skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not going to say anything really new here, but since I am living in US, I am going to cover American aspect. From my perspective, culture is to blame for this.

It does not matter what you do, but everyone expects an answer for anything yesterday. All sales are structured to pressure you into making a decision as soon as possible to prevent any kind of critical considerations ( on the off-chance you will come to your senses ). It is bad enough that when I am visiting doctors, they, too, try to structure their patients to a smallest window possible ( and I sure as fuck can't really process the information in seconds -- for numerous reasons including the obvious one: I don't have the medical background ).

The last straw for me was purchasing my new car with wife ( she was rushing me, because she just wanted it to be over with while I was going through the steps to see what I like, don't like, see reviews and so on ).

The whole culture is nuts and not helpful to anyone who thinks carefully about their next steps. For me, it took forever to simply say 'no, stop'. Granted, you can't always do that ( meetings likely being a good example, but it is not like a decision always has to be taken in those -- maybe it can be postponed if you think you can take the pressure of being 'that guy everyone waits on' ).
What ruins the voice assistant experience is that you can't be sloppy, you have to think it through before you utter "Alexa". It is not effortless
Why do I feel like this post is actually a marketing operation for kagi?
Concentrate on this form of solar power: CSP
On the one hand, I totally agree. On the other, the project as described is well within reach of a small team (1-5 people) of programmers that could pull it off in 3-12 months for under $100k (maybe even closer to $10k-$20k).

The way the guy was talking, it sounds like he had one of his employees who also happened to be studying CS whip up something that works while still paying base salary rates. If so, this means the owner got an insane deal by paying a full time programmer worth maybe $100k-$200k at a $30k rate.

In the end, I think you're right. The guy probably got an insane deal because he convinced one of his employees to do free labor. I do wish projects like that weren't so expensive. I'll also point out that for a savvy owner who has some technical experience, this is also a very feasible (relatively cheap) project.
> EA was looking to justify the time and money it had already spent on Quigley and Willmot's experiment

If true (the whole article is unsourced), that is a classic failure of undergrad business 101.
I'm also using Firefox for Android. For me, it's not flickering but there are lots of skipped frames on the initial scrolling animation.
Instead of making astroturfing harder you could also increase consequences for being caught and reward whistleblowers.

No company is going to risk posting without revealing that they are behind the post if doing so would result in - to make it extreme - jail time for the poster AND company leadership.

Ultimately, this is not really a technical problem but a social or legal one. As long as we let people get away with fraud - and let's be honest, astroturfing is fraud - then enterprising individuals will find ways around whatever technical means we put in place.
You can contribute far more to a 401k or Solo 401k if you're employed or self-employed, respectively.
Don't engage the troll, José.
Because that gives the game away of what the in-office people actually want.

Remote people want to work remotely. Full stop. If the only thing in-office people wanted was to work in an office it would be no issue — they have an office. But that’s not it, they want to be in an office and conduct meetings entirely in-person.

Wfh people are expressing a preference for where they work based on what makes sense for their life situation. In-office people are expressing a preference for how and where everyone works.

If I came into the office, put on headphones, only talked work things on Slack and called into all my meetings that were down the hall I suspect it wouldn’t count.
No flicker on Firefox desktop, but lots of unnecessary transitioning of elements into view while scrolling. I wish this kind of "wow the user" feature would go extinct.
Doesn't the list of cities with the most Iranians start 1) Tehran, 2) Los Angeles?
Yeah this was bad. The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers, rather than on the client…for a single player game.

I’m sure the development team knew everybody was going to hate that so it couldn’t have been a surprise.
Bun – A fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime
Well but this is my point. I don’t know the ratios resident/industrial for phosphates, it was an honest question. But for water, I do know the numbers. Indoor residential use isn’t even a rounding error. So why are Californians taking crappy showers with low flow showers when it doesn’t even make any difference?

If we really want to solve these problems and not just feel good about ourselves we should have a different set of policies.
HN perennial hit Kagi is good for this.
I have basically stopped using Alexa in my house. It started as a vision for an intelligent personal assistant, and what we ended up with is a glorified kitchen timer that reads out Amazon ads all day.

“By the way, sign up for Amazon music.”

“Tip your Amazon driver.”

No thanks.

I wish they had actually done something with the tech rather than promptly handing it over to the marketing team once it got some users. I’m trying to think of a single major improvement to the experience since it first launched a decade ago, but am coming up empty.
You can already use 2D networks, and they work pretty well, but there actually is a dearth of usable temporal video upscalers even though there are like 100+ papers on the subject.
Alternatively, you can trade them in.[1]

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/l/9187220011
^ this is some apologist bullshit right here. It will age poorly I assure you.
Maybe "Simcity (2013)" to be extra clear. After all, SimCity 2000 came out in like 1994. OTOH the ambiguous naming was intentional by EA. They faced the consequences for all the other bad decisions made around the game, so any confusion about the rebooted name is on them IMO.

But I'm more of a Cities:Skyline fan anyways-I'm glad the Maxis devs aren't too sour grapes about the competitor.
Strictly speaking, it's true, but when multiple games with the same name are released, it's convention to use the year for the newer one. (It's also generally convention to not use the year for the original one when the newer one is a remake of the older).

So SimCity (2013) would be the most expected way to refer to the game.
The pro WFH slack group is more than 20,000 people. These 700 just seem like a weird scapegoat to focus on.
In office yes, remotely not. Simply they are having a lot of problems, they can describe why this is a problem, they may miss Daily so there may not be an occasion to ask.
It is also much easier to be busy working from home. Much easier to say that someone spend last 2 hours answering on questions on Slack or similar, or on e-mails, or was waiting for answer from somebody else (very often they will ask question before lunch break).
In office team is doing self monitoring, remote it doesn't work so well.
Especially in case where most of companies pretend to work from office working from home.
This result is not meaningfully different from things that have been done with MRI 10 or so years ago. Why do you think it’s getting there? I see this field not moving forward in any meaningful way.
Yes, and the original SimCity was a wild success.
The Tesla price drop saga reminds me of when Michael Scott keeps dropping his paper prices when he makes his own company and the accountant finally has to tell him that he is pricing himself into bankruptcy.

https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Broke
I would love for Cities Skylines to implement some kind of multiplayer or online collaborative option.
>"By arbitrarily forcing return-to-office without providing data to support it and despite clear evidence that it is the wrong decision for employees, Amazon has failed its role as earth's best employer," one employee wrote, according to the report.

Both this and open floor plans were never about data. This is about control.
Nearly all employers, especially all of the oldest and largest will steadily pull their workforce back into offices where the bosses can satisfy their egos with the notion that seeing their people work makes them in charge. They don't just want to get things done. They want to see the buzzing activity of the office and feel like they are in control of it.

And this will happen in spite of any protests from the employees. By now most companies, especially tech companies, are well practiced at forcing undesired changes on large groups of people. They even have most of their customers actually paying to be spied on. Something no one would have accepted even 15 or so years ago.

So long as the company is arranged as a hierarchical power structure, this will be the way. That's the whole point of talk about things like "culture" as well.
The reader may take note that, between companies in a supply chain, there is no talk about or desire to control culture even though those companies clearly depend on each other to do their business at least as much as they depend on their respective employees.

Only within the company does anyone seek to control and define "culture". That is because setting company culture is means of controlling employee behavior. And it only applies to those who signed employee contracts. Consultants, general contractors, support staff, and vendors are almost always treated more as real and self-determinant humans than the employees the company leaders seek to control.

In short, your boss doesn't see you as a peer or as a fully capable rational agent. They see you as a ward under their care. This is a side effect of the power imbalance created by the structure of the company.

Isn't it strange that almost everyone on earth desires to live under a democracy more than a dictatorship but when it comes to the interactions that will dominate most of their days for most of their lives, somehow people are okay signing up to work under a dictatorship?

...And anyone still under the illusion that Amazon is or was ever earth's best employer might want to try talking to the delivery drivers and warehouse workers.
This thread is full of great discussion. Writing clearly can clearly be hard. It takes practice and skill.

This is why technology programs in schools require (or should require) technical writing courses. It might not seem important to know how to write for humans when you’re learning to write for machines, but writing for humans is one of the most important things you can learn, in any discipline.
I'd been looking forward to SC2013 for years and it was beyond disappointing.

I know I'm probably not a typical gamer in EA's eyes, but SC4 was such a solid release. It just needed playable regions (build multiple cities, join them together) and some more graphical polish. I'd buy that game in an instant.
I’m not at my home Obsidian vault, but now I’m curious if there is a way to make this work within the theme settings for Obsidian.

If anyone else gets to it before I do, let me know if it needs some reworking. I’ll post my findings in a reply to this comment once I have the ability!
A big part of the problem is that means testing is largely a waste of time. If you boost people based on income you end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to figure out where the income line should be. Even if you can find a good point to put that line, the "rich kids who just didn't test well enough" will sue because they think college admissions should be a meritocracy, and bossing anyone for any reasons is somehow descrimination. They recently won a significant court case with that exact logic.

My next statement will be controversial, and is largely anecdotal, but there is very little to no research that contradicts my opinion, so I'm going to say it anyway. Smart, capable people who simply "don't test well" are almost non-existent. Even if they did, you can't accurately identify who doesn't test well except by giving them a job and letting them prove they were capable when they aren't under testing pressure. I have met hundreds of people who claimed they simply didn't test well, and only one of them later proved it by being genuinely capable and competent.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this whole debate, is that it only really matters if you think it matters whether you went to one of the top 10 universities available to you. Frankly, most employers will throw out your application if it says Harvard School of Business. The number of management jobs that want Harvard graduates is less than half the graduating class, and Business majors have it easier than most of the engineering degrees in that respect. If you're an electrical engineer, there are fewer than 100 jobs Nation wide, and they are already occupied. If you want to be a civil engineer, straight up forget about it. The medical and legal schools are the only exception, and those are graduate schools only.

There is far too much focus on whether the top 10 university admissions are fair and equitable, and far too little focus on whether we have affordable universities that meet decent educational standards for everyone who could reasonably earn a useful degree.

We definitely shouldn't be trying to get rid of standardized tests. There are arguments that can be made about their content, especially historically, but they have merit in showing whether a student is ready for certain classes. At a normal university, they use SAT and ACT scores to decide if you can skip algebra and go straight to calculus, or if you need to take even more basic classes before algebra, and they do this for science and English courses as well. Having such a laser focus on how the top 10 or top 50 schools that actually turn away applicants because they're at capacity is a massive failure to see the actual big picture when it comes to education.
Surely if you have the knowledge and experience you can think relatively fast. If not then obviously you need time to research and form an opinion. Two different things.
There are a lot of recruiters messaging me for remote positions lately.
What kind of failures are you thinking of? Full scale human cloning for example hasn’t happened even though it’s been possible for decades.

Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC’s) are basically gone. Blinding lasers have actually been banned etc.

I’m honestly having trouble thinking of failures here.
I think that's part of the confusion. The title of the game released in 2013 was also "SimCity", not "Simcity 5" or "SimCity 2013"
The Difference Between Asynchronous and Multi-Threading
Who would have thought that Apple, a niche brand known to so few, would feel the need to use inclusive language? Mac? More like PC gone mad! /s
Well how would you fix Google's predicament? I think it's easy enough to conclude they're harming themselves, but what are their options?
+1 - it’s great for excellent people, it’s horrible for junior engineers, it’s bad for people who have trouble motivating themselves and keeping on task.

There is a decent % of people that do close to nothing while working remote. It’s not black and white, there are tradeoffs and it varies based on the person imo.
The Next Great Housing Crash?
Where can I learn more about this supercomputer and design tooling?
FWIW, the game is called simply SimCity, and the HN title is the same as the title on the article, so, no, not really. HN also tends to put dates on articles that aren't from the current year. If you're totally unfamiliar with the series, it doesn't matter. If you're a little familiar with the series (like me), then you know that the original was released more than a decade ago and pretty much defined the genre, so you know this isn't talking about the original game titled SimCity. If you're familiar with the series, then you know exactly what's being talked about.
Theres another way to view alexa. It is in 100m+ homes. Its limited right now due to the historical limits of NLP technology. But with the advent of LLMs, amazon has a chance to dramatically upgrade the capabilities of alexa, which is already in so many homes. A product that was too early, but may end up being able to capture the uptrend in AI.
Yeah Uber was acting irresponsibly and almost killed someone. Waymo is acting responsibly and is making progress without putting people in danger. Do you think Tesla is more like Waymo or Uber?
Max Headroom goes mainstream.

This tech will save the Murdochs, Sinclairs, every purveyor of infotainment, so much money. No more salaries for anchors. No more huge payouts to settle (sexual) harassment and descrimination lawsuits.

Agitprop like this will be automated, turnkey, ubiquitous:

Sinclair's Local News Anchors all Read Same Script
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

So much potential. These are exciting times for trolls and grifters.
I play SimCities since v1 and I awaited long this release. It was indeed beautifully designed and the gameplay was very fun and addictive.

Finally EA pushed the project too far and it imploded. Too bad, because Maxis didn’t reserve it.

I play sometimes Cities Skyline but - to me - CS misses the vibe of SimCity.
Answering quickly or thinking deeply first doesn't have much to do with intelligence, some smart people answer quickly and other thinks first. It mostly have to do with how much you care about being right, if you are deeply afraid of being wrong you will think a lot first before answering since you prefer spending all that energy over being wrong, while if you don't care you just answer now and think later.

Speaking before you think makes you look dumb, but it doesn't make you dumb. You see the difference? You might have met many such people who were smart, but that you identified as dumb since they weren't afraid of appearing dumb.
I will respond with a quote from an old movie that was a thinly veiled criticism of the communist system.

paraphrased:

A: Why can't we just let them choose where they want to live?
B: The issue is we want to live here and those that don't want to live here.

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

In other words, individual needs don't matter. Management clearly wants people back for one reason or another. The question is only whether 'wage junkies' will stick to their guns. I don't think I am being cynical here.
How Leaders Botch OKRs and Strategy
Overly detailed response but:

I have found that average number of hours played per day is negatively correlated with how laid-back the player is. Laidbackness is bimodal, in that lower skill and very high skill players tend to be laidback. A large amount of above average (but not excellent) players tend to play more hours per day, be more obsessive, less forgiving, and fairly judgemental of how other people play. I like to think of this as the Dunning-Kruger curve in action. We call these players "sweaties", because they are breaking a sweat and stressing over everything. Really great players don't stress, they just perform.
The problem is the genie is out of the bottle - unless in office is enforced and required 100% of the time it's still going to be Teams calls. Even before 2020 most of the meetings I were in, even if they were in person, had a teams call going at the same time because someone had to remote in.
Part of it is they don't want to renegotiate pay with the cast of a successful show so they cut them off before that becomes an issue.
I think if SimCity wasn't such a complete disaster, City Skylines wouldn't have taken off how it did. The big misstep I think they made is hinging the gameplay around multiplayer. While SimCity thought that collaboration would be done through "neighborhoods" and "resource sharing", City Skylines took the opposite approach and introduced collaboration through Steam Workshop.

The developers of SimCity should have realized that people don't play sim building games to play with others, it's a very much a solo game. City Skylines navigated this beutifully by letting players still play the game alone but also letting them collaborate through assets rather than through gameplay.
Anecdotal on my part, but there are many employees that are terrible working in the office. The more productive ones wear (wore?) headphones all day to try and maintain some level of productivity
We tried to replace our gas stove with an induction stove and failed miserably
I agree that "the window is very short" is not a great qualifier to downgrade severity with. Maybe if it required specific setup that was somehow hard to achieve, but "doing things fast" doesn't appear to fall under this qualifier. If I had to analyse this for a corporation I would have probably scored it higher as well.
(different person) I was seriously ill with covid. And yes I am vaccinated.
This is very polarizing and seems to be a cultural issue. Americans and westernized cultures are appalled at its selfishness, while many Asian cultures are accustomed to this totally normal and expected part of the closer family unit.
I don't see Chinese communist party buying Reddit stocks as proof against US government agencies using Reddit to influence the population, that's what I mean.
How do you protect/ensure the integrity of your par2 files?
AI Anxiety: Career concerns of the creative industries
Upon launch, I was of course disappointed with the state of the server and the online only nature of it. But the larger problem for why this game was a failure was the simple problem of way to little space to build a city. The whole concept of a few 1km x 1km city patches in a shared world to build in was flawed from the start. I want to build gigantic cities with elaborate public infrastructure and rivers full of sewage. Cities: Skylines simply was a much better fit for what makes the city building genre appealing.

I find it a bit shortsighted to center the blame for a boring game on its launch date debacle. Many other games with similar problems at launch became hits.
It’s more about selling someone’s attention than holding it. The best possible outcome for both websites and Google is for a user to click on on a website from search and then immediately click on an ad. To the extent you find the site useful and don’t need what’s being advertised, that’s a fail for both of them.
Has he though? If you read the headlines defiantly. If you read the follow up reports, no not so much.

Maybe I’m missing something though. Would you mind expanding what exactly you had in mind when writing this?
That's a fair point, and I think you're giving a good example of a certain context of established-expert wrt beginner and how to treat it.

FWIW, I had a friend indicate that because (tenured?) teaching positions are such high demand, that the available candidates can be significantly high caliber. So that might have played into why the math professor was adversarial initially.

The area I've found the depress-to-impress used was usually in peer contexts and didn't have any teachable outcomes, unfortunately. They're regurgitating material that they have better familiarity with, but probably unable to ad-lib off their "beat path".
Getting some heavy John Carpenter vibes with this Europa situation.
The Timeless Draw of Decorating Cookies
Arc's FP16 matrix throughput is actually quite good, way better than the AMD 6000 series.
Four years of running a membership program
We threw all these listening devices out the door. They're annoying and not very useful. This includes the Google ones too. We would use it to dim the lights or turn on the air conditioning, which is cool, but using your phone to do it is just as fast, and less error prone.
Another victim of the EA acquisition graveyard.