skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how much the fidelity of modern games hinders young people from breaking into computer programming.

Games are an amazing mechanism for learning because they can cover a gamut of computing issues in an interesting and motivating environment. The key to learning how to program (or, honestly, most anything) is to have a problem you're keenly interested in and trying to solve it. The "learning" becomes secondary to the problem solving.

My Dad learned programming (badly, wow was his stuff horrible!) through solving financial analysis questions. Kids, however, tend to not have "problems". But games are filled with them, and, done right, in a quick turnaround environment, they can be really fun, and quickly rewarding, to solve.

But, Back In They Day, LOTS of games were crummy, character or text based games. So most of the problem solving was not spent on assets, but just on the logic behind the game. As a student in high school with access to a PET computer, all I did was write games. When all you have is the, albeit robust, PETSCII graphic character set and a 40x24 display, you run into limits quickly (you should have seen my first forays into 3D programming).

But at the same time, the cosmetics cost "nothing". A few characters laid out on the screen. I had a submarine game with ships traveling across "rolling waves water", that, honestly, probably took 10m of coding to make it work.

Today, however, if you look out at most any game, well, the graphics are the graphics. 2D, 3D, etc. They're very involved. Even a web page today is (can be) a time consuming process of making it "look good" beyond simply generating the content for the page.

And I just wonder if that's acting as a barrier to entry for folks even wanting to try their hand at it. This "Alphabet" game, I can see that being very quick, even for a novice to make progress on with Visual Basic. A window is trivial, painting characters is straightforward, adding colors, etc. No worries about frame rates, double buffering, animated sprites, etc. Just clear the screen and stamp a letter (or letters) on it, and watch for a keystroke.

I know there are some child friendly environments that perhaps make this easier, but for teens that want to use a "real programming language", the step up can be quite steep. When your "Star Trek" game looks much like any other, its easy to focus on game play, logic, and "learn programming". When your "Star Trek" is made from E's, K's, and *'s and The Other One is full motion 3D models blasting glittering photons, you can see how for some, that can take the wind out of their sails to even start trying.
A better example is HTTP, which is text, but read by humans much less frequently.
Who makes their Jenkins instance world accessible!
That's true for fusion in general, but all the aneutronic designs look especially cheap to build, Helion's included.
Time to dust off my IRC client.
> All a robots.txt is is a polite request to please follow the rules in it, there is no "legal" agreement to follow those rules, only a moral imperative.

I don't know that this is true for the US. As far back as I can remember, there have been questions about whether a robots.txt file means you don't have permission to engage in those activities. The CFAA is one law that has repeatedly come up. See for example https://www.natlawreview.com/article/doj-revises-policy-cfaa...

It might be the case that there is nothing there legally, but I don't think I'd describe the actions of search engines as being driven by a moral imperative.
Drive to any supermarket and you'll see the same Canadian plates. They don't come all the way to the US for the food. South Florida is a vacation destination for Canadians; while a few may come for medical treatment, the vast majority come for the warm weather.
I’m no fan of the life of the author plus 70 years copyright regime we have today but the Brothers Grimm died roughly 70 years before Disney started making cartoons.

So that is still something possible to do in roughly 20 years.
> Trying to save up for the down payment on a house or a new car? Nope, that tax return we gave you expires in 3 months to force you to stimulate the economy. Bought a gun that was completely legal at the time, but the government has since decided you shouldn't have it? We have a record of you buying it, so we'll send the ATF to raid your house for it. Said something critical of the current president on social media? We've frozen all your money until we reeducate you.

As you mentioned, these scenarios would be theoretically possible currently with cash held in bank accounts—or, put differently, the vast majority of cash held by people. If government wanted to do these things, or alternatively, thought they could get away with them, why would we not already be seeing it?
Thanks, I had misremembered from the last Julia thread I read (thought it was the standard library that still had offset bugs).
Arguably worse than the house itself: owners who stay in precarious financial situations to pay off too much house. Yeah, it's their decision and they're probably learning a lesson, but...for what? Signaling to a select few people that they've made it? How is it worth the stress? Do they realize how time and effort they put into what is empty posturing?

Little wonder why some people's midlife crisis is explosive.
Through government funds, as other public works projects are. Or if people want to privately create their own, they can do so, as long as the results are open.
The guy that’s getting payed more than you because he cheated into a higher paying position is happy to have you believe that.
unfortunately this scan is missing some pages
> I find iMovie for Mac pretty useful, honestly.

Agreed, but only because comparable alternatives are even worse imo. Hopefully, one day Apple will nail it like they did with GarageBand, as GB used to be pretty meh as well not that long ago.
Show HN: Marketing software for solopreneurs who don't like marketing
Hey folks, I made 2Quiet2Market for busy solopreneurs who are "too quiet to market" what they build.

I've been building this since September 2022 because I am a software dev who likes to talk factually but doesn't enjoy to "pound the drum" and "toot the horn" to market my stuff.

On the other hand, if I don't market my stuff, people won't know about it and won't buy it. Bummer.

So what did I do to make life better for quiet or factual people like me who like to build stuff and want to make money with it?

I made a web-based app that helps you create your own habit for marketing. When people have a habit, they are more likely to do what needs to be done (marketing in this case).

The free plan of my SaaS contains these tools:

* Positioning blackboard

* Story Composer

* Experiment Designer

Positioning blackboards provide you with Lego-like building blocks to make your product look awesome and desirable. They clarify your marketing until you reach a story you want to tell that will make your customer buy.

Story Composer helps you create those stories step-by-step, and Experiment Designer lets you plan which stories to tell on which marketing channels, with a recipe on how to execute each marketing experiment.

Already with the Free plan, you can create your specific marketing playbook and turn it into a habit.

The Free plan allows you to have 1 project with 2 blackboards, and an "invite" feature to have a friend look at your stuff.

There are two paid plans as well:

- the Pro plan offers unlimited projects and blackboards, as well as an integration with the Todoist.com task management system. It automatically turns experiments into to-dos to get them done. And: The Pro plan also allows you to edit other people's stuff if they invite you to do so.

- the Advanced plan adds GPT to spice up the factual marketing copy from Story Composer, in order to make it more engaging for your audience.

Have fun, please try it out, and tell me whether you can use it to market your own stuff to the world.

It comes with interactive demos on its dashboard, and with comprehensive docs at https://2quiet2market.com/docs/

Cheers,
Matthias
I think their response has been pretty clear so far. They don't have a plan.

https://bard.google.com/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/01/tech/geoffrey-hinton-leaves-g...
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/13/google_lamda_sentient...
https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-real...
Doesn't it all just solve itself if you let the original data unused and mount the root of all those file servers through NFS?

You don't need the extreme of not running anything else on the server. You just need to not get it access to the original files.
is this a remote worldwide position?
Why do you care if other people buy mcmansions? The sorts of neighborhoods where they tend to crop up already have a million identical cookie cutter houses anyways.
I would argue that the problem with McMansions has less to do with their sheer size (though on the larger end, their size truly is ridiculous) and more to do with how badly utilized it all is.

One of these days I hope to be fortunate enough to design and build my own house, and so it's a subject I think about frequently. I'd like it to be a bit larger than average, but the allocation of space is determined almost entirely on practicality. So for example, rather than having a cavernous reception/living room and a dining room that's rarely used, the ground floor would have a small living room with the extra space instead going towards a kitchen with ample counterspace to do serious cooking in (something that's oddly skimped on not only in McMansions, but also more traditional houses) and a mudroom at the entrance so guests have a place to put their bags, coats, etc and have room to take their shoes off without stumbling over each other.

I suspect that there's demand for sizable, yet practically-designed houses like that but nobody's building them so people instead buy what is being built.
Isn't the typical McMansion people complain about $1M+?

That's definitely not text-book middle class - which would be closer to the median house - which is less than half that price.

There's not many places you're getting a 4 bedroom clown-house with a clown pool and 5 clown-y bathrooms and a 3-car clown garage for your 3 clown cars for $450k. And if you are, there's very few places this is a new-ish build.

Most of the places you're getting something like this - it's like a 20+ year-old home in Montgomery Alabama or Akron Ohio or something... And usually this was once a nice house that someone renovated in the style of a clown for the McMansion buyer...

You're either considering the average suburban home a McMansion or you think the top 10% is middle class.

In fairness, both of these are common conceptions - but I think they're both worth critiquing.
unfortunately this scan of kahan's chapter is missing some pages
As someone who prefers to focus on the product, post GDPR, here are some technologies which are just safer to not have, even on a non-ad-driven website, unless you like spending time arguing with lawyers and bureaucrats:

1. Analytics

2. Third-party resources

3. CDNs

4. DDOS protection services

What else am I missing?
I suspect city-wide we all pay for each others policing to varied degrees.
Bear in mind that Helion's reactor is 50MW, about the size of three large wind turbines. If it works they'll be mass-producing them in factories and shipping them by rail, and they'll have a declining cost curve just like anything else.
> Not all plans fall under this regulation.

No, but it's a small number. Approximately 13% of people with employer-provided plans have grandfathered plans[0]. That number is also steadily decreasing over time.

That's specifically looking at people who get their insurance through their own employer, so the denominator doesn't include, for example, people on Medicare or Medicaid.

The 80% claims rule doesn't apply to every individual plan, but it's widespread enough that it drives the overall structure of how insurance companies operate these days. They're not optimizing their organizational workflow for plans which comprise a tiny - and shrinking - fraction of their revenue.

[0] https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2019-section-13-gran...
I don’t think we should give fingerprinting scripts another bit of entropy.
> technological progress depends on people having incentives to contribute

Does it? That stands in stark contrast to open source in general, where people contribute without any monetary incentives.
"One of the pioneers of AI, Eliezer Yudkowsky, claims ..."

I don't think I've laughed this hard in a while. And then I stopped reading because holy shit, I'm not reading an article written by someone who believes that.
It is regularly updating, though, as now my count is up to "5 such comments".
if it is, then great.

but the baseline built in assumption that all home buyers should be able to afford new homes when people complain that new homes are too expensive is what misses the point.

New homes are built on the expensive side because that's what allows developers to turn a profit in areas where development plots are scarce to come by. That is - where land is the constraint, why would a developer choose to have a lower ROI?

Areas that new & old homes don't price too differently & there is still building happening are likely not in land/development/zoning constrained with undersupply.

Also laughing/crying internally as you describe 2003 as old (from my 1970s home)..
Never lived in a building that wasn't older than me..
Thanks. It encourages me to carry on and promote this website, which promotes entrepreneurs building AI products.
If they are really only 5 years from producing sellable power they are already capable of a science demo that would render this sort of vapid publicity stunt pointless. I’ve set a reminder to check back in 5 years, if the cynicism was genuinely needless I’ll apologize.
The vernacular is the mass-produced architecture of the everyday.

This is not remotely what vernacular architecture means. (And trailer parks are not vernacular architecture.)

https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Vernacular_archite...
Yesterday's conversation here about the Ed Sheeran lawsuit should explain much of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35868421

Here's one key bit from the OP:
- - - - -

But the lawsuits have been where he’s really highlighted the absurdity of modern copyright law. After winning one of the lawsuits a year ago, he put out a heartfelt statement on how ridiculous the whole thing was. A key part:

There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available.

In the aftermath of this, Sheeran has said that he’s now filming all of his recent songwriting sessions, just in case he needs to provide evidence that he and his songwriting partners came up with a song on their own, which is depressing in its own right.
Alright, so no more DDoS protection or rate limiting. Do we need consent before a router or switch on the network can process traffic? Isn't the ISP violating the GDPR if they hand out information about a customer to third parties without consent? What about servers that have logs turned on (Apache) before GDPR went into effect?

I know the opinion of lawyers about IP addresses. But it's so far from reality that it would break the internet if strictly followed.
It really is not. That's a made up defense.

The people who devalue mcmansions largely do so because these houses are the material legacy this country is leaving, and it's objectively shit. They are an irresponsible way to build and organize neighborhoods.
i do not know if i would actually agree with this as general advice, even for first timers (assuming healthy and safe settings) -- Strassman [0], paraphrasing as it has been a while, mentions in his findings the difference between psychotic and psychedelic thresholds. psychotic thresholds ~<= 300 mcgs tend to be more stimulant-like with an increased heart rate, and it is my opinion he contends this can be more anxiety inducing than a psychedelic dose, which depresses breathing and eases the heart rate/is less stimulating.

my anec-data is most people taking small doses, while enjoyable, seem to experience more anxiety overall than those who have taken a little more of a plunge (myself included in this) -- increased heart rate can really send people through some weird feedback loops, especially on peak.

perhaps mileage varies.

[0]: Dr. Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule
-> this is mostly a clinical study on the effects of DMT but Strassman does have general observational commentary on psychedelics such as LSD.
Meritocracy doesn't exist for the poor. Before getting my job at The Atlantic through a random personal connection, I experienced job discrimination on the basis of not having graduated from a "prestigious" institution. Obviously this is coded language for being poor. To add insult to injury, I had actually aced a couple engineering courses that University of Michigan had provided to my high school class. You don't get to put that on your resume though. Even though I've always been honest to fault, I would never judge a poor person for skirting the rules of society. At the end of the day, if hiring managers can't tell whether candidates have fake credentials, all that does is prove that credentialism is not about merit.
Bangladesh and Indonesia, two countries in similar parts of the world, with a majority Muslim population, are much more stable, with strong, growing economies.

Maybe there's something positive to be said about religion here as well I guess? Reaching for a simple answer for a complex problem is plainly intellectually dishonest.
I prefer to look gatekeepers in the face as I walk past them.
> they share identical four opening bars.

They are not even close to identical. They share openings that can be made to sound identical if you just play the sheet music with a few tweaks (like changing key) but if you listen to the actual recordings no one would have any trouble telling them apart. In fact, I'll bet if you played the opening bars of the actual recordings to someone who was not trained in music it would not even occur to them that they were similar in any way.

We could do an experiment: I'll bet I could find five songs that are similar enough to LGIO that if you played the original recordings of those songs along with TOL and LGIO to test subjects who had not heard any of those songs before, that they could not pick out TOL and LGIO as the allegedly infringing pair with odds better than chance.

> The question is, did he start with LGIO and make mods to it? If so, it's a derivative work.

Yes, but that's irrelevant. An infringing work is an infringing work no matter how it was produced. Of course, the most likely way that an infringing work gets produced is by copying, but this is exactly the problem: the more you allow people to claim copyright over things with little information content (like a chord progression containing only three chords), and the broader a net you allow it to cast, the more likely it becomes that someone produces an infringing work by pure chance.

> people do get away with fan fiction these days

Only if they don't make money off of it.

> a judge trial would have ended differently

There is no way to know. But if you're right, then thank God for juries because sometimes that is our last bastion of defense against corporate overreach.
Again, what part of "Well Regulated Militia" do you not understand?

None of these would be restrictions under a non-absolutist interpretation ignoring the entire start of the 2A. Granted, this does prevail now after decades of relentless promotion. That does not make it right.

Red flag laws are for people who have actually demonstrated their inability to control their own violence. There are a number of incidents of mass shooters who would have been prevented or slowed by such laws. And again, these people would be drummed out of any well-regulated militia.

Similarly, regulating or registering certain types of weapons does not seem out of bounds in a well-regulated militia, especially in urban environments.

I do have some problem with allowing police to seize weapons on suspicion, depending on the definition of suspicion, and the process to get them back. There are obvious circumstances where it should be not only allowed but required, and others where it is blatant state overreach.

Concealed carry, again in the context of a regulated militia — how is that a problem? You may have to show that you are armed.

Remember, even in the military itself, while weapons are issued and frequently used, they don't have people carrying any kind of weapon everywhere at any time, e.g., [0].

Again, the stated right is NOT any person of any level of mental or skilled competence can have access to any weapon at any time and any place.

It is:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The very first words are about regulation.

And the current results are proving the idiocy of a policy of unfettered access:
51 years of war 101,813 deaths

3 years of US gun deaths 133,759

US Death count in War

Vietnam War 1955-75
58,281

Korean War 1950-53
36,516

Iraq War 2003-11
4,614

Afghanistan War 2001-21
2,402

US gun deaths 2019-21
133,759

Every other western nation has similar levels of video games, mental illness, or whatever else you want to blame it on. Yet this only happens with any frequency here.

So, again, considering the ACTUAL constitutional intent of a well-regulated militia, what restrictions ACTUALLY INFRINGE ON RIGHTS OF SANE AND RESPONSIBLE PEOPLE.

I still have not seen a single instance of any actual legislator actually introducing a law that would broadly prohibit responsible gun ownership.

Show me one.

[0] https://www.military.com/pcs/can-you-carry-gun-military-base...
Amazing to see so many makers making money!
> People live up to what you expect them to live up to.

> If you expect a 6 year old to run the grocery store you own while you're away, then they will...

One of the problems with our society is the tendency to take a kernel of truth and then oversimplify and take it so far that it just becomes a total falsehood. Like your example of the 6 year old and the grocery store, there are certainly stores/communities where that's reasonable, but also lot of stores/communities where it isn't. There's no general rule there.

> The infantilization of people has caused far greater harm than almost any other thing.

...and then there's the the hyperfocus that leads to a total lack of perspective.
If TLS 1.3 will fail, I doubt QUIC will make it through. I'm no fortune 100 sysadmin but if I were that worried about network traffic, I wouldn't allow some unknown UDP protocol to go out unnoticed.

I don't know where these middleboxes are but this doesn't seem that important until people report having issues. It's been five years since TLS 1.3 was introduced and even longer since the survey that led to the compatibility mode was conducted, many companies with bad middleboxes will probably have had to upgrade them by now.
If it is not about the transient copies, then what other step in the machine learning process could possibly rise to the level of a copyright violation? What is your reasoning? Do you have a source?

If images/text being stored or not is not part of the argument, then what IS the argument that AI works are derivative? Is it only certain works? All works? Is it automatic? Does it require human intent? How do you get from A to B here?
People that don’t cheat much think that cheating is easy. Often times I see cheaters put in almost the same amount of effort as non cheaters the cheaters just get a higher probability of success.
Never though of it this way. Right!