skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rather than plant the gobi with trees (which need lots of water), could China just put in a bunch of wind turbines to prevent erosion? Like, is a wind turbine better than a tree at blocking the wind (well, it also doesn’t have a root system to keep dirt in place).

In eastern WA, we have special trees planted to block wind (mostly to reduce erosion), I wonder if those could be turbines instead? (Although, as long as water isn’t a problem, we should probably still use trees)
It does have precedence though. What Facebook would do when backed into this particular corner has played out in other countries.
> > If you assemble the components yourself, you still don't get Windows for free, you just get out of paying the Windows tax if you intend to install Linux.

You get Windows for free from the combo of self-assemble + torrenting + Microsoft not pursuing individual users for piracy

> > Dell XPS 13

And that is what I said, if you don't assemble the thing yourself buy the cheapest option from an OEM and then you can get Microsoft products for free if you are a wise guy.

And Microsoft tolerates it.
I have games plenty, but had never even heard about the Valeurs Gate franchise until last week. I must have been in a different bubble with Dune 2, Red Alert, Some City 2000, Tomb Raider, GTA3, Dungeon master and probably some more that I can't recall now. But the whole fantasy RPG wasn't really my thing I guess
If Firefox in its current form can't exist without Google's support, then Firefox in its current form is a useless vassal of Google anyway. We can't have our one hope for an independent web be entirely dependent on the organization bent on owning the web completely!

If their lifeline to Google is cut, maybe Mozilla will finally take us up on our offer and make it possible to pay for Firefox directly, rather than throwing money at Mozilla and simply hoping that it doesn't get misspent on nonsense side projects.
A friend asked me to make a brake and turn-signal controller for a custom motorcycle. I started with 555s until I realized I could get an ATTiny for less money and add more features at the same time.
This looks like speculation, not a leak.
>rationalization that withstands any cursory scrutiny

I mean yeah, that's the rationalisation, that useful idiots deliberately try not to see. PRC currently @65% urbanzation, with goal of 75-80% by 2035, aka 140-200M people. PRC "only" has 50M empty flats. Having excess housing inventory is fine, it's inefficient, but no more inefficient that US health sector at 20% GDP with medicore life expectancy. Which is only a light dig as US, but mostly to show that it's not big deal in the grand scheme of things.

>who will work the 10% of China's land that's arable to feed 1.4B people

PRC has 200M farming housholds when it really only needs 10M farmers using advanced ag equipment. There's stupid oversupply of agriculture labour, by design because it's a nice make job program for rural poor and consolidating agriculture is touchy subject because land reforms central to CCP founding mythos. Like out of all the concerns, lack of ag labour is most trivial.

>paying for any of this

With modest debt. PRC national debt is ~75% of GDP vs US ~120%, total aggregate debt PRC ~270% vs US ~760%. Basically +40-50% in the last 10 years to fund the largest infra expansion in human history. Pretty cheap all things considered.

>a zombie economy

1. @5% growth, if PRC is where JP is in 80s, that's 500% larger economy by 00s. If PRC is zombie economy, everyone else is stone dead.

> dependent on a crumbling world order,

2. PRC's is globalizing, see PRC increasing trade by 1T in last 4 years, more than previous 10, greatest increase in globalism in human history.

> surrounded by countries that hold millennia-old grudges against it.

3. Small countries where even with US basing, military force balance is trending towards PRC favor with each passing year.

>Plus Russia.

4. Guaranteed cheap gas and agri.

TLDR if PRC last few years is zombie, than momentum of PRC zombie horde will win like in most zombie media.
I saw an estimate that it would have been something like a -6X ROI in this case. Would be a reasonable nonstarter to set a bad precedent (from Meta POV)
You might find it interesting to try my open source ai coding tool “aider”.

It lets you pair program with gpt-4 like you are describing. But the source code lives in your local git repo. You can start a new project or work with an existing repo. You can fluidly switch back and forth between a coding chat where you ask gpt to edit the code and your own editor to make edits yourself.

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider
> And then you have stuff like fries which start out pretty great and lose all appeal the second they hit room temperature

While I agree with the general point, I had to mention that an air fryer can revitalize some things that I used to see as unsalvageable. Fries are surprisingly great after a few minutes at 375.
The low score is not completely unwarranted, though. The game itself is pretty wonderful. But the balancing and QOL decisions made by the developers has been; abysmal, and getting worse with each patch. It sounds like 1.1.1 is going to help a bit, but every the game started with serious issues, and each patch since release has made it worse. Add to the fact that many of the issues have been know since before release, and you get players getting really made about the game.

If you actively make decisions to upset the players, then don't act confused when your player rating tanks.
I note that one of the few dentists he mentions by name as providing a diagnosis consistent with his panel and a reasonable estimate is still practicing: Dr. Henry Wah in Marion, AR, apparently still has a good reputation and has been joined by other family members: https://wahfamilydentistry.com/
New Orleans rolled out facial recognition. It led to exactly zero arrests.

https://gizmodo.com/facial-recognition-new-orleans-police-no...
The article says the opposite about Australia:

Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down.” Chris Pedigo of the U.S.-based Digital Context Next assured the committee “it’s important to understand what happens when these bills become law. In Australia, they moved quickly to secure deals.

And apparently we've yet to hear from Google on this regarding Canada. But what's different? It's hard to see how Google can have a principled objection to Canadian but not Australian danegeld.
From the CBC: australia made a deal to keep news on facebook, why couldn't canada?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/meta-australia-google-news-can...

tl;dr the government has not left any room to negotiate, and the law is signed.
Please show me a crash test for a cargo bike with a baby in it.
Yes, certain language designs make it easier to break APIs for clients, just like the one mentioned above. I was pointing out that this is bad and we should try to prevent that from happening
A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Modern In-Memory Indices [pdf]
Before we go blaming environment regulations, all the literature on this topic that I have read points at the Jones Act as the reason that offshore wind is so difficult:

"The Jones Act, passed by Congress in 1920, says that only U.S.-flagged ships can move cargo from one point in the United States to another. The ships must have been built in the U.S. and be crewed by Americans. The offshore wind industry uses big, specialized ships to assemble the turbines miles out at sea, but there is not a single U.S.-flagged ship right now that can do that work."

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2023/04/03/t...
The Appalachian Trail keeps getting longer, harder
preach. it feels like it's only getting worse no matter the size of the company. people fundamentally don't understand creativity.
It makes perfect sense. Doesn't happen in the US because of regulatory capture
TNG hand-waves the problems of the economy, property rights etc, and doesn't really explain how they got to were they are. Proclaiming modern capitalist attitudes as "brain-damaged" is a bit smug given this.
Yes because they are fun and it works.

They have also changed a lot, compare God of War 1 to the recent one. They are completely different, and I would say newer is worse. I miss the rage.

Compare something like CoD1 and MW2... totally different. They both have you shoot military guns, I guess.
Costs also include server/DC/sales/marketing etc. you can’t include the server cost of say google maps as part of the people-headcount costs of google maps.
I've made a habit of not buying games at launch anymore. Most of them are nagging me for microtransactions (rant: don't like that word for repeated $10 purchases on top of a $70 game, that's not "micro" at all), they require an internet connection for single player, or are otherwise full of bullshit that to me makes them not worth $60+.

This one doesn't do that, so I bought it!

I've never played any of the previous Baldur's Gate games, but I did play Neverwinter Nights (2002) so I have some nostalgia for computer D&D.

Haven't tried the multiplayer yet, but I probably will. I heard there are some kinks to work out with drop in/out characters, but maybe that's just how it's going to work and you're expected to commit to one group the whole way through.
I do think Mike McGrath tried to communicate this. It got missed somehow.

Maybe we now got a case of foot (or even two feet) inserted into mouth. It’s highly emotional topic, even internally. I don’t know what the communications strategy is. Not my job. I will say that we’re encouraged internally, “don’t feed the trolls” and to let our various communication teams and leaders to do their jobs.

I just hope others like maddog guide the community back to sane discussions.
I'm 62. The job market is terrible right now. Especially for someone like you who is self-taught and has been self-employed for many years. Nobody cares about that. My advice is to do freelance consulting work and tutoring. Good luck
If you’re a government that sets a fixed exchange rate, one way you do that is by saying - for every dollar you give me, I will give you 6.5 RMB.

Since they’re the entity that makes the RMB, and a lot of people want to buy stuff from them in dollars, they collect a lot of dollars and print a lot of RMB.

The flip side of that is because they don’t have a big consumer economy, not as many people want to buy things in USD by converting their RMB (especially since the exchange rate is fixed at an unfavorable level).

So net net they have more dollars becoming RMB than vice versa. Those RMB become worth less anytime anyone exchanges them into another currency (because the fixed exchange rate), so they need to spend them in ways that don’t require an exchange.

Then domestic investors way over-invest in domestic projects, which leads to inefficient cities in the countryside.
There's now also https://github.com/vector-im/element-call.

They have SFU support as of recently, so it should scale similarly to Jitsi et al.
This actually made our neighbourhood and local politics Facebook groups more tolerable (which is the only reason I still use it once a week). It was basically 24/7 ragebait articles being shared around anyways, since that’s the only way of gathering large-scale engagement.
Less fake news, less engagement on platforms, less polarization. Why can't Canadians open their browsers and type in www.news-site.com if they want news? The Canadian government is obviously putting forward some really dumb policy, but the unintended consequences seem like a win-win to me. Hopefully neither side backs down and we'll get a juicy experiment to watch.
> Now that analogy is being mistaken for some sort of fundamental truth.

I think some of the pushback you receive is because you're calling it a mistake when you yourself just admitted that you can't know if it's a mistake because of our incomplete knowledge of neurology.

On the other side of this, there are straightforward arguments that there is some deep connection here. Since LLMs infer statistical relationships of languages produced by human brains, they are in a real sense building a statistical model of how the human brain processes language. It could be the case that this is merely an approximation of some kind, but it could also be exactly how it works.
horrible take. Taking the LK99 situation as an example: simply copying and adapting a well described growth recipee to your own setup and lab conditions may take weeks.
And how would you address situations where measurement setups only exist once on the earth? How would you do peer replication of LHC measurements? Wait for 50 years till the next super-collider is built and someone else can finally verify the results?
On a smaller scale: If you need measurements at a synchrotron radiation source to replicate a measurement, is someone supposed to give up his precious measurement time to replicate a paper he isn't interested in? And is the original author of a paper that's in the queue for peer replication supposed to wait for a year or two till the reviewer gets a beamtime on an appropriate measurement station?
Even smaller:
I did my PhD in a lab with a specific setup that only a single other group in the world had an equivalent to. You simply would not be able to replicate these results.

Peer replication is completely unfeasible in experimental fields of science.
The current process of peer review is alright, people just need to learn that single papers standing by themselves don't mean too much. The "peer replication" happens over time anyway when others use the same tools, samples, techniques on related problems and find results in agreement with earlier papers.
This article goes more into depth about the differences [0]

As far as I can tell the basic point is "Australia changed the law to something these companies could accept before it passed, Canada didn't"

[0]https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/meta-australia-google-news-can...
I remember thinking the same thing in my twenties. Sadly, cynically, and statistically, I think this position usually works itself out over time. Bullshit work is the basis for the entire economy, efforts to eliminate it will result in predictably bad outcomes.
This is a completely useless argument in the context of antitrust. Microsoft falling victim to copyright infringement is not going to cause a judge to say "actually, since so many people steal your stuff, you're not a monopoly after all!"
A significant problem we face today is the way research, especially in academia, gets spotlighted in the media. They often hyper-focus on single studies, which can give a skewed representation of scientific progress.

The reality is that science isn't about isolated findings; it's a cumulative effort. One paper might suggest a conclusion, but it's the collective weight of multiple studies that provides a more rounded understanding. Media's tendency to cherry-pick results often distorts this nuanced process.

It's also worth noting the trend of prioritizing certain studies, like large RCTs or systematic reviews, while overlooking smaller ones, especially pilot studies. Pilot studies are foundational—they often act as the preliminary research needed before larger studies can even be considered or funded. By sidelining or dismissing these smaller, exploratory studies, we risk undermining the very foundation that bigger, more definitive research efforts are built on. If we consistently ignore or undervalue pilot studies, the bigger and often more impactful studies may never even see the light of day.
This game is huge. It's 4 modern games in one. I am curious how one keeps a budget for a game like this. I agree love and passion are the reason this game is doing well, but honestly how do you convince the money to invest in something like, besides the trend of copying BG3 simply due to success?
RISC-V Origins and Architecture, Part 1
> In fact, if Google follows suit, there will be even more cancelled deals, lost links, and absolutely no new revenues from the legislation given that those are the only companies subject to the law (former Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez’s insistence that there is value in links that deserve compensation while simultaneously excluding Microsoft, Apple, Twitter and other platforms from the law amply demonstrates how the argument stands on shaky grounds).

This law targets Facebook and Google specifically. Facebook has been willing to negotiate in other countries but where do you start when the premise is false?
we can come up with a better people process

Sounds like a manager’s job. Who are “we” exactly? I’m not a manager and I don’t want to deal with people processes.
When the battery dies, the replacement cost will exceed the value of the car itself. As a result, used BEVs that have gone past the warranty period are basically disposable cars. This is much worse than ICE cars that can be repaired.

In reality, BEVs are an even older idea that ICE cars. They were "disrupted" and literally driven out of the market by ICE cars in the 1910s. What people are saying is that the car industry will move backwards towards an inferior business model. This is an absurdity.

Conventional car companies will do to Tesla what they did to EV companies of a hundred years ago. Articles like these are the peak of SV worship. It is a technological fantasy that ignores all history and real-world economic realities.
Are you from Portugal? Can your recommend a good dentist in Lisbon?
There is no restriction on buying vehicles, or even driving them on private property. You only need a license to drive them on public roads.
The post states that in Canada the Government has ultimate authority over all payment negotiations, it would seem that in the other countries facebook and media companies can establish their own content licensing contracts as independent businesses ought to be able to.
Google has also confirmed they will be removing links to Canadian news.
> and the elimination of Big Corp's big money political influence.

And companies like Google have more than just "big money political influence". YouTube banned discussions on legitimate discussion of Covid and politics in the past few years, for instance.
> But also there have been a load of really good CRPGs in recent years and there seemed to be a pretty low ceiling to how much interest they could get

CRPGs aren't a genre, but RPGs are. wRPGs like Mass Effect, Fallout, TES, The Witcher are some of the most popular franchises in all of gaming. Then you have jRPGs like Zelda, Elden Ring... The ones you listed are similar to Divinity & BG3, but the fact is the games are either on the extreme end of hardcore (Pathfinder especially), or are made without the production values or marketing. You've got examples like

The main difference that would still throw a lot of games is that BG3 is turn based combat, but I'd argue that with the dialogue, branching trees etc its more akin to Mass Effect or Fallout. Ultimately its its own thing, and it is a well crafted game, in a setting that many core fans already know and love.
* Further speed up replacing fossil-based power generation with renewables or nuclear, and add grid-scale storage like there's no tomorrow

* End subsidies & stop investment in fossil fuels yesterday

* Electrify everything (factories, transport, air travel, ...) as much as possible

* Stop buying unnecessary goods whose production has big environmental footprint (specifically: CO2 emissions. But also water, land use, mined resources etc)

* Stop slash 'n burn rainforest practices. Return degraded agricultural lands to nature

* Eat less meat

Just to name a few. Most of these are political / economic choices (and to a lesser degree, personal choices). Not so much technology limitations. And don't make us less wealthy or our lives less comfortable (quite the contrary, in many cases).
Ask HN: Do countries learn from past wars in a statistically significant way?
Do leaders consult both historians and statisticians to decide what to do about current conflicts based on what can be learned from history in a statistically significant way?
And on the extreme end you have the multi-decade longitudinal studies in epidemiology / biomedicine that would be more-or-less impossible to replicate.
I think only GTA 3 is contemporary to it. Others are earlier games, which might explain things.
New privacy tools and policies to help you stay safe and in control online
Sort of, yeah. When GP says "it's almost impossible to measure", that does not mean that upper management does not in fact have some sort of metric that says "productivity" on the label. But what they're measuring is most likely going to have a tenuous relation to actual productivity.
Yeah, I keep quiet too when I find myself in that position, and for the same reason, need the paycheck. It’s wonderful to do meaningful work and get paid good money for it but it doesn’t align too often that way

I find that most meaningful work or whatever is meaningful to me, is not very well paid
All four responses you listed are valid imo. Is there a particular one you disagree with?
Desktop Is Not a Destination (2007)
Could just be an experiment. Canada isn’t terribly consequential to meta so why not see what happens if you don’t back down.
I had fond memories of Dark Alliance. You maybe didn’t like it, and coming out for a console with no PC release was an odd choice for the series, but there was fun gameplay and story there. At least, 13 year old me playing co-op with my Dad through Dark Alliance 1 and 2 on my PS2 is a fond memory I have that maybe nobody else got.

Anyway, I was just surprised because I guess I never looked up a review of the Dark Alliance games but my general impression was actually pretty good.

edit: Apparently there is a Dark Alliance game with a naming collision that came out much more recently than the Dark Alliance series I'm thinking of. Smart move, Wizards of the Coast/DnD.
Barco: Linux Containers from Scratch in C
barco is a project I worked on to learn more about Linux containers and the Linux kernel, based on other guides on the internet.
Notice that "marketing" is in there. Microsoft claims the right to listen in on all your Zoom calls and use that data for marketing purposes.
And to be honest it probably will. There is enough places that will be nice enough even with full blown changes. Or they can jet around the planet in private jets to be in nice weather all year around.
Also jitsi can easily be self hosted which means no information will leak altogether.

I've refused to install zoom since they installed a Mac backdoor and refused to remove it until Apple took a stand and marked them as malware until they removed it. And that was far from their only skullduggery.
The Impact of ChatGPT talks (2023) – Keynote address by Prof. Yann LeCun [video]
A simple syntactic check will only ever work as a heuristic. Heuristics don't work for all cases and can be noisy. The point is, no modern language should need such hacks. This problem was completely solved in the 70s with sum types.
Because that would involve these people caring about their "boots on the ground" or thinking in the long term.
Those two things to happen less and less as things scale up and become public respectively.
It can go the wrong way. A successful war like the first Gulf War or Russia’s invasion of Crimea can give the confidence to attempt a less successful war like the Iraq war or the recent invasion of the rest of z ukraine.
He’s an author who influenced a wide range of technical people around the dot com era and iirc was an early proponent of the “we work for idiots” point of view.

Not quite the John Brunner of the late 90s but in the same neighborhood.