skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this felt like the apex of the post facebook/zynga monetise everything always online era

ea have always ridden trends mercilessly. and ms with its bungled launch of always online xbox. the hubris of those executives is a staggering in hindsight.
> The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers, rather than on the client…for a single player game.

As I understand it, this wasn't the case, and the claims that it was were primarily bullshit to justify requiring always-online access for DRM purposes.
Ah, that's the interesting bit: the actual simulation was 100% local. Networking was actually only required for region play, and I don't think it even communicates in real-time; just occasionally syncs certain variables between cities.

The always online requirement was just a form of DRM, and wasn't actually necessary for the game. EA even patched in an official offline mode in 2014.
Hey HN,

I made a simple tool for creating custom map styles for Google Maps.

You can of course already make custom styles with Google's Cloud Style Editor — but I've always felt it's a bit intimidating. I think the interface could be simplified.

(Here's a screenshot of Google's Style Editor for reference: https://share.cleanshot.com/VR76WYSd)

Stylist is a simple but hopefully useful alternative to Google's Style Editor. I tried to whittle down all the options to the 20% that 80% of users need.

This is something I've been hacking on in my evenings. I wrote it in jQuery and Jekyll cause I have very modest programming skills. Please don't make fun of me haha.

It's a pretty glaring omission that there is currently no way to save styles for future editing. Hopefully the tool is still interesting (and maybe even useful).

The tool has a marketing angle: it's meant to support a startup I co-founded (https://www.atlistmaps.com). The idea is people might create styles and then be interested in using them with our tool.
They were arguably professionals.
Practical solution: just use all ones instead.
I don't disagree that there might be a class issue involved esp in UK workplaces, but there is also this mystery that it seems like everyone knows that the big consultancies fail to deliver much more often than than they succeed by everyone except for the people in management with the budgets to hire these people.

They are parasites on both the private sector, public sectors, and even government policy development. I actually suspect its corruption more than classism.

I am speaking as someone that used to be one of those pink face graduates behind the expensive suits that was horrified at how hollowed out so many of our publically traded companies and government are.
> [routing] is the most basic task for Linux computer...

WTF?
Hello I come from a country where a university education is free and the government will support your living costs while you are a student. In that setting, we have too many people in high school and not enough in vocational school (and the local high school is way more academically ambitious than American high school seems to be).

The way our societies & industries still function, too many highly educated people is not the end goal. There's still a long road to grow the percentage of "information workers", especially roles needing higher education, and frankly all that seems to mean is that you outsource all manufacturing to other countries -- I think we've seen lately that wasn't the greatest idea.
I guess I have to take the test again. My old job had our types in the description of our team slack channel. I just remember being one of three extroverts on a team of 12.

But the way this person describes things is how I am precisely, when it comes to discussion on philosophy, politics, and so on. Debatable topics.

Slightly less so when I already know something or we are in a design/brainstorming session, I am more assertive.

I'm skeptical of the emphasis on the alphabet sorter.

Then again I see you have responded to some similar criticism of it below so I'll try to remember to read it when I'm not supposed to be managing a project.
The Adams dynasty? The first two incumbent presidents to lose an election?
I played SimCity 2013 a few months after launch, and I quite liked it, especially the gorgeous visuals.

I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors.

Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.

Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.

Add to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining".

It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game.

EDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only.
> When SimCity launched on March 6, it required players to maintain an active online connection to the game's servers. If that connection dropped, they'd be booted from the game.

SimCity, at it's core, is an offline single player game. EA really fucked this one up.

Also EA already had the reputation of ruining every franchise they bought.

The series lives on through Theotown and City Skylines.
Same. I think the article's title lays it out well. "Amazon's Big Dreams". Amazon wanted to do a specific set of things w/ Alexa and they've found that the market doesn't want any of that. I'll never buy something through my Alexa, for example.

What it could/should have been is the end cap for the Amazon brand in homes. A loss leader itself, but a constant reminder of the value of the company and the desire to keep spending money there due to the convenience it provides.

What the article makes it sound like they want is something more tangible. Something that quantitatively generates direct ROI. They'll never get that, or rather, that number will never add up to one that justifies Alexa's existence.
Omron doesn't offer an $80 PLC with gpio that runs python and can directly integrate with your ERP and other software like REST / SQL that anyone could teach themselves if they know python. If it takes two months to create a fully developed local, customized visual build out and assembly accounting software stack that also interfaces with torque sensors and serialization like this one, why is that any kind of a loss? How is integrating a pi with other systems any less valuable of a skill that isn't applicable across other sides of the business, compared to the very narrow task of integrating slow moving PLC hardware that has clunky ass proprietary software most of the time?

I don't know if you've worked in industry, but companies actually won't invest in their local employee to get trained on 'industry standard' automation hardware. They contract that out. So you have no one on site who knows how anything works, half the time. The choices are often "pay s ton and have all the traditional investment of time in a contractor setting up PLC hardware and finding external software integrators to do all the other actual useful stuff you want, or just don't do the project because all of that is expensive and resource intensive."
I'm pretty sure the subtext here is that thinking slower means thinking higher quality thoughts.

I'm pretty skeptical of this. In fact, I'd wager that what the author is actually doing is not revealing his thoughts quickly. There's nothing wrong with being shy or reserved, but let's not jump to neurodivergent superpowers just yet.
> [..] some professions and disciplines are far more likely to produce pretentious ivory towers than others, that I have a problem with. Typically and ironically imo it is stronger in the soft sciences than the hard.

Plenty of pretentiousness among the software crowd as well apparently.
> Ah, that's the interesting bit: the actual simulation was 100% local. Networking was actually only required for region play, and I don't think it even communicates in real-time; just occasionally syncs certain variables between cities.

I think you're right, but the misconception comes from the fact that EA actively played up the fact that they were doing work "in the cloud", to make it seem more powerful and advanced of a simulation (and to justify their reliance on the always-on network DRM).
Does anybody else have trouble with the way Mastodon organizes their conversations? It isn't just a straightforward branching thread. I think. I'm not sure. Maybe it's the app I'm using (tusky). It's just hard. Or maybe it's hard to do branching threads ui in the screen space of a phone. I don't know. Reddit and hacker news seem to handle it okay
Samsung Electronics to Make Its Own CPUs for Smartphones
And worst of all is when someone emojis your message, the flow to remove that notification is different. You cannot just select the chat and it clears it.
Another explanation could be that African mega-fauna evolved in close proximity to hominids, making them less susceptible to the pressures of being over-hunted. That could by why Eurasian, American and Australian mega-fauna went extinct shortly after the arrival of humans whereas they survived in Africa.
> take back control on how engineers run the applications locally.

How to piss off engineers in one statement. Developer machines are not something for you to “have control” over.
Humans are innately imaginative outside of the bounds of reality. Most people I know believe in things that aren't real, whether it be crystals, chakras, essential oils, random mythologies about random things.

Most interestingly, these are generally weak beliefs strongly held. You'll never convince these people that they've divorced themselves from reality, and you have nearly nothing to gain from trying.

Psychologists, doctors, lawyers, sitting congresspeople, etc. This isn't something that Facebook moms have a monopoly on.

We are really bad at recognizing our own flights of fancy (and, of course, recognizing what we're really bad at).
There is a lot of that sentiment on corporate fora ( which includes linkedin ). The general spirit is condescending and words used tend to include keywords like 'entitlements'. It makes me think its a coordinated propaganda effort.

I am actually debating starting a project tracking this ( I almost did at the beginning of pandemic after the ridiculous 'commute is your zen time' messaging ).
I personally believe that the SImCity version of multiplayer could have been impressively successful had it not supplanted everything else in the game. I like the idea of building cities that somehow interact with the cities my friends build, or whatever everyone else is doing. I like the idea of a game that asynchronously "breaks the meta". It just has to be a good SimCity game first and then have that stuff layered on top. SimCity 2013 was never a good SimCity game to begin with.
It is definitely a pc but if you don't treat it as a console and start selling newer upgraded versions, it will soon be dead as a platform. It is not machine you can swap the GPU or the motherboard or upgrade the memory at will and pc game developers / companies mostly don't give a fuck about people who aren't using something at least close to the greatest and fastest unless it is a highly sold platform.
So what about a search engine that penalises ads heavily? Would that not be interesting to companies like Wikipedia or Apple that don't need ads to survive?
Sounds to me like such a search engine could gain market share rapidly. Is there such a search engine already out there?
I'm with you. Those standards still make sense to me; don't need to think twice or stress about it.
AI May Help Detect Alzheimer's Disease from Routine Brain Imaging Tests
As long as you have some days in office for everybody it may work, but it should not be done in this way that some people are working from home, and some are working from office. Long before COVID (~8 years before ;-)) we had situation where one our colleague was in office only on Mondays, and big part of team was WFH on Friday and sometimes even Thursday & Friday, so best collaboration was on Monday, little worse on Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday almost nothing was happening
Hypothetically, if the voice detection and parsing were superhuman - what capabilities does that enable which the device currently lacks?

Voice control is a miserable interface, and there are few applications which I would endeavor to use it. Time, weather, math, and maybe a trivial fact queried from Wikipedia.
It's not actually the top comment; HN puts new comments at the top for a few minutes to give them a chance to shine in case it has the information needed to actually dethrone the most upvoted comment.
The Third Browser War
I think the Microsoft's one may have been based on Clarity Boost[1] rather than Chromium's VpSuperResolution since there's still no AMD implementation in Chromium[0], but Edge VSR does support AMD cards.

A fun anecdote here is that VpSuperResolution was actually added to Chromium by Intel back in April 2022[2], citing Clarity Boost as an inspiration. It works with iGPU, but it was never enabled by default. Nvidia's patch came much later in Sep 2022[3] but enabled by default with a driver-level trigger (rather than enable behind a feature flag like Intel).

[0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/ui/g...

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/edge/features/clarity-boost?...

[2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=131838...

[3]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136831...
Most physical labour (construction, but also work in harbours etc) just doesn't work this way. Perhaps that's not a healthy work environment, but if it is the only way you can earn the money that feeds you and perhaps your family why does that matter?
Correlation between the model scale and the quality of long text generation?
Most of the game worked perfectly fine offline with a minor hack released shortly after the game came out.

There were some game journalists muddying the waters with some assumptions about it back then, which can make it difficult to get an accurate retroactive historical context today.
> It’s always best to help people avoid errors. When an error message is necessary, it should appear as close to the problem as possible, avoid blame, and be clear about what someone can do to fix it.

Try designing with the idea in mind that the user will never see an error. First, instead of coming at it from the point of view "the user made an error", start from "the program was not useable enough". Much like a door with handle that cannot be pulled, but must be pushed, a program with a UI that appears to allow an action but really doesn't, the issue is not the person's fault. Respond to failures to complete the action the user attempted with alternates. Imagine how frustrating it would be if you went to buy coffee and the person working there simply said, "no, you've made an error" when you tried to order something they're out of. You'd right avoid doing business there ever again.
Recently, I conducted a few fine-tuning experiments on a multitask instruction dataset on 1b7 LLM, primarily related to open-ended long story generation. However, it was observed that after generating nearly 300 tokens, the quality of the generated text started to decline, becoming less fluent.

I am curious to know if there exists a relationship between the scale of the model and the quality of long text generation. For example, is it possible to achieve fluent long text after generating a certain number of tokens for models like 1b7?
I hope so. If the SEC completely change everything they're doing that would be for the best.

Specifically, they should stop pretending to regulate people they don't actually regulate (like FTX). And stop randomly banning things they are meant to be regulating (like Kraken Staking). Right now, they are BOTH punishing good actors and giving credibility to bad ones.
[ title: You have been inactive for a while ]

[ dialog: To help keep your account secure, you will be signed out in approximately 1 minute. ]

[ button: Keep me signed in] [ button: Sign out ]

[ maybe a link: Why am I seeing this? ]
"If a society does a good job of providing housing then 100% of housing should be affordable."

This can never be true, it's a mathematical impossibility.

Housing is not equal. There are always preferred units. A skyscraper will have a side with a better view, people will prefer to live near the top rather than the bottom, people will prefer bigger units with better amenities, etc. It's impossible to solve this by "providing housing" because no matter how much you build it cannot solve the issue of relative value.

So no, housing cannot ever be 100% affordable under any kind of market economy system. People with money will always be able to out-bid people without. People will always be able to construct homes which are better than others -- and this is a very good thing!
It’s well known that the US government outsourced psyops to China! Because, uh, you see, there are these lizard people…
ActivityPub is designed to be interoperable, and even today mastodon is far from the only implementation. So forking is not really so big deal here.
He also has a video for the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-oLBOL0rDE
The model weights aren’t that big, even compressed with the best algorithm possible.

For such an obscure game I would guess it came up with the rules. It’s difficult to prove though.
They need to make the ads and relevant HTML look identical to "real" posts so adblocking doesn't work
So is your "actual" ads spend in addition to the $5K that goes to the agency as their fees? Or does $5K include ad spend (money paid to google etc)
He could have been trying to evaluate how many public domain papers it wasn't sharing access to at the time, which would have required a collection of the database. Would also have explained why he wasn't trying to hide his behavior.

He would have succeeded if he was just wanting to deaddrop all the data in a bin, probably without getting caught.
A friend of mine was an SDM for something like Alexa grocery ordering, a few years ago.

I remember him saying that the additional revenue generated by what they did couldn't pay for even a single developer on their team. And it wasn't going anywhere. But hey, management want it to exist so they're all getting paid to do it.

Meanwhile, my part of the company at the time (Fulfillment) had projects with 7, 8, maybe even 9 figure savings estimated and we just couldn't find the developers for it because all the new hires were sucked into the Alexa org.

I'm glad they're cutting their losses, but Amazon ought to have done it five years ago when it was clear this was never going to earn them additional revenue.
> which shouldn't be too hard to do tbh.

If so, should not be too hard to reply to this comment outlining the related workflow, prompts, etc.
I like getting Alexa devices as Christmas gifts because it gives me the instant joy of throwing it into the trash.
The truth is that products are made to make money for the business first and meet customer need/wants second.

For the dishwasher example, most dishwashers are far too noisy. Unless you live in a large place with many rooms, it will matter. The problem is that quiet isn't a highly visible/marketable and cheaply made feature, so isn't prioritized. After purchase, many would want a quieter dishwasher but very few will bother to uninstall/return/exchange it.
> The always online requirement was just a form of DRM

We can only hope that every app/game that adopts this policy dies an excruciating financial death.
The alternative would have been "good developers, bad project managers", which would have been too brutal. Someone had to figure out the infra requirements, and it could only be someone with knowledge of the volume of preorders. That's not going to be developers, but rather someone in the corporate hierarchy.

I think the article is extremely charitable. They could have named every exec who made the call on the key features that brought about disaster (forcefully turning a solo game into a multiplayer one, underestimating requirements, etc etc) and instead they just said "EA", effectively absolving everyone but "the man".
"We only want to hire lucky people, so our hiring council only looked at your resume if everyone flipped a coin and all landed heads"
I know. So it's just a creeping suspicion. But the "need a different translator" still doesn't help. Because of the same reason the first one didn't help. Unless the person knows the semantics of the program, and not just the domain and the languages involved, we can't be sure they are making the right translation. It doesn't matter how many translators you throw at it (or how many tools). The closest thing would be to simply sit down with translators+developers and go through it. But that's also prohibitively expensive for specialist software (I.e. software where the number of languages times the number of translated texts is easily 100x the total number of users).
City skylines has more than filled this gap imho. Great community. You should check it out if you haven’t yet.
And yet, they seem to have managed to accomplish a solution which works well for them. Well done, them.

Isn't this supposed to be 'hacker' news?
Discord should be publishing chat logs in HTML format, like how FreeNode did for their IRC logs.
You should add your Matrix to your contact page.

Edit: Also, is there going to be another der* release this year? They and therefore you have taught me more than I'd learned in the last five years otherwise.
Fork wars seem likely for any open and distributed network project. Although the value of a network is directly proportional to the number of people on it, so one fork tends to dominate and subsume resources from the others until they become a husk hobbling along. This chaos isn't necessarily bad, it's just the nature of a network that has no centralized, controlling authority to settle disputes. It's one of the tradeoffs you take when deciding to avoid centralization.

It's still early enough that fork wars in Mastadon seem likely, and would take years to settle. When the first bitcoin fork happened, bitcoin cash, happened in 2017, it peaked at a value of about 25% of the main chain. Today it's value is about 0.5% of the main chain and it is effectively irrelevant.