skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The minor tragedy in all this was not so much the end of interactive movies, given what intensely problematic endeavors they so clearly were, but rather that the latest games’ vision proved to be so circumscribed in terms of fiction, theme, and mechanics alike. [...] A shocking percentage of the new games being released fell into one of just two narrow gameplay genres: the first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game.

Citation needed? This feels like fuzzy language used to protect an unverifiable claim. What is a "shocking percentage?"

Looking at (say) Wikipedia's list of notable games from 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games) I see a reasonable mix of genres. In fact, "shooter" games (searching the page for the number of uses of 'shoot') seem to share the top spot (21 results) with "role-playing" and "sports" games, the latter genre being neglected entirely in the article. (Noting that some games are listed as multiple genres)

From the article's earlier longing for the simpler time of gorgeous, hand-crafted 2D art, I wonder if the author simply misses classic-style adventure games. In response to that idea, however, I point out the Old Man Murray article (https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) on the death of adventure games: in brief Murray argues that the genre became so wrapped up in its own puzzle conventions that it became impenetrable to new players.
Also what about any random thoughts, ideas, notes you have?
M$ charges money.

Cisco charges money.

Google discontinued their video/messaging services too many times for people to get used to.

Heck for a moment I thought "Houseparty" was going to be a new social media, but I think their push notifications were too annoying.
They dropped a zero. The correction is useful, the snark is not.
The developer’s guide to the Human Interface Guidelines
Maybe they're not ignorant but the alcohol companies have a much stronger lobbying arm and more connections/acceptance with the audience of lawmakers who are the key decision makers on this than cannabis smokers/companies do?
False. The URL is currently in the Microsoft Store description.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/krita/9n6x57zgrw96
This is such a loss of money. The practical aspects will never be used.

This will move some technologies a bit ahead but so would work on biology and medical areas. I would be much more happy to see people cured or otherwise helped than to know that a partcle is this or that.

This is in strong opposition to what happened in these areas of physics in the previous century. Things which were directives had a conceivable practical application.

What can you make out of events which happen at such energies, the kind we will never reach outside of such research centers.
I guess that is -to some extent- the KPI for "wanting privacy".

Though privacy is also something people want "afterwards".

Something you'd wish you'd taken care of when its too late. When your identity is stolen, and used to get hundreds of speeding tickets on your name. When your sons pictures were lifted off your facebook to bully him after you had your 15 minutes of fame, and so on.
Curiosity Killed the Cat and the Asymptotically Optimal Agent
> Reinforcement learners are agents that learn to pick actions that lead to high reward. Ideally, the value of a reinforcement learner's policy approaches optimality--where the optimal informed policy is the one which maximizes reward. Unfortunately, we show that if an agent is guaranteed to be "asymptotically optimal" in any (stochastically computable) environment, then subject to an assumption about the true environment, this agent will be either destroyed or incapacitated with probability 1; both of these are forms of traps as understood in the Markov Decision Process literature. Environments with traps pose a well-known problem for agents, but we are unaware of other work which shows that traps are not only a risk, but a certainty, for agents of a certain caliber. Much work in reinforcement learning uses an ergodicity assumption to avoid this problem. Often, doing theoretical research under simplifying assumptions prepares us to provide practical solutions even in the absence of those assumptions, but the ergodicity assumption in reinforcement learning may have led us entirely astray in preparing safe and effective exploration strategies for agents in dangerous environments. Rather than assuming away the problem, we present an agent with the modest guarantee of approaching the performance of a mentor, doing safe exploration instead of reckless exploration.
> The reason is that if you try to stop people from speaking freely, eventually over time the tables will turn against you, meaning you won't be able to speak freely.

I think there are ways to "try to stop people from speaking freely" that are acceptable and indeed vital. We as a society generally have conventions around what speech is appropriate, and we generally teach people (both explicitly and implicitly) to, for example, ask for things nicely, compliment people, express gratitude, etc. And we as a society generally "punish" people who violate these conventions by being reluctant to interact with those people. I don't see this as a violation of freedom of speech in any sense.

And also, I don't really agree with the mode of argument of "eventually the tables will turn against you." I don't oppose strict legal consequences for murder, for instance, because one day someone might frame me for murder. I support the legal consequences for murder and I support various mechanisms to increase the likelihood that only actual murderers receive those consequences.
If you click through to request your offline data it appears that their regex to validate DOB is faulty and it fails the identity check requiring you to have to start a letter campaign to maybe get access to the data they hold about you.

(0[1-9]|1[0-2])/(0[1-9]|1d|2d|3[01])/(19|20)\d{2}

If the day you were born is between 10-29 it will not validate as a proper day.
That much can be fair. How often is it that the offending statements were only just made? Does that make up the majority of cases? Is the impulse based on any different reason?
I host my own tt-rss, and the install FeedMonkey (via my own sources.vsta.org) which provides a very nice viewer.
I'm guessing most of the folks you are taking about weren't even alive when civil rights legislation was first passed. And I object to the idea that only progressives can support civil rights.
Thanks, yep, those are all legitimate concerns about whether this would scale.

It's occurred to me that Stripe's email transparency[1] could help (although they discovered limitations with that approach too, and have been good about publishing those).

We're lucky (in some ways) not to have a large inbound feedback load, which is surely also a factor. Thanks for the external-request rotation suggestion; that's a good idea to provide a refresher from focus work when the burden starts to affect the team.

Honestly though, I have to re-state that it's been so refreshing and enabling to work this way that I wonder whether there'd be ways to scale up and solve the consensus, conflict and opinion problems you mention.

Despite that, I'd add another problem to the pile: not everyone is going to be able to contribute at equal pace at all times (for various completely valid reasons) in a large enough team - and there needs to be genuine cultural understanding and acceptance of that which I believe is frequently absent from high-intensity startup environments.

[1] - https://stripe.com/blog/email-transparency
Money printer should go brrr?

Would it really be bad to simply print the money for CERN, ITER or other scientific projects? New money without anything in return is bad but here? In these cases we would get an actual collider/reactor/rocket/whatever - built by actual companies that employ actual people, run by actual scientists, maintained by actual engineers, ...
I wasn't trying to say that this method would be hard or impossible to build, but it's hard to use for the average user. Moving mails around on mobile apps is already annoying enough (At least in the iOS Mail.app)
Wow this is insanely cool. I haven't tried it out, but I have a similar setup, except its pretty unreliable and unsafe to use. This looks amazing!
either that, or the "ticket revenue" from selling out a full theater was ~$5100. Average theater seats about 2-300 people, so ~$20 a ticket (not sure of the per-ticket price, but it was the premiere after all) works out at 250 seats.
Couldn’t agree more. Often I see people wishing for Mozilla to add more services. Please just do one complicated thing really well, Mozilla!

I guess all these additional services help lure more users to Firefox, so there’s that.

Maybe Mozilla can eventually generate enough revenue to stop nuzzling on Google’s money teat.

I think I just convinced myself that additional services are good overall for Mozilla. But yes, I’m firmly in the spread your online presence wide camp.
The NIH budget is currently around $40B a year.
> people follow incentives

Maybe the less they care about the company's overall goals and vision, the more they follow KPI:s and bonus incentives. When there seems to be no overall purpose and meaning anyway (except for making rich people richer?), then why not game the system?

But there can also be intrinsic motivation, just "unselfishlessly" doing what seems like good for the organization, if one likes its goal and reasons for existing.

Edit: You wrote: "significantly shifted my attitudes toward work, politics"

I wonder, how did this change how you thereafter did things at the workplace? (And politics somehow?)
While reading this I wondered how they ended up at a box office of $25,488. Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?!

If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings.

The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 seats [1]. 425 Seats * 5 viewings * $12 a ticket actually ends up at $25,500 or $25,488 if they did not report 1 ticket for whatever reason. As "any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets", I suspect they simply sold the tickets of the 425*5 seats they rented for a flat fee for $12 a seat to themselves and reported that as Box Office.

[1] https://whbpac.org/general-information/
Just to be clear, "fascism" is a term with a much more specific meaning than you're using it for. Fascism is a totalitarian/authoritarian ideology, but it's also a far-right one. "Left fascists" is an oxymoron. I think what you mean to say is "left totalitarians" or "left authoritarians".

> Those of us such as myself who are progressives have no moral high ground over the white supremacists if the fascist left use the exact same tactics that they do.

I don't think that's true either. I don't agree with censorship, but intentions do matter. Censorship as a misguided attempt to protect marginalized groups is bad, but it's certainly not equivalent to censorship in the service of white supremacy.
> But I am sure that some of the services I am buying are more expensive because of the Apple tax and I am paying Apple tax anyway.

Imagine how much more you could save if companies wouldn't have to include corporate tax burden into prices of their products. And what if you were exempt from income tax too? Just a food for thought.
It's so amazing to see them on HN, I learned a ton about python, pyramid, sqlalchemy and elastic on it's repos. So happy to see traction on open source projects!
Thank you!
Having spent quite a bit of time in the Santa Cruz mountains, Big Basin SP, Pescadero/Butano SP, and Portola Redwoods SP areas, the no mosquitoes thing is a bit optimistic.

Sure it's not as bad as say, northern Minnesota, but once you get away from the ocean and desert areas, if there's standing freshwater around there can be plenty of mosquitoes. The last time I camped in Big Basin everyone was running through clouds of them to/from the restrooms.

But yeah, in the cities like SF and LA, there aren't very many. The city would spray for mosquitoes at night when I lived in San Mateo, which surprised me coming from the midwest and not expecting Californians to be ok with such chemicals sprayed throughout their neighborhoods while they slept.
That’s always been a really silly assertion backed by a very small number of cherry picked examples.

How does anything we buy in the US even work at all, considering it’s all made in China by people of a different culture and race with zero diversity and zero representation of the customer?

We shouldn’t accept arguments like this, no matter how uncomfortable the righteous want to make us feel for thinking critically.
The Case for ARM Based Macs
Zoom is still in "growth phase" which means they aren't under a lot of pressure to turn a profit at this particular moment. So they proactively offered their free service to schools, the free tier isn't time-limited, plus their corporate product is basically the same as the consumer/free product.

And on the other side, Google was totally caught napping and assumed that everyone knew about Meet. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-vi... "[Google’s chief business officer] Mr. Schindler tried placating the engineer’s concerns, the people said. Then his young son stumbled into view of the camera and asked if his father was talking to his co-workers on Zoom."
They can malfunction due to changes in the device runtime anytime the OEM chooses, so no.
The case was extremely damaged, and not made of real wood but of plywood with veneer on top.

The veneer layer had already been sanded at least once and was super thin in places and of course that is where the bulk of the water damage was. In the end in a few places there was only a super thin layer of veneer left and in one or two places none at all. Wood grain filler was used to make the first layer more even, then three layers of red stain were added and finally two layers of high gloss transparent.

I would have loved to use only two layers of stain but the wood left underneath just wasn't good enough for that anymore. Anyway, so it isn't quite as dire as you make out from the pics but it also could have come out a lot better if there was more to start with. In person it looks quite good, especially the combination of brass with the red stain.
+1 for Newsblur, also open source! https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

I dearly miss Google Reader but that's the best replacement (and even better now than Reader was)
If you're "free" to do something, but only with consequences, you're not actually free.

If you have the belief that the best possible outcomes can be achieved by open discussion of ideas, then any sort of consequences for speech, be it social opprobrium, being blacklisted from jobs, having social media accounts closed, being blacklisted from web-hosting, etc., are all suppressing the open discussion of ideas, and thus bad.

There is a continuum; it is possible to have a viewpoint that certain kinds of speech are identifiably negative and it's worth banning them; hence, e.g., laws against slander (or, in the past, indecency).

The kinds of restrictions that are now becoming in vogue, however, go far beyond that, and are basically trying to squash politically undesirable viewpoints. I think at that point you've passed anywhere on the continuum that could reasonably be described as "free".
You're completely right to point this out, but this particular subject and individual seems to be a fulcrum for the sort of people who say things like, "kids these days...".

The most common thing I hear, by far, from members of the public at search and rescue fundraisers is, "why do you go to all that trouble for stupid people?" It's a question almost always delivered with the self-satisfied smugness of someone who has no idea that they're already suffering the atrophying effects of not venturing outside of familiar territory often enough.

McCandless surely made mistakes and errors in judgement. He certainly underestimated what he was getting in to. In that, he has something in common with hundreds of thousands of casual hikers, mountain bikers, kayakers, and visitors to national parks every year. There are vanishingly few entries in the annual Accidents of North American Mountaineering where the people involved are unimpeachable in terms of their preparedness or skill. In almost every case, there's something that someone could point to that the victim did wrong, and if not, then there's always the fallback that they were dumb to be doing it to begin with.

If he hadn't died, nobody would know his name. Statistics caught up to him. Statistics will catch a few other people every year while far more visitors to the same area will escape without consequence.

The dynamics of this subject on HN in particular are really sort of obvious, given that McCandless has come up at least half-a-dozen times on HN over the years, a site not known for its enthusiasm for the outdoors. The treatment here is often about as embarrassing as someone might imagine the topic of machine learning to be on a forum for mushroom pickers.
I mean in practice you can also list links to your site on the Apple App Store but you aren’t allowed to mention a cheaper price or another purchasing option.
I think it is free speech. But I think it is also uncouth behaviour and will be looked back on with embarrassment by most who participated in it in a few years time.

I think the solution is a better mechanism to tune out people who are obviously (to us) insane or morally bankrupt. Unfortunately, I see no easy way to do that without strengthening our filter bubbles even more. Maybe widespread meditation practice would help the race realists and the bigoteers be more visible without having as much impact.
She argued wittily against it almost a year ago:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...

I tend to mainly agree with her stance overall (and I happen to be a theoretical physicist.)
Doom, Mario, and Megaman all work extremely well within their limitations. The art is able to unambiguously present a world with atmosphere and it's clear what needs to be done. There's very little confusing iconography or hard to interpret sprites, everything is clear.

They're probably the best examples in the history of the medium of great design. Capcom and Nintendo are still making 2D Megaman/Mario games with the old graphic design and there are new retro FPS games coming out every year. SuperHot actually looks worse than Doom in most aspects other than the resolution and particles.

Sierra/LucasArts games, while beautifully drawn, suffered from unclear walking paths, confusing verbs, frustratingly slow interactivity, and nonsense puzzles. From an industrial design perspective, they were a mess.

Out of this World and Prince of Persia are probably the most prominent example of games that excelled in the two dimensions of graphics and usability, while Myst is probably the most extreme example of form over function in games that were successful.
I think there's probably a substantial difference for harsh laws on drugs depending on the drug - ex. I would bet most people believe that heroin or meth should be illegal, but far fewer people would think that about marijuana. Pew study (link below) says 2/3rds of Americans think pot should be legal

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-s...
I’ve been using rss2email from https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email — seems to works well for my needs
I was just listening to a podcast that included Steve Rinella lamenting that his recent wild game cookbook didn't make the NYT Best Seller list despite selling out on Amazon... If I remember correctly, it was precisely because of pre-orders. Thus, as he prepares to release his latest book, he's asking fans to buy the book, but to try and mix it up from just Amazon pre-ordering: pre-order at independent bookstores, order on release day, etc.
I routinely see arguments of the type "Argument X is likely to increase prejudice against Trans/BIPOC/Undocumented people, which will lead to more of them being murdered" used against completely mainstream conservative arguments.

Just a few weeks ago a NYT op ed by senator Tom Cotton caused a staff revolt at the paper which got the editorial page editor fired, and a main argument was that publishing it threatened the lives of NYT employees.
The return we gave gotten out of the military industrial complex is enormous. Without it there would have been no Silicon Valley, no Fairchild, no Intel, etc.

It has been money well spent, but I agree with you and President Trump that we should be bringing the troops home not wasting money and lives on endless wars overseas.
I love Pinterest for bookmarking things. Like, if I want to buy a new pair of hiking pants and shop around, I save them all to a new board. Dinner recipes, things like that. But I never look at the feeds or things they suggest.
> The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test.

When I see things like that I often remember a quote I came across years ago when tracking down the origin of the Lord Kelvin "end of science" quote (that never actually happened)

> While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. - Albert Michelson - 1894

It seems like every generation someone claims we've reached the end somehow and while they are giving that speech some young experimental scientist is in the background going "hmmm, that's funny" to prove them wrong.

Ironically she repeats the Kelvin myth here in point 16 - http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...
Show HN: Free, editable slides by big 4 consultant – new set every week
> Most people that support true free speech don't believe that all ideas are equally good. That's false.

I don't think that most or even many people believe that all ideas are equally good, but there are absolutely many people who invoke "freedom of speech" in their opposition to efforts to argue or establish that certain speech is bad.
I just noticed that too. No idea.

I also disagree with a lot of how the idea is presented in that text, but the idea itself - that if you get convinced of a basic point, you should extract the second, third, fourth and fifth order effect of that idea - is profound.

It reminds me of a story of a startup that did cybersecurity for SCADA systems, for factories. They would connect to diagnostics APIs, do anomaly detection, and could then alert on any cyber attacks.

Turns out factories are extremely sensitive to downtime (millions lost per hour of downtime), and a lot of them operate under "if it works don't touch it". So they pivoted - instead of actively tapping APIs, they would passively sniff network traffic, draw a picture of the network and what talked to what, and do anomaly detection on that.

But reality took the passivity idea seriously - and the value to factory operators ended up being visibility into the network topology. The company pivoted away from cybersecurity and into analytics and made a lot of money.
Here is the thesis itself:

https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/5353/m...

I do remember thinking that it was unusually well argued and presented. It's much more accessible to the practitioner than a lot of the other research in this area. In my experience this is a positive signal about the quality of the research.