skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NWN Hordes of Underdark and NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer were fantastic. It had that “magic of the outer planes” flavor that reminds me of Planescape Torment.

Weirdly enough the main character of HoTU was the one from Shadows of Udrentide (did I spelled right?). I remember meeting the ghost of one of the antagonists of the original game in hell and my character having her as a ghost girlfriend for the rest of his life.

Ah... I miss those fantastic stories.
The U.S. knows there's an obvious oil glut coming around 2025. So they are offloading large oil stores. Smart for them to do it now since it won't be worth much in the longer term.
Can WhatsApp Monetize with a Crypto Stablecoin?
Telegram for example supports most of Discords features, is native, and is incredibly fast.

I use Discord and like it, but it is incredibly slow at starting, switching rooms, and even just loading new messages.

But the most aggravating thing is that I can't type a message on mobile if I don't have internet connection. It requires connection to load the input field. Affects me every day in elevators. Most native apps just lets you write your message and sends it when connection is back.

Fine, Discord is useful, but I must respectfully disagree that their app is good. And it is definitely possible to make natively.
I get the impression that the future of gaming is not going to be massive AAA titles. They will start to not be economically viable very soon as we get to a max saturation of peoples time playing video games. With the over-abundance of good and "good enough" titles that took 1/100th of the time and money to create what sense does it make to have a 200 million dollar project?
What is genius? Genius is characterized by highly divergent thought, especially as compared with conventional wisdom. From this base notion of divergence, you actually get either genius or insanity.

Genius is characterized by divergent thought that feeds back with the external environment (society, historic events, etc.)

Insanity is characterized by this same divergent thought with the feedback being self-referential only. Thus it isn’t grounded in any way that society recognizes.

With that, neither genius nor insanity requires anything other than a highly divergent thought process marked by a level of attachment or detachment to society.
It sounds like D is in a good spot for these usages. It's fast, and you can nicely control the usage of GC - GC only gets called on allocations, and you can use @nogc attributes to statically confirm there are no allocations in the hot loop.
I'm not shedding tears for people who break their legs trying to jump a fence into someone's backyard so they can steal their TV, but the laws are what they are.

I can't exactly put down Home Alone style traps in my house; I'm not sure why this is any different.
Willy Wonka and the Medical Software Factory
> Hotel and taxi laws were put in place for a reason

That reason being to entrench the incumbent players by raising the barrier to competition.
I don't use taxis a lot. I have had a car and a licence basically since I was 17, but when I have had to use them, they've mostly been fine. Mostly to or from an airport/hotel.

One nearly killed me, but I don't judge all other drivers by his lack of sleep/attention/whatever prescription drugs he relies on to stay awake.

My issue with uber/etc is that they spend more money, campaigning against laws that would require background checks for their drivers, than it would cost for them to actually do the background checks. If that doesn't raise some questions for you, you may as well just look for vans with "free candy" spray painted on the side, I'm sure they'll be great.

"Taxis are terrible" is such a vague blanket statement its almost meaningless.
In that past, society was less informed. We are very much connected more than any time in history. I'm no were near wall street, but I can access some street gossip forums to find out how investment banks are doing, I can find out which funds lost what and who is laying off who and how many. It's much easier to pluck and sniff out these signals than in the past. I can run a query and find out exactly how many houses sold in a city this month, compared to last month or this time last year. I can see the price difference. I can see how long houses are sitting before they sell, the vast amount of data the ordinary man has access can't be discounted. My hypothesis is that in future bubbles, we will know like we know now, but they will not have a big pop, but rather a very slow deflation that goes on for months or even years. Because people know about it, some will anticipate they can profit from it and keep jumping in and out, whereas most would have stayed out if there was a big pop instead of a slow deflation.
Huh I haven't noticed that myself. I'm using it on OSX. The dude who runs it is pretty personable. You should mention it to him if you find the time.
I've been very interested in following the divergant paths of Star Citizen and Elite:Dangerous which are similar projects which started at roughly the same time (both kickstarted in 2012)

E:D seem to have taken the route of getting an MVP out and functional and have been iterating on that base since then adding new content, play modes, platforms etc. As a result they had a playable game out in 2014.

SC seems to have gone more for a big bang approach of only launching once they've got more in place with, from the blog post, an alpha in 2020.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

Almost 218 million.
It's hard to take a week off being a parent. Work is actually the easier part. I'm retiring when my kids are moved out.
Ask HN: How to work with bad contractors?
I recently joined a company on a team that had a significant software project outsourced to a team of contractors. The reason for the outsourcing is that we did't have the people at the time to ship the project, and the project required deep knowledge of a non-software field that they had and we didn't.

The problem is that the contractors are just bad at writing code. The project that they have provided has all sorts of problems: functions that haven't been implemented are imported and passed as arguments through chains of functions 4-5 levels deep, every component is deeply coupled to all other components, the same operations have been reinvented in 4-5 times in different ways, etc. Whats more, the contractors seem to be convinced that the code they are shipping is pure genius.

I've brought up one of these issues in the past with the frame "can you explain why you did it this way?" and the what I got back was a word salad. How do I work with these people? What approach should I take when I bring up these deep technical debt issues?
OK, so in 1995 there were few computer RPGs. True. In fact I distinctly remember myself at that time, as a huge CRPG fan, thinking that they were bad times for PC RPGs, and hoping for better times.

But 1996 was the year of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, one of the best RPGs of all time (IMO, way better than Baldur's) that would later continue into a saga that is still top notch today. In 1997, Fallout came out. I'm not personally a big fan of this saga, but its enormous success and influence in CRPGs is undeniable. In 1998, apart from Baldur's Gate, we had Fallout II and Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, a great game that renewed the legendary Might and Magic franchise with a new engine.

So no. You may like Baldur's Gate a lot (IMO it's a good game but way overrated) but it didn't save anything, and the image given by the article of being the first brave developers who dared publish a CRPG after a draught is just plain false.
Early 1970s Floppy Drive Boot ROM Card for PDP-11. (Diode Array Microcode)
I've heard a similar story about an app implemented in HTML5 and node.js (no good JS UI frameworks existed at the time). The fine-tuning took an extraordinary amount of time. I was on a project that redid it in QML in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the headcount and performance was great right away.
I wonder if they have long-time engineering and management staff. It seems to me that a lot of government (and large enterprise) projects fail or are inefficient because they get outsourced to some company that does the work but the organization doesn't really learn anything. Every few years everything starts from scratch.
I would like to know more about the one at UNC in Chapel Hill. The castle is pretty freaky.
Central Banks Should Prepare for Recessions, Not Delay Them
To me, that section says that you can emit machine code that will allow the branch predictor to do a better job, not that you can control what the branch predictor does.
Dragon Age suffered EA-fication along with Mass Effect. Even then I never thought it was even close to Baldur’s Gate. Part of it about being too edgy and tryhard but I did played it. My favorite part was the underground exploration part specially having Shale on your group. That was immersive AF and I did completed it in one go.
It's because much of the guts of VSCode is written in C++ and optimized.

Because, you know, Microsoft.
Yes, because having extra fire safety in hotels is certainly designed to keep people from operating amateur hotels.

And having laws requiring particular fare structures and payment methods is certainly meant to keep companies from competing with taxis.

What color is the sky in your world?
I think the difference is degree of injury. Having glitter in your car is a lot different than having a bullet through your face, which is where the booby trap case law comes from.
What game? I had a go of a tech demo at some point. It was awful.

Look at the thread, people in there believed SQ42 was almost finished. That was 2 years ago! CIG were giving the impression that they'd almost done the single player campaign, now they're talking about 2020.

A possible scenario at this point is that they burn through all the cash and the game is put out either unfinished or never sees light of day.

Maybe a great game will come out of this, but it's perfectly reasonable to believe that's doubtful.
The problem with this statement is it worked, and gives me great hope in this company that they were smart enough to risk it. The FCC said no, you cannot launch the satellite you spent years developing for reasons that ended up being completely wrong. So, what is a company to do? Launch anyways and accept the backlash as they had no other option. Once the satellites launched, they were able to effectively track them and the company got approved for more launches but this time without the 900k fine.

As long as the regulations of the US don’t make sense, smart people will continue to break them in the spirit of innovation. Will this breaking of regulation always end in relatively little consequence? No, and soon the FCC or another regulatory body will feel obligated to make an example out of some company with serious charges and I will feel bad for the CEO and company that is used for an example
Devotion to the quasi-religious idea of “natural rights” is not nearly as surprising as the belief that what are very clearly political compromises of the late 18th Century somehow perfectly captured such rights.
If you've tried VS Code, is it of desirable quality to you? If not why?

Customizability-wise I actually prefer Electron apps to native ones, with a few lines of CSS I can remove stuff I don't need and tweak the UI a bit, I'm not quite sure you can do the same as easily for native apps.

Also you mentioned dark mode, an Electron app could support dark mode too, taking as an example macOS native apps they also have to explicitly support dark mode, so I'm not sure what you lose in this regard by non going native.

I would argue that going full-native win95 style has more downsides than benefits, for most people simply being able to change the wallpaper is enough.
I am pretty sure that Swarm knew that they were breaking the rules. They submitted an FCC license, were notified that the license was rejected, and decided to launch anyways.

I think part of the reason that they were able to still get licenses approved is that they agreed to more oversight from the FCC. Also, after launching the satellites Swarm was able to show the FCC that they were able to track the satellites, which was the original reason that FCC denied the license. So it seems like the FCC had to say "we were wrong, but you still broke the law so here is a fine and then we will continue on with life."
Wow, not gonna lie, pretty impressed by the internet sleuths who tracked things down in the video: https://m.imgur.com/a/oxjd8lU .

Also pretty impressed people have that much time on their hands (as I say posting some random comment into the ether).
Exactly what I thought the link referred to initially.
GPS III Launching Today but You Can't Use It Until 2022
They collected, wrote down, and published well known German folktales of uncertain/indeterminable orgins, they never claimed they were original stories. The brothers had a preservationist goal.
It seems to me that it's misleading to call that a hint. Rather, certain code paths create hard-to-predict branches, and others create predictable branches. A hint would be some kind of metadata that says "you'll want to predict this branch this way based on your algorithm, but please don't!"
Imho, licenses should only be used in situations where (1) there are cost externalities to be considered that the free market doesn't expose+ or (2) it's better for society as a whole if supply is managed (e.g. capped licenses / quotas)

+ E.g. a cheap electrician using aluminum wiring that may short in 10 years and burn the house down. But of which the customer may not be aware / informed.
It's a nice right in theory, but in reality, stop-and-frisk, border control, parallel construction, 'I smelled weed in the car', 'I had a hunch', 'the drug dog gave me a signal', 'we got an anonymous tip (from an illegal search, via parallel construction)' all exist, and are regularly employed in the United States.

They also tend to be disproportionately targeted at particular, inconvenient, segments of the population.
There are restrictions in the Assistance and Access Act which mean that a defence against the civil penalty for non-compliance is that it would violate the law of a foreign country if the act would be done in a foreign country (see s317ZB(5)).

But my point was that these protections don't extend to Australian data -- the location of the data is irrelevant to jurisdiction if you're talking about Australian data being stored by an Australian company.
It shocks me that weapons-grade creepiness like this is good advice for a job seeker! Supposedly there's a talent shortage, but we gotta case the joint before interviewing? Nuts!
I wonder how I would be perceived in a place like that. I am introverted so I don't spark up conversations with people, but I'm always polite, cheerful, and express gratitude to people because the way I think about it, these are all nice and they cost me nothing to give. I wouldn't want to be perceived as insincere though. Is it okay to be a cheerful smiler in places where it's not the custom to smile as often?
I wish I could do that. I probably could if I didn’t had an MMO sucking a portion of my soul. But I confess I can do these things because my work is basically sprint and rest kind of job.
I have heard just that before. Meme or not, there must be a large kernel of truth.
Slightly off topic, but this order kind of defines the state of India. Whatever the issue is, there are always two sides both of which try to shape the narrative in their favour. One side arguing through twitter and some of self owned websites, what the implications could be, and other saying that the order already existed, and this is limiting the scope to only 10 agencies and doing it to curb terrorist activities, as if that makes it all ok.

The issue is that while this order is passed, there is no remedy for the citizens if their privacy is breached in any sense. The power is given to the home ministry, who at this point, think of themselves more as campaigner for next election, rather than an elected govt body, and hence it will be bad for political opponents in elections due in 2019. Since they made it concerning National Security, it is not covered under Right to Information either.

(The order and notification says that the interception and monitor could only be for certain citizens, or group of citizens, if they are deemed a threat for national security. Even Apple might be asked to break the encryption in this case.)
Maybe you should go back and read scoopdewoop's comment again. Half of their point was that slack and discord are not simple text only chat clients.
The promise of "Speed of containers and security of VMs" is enticing, but is there a simple 101/quickstart for somebody that just wants to run one container in this way?

as in no Kubernetes, OpenStack, Multi-tenancy, nothing.....

Just one bare-metal server, configured as KVM host, and how can I [run/start/stop] one Kata container?

I feel like everyone just assumes you're a Kubernetes Pro and runs infrastructure at the scale of Google/FB/Amazon these days... :-(
That's an area where Mozilla could have distinguished itself by being very developer friendly. A few years ago I was looking into embedding a browser and XUL would have been a good fit but it was pretty obvious that it wasn't supported well.

Same for their Javascript engine. Node could be running on Mozilla code instead of V8 if Mozilla had been more developer friendly.
My point about moral hazard stays the same and unaddressed.
I think you're discussing two different phases of optimization. PGO and Java's JIT use branch information to emit different machine code. Hardware branch prediction takes machine code and determines which branches in the machine code are taken, and speculates based on that information. There's an underlying pattern that both follow, but they're very different.
The debriefs especially are incredibly valuable!

Why?

You may think something happened based on your surface impression of what just occurred. The CEO may view it completely differently based on:

a. information you don't have e.g. past history etc
b. non-verbal cues (as other comments have mentioned)
c. something else

Ideally, the CEO would turn to you after each meeting and ask you "What do you think just happened?", you give your thoughts and then they respond with what they think actually happened.

I've read/heard multiple accounts of where this has been game changing for the non-CEO/manager person as it gives you an insight that you would only ever be able to deduce slowly over time via trial and error.
Don't think they will deploy great firewall for blocking telegram which operate from offshore.
The graphics and animations are more or less on par, it's the underlying mechanics where new ground is being driven. Star Citizen has taken the "simulation" approach to insane levels. There are so many things you can do in Star Citizen that just aren't possible in other games because of how they're designed.

In a lot of games, each interior of a spaceship would be a map, and then you would have a map of each location you could exit the spaceship, and then you would effectively teleport at a doorway when you "exit the ship". (Think about how this works in Mass Effect. The "ship" that you run around on never actually "moves". It's much easier and more efficient to make a game this way for a lot of reasons. In Star Citizen, they actually move a ship around the map, and if you open the door, it opens the physical barrier between you and the outside world and you can see out of it.

By keeping everyone and all objects "in space" all the time, Star Citizen allows some insanely different experiences that other games would have to specifically program functionality for.
I learned English by trying to figure out how to navigate menus in Warlords II and Castles II.

I played Baldur's Gate and barely understood the plot. A few years later, I eventually got to Planescape: Torment and actually managed to understand it.

If you love TTD, you should check out http://www.openttd.org/en/ if you haven't already.
I would make your request to sit down with another CEO a separate Ask HN, so it does not get lost. Good luck!
C++ can be a higher level, garbage-collected language.

http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#garbage-collection
I found this article incredibly naive and idealistic. The divide between China and America isn't a mere disagreement about trade 'disparities' and how IP is handled. The Chinese Communist Party is running an authoritarian, draconic police state that has spent its time quashing human rights, and threatening and bullying democratic nations, all while cynically exploiting its own citizens for increasingly centralized wealth. No amount of cross border trade can alter the fact that China has positioned itself as an enemy of democracy when it stands in the face of hegemonic Chinese power, both abroad and at home.

This is a country where the government forced ~10,000 women to be sterilized or see their families imprisoned in 2010, where a report came out not 2 months ago documenting how prisoners of conscience are harvested for organ transplants (the organs in question being sold; it is, after all, _state_ capitalism), a country that joined Russia in preventing the UN from sanctioning Syria after one of the worst chemical weapons attacks...I think since the Iran/Iraq war. This is the country that is stripping its citizens of their rights based on an algorithm that takes into account everything they say on the internet.

Every country commits human rights violations of some sort or another. No group is perfect. That being said, the breadth, scale, and malicious intent behind China's human rights violations beggars belief. These are not the actions of a nation that wants the best for the international community. These are not the actions of a nation that wants to integrate with the international community, except to loot it while enjoying the protections and rights created by that self same community of nations. Huawei is not dividing China from the world; China has done that for itself.
Oh, so your problem with the game is after all that it's not going according to your worldview. I don't suppose it would help for me to suggest one more time that CIG has been clear about "done when it's done" since the beginning? It's almost like that last sentence is completely invisible to everyone complaining about the release date. If you don't like it, go ahead and stick to your loot boxes and microtransactions and "ship it" and season pass titles you're used to. And let people enjoy things.
Procedural Macros in Rust 2018
Shrug = Hausser les épaules

Literally means "lift the shoulders"
Really? I'm pretty sure it's common to consider a conversation transcript anonymous as long as the names are stripped.

There was a story on HN in the last few days where just one side of chats with a home assistant device was enough to identify the person, his S.O., and their friends.