skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do people still trash Microsoft?

Microsoft is a big company. Some things it does will always be trashy - like fighting tooth and nails to keep Linux desktops and truly-open formats out of European public-service procurement. That's still going on, 20 years and 2 CEOs later, and will probably never stop, because screw public interest when there is so much money on the line!

But sure, in some areas they behave better now. They had no choice, after losing a whole generation of developers and seeing their cash-cows (Windows, Office, and AD/Exchange) under siege from SaaS insurgents. I've still to see something where their efforts are not fundamentally tied to their immediate self-interest, though.
Plus the Pokémon games, not directly Nintendo but still.
The issue with teams is performance. Teams is a relatively simple application. C++ is extremely common and well known, would have been a better tool for the job. That’s called engineering when you actually care about the quality of the product.
Worse is better on shifters. Old school downtube, non ratchetting shifters just work.
Nintendo said earlier this year they were moving away from the mobile market, which is what made me think they didn't see it as a huge success:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-21/nintendo-...

I suspect Fire Emblem Heroes is a result of competing interests inside Nintendo. Miyamoto has said publically several times that he doesn't think they should be making games like that—even after Fire Emblem's success: https://gamedaily.biz/article/197/nintendos-shigeru-miyamoto...
Contractors can also be part of the problem. Very few contracting firms with access to blanket purchase agreements are willing to dump proprietary tech—as it’s their cashcow. For example, Oracle is huge in the federal gov, and Oracle DBAs are billed at a premium over a dev who can just make Postgres work. Worse, Oracle isn’t the problem rather the problem is some legacy tech or middleware no one has ever heard of that is incredibly fragile and has been hacked into a partially working solution by a vendor over a five year period and management isn’t willing to expend the financial, social, nor political capital to correct and forget about management acknowledging sunk costs.

IMO, USDS makes this worse as someone like Matt Cutts has the cachet to bring in the playbook and get execs to listen. Whereas, I’ve been doing this for 3 years and routinely have to fend off coup attempts as the term “mvp” sounds like a joke to other career employees. As such, it’s often easier to check the box of the federal acquisition requirements and collect a paycheck versus hustling to build a vanilla web app using JavaScript a rest api and Postgres before the checkbox folks shut you down because the baselined version of Jenkins is 5 years old and you installed version 2.26x without a request for change.

So how do we scale this story? Inform politicals and bureaucrats that incentives matter, successful tech start-ups are exception not the rule, sunk costs are real, and you don’t need a catchy name like 18f nor the catchet of celeb dev to right a failing project.
You'd think that making a fully digital square or sawtooth wave would be trivial compared to this, but in fact it's much, much more difficult because the digital wave must avoid aliasing, an issue the analog wave generator needn't concern itself with.
When we have overwhelming evidence of fraud in the 2020 election and it's passed off as nothing, I really can't believe anything anymore, unless I see absolute truth (2020 election rules).
No, I think luck has little to do with it, but same for any kind of "guarantee" from nature that we anything close to unlimited potential, we're "bound to" colonise the universe, and so on...

The historical transitions are too few to make any general observation from (as in "we'll always make it" just because we succesfully transitioned 2-3 times).

Then there are the concepts and realities of limited resources (minerals, food production restrictions, etc.), externalities (e.g. pollution), low hanging fruit, diminishing returns (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom%27s_law), and so on.

Lots of other considerations, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature... (even at the moment, on top of shitty developments like climate change and pollution, we already have enough nuclear bombs to take civilization back 1000 years, ways to develop biological attacks, and other such niceties).
When you have a system that can only function if everything and everyone works in the same way at the same time, it will never actually function. The whole world is not going to move to Bitcoin, there will always be competing currencies - hence, there will always be speculation and uncontrollable fluctuations.
May it be that TSLA won't crash spectacularly, but fizzle slowly until it matches the Tesla's performance better? Especially if Tesla improves its performance gradually, too. Now that it's got into S&P500, it has some amount of stock bought by conservative institutional investors, which are unlikely to do a sudden massive dump, to my mind.
Ok, I'm going to just go with that idea. Let's create a public lottery for art, education, or lets say business funding. Since it's public funded of course it's worth more than the nominal fee (just there so proles don't fight over it) and we can hand out what... $100M (only 20x the fireworks) for a 100,000 people. That's $1000/person and only the scaled cost is only $200! If that's good, why not go bigger like $100B since it costs $10M to start a real business and hey, if you can't raise $2M for the ticket, what kind of entrepreneur are you?

So now we're distributing tickets from public funds worth 5x their purchase price only to the wealthy that can afford them? That sounds... fair? I mean proles get to work in the companies that are started so they benefit too (like watching the fireworks from behind the stands). Heck, even the "failed" entrepreneurs who just throw lavish parties and buy expensive cars support the economy! Life is good when you're born with privilege.
I guess it's best because even though it's time wasted there's no twisted hidden benefit for them (unless more sales but that's kinda expected)
Ask HN: Who is reading? (January 2021)
What books, posts or papers have you read this month (and year) that HN should know about?

If you could pick one book to share with HN for the start of the new year, what would it be?
One of my coworkers used to work for Nintendo here in Japan, and told us about his first day.

Apparently, in the building you visited, there is a massive Nintendo museum -- everything they've ever made, all carefully curated.

You get to visit this museum once, and only once: on your first day with the company. From that point forward, you are not allowed to go again.

They do this because Nintendo believes that, while it is vital to understand your roots, to know where you came from, it is equally important to not become mired in the past and rest upon old glories, and instead to look forward to the future.
I often think that from instant zero of the first artefact that could be qualified as life form.. from then to us there's a common structure to solve chaos and persist in time. It's a looong inheritence chain.
Note there was a discussion a couple hours ago that involved a lot of discussion on the topic of favourite reads is 2020:

“My Favorite Books 2020”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25595971
Neat! Thanks for sharing those experiences.

To clarify, the North Korean palace you refer to - which is the new building; is the boring blue and gray square shaped hospital looking one (the one I describe with the official sign out front of the gated entrance) ?

Fascinating to hear about it from the inside. I was excited to see the building and lay foot on the sidewalk of the compound but not the type to ask for a tour; I didn't want to be an annoying がいじん. Settled for a selfie and pictures of the outside; Kyoto on its own is has no end of photogenic opportunities so it was one of many.
Might be something else going on (wire transfer, maybe?); ACH payments are batch-processed a couple times a day, and so can't be instant.
My biggest problem with software has been that it perhaps limits creativity by providing such an unlimited palette.

My first synthesizer was a Juno 60, and I owned a bunch of other vintage and modern ones over the years. With hardware, it was a whole ritual to turn everything on, each instrument had its own smell, it put me into a mood of "let's play with this machine and see what happens".

When I moved to software, I finally had all the sounds I always wanted but could never afford, I finally no longer had to futz around trying to reprogram a patch I liked, I finally could send any instrument to any effects box... but there were less happy accidents. It felt a bit more like my day job, which also just involves sitting in front of a computer.

I think it can be like that for a lot of people, where the tactility and limitations of the gear can inspire a different approach to music-making. I imagine that aspect also plays in to the emotion that some people have that hardware instruments "sound" better.

All that said, I would never go back to hardware. As you say, it's hard to beat the convenience of a laptop.
The product of a simulation development, or any model development, is not the simulation/model. It is the modeler. The insights gained in requirement development, data gathering, coding, testing and review makes the modeler “the smartest person in the room” on the process.
OK, shareholders might get some proceeds after secured and unsecured creditors, but as I am sure you're aware, share prices are generally a multiple of book value. With a corporate death penalty, the net present value of the expected future earnings of the company is 0.

A fine can be paid and the organization simply continues. But the point of the corporate death penalty is that the organization ceases to operate; executives and board members lose their plum positions in ignominy; shareholders lose enormous value; and the rotten people and incentive structures in the organization are scattered into the wind.
"Surplus" capture/use is a bigger problem than most people realize, not just for solar, but throughout the entire energy economy.

There's a reason you still see so many flare-offs in the petroleum industries, even though it's always been "burning dollars" and is now usually discouraged via imposed regulatory costs. Yet it still makes economic sense in many situations.

Why would people invest capital in capture technology that only gets used a fraction of the time? Whether it be at a solar plant, or a refinary, people will choose to invest that capital where it's use can be maximized. There are certainly situations where it makes sense economically, but many where it doesn't, and more situations where the capital can be better spent elsewhere.

Similarly, if a hypothetical town gets 15kw solar power during the day, and 15kw of hydro or wind during night, and needs 20kw backup/surge capacity from gas/nuclear/other, you've designed a system that requires a surplus of capacity, not just in generation, but also in transmission and distribution. In that context, surplus==inefficiencies.

This can be somewhat minimized by so-called smart-grid technology, but people tend to focus on technical capabilities and not what makes economical sense, which is much more limiting than people realize.
Yeah even Pfizer had to “outsource” the lipid nanoparticle delivery system to a speciality firm. Synthesizing the RNA is within the realm of possibility for a sufficiently advanced lab, combining that with a delivery system is another level of specialization.
Paper is available at https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/111114
You’ll read pretty wildly off comments on this site about certain topics.

For instance, it’s gotten better over time but effectively anytime you see comments about how the markets work on HN it will be filled with inaccuracies.
This was a very clear way of putting it, thank you. Maybe it’s just me, but I find much of the discussion about algorithmic bias a bit fuzzy. Replacing “this algorithm is biased” with “this algorithm isn’t really optimizing what we intended it to” seems like a good step, with the added benefit that it requires people to be explicit about their objective function.
> but it's growth indicates people are increasingly prioritising it over paper to store value.

Or simply that there are thousands of speculators. (Which isn't even that many people considering the number of people who speculate in stocks.)
Skimming some of the paper, it differentiates between one time purchasers of failed products (a negative signal) and repeat purchasers of failed products (a stronger negative signal).
No, I doubt it would be considered for browsers in the immediate future. OPAQUE was chosen by CFRG as the asymmetric PAKE that IETF protocols should choose by default in future. If you're designing a new protocol and it needs (or should usefully have) an asymmetric PAKE, then the IETF would prefer OPAQUE.

For a web browser, as I wrote, the correct thing is to push hard for WebAuthn.

You are correct that as a user, today, you are obliged to have some sort of password store if you want reasonable security, but that's a constraint imposed by the past, rather than a way forward.
Hey there! I'll try changing the default thickness to something thicker (given that most phones nowadays have huge pixel density).

For now you can change the Line Thickness in the settings.

Regarding the pinch-to-zoom thing, it has been quite complex and I still haven't gotten it properly so for now I'm creating canvases with a default size (a square with the dimension of the largest screen side). I hope some day I get it working but right now I'm the only person working on the app whenever I have some spare time.

Thanks for your feedback!!
Makes me wonder.. do viruses have viruses ?
Right, which is why we need to somewhat entertain the idea that accessibility shouldn't be optional.

In the business environment you're talking about, I'm generally not in favor of legislating things, but maybe that's a requirement here. My point is that assuming what folkhack says is true, then the "we'll just educate people" idea might just not be feasible -- maybe it just straight up requires laws that force businesses to care.

At least for websites in general we can do things outside of the law that force people's hands. Google can deprioritize search results for pages that are inaccessible, but that won't really affect web apps. Maybe there are non-legislative technological penalties we could impose there as well; if there are certain things that only buttons can do, or if browsers start identifying pages/apps that are inaccessible and displaying warnings on them, or locking certain features.

SSL didn't really get solved until browsers started putting a big scary warning next to the URL bar that said the page was insecure. All the education and tooling was helpful, but it wasn't enough to make businesses care until their customers started asking them why Chrome/Firefox was saying that their app was insecure. It's tricky. I don't want the accessibility community to be the villain here, but it does kind of sound like commercial businesses need to be dragged into an accessible world even if they're kicking and screaming about it.
I love your mother opinion, what important is telling the difference between real life and not.
I don't think HN is a higher quality site in the sense you are referring to here. At least not recently.

You will see some well grounded, expert opinions here down-voted into oblivion simply because they clash with the mental picture of a number of HN users.

As much as I love HN it is slowly sliding into reddit-ism.
Just want to say that I was caught off-guard by the quality of the article, the text, the media, all of it. Bravo to the author.
A thread from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
This heuristic doesn't always work. The Catholic Church was unable to will the Earth to the center of the Solar System :)
Also how a majority of the world lives on the average wrong understanding of things. I guess society is not about precision efficiency.
Another reason is more conversions. Now my friends may send me a TikTok which I view in the browser. Then I see a lot of prompts to get me into the app. They also try to show brief clips of other videos you might want to continue watching (I’ve noticed they can sometimes be somewhat sexual) to get you to finish them in the app.

This makes it that much more tempting to get it even when I’ve already decided to not create an account.
Free Ways You Can Make Money on Instagram in 2021
Tesla leaves R&D out of gross margins, as is typical of tech companies, but automakers amortize it over each unit and include it in the calculation.

GM for example would add about $3k per car to gross margin if they did it the Tesla way.

There's nothing wrong or shady either way, but it does make comparison less straight forward.
Indeed! As I wrote the comment above, I pulled up my old photo of outside Nintendo's Kyoto office that day and noticed/realized that sure enough they actually display that Kanji you shared on a blue/white flat atop a tall flagpole directly next to the detached ground-level classic "Nintendo" logo sign.

Cross referecing with the building referred to later in Osaka then of course, it is the same blue and white colors with that Kanji. Didn't connect the dots at the time! Just happened to casually bring it up as a curious sight to my friend while walking about on a summer day.
Is this written by GPT-3?
Maybe more like selling snow cones in Siberia.
I don't think the distinction matters. The point is you're solving your problems via violence. Don't like what they're doing? Beat them up until they stop. Want their possessions, beat them up and take them.
Not necessarily. They can use capacitors instead. And the battery is only engaged when accelerating or braking. The car runs mostly on the fuel cell in steady state operation.

Those are just assumptions. There's no reason why you can't you reduce them to the point where they are non-factors. It's possible they go away completely, for instance if you use thermochemical production of hydrogen or store hydrogen in metal hydrides.

As I said previously, you don't need to perfectly match batteries on efficiency. If fuel cells get close to batteries, it's enough for them to succeed. The rest can be made up by a combination of lower upfront costs and light weighting.
Not for the OS
The NES was famous for flaky cartridge connectors (leading to the lore about blowing on them... which didn't really help) even when stock; the GG's design just stressed it more.

https://console5.com/wiki/Improving_NES-001_Reliability
That sounds like a hardware or driver thing, specifically related to GPU, rather than a Windows issue. You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Chrome.
When will similar restrictions be removed for Moroccan police?
My personal favorite: Any topic involving airplanes will involve 99% of the people sounding very confidant and very very wrong.
Disclaimer: am Microsoft employee.

tplacek's point isn't that source is worse than disassembler output, it's that governments already have and have had access to source for a while (by design as Microsoft does provide source access to many customers, partners, etc). The tooling to dissemble built versions and craft exploits has also existed for a long while.

If source access enabled a rash of zero days, that point in time would have come long in the past.
I live my life refreshing HN and haven't seen it before, so I appreciate it.
Nintendo does not do tours. I only got inside as the programmer on a team delivering a game for the Switch, early after release. We only even got access to the meeting and switch hardware through an executive's connections to a seperate major games company. Our taxi drove in after checking in at the gate, we got out, waited in the lobby for 10 minutes, then went to the meeting room for half an hour. In the meantime the only other visitor appeared to be a contractor meeting with his manager, showing off a poster for approval. Meaning even if one directly contracts with Nintendo good chances you'll never see more than the lobby.

You must have been to the new building. The old building does not have a large Nintendo sign. The old building has almost no space between the compound walls and the building itself while the new one has a basketball court.
A gentle introduction to the 5 Google Cloud BigQuery APIs
This article tries to go further in the understanding of BigQuery APIs since instead of putting all features in a single API service, It offers 5 different APIs and client libraries (Python, Go, or Java).
Mario Run had a major flaw for me. It would have been the perfect subway commute game, but it required an internet connection to play. I'm still baffled why Nintendo made this design mistake; they excluded a large market.
Decide to bike to save time and not have to park one of the most compeling reasons to bike over driving. Luckily I was living in boulder where biking to the main street was faster and easier than driving.
I also work in government consulting. The govt thinks “DevOps” is developers and ops folks sitting in the same room.
I have no knowledge of nuclear sea vessels but the sheer number of comments and the certainty implied makes me suspicious on that topic.
I mean, people have been saying this basically since the site began:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057

(I didn't find these, they're linked in the site guidelines.)
>We ran the VST synths through the same signal path as the Juno

Yes, but there's also noise inside the Juno at the DAC, chorus, etc.
Agreed C# and Java are virtually identical. However the cultuer is completely different. The plethora of libraries to me ends up being a handicap. We have had a bunch of different Java developers on our project and each one does things differently so we end up with a huge mess. I didn't see such problems in C# world where maybe we just had better devs that concentrated on clean models instead of incorporating fashionable libraries and other moving parts.
I mean the article literally says Uber is raising prices so...
I am from an embedded background/Operating system background. I would like to know if the ring buffers/circular queues in drivers or stacks suffer same problems as people are discussing here?
Well. I don’t (or very rarely) remember my dreams. Hope I get the protection anyway.
Humans are creativity machines. We are always expanding the amount of value there is in the world. The only way to have stable prices is to have a currency that inflates to match the amount of new stuff created.

But do we really want stable prices? Today you can buy a device a million times faster than 20 years ago for the same price. Imagine if everything were like that.
I forgot about that! I actually played most of the game on the subway, but I had to wait until the train was passing a station to enter a level.
Have a name of said book? In need of some new sci-fi.
Other people doing bad things is no excuse for you doing them. That's a recipe for a downward spiral.

That reference is distorted, in any case. "$foo is evil" is a trope of standard internet hyperbole, that gets applied to things ironically. That is not at all the same thing as what you posted.
The other 99%
Oh now that is super interesting. I've heard of Bandai's library, where they have copies of every game they've made plus consoles staff can borrow. Which is the exact opposite of Nintendo's theory.
I'm aware of that. It's just that it got much worse recently.
This is a joke. Australia is one of the best places for cycling, weather wise. I’ve never missed a work day. And that’s in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

The only problem with Australia is the majority are addicted to cars, so much do they can’t imagine going anywhere without them.