skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: An example of how A/B testing ruined everything
On paper the idea is so simple, try out new things and if they improve the product great, if not, undo them. You iteratively and gradually keep getting better. But I always felt in my gut it was wrong, and now I've an example to share:

Fortnite!

When it got popular around 2018, I got really into it and saw the progression of it getting "better"!

EPIC, the company who made fortnite, started to listen to gamers and it ruined the game. Game is pretty hard, it's not just a shooter game, it has building mechanics - you can build walls to protect yourself... an average good player (https://youtu.be/ajM4OifohOk?t=42), (the really good players are playing at 240hz and you can't even see all the moves in 60hz youtube video.)

I wanted a practice mode, they made it.

I wanted they'd give us unlimited resources to practice, they made it so. I wished they'd give us a way to edit map, they did.... and more.

Game mechanics are hard so it makes sense to have a way for players to practice.

Every time me and my friends cheered, but we couldn't see far ahead.

Game went from fun/somewhat challenging/social hangout time to toxic/grifting type of place. Where only people who spent 5+ hours, not playing, practicing could even survive. To have fun in a game you need to be at least little good. But practice mode and full freedom in it made it so that the only way to have fun was to live a unfulfilling life overall as you'd be dedicating every walking hour on practice.

The whole culture within the game changed, before if you got challenged, you would accept it openly and fight and have good time, after "improvements" people would hide and sit in corners for 15 minutes at a time, only to die. Because now fighting meant you could run into someone who has been practicing 8+ hours daily and has no life.

In 1 year the difference between good and bad player became so wide they had to introduce tiered matching. It tracks how you are doing and if you keep doing better you are put into lobbies consisting of generally better players. This made even worst, if you do start to win, then you get placed with people who 100/100 no-life practice mode habitants - the more you played the less fun it'd get.

A/B testing would have always given a signal that things are getting better, up until a year later, when everything started to go down hill. i.e. Practice mode = engagement++++ week over week!
org-mode already has this. Unfortunately, people seem to continue to use the inferior version of org known as Markdown. It is somewhat like how pdf overtook the superior format djvu.
Indeed, the relevant term-in-law is "market power."
Looking for a driven,tech co-founder
Hey everyone.
The rise of tik-tok and instagram,facebook and snapchat copying tik tok are everyday news.
Some context :
https://tinyurl.com/54ed988n
https://tinyurl.com/4kkj3ae8
Well you have to do whatever it takes to make sure that users are occupied and they don't leave you.

But the social media has become influencer media. Literally everyone is an influencer and playing the great online game. Now we know much more about the Kardashians than we know about our friends. And instead of talking to friends, we talk to strangers on Omegle (which is kind of fun). But we can't make strong relationships with that.

How many of you have best friends whom you can trust blindly ( like Joey and Chandler ) ? Not many I guess. what started as a way to find friends and deepen the friendship faded with the lore of being an influencer.
And guess we are going in full circle here. Just like everything else.
There is a rise of dummy-phone , record sales of vinyl cassettes and cycles.

So I guess there will be a return to friendster and myspace. And we can kind of see that. With the rise of BeReal and Locket which tells you to share your true life with your friends. But it's kind of boring tbh.

Instagram rose because of the filters which made everyone a "good" photographer. Tik-tok rose because it's an entertainment cheetos. Short , crisp , interesting videos.
I looked into this a couple of times for an urban-ish lot with an overgrown backyard. (I don't have a green thumb!). There were several services in my area, including the awesomely-named Rent-a-ruminant.

Unfortunately, for smaller lots, it just isn't feasible - the way the pricing is structured, the setup fees get you. They are really for multi-acre lots where they set up significant fencing and leave the goats for several days.
I mean, doctors clearly know better, but they Continue to smoke at a higher rate than the regular population...
It will eventually double. Canada’s 7%pa seems high to me, but so it seems to be. Mind, homes are much bigger, more energy efficient, better finishes. I think reasonable home appreciation should be close to the inflation rate. Or better, wage increases.

But, yah, even then it eventually doubles. Look up “Rule of 77” for an explanation.
Autonomous Reputation System
I can just say I hope I'd be able to opt out of this
I think he has a point there. If he did not pay for, it may be an even trade.

You'd just have to compare the cost per acre per month of machine maintenance vs the cost to maintain a well fed flock for a month; including land costs and property taxes if you own the land.
And the barrier of 32 ETH.

I run one of the eth validator serious for LIDO. We have 10 validator keys for testnet (prater/goerli now just Goerli) and around 1000 for mainnet ethereum on the beacon chain (which will be the consensus chain post mainnet merge).
> People have spent thousands of aggregate hours in CRUD that I've built doing jobs to support themselves and their families. It's the little affordances that make systems reliable, effective and maybe even kinda fun to use as an end user.

Agree with all you said, but this really hit home. It’s incredibly fulfilling to see and work with people spending thousands of hours in your app while your team continually improve it.
Lol, the reason the phone number is used as an identifier is because because it's a pain to have more than 1 or 2. It's an anti spam measure not a technology problem. You can key a database by anything unique. Icq used chronological numbers for fuck sake. Blockchain doesn't solve anything here.
A look back at Vim, a text editor through the ages
You're providing network access. Layer 3. IP. HTTP(S) is at layer 5; has nothing to do with your service.

Nor does Fastly. Serious, WTF does a CDN have to do with being an ISP?

> they have a lot of bandwidth at their disposal.

You think Level3/Lumen/Centurylink and Verizon don't? They certainly allow UDP.

Besides, who are you going to DOS using a cellular uplink?
"Impersonate"
King county does, I’m sure Clark county is more reasonable.
I think you’re right. There are problem and actions taken, but no discussion of how those actions paid off other than a couple of pictures showing good will.

This had good parts to it, but it feels like the sum of its parts was less than the whole.
Those Blu-rays and cartridges on my shelf are most likely going to outlast any digital storefront that these platforms have.

(Luckily none of them are for the Xbox, since Xbox doesn't give a shit about game preservation even if you have the physical media.)
Agreed - seemed like some interesting stuff, but not well written. Needs a quality editor and a few more drafts.
"clear" clears scrollback on my machine. alacritty + zsh on arch linux.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/business/dealbook/gps-dev...

If you pay cash, you probably can't be 100% sure there isn't one, but it would still be illegal for them to do this. Otherwise, when you loan/lease the car, it's legal for the dealer to put a tracker on 'their own car'/do it as required by the bank ('their own car' or a car they have a 100% value lien on, for those of you in lien states).

Via the article, the FTC was supposedly probing these to determine 'if the availability of car loans outweighed the privacy issues', but nothing came of it (which is why i'm not hopeful for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32426633 ).
I was under the impression that using markdown to create html webpages was a common use case, and had been solved. Was I wrong?

(I've used markdown for note taking, not for web pages, hence am asking.)
I think you're are looking at this with a very narrow lens.

a) GM can remotely disable the car if the subscription isn't paid. So likelihood of abandonment is minimal.

b) more importantly, this takes $1500 off the sticker price, making GM cars more appealing when compared to Ford, BMW, etc. People who don't buy a GM car don't buy OnStar subscriptions at all... so just increasing the volume of subscriptions is the most important metric

c) 3 years/$1500 is just the minimum. People who have paid for 3 years are likely to keep paying in year 4, 5 and beyond. Totally different reaction than just starting a new monthly payment in month 37. And GM can add new features as upcharges to increase those payments in future years.

d) GM can use the recurring subscription creatively to roll owners into a new GM car. Think family plans where the 2nd sub costs less, or a % of future subscription payments are credited against the cost of a new vehicle.
Especially given that in practice, such a law would mean that anyone who claims to be below a certain income threshold can cheat on their taxes and it's illegal for anyone to look into.
> What happens when the next group of RV dwellers show up?

Build more housing and give it to them.

> Isn’t it reasonable to expect your homeless population to backfill with other RV dwellers looking for the same?

Yes, but there's only about 500,000 homeless people in America. It would not quite double the city population. (Last I checked we were around 800,000.)

Park Merced alone could hold thousands more families if we converted the garden apartments and townhomes to towers, although that wouldn't be the only option. The entire Sunset District is almost all single-family homes. SF is a young city, there is lots of room.

> It sounds so wasteful to buy such expensive real estate, lose property tax revenue, and assume perpetual maintenance costs just to house a fraction of the homeless you could elsewhere.

Perhaps, but compare that to the opportunity cost to society of keeping all those families living in RVs. That's the real waste, eh?

Give them homes, let their kids grow up in stable homes, check back in three generations, eh?
Using New Tech to Investigate Old Photographs
When Fireflies Await a Night That Never Comes
JS and Python are my primary languages. I've toyed around with Rust, and it is pretty cool. There were a number of nice moments where I was surprised with how much it felt like I was writing high-level code. However, the overall learning curve is huge, especially if one is mostly used to garbage-collection (like me).

If you are doing web stuff, I'm sure Rust can be used effectively. But it is non-trivial and there are serious tradeoffs (learning curve, lack of ecosystem for web, hiring, etc). Teams would be better off sticking with python or JS for most web projects. Some perf-heavy backend or infra projects could possibly benefit from Rust, but otherwise it doesn't seem like the best choice to me.

It is definitely a cool language that seems to be gaining serious momentum. Could be fun to mess around with.
They (Tesla) now design materials with ML. So it's more optimization than innovation. I think ML combined with FEMM analysis can also be used to optimize motors. It might turn out a model that it too costly to manufacture but why not try it?

Anyway, I hope Robert Samsone uses FEMM analysis to design his motor. It will definity help him build less prototypes.
Which is exactly where I would focus if I was making a product. I’m so sick to death of these awful “free” services. I can’t be the only one.
We do have flying cars.
If DuckDuckGo really wants to beat Google, they could start by fixing the way the minus sign works in their searches. For example, if I type "cats -dogs" I don't want the first five result I get back to be all about dogs. This is the single biggest reason I ditched DuckDuckGo for Brave Search.
Relevant primer: Humans need not apply (2014) [1]

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
I use DDG 100% of the time and maybe 5%-10% after I have to add !g to get better results.

But maybe 1%-2% of the time I find DDG's results seem utterly unrelated to what I was looking for, like it randomly rolled a dice. I do mean completely unrelated. It's not a big deal but it certainly is a puzzle.
I was under the same impression as well. I have been using https://docusaurus.io/ for some time now and I am very happy with it and I am pretty sure there are other tools out there as well.
I have a very large number of eBooks on my computer that I can read.
Google Circles was a good concept but I presume poorly implemented. Facebook fails outside the school/university environment because most people do not want their private social lives to be public, and the start of Facebook was limited to young people.

LinkedIn is what the adult version of a social media would be, because most people are happy to share some aspect of their professional life to the public, and professional life is usually fake and a mirage.
OP is suggesting premaking such devices in large enough quantities that you'd just rely on them for the foreseeable future to run that legacy code.
It's outstanding for reading and annotating technical books in PDF format.
Same service OP is talking about? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32434474
Twitter Without the Home Timeline
You had me at goat rentals!
def totally_random():
return 42

In seriousness, solana’s proof of history is a super novel take ontop of proof of stake to solve this problem.

https://solana.com/news/proof-of-history
org mode is for cli nerds.
Why? Perhaps only add people you know and trust IRL, or have some other sort of reputation system.
> Some people say it's almost as hard firing someone as being fired.

Yeah but then they retire to their yacht to have their concierge bring them a double of Pappy Van Winkle and a Cuban cigar while they catch up on the polo match results.
Also, goats deal really well with sloped areas that machines and people struggle with.

Where I live they get used a lot on highway embankments.
Hi, less than 48 hours ago you had a "Show HN".

Your claim "we don't learn which eSIM your phone gets" is false. The eSIM update protocol, which is implemented in firmware which you do not control, will send you (the carrier) the eSIM's permanent ID (the EID), and you can't stop this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416373

Moreover, you provide no protection whatsoever against IMEI tracking, which all carriers implement. IMEIs are reported to the carrier immediately after authentication/attach (AKA), and many will block invalid/unexpected IMEIs. You can't prevent this. Without a solution to IMEI tracking your work on IMSI tracking isn't much use. This won't protect anybody from the telcos. At best it might stop people using a stingray without assistance from the telco (i.e. almost nobody). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416308
thats a lot of llamas playing basketball to see in a day
How did he do? Offhand it seems like using VBA would be a super power
For me DDG was as useless as Google: they both ignore my keywords whenever they feel like it.

I've sponsored search.marginalia.nu a few months (it is awesome for what it is and sometimes gave me better results than Google/Bing/DDG) and now I am a paid Kagi customer.

Yes, they too sometimes ignore quoted keywords, but they treat it like a bug when I report it.
> I suspect that that what really ate up personal social networking was very simple: private group messaging finally got good enough.

Which was achieved by WeChat since 10 years ago. It's something to think about that why are we so behind technologically.
It was ABSOLUTELY wonderful to have Firebug back in 2006/7 timeframe. I really enjoyed using it and looking at the DOM and whatnot!
What?? Could you go a little deeper into the complex numbers thing, it sounds so nutty.
Site reputation score could be factored in.
Xiaomi v Tesla.. FIGHT!
Previously, previously, previously, previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20hacking%20of%20Starlink%...
An oracle is a totally sensible approach for certain use cases, see the VRF support in chain link as an example:

https://blog.chain.link/verifiable-random-function-vrf/
> the bloke who is obviously not a snowflake, that posted a frigging swastika made from lbgtq+ flags should just suck it as a real man and just go to jail without complaining like a wimp

In other words, you're perfectly ok with persecuting some people, so it's not persecution you have a problem with, just persecution of people you feel shouldn't be persecuted. Got it.

> adults should be behaving more like adults and realise their actions have consequences other than not having Christmas presents.

Certainly. I have already said, multiple times now in this thread (though not all in response to you), that this bloke should certainly expect consequences such as other people saying how much of an asshole he is. But that doesn't mean he should go to jail.

> Just enjoy it while it lasts because that is the very thing that is just gone the moment that so called minor tweet repost swastika gets in effect.

So you honestly think that if this guy isn't arrested and jailed for his tweet, it's the start of a slippery slope to a new Nazi society? You appear to be ignorant of how the actual Nazis came to power. Hint: it wasn't by saying things that were offensive and having people just shrug and go about their business and not arresting them.
> Who’s getting their [vacant] house taken by the state to give to somebody else,

The simple answer is, volunteers first and if that's not enough we can do a lottery. That's just off the top of my head.

> and who’s paying to subsidize the rent?

US Government. We'll take it out of the defense budget. In the interests of National Security and all that.

I really don't think it's that crazy of an idea. The details would be messy but we could house everyone overnight if we really wanted to.
Americans became flaky long ago. I just made reservations at a veterinarian and a restaurant. Today they both called me on the day before the appointment to make sure I would be there. My doctors are threatening fairly substantial penalties (say, around $75) for missing appointments, a practice of which I approve heartily.
Yes, this is true.

I this Microsoft is going to struggle to persuade courts that Sony has the market power to exclude them from the computer gaming market though.
Goatscaping
It's a well-written story but like other comments are noting there's not an explicit message
Don't forget Hissp!
How do you know Gmail is doing nothing to stop it?
It's not hard to arrange these days, if one really cares. I have a local mirror of Debian main + contrib + non-free packages, source + i386 + amd64 for every package. It's 200 Gb - a $20 SD card can handle that. How many copies would you need to make for at least one to last N years?
> IIRC changing the IMEI in the U.S. is legal.

This is incorrect. Changing your IMEI it is illegal in the USA under the Wireless Telephone Protection Act of 1998:

"Amends the Federal criminal code to prohibit knowingly using, producing, trafficking in, having control or custody of, or possessing hardware or software knowing that it has been configured to insert or modify telecommunication identifying information associated with or contained in a telecommunications instrument"

https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/senate-bill/493
Haskell can use brackets, people just don't.
That’s way too much effort to use a search engine. I’m very technical, and I don’t see myself being interested at all - forget mainstream users…
Corporate Wikipedia Experts (2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32421641
A common approach is staking pools, which incentivize decentralization for the greater good of the network.

One of the largest ones for eth and several other chains ($7B TVL) is LIDO, of which I’m an eth mainnet and testnet validator node operator. They distribute stake over many high quality validators and have very rigorous operational guidelines to ensure high quality operators only are allowed. I’m not shilling for LIDO but they are a very professional and well ran DAO that truly cares about what’s they’re doing.

One of the cool things they do is liquid staking. In most PoS networks, your funds are locked during a given time boundary, generally referred to as an Epoch. You start staking at an epoch beginning and can not access funds until the beginning of the next epoch. Validators are rewarded for reliably and securely (no double signing!) performing their task via staking rewards. Staking rewards are quite akin to inflation in more traditional monetary systems.
I am hesitant to give it a try. Mostly use sphinx and .rst - docusaurus looks nice but also overengineered.

Is it a lot to set up or is it just markdown all the way and works out of the box?
Yeah, I found this out the hard way when "i386" distributions in fact supported 486+.
Even if it's never used commercially, this is still so cool. He made his own synchronous reluctance motor! That's super fun!
For those curious, 32ETH is between $1-3k USD depending on where you're temporarily located within the last 6 months, currently ~1.8k.
> [...] Vim creator Bill Joy told [...]

Yeah, no. Bill created the one true vi, and vim is Bram Moolenaar's much extended implementation of it, another implementation being elvis.

Sorry but if an article can't get even the most basic facts right, I'm out.
Yes, that's funny. How's the early teenage years going? I kind of worry about that time..
On a side note: wondering why the Starlink maritime coverage link [1] has made it to the homepage, but the hacking stuff never did.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32426281
>Typically the state will have one rate, the county can have its own rate, the city its own rate, and potentially even special districts with their own sales tax rates.

There's a simple solution to this: stop doing this. Ban cities and districts from having their own sales taxes. There's no reason to allow this. In my country, there's a single national sales tax that's the same everywhere.

The US's problems are a result of its own stupid decisions.
You're a right libertarian, no? Something worth bearing in mind, because a left-libertarian answer to many questions - especially those pertaining to property rights - is likely to be fundamentally different.
The way that Docker Desktop integrates is just one extra step away from `podman machine init`, since Docker Desktop just does the same socket relaying stuff for your existing WSL distros as it does for Windows. The actual Docker daemon only runs on the special distro that the tool (Docker Desktop or `podman machine` or whatever) sets up.

I assume that Podman Desktop does that but idk because I don't use it. Rancher Desktop also works this same way.

In all cases, the integration with existing distros happens inside the GUI app. Maybe I'll check tomorrow whether Podman Desktop offers comparable integration.

But yeah, it's a good integration to have because the native Windows CLI experience is still so impractical and clunky that many developers end up setting up a pet distro in WSL and pretty much living in it as their default terminal session. Good integration with cmd.exe or (pwsh.exe running under Windows Terminal, for that matter) is cool but it doesn't mean much to someone who does all their work in an Ubuntu WSL VM or whatever.
Rumqttc v0.14.0 Released
rumqttc is a high level, easy to use client library that helps build applications which communicate over the MQTT protocol (commonly used in IoT devices). With this update we have been working towards making the client API a lot simpler and gradually improving/stabilizing v5 support.

Any form of constructive feedback is welcome.
I suspect the efficiency is low if they’re activated by heat. They give high “efficiency” number, but who knows what the denominator is. It’s paywalled.