skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, no, no.

1. Super Mario Bros. is 40KB (PRG ROM is 32KB, and CHR ROM is 8KB). That said, I suppose if you were to compress the ROM, you probably would end up with value like 31KB.

2. Levels don't use RLE or LZ77, that would use too much space. Rather, the game uses commands like "from now on, use this ground fill pattern", "draw pipe here", "put a staircase", "put a goal". Super Mario Bros. uses two bytes per object, representing the following information: XXXXYYYY PSSSVVVV, where X is horizontal position within the page, Y is vertical position within the page, P moves to the next page, S is a command, and V is its parameter (length or number of an extended object). Y positions bigger than 0b1011 are used for special commands (as such parameters would be rendered out of bounds).

3. Graphics aren't compressed as they are stored in CHR ROM, and are directly accessed by the PPU (PPU cannot access RAM). However, as the graphics are 2bpp, they don't use as much space. Palettes are used to not restrict the entire game to 2bpp - note that 16x16 blocks have different color palettes. Some tricks are used to reduce the number of necessary tiles - for instance, clouds are the same thing as bushes, just with a different palette applied.

4. Demoscene is misleading. The way demoscene works is that most things are using procedural generation, meanwhile the levels in Super Mario Bros. are actually designed, and graphics were drawn by an artist, they aren't using some arbitrarily picked mathematical function chosen because it looked cool. The game has to be playable after all.
I think, though, that this is why, back in the '90s, there was so much hand-wringing about recent developments (at the time) in computing leading to the spiritual death of the demoscene. All that hardware heterogeneity meant that democoders end up far removed from the machines they work on.

It's turned out to be at least somewhat true, insofar as oldschool demos still carry a lot of cachet despite the hardware not being anywhere near as capable. I don't know which one took more effort or skill to build, but, on a gut level, 8088MPH just feels cooler than kkrieger.

Maybe that's just me showing my age, though.
Remember that Kashmir is still under 24h curfew, with no Internet / International calls since 5th August.
> A whole food plant-based diet is the best diet identified by science so far in terms of treating obesity

Citation?

I think the best diet science has identified in treating obesity is cutting out processed foods. Whether it's processed plant or animal food.

Heart disease and diabetes comes from sugar and carbs, all of which are plant based.
Can’t hear you while crunching my Sweetgreen salad trucked to freezing New York with diesel fuel /shrug/
Anyone know what they're using for the repo web UI? http://git.simple-cc.org/scc/
Try adding a source of carbs with a low glycemic index like quinoa, amaranth or legumes. It should increase serotonin levels and decrease craving for sugar.
> There are some obvious broad waivers on searches to enable the enforcement of import/export and immigration laws

Except those searches can be done at the behest of other law enforcement agencies and any information found can be shared with them.
Even if it only reduces storage demands it seems potentially worthy.

May I add a proposal to convert the mediteranian sea into a pumped hydro storage with long-term capabilities? It would need the same dam as the Atlantropa, but possibly less extreme.

There are some basins around northern Africa that might be amenable to slight terraforming, or just a re-activation of Operation Plowshare to blow a cavern which has it's rubble content lifted out and then used for subsurface pumped hydro.

Alternatively plan to collapse the cavern roof into itself after filtering persistent radionuclides and waiting for short half-life isotopes to decay. Collapse via conventional quarry techniques (a circle of drilled wells filled with ANFO?) or iteratively with robots that go out towards the center and drill to blast this off somewhat continuously. Then use a nearby water reservoir to pump in-between. Salt content shouldn't matter much except corrosion protection techniques.
Thats the point. Search my strongly-encryoted device to your heart's content! That does not require I decrypt it first.
What's the probability that the sequencing sample was contaminated and that the sequence result doesn't represent the animal in question? Has that been ruled out?

Obviously such integration errors occur in reality. Though, in therapy I'd expect the rates to be quite low. It'd be interesting to find out how often it happens in these applications.
> Because when the groups leading the protests were in power they were just corrupt, social conditions were just as bad and they were as brutal and tyrannical as those now in power.

Was this before or after the west decided to parcel up middle eastern land based on whims?
Your comment is a tad snarky and strays off topic within the snark... But for real, why not recognize sex work as a legitimate profession?
I feel like World War III was economic, and China already won.
My reading enjoyment was really harmed by the indiscriminate occasional lower-casing of the units. According to the notation I was taught, 1MB is 1 megabyte, while 1mb is 1 mili-bit - a fractional unit (used really rarely in information theory) that is 8 billion times smaller.

Note: I think you can actually talk about fractional bits in information through
Where we do and don’t want automation
Ringing character endorsement? It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to correct the seemlingly common misconception that RMS changed his mind only recently after the fact, when in reality he seems to have changed his mind many years ago.

Also, should people be condemned for opinions they used to hold, even if they changed them relatively recently? If so, what is the point of anybody changing their mind on any topic, if they’re going to get nailed for any opinion they have ever held? What kind of world would that make, where nobody could be expected to change their mind on anything?
> It puts industrial strength end to end encryption in the hands of millions of Chinese.

But China doesn't allow stuff like that, surely there is a backdoor.
A New Community for Developers
Yes, they have.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

Can you link to a source showing that Apple didn't turn over control of iCloud in China to the CCP?
It's time for businesses to treat China as a risk. China uniquely puts businesses in a position where they must choose between violating their values and violating their profits, and the recent spat of PR disasters have proven that your values affect your bottom line as well.

China will put your business between a rock and a hard place. Price it in.
I agree. I've used Octopus to automate deployments of internal LOB crud apps in the insurance space for a few years now.

My questions is, is it still aimed at .NET? I know it leans on Nuget as the package repo. But have they broadened to embrace deployment of other tech stacks?

Is Octopus considered best in class for what it does? Who are the primary competitors? Does Azure DevOps spell the end for Octopus?
There hasn't been a military/violent crackdown in Hong Kong.
Web apps! See original comment.

Web apps that can ask permission to access features of your phone like a native app.

There are Progressive Web Apps now that are decent like Twitter's but it's still not as good as a native app.
Would you rather have to know about your data in such detail that you can define a general function for generating it... or just define it?
https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/10/technology/apple-china-iclo...

Not only has Apple given the iCloud keys to the kingdom to China, iCloud is actually run by the state in China
Analysis of Commits in Travis CI, Buddy and AppVeyor Using PVS-Studio
> Many favor the Trump plan for a merit based visa regime. - Foreign policy towards India and Pakistan.

This has been a major sticking point for me. I absolutely despise Trump and could never imagine supporting the GOP. (literally over my dead boy)

But, I acknowledge that Trump has had an agenda that objectively speaking, benefits Indians.

Democrats have favored Pakistan in many situations, despite them routinely supporting jihadist militia & terrorists in both Afghanistan and India + hosting some of the most wanted men in the US (literally Osama). The US generally has a trigger happy tendency to jump to conclusions about human rights violations in other nations, without any nuanced understanding of the ground reality. So, I would rather a trigger happy group that favors us, than one that doesn't.

I am in favor of more taxes, but as someone on an H1B, I can literally not access any of the social safety nets the extra taxation would afford. I am already near $100k in debt from student loans, and none of the loan forgiveness/ free education programs will be of assistance to me.

Democrats speak of open borders and welcoming immigrants, but have done nothing to solve the problems faced by Indians who come to the US in the most legal way possible -> Highly educated, high skill. The waiting period on green cards is a minimum 40 years for Indians. At the very least, Trump (or the one smart guy in the cabinet) has changed the way the h1b lottery works to favor highly educated immigrants. It still sucks and some things have gotten worse, but the democrats certainly haven't helped.

Lastly, for some reason, South Asians are not seen as a "minority" in the US (also faced by east Asians to some extent). There is a non-trivial amount of racism and internalized insecurities faced these groups and Democrats make no effort to talk about them, despite being loud about the same thing for hispanic and black communities. Jokes against Indians are not considered racist. Every popular Indian in US media is an awkward funny guy and lets not even talk about the "unsexiness" of Indian men.(Don't want to go into it too much, because it makes the comment sound like an incel. Even secure and well groomed Indians fully notice this, but will never speak of it outside male Indian circles, because honestly no one like complainers. Black women have this exact same problem in media, but they are slowly getting their voices heard and the representation they deserve). There is a reason a good chunk of Indians either borrow the 'preppy white person' or 'black rapper' identity, and that is because Indians have not found a way to be comfortable in their own culture yet. This is a hurdle that east asians seem to be getting past this generation. The school admission scandals have only further exacerbated this issue.
The group leading the protest? wtf? there is no group leading the protest and the current government and all the political parties involved have been in power since the US gave it to them in 2003, and before that was Saddam for 30 years and as far as I know no one else was in power and Saddam is long dead...

Please stop making ignorant statements about my country... kthxbai
In retrospect, it's hard to imagine how anybody thought this kind of game would be fun or enjoyable.

Everybody in the game industry got so caught up in the fact that they could produce video-heavy titles that they never stopped to consider the fact that... almost literally nobody enjoyed playing these things.

All I can think is that...

1. Myst's massive success showed that there was a market for this kind of, uh, cinematic non-real-time puzzle game?

2. There was a notion that this sort of game would appeal to "regular folks", who outnumbered "hardcore gamers" by roughly a zillion to one.

3. Perhaps everybody involved knew that these games weren't very fun, but there was a sense that they had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get in on the ground floor of what might have been "the next big thing," akin to getting in on the ground floor of Hollywood in the 1920s or somesuch. In other words, that these primitive early titles were a necessary stepping stone to producing something better.

One very minor thing I'll say in defense of these FMV games is that they were generally played on small (think: 13-17") CRTs. The small screen size masked some of the terrible video qualities, relative to viewing them today on our giant 1080p/4K screens. But they still looked pretty bad back in the day. It was quite obvious that most/all of these titles were shot by amateurs in front of a green screen.
There are a lot more things at play.

Hong Kong is ideologically closer to American's values, and so having China take it over can be seen as a form of indirect threat. It also plays into the whole trade war going on at the moment. Financially, American companies have more ties with Hong Kong than Iraq. ...

People are also influenced by what the media gives them to think about this week.
We are discussing your assertion that due to the Second Amendment, an armed populace has "reminded" the American government that its use of force is "a bad idea" on multiple occasions.

The purpose of the Second Amendment is to guarantee the capacity of a "well regulated militia" to commit armed violence "in defense of a free state." Resistance and protest which does not involve armed violence against the state by definition is not relevant to discussions about the effectiveness the Second Amendment. This is not adding a "new qualifier," it's merely taking the intent of the Second Amendment seriously.

>Armed citizens, be they ineffective & disorganized, were enough to dissuade heavy handed gov't tactics for a long time - lest effective & organized arise.

This is an assumption on your part which willfully ignores evidence to the contrary. You're like Batman, thinking the bat costume works because "criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot", only with guns and the government.

Until you can actually prove that the government - which has been militarizing and becoming more aggressive since 9/11, mind you, not less, and which shoots unarmed civilians in the streets in broad daylight with impunity and often gets commended by the gun community for doing so - has changed its tactics out of fear of an armed populace and an effective uprising, I'm going to consider further conversation to be fruitless.
If your between 18 and 35, not all the wealth that you're able to enjoy the privilege of is under your control. Yes, someone can totally host a meeting in a large loft, but it doesn't necessarily mean the loft belongs to them and not their parents. Hell, even if it is their loft, it's not likely that it's being paid for out of the wealth they control, instead the parents pay for it.

Also, holding on to a small fraction of wealth you got doesn't detract from the much larger fraction you've given away. Yeah, maybe they aren't suffering like average Joe is but when did it suddenly become mandatory for everyone to suffer? When did we start measuring how good our society is by how much everyone suffers? Going by the metric of making everyone live happy lives, they are doing pretty damn good.

Investing the money only gets you back in the same position you were in before. Maybe you don't have the cash, but you sure do have the power. That's what these kids are trying to give up when they give away this money. That's the whole point of this organization.
Wow. The coastline of Africa is 18,950 miles (30,500 km), so That’s like looping around the content nearly 3 times.

Here’s what I found on that site:

> I’m doing an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit right now.
Come on over to Reddit.com and ask me any question you have about my three year, 54,000 mile and 35 country expedition around Africa.

It’s all on the table – safety, money, health, budget, visas, route, people, animals, the Jeep.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/brhbst/i_drove_my_jee...
> "Basically, we’re sending more data to smaller devices simply due to screen resolution. Which, for the next 2 billion folks in emerging markets, on 2G connections, is like the worst idea ever. But I digress. That’s a different post."

I'll take the devil's advocate position on this tangent. Mobile data infrastructure is remarkably reliable and cost-effective in emerging markets.

Anecdotally, I live in Canada. We have some of the most expensive and restrictive mobile phone service in the world. 4G coverage is still spotty, even in major cities.
On a recent trip to Morocco it was really astounding to me how much cheaper, faster and more ubiquitous 4G service was.

Here is some actual data:

[0] Global pricing of 1GB of data:
https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/

[1] Mobile data speeds by country:
https://www.opensignal.com/reports/2018/11/global-state-of-t...
Of course that's in part because China pays attention to what happens in the US, and they try to frame their message in such a way that is more palatable for Westerners.
Lego logic gates and mechanical computing
Why We’re Drawn into Darkness
Good luck trying to find a copy of this survey or its methodology. As of this comment, a primary source or anything like it doesn't seem to exist online.

Turns out it's a "PR survey": https://www.onepoll.us/pr-surveys/ -- created by a company that's "uniquely positioned to offer data-led content which is guaranteed to grab headlines." Perhaps your business wants a "Personal spring clean" survey or a "Things that baffle women about men" survey; if so, these are your people.

Basically, it's a press release that happens to contain some numbers.
I don't travel internationally very often, but I'm considering just backing up my entire phone/laptop and wiping it, then restoring from the cloud when I arrive.
well, you did invade them. Overthrew their government. but sure, other than that, next to no connection.
> "most" bullies are sociopaths or narcissists

Um, I never said that. I talked about tendencies, just like you did. It's not very meaningful to say what bullies "are", but bullying does generally involve at least some degree of instrumental aggression and callous/unempathetic attitudes. Such attitudes might arise out of simple imitation like you said, but only if someone else is actively demonstrating them - and this will generally be someone in the peer group who holds significant social influence on others.
So could you have these two places be inside and outside a black holes event horizen?
Difference is that FTC's mission is to serve the people, and they are appointed through a democratic process.
I would think a screen mounted in the standard rearview mirror position would be essentially unusable on the road (as opposed to parking) by anyone who needs reading glasses, as not even bifocal glasses or contact lenses would work with a screen in that position. it would seem one would need a display producing a distant virtual image, like a heads-up display.
I’m pretty naive to the Middle East, but the primary reason people are protesting is lack of economic opportunity (Iraq specifically), right? Is that someone’s fault? Can it actually be changed?

I don’t want people to be killed for protesting, but I don’t know if I care if that protest is successful or not. I’m open to ideas why I should.

It sounds like a bunch of people are protesting that their country and has few useful economic outputs, and that sucks, but I’m not sure what can be done about that.
Microsoft AI art visualizes building sentiment with photoluminescent fabric
I dare you to make an account on gab.com and TRY to find a neo-nazi on there. There are certainly a lot of conservative and right-wing opinions on there, but I've yet to see a neo-nazi. You're believing what your left-wing social media stream is telling you instead of thinking for yourself.
Major French Paper Drops All Ad Trackers
But didn't zsh development get stalled?
Stuff like this always makes me laugh, mostly out of the insanity of it. Most of these types have never had to file bankruptcy, or worry about paying the month past due bill(s), or how they're going to eat or feed their children. They have no idea what people need. When they want to play philanthropist to 'save the world' I just can't help but laugh.

You want to make a real difference? Find some people, give them a monthly stipend, tell them it'll last x years and they should use it to improve their situation.

Say you have 1 million dollars you want to do something with:

- Find 15 people

- Give each one $500 a month for a decade as a stipend/annuity.

- Take the other 100k and give four $5,000 scholarships a year for 5 years.

You'll radically change 20~ lives profoundly. For me $500 a month would be another week and change of take home pay every month, over the course of a decade it would be 35-45% of a house here around Indy.

Hell, I only need 700k to retire with a 3% safe withdrawal rate if I do not have kids (34 and not married so doubt that's happening). You could take that 1 million and give 10 people 100k and say "congrats, I just put you a decade closer to retirement!" and the impact it would have would be drastic for those individuals, and if you're worried about them blowing it on stupid stuff, just spread it out, 1k a month for 8 years and change.

Have a financial planner create a document that gives them suggestions on how to invest it into retirement vehicles or educational programs, or just point them at the /r/personalfinance sidebar and ask them to write you an update each month on what's going on in their life. Feel good for the better part of a decade.

---

I don't have a college degree, EVERYONE wants a college degree. I had a multi-millionaire, that at the time was running not one but TWO companies tell me he was sorry that I was running into a wall for not having a degree and that he was sorry it has become a "de facto union card". I begged, and begged, and even suggested things I could do for either company or some other endeavor of his and "I'm real busy right now" was all I got.

Last summer this individual that flew me clear across the country and put me up in a hotel for 2 days, to talk to me face to face for less than 1 hour - while they worked on their laptop the entire time. I spent all of my Sunday, Monday and Tuesday finally getting home at 8pm, having arrived at the airport here 8am Sunday, so they could talk to me for maybe 40 minutes face to face... the money they wasted on that was about 2 weeks of my take home pay.

I imagine they didn't think anything of it. "Hey I'm busy, I'd like to meet this person, I'll have them journey across the country so we can have a meeting since they aren't local" probably didn't think anything of it. but to me I thought they were finally going to give me a 'trial' job and wanted to do it face to face. Nope. Just wanted to meet me. I was devastated. For a week or so leading up to getting there I was like "This is it, this is it!!!" and then just "hi, nice to finally meet you"...

People with this sort of wealth, simply have no concept of reality for 'normal' people.
Great write-up! Pondering this question is the thing that brought my into software development in the first place. It was fascinating back then how my big, expensive, PC/XT would struggle to make anything run half as smoothly as a Game Boy. PC games with contents spread over several floppy disks, taking MEGABYTES of space and slowly crunch-crunch-crunching whenever I'd go to a different screen in Quest for Glory, but you could play in the immersive game of Zelda seamlessly.

It's good to look back and appreciate the fundamentals, since there was a lot of clever thinking in this we can learn from today. There are often times I'll come up with an overly hefty solution in a generic case, instead of thinking like Nintendo did about focusing on making something cool to look at with a fun experience, though with a much narrower scope. NLP is one place I see this a lot - it's often very easy to make aws happy when I go through GBs of data, for something where 95% of the value to the end user could be reached with a 50kB file on the S3. Dapps are another one - helps a lot to think like a Nintendo dev in the 80s about what the reusable parts of your data are.