skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What makes users want to share a game?
A few months ago, I released a small game called Fast Flood[0]. It's a mix of the Flood game and Wordle.

It did well on launch (>50k users played it in the first days) and has kept a group of ~300 loyal users that play the game every day, even though I didn't do anything to improve it for a long time[1]. These users spend an average of 6 minutes on the site and return every day or so.

The site has limited traffic today, but the users who visit are very engaged with the game, so I've started thinking about possible ways to get more people to play it. A week ago, I released an update that focused on fixing some existing bugs, a slight UI redesign, and, more importantly, tried to get people to share the game by adding a leaderboard[2]. Let me explain this last part.

Assuming that the game was engaging, my guess was that people shared games for three reasons:

1. Because the game dynamics require it (multiplayer-only games)

2. In-game or financial incentives (e.g., Play-to-earn, referrals programs, etc.)

3. Status (e.g., I feel good because I solved guessed today's Wordle quickly)

Given that doing 1 adds too much complexity, and I don't have the money for 2, I thought 3 could be a good option. I had two ideas. Either allow people to set up tournaments with friends where they could compete and compare results. Or a global leader board, where people could compete with everyone who played.

I chose the latter option and released these changes last week. It hasn't made much of a difference, making me wonder if my theory about why people share games is correct.

As a newcomer to game design, I hoped more experienced game developers/designers could provide insights about:

1. What makes users want to share games?

2. For daily puzzle games, have you seen any interesting approaches that make people more likely to share them?

Also, I have limited web dev experience. Please excuse me if my UI makes your eyes bleed :P

[0] https://fastflood.dylancastillo.co/

[1] https://twitter.com/_dylancastillo/status/151065561660752282...

[2] https://twitter.com/_dylancastillo/status/155013531452128461...
Succinct data structures are one of my favourites.

The idea that we can very cleverly pack a collection of information into a much smaller form, but you can query the compressed form with good computational complexity, and without unpacking the data you need to read is amazing.
The 100 page machine learning books, Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA), philosophy of software design etc.

DDIA was the most useful since I could apply it directly to my work, the others not so much. Not even sure if I took away much from the ML books since I rarely use it in practice. Still enjoyable overviews. DDIA will stick, others won’t.
do you know whether changing the location would affect him?

you might setup a recycling system and find that since its not the same location it doesn't have the same effect. Part of the fascination could be the snug feeling of sitting in the bath or not having to wear clothing, it could be the temperature in the room, the colours, the light level, the tiles or rugs, the smell or perhaps the mirror or the windows or the room could be a safe place for him such as memories of being bathed when younger and the water is part of that self-soothing mechanism.

You might try setting up a similar experience to the bathroom in his bedroom or another safe space as an alternative option, a bath like container with blankets (or without if he prefers to not wear clothes) you could then introduce a water flowing system or fountain and see if it has the same effect. It may be that the water is only a part of the stim and the soothing effect from the surroundings is a bigger part.

If you take a recycling water approach there are a lot of people making mini kitchens for their kids with a recycling water setup there should be youtube tutorials you can adapt to a container.
You’re using super obfuscated language so it’s hard to follow what you’re actually saying. It sounds like you’re saying because you can’t evaluate people with lazy mental shortcuts like race or religion, which would be illegal, you have to try and determine their actual merit, which is harder, and that is the source of corporate spreadsheet hell. Consequently, businesses would spend less time in spreadsheet hell if they could just go back to discriminating against classes of people that are now protected by law. Is that really what you mean?
Russian oil is traveling to Asia on tankers that used to carry Iranian crude
I'm current McKinsey. I tend to have a different pitch. A lot of people complain that they've been saying something for X years. Then a consultant comes in, talks to them, reports the idea, and then it actually happens and everyone celebrates. They perceive this as the consultants being full of shit, but really it's just that their own organization is deeply ineffective, communication is poor, or they are not as clear or persuasive in their own communications. If you work at a tightly wound bureaucracy, it can be really difficult to do anything without a third party coming in and just stepping over all the red tape to get things done with a mandate from the top.

I'm a data scientist. I HAVE pitched ideas directly to fortune 500 ceo's in my early 20's. But it's a weird thing to assume this is hubris. Fortune 500 CEO's are not gods. They're just people. And often times they have some pretty important questions that one dude with a python script can answer that they just don't really have the organizational capability to answer otherwise. It would be great if they could do this in house, but many times they can't, and almost always we don't leave until there's someone on their side who's been upskilled to do it going forward. I would recommend looking into it if you're on the ML side and don't care for FAANG.

edit: also fwiw, the marginal cost of a BA / ASC in the provided rate table in this article is $1.7M / year, not $3M.
> Similar performance to AMD and Nvidia in optimized games (tier 1 games)

Similar performance to AMD & Nvidia's lower midrange cards fwiw. Intel's top tier sku isn't aiming very high, only seems to be targeting something like the RTX 3060 (non-ti).

Fine enough place to start, but not exactly the most exciting thing even if the price turns out to be great.
I did it that way.

I was a couch potato until 30 or so.

Then I stopped using public transport and biked everywhere. I lived on a hill, so every time I got back I had to get back up again.

After a few years, I added swimming, because it cools you in the summer. Full body excercise and you don't even notice the sweat.

Later, I added lifting. Got me a home gym and went 2-3 times a week. Not having to leave the house for a dedicated workout really helped.
Converting methane to liquids would be more immediately practical. There was an article here about converting methane to methanol with atmospheric feed stocks and solar energy. My only gripe about methanol is that it is incredibly toxic. Perhaps they can adjust their tech to produce butane or propane.
I would think that's normal, because WW2 was 1939-1945, and even though it was waged there it didn't include events that would be considered a direct cause of millions starving in Europe. Which is why they didn't.

If you think WW2 was a major contributor to the Great Leap Forward deaths then just explain, rather than making oblique comments about how it's strange I didn't mention the thing that you're thinking of (but not mentioning).
> S'pore's private property second-most expensive in the world

> Singapore’s average property price is US$874,372 (S$1,183,375), with an average price of US$1,063 (S$1,439) per square foot.

— https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/singapore-worlds-secon...
Huge quote to give context:

>> The GCC project is not shipping a modified version of rustc; instead, this project has recently approved a plan to merge an independently implemented compiler front-end for the Rust language. By Leighton's interpretation of the trademark policy, the GCC Rust compiler cannot actually be called a Rust compiler. Should this interpretation hold, GCC could end up claiming to compile a language called something like "Gust" or "Oxide" instead.

>> Mark Wielaard responded, though, that the concern was overwrought:

>> That looks to me as an overreaching interpretation of how to interpret a trademark. I notice you are the bug reporter. It would only apply if a product based on gcc with the gccrs frontend integrated would claim to be endorsed by the Rust Foundation by using the Rust wordmark. Just using the word rust doesn't trigger confusion about that. And trademarks don't apply when using common words to implement an interface or command line tool for compatibility with a programming language.
He also pointed out that the one-time GCC Java implementation never ran afoul of the Java trademark.

>> Unsurprisingly at this point, Leighton disagreed: "sorry, Mark, you're still misunderstanding, on multiple levels and in so many ways i am having a hard time tracking them all". The conversation did not improve from there until David Edelsohn said (in an apparently private message quoted by Leighton) that the issues raised would be given "due consideration" and that any problem found would be addressed. That, evidently, was the wording that Leighton wanted to hear.

>> In the short term, there is probably little danger of a "Gust" solution; as was pointed out in the discussion, the Rust Foundation has long been aware of the GCC work and has never raised any concerns about it. That could change at some future point, though, especially if the GCC Rust compiler implements a different version of the language, perhaps with extensions that have not been approved for official Rust™.

>> If GCC Rust were to be successful enough to cause the Rust Foundation to fear loss of control over the language, the results could be bad for everybody involved. It will take some time before GCC Rust can catch up to rustc, though, if it ever does, so this is not an immediate concern.

===================

The Rust language needs a standard and soon.

If Rust is not standardized, it is only a matter of time before it is forked and fragmented.

If GCC Rust becomes Gust or something else, the different name would likely accelerate forking ("it's not called Rust, so it can do things differently than Rust").

The other risk for forking is that a large corporation using Rust wants changes that the current implementors disagree with.

Facebook / Meta did this with PHP to create Hack (https://hacklang.org/).

If something similar happened it could seriously undermine Rust.
So happy to see this back. This used to live on hginit.com. After it disappeared I had refer friends to the archived site via archive.org.

I suppose its is a less dated version of Vi vs emacs, I just found Mercurial to be easier to use.
Does that thing have a name? I am speaking to a group of executives at a local institution about this specifically at their organization next week, and can't come up with a snappy name for that.
Lol. Is that you Croce?

If you bankroll false data and your career benefits from them, you’re culpable.
Couldn't agree more.

I know a number of older/retired people who are in good health into their 70s and 80s. None of them "do exercise" in the sense of going to the gym, but all of them do sports/activity of some form and keep moving. They all walk places rather than taking the car (they have the time) and they do things like biking long distances with friends or playing tennis or badminton. If you're like one I know (84) you walk two miles each way to play badminton with your friends.

Sure there are health benefits, but they all do these things because of the intrinsic enjoyment and satisfaction.

Once my health is good enough to start running again I'll get back to running 20-30km a week, not for the health benefits, but because I get enjoyment from running in the countyside with a podcast on. I run because I love running. I walk a lot because I love to walk and more.

I want to be fit so I can run and walk, rather than the other way round, and I think that's the best long-term way to stay fit an healthy.
See also Matt Bierner's HAMT impl in JavaScript: https://blog.mattbierner.com/hash-array-mapped-tries-in-java...
That show has my favorite quote from all of tv. It best describes how I felt discovering mosaic and the web…

“When I was five, my mother took me to the city. And we went through the Holland Tunnel, and it was basic. Concrete and steel. But it was also my excitement sitting in the backseat, wondering when it was going to be our turn to emerge. It was the explosion of sunlight. And when we exited the tunnel, all of Manhattan was laid out before us. And that was the best part of the trip the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending. This is the first Web browser,” -Joe MacMillan (played by Lee Pace)
So, is it really depression or just demoralization?

https://newint.org/columns/essays/2016/04/01/psycho-spiritua...
Pfizer and Flynn fined for overcharging NHS for life-saving epilepsy drug
My city only approves high-rise and medium density developments next to major streets, leaving the insides of major blocks entirely to single family homes and occasional townhouses. Just your typical NIMBY asshole land.

There's a recently built 9 storey building at one of the busiest intersections in the city. If you look at the rental ads, it's all luxury finish, shiny appliances, modern kitchens with marble this and oak that. Personally, I'd much rather live in a dated or even run down apartment in a quiet street than in this "luxury" where I can't open the windows and can hear traffic even with them closed.
Yup, he's already said they're planning to publish extended write-ups.

I imagine it'll be something along the lines of ServeTheHome but with wider topics.
I’ve heard of these!

The fly.io blog has a really cool write-up about them.

Definitely an under appreciated concept.

IIUC, you can even validate the “sub issued” macaroons offline, provided you know the validity of one of its ancestors up the chain. Is this correct, or am I misunderstanding?
This is clever, otherwise you have to coordinate your cache setter and your async function call between potentially many concurrent calls. There are ways to do this coordination though, one implementation I've borrowed in practice in python is modes stampede decorator: https://github.com/ask/mode/blob/master/mode/utils/futures.p...
It has to do with economic pressures which make rural living harder and urban living easier. Inflation is one of those pressures.
All of the price changes in my retail purchases are meaningless when compared to price increases in land, healthcare, education, and taxes since I started working in mid 2000s for the location I lived / wanted to live in.

Daycare has more than doubled, $20k+/year increase for 2 kids, land is hundreds of thousands more. How much price changes have affected you are very dependent on what resources you were/are aiming to buy and who you are competing against to secure it.
Those are mostly HOT lanes - High Occupancy Toll. If you have the correct EZPass they are free with 3+ occupants. The toll is for drivers with less than 3 occupants who are willing to pay the premium, which scales with traffic and has a "soft limit" of $1.50/mile last I saw.
There is one bridge where it is 3+ here, and that’s really just because the traffic is much heavier. Carpool lanes aren’t designed for families at all, rather they are designed to discourage single occupancy commuters. That families get to use them is just a consequence that families drive in cars with multiple passengers.
>any party being in power for too long is a bad thing regardless of their politics

Indeed. I live in Wales, which has only ever been led by Welsh Labour. Since having our own devolved parliament in the late 90's, it's been Labour in charge.

As we've been talking about the state of healthcare, conditions here in Wales are much worse than the UK as a whole. This also happens to be true of practically every other form of governmental function.
Cats React to Stray Cats Game Compilation
Gosh, XKCD 927 is the most low effort comment that comes out every time sometimes tries to improve the state of things. I think there could be an argument for banning it entirely from Show HN threads.
See Steve Hanov's classic article on the topic: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=120
Because there’s no async fn on traits yet, almost all “async” traits are returning Pin<Box<dyn Future<Output=T>>> under the hood.

Same principle also applies if you’re trying to put a future in a struct (to create a named future). One of the fields will have more or less that type. This is useful for a few reasons (e.g. making it easy to refer to a specific future in type signatures or for writing futures out by hand).
I just finished a course on mindmaps that claims cognitive load was a factor as well as the backbone logic with concepts and details hanging off an example of higher learning in Bloom's taxonomy.

While there's something to be said about conceptual/abstract hierarchies merging (the prior learning effect is strong and can be exploited using curiosity and order control for what you're studying) I do think that with an appropriate theory, there is a universal conceptual schema that can be acquired. Many subjects are like learning a foreign language.

What I'm getting at is the difference between trundling through any particular piece of content and responding/learning based on a philosophical Worldview vs. the handy-dandy hierarchical list of the chapter headings and subtopics already laid out. It is an interesting question. Perhaps it depends on the type of content, and the end goal for learning the info.
The cynic in me wonders how much personal data is being harvested by these private companies with the PRC's blessing. The occasional high-profile smackdown could be a tactical way of hiding that agenda.
The effort required to reproduce a result, especially an exotic one, is often prohibitive. The reward for successful reproduction is near zero, and if you fail, it’s often absolutely zero - you are not going to be able to contest a result by a failure. The original authors can simply say that your reproduction was flawed, if they need to answer at all.

A journal that requires five confirmations to cite a work is a journal that will fast have zero submissions.

The main reason people attempt reproduction is to continue that line of research, and that often starts with reproduction plus a slight tweak. This is why you find a lot of papers like this. This is also how irreproducible results become sort of known about but not challenged in many fields.
MIzerable 6astards
> One of her biggest fears is that she’s only gotten jobs because she’s a woman and not because she’s talented.

I don't know how reassuring this is, but on the flip side there's often a lot of opportunity and positive conditioning that a man will get, which will help them land a job ultimately because they're a man. I suppose the idea is to try to balance that out, although it's understandable for a woman not to feel like they're being evaluated appropriately.
I am still not understanding the purpose of this as I believe it is grounded on the wrong assumption.

Pretty much every single asynchronous operation other than some `Promise.resolve(foo)` where foo is a static value can fail. Reading from the file system, calling an api, connecting to some database, etc.

If the original promise fails you're gonna return a cached failure.

Mind you, I'm not stating this might be completely useless, but at the end of the day you will be forced to add code logic to check all of those asynchronous computation results which will eventually outweight the cost of only saving the resolved data.
Most Singaporeans are in subsidized housing only the wealthy buy property, i think its something like 80% of all housing is public in singapore.
The Rust mentality seems to be, "move fast, break things". The language features, and rustc itself, change so fast that a rustc released 3 months ago can't compile code written by someone of the Rust mentality written today.
> A better calculator language

https://calca.io/
I bought one back before Google bought the company, because it seemed like a well-designed product with a good UI. In addition to the problems you mentioned, it was constantly updating its firmware. That sometimes bricked the device temporarily and sometimes it changed the UI so I had to relearn how to use the device. One update removed the ability to manually set "away" mode. I finally wised up and reset the thing so it couldn't attach to my wifi any more. Which made the app useless of course.

Then it became clear the thermostat wasn't getting enough power from my 2-wire thermostat transformer and that made it even flakier. I finally threw it away and replaced it with a $20 dumb thermostat, which will still be working fine after the zombie apocalypse. No more Nest products for me.
Yeah, people think of the children. I'm pro encryption, but sneering at people for "thinking of the children" isn't going to convince anyone.
SSBs are awesome (I bought one), especially for us computer touchers. Doing proper squats with a SSB requires a lot of thoracic extension which helps counteract the bunching we do all day. Thoracic mobility tends to suck in desk-bound people and it can contribute to a host of mobility issues throughout the rest of the body.
Randomizing Alexa Responses with APL-A
Learn how to create a more natural experience for your Alexa skill users by using APL-A to vary how Alexa responds.
I quite like Bits About Money: https://bam.kalzumeus.com/

As someone who knows very little about the finance sector I find the posts very understable and informative.
Somewhat straddling pure cs and cryptography/coding theory: one of my absolute favorites: Merkle tree. It's used for easily confirming the integrity of data. E.g. a filesystem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree
Immortal Game – The next generation of chess platform powered by blockchain
3+ digital outputs, preferably passive and preferably one slot (though many compromises have to be made).

6600 costs about $350 where I live, which is quite steep considering it's only purpose is to serve 2D and very basic 3D editing. Especially considering you'd also need a more capable/expensive card for the VM (at least for my usecase) .

Compared to A380 with 4 digital outputs which costs less than $200, it has the potential to be an extremely attractive linux card.
Totally agree. Motivation is fickle so it really cannot be relied on. There are many ways to be active. Even if you do want to "go to the gym" there are ways to make it easier - so you need less motivation - and more enjoyable so it is a positive experience.
That being said, a trainer can help get you to a specific goal extremely well, and help you kick start the "get to a point of liking it" stage.
> Ocean's 11 was cool and unique,

It might have been cool, but it wasn't "unique." It was the second one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean%27s_11
French Nuclear Outages Risk Making Europe’s Gas Crisis Worse
Not an individual blog, but if your reader supports creating a folder of feeds from an OPML file and you're happy to then edit it down to the ones that you find useful then https://engblogs.s3.amazonaws.com/engblogs.opml has around 500 feeds in the software development and devtools space.

https://github.com/simevidas/web-dev-feeds/blob/master/feeds... is another good one more about frontend development that I'm currently trying.