skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The usability of KDE aside, it's not exactly the most lightweight interface.

I wonder if that is still true. I switched from MATE to KDE several months ago and from what I read, KDE invested a lot in optimization of their code (both cpu performance and memory use) in the last couple of years. I switched to KDE on all of my machines. The oldest one it is running on is a Thinkpad X200t with a Core 2 Duo (SL9400) and 4GB RAM (with SSD), and it is running fine when using it with chrome, okular, krita, ... I thought they were kinda forced to focus on optimization because of the development of plasma mobile.

Obviously, it'll still be beaten by LXDE, but compared to Gnome it should perform a lot better nowadays than some years ago.
This is great news.

My subjective view of the desktop on linux is that:
I find Gnome and Unity to be, frankly, quite unusable and hard to get into a place you can use.
Sway is neat but requires skills and plenty of configuration. They really follow the unix way, which means you'll need a solid 3 days of work to get a desktop experience you enjoy.

KDE is a fine desktop experience with ok defaults which can become great with a tiny bit of configuring. You can see a lot of lack of polish and half baked product ideas from the 4.0 ear.

I get it, it's OSS and people will pick the problems they like to solve.
Not many people get excited about figuring out the optimal amount of padding in UIs and almost everyone would like to invent something novel - like KDE's activities, on which I wasted a significant amount of time, just trying to get them to disappear forever from my desktop.

Qt is definitely the most mature and complete solution to write GUIs in the world but the Rust bindings are barely working and something like conrod-core could be a good base for a desktop.

Having a profitable making money creating a polished linux desktop experience sounds simply amazing - and exactly what we need.

Hopefully between this and Valve's work on the SteamDeck, things will improve for the linux desktop.
Labeling something in every way imaginable is basically a free way to reduce the long tail of errors.

I think there's a wide gulf between that and "treat literally everyone like they have the intellect of a toddler" kind of policy making which you see advocated for a lot on Reddit (less so here, but sometimes). McDonalds definitely does that, but my impression is that it's more of an acknowledgement of things getting missed in that kind of work environment than people being stupid. When two school buses pull up and you've got every machine beeping and buzzing things need to be stupid proof.
> There are so many desktop environments already, all causing grief for anyone trying to switch to Linux with their own stupid choices and incompatibilities.

The current desktop environment situation is more uniform than ever and the situation is quite good and easy for users. Ubuntu and Fedora + RHEL are all-in on Gnome with no changes to the situation in sight, and KDE is a high quality runner up with users enjoying good compatibility between these. Most specialized desktop distros like SteamOS, Clear Linux, etc are also Gnome.
ECS (or what's called "ECS" nowadays) is mainly useful if you need to deal with thousands of similar data items each frame. Not many games need that outside of specialized systems like particle systems.
I'd say research different stacks before you start the prototype, pick the best one from your initial perspective, and if it's not working then branch to an alternative and see if it's better for your use case. If you don't do this, then you might end up ramming a square peg through a round hole and will need to rewrite later.

Basically, stick to your core competencies, but don't be afraid to try new things that will clearly (hopefully) improve your product. Fail hard and fast instead of dragging it out 6 months :)

This isn't about learning a framework at the expense of the product, it's about building something new that you might not have experience creating solutions for yet.
The search experience itself needs to be better. Why stop at listing search results? Why not find common patterns across top results to provide a holistic perspective?

We know Google is working on this [1].

It’s also something we’re trying to solve with sites like Knifist [2].

Answering questions in such a way is obviously very hard to do at scale. At the very least, boutique search engines should try to focus on this more.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.02274.pdf

[2] https://knifist.com
Game engines inevitably become monoliths because you need that level of integration between components. If you examine a modern game, you'll generally find about 3 different layers in the runtime:

- individual subsystems: aside from things like animation and graphics, many engines use externally developed libraries for sybsystems (e.g. retour for navigation or bullet for physics)

- integration layer: this comes across as a mundane glue layer between game code and the subsystems, but it is much more than that. This layer takes care of a lot of things. For example, it's often responsible that the right resources are loaded at the right time across all subsystems, makes triggers work (physics collision handler to trigger events/changes in other subsystems), makes it possible that animation timelines can act across other subsystems, triggering sounds, starting animations, altering object states, and many more things... This layer is also ultimately responsible for keeping the real time guarantees across all subsystems with all the tweaking that entails.

- game logic using the facilities provided by the integration layer

When you look at the evolution of game engines, the first ones were monoliths that had to do everything themselves because no reusable components existed (e.g. Doom, Quake). A few years later, reusable components started to appear (mostly physics and audio engines IIRC) and for a short time there were a lot of mostly proprietary engines integrating these components. But with games becoming more complex and more demanding, these integration layers also became more and more complex and became a huge investment. That's when the well integrated monoliths won.
Given how irrational TSLA is, he'll probably sell and the price will go up
Much quicker and more convenient is a spider catcher like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001356203377.html

With that I can easily pick them up and drop them out the window or whatever. You can do it at well over arms' length too. It doesn't seem to harm them, as there's a space within the grabbing cage that they get directed to. Small spiders can crawl out between the cage bits but usually stay on the end long enough to move them elsewhere. Big spiders are fully caught.
> Vagrancy describes when birds veer off-course and continue roving around — potentially indefinitely — in search of others of their kind. It is not uncommon. There are records of albatrosses spending decades living as vagabond singletons in the wrong hemisphere, Dr. Lees said.

This paragraph is almost poetic. As a human, I can relate.
> To be honest, I can't wait until browsers get replaced with some native crossplatform toolkit

That sounds like Flutter to me.
Children of Time is fantastic, a really unique take on sci-fi
Nice! thank you!
Lol, I'm on a 4th gen because my wallet is empty. But I like to think that it's because performance improvements up to 8th gen were pathetic.
IF the global hashrate stays the same as it did for the 2016 blocks prior to the last difficulty change - this thread is about if the hash rate was suddenly changed by miners going offline.
I do the same for projects I'm looking at, and I'm on linux. Gives a good understanding of the thing you're looking at. There are many things you can tell by looking at the build process.

There are some things I do not agree with the author though.

Pure make: I think it's refreshing to see, nowdays. Many autotools projects do not do ANY configuration, and could actually use just make in most cases. But the authors just jumped at the "autoconf/cmake" bandwagon, because they probably were never familiar with make, or just want to follow conventions (which is ok, I guess).

Fixing a make build is leaps and bounds easier than to fix compared to cmake or autotools. If you follow the "standard" C environment variable conventions a makefile can be extremely portable (I've written stuff myself supporting osx/linux/bsd/irix/aix for several years). Vanilla make doesn't support variant builds, but if you ever need that (and are willing to believe that make is not rotten as many people seem to suggest), I suggest you look at makepp.

There's no date on the article, but a common incumbent to cmake these days is meson. As a dev, I'm still conflicted between these two: meson has a superior syntax and less baggage, but everything else seems inferior to me at the moment, especially the documentation.

Building from source also gives you an idea of how the author is managing dependencies, which ones were chosen, and so on.

A big one for me is how I still consider a package with two external (that you have to build yourself), robust dependencies much better than 20 smaller cargo-managed crates that require 300mb to build, or ~100 packages pulled by tox when you actually _need_ to contribute to the python package...

This is great way to weed off between multiple candidate projects when you have the luxury of doing so.
I agree with the other comment and go further. Pick a stack and a deployment and just get really familiar with how it works so you can copy and paste for each project.

If you need a suggestion - Django with Postgres on Heroku is consistently the top prototyping stack of choice when it comes to Y Combinator companies.
I can assume that's your experience in your own bubble (in the US maybe?) But where I am in Europe the market is a bit worse and there are companies who will try to squeeze 8 hours worth of coding out of you due to an oversupply of talent and a shortage of innovative companies to work for.
I used to do package design for frozen and refrigerated foods, stuff they sell at Costco. We were always doing little illustrations showing how to, like, open a bag of croutons and pour it onto a salad. As if we were drawing the manual for how to put on an oxygen mask in case of depressurization. I always get a kick out of looking for those things on food packaging these days.
Agreed. So much breakage for so little. If I were teaching JS today I don't know if ESM is worth covering while CJS works at least as well. Maybe next year.
How browserify, webpack transformers and others are able to parse require()-s in the middle of a source file, but static analysers are not?

These subtly erroneous arguments are the essence of this push. Look, we are maintaining X, Y and Z, and they’re unable to do that R, so it’s bad. No, it’s you making them unable to do that consciously.
> PS: a standalone "bring your own engine" hackable Unity editor would be great, but I guess that doesn't quit fit into Unity's business model

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I want to write more standalone games with minimalist runtimes but also don’t want to give up the QoL you get with a decent scene editor with runtime inspection and “fiddling”.

One thing that intrigues me is the recent rash of tools made with Godot as it has a pretty good UI system that is used to make their own editor: https://itch.io/c/651672/tools-made-with-godot-engine

I could see a decent open-source game editor made this way as well. But don’t have the energy to actually do it myself.
I leave daddy-long legs in the house because they are no issue to humans (just leave unsightly webs) and can prey on spiders I'd rather not have around - red backs, huntsman, etc. Not sure if they eat white-tailed spiders too, but hopefully - we get a few of them.

Anything roaming near the kids' bedrooms gets treated more harshly.
I have heard of this and it is on my list of things to try. It seems counterintuitive to me that the glue wouldn't simply become a runny mess. Thank you for confirming it works. Just confirming we are talking about 'Pritt-Stick' when people say glue stick, are we?
ES Modules are great. Building JS applications is so much speedier, leaner and more fun now that they are supported widely.

One fallacy the author falls for is that they think one needs a build step "anyway" because otherwise there would be too many requests to the backend.

Loading an AirBnB listing causes 250 requests and loads 10MB of data.

With a leaner approach, using ES Modules, the same functionality can be done with a fraction of those requests. And then - because not bundled - all the modules that will be used on another page will be cached already.

I use ES Modules for all my front end development and I get nothing but praise for how snappy my web applications are compared to the competition.
It's not the fact that imports are top level that makes it statically analyzable. It's the fact that the imports can't be variables like commonjs allows.
Lots of FUD here but the short answer is a combination of:

* Hardware does degrade a bit over time

* New OS versions add more features that eat up CPU cycles, but also add more abstractions to make developer’s lives easier but potentially be less performant. These features and abstractions are often also optimized for latest phones, since software and hardware design are so tightly integrated.

* Developers tend to optimize for newer hardware, since that’s the hardware they tend to have available

* Finally, there’s just been a huge amount of progress in iPhone hardware from the X to the 13.
A former coworker wrote that book. When it came out he had a little party where he declared it obsolete already.
Works... as long as you are next to the server...
>PGP is bloated and complex...

Not in any relative sense. The commonly used Signal protocol for example is much more complex and is only applicable to one narrow category of application. In the Keyoxide case we are only doing signing so that is the only part of the OpenPGP standard that would be applicable.

>...channel binding...

Could you expand on how that might relate to PGP applications?

>...perfect forward secrecy...

... is not relevant for the protection of things like files. Even for messaging it is rarely of any value as users like to keep their old messages around.

>...poor/deprecated algos...

See my other reply:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29138592

...OpenBSD...

OpenBSD needed something compatible with the license of the base distribution. The mistake made was that signify was not made to use a preexisting format. So it is an attempt to create a whole new standard in a way that provides no benefit to anyone.
Flex scheduling is one of those things that's had far more staying power in the heads of people in ivory towers than in the heads of people in boardrooms. (not that that doesn't mean some dunce isn't implementing it somewhere at any given time). It bounced around various industries in the 2000s and mostly ran its course when people figured out it increases errors, increases lateness and no-shows, increases turnover and the benefits were scant if measurable. I know of at least one chain of retail stores where the results were bi-modal. The bottom distribution was the stores that just implemented the schedules at face value. The top distribution was the one where managers realized the schedules were insane and came up with their own off the books. I don't think that chain will be trying to push flex scheduling on its locations again for a very long time.
Those are some impressive ramparts.

Looking at them though, I wonder if they also had parapets and some sort of ladders or stairs to reach the top of them from the inside. It wouldn't at all be surprising, I think, for the archaeological evidence of the ramparts to survive much longer than some wooden parapets.

It's just... while those ramparts are very impressive, if you're trapped on the inside and can't even get up on top of them, the siegers can build ramps or ladders at their leisure. At the very least you'd want to be able to shoot some arrows or throw some javelins down at them to discourage that sort of thing.
Does every game have an engine?

This is a good time to point out we're really arguing over the definition of a word here, and can probably agree on a lot of facts and observations, even if we don't agree on what the definition of "game engine" should be.
> Public figures tailored policies and messages with seemingly less regard for the evidence than for herding the population into desired behavior. It's unlikely they'll command sufficient good will to pull such stunts again anytime soon.

Here in Canada (where it was really some of the worst in regard to the heaviness of message) I'm not so sure.

The problem is that it kinda worked. The messaging was so terrifying and the public so cohesive and compliant with the measures, that the vast majority in my province never got infected. We've now reached an 89% first-shot vaccination rate.

Belief that we've handled it well by going shutdowns + social distancing mandates + mask mandates + vaccine mandates is quite high. There's no real partisan split. E.g. a recent Abacus poll asked "Do you believe that MPs should be vaccinated if they are going to be physically in the House of Commons, or should they be able to attend sessions in the House of Commons even if not vaccinated?" and that's at 76% with clear majority support from every demographic breakdown, including political party (66% of Conservatives), sex, party, gender, age, province, etc.

So now what? It makes re-opening a little awkward if nothing else, though that is proceeding with a tentative schedule and about the only major rules left are masks and proof of vaccine status for some spaces. Perhaps our vaccination rate will be high enough to suppress it largely. Most people here have not wrapped their heads around the endemic reality though. I don't know how much longer this indefinite state can drag on.
What do we consider smarts?

For example, with some examples there, like pretending to do a mating ritual for another group of spiders in order to lure the female out, this seems like it's something built in to their neural networks through thousands of years of evolution. It doesn't seem significantly smarter than the other group of species doing mating rituals themselves. They just have a neural network that reacts to certain input with this output that evolution created and honed through all this time of them being around such input and this output causing a better survival performance.

I didn't see anything specific that could've indicated they could learn new things in new situations, so it seems like built in neural networks that come to them rather than them having special smarts to learn new things like humans have.

> Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.

I wonder about conclusions like these. I don't know about 1-year-old humans, but it's understandable that they can measure strength levels depending on the amount of whatever they are observing and if situations change they should recalculate their new decision. I just don't think it's a sense of numbers, it would be more like some sort of amount of input (pheromones, image, whatever) that makes them pay attention that something has changed.

And all in all it seems odd conclusion to compare sense of numbers based on that to 1-year-old humans. Trying to compare it to something, but the way they use those "skills" doesn't really make comparative sense.
> None of these people are upper-class?

In the usual sense used in the US, they’d mostly be above the upper middle class and into the upper class.

In the more theoretically grounded system otherwise used when discussing capitalist societies, they’d still all be, at birth, be at least petit bourgeois, so the idea that such names are clear indication of membership in the “lower classes” is only even possibly true of capitalist classes in the narrowest possible sense (“not of the haut bourgeoisie”, though even that is a stretch), or maybe if you are speaking of vestigial pre-capitalist class systems, and still just as narrowly (“not the titled nobility”).
On the other hand... suppose they get it right?

A desktop on Linux that looks good and works, and is shipped pre-installed on desktops and laptops like.... Windows and MacOS?

The chances are pretty small, but if they want to write their own desktop, then good luck to them.

There are enough Rust enthusiasts, that if they choose to also open source it, they'll likely make a lot more progress too. This is the kind of thing that the 'rewrite it in Rust' crowd get excited about.
I like this approach and will have a closer look.
Russian culture is fairly tolerant for visual clutter and generally doesn’t care about aesthetics. This might be related to the “worn-down” psyche of the people who endured a lot of cultural upheaval that was not in their favour. Think about a time where you were under pressure and the general state of your desk/room/home.

There is a lot of relief when something just works (i.e. this network). This may be a stretch but consideration for dangers that are remote and hard-to-imagine (i.e. fire safety) typically doesn’t happen in Russia, a la Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs, because the in-between needs aren’t taken care of.
Is this the card "technology" that ran DirectTV tuners as well? I had a friend who was, at one point, running 7 hacked systems, and recording everything he could to burn to DVD, but I never got into that.
I just looked up what Karmic Koala is, and it is Ubuntu 9.x.

I have not tried to use that recently, but I am quite happy running 14.x today, and it runs everything I need.

I use IntelliJ 13.x for my Git stuff, Geany for most of my text editing, a dozen different browsers at whatever versions they are for my Web things, and whatever versions of mpv, mc, LibreOffice, etc. it came with for what those programs do.

With only 1GB of RAM it's not always as snappy as I'd like, but I use the periods of swapping to meditate.

I don't have to use programs released today, only ones which I need today.
How many people in these fields have recognizable names? 200? 500? You’re talking about a narrow elite group.
Sure, if you're making a text adventure in the command line, then the REPL is basically your default game engine. That's where your i/o, computation, control flow, asset management, etc is implemented/centralized.

"Game engine" outside of the context of making a game is just a runtime (and/or environment), and I agree it becomes a bit meaningless (as a prescriptive thing).

It's like saying a CPU needs to have vectorized operations, or even a hardware multiply, to be called a CPU. It's true that in many, if not most, cases those are essential components. However, I find it more useful to define "game engine" as "whatever takes care of the game, physics, and display logic implementation for a particular game".

> Many a better approach would be to ask whether every game needs a game engine?
So, by my definition every game _has_ a game engine. I think a more interesting question would be, "when does a game engine need to be considered as its own logical layer or compartment?"
Not sure why it's downvoted, it's been proved many times
What's magical is the very much interactive, image-based development, type warnings at compile time (function per function with a keystroke), speed, building binaries, stability… Python doesn't have that :/

(https://github.com/bendudson/py4cl/ to use python libs from CL!)
> This whole pandemic has highlighted something that I really prefer not to think about, which is just how irrational, selfish, incapable of assessing risk and prone to confirmation bias too many people are.

Your entire post is a straw man of other people based on your fear causing you to lose empathy.

You’re an example of what you’re lamenting.