MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-02 22:49:28+00:00
Beat Saber is absolutely a rhythm game. It doesn't have the typical scoring system that is based on having an accurate timing, but it is far from the only one.

Guitar Hero, one of the best known rhythm game doesn't score based on timing accuracy. You hit a note or you don't, that's all, ut you still have to hit that note with a certain timing. Same thing for Beat Saber, you hit or you don't hit the note. If you want a high score, which is completely optional, as may just be interested in pass harder and harder songs, then there are other mechanisms at play. Guitar Hero has star power, Beat Saber has motion. That it is not pure timing doesn't make them less of rhythm games.

The article says that instead of being a rhythm game, Beat Saber is a "motion game" because it rewards precise and intentional motion. But it is the case for all rhythm games. For games about pushing buttons, the motion is rather basic, but take DDR for instance, even if it rewards timing, the key is how you move on the dance pad. Even if you hit the right arrows, bad movement will mess up your timing and drain your stamina. Even some pure button pushing game like, say, Jubeat is all about making the right movements.

The reason Beat Saber used motion for scoring instead of timing is, I think, that the smooth motion of the VR controllers didn't lend itself well to it. I mean, how to even judge timing? So instead, it judged motion, but it is not just a "motion game" like, say, Just Dance (which is also considered a rhythm game btw).

As for why is it so fun? There is no single thing. It took everything that worked, combined them, executed them well, and boom, a hit.

- Rhythm games are fun, you already have motion controls, motion controls + rhythm is dance, dancing is fun.

- Sabers just work in VR, there are plenty of VR games that feature some kind of sword.

- It is an active game, so it attracted those who want to exercise.

- It has an active modding community, and I thing the devs are smart about it. They tolerate it, without supporting it officially, so modders have a lot of freedom. Most of it is about the sharing of songs without having the right to do so after all.

- It is intuitive with a good learning curve. Most people just need a couple of songs to get comfortable on easy/medium difficulty, but the skill ceiling is high. For example, there is no special symbol to learn, just colors and directions, and on easier levels, they follow naturally (ex: blocks meant to be cut by the left saber are on the left).

- It is a VR game with no locomotion, it limits the risk of motion sickness.

Taken individually, none of these are special, but that's the combination that's great.

Edit: Another argument for "Beat Saber is a rhythm game" is that timing does matter. Unlike in most rhythm games, the timing window decreases as the notes/blocks move faster, simply because you have less time to cut them. Higher difficulties have the blocks move faster, making timing more critical.
by anonymars | 2025-05-02 22:50:02+00:00
Bang on. Indeed, I remember Ramit Sethi (finance blogger) making the same point (https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/the-big-wins-manifesto...)

> As Clotaire Rapaille wrote in his terrific book, The Culture Code,

“Years ago, Tufts University invited me to lecture during a symposium on obesity.

Lecturer after lecturer offered solutions for America’s obesity problem, all of which revolved around education. Americans would be thinner if only they knew about good nutrition and the benefits of exercise, they told us. Slimming down the entire country was possible through an aggressive public awareness campaign.

When it was my turn to speak, I couldn’t help beginning with an observation.

“I think it is fascinating that the other speakers today have suggested that education is the answer to our country’s obesity problem,” I said. I slowly gestured around the room.

“If education is the answer, then why hasn’t it helped more of you?”

There were audible gasps in the auditorium when I said this, quite a few snickers, and five times as many sneers. Unsurprisingly, Tufts never invited me to lecture again.”
by ivape | 2025-05-02 22:50:43+00:00
I appreciate your points. Morality is what most people want to take away from all of these books, but the thing they want to leave behind is one requirement that God seems to have, and that's straight up obedience. Obedience doesn't really fit inside morality, and in fact if you just distill morality out, obedience won't make it. The Old Testament hammers home the need for obedience to God's laws in story after story, until finally God just kinda lets us know that "hey you guys really cannot follow the law, so lets shift to a relationship framework with Christ". That's how I've been making sense of WHAT the Old Testament is in the context of the sequence, and further, why I don't ignore it because it seems to be he values both morality and obedience (and again, obedience doesn't fit into morality - Just the story of Abraham and his son, there's nothing moral about it).

It's a thoroughly Christian view, that being humans lack the capacity to follow God's laws because we're inherently sinners - but that's a whole nother' can of worms. It's kind of like a Kindergarten teacher (God) letting the kids run the show for a day (Old Testament), just to make it clear, they can't manage it. It's quite a thing to believe such a supreme being would run a sequence like that on us (in fact, that's how I make sense of a lot of the craziness in the world, that God would in fact let things run its course, however messed up (even in modern times, e.g - the narcissistic scale of social media, wars, factory slavery in China, migrant slavery in Mideast construction projects, abject poverty in the third world, pure greed and gluttonous abundance in the west, drug epidemics that rival plagues, etc, where all of these things are just as Biblically fucked up as parts of the Bible)). It's my only case for why the Old Testament is quite relevant to understanding the fullness of God. In short, the desire to understand how and why God would work in this way leads me to consider the entirety of the Bible, beginning to end.

Fun topic!
by londons_explore | 2025-05-02 22:51:15+00:00
I don't think it's a pipe dream from an 'amount of compute' perspective.

Any competent person can simulate 100 atoms in a crystal of some material, and say "whoa, it seems the bulk of this material behaves like a spring with f=kx, lets replace the individual atom simulation with a bulk simulation which is computationally far cheaper", and then we can simulate trillions of atoms.

I don't see why AI couldn't do the same.
by istjohn | 2025-05-02 22:51:25+00:00
Someone should develop an ad-hoc platooning network for truckers. Install a platooning cruise control package on your rig and then get an alert on your dash when another truck in the network is in your vicinity looking to platoon. Lock in the cruise control behind the lead vehicle, and the app automatically calculates the fuel savings and divides the savings equally between the operators.

Edit: Various sources say that platooning can cut fuel use by 4-15%.
by mulmen | 2025-05-02 22:52:18+00:00
> I'm probably just showing my age, but I like the idea of a "drivered" truck leading driverless trucks versus a completely autonomous system. It's similar to my attitude on crewed spaceflight-- I like the idea of the ingenuity and capacity for independent thought supervising an automated systems, versus autonomous automated systems.

Great example because spacecraft are fully autonomous. The weakest link in that platoon is the driver.
by dmurray | 2025-05-02 22:52:44+00:00
According to Wikipedia they aired music by Black musicians from day 1, with the Specials among others in their first program [0].

They were criticized for not having enough black acts. That's a reasonable criticism, but let's not make it sound like some kind of apartheid. They made a commercial decision about what genres to focused on, rather than something racially motivated. They didn't air many videos by country singers or classical violinists either.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV
by mk_stjames | 2025-05-02 22:52:44+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A brought two satellites back in the cargo bay that had not reached their proper orbit on a prior launch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-32 brought back the Long Duration Exposure Facility experiment, a bigass science probe the size of a small school bus.

There are still missions that are classified that could have done so as well.

It was something the shuttle was designed to do, with the 60-foot cargo bay requirement and the ability to bring back the mass it flew with coming specifically from the military.
by optionalsquid | 2025-05-02 22:52:57+00:00
We appear to be seeing similar things in Denmark: https://mobilsiden.dk/nyheder/opkoblede-biler/tal-om-elbiler...

According to these numbers, as of 2025, 65.5% of cars sold are purely electric and sales of electric vehicles are up significantly, compared to the same period in 2024. However, sales of Teslas has gone from 18.0% of electric vehicle sales in 2024 (making it the most popular brand at the time), to 6.3% of sales in 2025 (making it the 5. most popular brand)
by gnabgib | 2025-05-02 22:53:47+00:00
Discussions (20 points, 1 month ago, 18 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497652

(10 points, 1 month ago, 8 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43494887

Related:

Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M (39 points, 11 days ago, 23 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43757209

The Leader of the LeetCode Rebellion: An Interview with Roy Lee (70 points, 36 days ago, 45 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497848
by this_and_that | 2025-05-02 22:54:10+00:00
The game "Tea for God" (https://www.google.com/search?q=tea+for+god&oq=tea+for+god) also has this strange behavior where the world curves around in a non-Euclidean / M.C. Escher-style fashion so that you feel like you're in a labyrinth, but you're actually in a ~8ft square in your living room.

"Tea for God" and "Unseen Diplomacy" are the only games I'm aware of that operate in this fashion, with "realistic" walking movement that doubles back on itself.
by palata | 2025-05-02 22:54:27+00:00
> So an LLM that finds a piece of copyright data out there on the internet, downloads it, and republishes it has not broken any law?

Are you even trying? A gun that kills a person has not broken any law? It certainly can't be prosecuted.

> I'm not seeing a coherent argument that feeding a copyrighted work (that you obtained legally) into a machine is breaching anyone's copyright.

So you don't see how having an automated blackbox that takes copyrighted material as an input and provides a competing alternative that can't be proven to come from the input goes against the idea of copyright protections?
by meatmanek | 2025-05-02 22:54:29+00:00
Poisson distributions are sort of like the normal distribution for queuing theory for two main reasons:

1. They're often a pretty good approximation for how web requests (or whatever task your queuing system deals with) arrive into your system, as long as your traffic is predominantly driven by many users who each act independently. (If your traffic is mostly coming from a bot scraping your site that sends exactly N requests per second, or holds exactly K connections open at a time, the Poisson distribution won't hold.) Sort of like how the normal distribution shows up any time you sum up enough random variables (central limit theorem), the Poisson arrival process shows up whenever you superimpose enough uncorrelated arrival processes together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm%E2%80%93Khintchine_theore...

2. They make the math tractable -- you can come up with closed-form solutions for e.g. the probability distribution of the number of users in the system, the average waiting time, average number of users queuing, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M/M/c_queue#Stationary_analysi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit)#Erlang_B_formula
by glimshe | 2025-05-02 22:54:31+00:00
Our views are so far apart, I think we can't have a productive discussion in an online forum. Suffice to say, I don't have a problem with you living your life as you please.

I just intuitively believe that if enough people think like you, there will no longer be a society that can support the existence of people like you. I can't prove this hypothesis.
by NegativeK | 2025-05-02 22:54:36+00:00
We'd still get the same pressure to give an A+ to every interaction unless things were fucked.

I used to rate three stars for what "performs as expected" until I realized that it's punishing good products. Switch to A-F would result in the same behavior, except it'd be Uber drivers trying to make a living instead of noxious parents declaring that their kid deserves an A.
by danenania | 2025-05-02 22:54:57+00:00
We're talking about psychology, therapy, sycophancy, etc. None of this is empirical.

If someone thinks they can, say, create a billion dollar startup, whether they can really do it or not is a subjective determination. The AI might tell the person they can do it. You might tell them they can't, that the AI is sycophantic, and that they should stop talking to it because they're losing touch with reality.

But is the AI a sycophant, or are you an irrational pessimist?
by mulmen | 2025-05-02 22:55:50+00:00
> I feel like the ideal scenario would be to prioritize self driving truck at set times and set long haul freeways (i.e. Long Beach to Las Vegas or Galveston to Dallas) during the night time when there is no regular auto traffic - for example from 1 am-6 am.

But why though? These trucks will be safer than humans at the wheel. The most dangerous thing on the road will continue to be the humans driving next to the truck.

> That way if a human driver is concerned, they can choose not to drive during this period of time.

Why should we care about the concerns of a human driver? I don't get a choice to opt out of pedestrian smashing SUVs.

> Perhaps run the trucks in a train style configuration where a "conductor" can sit in the lead truck and manage any emergency issues that arise (i.e. security, crash or weather related).

What possible value will a human offer in that circumstance? We already have weather reports. Anyone willing to provide security is going to be prohibitively expensive and doesn't need to actually be in the truck. Autonomous vehicles are better at avoiding and responding to accidents than humans.

> what would stop a few cars passage in front of the truck and helping themselves to the cargo.

The FBI? What stops highway robbery today?
by dyogenez | 2025-05-02 22:56:49+00:00
We recently did a major migration from Next.js to Ruby on Rails with Inertia that took a few months. I wanted to share some of the thought process behind that decision, how we made it and what the change looked like in practice.

Inertia.js turned out to be amazing for this switch, and turned me into a big fan of Vite and Rails.
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-02 22:56:52+00:00
I had the pleasure of working closely with a Russian engineer on a team once and had to “massage” his stuff quite often into a state that would be deemed acceptable to leadership. It looked terrible, hacked together, haphazard - but it literally never broke. It’s been the better part of a decade now but I wouldnt be surprised if his stuff outlived mine.
by godelski | 2025-05-02 22:57:14+00:00
> It's not the type of thing that gets mathematicians excited

Says who? I've certainly seen mathematicians get excited about these kinds of things. Frequently they study Programming Languages and will talk your ear off about Category Theory.

> You can often blindly code your way through things by just following the type signatures and having a vague sense of what you want to accomplish.

Sounds like math to me. A simple and imprecise math, but still math via Poincare's description.

> in practice, CRUD apps are basically a trivial loop around a dispatcher into a bunch of simple functions operating on bounded data

In common settings. But those settings also change. You may see those uncommon settings as not practical or useful but I'd say that studying those uncommon settings is necessary for them to become practical and useful (presumably with additional benefits that the current paradigm doesn't have).
by tibbar | 2025-05-02 22:57:22+00:00
One of my favorite algorithms for this is Expectation Maximization [0].

You would start by estimating each driver's rating as the average of their ratings - and then estimate the bias of each rider by comparing the average rating they give to the estimated score of their drivers. Then you repeat the process iteratively until you see both scores (driver rating, and user bias) converge.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation%E2%80%93maximizati...
by tehjoker | 2025-05-02 22:58:35+00:00
I won't claim to be an expert on 1918 influenza, but here's a reference for the claim I was making: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5481322/

After reading this, I am less sure of the claim "most", but it seems that opportunistic infection was an important factor. There were a few unpleasant ways to die...
by cgio | 2025-05-02 22:58:42+00:00
Empathy does not lie in its perception on receipt but in its inception as a feeling. It is fundamentally a manifestation of the modalities enabled in shared experience. As such impossible to the extent that our experiences are not compatible with those of an intelligence that does not put emphasis on lived context trying to substitute for it with offline batch learning. Understanding is possible in this relationship, but should not be confused with empathy or compassion.
by Veserv | 2025-05-02 22:59:20+00:00
The difference between a flame graph and a trace visualization is that a flame graph is a aggregate/summary visualization. It helps visualize total runtime attributed to functions.

It is like the difference between seeing the mean of a distribution and seeing a plot of every datapoint in the distribution. They are useful for different purposes.

An example of how you might use it in conjunction with a trace visualizer is that you would select a time span in a trace and generate a flame graph for the selection. This would show you which functions and call stacks were responsible for most of the execution time in the selection. You would then use that to find one of those call stacks in the trace to examine how they execute to see if it makes sense.
by fitzroy | 2025-05-02 22:59:46+00:00
Beat Saber was the reason I bought a Quest 2. Now I actually find Synthriders to be a lot more fun. In Synth, if one person has purchased a song/map, everyone can play and players can create/share/upload maps and songs (there used to be a great free repository of songs that got taken down recently unfortunately).

Synth also removes some anxiety about playing in smaller spaces because AFAIK you're not encouraged to aim for big swings.
by usrusr | 2025-05-02 23:00:47+00:00
Problem is those railroad cars usually don't share origin and destination. And spending a day or two on the switchyard for every couple of hours of actual travel isn't what customers want.

The beaty of platooning is that trucks can join and leave while traveling at speed, all they need is a free lane on the side.

And if you really want to tease out all the efficiencies of rail, without suffering the drawbacks, you make electrified lanes that also have embedded tracks (like those of a tramway, but designed for higher load) and make the trucks multimodals that can switch while moving. Actually just those trucks that would see an economic advantage, trucks designed for light, high volume loads would likely stick to road wheels only.

A setup like this could actually be super economical compared to two because a rail network needs huge separation between trains because rails are terrible for braking fast. Multimodals on the other hand could be designed to be able to switch to their road wheels in an emergency. And a rail network needs an ungodly amount of nines in terms of reliability and rarity of maintenance, because there is no plan B network. Reliability nines are expensive. Multimodals on the other hand could easily be diverted to a dirt road for a bit when the main lanes are defective or going through maintenance. Where they would be running on the same batteries they carry anyways, for the last couple of miles on regular, non-electrified roads.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-05-02 23:00:54+00:00
I've tried -4o a couple of times. There are several topics I've seldom had anyone to talk about with, and the machine will supply useful (not so entirely new) information. Useful mainly for learners no doubt. Looking for new perspectives, not hand-holding.

I'd like to see more of the Monte Python approach ... 'I came here looking for an arguement'. Better the machine should say 'that's ridiculous because x,y,z' and send me away to think that over, and prepare counters than 'oh sure, that's a point of controversy innit? But yes, you're alright'.
by technetist | 2025-05-02 23:00:56+00:00
I think that ultimately you run into the same issue.

In US education you are taught that you need to get an A. Anything below a C, gets you on the equivalent of a “Performance Improvement Plan” in corporate world. And B is… well… B.

So with that rating engrained, people would probably feel bad about rating their ride-share driver a C when they did what was expected. And it wouldn’t stop companies from pushing for A ratings.

Even elsewhere like the food industry where they do have letter ratings, A is the norm with anything lower being an outlier.

Perhaps for this to work, it would need a complete systemic shift where C truly is the average and A and F are the outliers. In school C would need to be “did the student do the assignment.” And A would need to be “the student did the assignment, and then some.”