skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anecdotally the number of incidences of zero severance pay on being made redundant in the game industry seems way above the software industry norm to me. You read so many accounts of young people who love games building relatively risky careers fuelled by their passion being really pretty badly screwed over.

Just this week Telltale games announces a major studio closure, assured fans that one of their popular product lines will see further instalments all the while again paying zero severance to the humans who formerly made the game in question. It’s not a good look.

Another pretty bad example is the whole “will I actually get paid this month?” fiasco that dogged Crytek for years, repeatedly failing to meet payroll on time over and over again.

This wouldn’t be half as bad if the working conditions were reasonable, but it seems like working in games dev almost inevitably leads to constant crunch time to hit shipping deadlines.
Some of these are easy.

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?

Observer bias. Mean construction time is decreasing at an exponential rate. In the limit: nano-tech, with construction times approaching physical limits.

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

Introduce a replicator into a nearly-pristine environment and that's the growth curve.

> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?

Apoptosis

> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

Yes. Nothing. There is no working mass education system and no basis for thinking there ever could be.

> What's the right way to understand and model personality?

Neuro-linguistic Programming.

(The "Five Factor" model is no better than Astrology. NLP is based on hard science. It's one of the very few schools of psychology that has repeatable algorithms.)

> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? Why are programming environments still so primitive?

People ignore Prolog and Dr. Margaret Hamilton's work. (She's the person who coined the term "software engineering".) The combination of Prolog and Hamilton's HOS provides an end-user-programmable error-free programming environment.
Early access and kickstarter
Misanthropy should be looked down even more than misogyny because it’s hating twice as many people.
Facebook: "This user isn't clicking any ads, and will probably never click any ads. That's fine; their presence and contribution to the platform helps us attract and retain other users, some of whom will click ads, and so is inherently valuable to us."
The article discusses that if you make it mandatory you get the company culture to adapt that parental leave should not be a career-affecting thing.

It will never not affect your career. Even if you work for a wonderfully enlightened company that is happy to have you take six months off at full pay, the people who are continuing to work in that time are going to be gaining experience and increasing their skills, and will have a better shot at raises and promotions.
Exactly. One of the biggest reasons why Carbon (and Mac OS X) succeeded is that Carbon apps also ran on OS 8/9. Big apps like Acrobat, Final Cut Pro, Mozilla, and many others were able to use Carbon and run on OS 9 and X.
> I won't argue that some phenomena may be resistant to reduction beyond human capability to reduce. My main problem with the thesis is that whatever irreducible phenomena that is, is still part of the natural, physical world.

You don't have to posit the supernatural. People conflate believing in a single objective reality with having to believe in strong materialism (or worse, atomic materialism, when QM goes deeper), when all you have to do is believe that reality is consistent. You might not be able to create a total consistent model of reality, but if reality is consistent then you don't have to propose extra-physical forces due to conservation of energy or other such constraints. You can exclude contradictory hypotheses even if you can't settle on the "actual" one, even in-principle.

In which case you can have models in one domain of science, and models in another domain, which may not connect with each other, but they don't have to contradict each other either, and you can do this all while not believing in the supernatural or denying an objective reality.
How exactly would this be enforced? If a man doesn't disclose that his partner is pregnant, is he going to be fired? I don't see how it could be legal to do so. How is a partner's / spouse's medical condition any business of an employer?
I am not in the micropayment business, nor do I want to be. I do understand that news organizations and various web properties need to make enough money to survive, and would happily support a micropayment system.

But the sad reality is that it will not happen. Not because people like me would not follow through on their pledge, but because advertising is completely entrenched at this point and it most likely would not generate the same amount of revenues.

Keep in mind that newspapers (the old kind) used to charge both sides: a subscription for the users to pay and advertising on the other side. So if some organization would start to charge using a micro-payment system sooner or later ads would be back (or they would not even leave) simply because a large enough audience is worth marketing to, and an audience that is paying for content is worth more, not less.

So I'm afraid that advertising is here to stay.

The problem that I have isn't so much with advertising, it is with all the tracking. I'm fine with ads, and I'm fine with occasionally seeing stuff that I might be interested in. But all the tracking to boost the value of the individual profiles is what irks me. So an opt-out using a micropayment system to have zero tracking would maybe be closer to practical than a complete opt-out of advertising.
I tried using TiddlyWiki some years back but never really reached the stage where I felt I could definitely trust my use of it to result in it saving my notes properly. The real utility of it, I'm sure, comes with a large corpus - but I never got there.

At the time though, my only option was keeping it as a local file on a single machine - these days my home infrastructure is much more developed, and I think I might have more luck running it on a proper http server. Maybe I'll give it another shot.
It doesn't tell you how to work less or how to improve your life. It's specifically about legislation to try and reduce the gender pay gap by changing the law.
It's a tradeoff. You can sometimes get better performance if you implement scheduling yourself in userland, primarily because you can save a trip through the OS scheduler when you do context switches. But you lose compatibility with all existing code if you do so.

It doesn't need to be this way. There is a Linux kernel patch that a Google engineer gave a presentation about in 2013 [1] that allows for true kernel threads that can be scheduled in userland, eliminating the tradeoff. Unfortunately, the patch never seemed to go anywhere, and it seems that the author is no longer working at Google (mail bounced when I tried to contact him about it). Note also that Windows already has this functionality, known as UMS.

[1]: https://blog.linuxplumbersconf.org/2013/ocw/system/presentat...
Yes.

You are only asking to have people point out possibilities that you didn't.

But in your heart of hearts, you know you did.

That doesn't mean you didn't have fun. I suspect you need to revisit what 'waste' really is for you though.
Is Blendle making money?
Couple of things came to mind from reading this. First if your latest game doesn't sell despite past successes, you might have bungled your marketing, namely company branding. Most AAA game developers heavily invest in this, because if gamers like their current game, they might be interested for the next one, but only if they know who you are, not just your games. Consumers in games industry work just the same as they do in every other industry, indies just seem to think that because core gamers know who they are and engage with them, that the average consumer does too, but they don't.

Second one was that quote about lack of interest from games media. They do work as gate keepers, and most of them are heavily advertising driven, so the problem here is the same as above, indies suffer because they don't have marketing budgets. When the industry grows so large that it has to start attracting casuals, that always means spending marketing dollars, and indie industry has grown and saturated the core gamer group through, and casual interest just isn't there without marketing.
I see your meaning clearly now - but your point then is obviously tangential.

To your argument I also personally don't know there is any reliable way to equalize this problem. Men and women are created differently, and nature is unfair - just ask the fly and the spider. The social contract means we so far mostly anyway agree it is better treat equally than to force equality (shades of Bergeron is poignant - and yes this inches us closer).
That hierarchy of importance is quite apt.

If the game concept doesn't sell itself as an elevator pitch, then it doesn't matter how good the implementation is.

I once met an indie dev who was surprised that their Space Invaders mobile clone didn't sell on Windows Mobile, "despite its amazing particle effects."
Except that you have no way of proving that and it would be illegal for them to ask. What it actually does is leave you do the work/pay taxes for your colleagues reproduction holiday.
I've been writing a personal encyclopedia for the last five or six years or so. I have some 1500+ articles multiple of which are 50+ pages. I think it's been really valuable. I think I get a few things out of it:

1. Perfect recall. Every little detail I read in a book/blog/article stays with me. Makes it easy to synthesize results from multiple pieces across time, which is useful when you only have a casual interest in something. (I really like downloading the cool education images/GIFs and and inserting them in articles- otherwise I don't know where I'd keep them.)

2. Reveals what I don't know about a subject. For example, whenever I start off writing a new article on some topic, the first thing I write is a definition, e.g. "A cat is an animal that ...". The process of doing that often reveals gaps in my understanding.

3. It makes me better at asking questions when I'm trying to understand something. The analogy I like to make here is that learning a second language is harder than a third language, because after learning the second you know what you need to know to understand a language. But there's no reason that should be limited to languages and couldn't apply to all things, and things themselves. Some questions I like to ask are "What is the function/uses of this thing?" "What are the parts of this thing and how are they arranged?" "How do we make this thing?" "What's the history of this thing?" "What subtypes of this thing are there?"

The downside is that it dramatically slows down my reading speed, since I now feel I need to take detailed notes, and then I often have to reconcile them with notes on other things which can be time-consuming. Considering the number of books a person could realistically read in their lifetime is limited, it's unclear if it's worth the tradeoff.

I'm curious how other people think about remembering things, and if they have a system, what tools they use. It seems unsatisfying to me to read a book and realize I'll probably forget it in four years, yet most people seem content to do so.

If anyone is interested in the specific software I use, here's the Github project: https://github.com/Ceasar/Encyclopedia. It uses restructuedText (as opposed to Markdown) for the text. I edit them using Vim. All the files are stored in Dropbox so it gets synced between my devices. A simple Flask web server renders the pages in a prettier format.

Still very primitive compared to what it could potentially be, but combined with regular Unix command line tools it's worked fine for my needs. (I like the idea of a hacker-wiki by the way, more than something like this which comes out of the box. Seems like an personal wiki designed for a power user could be way more interesting.)
How did you do it ? External help ?
Many people (mistakenly) believe that these are PMR446/LPD radios. Some countries like Switzerland banned their sale altogether.
You can skip both, and most of the churn by taking a look at https://mithril.js.org . It's one of the only frameworks I've seen that gets you 95% of the way while supporting you through the last 5% instead of getting in your way. It includes all the regular things you need (view, router, requests) while staying under 10kb and having better performance than those two. If you need any help at all, there's a super friendly community at gitter as well. Did i mention 0 dependencies?

If you want to give it a go quickly, just load up https://flems.io/mithril .

Here's a quick hello world. https://flems.io/#0=N4IgZglgNgpgziAXAbVAOwIYFsZJAOgAsAXLKEAG...
Game development always scared me as one of those studies that you hope your kids don't get interested in. Another one is manual drawing, especially when it is Anime (what are the chances that someone from a small European country is going to excel at such a job?).

> Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in.

Addictive games use the above cognitive bias to make you keep coming back, trying to level up by grinding boring quests. "You are not done yet, but the end is in sight!".

As a good game dev, in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets.
True, but it's not like frameworks stop working. I still write an occasional app in WinForms and it works great.
Thoughtbytes:

> a growing body of literature suggesting that the immune system is involved in psychiatric disorders from depression to bipolar disorder

> Austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg developed a method of deliberate infection of psychiatric patients with malaria to induce fever. Some of his patients died from the treatment, but many others recovered. He won a Nobel Prize in 1927.
Note this gem in the footnotes:

> Ion implantation was also used in the Z-80 microprocessor to create some transistor "traps", circuits that looked like regular transistors under a microscope but received doping implants that made them non-functional. This served as copy protection since a manufacturer that tried to produce clones on the Z-80 by copying the chip with a microscope would end up with a chip that failed in multiple ways, some of them very subtle.
Thats is good time, you are just 3 miles away.
Interesting, but I do want to know if a randomized study produces the same results. Users who use adblockers are much more likely to be power users.

Mozilla does control for that by separating any add-on from adblockers, however. So maybe the finding is generally true. This is not very surprising if true, given the difference in experience across most websites when adblocking is on.
What you did there, I see
Typescript is added now.
Most of the memory usage comes from the user stack, and you can customize the size of the stack. So memory consumption isn't really the limiting factor here. More important is the cost of context switching.
That's one way to look at it, as if children are some sort of luxury good like a BMW or a labradoodle. The other way to look at it is that all adults were once children, so anything we do to support all children is fair.

I think the flaw with your framing is it's essentially ahistorical. The only way we all got here is by having ancestors. We all consumed quite a lot of resources getting to adulthood. If you're all that concerned about improper subsidies, surely you're eager pay back, with interest, the large one that you've received?
And it's due to bloat; the same kind of bloat that leads people to add megabytes of javascript and other resources to simple articles.
I am kind of in the same boat doing something different. I do agree you learn a ton more than working for someone else or completing any computer science degree.

But whether companies look for this type of employee, I am unsure that is true. The truth is, most companies look for employees without gaps in their resume. They are looking for signals such as having worked Google or Facebook. They care much less about your startup than most people think. If you don't hit those checkboxes, you are going to have a hard time looking for a job.
> less than 5c for more serious journalism.

I have always hated this idea. It turns the editorial role into a search engine optimization role and I can only see journalism as a whole suffering for it.

I work in broadcast where we still have a sales staff and do manual placement of our advertising in our content. I honestly don't understand what would be wrong with this model.

Larger websites are entirely capable of hiring a sales and traffic departments, selling advertisements to clients directly, and then placing and trafficing those advertisements directly from their own website. In my mind, this would net them a larger share of the profits, completely disable ad-blocking on their site, and relieve editors from having to generate populist content to keep their jobs.

Also, I wouldn't have to attach some new kind of payment account to my web-browser.
I use Emacs org-mode for this, works like a charm
The only bands you can use uncertified radio equipment on are ISM[1] (with strict limits) and ham radio bands.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_band
There are other approaches: Svelte compiles directly to DOM operations, choo/Marko use the native parser through morphdom, hyperhtml and lit-html use string literals and Template instances. Most of them are faster than React and Vue but nowhere as popular.
In private conversations with the local city mobility department (which covers public transport and parking), there is a lot of tension building up due to the expectation of autonomous vehicles coming online within a decade. Floating a 20 year bond to build new parking structures used to be a safe investment but there is now a widespread expectation that personal vehicles will not require parking facilities well before that bond could be paid off. It is forcing a re-evaluation of the traditional regulatory, zoning, and financial instruments historically employed by cities to address these problems, and nobody is certain of the answer.
It's worth noting that this is talking about research that involves sampling groups of people, or other similar sampling approaches. It is not talking about mathematical results which you can often find in computer science, physics, and elsewhere. Not is it necessarily true all of the physical sciences.

It also shouldn't be read as "science is broken and wrong so therefore my opinion should be considered equally." There is definitely a problem with accuracy in many scientific fields that needs to be addressed, but the baby doesn't need to be thrown out with the bath water.
It gets better, what if you're not with the mother. What if it was a one night stand, or you donated sperm to her as a single parent. What if you're not with her, she told you she was on the pill and it wasn't true. What if you're in a non binary relationship (2 fathers?). What if you adopt a young child.
I doubt even 10% of European citizens would pay even 5$ per year for that as long there are adblockers.

Now, if the content is worth it, that's different story. There have always been subscription based websites (e.g. forums with pay-to-upgrade schemes).

Why webmasters and advertisers haven't yet perfected and adopted server-side ad injections is beyond me.
Very interesting article. However, it only talks about drinking water and the real problem is water for agriculture and the author doesn’t talk much about cost of desalinated water vs cost of acquirer water. My own professional experience suggests desal water is cost-effective within sophisticated fertigation, controlled-environment systems which produce high value crops, but probably not for the more expansive wheat, maize, rice systems we use to grow our staples and animal feeds. Maybe we’ll be able to achieve this in an era of renewables.
More Evidence That Nutrition Studies Don’t Always Add Up
I wrote this controversial tweet on the matter a while back (embedded here for convenience [1], controversial because it uses averages!)
Which might make things seem more or less bleak depending on your perspective, but an important note from this data is that the 2017 median sales were about 2000 units per game (yikes).

[1] https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/967249172804943872

Average number of units sold per game on steam by year (note many games have long tails)

2004 - 11.6m

2005 - 569k

2006 - 581k

2007 - 833k

2008 - 279k

2009 - 322k

2010 - 391k

2011 - 512k

2012 - 535k

2013 - 601k

2014 - 157k

2015 - 111k

2016 - 73k

2017 - 49k
Funny.

I went to a talk by Edward Snowden's boss the week before Edward went rouge and got an introduction to the kind of text analysis system which is used by people who work for three letter agencies in places like Maryland and Virginia.

It was a product from BBN that looked a lot like RL3 but much more complex and able to handle a set of 50,000 or more rules in the assumption that 50 people are going to write 1,000 rules in a week as opposed to 1 expert is going to write 50 a day and then take 3 years to write that many rules.

This is an "expert system" which has to perform well in some particular domain so it might be analyzing police reports which have a certain structure, setting and cast of characters. (or medical reports or corporate filings or what did airline customers say about their flight?)

It is manageable to make a rule-based system that performs very well on specific extraction tasks and even prove that it works up to a certain point with statistical bounds. The metrics are different but I believe those systems would be laughed ought of court if they couldn't tune it up for 0.95 or better precision in some cases.

It's not cheap to write 50,000 rules but making training sets for machine learning is a lot of work too. I get good classifiers (better than mech turks) sometimes with 2000-5000 samples and some friends of mine in South America would expect you to provide about 20,000 samples for an simple data extraction pipeline.

Unfortunately I can't point you to references in the academic literature because the data sets are proprietary. NLP engineers look at metrics all day that they can't show you and it is too bad because you get a distorted picture of machine learning if you are doing Yann LeCunn's digits because that is a carefully built 'toy' problem which has had obstacles cleared away for you that is just big enough that the result looks miraculous.
Machine Learning is Fun – 8 Part series (2014)
There is a server version, which you can run locally. This keeps all the individual tiddlers in separate files in a folder. You can sync this folder, run git on it etc. Currently, the server doesnt seem to notice changes made outside the server interface(like editing and saving tiddlers in a text editor) until restart, though there is probably some way to manage this.
New neural network teaches itself Go, spanks the pros (2017)
That's only 3% growth per year.
I am trying to decide if I like the updated title the submitter gave to this article.

As submitted and on article: Want Equality? Make New Dads Stay Home

Updated: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
- Launch on Early Access on Steam etc selling WIP games

- Finish the first 20% and presell the unstarted 80% as a Season Pass

- Launch a basic version with DLC
‘Would that all journeys were on foot’: writers on the joy of walking
To be clear, this feature is standards-compliant WiFi. It uses standard 802.11 frames and leverages the vendor-specific features to allow custom payloads. It’s not “degrading the performance” of WiFi - it is WiFi.