skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of assumptions in the comments that Nintendo is behind this. If you don't know much about DraStic, that would be a likely explanation. However, in the specific case of DraStic, that is not the most likely explanation. The more likely is that DraStic is abandonware, and this is Google's very Google-y way of cleaning this up.

The thing to know about DraStic is that it's not an actively maintained app. It had two major developers - one of whom dissappeared a long time ago, to the extent that the remaining developer has not been able to contact the former. The remaining developer is the emulation backend developer, but is by own admission no expert on Android, and the emulation's GUI and system integration. As a result, nothing much has happened to this emulator for years. Although _some_ compatibility fixes with the Play Store have been released a few years ago, DraStic has not been updated to use e.g. Android's Scoped Storage requirements.

What I think we're witnessing here is Google's extremely rough way of cleaning up (what it considers to be) abandonware. It may not even be related to DraStic not using the right Android APIs - it may be as stupid as developer fees not being paid, or some more kafkaesque Google thing.

The entire situation around DraStic is a bit of a shame. DraStic is a very impressive piece of software from a previous age - achieving full speed Nintendo DS emulation on 2010 smartphone hardware. In contrast, other Nintendo DS emulators - most notably MelonDS and DesMuMe - barely achieve full speed on certain DS titles on modern smartphone hardware.

The remaining developer has been promising an open source release of DraStic's emulator code for a long time, but has never delivered. They cited technical milestones to achieve before open sourcing, which are difficult to make if you're burnt out on your software. The biggest shame there is that the open source release would likely propel it to become the most versatile Nintendo DS emulator out there [1], but I'm afraid it's doomed to be a closed source, abandoned and outdated Android app.

Finally, Nintendo has never gone after emulators. In the US, there is only legal precedent that emulators are legal [2]. Nintendo risks cementing the legality of emulation more by trying (and failing) to persecute emulators. Having an abandoned emulator in the Play Store removed while keeping gazillions of other Nintendo systems up there doesn't seem like the way to fight emulation.

[1]: MelonDS is a more accurate emulator and fully open source, but it is much more demanding than DraStic - requiring a PC or recent high end smartphone to run all DS games full speed. DraStic would be efficient enough to allow for enhancements like runahead input lag compensation that cannot as easily be achieved on MelonDS without very fast PC hardware. The remaining DraStic developer is also the developer of gpsp, a Game Boy Advance emulator that is fast enough to run most GBA titles on Sony's old 2004 PlayStation Portable - there's a real reputation of efficiency there.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_I....
This is $20 before taxes and shipping, it doesn't even seem to tell me the capacity of the card, and I have no idea who's behind this. Why would I buy from here, rather than from an approved Raspberry Pi reseller, that does tell me the capacity, for half the price? E.g., https://www.okdo.com/us/p/raspberry-pi-noobs-preloaded-micro... or https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-sd-card-noobs.html?defp...

EDIT: Okay, I found the capacity (32GB). But the only way I've found to see it is to right-click Open in New Tab on the Buy Now button and then hit the X in the top-left corner. I don't think that it could be any less intuitive. (And when I do this, I now also see the manufacturer of the card is "Everything But Stromboli", which is definitely not a name brand.)
> In the beginning, there was a feeling that the internet would be the ultimate tool to unite like-minded people. It probably is, the question is what like-minded people do when they get together.

It turns out that the answer is filter bubbles and Twitter mobs. Heterogeneous minds are really a good thing.

But overall it's hard to say that the internet is a bad thing. Sure, it came with terrible downsides, but it also brought us as a species forward by quite a bit.
Teachers would refuse to work at schools in areas with children who have low levels of home support.
Real time Linux has one known issue remaining
`functools.partial` has been bothering me for a long time and I've always thought it'd be nice to have something like the placeholder `·` that people use in math (i.e. `f(·, y, z)`). It didn't occur to me that a decorator might actually get us there without having to introduce new syntax. Nice project!
It reminds me of the "Tenryuubito" from One Piece, elites who put their heads in bubbles to breathe only their own air because they are too good to breath the same air as the common folk, but its kind of the inverse. They'd like the common folk to wear the "bubble" which will inevitably convey implicit connotations of inferiority. "Nobody wants to see your face".

https://media.giphy.com/media/aSeNfB1aAO7rG/giphy.gif
The room I'm in right now, which is also where I work, has two walls completely covered with books. (This is where all the sciencey nonfiction lives, and some other things like history and philosophy and economics.) It is, indeed, nice :-).
I’m aloud to pretty much expense any tool at work as long as I can justify it. I’ve never been asked to justify it, but that’s the rule. I think I probably expense a hundred bucks a month on tools.
Or you can just be a known drug lord, launder billions of USD through a respected international bank, no one goes to jail, small fine, and they're probably still laundering 10 years later and no one cares. No one is anonymous. They're probably all using SMS and corporate email.

Sell a little bit of drugs through the silk road and you'll get royally f-ed! Sell all the opioids in the world through a public pharma corp and you can keep enjoying your jet-set life and yacht.

The allegedly smartest people in the world are focusing on the dumbest problems while being reamed by the frat-boys that went to Wall Street and Politics, guns and drugs. LULZ.
I think the Minecraft Beta might be my favorite experience with gaming. I feel almost as if I'm "chasing the dragon" trying to find something to emulate it. Even if I were to spin up my own server of the Java version, it wouldn't be quite the same as it was then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
Handles like that provide plausible deniability, not bulletproof anonymity.
A client of mine sent me a 1099 last month through their QuickBooks account. I never used any of Intuit's products before.

In order to download it I (the recipient of the 1099 which is nothing but a PDF file) had to create a QuickBooks account.

During this process:

1. I was denied being able to make an account unless I used a password less than 33 characters (my normal passwords are well above that but it was blocked). Here's a tweet and screenshot of the form validation https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1486793382789885960.

2. Their page tried to get me to sign up to their paid services multiple times while attempting to download the 1099.

3. Their page tried to get me to upgrade my account to a paid account after I downloaded the 1099.

4. In order to close my account I had to call an 800 number and speak to a human. I ended up not doing this, but someone else in another comment said they tried unsuccessfully and ultimately filed a complaint against them through their state's Attorney General.

Pretty much every dark pattern you can ask for tied into an activity where incorrectly paying your taxes can lead to fines or imprisonment.
I think it's because the ad ignores the obvious fact that the puppet's life at the end--when it can only connect to its friends in VR--is obviously so much worse than its life at the start of the commercial, when it can perform in real life. The ad presents the Metaverse as an "upgrade" from real life, but it seems from the ad that the Metaverse is only an improvement after your life has gone seriously downhill.
The universe isn’t black and white. Hell it can’t seem to quite agree on where it’s particles are at a fundamental level (until we figure out what measurement is - see latest Sabine YouTube video). Further things are often negligible for some scale, great/useful for some scale, then outright horrible past some other scale.

Though naming something Soylent did always seem too on the nose.
>... on the Continent Galileo grumbled at the armchair philosophers who, “in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not betake themselves to ships or crossbows or cannons, but retire into their studies and glance through an index or a table of contents to see whether Aristotle has said anything about them.”

That quote does not appear to be dismissive of indexes to me. It appears to be about people who appeal to authority rather than doing their own empirical research.

I didn't see other quotes to support the claim that [a significant number of] scholars feared that the index would destroy reading, and I'm a bit skeptical of the claim offhand. I wish there was some information structure that would allow me to find such supporting evidence more easily...
Very sorry to hear of his passing. Sven Guckes was one of the kind souls on Usenet in the 90s who went out of his way to happily help people with their tech setups. I especially learned quite a lot about Vim and Zsh from him and his rc files which he made available to everyone on his webpage, long before public dotfile repositories on Github were a thing, even before most people in the Unix world knew those tools existed.

Decades later I am still professionally and personally using and benefiting from the tools and lessons he encouraged and helped everyone out with back in the day.

My only regret was that I never got a chance to meet him and thank him in person. The closest I came was at Usenix LISA '11 in Boston when I was speaking at a config management BoF: after the session I was engaged in discussion with a German chap who I later found out was from FU Berlin. It turns out he knew Sven quite well, so I gave him $20 and asked him to give it to Sven to buy some beer on me. A small gesture for
the considerable help and advice he had given to people like me.

Rest in peace my friend. You made the world a better place with your kind words and deeds.
If we're going to compare human beings to radios, I'd say it's far more likely that some part of the body is the case of the radio while the radio is contained within it. If the body is acase for the radio it makes no difference if you swap it out.

I'm willing to accept that my brain is an antenna for consciousness from another dimension but I find it hard to swallow that my toe nails are as well.
It was triggering for me in a couple of ways. So content warning for anyone reading, is the shit that brought all kinds of suicidal thoughts.

1. Being thrown away and having everything you love being taken from you by an uncaring world.

2. You’re about to die and it’s all going to be finally over. (Major trigger: death is the only way to find relief from the pain of existing.)

3. The only reason you don’t is because someone wants you on display.

4. Everyone ignores you. No one cares. You do not matter to anyone. You are alone.

5. The only escape from this tortured endless hell is a virtual world that is a shadow of the real thing.

Of these, only the second is likely to trigger me normally. Usually I’m fine and can see this coming and pause whatever I’m watching for a second to process it. This ad completely blindsided me with five things I couldn’t process in rapid succession.

It took a while to get back in my feet and not have it ruin my evening. At least I wasn’t a Bengals fan. That loss hurt to watch.
The NSA handles the wiretapping, not the CIA and they're over in Ft. Meade, MD. The NSA's datacenter is in Utah, though.
I don’t get it either.

Everyone floating around with no legs, cue music, real world puppet stomping his feet to the music. Arf.
A few times, but it was less about the code but more about the “head space” I’m in when I’m coding. I felt like I was programming my brain and I woke up exhausted each time.
https://toolz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/curry.html
zigzag is pretty wild. A kind of reversal task.
I wonder which era one needs to post so as to not be guilty of this unspecified "self" contradiction. Interesting to hear that "plenty" are making such specific demands for a random assortment of unidentified people simply categorized as racial minorities. I guess details aren't necessary when we can just say someone is doing something to some people at some point and it's not good.
This is already the case to a certain extent. In my state, experienced teachers are constantly applying for jobs in preferred districts. There is a notable migration pattern from poor districts to affluent ones.

Also, poor districts are penalized with a lower property tax base.
Good Job! Even better you shared the code!

Thanks
If the alternative is a total shutdown of the fishery, seems like it might be worth the cost.
Even if you do not agree with the coding style they propose, it is still useful to know and helps understand others code (and the rationale behind it). It is true though not everything applies nicely.
Hmm, maybe. The way I'd say it is that dealing with whatever happens to you is generally your responsibility, not that the things that happen themselves are.

("Generally", not literally always. Extreme example: If you get hit by a car and your injuries put you in a coma, then both fixing the injuries and taking action against the driver if appropriate are necessarily other people's job.)
A new life awaits you, in the off-world colonies - the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!
Could this be used without the "bp."? Half the point of coming up with a nicer notation is for the notation to actually be nicer.
There is something quite satisfying about stumbling on a superbly-written, over-the-top rant after a long drought. Rants are just so much fun when they're done by a competent wordsmith with a great sense of sarcasm. It probably helps that I mostly buy into his thesis.

And how can you not warm to a guy who describes himself as, "Editor/owner/flannel doofus"?

Loved this line: "the haunted space station that generates the profits and luridly deranges America’s aunts..." But truth be told, a couple of my aunts didn't need much help from Facebook. After nearly seventy years, I can assure you that an abundance of folks with gullibility to spare and kooky perceptions of reality has never depended on greedy corporations, if indeed a corporation can be greedy -- I've always thought greed was more a characteristic of people and a few other animals.

Still, just a great rant. Many thanks!
I like how clever this is. It's a little too clever for production code for my tastes, but it might be nice to use in exploratory programming.
I have the exact same book come to mind as first choice. "The First 15 lives of Harry August" was absurdly good.. Her other book "Touch" isn't too bad either.

The Harry August book is somewhat similar to another one that I also very much recommend. It's called "Replay", by Ken Grimwood
Given that just recompressing images on the homepage of some sites I’ve worked on has cut page load size down by megabytes it sounds like it makes a difference.
There are some things that PTP does better than NTP, but there are also things that NTP does better than PTP.

This is why pairing PTP and NTP together gives you a result that is better than either of them alone. PTP makes a great Stratum 0 reference clock for NTP, which can then apply higher level protocols along with other information source inputs to synthesize a higher quality time source that can then be made publicly available.

And this is also why the Network Time Foundation [1] publicly supports both protocols.

Disclaimer: I've been a member and supporter of the public NTP project since 2003, as well as associated projects like the NTF.

[1] https://nwtime.org/
I wonder if the author lives in a democracy or in a state which has rule of law. Because it strikes me that the solution space also includes many political, legislative, and judicial options such as, perhaps most obviously, the regulation of tech, or the effective policing of online abuse.
What makes programming unique is that(Assuming you are a basic "code monkey" level web dev or entry level embedded like me), you don't usually "learn" to code.

You get vaugely familar with it, memorize some patterns, and VS Code's autocomplete does most of the details.

Variables, objects, classes, take days or weeks to learn, but beyond that the "learning" isn't like anything else.

When you play guitar, you control every note with your hands in real time. Every mistake is immediately audible. There is no algorithm for playing the right notes. You either memorize them and can get your hand to do them accurately or you don't.

And you can't unplay a note.

Which makes it 1000x harder than programming.

Because of debuggers, unit tests, and the fact nobody expects it to work first try, it's iterative, interactive, and mutable.

There's no idea>implementation pipeline, every level including the idea is something you can debug iteratively with computer help.

Programming isn't just being an "IDE Operator", there's some actual skill involved, but "IDE Operator" is pretty much how it feels when compared to anything else.

If I find a library, and tell you about it, you will be able to use it in minutes. Your capabilities have greatly increased, yet all you learned was that FooLib exists, and two or three function names.

Design patterns and language features work roughly the same way.

Technology is the art of so arranging the world so that we don't have to experience it, says the quote. But that includes tech itself.

Learning a new tech is usually like learning to use a washing machine. There's often nothing you couldn't learn from a page or two long article.

The small percentage of things that do require actual learning are where most of the challenge comes from.

The level to which programming is more like being a machine operator is so extreme that a lot of people take years to UNlearn the habit of actually doing things by themselves.

Beginners reinvent the standard library all the time, and sometimes feel like they didn't really do anything if they just put 3 libs they don't understand together.

In any other activity, the more professional you get, the more unique things are, the more you do from scratch, the more deep understanding is needed.

In industry, the farther you get from hobby level the more standardized everything gets.

If someone really does deeply understand what they're doing, I'd call that computer science more than programming.

Programming is not craftsmanship. It is not martial arts or cooking or war. It's not philosophy or math or literature.

I don't do code katas, ever. Because unless you do Haskell or real CS level algorithms, there's... not that much to know about the fundamentals, and IDEs largely do away with a need to memorize specifics

All the actual skill is in structuring ultra complex projects, and in domain issues.

If your program involves math, the programming is probably trivial, an the reason it's hard is because of the math.
Like Playtest, or USS Calister? I'd be OK with either.
Can it be put into the FDroid store?
ooo what about some kind of zero knowledge proof that proves citizenship but nothing else.
> Everything you have and everyone you care about will be taken from you by forces beyond your control, the ad says. You will be surplus to requirements, first fungible and ridiculous and then literally disposable. You will lose everything.

This is literally what aging is. You are gradually worth less and less and number of people to whom you are worth anything shrinks. Because of the changing world and because of what it means to be aging human. Even your own grandkids, if you ever have any, will be barely giving a sh_t about you in a best case scenario.

This ad is for aging millenials like Mark himself. It's pure nolstalgia and promise of reliving better times.
The font that website uses is horrendous. My eyes jittered so much trying to read it I simply gave up.
In a modern context, PDF (pages) or websites (infinite scroll).

Personally I like scrolling, usually with a 2-finger gesture on a trackpad. For keyboard-only navigation (e.g. UNIX "less"), pages make sense though, controlled with the spacebar or Page Up/Page Down keys.

Scroll and pinch-to-zoom on a single trackpad is particularly user-friendly in my opinion, as well as two-finger tap to right click and search/define/copy-paste/etc.
For those that enjoy this sort of thing, the exam for dentistry involves a lot of literal shape rotation.
I appreciate your words. The passion and the way you write about nature is great. I connect with it. It does remind me that humans have become numb to the world around us. That we are just animals dependent on the ecosystem and we disturb it at our own peril.
You can't fix a resource problem with a positive feedback punishment loop.
The move from spinning rust to SSDs everywhere has probably reduced power consumption noticeably (though it’s likely just been sucked up by the cpu).
Even with the DMCA in practice the safe harbor provisions have proven ineffective and sites in practice are still liable for content, see YouTube v Viacom. The main benefit for DMCA is for the ISPs, mainly.

In practice DMCA simply made it easier to take down supposed infringers of copyright violations and spread the popularity of drm. In theory, yes it’s good, and it probably made companies like YouTube and Facebook more comfortable with user content. The other benefit is that because you can accept DMCA requests and assume they are correct as long as you respond promptly your liability should be limited

In any case you’re probably right but haven’t heard of any high profile lawsuits prior to DMCA regarding internet content so it’s hard to really say.

What the law says though is that DMCA criminalizing circumventing drm and other access control and related technologies, services or tools.
The overview is the very last paragraph:

> User creates an account with just their email or can create a temporary
> account. Their session lasts for a long time. If it expires or they try to
> login from a different browser, they get a code to their email. It’s a great
> solution for a simple site that doesn’t get much traffic.
Well, if it's not written in English, it's going to be hard for me to do anything with it.

So, yes -- I care.