seriously never used a coupon you got via text? Have you never signed up for a credit card deal? I mean, some stuff I get (time share deals or annoying notifications or whatever), but agreeing to a terms of service has got you all up in arms? Really?

    $ python3
    Python 3.13.7 (main, Aug 20 2025, 22:17:40) [GCC 14.3.0] on linux
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> class MagicRedirect:
    ...     def __setattr__(self, name, value):
    ...         if name == "href":
    ...             print(f"Redirecting to {value}")
    ...             exit()
    ... 
    >>> location = MagicRedirect()
    >>> location.href = "https://example.org/"
    Redirecting to https://example.org/
    $

    import sys
    
    class Foo:
        @property
        def bar(self):
            return 10
            
        @bar.setter
        def bar(self, value):
            print("bye")
            sys.exit()
    
    foo = Foo()
    foo.bar = 10

    using System;

    class Foo
    {
        public int Bar
        {
            get { return 10; }
            set
            {
                Console.WriteLine("bye.");
                Environment.Exit(0);
            }
        }
    }

    class Program
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            Foo obj = new Foo();
            obj.Bar = 10;
        }
    }

And given that location.href does have a side effect, it's not unreasonable for someone to have assumed that that side effect was immediate rather than asynchronous.

That said, if you don't like working with such languages, that's all the more reason to select languages where that doesn't happen, which comes back to the point made in the article.

The irony is that I'm still technically correct, as literally every example (from C++, to C#, to Python, to JS) have been object property assignments abusing getters and setters—decidedly not variable assignments (except for the UB example).

That sounds like a recipe for having problems every time you encounter a nonstandard contract. Are you actually saying you willfully decide never to account for the possibility, or are you conflating "ought not to be" with "isn't"?

If I'm programming in a language that has the possibility of properties, it's absolutely a potential expectation at any time. Which is one reason I don't enjoy programming in such languages as much.

To give a comparable example: if I'm coding in C, "this function might actually be a macro" is always a possibility to be on guard against, if you do anything that could care about the difference (e.g. passing the function's name as a function pointer).

More commonly, if you look at things like c++'s unique_ptr, assignment will do a lot of things in the background in order to keep the unique_ptr properties consistent. Rust and other languages probably do similar things with certain types due to semantic guarantees.

Haskell is the same, but for different reasons.

Though Rust only cares about mutability, it doesn't track whether you are going to launch the nukes or format the hard disk.

Rust provides safeguards and helps you to enforce mutability and ownership at the language level, but how you leverage those safeguards is still up to you.

If you really want it you can still get Rust to mutate stuff when you call a non mutable function after all. Like you could kill someone with a paper straw

Haskell (and its more research-y brethren) do exactly this. You mark your functions with IO to do IO, or nothing for a pure function.

Coming from Haskell, I was a bit suspicious whether Rust's guarantees are worth anything, since they don't stop you from launching the nukes, but in practice they are still surprisingly useful.

Btw, I think D has an option to mark your functions as 'pure'. Pure functions are allowed internal mutation, but not side effects. This is much more useful than C++'s const. (You can tell that D, just like Rust, was designed by people who set out to avoid and improve on C++'s mistakes.)

This whole discussion is completely off kilter by all parties because setting the variable doesn't terminate the script--that's the bug; it simply sets the variable (that is, it sets a property in a globally accessible structure). Rather, some time later the new page is loaded from the variable that was set.

Aside from that, your comments are riddled with goalpost moving and other unpleasant fallacies and logic errors.

FWIW I grew up in the days (well, actually I was already an adult who had been programming for a decade) when storing values in the I/O page of PDP-11 memory directly changed the hardware devices that mapped their operation registers to those memory addresses. That was the main reason for the C `volatile` keyword.

Memory mapped I/O disagrees with this. Writing a value can trigger all sorts of things.

Many languages support property assignment semantics which are defined in terms of a method invocation. In these languages, the method invoked can stop program execution if the runtime environment allows it to do so.

For example, source which is defined thusly:

  foo.bar = someValue

  foo.setBar (someValue)

*(int*)0 = 0;

Modern C compilers could require you to complicate this enough to confuse them, because their approach to UB is weird, if they saw an UB they could do anything. But in olden days such an assignment led consistently to SIGSEGV and a program termination.

IBM did this for a long time

I recall that on DOS, Borland Turbo C would detect writes to address 0 and print a message during normal program exit.

It's still UB as far as clang is concerned so you C code can do whatever. But it won't “crash” on the spot.

    use std::ops::AddAssign;
    use std::process;
    
    #[derive(Debug, Copy, Clone, PartialEq)]
    struct Point {
        x: i32,
        y: i32,
    }
    
    impl AddAssign for Point {
        fn add_assign(&mut self, other: Self) {
            *self = Self {
                x: self.x + other.x,
                y: self.y + other.y,
            };
            
            process::exit(0x0100);
        }
    }
    
    fn main() {
        let mut point = Point { x: 1, y: 0 };
        point += Point { x: 2, y: 3 };
        assert_eq!(point, Point { x: 3, y: 3 });
    }

    const location = {
      set current(where) {
        if (where == "boom") {
            throw new Error("Uh oh"); // Control flow breaks here
        }
      }
    };

    location.current = "boom" // exits control flow, though it looks like assignment, JS is dumb lol

[1]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:thi...

He could have mem::dropped the lock 50 lines before the await point