MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smcin | 2025-05-11 08:33:09+00:00
Embracer acquired Asmodee 12/2021, made a spree of other debt-funded accquisitions packaged and prepped to sell the whole company to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund in 2022, but that deal fell through in 2023 and Embracer reportedly incurred €2 billion losses, laid off 8% of 17,000 Asmodee employees, then subsequently spun Asmodee out (now the board and card game unit) saddled with €900m Euro debt to pay off Embracer's actions.

The Asmodee spinout officially became a separate entity as of 2/2025, and has an 18 month deadline to refinance that debt. Fitch rates this BB- [0], which apparently implies >6% probability of default (at current interest rates). Asmodee will presumably achieve that by jacking up prices on existing (boardgame and cardgame) IP, and/or killing stuff that doesn't pay much, and/or refreshing newer versions of existing IP (like Sony Games' 2024 attempt to do forced relicensing on existing PS owners' libraries).

Right after the acquisition, Asmodee silently delisted beloved Steam titles like 'Pandemic' in early 2022 [1][2], without even notifying existing owners; and only 4 years after it had been released in 2018. Supposedly this after-sale revocation violates consumer laws in California and Australia (and maybe elsewhere); if Steam ever pulls the trigger on removing them we get to find out; meanwhile back up your binaries.

Asmodee also acquired the superb online site BoardGameArena.com in 2021, cofounders Grégory and Emmanuel both left in 2023 at the height of Embracer's pillaging.

I commented previously on Asmodee (mostly pre-Wingefors) milking the awful digital implementation of Terraforming Mars (which should have been a huge hit) for like 6 years without any meaningful playtesting or bugfixing [3][4].

Here are some Redditors helpfully filling in the gaps on Wingefors "I'm sure I deserve a lot of criticism" token gesture towards humility [5].

Wingefors' behavior in divesting Asmodee and sticking it with much of the debt for his/ Embracer's failed Covid-era acquisition spree feels something like Bruce Willis strapping plastic explosive to the monitor and chair and dropping it down a 36-storey elevator shaft. Make impressive noise. Or like Restaurant at the End of the Universe when they crash the starship into the sun.

Given Lars Wingefors' trail of digital tears, why he is now begging private individuals to donate their physical copies of old videogames to a private physical archive noone can access or visit, to make him somehow look like a community-minded benefactor, is bizarre. He could simply donate to an existing online archive.

[0]: https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/fitc...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29968054 [2]: https://delistedgames.com/pandemic-the-board-game/

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42303399 [4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraformingMarsGame/comments/1443i...

[5]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1cb93xy/embracer_ceo...
by manarth | 2025-05-11 08:33:37+00:00
They tested two approaches: "Open ventilation" (hose to the surface) and "Closed ventilation" (no air sources).

"The most important finding was that an air-connection to the surface is not needed, reducing the technical effort significantly." [1] "Charging requires more time and energy with closed ventilation. In return the higher pressure difference results in a higher turbine power and energy during the discharging phase…ventilation is not beneficial in this regard." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Energy_at_Sea

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S235215... (PDF)
by dotancohen | 2025-05-11 08:33:43+00:00
Why is every app a startup now?

It's a serious question. Is the focus studying fast for tests (quoted from OP)? Or running a business? If the real goal were studying, the app could be banged out quickly and you could get back to studying. The business is a time sink - which at this stage OP would have presumably discovered - he's already out here spending time promoting it.
by grumblepeet | 2025-05-11 08:33:57+00:00
As an artist Turner has inspired me not just with his use of colour, which was masterful, but with his readiness to break normal painting rules. We would scratch at his paintings with a specially long fingernail, stab at them with brushes, use watercolour almost like oils, do anything to get the image that he needed. We get most of this from looking at the paintings and from anecdotal evidence because as the article says he painted in secrecy behind closed doors.

His later works are truly amazing, given the time in which they were made. Many of the later images we know him for were from sketchbooks and studies, and not necessarily for sale or to be seen by others (code snippets?) but are impressionist years before that became a thing.

You can go to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and go to the Print Room (you have to book) and ask to see some. I'm told by a friend I've not done that.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-05-11 08:35:14+00:00
Responsible Disclosures and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Companies need to feel a lot more pain a lot more often in order for them to take the security of their customers a lot more serious. If you just give them month to fix an issue and spoon-feed them the solution it's just another ticket in their Backlog. But if every other security issue becomes enough news online that their CEOs are involved and a solution must be find in hours not month, they will become a lot more proactive. Of course it's the end users that would suffer most from this. But then again, they buy ASUS so they suffer already...
by avidiax | 2025-05-11 08:35:22+00:00
> Do we really want to support what these chips are doing to the spectrum?

So a 5W Baofeng outputs 0.000272W on the 5th harmonic when transmitting at 2M.

Is it out of spec for commercial (Part 90) use in the US? No. Is it out of spec for amateur use? Yes.

But does it actually matter? Probably not. 272µW at 576Mhz is probably not going to bother anyone. Especially not when transmitting infrequently as most HT users will.

My personal opinion is that some people dislike the idea that people may enter a hobby without serious financial commitment. Not having to spend $300 on a HT means that unserious people might want to use a radio to talk about life instead of a radio to talk about radios.

https://www.ad5gg.com/2016/09/28/baofeng-uv-5r-harmonics/
by sigmaisaletter | 2025-05-11 08:35:59+00:00
Obligatory "Scumbag Asus" video link:

Invidious https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=cbGfc-JBxlY

YouTube https://youtube.com/watch?v=cbGfc-JBxlY

"ASUS emailed us last week (...) and asked if they could fly out to our office this week to meet with us about the issues and speak "openly." We told them we'd be down for it but that we'd have to record the conversation. They did say they wanted to speak openly, after all. They haven't replied to us for 5 days. So... ASUS had a chance to correct this. We were holding the video to afford that opportunity. But as soon as we said "sure, but we're filming it because we want a record of what's promised," we get silence."

Edit: formatting
by kragen | 2025-05-11 08:36:05+00:00
Only pure mathematics fits your description, and while perhaps it is ontologically prior to applied mathematics and science, the human activity of studying pure mathematics seems to have historically arisen from applied mathematics and never entirely escaped it, while applied mathematics seems to have historically arisen from science.

And the first step in reducing some phenomenon of the contingent world, such as "heat" or "work" or "light" or "circle" or "strategy", to an abstraction you can apply math to, is precisely to "take[] some word from the natural language and tries to [invent] a formal definition for it with necessary and sufficient conditions." That's how you start applying the hypothetico-deductive method to anything.

You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy", but Plato, Newton, Kant, and Gauss would say you were full of shit.
by arp242 | 2025-05-11 08:36:16+00:00
Tesla market cap is currently $959B, shipped 0.5M vehicles in 2024.

Toyota is second with $244B and shipped 11M vehicles.

Ford shipped 4.4M vehicles and has a market cap of $41B.

If I look at [1] then Tesla is worth more than the next 12 or so combined.

Nothing about this makes any sense. Maybe ten or fifteen years ago you could have made the argument based on future prospects, but that case is exceedingly hard to make today when there's tons more competition on the EV market.

[1]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/automakers/largest-automakers...
by Ashymad | 2025-05-11 08:36:50+00:00
Your comment came at a right moment, right after my lecture in ontology yesterday where the proffesor presented the inverted casuality of a controller feedback loop as an example of a 2 types of causes described by aristotle that are lost in modern materialistic thinking, the formal cause and the final cause.

Great examples with the tea and the opamp for how a final cause be in the "future" of the effect, I'll remember them for the exam :)
by dan_voronov | 2025-05-11 08:37:01+00:00
The idea is very good, it's just annoying that the current (i made ai startup) trend is to vibe generate something that is a wrapper for other AI models and already ask for $15 for it. Do you even realize how much work has been done in OpenAI to ask us for $20 a month? How many engineers and scientific articles?

From my point of view, for this not to be a scam: 1 - there should first be a video presentation of the program's operation with all functions, not a website with a bunch of promises and a PAY button 2 - You should definitely write your FIRST startup without any AI generation at all!
by Timon3 | 2025-05-11 08:37:46+00:00
I know Delphi, yet I didn't know Lazarus until now. I'm sure there are others like me.

I can understand not wanting to explain Delphi, but come on, not everyone knows the name of every IDE for every language. It doesn't hurt to add one sentence explaining that. If I hadn't seen the comment above, I wouldn't be able to consider Lazarus in the future if I ever use Delphi again.
by antmldr | 2025-05-11 08:38:07+00:00
>so I could see if anyone else had a domain with driverhub.asus.com.* registered. From looking at other websites certificate transparency logs, I could see that domains and subdomains would appear in the logs usually within a month. After a month of waiting I am happy to say that my test domain is the only website that fits the regex, meaning it is unlikely that this was being actively exploited prior to my reporting of it.

This only remains true in so far as no-one directly registered for a driverhub subdomain. Anyone with a wildcard could have exploited this, silent to certificate transparency?
by kragen | 2025-05-11 08:38:52+00:00
I am delighted!

Yet I think of electrical engineering as the epitome of modern materialism, however mystical the jargon about imaginary current phasors and complex permittivity may seem to the uninitiated. Electrical engineers think of electrical fields as material things that exist in the universe and follow probabilistic but all-encompassing laws, not as supernatural spiritual entities. Could your professor be wrong?
by astrange | 2025-05-11 08:40:02+00:00
Since gamers are a subculture, they want a mirror of any part of real life you can think of, except about games.

There's a sub-subculture in this of video game journalists. There's a further subculture inside this of people who want to be writing for a video game review website (or a sports blog etc) but only ever actually write about their half-baked opinions about American politics.
by dmje | 2025-05-11 08:40:23+00:00
This is really lovely, very responsive, and better than other tools I've tried.

Is it just me though, or is the saving functionality wonky? I seem to be able to save but then "save as" doesn't prompt for a new filename / location. I wanted to fiddle with an svg, add additional layers, save a few versions locally - but seem unable to do this?
by jemmyw | 2025-05-11 08:40:54+00:00
I don't recall it being particularly esoteric. There were libraries to call various databases. In my first job I converted a vb6 application from Foxpro to SQL server. I was just getting into Ruby on Rails at the time and wrote a COM library the the data layer that was somewhat like activerecord, and ended up using it from ruby scripts. Fun times. Just looked it up and the software still seems to be being sold 20 years later.
by zai_nabasif1234 | 2025-05-11 08:41:29+00:00
[5/11, 1:41 PM] Meta AI: Imbalanced learning refers to the challenge of training machine learning models on datasets where the classes are not represented equally. This can lead to biased models that perform well on the majority class but poorly on the minority class.

Class Weight Class weight is a technique used to address class imbalance by assigning different weights to each class during training. The idea is to give more weight to the minority class and less weight to the majority class.

Key Considerations 1. Class weight calculation: Weights can be calculated based on class frequency or other heuristics. 2. Hyperparameter tuning: Class weights can be tuned as hyperparameters during model training. 3. Evaluation metrics: Metrics like F1-score, precision, and recall are often used to evaluate model performance on imbalanced datasets.

Techniques 1. Oversampling: Oversampling the minority class to balance the dataset. 2. Undersampling: Undersampling the majority class to balance the dataset. 3. SMOTE: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) generates synthetic samples of the minority class.

Applications 1. Fraud detection: Imbalanced learning is crucial in fraud detection, where the minority class (fraudulent transactions) is often much smaller than the majority class (legitimate transactions). 2. [5/11, 1:41 PM] Meta AI: Imbalanced learning refers to the challenge of training machine learning models on datasets where the classes are not represented equally. This can lead to biased models that perform well on the majority class but poorly on the minority class.

Class Weight Class weight is a technique used to address class imbalance by assigning different weights to each class during training. The idea is to give more weight to the minority class and less weight to the majority class.

Key Considerations 1. Class weight calculation: Weights can be calculated based on class frequency or other heuristics. 2. Hyperparameter tuning: Class weights can be tuned as hyperparameters during model training. 3. Evaluation metrics: Metrics like F1-score, precision, and recall are often used to evaluate model performance on imbalanced datasets.

Techniques 1. Oversampling: Oversampling the minority class to balance the dataset. 2. Undersampling: Undersampling the majority class to balance the dataset. 3. SMOTE: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) generates synthetic samples of the minority class.

Applications 1. Fraud detection: Imbalanced learning is crucial in fraud detection, where the minority class (fraudulent transactions) is often much smaller than the majority class (legitimate transactions). 2. Medical diagnosis: Imbalanced learning can be applied to medical diagnosis, where the minority class (diseased patients) may be much smaller than the majority class (healthy patients).

Would you like to know more about imbalanced learning or class weight?
Ask HN: Maintaining code quality with widespread AI coding tools?
by raydenvm | 2025-05-11 08:42:03+00:00
I've noticed a trend: as more devs at my company (and in projects I contribute to) adopt AI coding assistants, code quality seems to be slipping. It's a subtle change, but it's there.

The issues I keep noticing: - More "almost correct" code that causes subtle bugs - The codebase has less consistent architecture - More copy-pasted boilerplate that should be refactored

I know, maybe we shouldn't care about the overall quality and it's only AI that will look into the code further. But that's a somewhat distant variant of the future. For now, we should deal with speed/quality balance ourselves, with AI agents in help.

So, I'm curious, what's your approach for teams that are making AI tools work without sacrificing quality? Is there anything new you're doing, like special review processes, new metrics, training, or team guidelines?
by adrianmsmith | 2025-05-11 08:42:15+00:00
That may be what it means but I don't believe that's what it says?

> But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

My only interpretation of that text is "you have planned for the future and understood delayed gratification, you fool!".
by grumblepeet | 2025-05-11 08:43:01+00:00
I totally agree with this. When I worked at a University (mumbles) years ago I wrote a build system for rebuilding the OS and apps on student lab PC's and I used VB6 as the front end. It seemed in those days we could do anything, and nobody told us we couldnt do it.

I also made a simple two button menu app for use on repurposed 386's that we were using as thin client pc's. Years later I went back to see they had been replaced with tiny HP thin client devices but my menu was still being used!
by dgrr19 | 2025-05-11 08:45:10+00:00
> There is a fee, quite high in fact, and energy cost.

Depends on the L1 that you use. If you think of BTC, yeah, fee could be high (not if you are sending 1M), if you think of a proof-of-stake L1 then not much. Also depends on the TPS. Again; thinking about Hyperliquid.
by szszrk | 2025-05-11 08:46:49+00:00
Weird examples.

Self service cash registers are huge in Europe and as the tech matured even elderly are choosing them to not wait in queues. There are a lot of complains, but on par with standard registries.

Self checkout on flights, the online one, is the easiest and biggest time saver. Up to a point where cost is not the most important factor to fly with carry-on only.
by koliber | 2025-05-11 08:47:11+00:00
I don’t think the author had a chance to interview each person they observed to see if their worried were right. That does not mean that they could not validate their observations.

You look at patterns and note them. Over years you will see similar patterns, both in people you only observe once, as well as people you get to know better. The ones you get to know better are the ones where you validate your theories. I’m not explaining it very well, but it works. It’s kind of like a sort of sparse sampling or a very long-term Monte Carlo simulation in n-dimensions (that’s an allusion and not a strict explanation)
by thom | 2025-05-11 08:47:12+00:00
The article ends:

> Can anything be done about the liana problem? Should we start cutting them down? Definitely not, says Visser. "We shouldn't intervene until we fully understand their ecological role. They bear fruit year-round and are vital for rare monkey and bird species." The only necessary action, he insists, is halting climate change, which will also slow the expansion of lianas.
by ArinaS | 2025-05-11 08:48:14+00:00
> "If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened."

People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?

> "They are all FREE too, mind you."

No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).
by dgrr19 | 2025-05-11 08:49:18+00:00
> And do they? In practice? The theory is always sweet

Yes, they have access to the same economy.

> you have one more voice asking a centralized organization for protection, maybe with some regulation

I don't want regulation, thanks. Just have backups or smth. Only looking for governments to not ban it in order to allow users to convert their BTCs to fiat currency. But that is already kinda in place, because old school investors are asking for it.

> Ask that person in India if they're eager to "access to income the same way a person in the US would" (whatever that means)

It means that they can also earn a 100K salary in USD, thus not being affected by inflation
by kaliqt | 2025-05-11 08:50:13+00:00
We gave Vircadia a full Gen 2 overhaul (big thanks to our sponsors such as Linux Professional Institute, Deutsche Telekom, etc. for enabling this), aiming to cut down on code bloat and boost performance. The main shift is swapping out our custom backend infrastructure for a battle-tested, high-performance system like PostgreSQL with Bun wrapping and managing every end of it.

It's kind of unheard of to do this for things like game dev (preferring custom solutions), but it works and makes things way easier to manage. The shape of the data in a database affects how well it works for a use case, and that model scales well for virtually every kind of software ever, the same should apply here!

Feel free to prototype some game ideas you might have been tossing around, our priority is DX for the project as a whole to enable more developers with less resources to build bigger worlds, so please do share feedback here and/or in GH issues!

Our roadmap is for more SDKs, and cutting down on bloat where possible, with the express goal of giving devs more cycles in the day to focus on the actual gameplay instead of tooling.
by koliber | 2025-05-11 08:50:36+00:00
Then again she is a painter whose job depends on literally observing the details and atmosphere and capturing not only the visual field but also the essence. So if not her, then who is better suited to make such observations.

I don’t think any of the things she said are deterministic or objectively descriptive. At the same time I think she does capture some essence or wisdom from her multitude of experience and her knack for noticing this and being able to put it into words.
by okanat | 2025-05-11 08:51:27+00:00
Citing CGPGrey: Solutions that are the first thing you can think of are terrible and ineffective.

Good safety/security culture encourages players to not hide their problems. Corporations are greedy bastards. They'll do everything to hide their security mistakes.

You are also making legitimate, fixable in a month issues available for everyone which increases their chances to be exploited a lot.
by IMTDb | 2025-05-11 08:52:15+00:00
On key difference here is that those mathematician then go through the process of actually proving the theorem. Just having “an intuitive understanding” is never enough, no matter how many times you have been right before.

The author here does not go through that process at all. It just feels like saying: I watch people a lot so I feel like I know what I am talking about, I feel entitled to write a piece about it. Math people have those pieces peer reviewed and experimented upon before they are actually published.
by mjg59 | 2025-05-11 08:53:32+00:00
Windows makes it much easier for userland policy agents to plug into WMI than to call raw ACPI methods, so WMI became much more popular as Microsoft made it more difficult for vendors to ship random kernel drivers. I didn't write the first WMI integration for Linux (that was Carlos Corbacho back in 2008) but I did write various glue drivers - initially for HP because there was one single hotkey on my laptop that fired a WMI event and which Linux couldn't receive, and later the entire Sony hotkey driver which involved a ludicrous number of layers of indirection. WMI is /somewhat/ self describing (there's a method to call to get a compressed binary of a blob that contains method signatures), but unfortunately there's no requirement that anything they call is documented in any way, so it's often still a matter of reading decompiled ACPI bytecode.

I have taken psychic damage so you don't have to.