skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience WASM performance is not that much better than JS in most cases, not so much because WASM is lacking, but because most JS runtimes performance is really, really good for a dynamic language.

When I measured C compiled with clang -O3 vs JS performance the only noteworthy speedup were on math-heavy tasks and even there only for integer-heavy math (floating point math was better than JS, but not by much). In a few cases the performance was worse. Notably recursive algorithms were _much_ better in WASM though even with algorithms that can't have tail-call optimisation (I guess function invocation has a lot of overhead in JS compared to C)

I think people over-value WASM speed. With regards to performance I imagine that the biggest gains compared to JS would be from not using garbage collection language. GC overhead, especially JS GC (compared to golang GC) can be painful in very large applications, especially in things were timings matter like 3d rendering. But GC can be optimised for in JS by avoiding allocations in the critical paths of the app
Clour providers all have similar services, azure frontdoor is one example coupled with azure waf.

But honestly, no one really matches their quality of service and user interface as well as attention to detail. But a major reason to ditch them is that they may decide they hate your ip or browser just at the exact moment you need to do a critical change or troubleshoot something on their platform. The arrogance behind "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude is silly. If I can type in a legit user login with 2FA and I am a paying customer, no security control should block me at all. Google suffers from the same arrogance.

I would use CF for personal stuff but not for my business or at work.
India Keeps Pulling the Plug on Its Digital Economy
No, because instructions to compute any computable function for an utm only requires a tiny set of instructions on how to generate every possible permutation over forever increasing lengths of tape.

It will run forever, and I would agree that in that set there will be an infinite number of functions that when run would be deemed intelligent, but that does not make the computer itself intelligent absent first stumbling on one of those specific programs.

EDIT: Put another way, if the potential to be made to compute in a way we would deem intelligent is itself intelligence, then a lump of random particles is intelligent because it could be rearranged into a brain.
This seems really easy to test ethically.

You sift through the edit log to find edits correcting factual errors.

Then you find the edit where the error was introduced.

You can probably let an LLM do the first pass to identify likely candidates. With maybe 20 hours of work you could probably identify hundreds of factual errors. (Number is drawn from a hat.)
The other side of this is that (to pull numbers out of my hat) 90% of non-targeted attacks are password reuse and 9.9% are phishing with 0.1% being something else. The fact that TOTP doesn't solve phishing does get talked about.

Ultimately totp & sms based 2fa is used because it solves the real business problem that websites face (the business problem being when enough users get hacked they blame the business not themselves, so we just need to save most of them not all). Yes there is some fear mongering to make people sign up for 2FA, but it is actually solving a big problem effectively. It doesn't matter its not helpful in more fanciful scenarios since those scenarios are largely imaginary to begin with (for the average user).
> these dubious "contracts"

Dubious indeed. See also:

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/9/275696-to-regulate-tec...
Instead of speaking of own feeling based on a "section" the rational approach is to read the actual scientific paper dealing only with that topic:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04158

"Outside the Safe Operating Space of the Planetary Boundary for Novel Entities"

Environ. Sci. Technol. 2022, 56, 3, 1510–1521
> So something whose lifespan is exponentially distributed (such as a radioactive particle) does not display the Lindy effect.

Huh? Is this true? If I had particles with unknown half-times, I think I would expect the older particles to stay around longer, if that makes sense. (It is possible that there is no 'I expect' in the probability theory sense, like in the two envelopes problem.)
Glad to see that DreamBerd is back after a short foray into pseudo-woke mentality
Was the VK2 group in an earthquake zone? If not that might explain their disinterest.
Possible hints of life found on distant planet – how excited should we be?
if you cut all the "moral crap" about of the war in ukraine:

because nobody wants to die in a nuclear apocalypse!?
> nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down

some communities do, for example the webots discord i'm in. They have a mirror of all chat logs indexed and searchable on their docs website. I don't know how they do it, I can ask if you like.
That’s exactly the point. If you can list the number of ‘AAA’ games on one hand, then the meme holds true. I work on AAA games on in-house engines, and I’m yet to meet someone at work that would consider using Unity for anything other than a mobile, or small ‘indie’ game.
Good... now let's make a formal specification for this:

<ahahah>mmm... <ohoho>nope.</ahaha></ohoho>

Fully joking :-P
I have a beef with YAML/TOML/JSON as an inline front matter (header) format for SSG (static site generator) posts, but that's because if I want to save a mostly Markdown SSG post on Github...

1. the post is previewed with Github's dialect of Markdown and not the SSG's (and definitely with none of the inline configuration applied)

2. the preview is still a Markdown document, so you get no benefits of syntax highlighting or auto-formatting w.r.t. the config header (short of opening in Vim and explicitly declaring the filetype or temporarily changing the extension in Github's editor)

3. you HAVE to put trailing spaces in the YAML/TOML/JSON or the preview pane crams everything into an unbroken paragraph

4. there's not a quick preview of how the configuration will parse, just specific workflows (live update, compile single page) that you can test and then modify as needed. This is either in the rich online editor or your own machine and will require console commands and a browser window

5. I still have to know all of the modifiable attributes as well as defaults, which will be in a separate document and probably not in a Ctrl+Space dropdown

-----

For point 5, it would be nice if configuration formats had completions for common editors and/or their own scripts:

* "generate big config file with all possible keys and default values"

* "condense modified config file so it only contains non-defaults (and hope the schema doesnt change hahaha)"

* "suggest a valid fix for a currently invalid config file"

-----

Sure, this all isn't a direct criticism of TOML, but inlining configuration is a great-to-okay idea that is simply poorly executed. It is extremely unfriendly to non-technical users; I can fully understand why someone would pay a few hundred a year for a WYSIWYG templated website builder to just handle everything.
How do you find the factual errors that weren't corrected to figure out what the correction rate was?
The lifecycle of a startup full of young arrogant naïve inexperienced souls:

1. Why is everyone doing all these complicated things?! We stopped doing them! We're much smarter than everyone!

2. Few years later.

3. At great financial, technical and business cost we redesigned our system to do all those complicated things, because our initial version was an unmaintainable spaghetti monster that wrapped up everything its tentacles touched and hugged it until it died.

There are situations when exposing SQL is a right call. I'd say those are pretty narrow, say when you have colleagues in a partner company doing integration. SQL is not a way to avoid having an API. SQL is an API. The surface of this API is gigantic, and it also binds your customers to a particular implementation of your database (the SQL vendor you happen to use). If those customers are few partners, this is easier to change. When it's the public at large... you're effed. This is all pretty basic systems analysis, but kids these days don't know the first thing about it.

But here's a basic rule of thumb: exposing SQL as your API may be the right call if you've spoken in person with every customer who will be using that API, and especially if this in-person contact is regular, say at least once a month. If you haven't, then SQL is not a good API for that customer.
> Everybody's jumping ship to Godot or Unreal or whatever else because we all need a game engine. But why?

I'm assuming we're talking about 2D games so I won't dwell on the "because they want to make a 3D game". See musings below

1) not everyone has that technical prowess, they may not even want to code to begin with. I may be able to whip something up in a few weeks for a 2D game, but someone new will simply be learning how to code first and then finagle with libraries they can't full piece together. So engines that can heavy lift and let a user do simple scripts (if that) to do their movements is a big demand.

2) engines differentiate from frameworks by offering different suites for other parts of development. Designers would love a level editor and that is annoying to make (even in 2D). Artists may want to tweak the lighting or even do some light procedural generation, so the ability to get feedback of how it looks in-game helps a lot more than guessing in their artist suite. even other programmers may want conveniences for front-end annoying stuff like UI, where the correctness isn't based on the code

3) Familiarity. Just because you CAN work on your own engine doesn't mean you want to. I'm sure the Hollow Knight devs simply followed up on their game jam project in Unity because they knew Unity. You can't spend all your waking hours thinking about how your tools may go to shit in 10 years. You'd never get anything done.

I'm all for encouraging more engines, but I can understand reasons to seek out something rather than prioritize ownership.

-----------

>But every indie developer I've talked to about game engine development acts like it's a dark art. That it's just impossible for mere mortals to do such a thing, and if you do, then you'll never ever release a game, or you'll spend literal years on the engine. Again, I predict a couple weeks.

As someone who's gone down that rabbit hole: it is black magic combined with pixie dust when working on a 3D game. There is just so many edge cases to resolve and techniques to implement to make a 3d scene look good. And now you need to build something that lets non-devs be productive on op of that (or accept that you will have an artist backseat driving you, losing efficiency). You will spend years and end up with a much worse product, likely very buggy (no pun intended). There's just too much to learn before you even start making the game. Make games, not engines (I say as an engine programmer).

For a 2d engine, sure. Hollow Knight probably could have been made in Gamemaker with no technical hiccups. And if you know what you're doing you can utilize a couple of libraries and whip up a decent 2D engine that is all yours. You'll still have issues, but it isn't insurmountable if you're making a simple game that moves around a few hundred sprites on screen.
No. I value a meaningful "Last updated at" timestamp.

If I open a word document, redact a few bits, save to PDF and close it - I don't want my changes saved but they are (real scenario from last week. I'd only just moved the file into Onedrive so autosave had turned itself on)

Ditto sorting and filtering spreadsheets.

Software engineers: By all means save in the background so I never lose anything, but don't assume I want the latest changes.
Most large retailers (e.g. Target, Walmart) now scan the barcode on your ID at the POS when buying spirits.
Show HN: Rapidly Build Responsive No-Code UI with This Bubble.io Extension
> Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever.

How is Discord more social than the other systems you mentioned? I consider something to be social (social media, social network, etc.) when the primary utility manifests as a function of establishing friends, followers, or whatever similar jargon.

That is: if the content presented to me is primarily generated by users who I've selected, while content generated by users I haven't selected is unavailable or relegated to lower tiers of functionality, then it's a social network/medium. In other words, it's the product of subscribing primarily to people (regardless of what they might discuss) rather than to topics (regardless of who participates).

I don't see Discord in this way. Isn't it more about subscribing to topics than to people?

I realize you're not speaking for yourself, but for the HN hivemind; my question remains.
no shit. not everything is yaml and emoji status lines.

but that's got nothing to do my mistake of using M4 when better tools existed.
Good call.

A good video related to this: "Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg
> The boat looks like a floating tank, like a warship with sails on it

Well it's German made and owned by (Belo)Russian oligarch. It probably has concealed missile launcher.
You can definitely stand up the basics of a 2D game engine really quickly… if you’ve done it before. If you haven’t it’s an unexplored problem and is significantly more challenging.

But it doesn’t end there because once you’re done standing up the engine you need to improve and maintain it. Then port it to different platforms, you did remember to abstract things nicely when you stood it up right?

And that’s without mentioning all the extra time you’ll be putting into higher level systems like localisation and UI. And the combo of those two is fearsome!

Plus you have to make a game.

Or you can use Unity or another off-the-shelf engine and ignore most of these issues.

Which isn’t to say you can’t make an engine but if you are running a business you need a compelling reason why that becomes an advantage. I doubt Hollow Knight would have found it’s success as easily if they had to worry about all of that.
Also couldn't care less about math in school, until it came time to write game engine stuff. I learned trig so fast, and it made intuitive sense because I could directly model it in my game. Same with matrix math.

Kids have a hard time handling abstract concepts, especially boys whose brains develop slower and for a longer period.
The US carefully developed its cyber security plan during the word press macro era. Let's send the FBI to foreign countries in the hopes of arresting teenagers who learned how to cut and paste, genius.

Unfortunately, it forgets how to do this if the country is Israel instead of the Philippines.

Is there some solution in that to making sure 100% of possible red team members are more aligned with the profit interests of the US' strategic private companies than the US strategic partners in running illegal conspiracies?

I'm baffled as to what utopia of a profession has global tool collaboration and consequences, but somehow manages to deal with 230 groups of nationalists, thousands of sects, and embargo's on any one group paying people across all of these to provide a regulatory framework for safe and human benefiting tools in their category with no edge cases. If such a regulatory framework existed maybe it would shut down these mobile phone companies over behavioral harm?
Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, [...]

You do not need the whole bible for that. The bible contain way more then cultural references and a lot of that more is mindnumbing boring.
Consider if you accept these three propositions:

1. In the future we will identify genes which govern sociopathy, or at least predispose to it.

2. Parents will have the ability to edit the genomes of their kids before conception.

3. Nobody wants a sociopathic kid.

This is my headcannon for how humanity creates the Federation.
Excellent point. That's more difficult but I think the ethical way to do it would be to recruit subject matter experts to fact check articles across a variety of disciplines. Bonus, you can then contribute corrections.

In general what I'm saying is, this is a fertile ground for natural experiments. We don't need to manufacture factual errors in Wikipedia. They occur naturally.
I've been there. On a Discord I used to moderate, there were a few people like that who did not really break any rule, or not in an egregious enough manner to deserve a ban individually

A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.".

That rule has been used a few times since its implementation.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to buy contacts before being shown how to use them. Really

It's not hard, but at the first time, the guidance is really useful
Seems nobody has really cracked vocals with songs...
Online family tree builder
I live in Budapest, my salary is around $53K. My wife doesn't work (although she does get maternity benefits which come to around 650USD/mo.

I live a comfortable life. I rent a flat in the city centre which is big enough for me, my wife, and my son. We eat out. We travel abroad about once per quarter (UK, Switzerland mostly). I wouldn't call Budapest 'bumfuck nowhere', and I don't think there are many significant compromises on my quality of life. The one concession I would make is that we don't have a car, it's just unnecessary.

We could easily get by on my salary alone just by reducing the frequency of our travels to three times a year, but as my family lives outside Hungary, we don't. There aren't many folks anywhere in the world who could say that they can support a family on a single income.
That limit is efficient for measuring and selling glasses.

As a life-long user, glasses with an error of 0.5 are unacceptable for me. That's the amount of change over years when it is time to get new ones.

Not all deviations are measurement errors. There are potential variable conditions of the eye (e.g., spasm of accommodation and sugar level). An online solution that can consider them properly is definitively worth a patent.
There is no reason that giving now what is needed would lead to an apocalypse.
Why do you need to “renew” the prescription if your glasses give you 20/20 already?
Reminder for Firefox appreciators: use Nightly for latest features that might not be part of the main release yet.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly
That works for medicine because nobody wants two appendectomies. But plenty of people would want a second apartment, an unlimited amount of subsidized food they could resell, another UBI or social security payment etc. Then everyone backs up their truck to fill it with a fungible commodity being offered below the market price.

The biggest problem with most of these things isn't that they require ID, it's that they require means testing. Showing your ID is, I mean, you take it out of your pocket. We could make one sufficiently easy to get and then it works for everything.

But if you also have to show that you're currently unemployed but previously made an amount of money within the eligibility threshold but haven't been unemployed for more than six months to collect unemployment and then show that you don't have investment income more than some other amount to get food assistance and then show that your household income is below some other threshold to get housing assistance etc. etc., that's a hot mess.

The sensible thing to do is replace all of said mess with a UBI, which doesn't require means testing and so doesn't require all of that paperwork. But it still requires something basic to keep you from getting more than one.
Not allowed, sadly, employee insists that all licenses used have to be bought ob their name. Legal something yada yada… I can’t just bring in my personal license.
The leader/management dilemma is a dilemma and so far has evaded any solution. Some countries like Singapore explicitly tried to solve for it and still are, objectively failing.

Cycle:
- Great Leader arises from a group of aligned leaders, more equal than his peers
- Competing non aligned leaders are purged, creating strong execution momentum
- The fellow leaders start hiring managers to take care of the day to day
- Eventually leaders churn and managers take their place because they know the organization and finding aligned leaders is close to impossible.
- Rinse and repeat
- Eventually the Great leader (if he does not expire / retire) is surrounded by people who know how to run the organization within the box, but have never been allowed to think out of the box. All their success was in fact knowing how to maximize the inner workings of the box and not rocking the boat.
- Leader leaves, game of thrones ensues.

This is in full display in most political parties. Take Germany or the UK: the qualifications to become leader are entirely different from the skillset to run the country (Hence the endless supply of prime ministers in the Uk who seem increasingly mediocre or downright incompetent). They absolutely know how to play the game to take the throne (chiefly loyalty to the cause) - but once on the throne, having to lead, requires entirely different skills they don’t possess.
In Poland no prescription is necessary for vision correction. At least one big chain of opticians doesn't charge for sight tests and gives full refunds on all purchases up to five years.
Christopher Alexander, the architect whose work on architecture sparked the software Design Patterns philosophy/movement, also tackled this problem. He obviously didn't focus on software but rather approached this problem from the general design.

His thoughts are in "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" (1964) and I believe his conclusions are similar to the authors of this article: split the design problem into "clusters" of decisions, so as to minimize the dependencies between "clusters".
This is 100% the pattern. However most startups (and most software projects if we think about it) fail. They don't make it to year 2.

This in built failure rate shouldn't be a reason against doing things right the first time but it might explain how many don't get to learn the lessons from year 2. Most of the time we will never get to redesign and realise the mistakes we made.
No and this is also a thing only people do not know what is in it say. Or people who want to be edgy say. And I am saying that as someone who attempted to read it, so have passing idea about content.

If you want to know who Hitler was as a human, read either "Hitler, by Kershaw Ian" or "Third Reich Trilogy by Richard Evans".

If you want someone to realize Hitler was not unique, make them read about other genocides, about Italy at the same time, about Stalin, about Japan, about slavery, about genocide of native americans and so on.

Also, I would highly NOT recommend it for someone who does not know actual German history, because that book contains ... well quite a few untrue claims. If you are in general interested in that period and read a lot, nothing wrong with reading it. But if you are not and this is the one historical book you decided to pick and recommend over all the others, then I have hard time to believe you are neutral in your pick.