MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Shuffle – Game Mode as Experiment Engine
by gok2 | 2025-11-27 16:47:20+00:00
Hello hello,

Cofounder of Colonist here, an online Catan-style game on mobile and desktop. Over time the player base and community have grown into the millions, which still feels pretty wild.

We’re constantly building new events, maps, and modes, but that takes a lot of time and effort.

The point is Shuffle.

Shuffle is a simple matchmaking queue that rotates a set of maps, modes, and rule sets every week. We use it to: - Find out which maps/modes players actually like - Serve different configurations week by week - Test brand-new modes before they go into the main casual or ranked queues

We want to use Shuffle to test things like: - Non-standard resource distributions / trade ratios - Robber / dev-card variants - Alternative win conditions - Completely new game modes

Under the hood, it’s basically a tiny experiment engine on top of matchmaking: - Each Shuffle option is modeled as a sub-config (map, rules, player-count) and stored in a DB - A periodic job picks the next config using recency-biased weighted random + cooldowns - Matches log metrics keyed by that config so we can compare variants afterwards

I like this idea of a test harness doubling as an “experiment engine” and thought it might be interesting to share from the inside.

I’m also curious: - What other out-of-the-box uses do you see for a system like this? - What are some mechanics you’d want tested in a system like this?

Happy to answer technical or product questions and to share more details.
by bfrog | 2025-11-27 16:47:45+00:00
DSP is simply a compute architecture that focuses on mutliply and accumulate operations on particular numerical formats, often either fixed point q15/q31 type values or floats f16/f32.

The basic operation that a NN needs accelerating is... go figure multiply and accumulate with the added activation function.

See for example how the Intel NPU is structured here: https://intel.github.io/intel-npu-acceleration-library/npu.h...
by lkey | 2025-11-27 16:47:47+00:00
Hello there (new-account){name}{number}! When did you discover that {you, a real person} believed that the only way to protect the {women!} and {children!} was this new agency founded under Bush in the wake of 9/11?

Did you know that all {women!} (over 12 million every year) are actually most endangered by their intimate partners, who are predominately within their same race and class?

Do you think this is more or less concerning than this inflammatory anecdata you've created an account to provide? Do you think that domestic violence prevention (less than 1 billion) should be more or less well-funded than ICE (170 billion)?

> (Under the Trump admin): Teams responsible for violence prevention have been decimated, and a reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services has eliminated divisions wholesale.
by baumy | 2025-11-27 16:48:16+00:00
From experience, my response to this is, por que no los dos?

I am 100% certain that conservative men being less likely to seek help is _part_ of the reason why various data shows them as having fewer mental health issues than their liberal counterparts. But I doubt that's the whole picture, and it's also by far the least interesting part of the picture - the cause and effect there is pretty simple and clear.

As another commenter in this thread observes, there's "too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc". I think that's part of it as well, and it's not difficult to believe that this is something that impacts "liberal and left leaning men" more than conservatives, due to sheer exposure if nothing else. I think you do a disservice to the discussion if you dismiss this outright.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-11-27 16:48:30+00:00
DMCA isn't intrinsically copyright. It's a questionable attempt at a safe harbor provision that has horrible provisions for abuse. I'm not even of the opinion that copyright about computer software is poorly executed. It's mostly software patents that don't make any sense to me. When you have a concept that essentially every mathematics undergrad is familiar with getting labels slapped on it & called a novel technique. It's made worse by the fact that the patent office itself isn't enabled to perform any real review. There are no shortage of impossible devices patented each year in the category of things perpetual motion.
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-27 16:49:36+00:00
> Regardless you made a specific statement - if supply/demand worked, price of the houses in Detroit would have gone to zero. And, sure enough, it has in fact gone to near zero

It hasn't. It remained steady at 30% consumer spending.

“Why would consumers spend 30% of their income in something that is available for free on the market?” is the paradox you been avoiding all along.

The answer is simple, these “free houses” never actually went on the market because humans aren't rational and they think a house's value is at least roughly equal to the price they paid for it, which means they will refuse to sell for less, no matter if they lose money in the process. Ask any real estate agent.

Supply and demand almost never work for assets unless there's a significant liquidity pressure.

I'm not going to respond to anything else because you will again take that as an opportunity to escape the paradox. (And because it is much more entertaining than attempting to explain why allowing corporations to poison the neighborhood isn't a good idea)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-27 16:50:16+00:00
It does, by its very nature. Power is not magic, nor is it the Force. It's not a quantity you can stockpile and own - power is leased, it's granted to you by other people. It comes with expectations on how you will wield that power, and usually can be taken away just as quickly as it was granted, if you exercise it in ways they don't approve[0].

Power is obtained through meeting people, gaining their favor, entering deals, providing them services, eventually joining their ranks and advancing to the next level on the ordinal scale. Especially in politics, "power corrupts" by definition; by the time you gain any, you're so thoroughly entangled in mutual deals and friendships with other players you're no longer an autonomous entity - and if you're not willing to do that, you will never be given the opportunity to advance.

--

[0] - Yes, there are caveats and strategems one can use to hold on to power - usually by playing people against each other to coerce ongoing support; every history period and every movie with a villain has plenty of examples. It's another discussion; my focus here is on what power is, and where it comes from.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-11-27 16:50:19+00:00
My controverial opinion is that the "left" has more mental problems because of the therapy and pharmasutical industries.

Conservatives are less likely to see proffessional help but not help. They simply rely on family which imo has a better incentive structure than therapists.

Anecdotally I've watched a lot of people go down the therapy and medication route over the years. I've noticed they become more unstable as time passes. Maybe that would have happened anyways.

or

Maybe it's because humans weren't designed to spill our guts to strangers and then take prolonged phycoactive drugs to fix mental problems that science does not understand.
by jjtheblunt | 2025-11-27 16:50:43+00:00
an interesting thing about Twitter, I find, is that plenty of rage bait and narcissism bait surface, but amid very highly technical information which is also published there, and extremely useful (immunology, genomics, and of course computational) to me.

i've learned pretty well how to 'guide' the algorithm so the tech stuff that's super valuable (to me) does not vanish, but still get nonsense bozo posts in the mix.
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-27 16:53:16+00:00
Could someone use a third-party AI agent to re-curate their feeds? If it was running from the user's computer I think this would avoid any API legal issues, as otherwise ad and script blockers would have been declared illegal long ago.

> but the well-intentioned blocklists just became the chief tool for the mean girls of the site.

I've never used it, but yes this is what I expected. It would be better to have topical lists that users could manually choose to follow or block. This would avoid quite a bit of the "mean girl" selectivity. Though I suppose you'd get some weird search-engine-optimization like behavior from some of the list curators (even worse if anyone could add to the list).
by Superuser666 | 2025-11-27 16:54:46+00:00
As someone who's been working heavily in Rust for the last year, I have to agree with you, here.

Look, there's a lot of folks who gripe about Rust; I used to be one of them. It's like someone took C-lang and pushed it to hard mode, but the core point keeps getting lost in these conversations: Rust never claimed to solve logic bugs, and nobody serious argues otherwise. What it does is remove an entire universe of memory-unsafety pitfalls that have historically caused catastrophic outages and security incidents.

The Cloudflare issue wasn’t about memory corruption or type confusion. It was a straight logic flaw. Rust can’t save you from that any more than Ada, Go, or Haskell can. Once you accept arbitrary external input, the compiler can’t enforce the invariants for you. You need validation, you need constraints, you need a spec, and you need tests that actually reflect the real world.

The idea that "only formally verified languages eliminate logic bugs" is technically correct but practically irrelevant for the scale Cloudflare operates at. Fully verified stacks exist, like seL4, but they are extremely expensive and restrictive. Production engineering teams are not going to rewrite everything in Coq. So we operate in the real world, where Rust buys us memory safety, better concurrency guarantees, and stricter APIs, but the humans still have to get the logic right.

This is not a Rust failure. It is the nature of software. If the industry switched from Rust to OCaml, Haskell, Ada, or C#, the exact same logic bug could still have shipped. Expecting Rust to prevent it misunderstands what problems Rust is designed to eliminate.

Rust does not stop you from writing the wrong code. It stops you from writing code that explodes in ways you did not intend. This wasn't the fault of the language, it was the fault of the folks who screwed up. You don't blame the hammer when you smack your thumb instead of a nail - you should blame your piss poor aim.
by vrighter | 2025-11-27 16:55:07+00:00
"But building the same functionality has undoubtedly become simpler."

I disagree with this statement. It has become simpler, provided you don't care about it actually being correct, and you don't care about whether you really have tests that test what you think you asked for, you don't care about security, and other things.

Building the same thing involves doing the things that LLMs have proved time and again that they cannot do. But instead of writing it properly in the first place, you now need to look for the needle in the haystack that is the subtle bug that invariable get inserted by llms every single time I tried to use them. Which requires you to deeply understand the code anyway. Which you would have gotten automatically (and easier) if you were the one writing the code in the first place. developing the same thing at the same level of quality is harder with an LLM.

And the "table stakes" stuff is exactly the thing I would not trust an LLM with for sure, because the risk of getting it wrong could potentially be fatal (to the company, not the dev. Depends on his boss' temperament) with those.
by tucnak | 2025-11-27 16:55:34+00:00
> There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it

Speak for yourself. Some of the most fascinating poetry I have seen was produced by GPT-3. That is to say, there was a short time period when it was genuinely thought-provoking, and it has since passed. In the age of "alignment," what you get with commerical offerings is dog shite... But this is more a statement on American labs (and to a similar extent, the Chinese whom have followed) than on "computers" in the first place. Personally, I'm looking forward to the age of computational literature, where authors like me would be empowered to engineer whole worlds, inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer. (With added option of the reader playing one of the parts.) This will radically change how we think about textual form, and I cannot wait for compute to do so.

Re: modern-day slop, well, the slop is us.

Denial of this comes from a place of ignorance; let the blinkers off and you might learn something! Slop will eventually pass, but we will remain. This is the far scarier proposition.
by jdiff | 2025-11-27 16:56:08+00:00
You got one. And how many good neighbors were dragged out of their cars, how many parents torn from their children, and how many American citizens wrongly harassed or dragged out of their houses for it? How many preachers praying peacefully in the streets were shot in the head?

This is not, and has never been, about the murderers. The murderers are the excuse, the people who are actually being harassed and brutalized are not them. And as mentioned, many of them are American citizens.
by fidotron | 2025-11-27 16:56:09+00:00
In the One True TV Holmes https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086661/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_acc... this is even shown as a tension between Holmes and Watson, with Watson showing the modern view.

Of course Brett was in fact completely out of it for much of the filming on all sorts of things.
by aregsar | 2025-11-27 16:56:36+00:00
Startups need to move fast to quickly validate their assumptions. Full stack batteries included frameworks like rails, Laravel and Django are much better suited for this with integrated background jobs, mailers, authentication and authorization, caching, queuing, notifications, active record style ORMs and broadcasting systems all baked in and designed to work together not to mention a common project structure for all apps and built in unit, feature and integration testing infrastructure. Add to that a huge ecosystem of packages designed to integrate with the framework and a large community.

I personally use Laravel for my side projects and but have been a long time asp.net user at work where working with multiple teams on large projects is more of a concern.
by drbojingle | 2025-11-27 16:57:18+00:00
No, there needs to be control over the algorithms that get used. You ought to be able to tune it. There needs to be a Google fuu equivalent for social media. Or, instead of one platform one algorithm, let users define the algorithm to a certain degree, using llms to help with that and then you can allow others to access your algorithms too. Asking for someone Facebook to tweak the algorithm is not going to help imo.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-27 16:57:42+00:00
False dichotomy; power is not a stockpilable quantity, it comes from other people and their willingness to defer to you or entertain you. Compromising is not a temptation to get power quicker - compromise is power, it's how you acquire it. The more you want to lean on the system to help you, the more aligned you need to be with it, eventually becoming one with it; you sacrifice autonomy at every step of the way.
by randycupertino | 2025-11-27 16:58:11+00:00
I had a weird LLM use instance happen at work this week, we were in a big important protocol review meeting with 35 remote people and someone asks how long IUDs begin to take effect in patients. I put it in ChatGPT for my own reference and read the answer in my head but didn't say anything (I'm ops, I just row the boat and let the docs steer the ship). Anyone this bigwig Oxford/Johns Hopkins cardiologist who we pay $600k a year pipes up in the meeting and her answer is VERBATIM reading off the ChatGPT language word for word. All she did was ask it the answer and repeat what it said! Anyway it kinda made me sad that all this big fancy doctor is doing is spitting out lazy default ChatGPT answers to guide our research :( Also everyone else in the meeting was so impressed with her, "wow Dr. so and so thank you so much for this helpful update!" etc. :-/
by ben_w | 2025-11-27 16:58:13+00:00
If the AI was good enough, vision-only self-driving would be at least as good as the best human.

The AI isn't good enough. I'm starting to suspect that current ML learning rates can't be good enough in reasonable wall-clock timeframes due to how long it takes between relevant examples for them to learn from.

It's fine to lean on other sensory modalities (including LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, whatever else you fancy) until the AI gets good enough.
by criddell | 2025-11-27 16:59:00+00:00
A social network can be great. Social media — usually not.

Something like Instagram where you have to meet with the other party in person to follow each other and a hard limit on the number of people you follow or follow you (say, 150 each) could be an interesting thing. It would be hard to monetize, but I could see it being a positive force.
Enterprise security can be messy: Building a Security-Aware Culture
by rezliant | 2025-11-27 16:59:05+00:00
Your executive team gets it. They've approved the budget, they mention security in board meetings, they understand the stakes. You're not fighting for recognition at the top anymore.

But then you look at what's actually happening three levels down. The marketing team is sharing credentials to social media accounts. Sales is pushing back on MFA because it adds seconds to their login process. Developers are storing API keys in public repositories because it's faster than the approved method. Remote employees are working from unsecured networks and don't think twice about it.

The executive commitment is there. The company-wide behavior isn't. And that gap is where breaches happen.

This is the challenge that keeps security leaders up at night. You have the mandate from above, but translating that into thousands of daily decisions made by people who have completely different priorities is a different game entirely.
by mvkel | 2025-11-27 16:59:07+00:00
> One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote

It seems like you have a specific person in mind as the audience member (yourself?), but the piece could benefit from a wider view. Given your hardware choices, reliability seems to not be a factor at all, but near-term cost (at the expense of long-term cost).

I'm not expecting you to personally test your hardware choices, but make choices based on the aggregate accounts of others, like the rest of us.

I would imagine the mean audience member would want to buy something they can set and forget, which would necessitate the reliable choice. That is wholly different than a person who is excited about tinkering with a brand new NAS each year
by gjm11 | 2025-11-27 16:59:08+00:00
I think it's fair to say that summing the series directly would be slow, even if it's not slow when you already happen to have summed the previous n-1 terms.

Not least because for modestly-sized target sums the number of terms you need to sum is more than is actually feasible. For instance, if you're interested in approximating a sum of 100 then you need something on the order of exp(100) or about 10^43 terms. You can't just say "well, it's not slow to add up 10^43 numbers, because it's quick if you've already done the first 10^43-1 of them".
by ignoramous | 2025-11-27 16:59:54+00:00
> Google will allow firewalls, but not selective firewalls: ...

These exceptions have been in place since before 2022. Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637193

> Google has also removed/threatened to remove prominent firewall VPNs for bullshit reasons (claims that apps violate random policies) ...

I co-develop one such open source "firewall app" for Android, and you're right that apps like ours have been previously removed for blocking ads out-of-the-box. But, removals also happen due to stricter rules/policies that apply to apps using VPN APIs.

Note that, of late, many a popular apps ad-blocking out-of-the-box (like the DuckDuckGo browser with app tracking protection) haven't been removed.

> Unless you own the kernel on every SoC running on your system (including the modem)

I get your point but don't think even a rooted (supervisor) Kernel gets you much guarantee as there always could be a higher privileged hypervisor controlling it.

> Apple's questionable privacy decisions are a lot less worse

They've improved post Celebgate yeah, but the duality is such that... Apple is one of the largest buyers of user data aka "market intelligence" (per folks I know who work in this domain) that (presumably) these other shady apps collect.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-11-27 16:59:55+00:00
Which is why you should cancel your Twitter account unless you're on the same page with the guy who owns it, but I digress.

if a site wants to cancel any ideology's viewpoint, that site is the one paying the bills and they should have the right to do it. You as a customer have a right to not use that site. The problem is that most of the business currently is a couple of social media sites and the great Mastodon diaspora never really happened.

Edit: why do some people think it is their god-given right that should be enforced with government regulation to push their viewpoints into my feed? If I want to hear what you guys have your knickers in a bunch about today, I will seek it out, this is the classic difference between push and pull and push is rarely a good idea.

My social media feeds had been reduced to about 30% political crap, 20% things I wanted to hear about, and about 50% ads for something I had either bought in the deep dark past or had once Google searched plus occasionally extremely messed up temu ads. That is why I left.
by mg | 2025-11-27 17:00:13+00:00
Does that mean that one will be able to purchase tablets with this chip and replace the OS with Linux?

That would be great. As far as I know, there currently are no options for lightweight tablets that support Linux.

Not sure how well WSL2 on tablets work. Does anybody here have experiences with WSL2 on tablets like the new Microsoft Surface Pro that uses the Snapdragon X Elite chip?
by adrian_b | 2025-11-27 17:00:53+00:00
The LTO cartridges are cheap and the programs that you need for using LTO tape drives are open source.

The only problem is that the LTO tape drives are very expensive. If you want to use 18 TB LTO-9 tapes, the cost per TB is much lower than for HDDs, but you need to store at least a few hundred TB in order to recover the cost of the tape drive.

There is no chance to see less expensive tape drives because there is no competition and it would be extremely difficult for anyone to become a competitor as it is difficult to become able to design and manufacture the mechanical parts of the drive and the reading and writing magnetic heads.