skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Selling cosmetic things is literally the best way of extracting money from this. Humans are social creatures, and clothes, real or virtual, are part of social display, some people (me for example) don't care about it, but they are exceptions, most people care deeply about using clothes for social display, and "threatening" them with not having a potentially high social status piece is a good way to make these people buy everything.

This is the whole point of the fashion industry too, every year the "collection" changes, this makes people both afraid of being "left behind", but also of missing "classics" that won't be manufactured again, also it is why fashion designers release things in "collections", idea is seduce people in buying the entire collection, not just the piece they liked.

When you are dealing with something that has an actual value, for example a base-version magic the gathering or pokemon card, the value is exactly whatever the item is useful for, the more useful it is the more people pay for it, but when you are dealing with stuff that is useful to display social status, things change, and you end with people paying ludicrous amounts of money to buy a brick written "Supreme" when the "Supreme" guys themselves are not sure why this is happening.

https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/skate-brand-supreme-se...

Or in case of game cards, people willing to pay sky high prices because the card has special art, sometimes even if the art is UGLIER than the base version, just because it is rare and a social status, things get even wilder when the social status is part of the reason the card exists in first place (for example cards that were manufactured to be given to judges or championship winners)
Mercury is still used today in Australia. https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/9/1/053/116413/W...
> While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component.

The more I think about it, the more I realize loot boxes to kids now are what trading card packs were to kids back in the day. When I was in elementary school, I was deep into Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Card packs ran ~$4 and carried the chance that you got a super powerful card. I spent probably close to $100 on cards over the years which, for a 8 year old kid, would be akeen to me dropping $3k on the new Mac Studio.

But there were natural controls in place back then. I had to save up every week to get a new pack, and I only had one chance per week to buy a pack. Now with microtransaction, the biggest problem (in the context of kids), is how easily accessible it is. If I came home and opened my pack to find that it didn't have any good cards, I would have to wait another week to get another pack. Now a kid can just go and get another lootbox instantly.
uefi isn't a piece of software, it's an interface.

tow-boot is one such implementation of this interface
Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album
As a kid I used to play the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game a lot, and the odds for getting cards of certain rarities were published on the packaging so you knew how many packs on average it would take to hit a super rare/ultra rare card. There were 8 commons and one rare slot per pack which had a 1:5 chance of being a super rare, 1:12 for an ultra rare, and 1:23 for a secret rare.[0]

Additionally the cards had actual utility where the rarest cards often had better effects than commons and decks would be built around these rarer cards to be used in a duel. For games like Fortnite where the items in the lootboxes are purely cosmetic, the kids who are playing know that they aren't getting any competitive advantages with different skins in playing. However this becomes a bit murkier in games like FIFA and Star Wars Battlefront 2, where the rarest items from lootboxes contained items that were better than those obtained through leveling up alone. The article says that "92 percent of the FIFA boxes are not bought with real money, but unlocked via football matches and are therefore simply part of the game of skill." which implies players can expect to get a reasonable number of good players to build a team with and a team constructed of said players on aggregate would not provide a significant competitive advantage.

My opinion is that players should spend time in games because they consider it to be fun rather than to be the best for the sake of being the best, and the in-game whales who spend the most $ on a game shouldn't be overpowered to the point where free to play players should feel they need to spend money to win.

[0] https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Booster_Pack
There's a babel plugin for adding an Angular-style "display-if" to JSX -
https://www.npmjs.com/package/babel-plugin-jsx-display-if

I've only seen it used in projects once or twice but it really does wonders for readability once the team becomes OK with the new-ish syntax
Counter-historical as in not corresponding to history?

1. What?
2. Genocide denial talking point straight from the hurriyet. Massacres had been going on for 20 years in 1915.
3. Armenia didn't occupy anything until 1992. In 1990 people in NKAO were speaking of independence as were people in the rest of AZSSR, in 1991 Soviet Union with the support of AZSSR was ethnically cleansing parts of AZSSR of Armenian militias. It wasn't until 1992 that after being besieged for a year NKAO defenders broke out and started occupying anything.
4. The civilians that were death marched into the Middle East were causing those millions of deaths?
CERN Suspends Collaborations with Russia
I wondered why they do it back then, and wondering about Twitter now: when trying to access those from Russia, if you use Tor, it's easy to access the website on its regular address via an exit node. Of course an .onion wouldn't harm, but it doesn't make much difference. On the other hand, the government tries to block Tor in Russia since the last year, the bridges that used to work don't work anymore, and even if you obtain new ones to which you manage to connect, somehow Tor still fails to complete a connection to the network (I didn't investigate further yet). So a regular mirror is likely to be more useful than an .onion one (even though it's also likely to be blacklisted soon).
Podcast Interviewing Mark Lorion, Founder of Tempo Software
This.

I've worked past the point that my access started expiring and I had to make sure not to reboot anything important so I could keep making progress, even after they came and took my chair away [yes, seriously]. When I absolutely had to reboot the dev system to continue, I sent off my final notes and left.

I do agree that knowledge transfer is top priority, but sometimes there's also work I'd really like to hand off in a completed, easy-to-take-on state, that will save the next engineer ever more time than another few hours of brain dump.

Still, try to do the brain dump first.
To what degree to you believe that should be the case? There are multiple political interpretations of that sentiment throughout history with widely varying implementations and downstream consequences.

Is it just public transportation? Are airlines and trains public transportation? Is it other critical infrastructure? Utilities? Energy? Healthcare? Communication? Other societal necessities like food/housing/shelter?
Recruiters are severely limited in the number of roles they can offer you are severely limiting yourself if you do this.
A couple years ago, I switched from German QWERTZ to a UK QWERTY keyboard (wouldn't have minded US QWERTY but the differently shaped return key seemed too foreign). I am not looking back: for programming but also general tasks, having keys like

` [ ] \ / { }

very easily available is a blessing. The German QWERTZ keyboard has triple occupation on some keys, which is not ergonomic and harder to type fast with.

Anyway, both Linux and Windows offer fast switching between installed keyboard layouts/languages using SUPER+SPACE. This is needed in e.g. emails, where I still need Umlauts. It's just much easier to read that way. However, switching back and forth constantly is completely overwhelming and not viable. However, in German, there are perfectly and officially (?) acceptable alternative spellings for our special "Unicode"-characters. They can be typed using plain ASCII, aka a QWERTY keyboard.

So, I wrote a script to read in any text, combined it with AutoHotkey on Windows and now have a tool that, at the touch of a button, replaces selected text using alternative spellings (gruen, Duebel, Faehre) with their correct versions (grün, Dübel, Fähre). The tool could be extended for other languages rather easily. I've been using it for over a year now and recently got to release it properly on the cheese shop:

pip install betterletter

(https://pypi.org/project/betterletter/)

Before putting this together, I had looked around for an existing tool. To my surprise (there's always something!), I found nothing. I guess this scratches a too specific itch: using QWERTY but wanting proper spelling quickly, while remaining on QWERTY as to not have a mental breakdown and stay at full typing speed.

After writing, select everything (CTRL+SHIFT+HOME works well), hit shortcut, text will be replaced. This takes about 2 seconds, much faster than switching keyboard layouts back and forth. If this ran as a daemon with the dictionary loaded into RAM already, the script could run almost instantaneously (most of the 2 seconds is IO, reading from disk), in linear time according to the text input size.
Exactly! This is the meat of it. If anyone wants to talk about what I have written, we can look at and run it together. It's all available to look at, discuss, and actually use. Isn't that more important than anything I could tell you with a test? Arguably, looking at my existing products, in depth, is the best possible interview.
Ten years of web page bloat: What have we learned?
For me it’s a steep drop-off of productivity going from “I really want to complete this” to realizing after a couple of days that it doesn’t matter

Other people have there own lanes to worry about
For these situations I often use IFFEs with if-statements and early returns inside.
I came across "Poisons in your food" by Ruth Winter in my high school library one day and haven't slept since.
What kind of FPGAs can this reasonably run on? Is that model dependent? Could a small model run on an ICE40 FPGA? I looked over the doc but I can't find anything concrete.
Blender is shaping up to be the best open source project I've seen in my 20 years of tech, and I'm comparing this with many other large ones I've used, like Linux kernel or various distros, FreeBSD, Kubernetes and so on. They do everything so well, even the releases, I think it beats the paid competition now or will soon do in feature parity and ease of use. As of Blender 2.8 the UI is fantastic.

This update comes with many geometry node improvements which continue the trend of making Blender the premium non-destructive modelling solution. I'm in particular interested in seeing how 6900 XT and regular M1 (in Mac mini form) will perform under Metal with 3.1 and macOs 12.3. I was a long time Radeon VII user on Mac but before 3.0 the stability and performance was just not there so I've moved my Blender experiments to Windows and Nvidia which works spectacularly but I'm not fussed about booting win just for Blender. Sadly I don't think AMD is bringing HIP for their older, pre-6000 GPUs https://code.blender.org/2021/11/next-level-support-for-amd-...
Case numbers are mostly irrelevant and don't mean much one way or another. Official case counts vary a lot based on the extent of testing and reporting. If you test more then you find more cases. In the US, the CDC estimated that only about a quarter of infections were ever counted as cases.

What actually matters is the rate of hospitalizations and deaths.

And we're all going to be exposed to the virus anyway. Whether that happens at home or abroad hardly matters.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
I really don't think any of the ones I encountered would have fooled me. They were all absolutely terribly done.
$400 is literally less than one hour of billable work in most places, negligible.
Location: Russia/Armenia (I’m in the process of relocating right now)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Rust/C++/Go, linux networking, database development
Résumé/CV: https://bit.ly/3tC2tVe
Email: pianlakkaa@gmail.com

About me:
I’ve worked at Yandex (aka “Russian Google”) at the network infrastructure team developing internal tools using eBPF kernel modules and DPDK library. Before that I’ve done some search engine (Sphinx) and microservice development.

Last 4 months I’ve spent researching the question “Is it possible to solve V8 style language runtime isolation using formal verification methods to avoid performance penalties imposed by Spectre vulnerability mitigations?”, which is a common theme to dig myself deeper into modern processor architectures and FVM. Initial plan was to try to develop something useful in the process and give a talk about it, but it all went sideways after the start of the war.
Consider a finite, nonempty set of powers of two that are greater than one. The sum of the reciprocals is between zero and one, and you can always expand any such set to another larger one, which will increase the sum of reciprocals but it will still be under one.
Looks to be a good and bad start.
CPython Listsort (Timsort)
Funny thing is a 10th generation iMac with the 5k panel probably costs a lot less than $1799 these days. I can't even find it to buy on Apple's site. I'd guess you can find a refurbished, or new units outside of Apple, for a lot less than what the new Studio Display costs.

While it sounds a bit crazy, it might be worth going that route too.

I've been using a 27" 5k iMac mostly as a monitor for the entire pandemic so far. It's the biggest display I can fit between the closet walls I work from. It took some fiddling to get the setup right, but what I ended up with works really well for me:

* I remote into my work machine using the built in Screen Sharing app (which is really just a VNC client)

* The remote machine is connected to the iMac over ethernet and sits on a shelf above me in the closet

* I use macFuse and sshfs so that the work machine's drives can be mounted on the iMac

I rarely, if ever, notice any image quality issues or input lag with this setup. The directly wired network connection helps with that.

Aside from the benefits of the display (which, to this day, is still the best I've ever used), you get a full computer.

That means I can have a video call going on on the work machine, CPU pegged, while the iMac compiles stuff without competing for CPU.

Given the $1599 price of the Studio Display, and used 5k iMacs near me going for about $700, it's a no brainer. I'd still go this route if I were wanting a new high resolution monitor.
A major practical advantage is that Tor exit nodes regularly have their IP addresses marked as abusive and then you have to do a million captchas to sign in, and the onion service doesn't do that.
It's interesting to me how many people have diametrically opposed views of what a 1:1 should be. Business meetings / status updates vs. personal discussion. Structured agenda vs. no agenda. Weekly vs. biweekly vs. monthly. Etc.
Dumb question: what did the Pipewire developers do that makes it so much better than everything else on Linux?

Sound has been an absolute disaster area on Linux for decades and it seems like the Pipewire guys just flat out solved it. (I would say "suddenly", but Wim Taymans has been working on this directly for almost 7 years and worked on Gstreamer before it)

What did they do so much better and differently?
"...Starstreak has a number of advantages over infrared homing guided, radar homing guided, and radio command guidance MCLOS/SACLOS (e.g. Blowpipe or Javelin) missiles:

It cannot be jammed by infrared countermeasures or radar/radio countermeasures.

It cannot be suppressed with anti-radar missiles..."

...

"...On 9 March 2022, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said that the United Kingdom was looking into delivering Starstreak missiles to Ukraine, to prevent Russian air supremacy following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine..."
Whatever the population feels like should not be subject to market pricing.

Also, whatever is prohibitively expensive to duplicate, such as water/sewage/gas pipes, electrical/fiber wires, etc. Or public transport like underground train systems.
Vosk https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api
This is exactly how China is justifying their censorship.
Red Hat moves out of Russia
Thanks, for bridge to Demo Day loans we are underwriting the YC program. For seed extension debt-these companies are still young therefore, our analysis is also betting on traction, quality of founders and investors on the cap table. However, for later stage loans we underwrite on the basis of both a top down as well as bottoms up analysis.
> I don't think Americans understand how Europeans are experiencing this attitude of appeasing.

I think it depends very much on how interested they are in foreign affairs, and their particular political views.

I don't really fit "Democrat" or "Republican", but I definitely tend to lean more to the "Republican" side on this topic. Trump's platform included trying to get NATO members to "pay their fair share." Like most everything Trump says, that's unnecessarily confrontational, but the point is valid - Europe has been reliant upon US defense spending for decades. Because they know the US is there, they've cut defense spending. As you pointed out, that means they are currently incapable of effectively defending themselves without US intervention.

> It's about Russia being run as an authoritarian imperialistic etno state.

I think you're likely exactly correct here. More importantly, even if your analysis of Russia's motivations aren't quite right, you're "close enough." Their actions are consistent with this view.

> Everytime the US appeases, Russia is encouraged to do more violence, more aggression.

Because Russia currently sees the US as "Europe's military", you're absolutely correct.

> The more clarity the US gives on when and how it will enter war, the less likely it is for the war to take place. And we really just need you guys to have the discpline for the next few years, and then we won't ever need US soldiers patrolling our borders, which seems fair and important (because there are more threats in this world than just the Russians!)

Unfortunately, that's just not how the US political system works. We almost always have a fairly drastic change in leadership (and therefore foreign policy) every eight years. We often have it happen every four years.

There is a reason that Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, then didn't move on to annex more (or all) of Ukraine until 2022: the US had a leader that was unpredictable and relatively aggressive from 2016-2020. With Biden replacing Trump, Putin began spooling up the Russian war machine for the attempt. He'll take what he can take right now, then pause. He'll give Americans time for Ukraine to fade from the popular consciousness before our next election cycle. If Biden is re-elected, I expect he'll almost immediately move to take more territory. If it's someone else, he'll likely wait a few months to observer their policy decisions and decide whether to move or not in ~late 2025 and act in ~mid 2026.

Basically, Europe should plan on the US remaining passive until 2025 at the earliest. The only time you may have is while Putin is integrating Ukraine into Russia (or the "Russian sphere of influence", á'la Belarus). If I were the leader of a European power, I'd be putting defense at the highest possible priority short of a war footing. If I were the leader of an ex-Soviet state, I would be looking to build strong relationships with European states with stronger economies and militaries.

The 2020s are going to be rough for Europe.
Quality sure, aesthetically coherent? No
We've talked about this so many times on HN, and I've weighed in on this so many times. But it's an important enough topic that we should have the discussion again.

You left undefined what you mean by "some sort of basic coding test". I have been screened out of jobs based on questions like "find all matching subtrees in a binary tree", or "find all sub matrices with positive determinants in an NXM matrix" (at the whiteboard, in 45 minutes).

I don't think this is as much about critical thinking as you do. What limited feedback I got (from a recruiter, never the person who did the test) was "analysed the problem and sketched the solution well, but didn't make enough coding progress."

Again, this was 45 minutes at the whiteboard in a day of getting shuttled from room to room for 5 hours of this.

At least you didn't mention "programmers who can't write fizz buzz." I have never heard of anyone getting screened out because of fizz buzz. You may have seen it. But based on my experience, the coding problems are way, way harder than fizz buzz.

Maybe you're doing things differently. If so, that's great, but I don't believe it's he norm at all.

I'm also totally ok with you giving a difficult technical test that will weed out many competent programmers, as long as you don't pretend it isn't.

I'll finish the way I always do - the alleged "shortage" or software developers in Silicon Valley is a product of rational market behavior among educated people who are free to choose a career according to market signals and their own personal interests. Re-taking your second year undergraduate data structures and algorithms exam is about as appetizing as retaking organic chemistry for the rest of your life for a physician, or retaking your partial differential equations exam is for an actuary. If free citizens don't want an employer's job in the numbers the employer thinks they should, even though the employer has decided it pays well, that's the market's answer. I see no need for the government to ask again on the employer's behalf.
No, these signals are at a low frequency of around 1.4 GHz, not at the high frequencies of infrared or visible light.

For such radio signals, much larger antennas are needed than what we can expect to have on space telescopes in the near future.

A much more likely improvement, compared to what can be done on Earth, could be obtained by building a large radiotelescope on the Moon (i.e. with a large array of antennas), on its hidden face.
Honestly the #1 thing that worked for me was not trying to do blind weight loss

You need logging to be able to "debug" the weight loss

If you don't have logging you won't have a good idea of why it didn't work if you fail

Logging meaning tracking calories

There are a lot of heuristics like avoiding food X, or intermittent fasting but these are all just proxies for eating less calories
I have been writing code in C-like languages since 1996 and I find the ternary equivalent to be unreadable.

If you're ever doing this in any language with simple if() conditions, you need to refactor anyway.
Exercise extreme self-restraint at the supermarket and then take it easy at home. Related: Never go to the supermarket hungry.
Company Plans to Dig Deepest Hole to Unleash Boundless Energy
You are probably the person to lead that movement - you can't rely on others for things like this. I for one support your project!
Reminds me of Nintendo Seal of Quality for the NES. The uncontrolled amount of crap games coming out for Atari was the demise of the home videogame wave at that time.

Nintendo felt the need to closely control the supply of games and their quality to "guarantee" a good experience.
Lambdas were Java 8 in 2014