skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'd really enjoy a detailed writeup on why the graphics industry has been so fragmented.

An old comment on SO dives into OpenGL vs Direct3D: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/88055

> Thus, Apple chose to do what Apple does best: eschew common standards

When Apple released Metal, OpenGL had already been an unusable mess, and Vulkan had not even begun to be a thing.

Vulkan began as a project a month after first version of Metal was released.
The death rate has plummeted not merely the infection rate. Even where "second waves" are occurring around Europe the death rate for this second wave is substantially lower.

https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/20/second-wave-of-cases-not-caus...
What constitutes a hack has changed.

Once upon a time it was clever things you could do with hardware. Like how Carmack figured out how to do smooth side-scrolling on EGA hardware, leading to Commander Keen.

These days, it seems a hack is often duct-taping together a bunch of third-party stuff, often for visual effect. E.g. connecting a database of some kind to a map, or a funky visualization. With a broader audience online, something that relates to a wider audience gets more traction.

I think there is overlap between both of these kinds of hack and startups, but the overlap is bigger with the latter kind. Building a business using as many shortcuts as you can, leveraging what other people built, is much more efficient than doing almost everything yourself, which is what was required in the early days. The early days was about exploiting hardware; these days, it's about exploiting existing software and data.

Detailed posts about languages and libraries isn't really hack territory IMO, unless they're exploits of some kind.
Very difficult to compare this data. Flu deaths will be down this year because of all the additional precautions taken around transmission, which may disproportionately affect flu virality (ie. perhaps COVID still manages to transmit despite precautions while flu does not.) Then if you say okay compare a previous flu year, you’d have to compare with the same conditions, which in a typical year would be no masks, barriers, social distancing, etc. And I think we all know how much worse COVID would be if we weren’t taking any precautions - we were warned for months about it.

So I’d imagine the initial observations that COVID is about 3-4x as deadly as the flu (and not 10x+ as some of these numbers suggest) are probably accurate enough.
What you're proposing as a solution has already happened: Google relinquished their control over this protocol to the IETF, where it changed so much as to be incompatible with Google's original.

Now they're updating their own deployment, making it compatible with the updated standard.

Chrome/Android/google.com is literally changing what they do to match what the standard says.
A \w{19,} regex found me a lovely poetic name of Lllllllllllllllllll
I've read the blog and got interested in Roblox (basically, WTF it is? A game company? A game engine? Something like Steam?).

First, there's no clearly visible direct link to the company page from the blog (the logo doesn't take you there but to the start of the blog).

Second, I removed "blog." to get to the main roblox.com page, and it's a form to sign up without saying WTF this is.

The closest thing to this is an "About" page -- which is still so cryptic, I don't have any clear indication what they do.

And I cared enough to go through this and read some of the About text. The average person landing on their page / blog wont care that much.

P.S. I still don't know what they do. Looks like a game store. Or not.
Why make this point and ask for a moving average? The fact that it is new and unknown is part of why it is deadly, and that is reflected in the statistics. Why try to erase one takeaways from this set of statistics?
It's also missing all the names that are composed of multiple words (and thus contains spaces) which is very common for Dutch last names.
It's counterintuitive, as magically the car appears behind the door that Monty chose. But tbf chances of it being behind the door you've chosen were 0 to begin with.
>Apple surely was aware of this, yet wanted to go their own way.

First, well, AMD wanted to go their own way (designing their own thing in Mantle), so why not Apple?

Second, the year Metal appeared publicly wasn't the year Metal was designed in Apple. It was released in 2014 -- so it could very well preceed Mantle by a lot.
> In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures.

I'm looking at this [1] data, Table 4, specifically the row for April.

Deaths in April

Pneumonia+Influenza, 5yr avg: 2,354.8

Pneumonia+Influenza, 2020: 1,933

COVID: 29,128

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=%2fpeoplepopulationandcommun...

April was peak, pre-lockdown, full-blown pandemic conditions. That's a 12x difference. Bad. Shit.
When I get 35 kg bags of sand and gravel, I keep the bags and reuse them for years now. They are almost worth the price of their contents.
> Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.

> Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.

> Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0. If you can't get someone to treat you well, you can have your own software company paying your bills in 6 months, or VCs funding your startup.

Points 1 and 3 apply, perhaps, to Silicon Valley, but not as much in the rest of the world. I currently work in the Netherlands - there are plenty of jobs and the pay can be good, but at the end of the day you're just another worker. The disparity in negotiating power is still enormous.

Point 2 is mostly not that relevant (outside of SV). Even if you get some equity, it will be peanuts. I worked at a company that had a very successful IPO. We all got a few stock options, enough to make a few tens of thousands of euros if you sold them at the right time. The actual shareholders (the ones with decision power) made from tens of millions to billions. The disparity is enormous.
Babashka (https://github.com/borkdude/babashka) is the new gateway drug for Clojure

Essentially you can use it in most places you'd currently use bash scripts the install footprint is small and the startup time is fast

It's kind of like Clojure without the JVM, very easy to justify for one off bits and pieces
Largely because we locked down the entire country and had largely stopped community transmission by then I imagine. Now that lockdown has been lifted and what restrictions there are are increasingly being ignored we are seeing increased community transmission, a concomitant increase in hospital admissions and should start seeing an increase in deaths over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully this wave of deaths will be lower because we are better prepared and have better treatments, and also because the rise in infections is being driven by young people.
Probably because many people don't see this as racism.
Have a look at those dates along the bottom of the charts.

COVID dates are in spring, Flu is the middle of winter. TBF we don't have data on what COVID is like in the winter so the jury is still (a little bit) out on what that looks like but this comparison is misleading.

I bet if you plotted Flu for those dates (i.e. in spring) you would see significantly fewer deaths than from COVID.
The ecosystem is fragmented for historical reasons. Wikipedia pages of each API explain the historical context of each.

The main reasons there has not been a big push to create only one graphics API are:

1. it's hard after the genie of many API:s is out of the bottle (why should i port my code)

2. Surprisingly, the benefits would not be that huge (IMO) - compared to the enormous amount of energy this would take.

The graphics data the different API:s consume is more or less the same. Since it's eventually fed to the same hardware. So for an engine a large part of the non-trivial code is actually graphics backend agnostic.

All of the API:s basically

1. select whether to draw to onscreen or texture

2. load triangles

3. load shader program which a) modifies vertices of triangles (projection etc) b) computes pixel color for each sample in triangle

4. load variables and textures that are used as input to the shader program

5. draw.

The shader code has different languages but all of them are more or less isomorphic.

The above is a ELY 5 trivialization, but the gist of it is more or less so.

The difficult part actually is managing the state of any complex graphics program, not getting the graphics to the screen. So, first you need to learn a graphics API and think that's hard. Not so! What's actually hard is then figuring out how to make any coherent application around that.
Compare the last few years then. Sweden did not have a bad flu seasons unlike the neighbours, who did.
What Is the Best Web Scraper to Scrape Commercial Businesses?
At the moment they aren't, true. Most likely a demand problem. But there are more Model S on the road in Norway than Model 3.
I made a number of points and I'm not sure which point this quote is meant to address as it doesn't appear to address any of them?

There is no way to know if somebody would have died from the flu/pneumonia if they didn't first die from COVID-19. Excess death calculations provide a hint but are confounded by additional variables created by the lockdown (eg people not getting exercise, not getting checkups, not eating as well, depression, etc.)

Furthermore excess death calculations can only take into account < one year of data at present. We don't know if it takes off 0.5, 1, 2, 3 or more years of your life expectancy ie. would you likely have died of a respiratory illness in 2021, 2022, etc. - these are important questions, I've seen estimates saying 8 years - which is a very compelling argument for lockdown - but would 0.5 or 1 year have the same gravity?
Even if this data was correct, the difference is that in 2020 there were pretty stringent measures in place to reduce the spread of Covid (which were not in place in the past for major influenza outbreaks). We do not have a clean counterfactual to what the number of deaths would be in the absence of those measures, but the height of the outbreak in Italy can perhaps serve as some approximation, and there the excess mortality was orders of magnitude above previous years.
But then you get electric shocks to the tongue...
> Compare this to Influenza/Pneumonia, which I'm just guessing we've been studying for much longer and already have treatments for.

Do we? It's mostly the same symptomatic treatment afaik, influenza antivirals are barely effective. The real difference is that there is a vaccine.
Maybe you haven’t seen those trash bins with two holes, one for recyclables and one for general rubbish, and they both empty into the same bag?
It's basically a game which people use as a basis for custom games. I never fully understood it either, but my little brother used to love it.
It’s also contained because unleashing it would totally overwhelm almost any nation’s hospitals, cause a cascading death toll because no treatment could be given.
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You are not in their audience, because you're not a (pre-)teen. It's a mobile 3D game which also serves as a kind of platform and hub for accessing user-created mini-games. If you think Second Life for kids, you're not too far off the mark. The recent hit Fall Guys bears more than a passing resemblance to a lot of Roblok's more popular mini-games.
Maybe, but you're asking me to give up a lot of money now on the off chance I might get something back in the future. And I don't plan to be at any employer more than a few years anyway.

Also, if the whole industry is being offshored or replaced with AI, the union won't be any use as they'll have no leverage either...
‘If you’re going to speak truth to power, make sure it’s the truth’
>We all use the same WWW which uses the same markup language and the same programming language with (almost) the same APIs, and huge effort is expended in polyfilling over the differences.

And we get the joy of Electron...
The confusion lies in "just the flu". Actual Influenza is in fact quite dangerous.

However, we need to compare COVID-19 to Influenza to get some perspective. I would argue that Influenza is worse than COVID, for the simple reason that it kills more young people and children. The average age of a COVID fatality is higher than life expectancy. Influenza destroys more years of life.

We also need to make a distinction between the time frame in which the virus was new and killed a disproportionate amount of susceptible people, versus the time frame we are in now, where the virus is once again kills less people than Influenza - as the data clearly shows, though it isn't highlighted in the publication.
> This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just
> the flu"

Any discussion about the COVID deaths that does not take age into account is not worth the time. For the younger population it may actually look better than the flu.
Question from someone who knows nothing about physics: Was the Big Crunch theory discarded?

After reading the article I did some research, and several places mentioned this theory as obsolete.
CP isn't a free speech issue. It's a child abuse issue. Even a hypothetical no-holds-barred free speech extremist situation, CP would still be illegal.
I've seen a joke that is along the lines of, "Swedes are looking forward to the relaxing of the 2m social distancing rule, so that they can resume the 10m social distancing of the past."

I'm of the opinion that comparing countries is mostly a pointless exercise, because there are so many variables involved.
> a concomitant increase in hospital admissions and should start seeing an increase in deaths over the next couple of weeks.

For the past couple months people have been predicting an increase in deaths to follow the increase in cases, but it hasn't happened.
Can you give me some examples of "clear astroturfing"? I see what I presume to be astroturfing occasionally, but only on hot-button political issues that I've come to believe we usually shouldn't discuss on HN anyway.
The influenza season in the UK is typically October-May with the peak period December-March. So the 2020 number for influenza is a bit flawed given that it's missing 25% of the typical peak period and 3/8 of the whole influenza season.
They didn't have to shut down the country though and since August there's 6 or less deaths a day.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
The vast majority of software has bugs especially around edge cases that aren't frequently encountered. Sometimes it isn't even worth fixing somethings as they are expected so infrequently, it's easier to fix things by hand or via some other hack.
The collective brain: where does innovation come from?
No data from Ch1na?
Fortunately, WebGPU is on the horizon to fix this mess.
And before someone links the relevant XKCD comic, I'll do it myself: https://xkcd.com/927/
I'm not sure how practical it is to have two classes of water for different purposes though, given most buildings come with only one set of pipes.
While interpreting this it's worth noting that the influenza season in the UK is typically October-May with the peak period December-March. So the 2020 numbers for influenza are missing 25% of the typical peak period and 3/8 of the whole influenza season.
Ask HN: How to Listen to Music?
I'm fed up with walled garden music players. Is there a player which allows me to add accounts to streaming services that I use, whether premium or free, sort of like email accounts, and listen to music from multiple sources?

Please don't complain about the sorry state of music industry in this thread. We know.
> Covid does not seem to have the same seasonality that the flu has,

[citation needed]

Considering that covid-19 is a pandemic, and has not yet reached the point where its endemic, we can't actually know that.

> The number of deaths from flu, pneumonia, and Covid are about 50% higher than the year 2000 (Jan-Aug)

Correct, welcome to averages.

In april the total mortality was between 50 and 125% higher than normal (per week, looking at total deaths, not counting where covid was mentioned.) That peak was neatly 3-4 weeks after lockdown was imposed. So to answer your question "justify the draconian measures" do you want to re-run that experiment? because I don't like the look of those odds. Looking at the USA, where they've tried it, it doesn't look too hot either.

see raw data here https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Install Roblox studio, make a game and then publish it on Roblox... Then anyone can play it.
Other than AWS as in other comments, another solution can be Firebase. You get user authn + hosting, most likely for free.

For theme I've been happy with Landkit (https://landkit.goodthemes.co). It's a bit heavy but you can shrink it.

If you're open to hosted solutions, we're building Saasform. In short, you get landing page + user authn + payments ready to go. Still in early alpha, but if you want to chat more feel free to reach out via email.
I suspect that Roblox enjoys being a product that gets new users by word-of-mouth, so they can slack on the web presence. And Roblox is a game that lets you also build levels, including surprisingly advanced programming, for other users to play. It's very popular with a constantly refreshing demographic of 13-20-somethings.
Why show five graphs between 1990-2000, and zero for the next twenty years?
I know I'm swimming against the tide on this, but I really don't think (3) is a significant factor. Apple knows very well that all the top tier games and graphics applications are going to be cross-platform. That's just a fact. They really can't afford to put significant road blocks in the way of getting those games and apps on to their platforms. That would be a massive foot gun.

Also you can't with a straight face say on the one hand Metal makes is much easier to run an app or game across all Apple's platforms, and on the other argue it imposes an excessive cost on porting apps to their platforms.

If I'm developing a top tier game and want to port it to MacOS and iOS, does Metal make it harder because it's different from the system on other platforms, which in reality were different enough in the OpenGL ES days anyway, or does it make it easier because I get access to all Apple's platforms in one go? It might make it harder in some very specific cases, but a lot easier in many others so it's really a wash.
Part of Go’s tradeoff is managing that extra effort (or delay in waiting for the features to hit the main branch) in return for an extremely stable, simple language.

You might find that to be a terrible idea, but others ostensibly think differently (Go is quite popular)

Personally, I prefer more advanced type systems. But I understand Go can be a good choice in other situations.
Half of Women Will Leave Their Tech Job by Age 35, Study Finds
My 7 year old niece knows what Roblox is.
A lisp without brackets is no longer a lisp.
No, it states only what is happening this time. It does not say "always" or talk about what happens/happened for other contestants.
I was with you in not understanding what they do, however, it seems there are a lot of people who do [0].

As far as I've understood, it's a game with a game builder inside that allows users to create their own games, that can then be shared. This viral loop, especially among the main demographic of tweens, has propelled it pretty strongly.

Like Tik Tok, the concept is abstract, but the execution and usage seem off the charts regardless.

[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-06-29-roblox-pla...
>It’s also contained because unleashing it would totally overwhelm almost any nation’s hospitals, cause a cascading death toll because no treatment could be given.

This is clearly not true because it didn't overwhelm Sweden's hospitals, or Japan's, or South Dakota's, even though they didn't have lockdowns, just voluntary social distancing.
Agreed. But you can compare Sweden to itself and it's pretty clear that Sweden had a much stronger reduced social life during Covid compared to the mentioned flu seasons.
I edited my comment. I could have been more clear.

I should have added that I think it depends on what the creator of the graphics/information is trying to show. If it's a pure death rate comparison, then sure you could lump everything together.

However, if you want to show a more real-time comparison, you choose to segment the data based on time.
Lockdown was due to being unprepared. It's a long time since nearly all nations opened up again, though measures vary wildly and is researched on.
IF Julian was able to exercise his right to free speech, I'm sure he would provide ample evidence to support his position.

However, that is not the case with Julian today - but he would be the one who actually knew whether Seth Rich leaked the DNC documents.
That's an additional factor if you get to the limits of your healthcare system. At that point Covid gets more lethal because many people don't get adequate care, and every other critical illness also get more lethal because the hospitals are overflowing.
Sweden showed that not to be the case. It's the only real control I know of for the hypothesis that you present as fact.
This is what you'll get with unions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5a_00YVVkQ&feature=youtu.be...

My experience with unions. Monitor breaks at CES. Go get another, try to carry to booth. Get stopped because "only union people are allowed to carry equipment inside the convention center". Try to plug in some equipment. Get stopped because "only union electricians are allowed to plug in equipment in the convention center"

I know others who have add similar experiences in the aerospace industry where responsibilities were divided up and person A is not allowed do any work outside of their designated job.

For example, your job is to write UX features, some else's job is to unit tests. You're not allowed to write unit tests.

Why I would I want that?
This reminds me of the California/Australia wildfires. They're the result of a whole cascade of problems, from global warming to the details of under-supported local firefighting infrastructure, but those at the top aren't interested in any of those until they start to feel the heat approach them.

I think the possibility of election "chaos" is starting to look real; you've already had this year "armed protestors occupy State building", "crowdfunded anti-protestor gunman", huge ongoing demonstrations, voter rights lawsuits, and chaos in the mail system on which mail-in ballots depend. This is going to make the whole Bush vs Gore hanging chad debacle look like a gentlemanly dispute from a vanished age.

Those at the top of Facebook won't mind a clean victory for either side. They don't even mind a one-off clearing of the streets with live ammunition. What they will mind is ongoing violent struggle for the legitimacy of the state.

(absolutely not a given, but definitely a risk. Much like the President catching the virus that's dangerous to unfit people over 65.)
This is a really difficult causal inference to make. There are so many confounding variables, from quality of healthcare to age demographic of infection, etc. It's also noisy. A nursing home getting infected and many older folks dying can completely spike the numbers. So I pretty much don't trust their statistics, especially if they are reporting 3 significant figures like "7.49 days doubling the number of fatalities". Even just misaligning the starts of the exponential growth phase of curves (does it begin at 1 case per 100k, 5, 100?) can throw this way off.
Not sure if you misread, but MrBuddyCasino's comment was about Sweden.