skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was just about to post the exact same thing. I played it a few years after release as a child, and was thrilled to find a single copy of the novelization tucked away in my local Borders. I liked Sam & Max Hit The Road and Day of the Tentacle more, because they were hilarious, but I thought The Dig was at the very least pretty great at conveying an utterly haunting sense of atmosphere, between the art and the soundtrack. this retrospective says the voice acting and character writing wasn't great, and I suppose it wasn't, but I wonder if it seems worse than it was specifically because, without basing the game around humor like all the other SCUMM games, the writers had to make A Serious SCUMM Game Script, and it's kind of hard to convey anything resembling serious drama in the SCUMM engine with VGA graphics. again, I was young when I played the game and read the book, but I liked Boston Low's characterization as the tough ex-military reluctant protagonist who spends most of his time on an alien planet alone, trying to figure out where to go next and what any of what he's seeing means, keeping a sense of sarcasm when talking to himself to mask his underlying feeling that he will probably never make it back home.

the strategy guide had a "making of The Dig" section at the end, and now I'm going to have to dig my copy out of storage and compare its portrayal of events with the likely more cohesive and truthful story told here.
Some vaccines (including those) are basically perfect, but they're a minority. It also doesn't logically follow that anything which isn't perfect isn't a vaccine.
Not yet, but I will. It is on my curiosity list.
And these new security protections are obviously why users never get viruses anymore!

I spent a lot of time cleaning computers for friends and family, and often times they would have viruses because users were looking at porn or downloading games.

Well, it turns out most users like looking at porn and downloading games. Most users want to play indie games (that may be garbage) or read not-licensed foreign comics. Users enjoy being able to boot up old programs and play with fan made mods.

Let's not pretend cracking down on all of this is for the user. Honest computer security would give the user a clear and readable label ("hey, this free game is going to send off your personal data including browser history") and let them make the choice. Users are not farm animals to be kept in neat little pens.
That looks interesting. Thank you.
> The original workers model of pay per execution is incredible.

It's still there!
However, our expectation is that a tree falling in the forest could kill us even if we didn’t hear and see it. That’s why we look when we cross the road. The fact that we’re subject to all sorts of things that can cause us harm without sensing them makes the case a lot more compelling that the light meter exists when we blink.
>the vitriol directed at Facebook has become so disconnected from reality

It has completely poisoned discussion on a number of virtual reality communities, since Facebook owns Oculus and the Quest 2 is very commercially successful. The /r/virtualreality community has become incredible negative, tribal, and toxic over the last couple years, mostly revolving around conspiratorial speculation about the future of the oculus platform as owned by Facebook. Almost any discussion about any topic is guaranteed to have at least a couple comments somehow relating it back to why Facebook is evil and "destroying VR."
The 747 ping pong ball estimation problem is a Fermi problem, where the goal is to get the right order of magnitude of the answer. Sure.

But "why are manhole covers round?" is not. It's a stupid "have you ever heard this clever fact" question that's often designed just to figure out if you're clever and/or lucky vs testing actual knowledge and skill.

If your aim in interviewing is to fill the team with people who love being clever then it's a great technique. But in my view, it's better to interview for the skills the job requires.
Mine too.

In fact I dare say the GPU has been the single most failure prone component of every computer I’ve owned for the past 15 years.

Which only further illustrates the point that putting something expensive and unreliable into an already expensive device seems risky.
Aren't most apps on phones now free anyways? Can't remember the last time I bought an app on my phone
It's kinda sad to see the astronomy community consider a slight inconvenience to their hobby to be more important than worldwide internet access.

We lost a jumbo jet to the ocean and were unable to find it because we did not have worldwide coverage. How many millions of people are without internet access in rural areas? Don't many consider internet access to be close to a basic human right?

I was considering getting into astronomy myself but do not want to be part of a community like that. It's probably a vocal minority but it's still disappointing.
The cylinder being the strongest shape is the most interesting answer.
I know it's a stupid example, but even in the movie "The Brokeback Mountain" the two gay men had families and kids, not only because being gay was ostracized, to put it mildly, but also because having kids was considered a duty, social pressure forced many homosexuals to live a "normal life" to avoid discrimination or worse.

Being gay was dangerous, it could ruin an entire family forever.

There are many ways to push people to do something they are not keen to, draconian laws is one of them.
Many of Hacker News users are young and they believe that one day they'll run a company like Apple and they wouldn't like regulation to dictate how they can make their profits (which then quickly get disguised to avoid taxes).
Some also think that such regulation will hit their future small business - which is like being scared of going out because a bus may hit you.
Weird that Digital Ocean is not part of the bandwidth alliance.

If they were, would that mean I may not get charged bandwidth for traffic from my DO VPS to CF proxies?
Oh I understand the crypto communities use, I’m saying they intentionally or unintentionally chose a meaning aligned with their interests and not with reality. I will continue to call out their bad faith actions because if cryptocurrencies are to form any meaningful role in a future economic order it has to be from a position of, well, reality.

I've followed the space very closely for 6ish years now, and I've made a lot of money on crypto both long and short, and I engage with a lot of folks both online and in real life who are both pro- and anti- crypto.

However, fundamentally, I'm with Jackson Palmer.

https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1415353991106420741
> WebOS

webOS 6.0 on the LG TV is surprisingly pretty damn good. I think they even opened it up for other TV manufacturers to adopt webOS.
It's almost funny how, besides parking and renovation costs, I never heard of any of the other issues over here. Schools are all public (except for rich parents kids unable to make in a school daddy isn't paying for), crime is hardly a real problem (at least where the nice houses are), taxes are everywhere the same (for employees, if you have a company communities can set their own percentage). Waste removal differs, but not by much.

Maybe part of the reason why this kind of houses tend to be twice as expensive as a similar sized one in suburbia.
Obviously this wasn’t an “insurrection,” and the people using that inflammatory language are hyperventilating to crack down on dissidents. We even know that FBI agents were involved in setting this up (although the full extent of involvement is unknown). It’s no different from China or Cuba. Perhaps more insidious than what you’d see in Russia.
Getting rid of lousy Excel-driven processes is a big part of my current job. SQL only solves half the problem, though: Excel is also a tool for manual data-input and manipulation. To solve this piece you often need to create CRUD webapps, which can be much more complex to develop and maintain than some SQL in the database.
Good first step would be to stop being extra lenient towards religions. Christians are no longer persecuted or discriminated against anywhere in the Western world; they don’t need extra protections or freedoms.

If you want to be homophobe, it’s fine, but either keep your ideology away from people under 18, or face prison. Same with sponsoring homophobic organizations. Until then nobody should give a crap about your precious religion and how it’s allegedly not a hate-driven crime ring.
Scientists Finish the Human Genome at Last
Fair enough, the issues for me are that: once something works in a spreadsheet there are no money assigned and willpower to redo it clean in something else, because most of the value is already there; and the people who are available and know the requirements aren’t skilled in anything else.

So prototypes are done in Excel because it’s the fastest and cheapest way to do it, and they don’t get redone in something else afterwards for the reasons above.
Same here. One detent of the scroll wheel and it's 2/3 of the way down the page. I tried disabling smooth scrolling, but that didn't fix it.
Note that we're talking about the home page, x.company, not the page linked.
Currently we've adopted the requirements and interviewing strategies from leading support groups such as Mental Health America.

Surprisingly there are a lot of thoughtful people out there with solid experiences facilitating discussions/conversations and this has not been a bottleneck for us!
Like everything, a great majority are junk and/or niche.
https://archive.li/wjFaL
Never played the game, but I loved the book as a kid. Along with his novelizations of the Alien movies, Alan Dean Foster was right up there with Stephen King as far as I was concerned.
I would really appreciate if HiSilicon once again was allowed to fab via TSMC.

Fine if the US doesn't want to buy any of Huawei's products, but for us in the rest of the world. Please allow us.
It could be the fabled Apple TV that Steve Jobs was hinting at before his death.

To be honest, both Amazon and Google has gotten this right already with no touch voice controls.
If you stole the source of Google Spreadsheets and built it into your product, of course you’d win. Oracle did not claim that Google did that.

If you built a spreadsheet app that was compatible with Google Spreadsheets’ formula language, Google (rightfully) wouldn’t have much of a case. In fact, Google pretty much did this by implementing much of Excel’s formula language.
> Pizzagate was a crafted phenomenon

Maybe. The emails that kicked off pizzagate don't seem to be crafted to me.

> the realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related. Is it yorus?

The emails were using coded language around pizza. These emails spawned pizzagate.
The solution I was going for with WebVerify is more web-centric rather than domain-driven, which I think is a better fit for webpages. It can be enforced at the hyperlink-level for shared domains (like GitHub Pages, University web spaces) and works for static resources without needing to configure external resources. The only really complicated part is PGP but that can be solved with better tooling (as seen with Keybase).
True, but Shazam is a testament to what's achievable even without audio source separation. Even going back about 10 years when I first tried it, I was kind of stupefied that it managed to work in a noisy department store.
This is not true, you can see the data[1] yourself for in-state students. It is true that of in-state students at UCs, white students are "underrepresented" compared to their share of the population, but their share of admissions is actually very close to their share of applications so there could be other reasons for this. For example, white students in CA may be:

* more likely to apply to private schools

* more able to afford private schools

* more likely to get accepted to private schools that don't have the same race-blind admissions restrictions that UCs do

* more likely to go out-of-state for college

[1] https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/chapt...
SL was a milestone in what it's trying to do but I'm not all that sure if its intentions are any more crazy or sad than AOL-era chat rooms and online communities- some of which were also graphical. VRML was developed for chat rooms in the late '90s. The only difference with SL is that it was developed later on in history and further along late capitalism, I guess.
It’s simple natural selection that the most engaging social media platforms became the most profitable, influential, and popular. There’s no guarantee that VR/AR will have the same selection pressure, and if the tech does have the same selection pressure than whoever wins will be engaging as well.

IMO Facebook creating the metaverse is like Xerox creating the GUI. Most likely the things that made Facebook successfully in social media will not make them as successful in VR/AR and they’ll either pivot hard or (more likely) lose their market leader position.

(I’m holding FB stock until their AR offering is announced, and possibly for a few years afterwards but I’m doubtful I’ll have their stock in 15 years.)
Right, they seem like a project not a company. I suppose they can put in a request to have Alphabet fix the website, they may not have the autonomy for that themselves.
> Do they?

Yes.

Burn-in is a real problem [0], especially for OLEDs last I checked.

LED backlights wear out, I've personally helped multiple people replace them in external monitors and laptops over the years.

And they're obviously more fragile and exposed to the elements than a GPU within a case.

> are you speaking about yourself or about kids...?

What difference does it make? You do realize kids are a real factor, they exist, are rather common actually. And these days gaming has become just as popular among adults too.

It's as if everyone forgot the rash of broken displays when the wii came out... surely those people appreciated not having to pay for a GPU too when replacing those displays.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_burn-in#Plasma,_LCD,_an...
Why businesses get obsessed with Content Hubs and what it is
Outstanding adventure game with an immersive world - and with the protagonist voiced by The [other] Terminator!

I'd argue it's the most atmospherically-memorable of the LucasArts adventures, and am surprised at the article-author's conclusion.
I think it's always important to understand the context and history.
I guess I submitted too early :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27925605
On a PC, the moment I power it off those apps no longer have access. That access is controlled by filesystem permission, and exfiltrating that data is relatively hard.

Every app on my ipad needs oauth access. That means those credentials can sit on a remote server and be leaked or used at will, and no firewall or filesystem permission is going to help me.
You would think that ultimately the question is about the thought process. But that usually gets lost and it devolves into a question that gets asked with an expected answer.
> The real problem is that the ability to come up with a good napkin math estimate for a technical problem doesn't correlate with the ability to actually do the job to solve the problem.

I don't think this is true at all. There have been many times where I've estimated numbers to come up with a "scale" number ... which was important in other ways. How many servers are we likely to need? How many connections per second are we likely to see? How much memory is this likely to take up. Depending on the context in which you need to know the answer, estimating a value can be extremely useful. It can point you towards the right "group" of solutions that you should consider.
I was responding to a comment that implied these laws were an example of self-determination, and removing them would be an effort to control population growth.

My comment makes the point that these laws are actually more foreign in origin than they appear, and before they were imposed by the brutal process of colonization, the population was doing just fine.

My comment was never intended to describe how to fight the laws, just to flesh out some background missing from the one I replied to. It is your comment that came in with these additional themes out of left field. My guess is that you felt triggered by the word "colonization" and perhaps by being reminded of the atrocities committed in former colonies. Why these would be an irritant to you is beyond my ability to guess, sometimes truth hurts I suppose?

Let me know if you need any addy help navigating other conversations.
> They allow VPN and DNS-based blockers, request interceptors in Safari (so-called Content Blockers)

Yeah, DNS based blockers misses a LOT of ads and webannoyances. And if you think that the content blockers are good enough you probably havent been using youtube lately on safari as they are now able bypass all current content blockers that I tested (adguard[1], 1blocker, wipr).

> ... and are adding support for WebExtensions to Safari in next iOS release.

Yeah, but I'm not holding my breathe that they will allow extensions similar to uBlock and noscript (hope to be wrong).

> I'd say they are very close to Android or desktop macOS.

Anyone with experience using uBlock/NoScript/uMatrix can attest that content blockers on iOS is not close at all, it's just a skeleton of uBlock Origin capabilities.

[1]adguard created a shortcut extension to bypass the content blocker restriction but its utterly annoying to do it everytime some random video.
I recall a meeting in which someone used the expression "flush out" and was corrected by someone else with "flesh out", which prompted a third to posit that the correct expression was "fletch out", claiming the true origin of the expression was in arrow-making. Would have been better delivered while leaving the meeting, making for a "Parthian shot".
This is actually an easy problem. (Anyway, easy given the size of the things.) Make a ship that can nest the top of the tower close to horizontally, axis up. Winch the top of the tower down into its nest. Fix the turbine using cranes attached to the ship. When finished, unwind the winch, and let the tower right itself.

There will be complications. You might need to release (one or more of) the tower's mooring lines after it has tilted some ways, and re-attach them on its way back up. You will need a cable attached to the top of the tower to winch it down with, either left there from construction or attached at need. The ship probably needs a boom sticking out aft to the base of the tower, with a grabber that can swivel up as the tower comes down.

The nest and boom need to be customized for the tower design operated on, but the ship can get those mounted before it goes out. The nacelle probably has to be re-designed from scratch to be worked on from that angle.
Legally in the US, adults are the only people that TOS applies to. Minors can't enter into contracts, of which a TOS is one.
As long as cheating remains profitable people will cheat. Athletes will take doping, sport bettors will bet on fixed games, and company executives will insider trade.
I'm thinking that chances of Facebook turning into a 'metaverse' are less than the chances that Facebook will turn into the next MySpace. But perhaps I'm overly cynical.

It was pretty clear to me that had Blizzard a bit more vision they might have been able to pull this trick off with World of Warcraft but at this point I think that too is off the table.

One of the more interesting things I've learned over the course of my career is that the ability of an organization to "change" is tightly governed by the ability of its leadership to "see". Truly the most fascinating part of my time at IBM after it had acquired Blekko was seeing a company from the inside that actively at war with itself between the folks who wanted to modernize it and the "old guard" who wanted to keep the status quo.

As an executive it is important to understand that in order for change to happen, all of your leadership has to see their own role in the new vision and how they will be successful, otherwise they will treat it as a threat and work against it, both actively and passively.

Given how Zuckerberg has handled the disinformation problems at Facebook (essentially by throwing other executives under the bus rather than take ownership) it seems unlikely they would be able to pull of such a transformation. Mostly because the other executives would be sabotaging efforts for fear they would be thrown out.
I think a lot of that comes in the form of partial and adaptive automation, though— like self-checkout at the grocery store, where it's "automation", but only in the sense that the self-checkout console enabled outsourcing the pick and place part of the work onto the consumer.

Or elsewhere in the thread, the example of moving a previously-modular computer part onto the logic board, so that it can be soldered on rather than needing to be installed later in the assembly process.

Companies like Rethink weren't in this world— they were trying to build a manipulator (Baxter) which was a drop-in replacement for a person doing pick and place work. Which has a certain appeal, if it works ("no need to retool anything; just buy it and put it to work!"), but it puts you up against the direct price comparison of just having a human continue to do that job.
Is it hyperbole to say that Facebook helped enable genocide in Myanmar? Or that it has been an incredibly useful tool for political propaganda, more so than traditional media ever was?

They have not done anything to meaningfully address the very real issues their platform has, and are forging ahead regardless to become even more ubiquitous. The negativity is very understandable.
Ironically enough, they are now using anti-Western sentiment to shut down LGBT rights.
I remember that one Ugandan guy, Pastor Martin Sempa (sp.) infamous for the “eat the poopoo” video about 10 years ago, going on about how “Africa does not want this sickness. Is this what Barack Obama wants to bring here?” referring to LGBT rights.
Yeah, I think that's the point Ostrogodsky is making. It's weird to evaluate someone's action in country A based on laws in country B.
> My opinion is that if a company needs government help to thwart competition, then competition is absolutely needed.

This is not as simple as that. The current waiver on environmental studies for satellite launches was put in place in an era (the 80s) where individual satellites were not considered a threat. Now we're launching 'constellations'.

It does really smell like some Oracle-level lawsuit driven anti-competitive behavior from viasat. However, as always, the truth is somewhere down the middle.
Having loved high-density cosmopolitan places, I confirm it’s not baked in American values but it’s based on actual benefits:

- In high-density, you share everything. Therefore, everything is closed for public access during Covid, but also when there is wind, rain, hot weather or risks of terrorist attacks (talking from experience of my life in cities). The rulers of the city have effective control on your ability to see the sun.

- Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization. And when you’re over with your youth ideas that everyone will fit together and do peace and love, you start starting at the poster in the hall of the building that says “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble). Given cities gather people who lean towards collectivization, you yearn to get your own lawns with friends who will understand this.

- Also, the costs.

So, it’s not cultural love for lawns, it’s a cycle of people moving by necessity.