skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> the iPhone is still the most popular device in the world to play games on because so many people own them.

Many more people own Android smartphones than iPhones:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Android smartphones are a big target for games:

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-android-games

The iPhone might get some games that Android does not, but most iPhone apps will also cost more which means fewer people will play those games.

From those facts, I doubt that "the iPhone is still the most popular device in the world to play games on".

Do you have any references to support your statement?
Seems like we have a lot of good GA alternatives on here already. Thought I'd add one: goatcounter.com

Not mine, and I only just started using it. But it's easy to implement, and shows "just enough" analytics data for me. Nice simple option.
As an ex-academic, this isn't a secret. The mental health of the entire sector is in shambles, see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01708-4

The Nature article and OP's article identify one culprit: poor supervision. I have a shit-list of awful supervisors that I try to steer potential students away from. Universities know that these people are awful but do nothing: in some cases I personally know, the Vice-Chancellor of the university and the toxic supervisors are best buddies.

Case in point: Alan Cooper, international ancient DNA expert, was fired after a long battle because he was so incredibly toxic. He just got hired by another university! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02147-x

Academia has no interest in weeding out its most bad members. So I, and many others, left.
Google Should Buy Twitter (2010)
What would the use case be, when in many situations solar coupled with very thin batteries can achieve tens of watts in the same size?
see bookofjoe's comment. I didn't find the article terribly informative. In fact, it didn't really have much information other than that alc may increase heart rate and tends to dehydrate, and to make sure to drink enough water.

As far as non-dangerous exercise, such as gym cycling stations, or a Bar-group-pedal-cycle guided exercise event, I think there's a possibility that drinking and exercising might just possibly have health benefits--pure speculation though; it would be interesting to test and do studies on this topic.
There is some truly awful irony that a cofounder of reddit, with reddit's current actions, was the victim of a reactionary bully justice system for using his legal access to the JSTOR database [1] even though JSTOR came to a non-criminal settlement with him over it. A prosecution that undoubtedly contributed (or caused) mental health difficulties leading to his suicide.

And now, a decade later, the reddit platform that he cofounded is betraying the principles of that cofounder.

[1] Yes it's slightly more complex than that, I know, but not to anything that should have come anywhere near the attention of criminal prosecutors. He used his legitimate access to download far more than JSTOR ever thought someone would do. He did it in a basement that anyone walking around the building could go into, and entering an unlocked closet where he connected his laptop to a network switch wherein he left the laptop running while downloading.

~

Heck even after MIT noticed this they didn't lock the closet! Instead the just surveilled it with a camera to observe who might be going in & out. If there was any harm at all from these actions is was merely that downloading the way he did made the JSTOR system slow down at times until they blocked the offending IPs, and then the whole block.

A decade later and this injustice still fills me with sadness and rage every time it comes up. And as cynical as I get with every passing year, I hope to hell that I still at least hang on to that sadness and rage and never let time and cynicism dull its edge.
Wow, I learn something new every day!

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Typeof.html

Having learned (old) C in college and taking a closer look at it lately, I was surprised how much you can make it look “modern”, what with _Generic, wchar_t, booleans and even this __auto_type.

It seems like with a couple #define macros and some discipline you can make it look and behave more ergonomic.
wow, you made something complex understandable to me. I'd dabbled in shaders but Raymarching (I now know why it's called that!) and SDF had eluded me, thank you.
Question:

If I come up with a clever tweet and then post it, does twitter own that data?
what if i posted it to a middleware like a browser extension that then posts to twitter but also makes it accessible on an ipfs feed?
> Dropbox

We (the HN community) need to stop regurgitating and reswallowing our own mythology like this.

Like, yes, when Dropbox first posted their idea on HN some people were like “just setup an SMB share”. But when I got to college in 2008 my friends (CS and non-CS-majors alike) were all using Dropbox to share pirated music and group project files, and it was clear to all of us how useful it was. I know I wasn’t alone in this.

It is not the case that “everyone thinks good ideas are stupid”.
It's not most, but it's still remarkable that about 5% of humans who have ever lived haven't died.
> The ruling proactively limits elected officials ability to speak

Point to the part of the decision that says that as your take is apparently more partisan than CNN.
Never fast consistently or consistently never fast?

I find the latter.
I have a degree in Mechanical engineering, the role I have is mostly application architecture, development and ops.
Do I have the right as a twitter user to host my tweets outside of twitter? Does where I posted first matter?
I think it’s a less of two evils thing.

Also, most of what I watch on YouTube is clearly pirated (or ad free). That’s pretty much been their business model since day one, though they have diversified a little into legitimate for-profit content that is supported by ads.
Are there any places in Europe where small homeowners get exposure to variably-priced electricity? I.e. is it just large commercial consumers who can take advantage of electricity priced below zero, or small players too?
Reading the NYT would make me less informed on the issues that affect me and people I care about.[0][1] That's the point, I think. "The News" most people consume is a pale imitation of information. A version of this article with 10 years of growth might modify the suggestion toward finding better sources of information. Less New York Times, Fox News, and MSNBC. More ProPublica, NewsHour, and advocacy orgs staffed with people who are actually qualified to speak on the subject.

[0] https://glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgtbq-a...

[1] https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-cal...
I really like your website/blog! It's one of my fav blogs out there that I'd wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. I also like the fact that the ads are not intrusive at all
Pretty much same setup here except I used a Lacie atom NAS, added a USB stick to the motherboard for booting.
Bluesky is limiting signups since it hasn't been released yet so it's not really a fair comparison.
If you actually read the linked bug report (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1745823) they talk about making the list user configurable. I actually agree that having a per extension list for disabling on some websites would be nice (some websites break with extensions, e.g. I use tridactyl for Vim like Navigation, but if I work on e.g. Overleaf things get into the way of each other and so I turn it off via mode ignore)
It appeared they rant about how "doing all the things in life later" was the biggest drawback and continues to contradict the point by providing a timeline that places them at 33yo with all of the listed life goals achieved, starting with a graduation (I assume by the context, with a PhD, at 27). Some of such life goals are not even achievable for some. It sounds like a simple attempt to humble-brag.

Assuming that they worked their tush off or pushed for opportunities also sounds coming from some privileged background, as it seems to assume that hard work and proper initiative would be sufficient in achieving such things, while for some people the first guard is already getting the necessary elementary education, while being in a stable and safe environment.
What is “the right way” to install Python on a new M2 MacBook?
Is programming even the hard part about programming? In all seriousness, what we would really need from an AI to start really saving me time would be for it to interview all the customers/partners involved on the project, determine the scope of function needed, boil all that down to a set of sensible domain models that make sense to everyone, identify where/when messages need to be passed, determine which things can happen piecemeal as opposed to requiring a bulk op, deciding on a persistence technology based on the nature of the requirements...

And that's just an abbreviated form of what I go through when designing a back-end for a tiny boutique application. 99% of programming is making decisions. When you finally have everything planned, the code can almost write itself, but getting to that point requires so much background knowledge that I'm not sure GPT4 will be hunting for my job anytime soon. Or even really augmenting it. I'd be happier if they could just get auto-complete in VS Code to not suck complete balls.
Thanks for clarification, that’s a neat idea.
You fucking what?
https://ktkaufman03.github.io/

I don't post a lot, but when I do, I try to make it interesting. So far I've covered:

- a creative use of Rust's type system (https://ktkaufman03.github.io/blog/2023/04/20/rust-compile-t...)

- taking a deep dive into some obscure, closed-source scanner drivers, and ultimately creating new ones (https://ktkaufman03.github.io/blog/2022/09/04/pakon-reverse-...)

I do have some more posts planned for the not-so-distant future, which I think will be interesting!

If for some reason you want to subscribe, I have an RSS feed set up: https://ktkaufman03.github.io/feed.xml
If the UX was intuitive, it would, well, be intuitive and I wouldn't need all these paragraphs.

Anyway, I'm using Chrome and that's what happens.
Both ACLU and HRC have convenient tracking for these bills.

Last year over 300 bills were introduced, and 29 were signed into law (still far too many).

https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-wor...

https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-the-aclu-tracks-a...
It is not GPT-anything. The Register has been laughably duped here, just like the telemarketers.

The "robots" do not listen to the scammer at all. Basically the algorithm just waits for pauses from the other side and plays random audio. Often just "uh huh", and "keep talking", and "can you repeat that, I wasn't paying attention" and things like that, plus random chatter. The core of it is probably some 50 line script.

The responses don't use anything from the telemarketer's utterances; it's dumber than Eliza.

Yet it captivates them, keeping them talking!
I’ve had many blogs but recently started hosting under my own domain.

https://ruky.me where I mainly talk about digital health, startups, programming and open source
https://www.adamconrad.dev

A lot of it is around engineering management best practices but there are some more philosophical and personal bits sprinkled here and there.

It has hit HN a few times but I’ll admit I have no analytics on it so I don’t really know how many readers I have beyond my newsletter subscribers.
Cory Doctorow: Platform capitalism and the curse of “enshittification”
Just one example:

Tennessee has recently passed a law banning “male or female impersonators” from performing in public places. Tennessee also does not alter sex on birth certificates for trans people.

Arguably this means that Tennessee banned trans people from performing in public in any capacity.
https://jerrynsh.com/

Started this blog about 2 years ago. I write about Python, web-scraping or some inconsequential tiny projects (inspired by tinyprojects.dev :D) that I worked on. TBH, I haven't settled on any niche.
www.jamesgill.net
Intellectual and artistic pursuits would be sponsored by rich and powerful people, because it would reflect badly on their honour if they didn't.

Now that we're all equals, the rich and powerful don't have to do any such things anymore.
> For most people there's something in there worth knowing.

Your distribution is way off.

If we’re talking national US news like the NYT or WaPo reports on, there is actually worth knowing. The only value it provides is “sounding informed” at a party.

It has a huge negative downside too. It’s some watered down biased version of what’s going on in the world that fits narratives of the editors, with barely any relationship to reality.

National news is absolutely propaganda-loaded trash that serves a severely negative value for society overall.

Local news has a better hit ratio, but it’s still like 5% maybe at best on any given day.
As you mentioned, TLS doesn’t solve this problem entirely since the ISP can still see what domains you visit.

For those use cases, people should really be using Tor instead. In that case, if the website is public, HTTPS doesn’t really serve a purpose since the exit node isn’t going to get any private information.

Perhaps HTTPS does help if the sensitive information is hidden in a wide-ranging domain (e.g. Reddit, Twitter) and because support for it is so widespread. In those cases, HTTPS is likely already supported.

However, if the politically sensitive but public information is on a small domain, such as a personal blog or informational topical site, HTTPS serves almost no purpose there since it’s obvious what your activities are from the domain. In that case, one should definitely rely on Tor.
I read your capsule. I think you hit it out of the park when discussing how Google impacted XMPP and the possible implications for the fediverse. Nicely done.
At first glance this may be perceived as a good thing. But as someone who lived my whole life in Sao Paulo i dare to disagree.

Not only it killed part of advertising industry, and for me made the city uglier, it was a faccade to destroy small businness, shops and buildings and replace them with condos for the mayor friends. Who "surprisingly" used to be a civil engineer.

Funnily enough, the only thing allowed to have huge billboards and outdoors is the Estate, public buses, subway wagons, subway stations. They are all full of advertisements. Huge ones, and guess what. Much more expensive cause they have the monopoly of it. Hypocritical to say the least.

This law, together with the PSIU law which forbid loud noises, were used to close down small business, demolish them and build useless lifeless new buildings. Where there were life, shops, bars, restaurants, lights, its now full of huge buildings, more crime and the corpse of a once alive and blooming city.
Currently using self hosted Motamo Analytics. Very easy to use and intuitive.
I'm interested to see how this affects Gleam.
https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net

Been dark for a while... moving everything from PHP to Python and React which has been fun, but tedious. Also, I had a baby and they are just crazy amounts of work (and fun).

I will hopefully soon continue to write about projects I'm working on, tech tutorials, Vim+Neovim, Linux, 3D printing, art and design.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2218153120

one notable realization in recent decades has been the role of thermophysiological differences among marine vertebrates that plays on their geographic and bathymetric distributions. For example, endothermic taxa can have higher cruising speeds that increase prey encounter rates as well as wider migration ranges compared to their ectothermic counterparts. In fact, endothermy, the ability to metabolically elevate and retain body heat over a broad ambient temperature range, is regarded to have an evolutionary merit as demonstrated by the fact that it evolved multiple times in vertebrate history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation

Thermoregulation in organisms runs along a spectrum from endothermy to ectothermy. Endotherms create most of their heat via metabolic processes and are colloquially referred to as warm-blooded. When the surrounding temperatures are cold, endotherms increase metabolic heat production to keep their body temperature constant, thus making the internal body temperature of an endotherm more or less independent of the temperature of the environment. Endotherms possess a larger number of mitochondria per cell than ectotherms, enabling them to generate more heat by increasing the rate at which they metabolize fats and sugars.
Maggie Harrison's War on Wine
https://forwardscattering.org/
High performance code, physics, maths. New posts coming soon.
Probably because the economy's screws are turned so tight on the masses that it's hard to fund a hobby that isn't generating returns in some way.
This is what ChatGPT and GPT4 are good for, iterating quickly in an unfamiliar ecosystem. Picking up frameworks now feels like a ChatGPT superpower. It doesn't remove reasoning and I've seen some scary bugs introduced if you're not really carefully monitoring what the AI is outputting.

Basically, these days before I dig into documentation I ask "How do I do X with Y framework in Language Z" and if it's pre-2021 tech it works amazingly well.
The Dell 6k has the buttons on the back so this is not a problem.
Strongly disagree. You can get a full masters from UT Austin with specialization in AI/ML for about $10k. Fully remote. https://cdso.utexas.edu/msai . Compared to a typical bachelors which is what, about $50k?
Yeah, I think I do. No one should be smoking. It makes no sense. Adults should be discouraged and it shouldn’t be condoned in common areas. Teens get this treatment, adults should too.

Edit: if people want to smoke privately or without sharing second hand smoke, I don’t think they should be stopped. I’m not trying to say it should be outlawed or something. I just don’t like being around it or having it normalized to kids (or even adults — we shouldn’t accept it as something people do so casually, especially in close proximity to non-smokers).
This is the WORST feeling if you use co-pilot in an IDE. It's so incredibly disappointing.
All of which reduce the Heat Island Effect.
Are you planning on continuing all development in public, or will you make the code private?
Oh man, what a great domain.
I find that surprising. Look at https://mathstodon.xyz/about and some of the world's leading mathematicians (among those who are online) are there. In computer science expertise is more diverse and distributed so the users are spread across many servers.
ooooh, sorry, no, it's gone.

I had a whole thing happening around becoming a bold lead climber by becoming an amazing lead belayer.

It was great! I've helped many, many people become very safe, very confident sport climbers. Watching them 'climb through the grades' is enjoyable for all parties.
I’m surprised there isn’t more push to move the demand to align better with the solar peak.

In the UK AFAIK there’s only one energy provider trying to have tariffs matching the duck curve, and they complain they’re limited by regulated wholesale prices.

I haven’t seen any appliances supporting variable tariffs or even just having an option to shift more power use to mid day.
Hah yeah you might be right lol - var definitely does save on keystrokes.
A long time ago back when browsers supported Java applets you could include applets in your banner ads. I worked at a place that had a product that included a chat service. The chat client was in Java and would have been quick and easy to convert into an applet.

I tried to convince the person in charge of our advertising that we should include such a chat applet in one of our banner ads, which would put everyone currently viewing the banner into an anonymous chatroom. Unfortunately he wouldn't go for it.
Might also be an interesting idea to use sqllite's inmemory feature.
I think this is incorrect for most use-cases. LLMs do grok code semantically. Adding requests for coding style injects implementation specificity when flattening the semantic multidimensionality back into language.
> In my experience, ordinary lowly FAANG software engineers are expected to treat each other with respect and kindness that is simply unimaginable in average companies.

Strongly disagree. Yes, there are fairly good standards about how you communicate with other people. But competition between peers is higher in these companies, and you can see it. It's hard to form friendships in a SV company for this reason. Less-competitive industries are different. Most people don't really want to be in this kind of competition, and will be friendlier in other situations. But they'll endure these environments for the money.

One of my concerns is that, if this is the only kind of environment you experience as an adult, you're going to start to carry this kind of competitive behavior out into the larger world. And as this corporate culture starts to eat larger and larger parts of the economy, this increasingly will be the only thing people know. This seems deeply corrosive to society as a whole.

It's one of the reasons I like to get out of upper-middle-class professional milieus when I can. People act differently. They're friendlier.
Bucking or Setting Trends (On Erlang, the Beam VM, and Elixir)
https://www.dquach.com/

A scattering of personal newsletters, tech, and data engineering. For the personal newsletters that involve traveling, what I do is journal every day while I am in the destination country, and then when I'm at home, begin writing. Each travel post takes about 40 hours of writing, editing, and picture selection.

For the travel posts, I try not to rehash a history of a place (you probably could watch a youtube video or read a book for better perspective), but instead try to find something hopefully new and insightful to reveal

EG
https://www.dquach.com/2023/04/05/personal-newsletter-2023-q...
on behalf of the world i would like to express thanks to all scientists who have borne personal costs to advance our understanding and life quality wherever it really has done so
I have to disagree. An auction website that everyone in America can use? A marketplace for small crafts that is nation wide? A social network that connects a large creative community and show cases brands and products?

It's not hard to imagine any of these having huge TAM's.

On the flip side, there are tons of ideas that just don't have the market size - an app that helps students memorize the latin numeral system is unlikely to have a large market.

I agree it's not easy to predict if a startup will succeed - but that's different from seeing if there is a market worth going after.
Ask HN: How to learn a C++ codebase with templates
What are some tools that can be used when starting on a new C++ codebase that makes extensive use of templates. I find it impenetrable compared to code I've worked on in the past. Also there are no comments or documentation... Would a LLM tool help?
Http://www.camasmeditation.com

A blog about Metta (lovingkindness) meditation, pop culture, and the Pali scriptures. I haven’t updated for a few months but I am about to post a new one on the joys of being a householder.

Every post includes a fully guided half-hour meditation.

Not for everyone but some of you may enjoy it.
paritybits.me

The best time to start a blog is thirty years ago. The second best time is today.

This blog went active a couple of months ago. Writing for myself and for the sake of it, to make a habit of collecting thoughts concretely. I have a couple of dozen drafts ongoing evenly scattered between 1% and 100%, and it's fun to poke at things occasionally.

Only the first post, https://www.paritybits.me/copilot-seo-war/, had any uptake. That's ok!
Is it cheating to use Google Maps? I got to zero miles on the second guess because it was a picture of a sign, and I just looked up the church to which it referred.
what are the error bands on this?