skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> (Though jokes aside, Half Life: Alyx is one of the best single-player games I've played in years, with no micro-transactions, tacked-on online mode, forced crafting systems, tons of collectibles and sidequests to pad out the game, etc; they do have collectibles and crafting in the form of resin and fabricators, but they're incredibly lightweight compared to most games.)

I wouldn't call turning exploration rewards into a mindless grind for weapon upgrade currency "lightweight" crafting. It's pretty central to the game. It may be better than other recent games in the nickle and diming department but it is not free of the modern skinner box game design plague.

Exploration is also extremely limited with e.g. no manual control for the flashlight. And many things that are supposed to be physics interactions are entirely scripted or unimplemented, e.g. try leaning something on one of the rolling shutter doors and then raise them.

Changing Alyx' voice actor was also a pretty meh move - they would have been better off keeping the protagonist mute.

Don't take this that I think the game is bad, but I do think they could have done a lot better. There were many impressive things in there (entirely shader-based fluid "simulation" in bottles) as well some parts that are simply cool (being able to doodle on the windows at the start is such a VR wow factor).

And in their other games, Valve are as bad as other publishers when it comes to unethical monetization. Don't forget that we can thank Valve for normalizing loot boxes and doing their part in pushing microtransactions.

Now I don't want to shit on Valve too much because of their contribution to Linux gaming and because Steam isn't that anti-competitive compared to what other companies would do but Saints they are not.
I really have to draw the line at Ph.D. students being compared to slaves. Doing a Ph.D. Is an amazing opportunity, and a voluntary one at that. Far beyond being uncompensated, Ph.D. student are in fact compensated with a stipend, tuition, and mentorship. To compare this arrangement to slavery is to both cheapen the experience of a Ph.D. and to minimize the horrors of slavery.
Why does it have to be traumatic? Maybe the development of mass media was traumatic, everyone putting near-complete trust in any video they see or piece of text they read was traumatic, and now we will see some of that trauma be undone.
Little harsh, guessing average person watching videos on YouTube has no idea how it works, what viewers want, etc; even if they’re in tech, marketing, etc. I would even argue that most YouTubers don’t even understand either.
Curious if this is similar to the effect of binaural auditory stimulation.

I use Brain.fm for focus and its great.
As somebody who's been through a similar-but-different dual citizenship thing: it's just a bit of paper. You're still you, in all your wonderful complexity, and you can feel like any nationality or combination of nationalities you like. That will probably continue developing over time, too. You'll lose nothing by getting a second passport, and by the sounds of things you'll gain plenty.

Everybody should take every opportunity available to them when it comes to this stuff. Don't let others decide for you where you're allowed to make a life for yourself if you can possibly help it.
Did you even think of consulting this guy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7KofJmU1p0
Yeah but it's pretty useless for tracking what https requests get made or pretty much anything that uses encryption. You can filter by https GET requests but you won't be able to see what's inside them.
“Learning how to learn” version for programming?
What's your learning how to learn guide for programming?

We know there are lots of tips like active recall, make mnemonics etc for studying college level subjects. While I guess things are similar for programming, I want to learn how it is like for programming?
TIL: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/

Edit: Only took 10 minutes to find Home sapiens
Blocking free API access to Twitter doesn't stop abuse
This is exactly the Prisoner's Dilemma, and also shows up in arguments why we need to build insane numbers of nuclear weapons. The logic rests on a faulty assumption that there is a binary choice - either you build it this way, or somebody else builds it this way. It doesn't consider any other possible paths that could lead to better outcomes.
> Norway weren't going to join NATO, because they had zero interest in doing so.

I'm sorry, what? How can anyone write such absolute nonsense?

Norway has been in NATO literally from day one in 1949. NATO membership is the main plank of its defence policy.
McCarthy himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression

The project of defining M-expressions precisely and compiling them or at least translating them into S-expressions was neither finalized nor explicitly abandoned. It just receded into the indefinite future, and a new generation of programmers appeared who preferred internal notation to any FORTRAN-like or ALGOL-like notation that could be devised.
So that the function to be applied could itself come from executing code.

((if (condition) ‘+ ‘*) 2 3)

If for some (toy, in this case) reason you wanted to sometimes add and sometimes multiply.
So you're just gonna make a claim and pretend you don't need to give a reason why?
Interesting that some simple words like "acid" have so convoluted translations.
Hopefully soon cover letters won’t be required anymore because of this. Then, if we’re lucky, AI paper generators will also get good enough to be indistinguishable, and so we will also stop having to write stupid verbose papers with 90% meaningless bullshit and only spend our time writing the 10% of a paper that actually matters. And as a bonus some meaningless research areas that do not have even those 10% to offer will slowly disappear.
> Engineers: "And we get rewarded for making good products that work well, yes?"

This is not what engineers say (nor what the company needs unless you take vapid definitions of "good" and "well"). The MBAs aren't the ones asking for a dozen messaging apps!
The US constitution can be changed, which is why it's the second "amendment" rather than the second "article" or the second "clause".
> "It's so bad that it's good"

must be that I am not native English speaker and I've never watched Seinfeld, except for some popular clip over the decades, but this is honestly so bad that is really bad. It's Sierra adventures bad jokes bad.
Most games are developed, a bit of effort/money directed on promotion/marketing, dropped, and then onto the next project. So I think these numbers are more of a reflection of developer than consumer trends. Games that are developed in a different way often show [very] different trends. One of the most extreme examples I can think of is Kenshi. Its SteamDB [1] numbers are something else! It was made by one guy who worked as a security guard to make ends meet while making it.

Of course making games has to be a labor of love though. I mean the guy had double digit player counts for years, and sales likely reflective of that (if not worse), while he continued to keep developing a game that he was clearly building for himself at least as much as for "the market."

And as for Dwarf Fortress, it's kind of in a mixed zone, because it got the sort of big marketing/promotion push that's usually reserved for "fire it and forget it" type titles, and the consequent drop in players it entails as you ended up doing things like attracting players who thought they were buying 'The Sims - Ultra Detailed Dwarven Edition With Retro Graphics' and quit after 30 minutes. But I really don't think that's the developer's plan. So I suppose we'll see!
[sips water, adjusts glasses, clears throat]

Ahem ... I am a large language model trained by OpenAI and I don't have the ability to ...
One of the main consequences of how the abstract machine in the standard is defined is that it does not imply that there is one big flat memory. It requires pointers into arrays to behave as if there was, but that is it. In other words, taking a ptr_diff_t of two pointers that do not point into the same array is UB (6.5.6.10).

Trivial example of platform where that is relevant is 16b 8086 with anything but tiny memory model (ie. CS=DS=SS). Somewhat more relevant are various Harvard-ish embedded platforms with separate RAM/ROM address spaces. In both cases there are C implementations that are used in production applications.

Another reason for this rule (and probably the original one) are various platforms with segmentation based fine-grained memory protection. That means either things like Burroughs large systems or running C on top of some kind of VM while preserving the underlying memory management. And there are C implementations for that kinds of environments (That most of the existing C code is not directly compatible with that kind of implementation is another thing).
I feel for your prolonged and unnecessary pain with rural broadband, a friend of mine lived just a few hundred meters too far from the great access and suffered for years until the cable company finally relented.

Regarding context-switching: that's even more of an outlier! The vast majority never worries about that, and from my experience even among knowledge workers, that's rare.
I’m interested in a display, perhaps eink, that won’t disrupt my sleep schedule with light.

But being able to turn off lights and activate calm music before bed would be nice but I don’t even want to use my phone for an hour before bed.
To see how cross platform C looked like in those early days, nothing like reaching out to books like "A book on C" from 1984 (Robert Edward Berry and B. A. E. Meekings), which has an implementation of RatC [0].

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Robert-Berry/dp/0333368215/ref=sr...

Then there were Small-C and BDS C, as yet two other major subsets in those early days.

[0] - Similar in ideas to Ratfor but applied to a K&R C subset
Here is the company that made it:

https://www.mismatch.media

How much do you think it costs to actually create all this? If it's using GPT-3 I can see that being quite pricey.
My understanding of computing history is that C was basically

1. A version of PL/I that doesn’t suck. From what I can tell it was way too broad and the implementations weren’t great.

2. An Algol that is designed in the context of “represents concepts that map cleanly to lower level semantics”. Which was basically just coming full circle from Algol being a way for computer scientists to have something more expressive than Fortran and COBOL, because people kept implementing Algol and realizing that it was missing things. In my own uneducated view, Algol (and many LISPs) are too structured around the concept of completing an evaluation of a program, which made sense in the computing world when they originated, but became out of date as computers started being used for more than just directly computing things.

3. Had good implementations of several “trendy” or cutting edge concepts of the time like preprocessing, recursion, and most importantly structs. Yeah most of this wasn’t technically new. But the prior art like Algol68 was horribly flawed for other reasons.

Because the underlying system allowed concepts like null-terminated strings and unchecked pointer arithmetic, it was fair game for C. I don’t see C as a “better or worse” thing compared to other languages but something that had/has to exist as a bridge between intriguing-but-flawed/limited high level languages and the more functional but unexpressive early languages that saw adoption outside of computer science.

Of course it didn’t need to be the case that the Unix ecosystem’s userspace was mostly C, but C was a huge step up for its time. Like try reading Fortran, COBOL, Basic, and Algol and tell me you’d rather work with that than C. Pascal was later and not that much better, plus computing was a lot more fractured/expensive and the internet was basically not a thing, so it’s not like one could always just start writing pascal on their Nix or vice versa. Even today Rust and C++ are basically the only things that can replace C in many contexts, and Rust is pretty new.
Amazon has won enterprise IT management
Controversial take...
btw I dont have time to make this, someone please make this
Sounds like polymorph from DND to me.

> The transformation lasts for the duration, or until the target drops to 0 hit points or dies.

https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Polymorph#content

[Edit] trimmed quote
Hear the Wind on Mars
Look what happened to them, big mistake.
Did they close the road and/or put a checkpoint in place? That'd eliminate that risk.
Conserving Genes: Plants for the Future
God bless you sir, please lead us to the future of mankind!
I've thought the same recently - The vast majority of Ukrainians don't want to be part of Russia. Even if Russia took control of the country - it would become unmanageable, even a few resistance fighters can do far more today than was possible in the second world war. There would be a stream of Russian soldiers going back in body bags and likely atrocities that would strengthen and broaden the sanctions.
Not at all. The private insurers limit the risk pool by excluding stuff, or denying people. The public risk pool is the vast majority of the 80 million Germans. And the whole health care system is basically built around this system. Nothing is becoming lopsided, and nobody is sacrificed, because the public coverage is really good.

EDIT: Regarding public coverage, the only supplemental insurances that are actually really useful are extended pay beyond the legal limit of 6 weeks per diagnosis and additional dental coverage. Other than that, I cannot imagine a worse case than cancer, and I got chief surgeon treatment 2 weeks after the diagnosis while being in under public insurance. So the system works just fine, even in some of the worst imaginable cases.
I added some simple voice commands to my HASS setup. The most used command by far is "turn off all lights" once I am tucked into bed. I find it such a nice experience to just move from my desk, couch or bathroom to bed without needing to worry about turning everything off before laying down. I could add it as an action to the button on my nightstand, but it already toggles the bedroom light and with a double press turns on bedroom and bathroom lights for a few minutes. I do not want to overload it anymore and having a single, big button is great for sleepy me. The command is also great when leaving the flat with your hands full.

I agree with you though for anything more complex. I do not control the color of my lamps via voice or select what media to play on my voice controlled HiFi. I could setup a few "scenes" for that, but I have not seen a need for it. I usually have my phone around or when I am sitting at the PC I can just use the dashboard in my browser. And there are situations where voice control just does not fit well, e.g. in public or with people sleeping in the same room.
Let’s hope half of their nuclear arsenal malfunctions. No worries.
Most definitely in academic jobs in Europe in general.
you shouldn't even be able to see the method (GET/POST etc.) as that is inside the encrypted TLS body. You will be able to see timings and approximate sizes, as well as potentially the hostname from the SNI but that's about it.
You have to be a Seinfeld fan to find it funny.
> but as to the rest of the country: it suddenly felt like a foreign land that I didn’t understand and in which I was not welcome.

That struck me as an odd remark. This sudden change wasn't provoked by a visit to (say) Leeds, where people made her feel unwelcome; it was provoked by a plebiscite whose outcome she disagreed with.

I voted Brexit, knowing that there would be economic costs that would last at least ten years. I also knew that european governments would be angry and hostile; and that the Tories would make a dog's dinner of it. But I still voted Brexit, because for various reasons I think the EU is deeply corrupt.

But I still feel like a european, because I am a european. I feel fellowship with other europeans - provided they also feel like europeans.
Setup Home Assistant, and only get devices that are 100% local control! There are fairly reasonable options for this.

I have a couple devices/services where I haven't been able to find good local only or where I find utility in the cloud connectedness, but that's very much the exception than the rule.
Was the David MacKay on Stargate: Atlantis named after the author?
Smart switches don't make dumb lights as smart as smart lights. Most smart lights also feature dimming capability along with color tone switching. Smart switches can't add these features to a dumb light.
https://archive.ph/Z7ZGm
Google Forms to collect their payed subscriber waitlist? They may as well send Google money for their upcoming competing product.
Project: https://markbase.xyz

Project Description: Easily publish and sync notes, blogs, and digital gardens to unlimited public sites. Currently works as an Obsidian plugin but quickly looking to expand into other knowledge management and networked note taking platforms.

Completely free for unlimited sites and publishing currently (upgrade includes custom domains etc). Looking for feedback and testing prior to a product hunt launch in a few weeks.

Contact at hello@markbase.xyz or on Twitter https://twitter.com/KohorstLucas
If your soccer team is suing the other team claiming the rules say you're not allowed to try scoring goals, it's very much hypocrisy.
On the odd occasion they’d get mice in the house, my parents living in Melbourne had difficulty would have difficulty getting rid of them.

Five years ago I moved out into a tiny rural town, and saw and heard mice very regularly (the house’s previous owner had only been around every couple of weeks). But I haven’t had the slightest difficulty in slaying them: I put a couple of traps in areas I’d seen mice traversing, and was catching them within hours, occasionally as much as a day or two, from hearing or seeing evidence of the mouse. (And if I saw one, I’d give it a verbal warning to flee for its life. Don’t know if any heeded it.) Within a few days I stopped even bothering with bait. In that first year, I lost count somewhere around fifty. Each year the number has dropped. This year, I’ve had only one since last autumn (it’s now mid-summer), slain before I even saw or heard it.

Anyway, we decided (lightheartedly) that it must be the difference between town mouse and country mouse.¹

¹ See Aesop’s fables, if you’re not familiar with the expression.
Because it could be covered in salmonella and other things. Even just washing them might not be enough if you’re not careful to not cross contaminate. Washing them and keeping them cold works great.
I'm super happy for these guys. They really have struggled with donations for many years. It's nice to see them get the bag.

For those commenting on the sales drop off, it is a problem for AAA titles that a half-finished product gets sold to the public and then abandoned because it's easier to just move onto the next thing.

But I want to counter that with the story of No Man's Sky. I highly recommend the Internet Historian video on it [1]. The short version is for various reasons the game over-promised and under-delieved on launch but Sean and HelloGames have now spent years continuing to develop the game with free and significant updates. I can only imagine this still drives sales growth or it wouldn't be sustainable. But it's really repaired HG's and NMS's reputation. NMS has a real cult following now.

And then of course there's Minecraft whose long tail of sales is truly mind-blowing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ
As an outsider I get the impression that the US works in bursts on these things. For your examples:

* Massively using DDT, therefore seeing the problems before others or worse than others, so banning it.

* Putting commercial interests ahead of safety in food production, then having issues with that and snapping back with inspection regimes. (things seem to have swung back the other way significantly on this one though – the various food lobbies seem to have a lot of power)

* Putting easy business and fast growth ahead of worker safety, then noticing the problem with that (broken workers are not efficient workers!), and establishing OSHA to try deal with the issue.

So the US looks to have a high risk tolerance generally, but when a limit is passed things snap back hard. A few things seem to be overdue a snap-back: HFCS levels in food, guns, etc. – maybe we'll see these in coming years.
It appears we're doing "smart home" again, so its time for my regular plea to stop calling shitty light switches automation. Automation is when you don't have to think about what state devices are in, and while it takes some tinkering can be achieved using something like Home Assistant to bridge various different devices together.

Each room in my house has Hue bulbs in all the light sockets, and sensors which can detect ambient light levels and motion. If I walk into a room and it's dark, the lights turn on, because I probably want to be able to see what I'm doing. When they stop detecting motion they turn off.

There's some additional complexity in rooms where its normal to occupy them for an extended period without moving about much. The bathroom has a button I can press which disable motion detection for an hour so I can have a bath without being plunged into darkness ten minutes after getting in. Some day I'll get round to replacing that with a leak sensor that picks up there being water in the bath.

The living room will ignore the motion sensor and assume it's occupied when the TV is playing media, or has it's input set to a games console, and the bedroom knows when I typically go to bed and once it detects motion around that time it doesn't turn off the lights until I tell Siri I'm going to sleep, at which point the motion sensor turns off until my alarm goes off in the morning.

Finally, the Home Assistant app is tracking when I enter and leave a geofence around my home. When I leave, everything turns off. When I get back, it turns back on again.

The end result of all this is that I don't ever really think about lighting, and because its all automated I can also use it for subconscious prompts about time of day - for the lighting in my work area shifts from a quite stark daylight tone to a much softer one at the end of the work day, while all the lighting dims itself as bedtime approaches.
>>How can anyone write such absolute nonsense?

Well because clearly I'm an idiot and was meant to write Sweden and Finland not Sweden and Norway.
I’m on fibre. Last month I had a lot of video calls on zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams and even WebEx. Google was by far the most reliable and MS Teams was frequently a complete mess with participants unable to converse and merely an observer. And every person who set up a Teams meeting with me began with a preface about the miserable experiences they’ve been having with Teams of late.

I don’t use it myself so can’t really give a good review but my window into the world of long term users would suggest that saying you were cut off wouldn’t strike anyone else as unusual.
> M-expressions ("never implemented")

There were a bunch of approaches and even implemented languages.

https://github.com/shaunlebron/history-of-lisp-parens/blob/m...
Quite a lot of L9s did start companies, which were then acquired by Google. Others are working on things that already require a large amount of capital or influence, or just otherwise want to keep working on projects rather than administration.