skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sort of fit the mould described, so does my partner, but I think there's more to it. We're in our 50s, and started with Defender and Tempest, even Space Invaders in the arcades. :) Yes, I've definitely lost interest in MMOs, any social gaming, and 95% of anything that is on consoles or counts as an AAA title.

I think that's as much because most of those games contain tons of what I'd call cynical time and money sinks. Loot boxes, RNG designed to keep you playing "enough" so force you to farm. Building weapons and armour, delays or maps, even the whole gameplay around those $$ related additions. I don't like open world games that are so tightly on rails it's almost like playing an old laserdisc game like Dragon's Lair. The first couple of Call of Duty games were very much this. So dull.

We mostly play indie titles and can spend as much time as we ever did. We spend time because it's fun. If it's designed to take time, I'll try something else. Sometimes, they'll take far more hours than the alleged AAA titles. Factorio, Shenzen or some of the recent (and very welcome) resurrection of turn based RPGs like Divinity and Pillars of Eternity have all felt far more substantial than any major titles.

Of the majors I can think of Civ and Skyrim, and if Paradox count as a major Europa Universalis. That really is about it. Of the rest, I couldn't care less. I'd prefer Skyrim to be, or at least feel, more like the depth and complexity of Morrowind.

I think we both tend to play in shorter spurts - real life shows up that bit more.

How much of that is me aging, and how much the arrival of the ability to milk revenue from every game? :)
800-555-TELL used to be a voice-operated information service complete with turn by turn navigation, eventually purchased by Microsoft IIRC. XXX-555-1212 used to be an information number (both may still exist; I haven't checked).
All great recommendations. More indie gems:

- Spelunky

- Don't Starve

- Factorio

- Stardew Valley

- Faster than Light

- Kerbal Space Program

- Dungeon Warfare (if you're a TD fan)

- Return of Obra Dinn

- Cities: Skylines

- Frostpunk

- All Zachtronic's games

- RimWorld

- Darkest Dungeon
It's only a problem if you're a public company and have shareholders. If you're private, it's not really a serious problem if you have a large enough buffer to support current operations. I think Bloomberg is in the latter category. Revenues from selling their terminal have declined every year for awhile, but since they're private, they're not panicking as much.
If you criticize somebody's work, they'll get defensive. That's a totally normal human reaction. Users rarely say things like "sorry I don't like it", it's more likely they file their pet peeve as a major grievance that supposedly affects untold numbers of other users, like the guy who wrote this blog post.

Frankly, a lot of users really do have bad workflows, questionable use-cases and they are relatively uninformed and often unwilling to learn why things work the way they do. If they don't pay, what else should they do besides fixing it themselves?

Generally though, "patches welcome" or "fix it yourself" is just a more polite way of saying "this is getting annoying, please leave now". I don't think those developers actually care that you (don't) use their software. You can tell when somebody actively wants to keep you as a user by them not acting in that way. Like saying "we'll consider it" and then proceeding to do nothing, for example.
Alphabet overtakes Apple as world’s third-biggest company
interesting, how is that transit share calculated? ridership / regional population?

i’m certainly not trying to say LA is a beacon of transit, but it’s not all cars here. it’s quite possible to get around without driving.
Right, but IMO that's meaningfully different from "the government and the press are in bed", which implies a wholesale conspiracy.

The fact that individuals within government can find favourable coverage from one of dozens (hundreds?) of independent media outlets, each with its own perspective and bias, isn't really all that surprising or scandalous.
Sorry for the useless nitpick but it's not so much about working place per se but rather about internal switchboard; although it usually is linked. I once rented a place here in France that was a former student building, while it was a normal apartment renting on paper/legally/technically, I still had to dial a number to reach the outside world. Fun times when your old neighbor transfer calls to you without wanting to.
So it's "radio dark", not "sun dark". (At least per human radios.)
Man. I came here to post the same thing.

Google has been screwing up EVERYTHING lately. Every recent Google product launch that I can think of has been botched. They're REALLY checked out over there.

Serious question. What's the last major successful Google project that was built within Google and not acquired?

I can't think of one.
Having another referendum now we know what the actual options for leaving are seems democratic to me. But you won't get people, including politicians, that want a no-deal brexit to agree to it.

And even though Farage himself said, "if the referendum was 52/48 to remain then in would not be the end of the matter"
A continuous-time MaxSAT solver with high analog performance
I wouldn't say that's the reason. This statistic has already been true for some time in the US, I believe. I think this article is specifically talking about UK produced games. I could be wrong, though.
Just tried the some of the apps and while it seems pretty promising, they are really mobile apps running on the desktop, in fact, it even says that on the website :). For example, the picker is a carousel wheel and not a native looking control. I understand that is still Alpha but do you plan to make it feel more like a desktop application?
Maybe they had a problem and the regular radio was offline /s
As a smart contract developer I'm curious about

> It also skips the convoluted smart contracts (which IMHO are severely expensive, hard to fix, exploitable bugs waiting to happen) in favor of simple but adequate financial constructs builtin to stellar for custom assets.

To me that feels very very limiting and my optimism about Ethereum is the generality of the smart contracts and ability to programmatically enhance Ethereum.
I discovered that there was, in effect, a marketplace of secrets in Washington, in which White House officials and other current and former bureaucrats, contractors, members of Congress, their staffers, and journalists all traded information.

This is why I left that world.

The US Government and policy makers decide that it is sometimes necessary to do things that put US Govt employees at mortal risk. It is important that there are employees like this that are willing to take those risks and they do so knowingly.

Where this goes off the rails is when those same Policymakers put their ego over the safety of the people they are risking in order to repugnantly gain status or money.

This "marketplace" is a dark pool of real risk that is opaque to those who are trying to execute the orders given. An operator can reasonably evaluate what the risks are going into any intelligence activity, but there has traditionally been an underlying assumption that the people giving the orders aren't going to comprimise the activity. I'm not sure that's an assumption worth holding anymore.

I should note that is a separate point from accountability and transparency with respect to the "should" of these activities. There is an equal need for democratic accountability for these activities, and OPSEC is often in conflict with democratic discoverability. There should be more discussion on the "how" of that, because as it stands such information sharing is not magnanimous or virtuous - it's exploited for personal gain.
Can't help to mention that several round stones stacked in balance is so artificial that is an 'universal' sign to mark the path in wild remote areas. A typical I was here sign.
Top a16z Podcasts and Videos of 2018
Because for shareholders, the stock price only appreciates if the company grows.

In many ways, it mirrors the issues for Hacker News entrepreneurs. To get VC capital, you have to dangle promises high returns on your equity — even if a consistent cashflow business is a great outcome for an entrepreneur (these businesses are pejoratively called "lifestyle businesses").
My experience with private servers for WoW is that they offer a very different gameplay experience than retail World of Warcraft, which is their primary draw. The lack of a subscription fee is a nice side bonus.
Can you define mind? It is well known that lithium can be used to treat some mental disorders. It must be doing something to the brain in order to have that effect. In my view, that literally means lithium is mind-altering.
I think you misunderstood the parent comments point. “PCs aren’t making a comeback” doesn’t mean they disappear entirely. It means that they’ve now been relegated to niche use cases, like the ones you point out.

Not only have mobile phones cannibalized the “a PC on every desk” for people at home, they’ve expanded to “a computer in every pocket”.
Climate problems are not about price, they're about CO2 émissions. Turns out producing and installing batteries produces a lot of CO2, and they're not even enough on a large scale so they have to be complemented with more pilotable electricity, which unfortunately mostly is carbon-based. As long as we depend on those intermittent sources (that's the real name we should give them not to be confused with other renewable), we rely on carbon.
it's not "seen as a problem," the company just gets valued differently if growth is expected to slow
I don't see why Brexiters should be silenced forever if they lose the next vote, no. We repeat other votes on a regular basis, and sometimes when the facts change, politicians and the people change their minds. Something as complicated as Brexit seems like a particularly bad idea to make an exception for.

If a subsequent Remain vote resulted in a similar situation where any real world option to remain in the EU would be regarded as a betrayal worse than leaving by a large fraction of the people that voted for it, I'd think another vote was actually necessary...
> Why does the company need to grow if it's profitable as it is?

This is how capitalism works. Everything has to be growing all the time, or it's seen as failing. Requiring infinite growth on a finite planet is a problem, but so far all the alternatives are considered fringe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy
Lived and invested in India for the last four years. This is definitely not China and I dont see the inclination among Indian consumers to shell out $1000 for an iPhone. India is the most competitive Android market in the world, with high-end, competitive phones with same features as an iPhone retailing for $200 - $300 (see Pocophone F1 by Xiaomi). Apple would need a radically different game-plan if they are serious about India.
The story itself is from 2018, title included. Whether things have changed or not in the meantime is a rather different question.
This reads like a press release — I thought the puffery would be followed by something substantive but hit the bottom of the page instead. If you aren’t a true believer before reading this you wouldn’t leave having learned anything.
The difference is that most phones were large due to limitations of miniaturization of the tech. Now it's mostly for aesthetic reasons, which is fine, as long as manufacturers make smaller form factors. Apple stopped doing that, so expect everyone else to follow suit and make phablets from now on.
Have they? Or is just those that were against it from the start still cannot accept it?
Personally, I look forward to QubesOS-feel [0] to be more mainstream and user-friendly - access to USB drives in secure VM, interoperable applications between various OSes and easy way to create a disposable disk/VM...

[0] https://www.qubes-os.org/
Antarctica, the big melt and what it means for people
An Android or iOS App for Boosting the Volume of Speech-Impaired Person?
Since “Unknown” in that graph are just IP addresses that havent bragged about who they are

So its good people are chomping at the Chinese mining pools
> Why does the company need to grow if it's profitable as it is?

The word "profitable" covers wide range of possible outcomes.
Generator comprehensions in Python
Which is why I have been using a cheap moto G for the last 5 years costs me < £150 and £7 a month.

If I lose it or drop it I am not concerned.
The real story here is the sharp economic downturn in China.

The fact that Apple hit or exceeded their sales goals in most regions but crashed in China is telling.

Perhaps China is decoupling from global growth much like Japan did in the early 90s.
There is still an unresolved dispute over Lough Foyle and a semi-resolved dispute over Rockall
Immortal Jellyfish and Mainframes
Thank you very much for that! I am going to try this this weekend.
I wonder if the "Aging Gamer" described is the title is really a gamer, i.e. someone passionate about videogames, or just some kind of consumerist who only keeps up with whatever is marketed towards him or her.

I play videogames, but I can't call myself a gamer. Maybe I was back when I had free time to practice fighting games, and played competitively. Maybe I was a gamer when I played a bunch of niche titles, regardless of genre. Maybe I was a gamer when I collected rare games and hardware. I'm certainly not a gamer now though.

I think about the decline of time I spend on gaming. A lot of it comes down to not having enough time (with a full time job and other interests I didn't have when I was younger), but I'll make time for the right game. I think the article jives with this, but I'm not sure if this is specific to gaming. It reminds me of a similar article I read on here a few years ago that talked about how after a certain age, people stop seeking out new music as well.
Ask HN: What to answer to users which are “surprised” that your SaaS is not free
As many other SaaS, we also receive emails from users saying "I was not aware that this was a subscription service...", "why this is not free", etc.

What is the best answer to these kind of inquiries? Are there some tricks to convert these users to paid?
Sorta like 'Don't get high on your own supply".
Isn't the general server market dying because of the cloud?
An interesting side-effect emerges. The total video game backlog stretches far back into history, with many games from the past 10 years alone still being relevant today.

As a single data point to add to the discussion, while Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is available for sale, I chose to purchase Modern Warfare 2 instead, for me, my wife, and a few friends for below the cost of a single license for the former game. The graphics and gameplay are considerably richer, in my opinion, than PUBG and Fortnite. The graphics are comparable.

This is a staggering revelation to me. To get something dramatically better in terms of visual fidelity, I would have to purchase a game like Battlefield V. But the cost is unappealing in a global market with several industries increasing prices across the board.

I'm searching for better values in a world with increasing costs, and finding that many people are still playing these older games, in part because they're not much different than new blockbusters.

Additionally, I'd rather not pay 60 USD for what has been called at times a "beta." I'm good.
Experts urge Egypt to rethink two-child population strategy
Here's an idea on how to make billions selling a product in a market that seems in decline.

1) Take the latest Macbook Pro

2) Remove the Touchbar, add back F row buttons and ports.

3) Replace the LCD with a 4K OLED display with thin bezels

It is that easy.
It doesn't make sense to say GNU/Linux on Zircon. That would be GNU/zircon. Unless you mean syscall translation layer.
Ask HN: Should Apple buy DuckDuckGo?
Given Apple commitment to privacy, and sharing almost every service with Google (Maps, storage, browser, OS, etc.) except search and DuckDuckGo having a great momentum, this looks like an obvious step, what would stop Apple from doing that?
How are the "algebraic data types" algebraic if they don't express any relation to each other?

This seems like a cool syntactic layer for people that are already writing Python and wishing for a more functional style. However to call this a functional language would betray the definition.
Thanks Mom.
This was my take away as well. "Shame" in this case is defined as independent retailers with "low quality goods." In this case, it appears that "low quality" is synonymous with anything not Mainstream Luxury.

Beyond that, this is the reality of how modern mall development works. Mall properties are basically ephemeral pump and dump real estate schemes. When the anchors move out to the latest highly subsidized mall with bigger and better TI incentives, little guys move in. Some of them are garbage, but many are not. Sometimes the mall makes it, sometimes it doesn't. Nothing new or special here.
<humor> Pretty long technical answer for “it will create a new penis measuring contest”. </humor>
> I find the argument a little bit disingenuous after claiming rust is type safe (you can do the same kind of non type safe magic with the unsafe keyword).

Rust is probably the most type safe language I’ve ever used, granted it’s not many, but definitely between Java, C, C++, JS, Python, Lisp, etc. If you put Rust in the same category because it has unsafe, you might as well just throw your hands up and say that no language, not a one is typesafe, with the exception of possibly Assembly, which practically treats everything as just a series of bits.

There is a misconception that b/c Rust has unsafe it is proof that it is itself unsafe, but this devalues the entire point of having any form a safety in language.

The language is typesafe, memory safe, and datarace safe, so long as you keep the guardrails on. Sometimes you take the guardrails away for very special reasons, but those are generally rare (unless you’re working with FFI, hardware, or low level concurrency). I have entire codebases of multiple thousands of lines in Rust without the need to use unsafe at all.
Investers could also ask for all that cash to be issued to them.

See altababa / Yahoo for example
> After breaking and dropping several, i had lamented that i really wished that they had included the little lanyard bracket so i would drop it less.

> I was literally told i was an idiot for not appreciating Ive's design asthetic.

That's ironic, since I have an old iPod Touch that has a build-in lanyard bracket.

https://gizmodo.com/5942681/the-ipod-touchs-newest-banner-fe...
Agreements for trade aside (which they can negotiate with EU still, and they will), why would they want to "come back"? To have their monetary police decided with undue Berlin influence and restricted lawmaking sovereignty?
Ah man. That's wild. Mind me asking how old you were when your brother was getting that treatment and you rebelled? Or at least how big of an age gap there was between you? My brother and I are very close in age so I wouldn't have been able to make that informed of a decision if the same happened to him (I'd have been too young to argue my stance in any coherent manner).

That said: I'm waiting for my neurotropics and cybernetic implants as well...
Wouldn't a second referendum be basically the same effect? Vote now on a negotiation result, with the ability to stay in the EU if that's the voting outcome. But that's not how it had been sold and structured from the start, so now it's seen as going back on the result of the first referendum. (and it wasn't established beforehand that revoking the Article 50 notice is possible, so it's somewhat understandable that wasn't the initial structure - although if it had been taken seriously, that possibly could have been established)
I would say that L3 is more a fallback for when L1 isn't available.

<edit> The last time I looked into Netflix's use of widewine (Which was about a year ago, so everything could of changed since) L3 is only used to protect their SD streams, L1 is required for HD, but L1 could still protect a SD stream. What I mean is L1 could be used for HD and SD where L3 is only used for SD. But you are free to implement it how ever you like (dependant on the contracts you have with content producers / rights holders). </edit>

Even with a unlocked bootloader with custom BL/Rom L1 streams are decrypted and decoded within a Trusted Execution Environment (Basically the SoC in your Android device) and then send directly to the screen from there. Unlocking the bootloader and running a custom rom shouldn't effect the "trusted" state of the TEE so you should be able to decode L1 content just fine.
It's current valuation is based on an assumption that the revenues will continue to grow significantly.

If it turns out that in reality the revenues will be stable/stagnant, then the owners of Apple are in for a rude shock (since it'd mean that Apple is worth much, much less), would not consider this situation as acceptable, and would be ready to install new management and approve radical changes to try and continue growth (of both revenues and share value) by any means possible.
Interesting view I hadn't heard before.

Notably, under the left's view, believing a system is just would require proving a negative.

Is basically 'guilty until proven innocent'; a recipe for eternal identitarian strife; totally different from how we approach structurally similar questions on other topics.
We're still really only partially (fractionally even) serious about pursuing renewable energy.

We need to increase capacity of renewable energy production, of course, but that is the easiest part of the whole equation. We also need serious investment into energy storage, by orders of magnitude more than what we have today. That will be at least as large an investment as building out the base capacity. And we need massive improvements to the power grid to make it possible to transmit power from where it's generated to where it's used, which will be at least as big an investment as either the capacity or storage problem.

Fortunately, all of these problems will benefit from technology advancements, and all of them can represent capital investments which provide lasting long term value (not just in CO2 emissions reductions but also in improving the resiliency of the power grid). There are tons of people working on the generation problem. The storage problem is about in the same state that generation was maybe 20+ years ago. And the grid problem? You could fit everyone working on it into a conference room, a small conference room. We desperately need to amp up investment in every aspect of this field ASAP.
Amazing, everyone dropping python2 should have been 2010s headline but hey whats another decade
TIL tetrode has a special meaning in biology: a four-conductor microelectrode for probing neurons that gives essentially a direction reading along with amplitudes from each of the four electrode components.
Never have I ever been in a call where the latency was dictated by speed of light, since about early 1990s when phone lines went digital. There's an awful lot of routing and switching along the (rather indirect) way, and each hop adds some ms to the mess. Even if the call was only Houston-transatlantic (or worse, transpacific for whatever peering reason)-Netherlands, you'd get pretty bad latency. Add the orbit-relay station-Houston leg, and I assume you'd have a bad time.

Ham radio, on the other hand - now we would be talking significant fractions of c!