MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crq-yml | 2025-09-09 03:06:16+00:00
Challenging fun is the kind that defers satisfaction to near the end of the process - so the more challenge there is, the more uneven the satisfaction is likely to be. It's the same satisfaction one experiences with language fluidity, and being able to "converse" with the mechanics. That is the cause of an essential problem in the design of such games: enjoying the game means becoming literate in what the game is doing. Some people are hooked on the pattern recognition particular to that form of challenge and find it easy to progress and satisfying to win. Others have difficulty maintaining attention, get frustrated quickly and quit. This is evident in reviews of UFO50, the anthology of "authentically fake retro games" from the makers of Spelunky. Most of the games in UFO50 are difficult in more-or-less the same ways that games of the NES era were, with some intentional anachronisms. People find games they love and games they hate in the collection, but their opinions on which ones, and how hard they are, are all over the map and in vigorous disagreement. It is an excellent litmus test for what kind of gamer you are.

The most notorious game in the collection by most estimates, Star Waspir, is a vertical scrolling shooter. For most people, it's the hardest thing they've ever played, but they also like it if they persist, and the overarching goal of completing all 50 games propels them into developing appreciation. The enthusiasts in vertical shmups, on the other hand, find it a bit out of touch with where the genre is and not all that hard relative to other games: the mindset of shmup players is one of playing the same 15 minute experience repeatedly with incremental improvements in progress or score over weeks and months, and intentionally choosing between easier and harder routing according to their current skill - as opposed to the mainstream of continual progression through content with a binary conclusion of "beat the game/did not beat the game". Star Waspir has elements of the modern genre but it's also stripped down to be more within the 80's vintage, retaining certain rough edges.

A large part of what hooked people with HK was that everything was "paced for mortals" and stayed in an accessible Goldilocks zone with a lot of room to grow into doing harder stuff. This also made it incredibly boring to Metroidvania enthusiasts who knew all the tropes: it's the plain vanilla version of this gameplay, given a lot of attention to detail, but it takes a while to get going and doesn't have many things for enthusiasts. Silksong has pushed a little more into the enthusiast territory, which is always going to be to popular detriment.
by karmakaze | 2025-09-09 03:06:17+00:00
The excess-(2N−1) offset binary representation has the useful property where storing a sequence of them in memory, MSB-first means you can lexographically process the bytes opaquely and it results in ordering by their values. MySQL uses this (2's complement with inverted sign) for indexing or sorting. You can see this in the hex value displays in deadlock logs.
by rubyn00bie | 2025-09-09 03:07:42+00:00
Lucid offers the best range of any EV. And while not really directly comparable to the Model S Plaid because it is twice the price of the Plaid—- Lucid’s Air Sapphire absolutely out performs the Plaid in every scenario. I think the days of Tesla’s dominance in the EV space are dwindling rapidly. If Lucid can get their midsized car out, at a reasonable price, I don’t see any real reason to buy a Tesla unless you just particularly fancy one. That’s not a great proposition for a company that was once considered a tech company with a huge lead over everyone else. It’s only a matter of time before the double whammy of lackluster innovation and Musk’s politics come home to roost.
by drzaiusx11 | 2025-09-09 03:08:19+00:00
From personal experience with bosses: no, often times it's not a sufficient argument.

If the choice is thought to be between:

* delivering value directly to the customer to justify a company's existence

* or adding tests to things that already work (shore up) in an effort to make more correct changes in the future

Will anyone be surprised how often it's the former that management will go for?

I've found the appetite for this type of testability/observability improvement work increases proportionally with the number of support calls being made from customers complaining about the current feature set being unstable and buggy. This work is less palatable when customers really are just looking for that next new feature you promised instead and everything else is a-ok. The exception being things like orbital navigation systems etc..
by monocasa | 2025-09-09 03:09:27+00:00
That's really hard to drop.

Fancier unix programs tend to make all kinds of assumptions about page size to do things like the double mapped ring buffer trick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_buffer#Optimization

In fact it looks like apple silicon maintains support for 4kb pages just for running Rosetta. It's one of those things like TSO that was enough of a pain to work around the assumptions that they just included hardware support for it that isn't enabled when running in regular arm software mode.
by benbojangles | 2025-09-09 03:10:42+00:00
when covid happened gold prices, crypto and art prices went through the roof; now that the covid situation appears under control and markets have returned back to normal, everything is predictable again - it makes sense that art markets are taking a steep decline back to normal levels. Being able to hide assets during a time of //war/plague/market crash/comet strike etc// is a skill which will make a man great wealth if he offers the service to whoever is rich and still alive. It therefore seems logical that art markets and shows can mothball themselves for the time being.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-09-09 03:10:50+00:00
I remember IBM making huge claims about using the blockchain for supply chain management. For instance[1]:

> A recent pilot by KPMG, Merck, Walmart and IBM using blockchain injects new trust into the system by reducing the time it takes to trace prescription drugs from 16 weeks to just two seconds.

It was impressive how many people uncritically took these claims as facts.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/solutions/blockchain-supply-chain
by noduerme | 2025-09-09 03:11:07+00:00
>> You're not thinking about it the right way.

I'm well aware of the tendency of societies to accept convenience over privacy, of the underlying risk of surveillance at scale and of the stripping of privacy from off-the-shelf applications that users are unlikely to abandon.

You seem to be assuming I was making a case that people will just get around these invasions of privacy en masse, and I'm not making any such case. Nor were my questions designed to undermine the original article or to dismiss the harms or the totalitarian nature of these laws.

More difficult privacy means less privacy for everyone, and it means no privacy for the bulk of the population. I agree.

So I don't need a lecture in how my questions misalign with the absolute need to preserve encryption. My questions are geared toward understanding what individuals can do in a society which has already turned completely into a panopticon. And I don't think it's useless to ask those questions, nor to educate people in how to protect themselves in such a situation, even if the task seems hopeless on a mass scale. Such a situation appears increasingly inevitable in the West, and I think it's valuable to take whatever lessons we can from societies that are already further down this road. My family fled a totalitarian dictatorship long before such powerful surveillance technologies could even be imagined. I think knowing how people cope with and attempt to preserve a modicum of provacy under the present conditions in modern dictatorships is instructive in preparing at least some part of our population for it.
by coppsilgold | 2025-09-09 03:11:08+00:00
When it comes to e2e encryption it's important for the ends to be static (not web apps) and auditable (open source, reproducible builds) because the software running on the ends can trivially compromise anything going trough either of them. It can be as simple as a script being loaded from the server into a runtime such as Lua (closed source app). Or custom javascript delivered (web app).

When these conditions aren't met, any e2e encryption claim can be dismissed out of hand. This does not mean the service offers no value, it just means it cannot be trusted to keep anything confidential.
by mh- | 2025-09-09 03:11:32+00:00
Interesting. I can't see the source for the data in your link (it cites Statista, but that's just a graph and requires a subscription to see the source data.)

Not saying it's wrong (I have no idea, that's why I googled), but would be interesting to know.

edit: but also, you're right that I inadvertently looked at US-only data. I did say it was a quick Google. :) Edited my original comment.
by ehnto | 2025-09-09 03:12:20+00:00
I don't think LLMs are building towards an AI singularity at least.

I also wonder if we can even power an AI singularity. I guess it depends on what the technology is. But it is taking us more energy than really reasonable (in my opinion) just to produce and run frontier LLMs. LLMs are this really weird blend of stunningly powerful, yet with a very clear inadequacy in terms of sentient behaviour.

I think the easiest way to demonstrate that, is that it did not take us consuming the entirety of human textual knowledge, to form a much stronger world model.
by jbm | 2025-09-09 03:14:02+00:00
I've generally advocated ignoring Musk, but it's impossible to defend him in good faith as a reasonable figurehead for a multinational company. His X page in particular portrays a man who cares deeply about 4chan/pol politics and very little about his car company.

If he cared at all, you'd see a better repair process with them. There is a Tesla repair hub in Calgary where I live, and I had to wait 5 weeks for them to see my car (including an un-explained situation where they bumped me, despite me being concerned about a safety issue). I eventually took it to an EV repair shop who did it for half of what Tesla quoted because, FFS, the world's most valuable auto company is "Resource Constrained" with mechanics.

Seriously, how can they afford a trillion on a CEO when they are parking expensive Cybertrucks on the front lawn of their Calgary store?

I still love driving my car (a 2019 Model 3), but I have no faith that Tesla will actually improve on it with their current leadership structure.
by kentich | 2025-09-09 03:14:29+00:00
You're absolutely right. Big corporations don't like remote work and don't want to enhance it. Tech enthusiasts is the only hope for improvement in this area. The good news is that there are innovative projects that can significantly enhance remote work. I suggest trying MeetingGlass - video meetings through virtual frosted glass. This tool can make it easier for both employer and employees meet via video on a fair terms without violating prvacy.
by dublinben | 2025-09-09 03:15:02+00:00
What do you think the market is for this kind of digital art? Do you see this style of work attracting an audience elsewhere? How much is it selling for?

I'm far from an expert, but I do occasionally buy original artwork. The sheer multitude of works you are displaying (more than one a day!) devalues what you are doing. It suggests that these can be churned out with relatively little effort.

If you are really posting this for other people, and not just yourself, try posting fewer pieces. If you had to pick the single best work from July, which one would it be? If nothing stands out to you, then how is a potential customer supposed to pick you out from the crowd of similar artists?

I personally like the Persistence of Structure series, but they're each pretty interchangeable.
by nobody9999 | 2025-09-09 03:15:27+00:00
>I mean, doing what they do in the UK, where you need to provide proof of your right to work on day one of your job would help a lot.

Every job (as an employee) I've ever had has required me to submit IRS form W-9[0] on my first day of employment (or before). It's a standard part of the on-boarding process. To clarify, the W-9 form is to provide your "Taxpayer Identification number" (TIN) to those who will be handling payroll/tax withholding (that is, your employer).

If you cannot provide a TIN, you are not allowed to begin working. If you don't have a TIN, presumably you don't have the right to work. Or is there something about the UK's processes I'm missing?

[0] https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-w-9
by randomname4325 | 2025-09-09 03:15:32+00:00
Every time I read about a big publicly traded company say something "we're like a startup" I just LOL. Startups win by doing something really disruptive that actually works. You only hear about extreme success. Most things fail. If SNAP allowed each startup squad (10 users) to actually operate like a startup, they'd launch 500 unique disruptive features per month, every month until they hit a growth curve. I'm skeptical that's actually happening.
by YouWhy | 2025-09-09 03:15:37+00:00
To the extent a random person's evidence on the Internet amounts to proof:

From people at Facebook circa 2018, I know that end user privacy was addressed at multiple checkpoints -- onboarding, the UI of all systems that could theoretically access PII, war stories about senior people being fired due to them marginally misunderstanding the policy, etc.

Note that these friends did not belong to WhatsApp, which was at that time a rather separate suborg.
by omoikane | 2025-09-09 03:18:05+00:00
I see it since I don't have adblockers installed.

Instead of adblockers, I remember sites that are user hostile one way or another and just avoid those sites. Those sites that are heavy on ads usually aren't worth my time anyway, so the presence of those auto-playing videos in every corner ends up being a signal for me to go somewhere else.
by maxbond | 2025-09-09 03:18:16+00:00
Thanks! That was the intention. There's a tool called `retry` which does an even better job by caching stdin so that it can be integrated into shell pipelines.

I was thinking of it as a subcommand, like `git pull`. I think of the backoff schedules as different "modes" the command can be put into, each with their own set of arguments. I also made some questionable design decisions and coupled too closely to the CLI argument parser (`clap`), which would make it a big pain to back out of that decision.
by avgcodor | 2025-09-09 03:18:37+00:00
I've replaced a few large legacy systems over the years and I disagree with most of the points mentioned in the link. The only way guaranteed to work is to run the old system concurrently with the new system with live inputs and compare results for a trial period and fixing discrepancies as they arise. Only when there is 100% behavioral/data fidelity with the old system can a switchover to the new system occur.

I'm not aware of the formal Design Pattern name, but a google search yielded this blog post on the subject: https://medium.com/@sahayneeta72/parallel-run-strategy-7ff64...

Coincidentally this is the same strategy github employed when verifying libgit2: https://github.blog/engineering/engineering-principles/move-...
by ehnto | 2025-09-09 03:19:21+00:00
Fluid and natural are pretty different concepts, perhaps "intuitive" better maps to what you mean? Humans aren't that fluid, certainly wouldn't be when it comes to vaulting, jumping etc.

Playing a game with realistic FPS movement like milsims is a totally different experience.

When it comes to fun and intuitive movement, I would say realism should go straight out the door. I want to feel like a cheetah chasing a goat across a cliffs edge in games. Personal preference but I feel like objectively more fun.
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-09 03:19:34+00:00
Now that I think of it, when a professional YouTuber shows their browser, more often than not, there is no ad-blocking. But as professional YouTubers, there is no way they are not aware of ad-blocking.

I wonder if they actually watch the ads on purpose, even in private or if they turn their adblocker off just for the video, as not to give ideas to their viewers and potentially losing ad revenue.
by soulofmischief | 2025-09-09 03:19:43+00:00
The aim of the billboards I am speaking of is to confuse the semantics between anti-Israel speech and antisemitism, and to normalize ostracization of those who do either, effectively contributing to the chilling of speech over time by forcing dissenters to be more careful about when and where they denounce they genocide.

You are taking for granted how many of these damn billboards have cropped up recently and how prominent they are. Don't you make the connection to McCarthyism? We've seen all of these tactics before, and road signs have long been a prominent medium for controlling public opinion.
by like_any_other | 2025-09-09 03:19:48+00:00
> LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model

Let's take a look at this "for-profit model" - is it just higher price outweighed by better product? lol:

Microsoft, after getting beat up in the press for making propietary extensions to the Kerberos protocol, has released the specifications on the web -- but in order to get it, you have to run a Windows .exe file which forces you agree to a click-through license agreement where you agree to treat it as a trade secret, before it will give you the .pdf file. Who would have thought that you could publish a trade secret on the web? - https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and...

Back in 2001, Be, Inc. managed to get BeOS pre-installed on one computer model from Hitachi. Just one. On the entire PC market. Microsoft forced Hitachi to drop the bootloader entry to hide BeOS from customers buying it. They enforced their monopoly over the only possible niche BeOS could find on the PC market, crushing Be, Inc. in the process. - https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w...

So why aren't there any dual-boot computers for sale? The answer lies in the nature of the relationship Microsoft maintains with hardware vendors. More specifically, in the "Windows License" agreed to by hardware vendors who want to include Windows on the computers they sell. This is not the license you pretend to read and click "I Accept" to when installing Windows. This license is not available online. This is a confidential license, seen only by Microsoft and computer vendors. You and I can't read the license because Microsoft classifies it as a "trade secret." The license specifies that any machine which includes a Microsoft operating system must not also offer a non-Microsoft operating system as a boot option. In other words, a computer that offers to boot into Windows upon startup cannot also offer to boot into BeOS or Linux. The hardware vendor does not get to choose which OSes to install on the machines they sell -- Microsoft does. - https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
by gxs | 2025-09-09 03:20:15+00:00
If google weren’t such an ass about your data you could download everything and run some queries to see how you should create your rules

What is sending you the most emails? What emails did you actually care about?

Yes yes, you can do this technically speaking, but good luck actually trying - everything is so slow and old emails with attachments will simply not download - they won’t load even in the UI sometimes

For me, I did what you did except with a new email address

That address has notifications and they are reserved pretty much for just people - I don’t use it for websites at all - I only give to people whose email id like to see right away
by peterashford | 2025-09-09 03:20:32+00:00
We have a model for what intelligence is - what humans do. If we produce a human-like AI I think we'll agree it's intelligent.

The fact that there are degrees of intelligence (dogs > flies) isn't that big of an issue, imo. It's the logically night is day argument - just because we can't point to a clear cut off point between these concepts, doesn't mean they aren't distinct concepts. So it follows with intelligence. It doesn't require consensus, just the same way that "is it night now?" doesn't require consensus
by 8organicbits | 2025-09-09 03:20:39+00:00
That's a good point. I'm a developer and security freelancer so I've been on both sides of that interaction. As a developer I usually update when there's a severe vulnerability in a dependency; checking if I am actually vulnerable would take longer. As a security contractor I've helped teams with some really out of date systems, often with several high severity CVEs. I typically (depending on contract terms) assess if the application is vulnerable, and if so, if there's evidence of compromise.

I prefer establishing an update cadence versus fire drills. Security hygiene over heroics.
by LocalH | 2025-09-09 03:21:40+00:00
I wouldn't even say that use of a header format itself is indicative of wrongdoing, even if Tomohiro hadn't went on to work for Nintendo.

However, if Nintendo had released any NES ROMs with a "DiskDude!" header? Then maybe. AFAIK this never happened though, and the big leak proved that they had a full final (and sometimes post-final or unreleased final) archive with split PRG/CHR, so they didn't need to use DiskDude! ROMs.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-09-09 03:21:51+00:00
In general, most modern ARM 8/9 64bit SoC purged a lot of the vestigial problems.

Yet most pre-compiled package builds still never enable the advanced ASIC features for compatibility and safety-concerns. AMD comparing the NERF'd ARM core features is pretty sleazy PR.

Tegra could be a budget Apple M3 Pro, but those folks chose imaginary "AI" money over awesomeness. =3
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-09 03:22:40+00:00
"So a paper published earlier this year by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two computer scientists at Princeton University, is notable for the unfashionably sober manner in which it treats AI: as "normal technology"."

The paper:

https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/d6e33a074ac9269e4511e5d...

"Differences about the future of AI are often partly rooted in differing interpretations of evidence about the present. For example, we strongly disagree with the characterization of generative AI adoption as rapid (which reinforces our assumption about the similarity of AI diffusion to past technologies)."
by acoustics | 2025-09-09 03:23:09+00:00
This is why I'm so glad that I work in a closed monorepo now. There is no package management, only build tooling.

I find myself nodding along to many of the technical and organizational arguments. But I get lost in the licensing discussion.

If it is a cultural problem that people insist on giving things away for free (and receiving them for free), then viral licenses can be very helpful, not fundamentally pernicious.

Outside of the megaprojects, my mental model for GPL is similar to proprietary enterprise software with free individual licenses. The developer gets the benefits of open projects: eyeballs, contributors, adoption, reputational/professional benefits, doing a good deed (if that motivates them) while avoiding permissively giving everything away. The idea that it's problematic that you can't build a business model on their software is akin to the "forced charity" mindset—"why did you make something that I can't use for free?"

If you see a GPL'd bit of code that you really want to use in your business, email the developers with an offer of $X,000 for a perpetual commercial license and a $Y,000/yr support contract. Most are not so ideologically pure to refuse. It's a win-win-win: your business gets the software, the developers don't feel exploited, noncommercial downstream users can enjoy the fruits of open software, and everybody's contributed to a healthier attitude on open source.