skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article is worded pretty badly, and is clearly written by someone who's had some things explained to them, and then have got a bit confused.

"Raytracing" is a bit of an overloaded term, but conventionally "Raytracing" for graphics meant a serious of "raycasting" events, and "Whitted" style was a technique which could approximate reflective and refractive materials fairly accurately (as long as you modelled the fresnel effect and absorption) in a recursive style. Modifications on top of this are also to do limited indirect rays for global illumination and this was used a bit (in film/CG VFX in hybrid renderers like PRMan pre 19), but doing global illumination this way was pretty slow and didn't scale well (an exponential branching factor at each bounce). So technically, the article is sort of correct on this point, as Pathtracing is more smart about how it handles the full rendering equation of "all" light transport simulation, and is faster than Raytracing for high fidelity (i.e. global illumination, area lights), due to its stochastic nature of sampling multiple dimensions of lights, surfaces, volumes, etc across many samples per pixel.

Pathtracing does take reflection and refraction into account, but generally (there's a technique called 'splitting', which sort of branches the paths to make it more like 'Whitted' raytracing, but ignore that for now) it relies on "importance sampling" to make smarter decisions, based off the material response (diffuse, glossy, reflective, refractive), which guides the direction of the next ray off the previous surface. This generally means that due to the "random" nature of pathtracing sampling (it uses monte carlo random sampling), predominant lighting is generally more efficient, although things like caustics, SSS and indirect illumination can still be very noisy as they're hard to sample and can take thousands of samples to resolve to "clean".

There are other techniques like Russian Roulette to kill particular paths which don't have much throughput and/or light contributions, which can speed up renders as well, and I think is what the "dumping most or all of the secondary ones doesn't affect things as much as one might think." part is referring to.
Ok, don’t care if I get downvoted for this.

WTF is Solid?

Would it hurt so much for people to include some sort of description of what something is when they apparently just outright steal an English word because they can’t think of a better name.

I’m not going to Google that out of principle.
Ask HN: How would you learn data science, if you were to start all over?
Not clear what you mean by “this specific example” given that your linked article is about DHS’s defunct Disinformation board and AFAIK this board never even became operational (and in any case hasn’t been mentioned in Twitter Files).

It seems to me rather that all these folks shocked to hear this stuff just haven’t been paying attention to either their high school civics course or to current events of the last 20 years.

You actually think the FBI doesn’t report content? Obviously they do.

You don’t think the FBI gets a privileged reporting line over newuser1848391? Obviously they do.

You don’t think Twitter regularly gets content moderation requests, from governments or elsewhere, that they simply decline? Obviously they do.

And you don’t think they sometimes get content moderation requests from governments or elsewhere that they oblige? Obviously they do.

Here’s a good overview of relevant case law: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...

Will you also be surprised to hear that almost all private companies can (and many will) simply choose to hand over your private data to the government upon warrantless request?
I'm amazed you're amazed. I use cutlery that's 150 years old, every day, tableware that's over 80 years old, even kitchen rags of the same age. My dryer is 20 years old and works fine.

I wear shoes, coats, sweaters that are over 15 years old. My main stereo system is 25 years old; even the Sonos components (that I hate) are over 15 years old and still work ok.

I kept a motorbike for 25 years, and then eventually it was stolen (which meant the thieves still found it interesting).

I don't understand why tech that works should be thrown out just because there's new tech. New tech has to offer incredible new possibilities to offset the hassle of change.

My main system runs Win7 on hardware that's 10-15 years old and it does everything. I also have a couple of laptops running Win10 and I have yet to find what they do better, except being annoying and "different" for the sake of it.
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?

Uh yeah, VR itself as a concept and models of VR have been live since the 80s but were especially hyped in the 90s but never went anywhere beyond amusement parks and arcades. And no one wanted to touch VR in the 00s despite huge leaps in processing power.

I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time, maybe because it was too expensive and too hard to upgrade. As a result, DOS and Windows and IBM clones took the PC market, despite coming later and initially being inferior.

Lots of such examples in history.
How’s the memory managed?
The Spawn of ChatGPT Will Try to Sell You Things
Your emails will just not get into the inboxes of major providers.
Will go to their spam folder for who knows how long.
For profit health insurance is IMO not pro social.
Former US President Donald Trump sells out NFT trading cards
Just five days ago OsmAnd 4.3 for Android with new faster rendering engine that uses OpenGL was released.

https://osmand.net/blog/osmand-android-4-3-released/#new-fas...
Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3
> The Onion was $5, ... the company appeared to be in pivot mode.

Oh, I see, they produce satirical news now
It’s the government not putting money into R&D across the board.

Oh and it’s ridiculously dangerous to the point everything around it must be super protected and over engineered.
windows 11 removed many of the previous keyboard shortcuts eg ms paint annoys me so much now the keyboard accessibility degraded badly in win 11

Microsofties: Please put them ALL back to match Windows10, acknowledge the heritage of the previous version, and the years of keyboard muscle memory now flushed down the drain

example, let me use the arrow keys again in popup dialogs (arrow left+right keys now do nothing... have to use the tab or shift tab or mouse in dialogs)
Well, since Elon is severely sleep-deprived and is a one-man censorship switchboard, he is now not running two of his three companies, and pro-actively destroying the third one.

And I am using the word "censorship" sarcastically because that's what the "freedom of speech absolutists" just love to use.
> In one part of their study, the researchers approached strangers and asked them to take a made-up survey. Half the respondents were given a pen and paper to fill out the form; the other half were handed an iPad. At the end of the exercise, respondents were asked if they wanted to give their email address to receive information on how to donate to a charity. Those who used paper were much likelier to provide their email addresses.

Forgive my ignorance, but what should this mean?
Fluent C (2022)
It may be possible to use conductive ink to place the necessary connective paths on the board to the inserted RAM.
a "simple" solution would be requiring companies to set up legal entities/subsidiaries into the countries they make above xx millions of revenue, getting taxed at the local level, keeping simultaneously things simple for small companies which may sell across borders.
It isn’t gatekeeping. “Orwellian” has a negative connotation. It is unreasonable to describe ordinary internal jargon as such.
Lots of crackheads get jobs on the boards of foreign energy firms, and lots of crackheads dads withhold a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the nation where their crackhead sons have these jobs unless they fire the prosecutor looking into their sons business. Total nothing burger. Another one for the big guy.
I think the truth is that VR is there. They've sold lots of headsets and people who love it, really love it. Expecting it to sell at iPhone levels was never going to happen.
The still images don’t do that toy enough justice. There’s a review video with Adam Savage, a former designer at Industrial Light & Magic:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ytI929g4puE
Except it's not clicking the report button. See the FBI could have a special agent assigned to clicking the report button instead of directly emailing Twitter asking for the removal of things that are in some cases obvious jokes.
Atari's branding is so epic and timeless, it'd be a shame to abandon it in the dustbin of the past. Glad they're doing something with it.
That’s why every company has adopted NISTs password guidance and those that refused had their CEOs thrown in prison.
I live in Ukraine, where yesterday the water (and central heating) was cut off due to missile strikes. But as a Muslim, we are religiously recommended to take a ritual bath on Friday. So I took a "shower" the way it was described in our medieval religious textbooks[1], from a store of cold bottled water, using a total of about 5 litres. Simply pour over oneself with a small jug, 3 times over the head, and a couple times over the right and left shoulder, thoroughly rubbing with one's hand over the entire body after each pour.

Though cold, it was extremely and thoroughly refreshing (and different from a simple cold shower). Highly recommend you try it once, the shower-from-a-small-bucket method, that campers and other outdoors people are used to when dealing with limited supplies of cold water. After it was over, I remember thinking to myself, this isn't too bad, I could live like this if I had to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghusl
WPF will be community run project
Were they? I stopped watching after not being able to bear the stuttering graphics anymore.
The emphasis on there being an FBI connection seems naive to me, as I had always assumed some gov agency coordination on some level, both in software and hardware companies. Furthermore their involvement does not sound that deep/frequent, some pointed out once a week on average, if viewed in context proportional to amount of users, both real and fake, this does not seem that large.
Thanks for the reference! Best write up I've seen so far on the topic.
And this is with then sucking eastern europe dry off almost all capable medical personnel.

Lets face it Western European healthcare is a scam. They are barely existing with millions of qualified people from CEE and now they are eyeing countries like Philippines, Indonesia and such.

It is all a ponzi
There are plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick before we get to reducing showering, one instance being home insulation.

Meanwhile in places with district heating water is commonly heated via combined heat and power plants, making the carbon point somewhat moot.

Of course in a fully-renewable scenario there would be no steam plant to provide heat, but here's where nuclear enters the picture.

As for water: food has orders of magnitude higher water requirements. Granted, it's not the same standard, but at the same time you can't just pour whatever on your crops. Some treatment is always required.

https://www.eniscuola.net/en/mediateca/water-footprint-of-fo...
> ""Whats the point in ${enormous amount of work others did for me for free} ...""

That is the least charitable interpretation of it, and I think not at all what it actually says.A much better reading of it is, paraphrased:

"The PCI-e patch is nice, but it would be a dealbreaker waiting on driver support."

"The drivers are open source and checked into the same tree, so there's no dealbreaker there in waiting for vendors or coordinating with third party organisations and their release schedules {and that's the point of desiring open source drivers, so the system isn't hobbled by binary blob drivers and vendor release schedules}".
Not exactly. More like a solo first time trip on 5 acid tabs going horribly wrong. It wasn’t meant to be a solo trip, but my ‘friends’ abandoned me. I tried to go outside because I was absolutely freaking out walking around a busy town, thinking I could distract myself. Then shit hit the fan even worse. It was a terrible trip, put it that way. So more like an extreme long lasting panic attack on top of visual hallucinations. I was 19 and dumb clearly masochistic!

Oh fun fact: When an ambulance was called and they basically dragged me into the hospital bed. As they injected me with adrenaline, that scene from Matrix happened to me as real as day (obv not tho) of when Neo touches the mirror and it goes up his arm and over him - I hallucinated that it was happening to me, watching the cold metalic liquid travelling up my arm. It was quite out there stuff!
Does anyone know of cheap touch screens to hook up to this. I feel a lot of cheap computers are available by now but the expensive pieces are displays which would 100X the value of these boards.
If you want someone to give you their email, give them a piece of paper and a pen and ask politely
I enjoy this as a friendly/elucidating discussion and don’t want to annoy or antagonize you (just don’t respond if I do).

I do appreciate your take on the original Macintosh.

VR has never been ahead of its time in that it’s never had a time. It still hasn’t made its way into any sort of popular acceptance. The gaming industry is the only space in which it has made significant strides. If VR circles back around to popular acceptance of something like Carmack’s vision (like the Mac has done with Job’s) your point will be valid.

As it stands, Carmack’s vision failed, and Meta continues to experiment and R&D with different directions. Carmack’s decision to leave more closely aligns with the ideas expressed in the comment that started this IMO.

I’m literally invested in Meta’s endeavors here. (FMET through Fidelity Investments.) The previous sentence is just communicating my bias that I think they have the right idea in the long run.
To re-paraphrase a common saying: Half the metrics I track are useless, the trouble is, I don't know which half.

Obviously for core business metrics there's a direct cost associated with measuring, validating, and maintaining access, but even for more technical metrics that's true.

The issue is, without a comprehensive metric collection and analysis system tracking multiple metrics, troubleshooting reduces down to a red light / green light level, which is not super useful. Is your site "down" because your uplink has gone offline, your servers, or is it your metric collection system throwing a false positive?

Same can be said for business metrics - is revenue down from customer acquisition, deal size, or orders per customer? If you don't track more metrics than the minimum, it's hard to tell.
I think the framing should be around what makes sense on a dashboard, not how many metrics total that the entire company (or whatever cohort) wants to collect.

A dashboard should not distract from what you're trying to do. It should show only the information you really need [1] so that you can focus on actually driving.

I worked at one company where we had so many signals on ours that it looked like the dash of a 747 [2] to me. Pilots go through a lot of training and tests to show that they understand those and how to respond to different scenarios! Software startups are a bit more seat-of-pants than that.

We can have dashboards for different purposes and roles, for different activities we want to drive. But the dashboards should focus on use. And if there are metrics that don't fit on any of the dashboards, they're not about driving anything - maybe consider scrapping them.

[1] https://www.pinterest.com/pin/58054282668632186/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/cockpits/comments/ayr4z7/boeing_747...
Can’t you just do the 3 finger side swipe to move between desktops?
I guess it also depends on the office structure, I'm very lucky that our team is just the right size for a single secretary who coordinates our calenders if we ask.

And mostly we coordinate with ourselves.
Meta already created a bot to play the game Diplomacy, including negotiating in natural language with the other players. Not only did the game end up in the top at a large tournament--none of the human players had any idea they were playing an AI.

There was one comic slip up, where the program first suggested to invade, only to later counsel against it. The human in question complained about the conflicting advise, but didn't realize he found a bug. And why would he?
Put another way:

Metrics are simply knowledge. But knowledge isn't power.

Understanding is Power.

That is, consuming the metrics dots isn't enough. The difference making comes from understanding the broader context, as well as the connections between the dots.

Believing in "Knowledge is power" is a trap.
> Why Do We Shower?

Get itchy fecal matter off behind & not have to mess with aiming bidet wand spraying maybe fecal water outside bowl or mess with a rag with fecal chunks.
If it was the ops intent, they mangled it to the point I'm not even sure.
I honestly expected "have you stayed Atari today?" to feature prominently.
Likely that the experience of the electrical survey was more aggravating than the pen-and-paper one.
This does not follow, in the same way that the existence of the police does not imply a slide towards a police state. The slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy.

Besides, at least around here they already ask for an ID if you look young enough, for some movies. This is not enabled by new technologies.
holy shit that duck animation is so good, it also teaches a bit on data collection and matching, love it
I never said I was shocked about it. The government and particularly agencies like the FBI have long engaged in illegal abuses of their power, ranging from illegal speech restrictions like this to the knowing legal persecution of innocent people to outright murder and blackmail.

Nor is it news to me that companies are increasingly voluntarily sharing vast amounts of data with the government, to the point that the surveillance state we feared has come to pass as a corporate-state partnership.

What I’m surprised about is the increasing number of people who see it as normal and acceptable, or choose to dismiss it as “oh, this has been happening.” Yeah, that doesn’t make it okay.
Arvind's making the case that the algorithm isn't particularly special and it's all about the system design which hooks users.

It's definitely true that a huge part of their user retention isn't some magical algorithm, but they have made some genuine algorithmic/training improvements which are interesting. They published their methodology a few months ago (https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07663), which wasn't referenced in the article (only an official blog post and a few reverse engineering attempts that I don't think are enough to conclude that their recommender is just run of the mill).
I donr use zoom much but it has a very intuitive UI - everything is easy to discover.

Meanwhile in TEAMS people dont know how to do things.

Recently I had a meeting that was supposed to be recorded, firsf nobody could record it; now the supplier side does not know how to share it as a downloadable file.

The Microsoft cloud experience is pure trash from productivity point of view.
> Musk has achieved great, incredible things. That’s just indisputable fact.

But I dispute that.

> the development of reusable rockets

Reusable rockets existed for almost exactly 25 years before the first SpaceX flight.

-----

A sense of perspective is always valuable in avoiding hyperbole.

Pasteur's invention of vaccination was a great thing. Walking on the Moon was an incredible thing.

Musk is some industrialist with a bunch of _promising_ projects, many of which are in trouble right about now.

Buying a car company and convincing rich people to buy shoddy electric cars, in part by lying about their capabilities, does not make you a Darwin or an Einstein. It doesn't even make you a Jimmy Carter (an underrated President in my opinion).

Once all the dust has settled, I expect Musk's story to be a cautionary tale and not an inspiration.
I don't think many people loved Jobs, and a good few hated him.

But unlike most narcissistic assholes he was unusually good at certain things [1]. And he could be persuaded to change his mind when he was dead wrong, at least some of the time.

So that made him tolerated.

[1] Finding good people, understanding that computing is about services and UX and not just boxes, and having a goal for commodity computing that was at least as aesthetic as technological.
The author seems to neglect that heat from the water like the water itself can and should be recycled.

Ideally, taking a hot bath or a long shower should just be a different form of heating your apartment or house. The same way your refrigerator or your kettle should contribute to the room temperature. If we then also generate heat with heatpumps or solar power (or both), I don't see any reason to not indulge in long showers.
Setting a reminder that’s visible the moment I wake up and see my phone has a better chance of reminding me than something I’ve written on paper.

But I personally use both. Paper is for ongoing goals I’m working towards since I’ll glance at it several times a day (unless I forget my notebook), but for events and so on, electronic reminders are a “do this now” sort of thing that I can’t accidentally miss because they’re so distracting.
Shocked to learn that it’s legal, not that it happens.

So long as there’s no coercion it’s completely legal. Not considered a controversial topic.

https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...

There are lots of dangers with this pattern but this is simply an extremely extremely poor case to try to take up the fight on.
A methodology or the methodology?
I wonder how his health is and what life looks like to 94 year old Tom Lehrer. It's sad that people grow old and die. His must surely have been a fascinating life. I hope he's still having fun.
Not only vodka, but any alcohol (at least at more prosperous times). And for a few reasons. 1. It's not a bribe if it's not money. 2. Liquidity: good luck converting your soviet rubles into anything useful.
Don't listen to him, he's not answering the question that was answered.

I'm sorry for your difficult situation. Phones killing attention span is real.
Yes, Perelman was by far the hardest to come up with, but I really wanted at least one contemporary name in there.
It's not a Ponzi, reality is western europe is not really rich, not as much as it seems. Debt is over the roof, demography is a disaster, politicians worse and worse every year passing, corruption even inside EU parliament. China is now much richer as a whole.
I'm working in a project with around 4000 people across 330 teams and quite a few different sites in a comm-heavy role - time blocks on the calendar to get work done can be a necessary survival tactic :-)
Now it all makes sense https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/5/8/15582580/atari-blade-...
More people use WhatsApp today than when it was purchased. “Quite a bit” is not how I’d describe it.
Interesting idea. How's it going to work with the large equipment, allow rain through, and affect soil temperature?