skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft is not building the future of gaming, they're buying it. Seeing a bunch of excellent third-party cross-platform games become xbox-exclusive is really sad for gamers.

Microsoft has not been making money on xbox. They're not investing money made with xbox. They're using Office/Windows/Azure funds to boost Xbox, and it's not a fair fight. Sony and Nintendo don't have that kind of money.

I get Sony has acquired studios too, but by comparison they seem carefully planned. They're usually studios already making (mostly) playstation exclusives (e.g. devs of Returnal, Spider-Man and Dark Souls).
I have been super into the book Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems
by Thurner, Hanel, Klimek.

I thought the whole field of Complex Systems was kind of bullshit before this book. IMO we just don't know that much in this area in 2022.

It is just too new and different. I thought it was about fractals or some nonsense before reading this book.
I'm just glad I didn't buy a PS5. I'd be worried if I were Sony.
Unsurprisingly, their stock is off by 6%...
Don’t forget rebase if we are doing this.
Some games sold via Steam don't integrate with the Steam APIs, so once it's installed, if launched directly with the executable, it won't force Steam to be running alongside it. So in _some_ cases, Steam isn't the DRM.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-case-for...

According to the treasury, the total gap is about $600B/year.

> To further ensure that everyone pays their fair share, the Administration also calls for using information that financial institutions already possess—without imposing any burden on taxpayers whatsoever—so the IRS can deploy these additional resources to audit more sophisticated tax evaders. These changes to the third-party information reports are estimated to generate $460 billion over a decade.

So about $46B/year from reporting changes.

However, contra your intuition that this will mostly impact marginal contractors, the treasury claims that the misreporting is progressive and higher earners misreport more income.
Absolutely terrible?
Isn't government awesome! Let's squeeze the little guy for every cent we can! /s
You are getting down voted but that is what most players care about it. It's the reason COD and every 2K or sports game gets worse every year. It's the reason Pokemon somehow continues to become more and more souless. It's the reason companies can put out shit and still print money.
If it is, I like this protection racket.

Inflamatory statements aside, and whether or not online advertising is acceptable in its current form, there is a need they are fulfilling. If people don't find ads to be hospitable to their user experience then people don't find ads to be hospitable to their user experience, period. You can argue why all you want, in the meantime, ABP is there to get rid of them for you.
Thanks! Sadly haven’t had the time in the last 6 months to continue working on what I was experimenting with. Hopefully will soon.
Individual polling says that people did want a progressive mandate. The measures inside the Build Back Better bill each have 70 - 80% support when polled individually. But Build Back Better only has 40% support.

The messed up political system that forces the Dems to bundle the disparate measures together is the main culprit, and navigating that with only 50 senators is really hard.

50 senators combined with silly filibuster rules and Republican/Sinema/Manchin exploitation of the rules is the hand grenade the Dems are dealing with.
someObj.someMethod(Some::reference);
Apache Statement on White House Open Source Security Summit
Gamepass will be the netflix of game... rental? Sharing? Streaming? Whatever you want to call Gamepass. I'm surprised it didnt happen sooner.
I kept expecting the phrase "reinforcement learning" to show up, but even after mentioning a Bellman-style time-decayed sum over future rewards, it doesn't appear, which seems odd to me. And roughly, I think "runs" == "exploitation", "tumbles" == "exploration" in terms other people use.

A thing that the author glosses past is the relationship between having a model of the world and maximizing rewards. It's taken as given that a model-based approach leads to better predictions about rewards ... but when we try to get systems to actually solve problems, this often isn't the case. Learning policies which yield high rewards is often easier than learning a model which actually describes the environment. I think of value iteration as learning "I feel this is a good state", policy iteration as "I feel this is a good action", and a real model as implicitly providing "I think this is a good action because I expect that ..."

If artificial systems have the greatest successes with model-free approaches following algorithms very similar to the one the author describes, but humans seem to have a rich model _and_ do better than those artificial systems (at least accounting for data efficiency), doesn't that at least suggest that we're thinking differently?
"You essentially have a "break even" point 20 years in the future, from there onwards you start saving money."

That's exactly how a 5% roi investment works. There is nothing unusual here.

"in less than 20 years time it is possible that someone comes out with a mega-para-hyper-ultra climatization device that makes yearly energy costs go down by (say) 90%"

And it's possible second coming of Christ will happen, or an asteroid will fall, and you'd be better off soending money on hookers and cocaine.

A plan that relies on some unrelated events to solve your problems is not a plan. Why bother planning at all then?
> several friends have been outraged

I don't know if you can even call it cynicism anymore. You just understand the news media business model. Outrageous headline -> more clicks -> more ad revenue. There would simply be less revenue if your friends only had to read one article to get the full picture.
Overwatch released over a hand full of years ago, it already had its "couple of months of hype" since then.
There aren't. My point is, if you want to take down a cheap drone that comes at you with a 500 pound gravity bomb (and could make your day quite unpleasant), you can't afford to spend a missile on that, but you can afford to send another drone with a 50 cal machine gun or a 20mm cannon. But that means dogfight.
As much as the HN crowd dislikes to hear it, the biggest gaming console in the world is the smartphone. PC Gaming is almost as big as the entire console market, bigger than any individual platform. Any publisher-focused antitruster would have microsoft leaning very hard into those facts.
Huh? The neighbor kid has always had to pay taxes.
The Games Pass is such ridiculous value that my "non-gaming" partner got a Series-S with Games Pass to play MS Flight Simulator, and as an aside, to have games available to myself and our kids (it was impossible to get the Series-X in the UK in the lead up to Christmas without paying scalpers).

I have a PS5 (sadly from a scalper), and I begrudgingly got Plus to fully experience the PvP aspect of Demon's Souls but the fact that it comes with a bunch of PS4 games for free, especially a few that I've been meaning to buy, makes it worth the subscription.

I doubt Sony would have done this without the pressure from the Games Pass.

I think Microsoft know that the PS4 won last gen on the basis of the amazing exclusives it had. I think that Microsoft is going to put a lot of exclusive pressure on Sony this gen with their buying spree (Bethesda etc), and while it is very hard to find time for gaming, I'm glad we have both systems in my house.
Startups for Students Guide
The source for most movie rips today is Bluray, which is already an encoded medium. Yet Bluray remux's are not the common distribution format.

Yea you are technically correct, but if the distance from the original is just a handful of encodes, good luck noticing any lower quality that's not simply due to poor encoding settings. And when a proper encode can be a 10th the size with hardly any drop in quality, in a video file you might view <12 more times in your life, does it really matter.
For home use, that's fine. I don't worry about the power peak usage of my computer since it rarely gets to that level. For servers, that's a no-go.
YC's Startups for Students Guide
This is a good point.

Actually on closer inspection they don't even particularly care about E2E encryption, and here I was thinking this was snooper's charter v2:

> We are not opposed to end-to-encryption in principle and fully support the importance of strong user privacy. Instead, our campaign is calling for social media companies to work with us to find a solution that protects privacy, without putting children at even greater risk.

So we missed the point. This is a campaign to protect kids from shitty parenting, aa, I mean the social networks... so that they can be safely indoctrinated by social media without needing to encourage a responsible society.

In all seriousness, the larger risk here then is not necessarily criminal activity from data leaks (though that's still a real possibility with a gov backdoor) - the greater risk is deeper government mass surveillance built directly into the most popular social media networks.
IP laws already prohibit competition.

There is only one maker of Diablo, and no Torchlight is going to replace Diablo.

Games aren't going to get pulled from other platforms. New games may not come out on (insert-your-preffered-console), but they never were guaranteed to come out at all.

Thus consumers aren't loosing anything here. It doesn't even reduce competition.
I think you are forgetting the terrible experience of ActiveX errors, Java errors, Javascript alert boxes, broken image tags, and broken layouts that were all common in the past.
Honestly, they can keep a lot closed but still create modular designs and repairers win without giving away the farm.

If you don't want to pay John Deere for their fancy autonomous farming, that's fine. But you should be able to swap in a different control unit and not have to worry about your tractor simply refusing to run like a Keurig machine that refuses to run non-rfid tagged genuine k-cups.

Voids your warranty, sure, but I think you should be able to make that decision for yourself.
Slow, short battery life, buggy. You don't want this for your daily driver.

Now, it is a fun toy to play with. PostmarketOS with SXMO is an interesting experiment and I love the idea of a pocketable linux computer with a modem. It could potentially even be a phone if people stop trying to treat it like a feature phone and accept that you are running on limited hardware and software needs to be written as such.
I was a consultant for the first 13 years or so of my career, then switched to working on one product. I agree with everything he said, but there are downsides too.

The downsides for me were:

* You rarely (almost never) get to work on multiple iterations of a product. You parachute in to get something working before launch, or fix the work of some other contractor, or (in the most fun case) to take an idea from zero to launch. But, in all my time, I never got to do the version of that, where we learned what didn't work and then made changes to improve things after launch. That's a huge part of product development, but it's simply not part of the model of consulting. After completing your contract, you'd Fulton out of that company and drop in to a different contract. If you want to stand by your work in the long term, and have the feeling of shepherding something to success, you won't get it as a consultant.

* The flip side of always learning is that you have to learn whatever stupid stack you've inherited from the client. Always different. Yes, you will always be learning, never in your comfort zone, and if you work with startups, you may even be on the cutting edge. But, that can also get real old after a few years.

* The business side can swing wildly from feast to famine. When I was an IC, I would spend weeks not doing anything because there wasn't a contract for me. Can be fun to sit around, but the novelty wears off when you realize your job may be on the cutting block 4-5 times a year, just due to what lineup of clients are coming through the sales funnel at the time.

* Related to the above, I think there is just a fundamental problem with the business model for consultancy shops that will tend to make them unstable in the long term: you have to staff up to get new contracts, then when those contracts run out, you either lose those employees (if they are not salaried) or spend a ton of money as they wait around for the next contract (if they are). You end up going for new contracts, but if those contracts don't exactly match your roster of available staff, you have to hire new people. As time goes on, you end up making bigger and bigger bets with staffing, and eventually you lose. I saw this happen so many times. The result is not that the company goes out of business, but that there are huge layoffs, with such a massive change in company culture, that it is effectively a different company afterward.
Ironically, HLL is a lot closer to the original BF1942 than any other game I’ve seen recently.
I mean eBay is full of sellers that deal in salvaged stuff. There are even sellers who offer rechargeable lipo batteries salvaged out of single use “disposable” vape pens.

If there is a market for something, no matter how small, somebody on eBay is catering to it.
https://ciechanow.ski/js/base.js
https://ciechanow.ski/js/gps.js

Looks like WebGL to me.
As much as I love and depend on git, the visible user interface seems a bit ugly. You can get used to it over time, but it has a certain non-unix flavor that I dislike...

There should be a purely unix way to use git, as in "everything is a file". Sure, you can go to the .git folder and there are files in there. But the structure of these files does not directly represent the structure of the repository. What I want is to "mount" a git repository, so that I can explore its contents using cd, ls and cat. Also, by editing these files I implicitly make commits and create branches to the underlying structure. Would that even be possible?

EDIT: A disturbing feature that I don't see a way out is that in git there are "standard" and "history-rewriting" operations, and there is a clear distinction between the two. To what would that correspond in terms of pure file operations? Something about changing the default permissions?
Sounds fun. Normally I would say that sounds expensive, but he can afford it and like he said it is certainly a way to experience quality control.

I do have some questions about what his experience will be like. I have lived out of a suitcase before (duffle bag) while traveling from place to place constantly, but I as in Afghanistan with almost no physical assets to manage. Considering his wealth I suspect there would be some real life things to manage that would make this variable temporality more complicated.
The services don't seem too concerned about small businesses abusing the friend to friend options for their own purposes, so I can easily see it being the latter.
AI-generative art predicted to be next trend for NFT sector
The reminder from the previous registrar could be just a default action and safe to ignore.
Do you have www as a cname in cloudflare dns?
Have you set up a redirect from www to non www (root domain) in page rules?
Apple has started to sink hundreds of millions into Apple Arcade the past couple years.

Big AAA titles take several years to produce and I doubt Apple will allow half-baked games to launch. That means we won't be seeing those games start to launch until 2023-2024.

Apple is definitely working on a VR headset. They've bought out 4-5 VR companies already. There were rumors of a 2022 launch, but 2023 matches up much better with their game studio launch dates.

That subscription is a HUGE moneymaker (that's how WoW made Blizzard so much money). Most serious gamers play 1-2 games for a couple of years. Traditional studios charge $60 (less for sales) and then release one $20-30 DLC per year. That gives them $120 over two years at the very best (though most players won't bother with DLC). Apple gets $80 per year unconditionally. Moreover, this will get casual gamers in addition to hardcore ones.

Now that Apple runs everything on M1 and even the slowest M1 chips have better GPUs than most Wintel systems, Apple can sell games to everyone. Because everything is using the same architecture (same CPU and same GPU across the board), their devs save a ton of time and money developing and optimizing which means their total time to deliver and cost to deliver is much lower.

I suspect that MS sees this as an extremely serious threat. They need to do everything they can to leverage xbox pass and compete.
>"Note that it's commercial transactions, not your friends & family payments"

For now. Once established it will be trivially easy to make this apply to all payments.
> Naturally, large range uncertainty increases the ambiguity of position, but the relative position of the satellites also matters. If they aren’t well spread, the exactness of calculated location also suffers.

(see the excellent example in OP)

Fun tidbit, the resulting error is known for the system in closed form as Geometric Dilution of Precision, and is a 3x3 (edit: or 4+x4+ if you are estimating bias or quantities like time, thx brandmeyer) matrix that depends on all the locations of the visible sats, and your position relative to them.

GDOP is a general relationship for any estimator based only on the equations used to derive something from sensor remote sensor measurements. It's possible to derive GDOP for any sensing system using the Fisher Information Matrix (which is the inverse of GDOP). Some minor caveats apply, but in general this is a useful trick.

FIM is worth learning if you want to get into sensing & estimation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_information

Another fun thing: FIM can be derived a number of ways, and appears if you simply ask (mathematically) "What is the most likely position of the gps sensor given sat locations" as the hessian matrix of the system that you use while answering that question using e.g., convex minimization.

All of sensing & estimation is just mostly convex optimization.
I'm rather surprised that man-made reactors account for 1% of all neutrino flux, especially with only about 10% of world power production coming from nuclear power. Obviously reactors release neutrinos at a much higher rate than natural decay, but there is only about about 10^5 tons of uranium in the worlds reactors compared to around 10^15 tons in the earth, and there are a lot more radioactive elements in Earth than just uranium.
By application state, do you mean something like an in memory cache? I would prefer having no such state in the first place, and have all meaningful state in the DB to be pulled out or mutated as needed.

I recognize that what you’re advocating for makes of sense in some applications, I just wanted to point out that I haven’t felt the need for it in my eight years of software development.
Nah, their model is different. They are building a Disneyland-like experience, where the public pays to "be there" and the attractions always change. Never been done before.
> Why would we be fine in a decade?

Because physics. Atmospheric drag at those altitudes causes orbits to decay to the point of deorbit in a matter of years.

> 67,000 collision-adjustments a year

Do you consider drivers making adjustments in steering to avoid collisions with other cars to be a problem? Because there are millions (billions?) of those happening daily, and we don’t think twice about it.

There will be the occasional unmaneuverable satellite, but I expect Starship (which SpaceX has said is essentially necessary for the success of Starlink) will be cheap enough within a decade to be the “tow truck” for broken down satellites.
The problem is legitimate but the proposed solution is useless
Peugeot thinks its wingless 9X8 race car can win Le Mans
Because it's a heavily entrenched industry that's not easily disrupted, where each brand has carved it's on territory by geography and there's this silent gentlemen's agreement of "you stay out of my market, I stay out of yours and we all win" since even if the other competitor would attempt to come in the other market, it would face an uphill and insanely expensive battle just to enter the market, as in order to capture any market share it would need to undercut its competitor on cost while offering superior quality, while spending insane money on the supply chains and world class service and tech network which guarantees the up-time of your machinery, thereby weakening the profit margins not just for themselves but potentially the whole market.

So why would you want to do something as risky and foolish as that when you got a good thing going?
"Reaching the sun is, remarkably, more difficult than reaching the outer planets, or leaving the solar system altogether."

A fact that I independently stumbled upon in Kerbal Space Program when I was trying to fly my Kerbals directly into the Sun. It was surprisingly difficult (still haven't achieved it - no spoilers please!), but obvious after a few moments thought.
Don't Fight Your Mind
Couldn't a capable foreign rival just come to America, approach a local farmer and ask them for access to the tractor for long enough to derive whatever alleged trade secrets there are? Or even just buy one, either here or overseas and disassemble?
Is "acceptable ads" really a bad thing? I'm not opposed to seeing any ads; I just don't want badly behaved ones. And is there a less bad alternative to accomplish that?
And the opposite effect happens too: UBI makes it easier to move to cheaper areas and to take the time to make food from scratch rather than relying on quick take out.

Any changes will be very marginal. Fundamental demand isn't changing, it's just a redistribution of demand. Some prices will go up, some will go down, but neither will move much.

Unless of course UBI isn't fully costed. Then the money supply increases and we will likely see inflation.
My read is that it was really Nintendo's failure to broaden their market that opened up the space. Cart vs CD was a understandable debate when the N64 was being designed. But the GameCube vs PS2 was just... ugh. And Sony has always had arrogance in spades when they get a lead.

I guess, in retrospect, Microsoft's fundamental synergy was "developers, developers, developers!" And realizing trading more powerful commodity PC hardware for decreased programming difficulty was a good deal. There were a large number of developers, or future developers, dissatisfied with catering to {insert Nintendo or Sony weird architecture hoops du jour}.
Unflow (YC S19) Is Hiring a Founding iOS Engineer
The word “open space” hadn’t enter the collective conscious yet.

I guess you've never heard of the Pine Barrens — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Barrens_(New_Jersey)

1,100,000 acres of forested land, most of it preserved by the federal government for emergency use. In the event of a catastrophe, it contains 17,000,000,000,000 (that's 17 trillion, with a "T") gallons of the most pure water in the nation.
I have been using the OG Pinephone full time for a month in the US (Mobian Phosh). I am able to use VoLTE Calls, SMS, MMS, Visual Voicemail (so all of the basic feature phone stuff works).

It is very very slow however. Firefox takes 40 (EDIT: ok more like 15-20) seconds to load, and I don't even bother to load heavy resource sites without uMatrix.

Also, battery life is not great. Screen on time is 3-4 hours, and standby time is approximately 12 hours.
my question is whether Microsoft was fanning the flames of all the controversy surrounding Activision recently and how much that dropped the acquisition price.
I 100% agree with this. At the moment, Consulting seems to be running around, getting the barest of understanding of a clients needs and throwing a solution at the wall until we get shifted to another engagement