skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, it gets worse. Tyranny amasses resources, and politics is power is marketing. Part of advertising absolutely is propagandizing humanity in the most traditionally appalling ways towards the most traditionally horrifying ends.

It's not even about 'propagandizing genocide and tyranny to make money'. For some people in power, genocide and tyranny are what you spend money ON, and the engine for making that money. Money isn't the goal, ideology is. Advertising connects naturally to that true goal, and nobody's asking where the money is coming from.

I adblock Google in part because some of the people able and willing to pay them Google-sized money to propagandize me are truly evil people that I don't want to hear from.

Influence is a part of life, and that's all advertising is. But at Google scale, and with good enough feedback (something Google and Facebook have really optimized for), influence is too effective- society-damaging levels of effective. And then it comes down to who's amassed the most money and power and also knows how to exploit those resources to work their wills.
In terms of hardware, yes. In terms of software, no. Last time I tried that with an iPad you did not get a true windowed DE. It was okay if you wanted one big app and one sidebar app and a lot of context switching.
Show HN: Supademo AI – Beautiful AI powered interactive demos
Unity is a tragedy. They have managed to fumble the technical aspects so much it drove people away, to the point they become more valuable as part of an ad business than an engine one. Their efforts outside the games industry don't appear to have as much traction as they deserve either.

The question has already been "Why aren't you using Unreal?" and that's just going to get harder.

Given the current VC taste for eliminating all things which count against gross margins now might be a good time to be an engine developer again.
how would the loss of funding put Firefox in better shape? Are you saying that exposure would mean dollars would flow in from donations from new users?
The <blanks> behind the pre-trial briefs redactions will tell a lot. Some here, more detail in this thread [0].

1. Google’s <blank> with <blank> prevents <blank> from pre-setting a
different, more private search engine (e.g., <blank>) as its default [blank].

2. Google's partners-including OEMS, carriers, and Apple-wanted more flexibility than what they ultimately received under their contracts with Google. In particular, <blank> bristled repeatedly at the <blank> restrictive nature ..... For example, in <blank>, <blank> sought to offer <blank>. Google refused.

3. Browsers also took issue with Google’s restrictive terms. For example, <blank> sought an alternative to Google and signed a contract with <blank> to encourage competition in search, welcoming the <blank> to <blank>. However, the trial testimony will show that to win the <blank> default from Google in 2014, <blank> needed to offer a <blank> million annual financial guarantee—roughly <blank> million more than Google was paying for the <blank> default. <blank>

[0] https://twitter.com/ColinHayhurst/status/1701274277830357164
How much of a shifting sentiment is bird death really? It’d be nice if windmills didn’t kill birds, and I agree with the idea that we should just do it if it’s low effort. But this topic has always felt a bit more like a talking point fueled by vested business interests, and less like genuine concern.
The claw of capitalism will always tighten its grip. Any software company that goes public has this problem it seems.
Yeah, I agree. Building a really nice slide over is surprisingly hard.
Fascinating.

One surface level comment. As a non-religious person, I have always found the distinction between buildings for different types of religions as being somewhat artificial. Sure, they have different architectural styles, but they all have a similar purpose in my mind.

So a mosque is a church is a temple, on some level.
This is an unauthorized derivative work. He is not entitled to make any money for it without Apple's consent under current copyright law.

It's the same as you, being not-Disney, making a sequel to a Disney movie and putting it in theaters.

Then he turns around and tries to indicate that it's wrong for others to profit from derivative works based on his efforts.

Either copyright law is just and valid, or it isn't.

Either what his competitors are doing with his work is wrong and bad (as he seems to think it is), and his modification of Apple copyrighted material is also wrong and bad, or what he's doing is okay, which also makes what his competitors are doing okay.
You are ignoring all the FOSS that never existed because Google killed it or prevented it from happening. Monopolies kill choices you will never even hear of, just by existing. You may believe some technologies are better off because a monopoly exists, but that's almost certainly always incorrect, monopolies impede progress.
I try to avoid giving my cell number, precisely because it’s not secure, but also because it changes or I travel, and then I’m locked out of my own account.
They seem to work for me.
It's just so strange. They provide two systemd files, you need to choose one, edit (!) it, put on the machine etc. Comparing with nginx's boring apt-get install that does the right thing this feels like non-mature way to distribute things. Especially for people who script and document all of their server setup procedures.
I remember seeing a blog post by Mozilla explaining how the new css engine, which is measurably faster, would never have been implemented in C++ because the engineers were not confident they could handle the tricky concurrency issues in that language.
I wonder why this chrome extension isn’t available to install via the chrome extension service itself. It’s akin to an ad and tracking blocker, right?
Where is the Rust portion of the project? It appears to be named Rumble.
Moving the End-of-Life Date for Node.js 16 to September 11th, 2023
As far as I remember they only use it for spam protection (i.e. the phone number serves as a moderate-level "proof of humanity"), but not for 2FA purposes (unless you pay for their premium service).
Yes, TikTok was created by the Chinese company Bytedance, by merging their own app with another Chinese app which was popular in the USA. But I'm not sure whether it could be called natural progression just because of its origin. It's a natural direction of progress for all social media-services. I mean home shopping-TV and sellout-parties with your friends and neighbors are quite common in USA too. And this is just a version of this for the digital space, in which Chinese apps have more experience and success at the moment.
The pricing is a bit weird. Their criteria is based on gross revenue of >=$200k. But instead of charging a percentage of that, they charge per install at a rate of $0.20/install.

So if you made $200k off of 1M installs, you’ll now pay $200k and your total profit will be zero.

I guess the assumption is that each install will earn you >>$0.20, but that’s a very generous assumption. What about a F2P game that has millions of installs but only a fraction support the game with microtransactions?

There’s definitely going to be some cases where studios will owe more money to Unity than their game makes.
Looks like just the website wrapper. Where is the code?
And most of those many will flip on a dime. Invading Iraq had something like 70% public support and Afghanistan was even higher. Of course, you can't find most of those people now.

Because they're mostly flip-floppers based on their political ideologies.
Presumably the Pro/Enterprise subscribers are more likely to reach the thresholds as well so get charged for installs and it’s a carrot to get people to upgrade if you expect volume.
I love Rails, but the author's complaint is also my most frequent complaint.

The "convention over configuration" kind of sucks since it's far too easy to break from "convention".
As Google is an ad company, anyone believing that they want to make ad-blocking better is.. not looking at the economics. What makes sense if this is what they're pushing forward with is that Google sold ads would be exempted while other ads would be ground out. My guess is there's a mix of reasons and none of them are for the benefit of the users.
> They're charging the game developer 20 cents every time a user installs the game?

Yup, but don't worry. You can get a discount if you use Unity's ad network![0]

This whole thing seems...short sighted.

[0]: https://unity.com/pricing-updates "Can I get a discount on the Unity Runtime Fee?"
I actually enjoy it. And this is coming from someone that spent a lot of time in C, assembler, lisp, Scala, Java, and so on....C# is much nicer than it used to be, and gets out of the way. Tooling is so much better than it was just 5 years ago. I'm using rider on an m2 with no issues. Of course it's not free- regular vs2022 won't even open on a mac. Most of the things I don't like about C# mostly have to do with the community and the average C# developer. Even the documentation, which used to just suck, is getting better.
> Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising.

This is not true. This is the excuse used to justify the spying.

Contextual ads work perfectly well for providing information about new or niche products. It the other, much creepier, use case for ads that want the detailed information to target tailored ads at individual users.
Neat to see a new implementation, although I'll note that for those looking for a drop-in replacement for the whisper library, I believe that both https://github.com/guillaumekln/faster-whisper and https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX are easier (PyTorch-based, doesn't require a web browser), and a lot faster (WhisperX is up to 70X realtime).
I agree. Everything about the number makes no sense. It assumes there are more cats than people and these cats are just killing machines. Maybe I just live in a bubble? I live outside of Boston and there are definitely fewer cats than people. There are very few stray cats, a small % compared to house cats. I let my cats outside on rare occasion, but almost nobody else I know does. I assure you my cats are not capable of killing birds. They just look in wonder. All in all, I've had about 30 cat years of ownership and there is maybe 1 dead bird altogether (RIP Frisky).

I don't really know what's going on in other parts of the country. Are there stray cats just roaming the forests? I can't imagine why anyone would have incentive to exaggerate these numbers though.
This might be good for for Godot..
Sure, but 100M is prohibitively low. No one will actually use this if it is capped at that.

I do volunteer technical work with some of our homeless shelters. Having access to email is critical. Without it, they have no access to a whole host of government services they need. They don't have their own computer, so they are relying on email as their document storage.

Gmail and other 3rd party email providers constantly cause issues for them. Their login is often tied to a cell phone which gets broken, stolen, and replaced often. Or they cycle through numbers since their service is constantly interrupted due to payment issues. They rarely have any way to gain access back to their email, and their access to many important services is lost.

At least with the post office, there is a physical place you can go to, and have multiple ways to prove your identity and continue to get access to your email, which like I said, is a requirement and lifeline for this population.
I am 99% certain this is not novel and I've seen it in old ( in the CART times ) papers....
The prestige Isaacson has gained could only come from a media establishment that celebrates sensational celebrity culture.

Of course 'the Isaacson Accord' means softball puff-pieces in exchange for access, or this would be his last biography. He's just better at masking it with gently critical anecdotes the rest of the lazy media is happy to lap up and quote.

Aaron Sorkin's snappy, pseudo-intellectual biopic is next.
They have thresholds based on revenue and install counts. You have to meet both before you pay anything.

After reading the FAQ though I’m not sure it’s a good deal.

It also seems like you 100% have to enable spyware
Vercel demo doesn't work in Firefox:

"TypeError: i[e] is undefined"

and "No Model Loaded" error after loading and picking a file and pressing transcribe.
Rails is great for building something fast with great tooling. Twitter started with Rails, IIRC, and eventually migrated to Scala. That's okay, that's what you do as you grow and see it cannot do what you need it to do.

Laravel is the same way in PHP, IMO. I think that's a big reason people hate on Laravel so much.
I love Corey Doctorow’s term “enshittification” because it perfectly captures the process of a service corrupting their own offering.

Yelp started by offering (somewhat) trustworthy crowdsourced reviews for local businesses - free to the businesses.

Then their purpose changed to extracting as much profit as possible from small business owners - at the expense of everything else.
You're telling me. I've been working on a Unity project for several years and now I'm on the verge of scrapping the whole thing and starting over in Godot because of these fucking MBA parasites. I should've known better than to trust a publicly traded company with anything ever.
If we open that floodgate, I feel like we have to talk about the browser situation too. How are innovative browser engines expected to compete in a landscape where their defaults are not respected or possible?
This does give Apple more influence over China, as well as giving China influence over Apple. At these scales influence is never one-directional.
Looking at that tweet, I can't tell if it's a scam or just your regular cryptard NFT pump post.
This is probably the noisiest topic of all of them (where "noise" means there is a lot of dishonesty and hatred and petty sociopolitical tribalism masquerading among the honest argument).

I haven't read this article, but I am open to an argument that trans pronouns could have negative effects, and giving the article the benefit of the doubt (that it's honest): I feel completely confident that the people uploading a mod to remove something trans- or gay-related from a video game are part of the noise, and are not honestly trying to support the argument you have linked, and are doing more harm in spreading hatred than theoretical good.
They insist on adding it to the standard response path, but they're happy for you to remove it:

header -Server

However as this isn't global configuration it'll tend to pop back up in implicit configs like HTTP redirects and error handling if not overridden.
Lol.

But, seriously again, isn't that a weird thing to examine in this study? The researchers hypothesize that wind turbines might increase the surface temperature, and they found that they do not. Great.

I don't know why anyone would look to examine that, since they produce negligible GHG.

If I were examining it, I would look at stuff like how much wind energy getting removed changes things that are contingent on wind.
"Once a game passes the revenue and install thresholds, the studio would pay a small flat fee for each install (see the table below)."

This was not clear to me at first based on their table which currently shows 1-1000 installs as falling into the $0.20, but it's in fact actually the installs AFTER passing the threshold I believe. So assuming it was installs, it would be install 200,001 - 201,000 that would be charged $0.20?
Most people just aren't cut out for it. To be a good manager you need to ....

1. Be willing to be wrong a lot and admit it

2. Show vulnerablility

3. Deal with constant setbacks and disappoinment

Most people get the reigns and are suprised to find out its actually a thing nobody wants. Like being a social worker.
Oh I know. I never left.
"People will buy a developer tool, but you can’t sell it."
I'm saying if Google can't throw billions at other companies to push Chrome over Firefox, Firefox can get those users for pennies on the dollar, or even be considered the free better choice for product vendors to include.
This cannot be right, how can this makes sense with mobile gaming? Unity has a HUGE market share there, so they know the number. How can free games ensure a 0.20$ per install? Why not go with X% of the revenue?
You need to meet minimums in terms of revenue and installs so for college students it’d be a success problem. It’s still going to put a load of people off because who needs the added worry and reporting involved!
I have, over the years, developed a theory, to wit: we keep reinventing basic system administration tools over and over again for three reasons:

1) It's fun.

2) Most programmers are naive. (This point bears expansion: most programmers have less than five years of experience and this has been true for decades because of the exponential growth of the field. I don't have the exact numbers, but the shape of IT is Eternal September.)

3) People make a lot of money from these microcosms. You can't make money selling old shell+SSH+make, so you wrap it in e.g. Python and create an "ecosystem" and then people are getting jobs and selling books and courses and even certifications if it goes that well.

(Point 3 is mostly due to point 2 (naivete) but there are certainly people who consciously and deliberately try to create new things just to get in on a hustle.)

- - - -

Just use Lisp.

(That's my new slogan.)
tower fan absolutely agree!
I wish I could share the details. Honest to God.
It's interesting.

I agree with everything in that article.

At the same time, I also agree with similar but opposing articles complaining about people who did train to be managers (by going through university program) now leading technical people without having a clue on what those people are doing, how their problems are solved, etc.

I think this is a generalized class of frequent hiring / placement problem: I have two orthogonal skillsets I need. Which one is core, which one is trainable?

In other words, do I hire person with A and train them on B? Or do I train a person with B and train them on A?

(As somebody who was a techie and is now in a management role, I'll lead through the entire series and see what help I can gain from that. But note there exist MANY useful, structured and helpful resources for those who want to improve their people managing/supporting skills. The key part though is acknowledging you want/need to improve those skills - for many of us, learning SQL or C++ or JavaScript is perceived as a "hard skill", useful and pragmatic; whereas "people managing", "coaching", "negotiation" etc are seen as "soft skills" and not worth. If this article helps some people convert their thinking and acknowledge we need to work just as hard on people skills as on tech skills, awesome:)
Beautiful imagery. Sorry about the hassle. Glad it's repaired.

The GM Saturn has a large amount of plastic. Or had. During forest fire season some dozen years ago, a photograph of the melted-through plastic door of a Saturn was published, making me think about the value of metal around the parts that protected the occupant. Yes there is steel cage material but these panels, I didn't realize, might not necessarily also be metal for certain cars.
I suppose unregulated markets will inevitably attract opportunistic scams.
It's not an shifting sentiment though, it's opinion (propaganda) pieces from fossil fuels industries (well their PR firms) that keep stirring up this sentiment.

Letting them set the frame for the discussion and then following along is by no mean "getting ahead" it's simply playing their game.
Perhaps drones can save birds?

IIRC Festo has some of the longer flight times with their animal-inspired drones?

Would a covered charging dock/cradle for an autonomous or semi-autonomous bird-saving system would save [wind turbine] owners money?

"Never landing drone: Autonomous soaring of a unmanned aerial vehicle in front of a moving obstacle” (2023) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17568293211060... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1139887687601566150...

"Orographic"; Orographic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orography
In Java land there’s many more.
The impressive thing about Asimov — incidental to the quality of the writing — is he probably sat down and blasted that out in an hour top-to-bottom with no edits.
Volumetrically one of the most impressive authors in history.
Belgium - 13 years in the position, simple IT Tech: I have to give 13 weeks notice if I quit. I'm allowed to take a (paid) day off each of those week to look for a new job. If my employer fires me, he has a 42 weeks notice to give me, I'm of course also allowed to take the day off every week to look for a job.
I’m going to say not good, based on GO’s performance and the latest .NET finding on experimental green threads.
College students don't have to, since they don't meet this criteria to be charged the monthly fee: "Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs."

That said, wow. Charging a monthly fee on game installs is absolutely wild. The personal fee (for first world countries) is $0.20 / month. If you charged $10 for the game, you'd be losing money after only 50 months (around 4 years).
"But the internet in 1996 was absolutely amazing and totally free!!"

eyeroll
If you have 2FA enabled, they can deny you access to your account, but they can't actually access it either (unless they also compromise your 2FA of course). That is, they can reset and change your password with only a phone number, but will still require a 2FA token to actually access the account.
It's kind of interesting to me how Intel ended up making/owning the thunderbolt interface, given that they don't make products at either end (no intel laptops, monitors, or docks).

I guess they technically make much of the chips that are in the laptops, but it seems like a stretch that to say there's synergy between thunderbolt cables and intel chips.

Am I missing something?
As much as I enjoy Asimov, I have to say that he is wrong. The gap between what we know and what is true might have decreased immensely, but it is still infinite. Any quantifiable increase is 0 in relation to infinity. Asimov's counter-argument that we are quantifiably less wrong than we were in the past simply does not overcome this core issue. If there is an infinite amount of knowledge separating what we know from what is true, then we can learn an infinite amount of things and still have an infinite amount of things left to learn.

To feel justified in thinking the universe is "essentially" understood is to be OK with one's concept of the "essential nature" of the universe to be inherently divergent from a future concept, which according to Asimov's own argument is going to be more correct than our own.

To me, it reads as a bitterness towards mortality, a sort of sour grapes: the insights we will have about the universe at some future time must not be very interesting compared to what we know now, because I won't be around to know them.

edit: I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Asimov's perspective is shared here. It's very easy to understand the essential nature of the universe when you define the universe as the parts you understand.

I don't think human beings in 1000 years will look at our current understanding as special in any way. As transformative as our era is, it will be dwarfed by the scale of transformation in future eras. It's just the most transformative era so far. That's temporal bias, nothing more.