skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Hit a wall with my ongoing game project because of patents
I've been working on a custom renderer that uses compute shaders to do pathtracing. The idea was to use Rust/WASM/WebGPU so I could upload a demo directly to the web, so people could play it as easily as clicking a link. Additionally I thought that I could achieve acceptable performance with a combination of new techniques and algorithms as well as using lower-fidelity textures+meshes.

Over the past 1.5 years I've basically read every single raytracing paper published in the past 10 years, and have been slowly working to implement relevant papers into this renderer. Recently I found out that one of those papers was patented, and there's no way to use the ideas inside it[1]. This by itself is not a huge issue as I can avoid using the technique and I don't think it will have a massive impact on performance. The bigger issue is that I don't know what other algorithms are patented that I have no idea about. Maybe some of those algorithms are just straight necessary in order to hit any reasonable performance guideline. In that case, this whole project is fucked and I should go do something else.

I feel seriously disheartened about the whole thing now. I do not currently have any income, and I do not have enough money to fight off a lawsuit. Even hiring a lawyer to search for potential patent-infringement seems extremely expensive. I don't know if I should give up on this entirely and move to using a commercial game engine, keep working on this and ignore the existence of patents (except the one I found), keep working on this and search out for more patents to make sure I'm not infringing anything, or do something radically different altogether.

[1] The patent # is 10580193, but I would not recommend looking it up if you are in graphics work due to how willful infringement works.
Nationalmuseum’s Financial Situation
That's far less likely in most Western countries. Whether or not bitcoin is safer than a bank depends on where you live. But in the West it definitely isn't.

If you live in the third world, sure.
Nice. How did you split the data and queue records? Tables, dbs, partitions, etc?
Every time I see one of those, as a big fan of TV crime dramas, I cannot help but think that voice recordings as proof are going to be a thing in the past very soon.
Years ago I remember hearing it was due to growth hormones we feed livestock. Wonder if that's been debunked.
Have you tried supplementing magnesium or zinc or some other minerals? One of the troubles with processed food is that it reduces the minerals you get out of the food. Maybe the grand parent had a positive reaction because their alternate foods with less processing. Eg dark chocolate tends to contain a lot of magnesium.

I personally felt a big difference with magnesium supplementation.
Awesome, love to see more Java devs pushing back on the spring madness.

In Db.java, with the write/update/delete locks, that mutate both in memory and on disk, is there not a bunch of race conditions there?
I like the "X, [the platform] formerly known as X" its evolution. Latest in the wild sighting was "X, formerly Twitter".

What I like about it is that it lifts the skirt on the superficial divides. Good soldiers of the information regime all toe the line here and dutifully help Elon with his illadvised brand name destruction. I mean, I go to geopolitical websites run by people who like Putin, for example, and even there, the resistance blogger/propagandists dutifully remind us the "X, formerly Twitter" just in case we forget or haven't heard the news. We know things are bad if even North Korean output is using the "formerly Twitter" insert. Anyone checked?
> I can't remember the last time I heard of someone voluntarily exporting to PS

you'd be amazed at what people will do. i did the initial layout for a company's product labels in Illustrator with all files saved as *ai files. after the hand off, the person taking over the tasks ran into issues. they had no idea how to use Illustrator, and re-did the entire layout in Photoshop. when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

so i can see someone trying to export as EPS because "it's vector" from something like photoshop.
Sadly, I just assume that no company can be trusted these days.

It wasn't too long ago that the leadership of companies was often fairly stable. Now you see people rotating through every couple of years, rarely having to face the fallout of their bad decisions.
The SR-71 Blackbird Astro-Nav System worked by tracking the stars
A master password isn’t what we’re talking about though.

1Password last I used it, asked for a master, and a secret extra password. I still cannot explain why.

Granted my setup was for corporate but I am pretty sure it’s the same for everyone.

My best guess is that they are trying to cover for weak masters in the way that LastPass was enforcing but failing to update their PBKDF2 interations.

Which IMO is stupid and a failure to enforce best practices at the user’s first input.
> I'm not sure "codec" is right. Maybe encoding?

Numerology
I had a Nexus 5X that bootlooped, but if IIRC from my research at the time, Nexus 5 also had the same problem, albeit seemingly to a lesser extent.
Gain knowledge, not goods. This way you are the valuable good and people need you alive due to your knowledge.
> Any passwordless FIDO credential is a passkey.

Oh great. So a physical security key could be a passkey, but only if it's used as 1FA not 2FA. At the same time, this weird "store key material in a device and optionally sync to the cloud" thing is called passkey, but if someone uses it as 2FA it suddenly isn't a passkey?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/
They make more money with much much more primitive “targeting” because they are sitting on top their own platform with no competition. If someone wants to display their ad on the Apple platform, they pay apple.

I don’t mind being targeted by searching for “mobile game” in the app store and it displays a mobile game ad, and maybe even used up that I’m a male in his 20s. That just can’t be compared in good faith to what google or facebook does.
> that's enough of them to put pressure on the employers to meet their demands, their demands get met.

Or your employers can hire some thugs to disperse you and the other strikers. When you resist the governor will just use that as a justification to send in the national guard to “maintain law and order”. At least that’s how it often worked in the good old days..

> Well sure they could.

In an imaginary world maybe. In a society with no safety nets and and where any meaningful accumulation of savings is infeasible? Not so much.

> you can go work for someone else.

Under the same conditions. Labor has an inherently weaker bargaining position (due to certain pretty obvious factors) compared to business owners. Unless you have some external regulation or societal pressure and employers are behaving fully rationally (i.e. maximizing profits) that will always be the case for the majority of the workforce.
Hey, it's the Ian knot guy! I taught myself the Ian knot like 20y ago and it's one of the best small life skills I've learned. My shoes haven't come untied since. I think I tried to tie a traditional shoelace knot a few years back and I barely remember it.
This is what I want. Just Youtube w/o ads, but it is $14/month/USD. TY Premium includes music; Spotify costs $12/month/USD.
Premium is over priced.
Youtube really doesn't want you to buy Premium, they want the data more than the money.
What you say means you're a philosopher too!

Seriously, philosophy is a personal endeavor. You derive your own, make your own deductions, and you believe in them. That makes it valid for you.

But ... if your philosophy is about how the world works, about some aspects of reality, and you want to ensure that both your philosophy and reality agree, then you can choose to do science:

1. From your philosophy, derive some hypothesis.

2. Check you hypothesis with some experiment.
Probably a bit of both.

Depression makes it hard to have executive function. Lack of executive function makes depression worse. It's a vicious self feeding cycle.
You have a (constantly expanding) choice in what software or hardware your passkeys are provided by, and can decide based on your own risk/convenience trade-offs.
I do as well, plus the bar through the 7
depreciated != deprecated
US and Brazil follow the FCC rules. I would guess most of the Carribbean would follow FCC as well.
>The deployment is really easy to do

I mean, fwiw here's what we do to deploy QuickBooks: double click on image or CD, drag/double click icon, follow any prompts, now it's done. Click on icon in dock to launch QB thereafter. There was no need to read any FAQS, join a Discord or even send an email. That would be my definition of "easy". I suppose "here is a VM image ready to go, download and click button/run command" wouldn't be terrible though still already a massive leap in needs over QuickBooks.

>that is acceptable especially when you use a new technology

QuickBooks had its first release 31 years ago. Like others say I'm sure there are reasons for the explosion in nested stacks upon stacks of complexity, but I'll admit I still find myself pretty befuddled about how we ended up here. I guess it looks like from the docs the goal is exclusively compete with the QB Cloud Service specifically so that takes a bigger stack, like you're building for B2B. But kind of feels like it's an odd choice of targeting here. QB was always aimed heavily at small, and eventually medium-small businesses. Huge places used other stuff. Small end of the scale are also the ones who face the most pain from the shift to subscription-only if you didn't snag a last physical copy. The docs say

>Bigcapital is built with a multi-tenancy architecture that allows multiple organizations to use the same software while keeping their data separate from each other

Is this actually something in demand here? Why wouldn't each one run their own, or if not just pay Intuit? Is the idea that various companies will offer Bigcapital services for sale? And it says "keeping data separate" but I don't see anything about E2EE in the docs or FAQ, though maybe it's buried somewhere. If the data is only separate based on user permissions what orgs are going to trust something as sensitive as business financial data to a multi-tenant situation for something unproven? I don't find it promising that the (incredibly sparse) docs have this to say about signups:

>The environment variable SIGNUP_DISABLED should be set to true to disable the signing up of new users. When set, the following facts hold:

So, does that imply that by default it's just open to the world and anyone can sign up? In 2023?

I guess I'll watch the project if only because subscription-only for QB sucks and I'm sure will be a problem eventually, but... I dunno. This isn't what I would have immediately thought of for "An open-source alternative to QuickBooks" in terms of approach.
That was the title when I posted, but it looks like it was changed. Not sure why, because as you mention the focus is more on the lack of transparency
I know this hasn’t been true in reality for some time now but subconsciously I still have it so closely tied to the windows and azure ecosystem for some reason and doesn’t really cross my radar as a result.

I say that as someone who actively went on the hunt for a new language around 2020 as well after years in the Ruby community. C# would have been a fine choice in a lot of ways I think. I ended up with Dart which is syntactically very similar and shares many of the same advantages but remains a very small ecosystem.

Either way I really enjoy sticking my head into other communities posts like this and just seeing what’s going on with them. I always enjoy the compare and contrast exercise of it all.
Isn’t this because they have to pay Red for their ridiculous patent of compressed raw video?
I think they were correcting the spelling from depreciated to deprecated
I like her cannibal art where she has actors play dead bodies on a grazing table as the rich and famous pick food made into simulated body parts off the actors and chow down. The metaphor there is just so on point.
Of course USDC is upgradeable; it's run by an entity that is attempting to comply with the laws and regulations of many different jurisdictions. No power-hungry regulator would allow them to deploy USDC without the capability to arbitrarily intervene, freeze, and blacklist.
> Sorry but that's nonsense.

I'm not lying. This problem cost me a full weekend earlier this year. I may have misremembered the exact version numbers, though. Perhaps it wasn't between 2 and 3. Is there a Python 4?

The problem is that you can't have one Python interpreter that covers all versions of Python, and Python is very unforgiving about using the wrong interpreter version.

In any case, it was a serious problem that cost me a lot of time and really soured me on Python as an end user. I've not encountered a similar issue with any other language before, so this appears to be uniquely a Python thing.

But I don't know. I'm happy enough to just avoid Python-based anything whenever possible now.
I get annoyed at all the "processed food" studies because when you go to look up the definition of ultraprocessed and processed it's all very hand-wavy "you know it when you see it" kind of thing so there's no way to know what to avoid in your diet.
depreciation is what happens to you car.
deprecation is what happens to file formats.
> when Chrome started blocking/disabling ad blocker extensions.

That has never actually happened (yet). Though it is true that firefox offers APIs for better blocking.
Even the F-35B doesn't actually do vertical takeoff in practice (though it's capable of doing so IIRC), it does vertical landing and short take-off. Going straight up uses a LOT of fuel.
I am not afraid of controversy.
Reading comprehension much? He's saying "If". My reading is he's not calculating that this will happen.

On the flip side, we're not seeing any slowdowns. Oil companies are already calculating the billions of dollars of future profit they'll get from extracting the oil they know is in their fields, and so far no one is able to get them to stop.
OK. Crypto is not like railroads, and it isn't like 8-Track, either.

I never had either one. I have ridden on trains, though /s
The reaction to this is as if every computer on the planet is losing the ability to open with PS/EPS. PS/EPS were not native MacOS files until the infusion of NeXTSTEP code into MacOS in the form of OS X.

I've lived in a mixed system world for a long time, opening PS/EPS on Windows has always required extra software. You can convert it on Linux easy enough, or just install Ghostscript on MacOS.

Either way, the time of PS/EPS as a regular and common interchange data format is long gone.
Presumably those print shops have a Photoshop license, which would mean they're unaffected by this.
Darn it, s/transient/transitive
Well, yes. Point is, GPT-4 read the entire StackOverflow and then some, comprehended it, and now is a better interface to it, more specific and free of all the bullshit that's part of the regular web.
Yeah, this bothered me a lot back in 2012 or so after reading a paper by James Hansen pointing out that one of the chief effects of adding CO2 is to change the shape of the distributions of seasonal temperatures and rainfall

The bell curve gets flatter and wider, so extremes become much more likely, so the risk of simultaneous extremes in two or more regions at the same time, and for consecutive harvests, goes up even more.

From O(1 in a million) in the 1980s, to O(1 in 10) by the 2050s. (Numbers for illustration, not exact, but the change in order of magnitude is about right, I think.)

But then I realised how much fat there is in the global food production system, particularly with biofuels and animal feeds (wheat, soy, maize). It's not likely to be a problem until every other harvest is failing.
So what? you say. People using assistive technology care. Accessibility shouldn't be an afterthought.
You might enjoy this:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...
Every time people talk about "Blue light" it's a problem precisely because it's like the light we get from the sun, it mucks up our circadian rhythm and keeps us awake. Or it's bad for our eyes because reasons, even though "there is no good evidence that filtering blue light with spectacles has any effect on eye health, eye strain, sleep quality or vision quality" (Wikipedia).

So if tablets do the same thing the sun does and keep us awake, that must mean kids in very sunny areas have early puberty as well? Those up in the tropics with a consistently large amount of sun year round, for example?

Even simple logic deduction, this story makes no sense. And when the truth comes out, it'll probably be something like "Exposing rats to the equivalent of 20 suns worth of blue light causes early puberty and death"
That event did not occur within the US judicial system.

Though it did occur within a territory unlawfully invaded by, and occupied at the time by, the United States.
The Godot core developers have a company you can partner with for a Godot build for those platforms. It's not really a big deal if you're making the kind of money to make that port worth it.
Authentication should just be another service you talk to over UNIX domain sockets. The dynamic library design is a huge problem, and changing the configuration language won't fix that.
It isn't similar, does not offer support for all kinds of Windows development.
Even still, you can't use "They wouldn't be in this court if they hadn't done something wrong" as part of the evidence for the 'preponderance of evidence' standard.
It would be interesting to see data of how much blue light an individual is exposed to proportional to their smartphone use. I would expect people who are regularly outdoors would use their smartphones less due to the difficulty of seeing the screen under the enormous blue light reaching from horizon to horizon.
Absolutely. We're still in early days, but the products that Intel has announced in this space are impressive, and if they execute well they should be able to capture a significant amount of market share. That isn't to say that they will be the majority or dominant player in this space, but even capturing 10% or 20% of the datacenter GPU market in the next few years would be a win for Intel.

Intel is also well known for inking long-term deals with major discounts for big customers (Google, Facebook, etc.) that can commit to purchasing large amounts of hardware, whereas Nvidia doesn't really have the same reputation. It's conceivable that Intel could use this strategy to help bootstrap their server GPU business. The Googles and Facebooks of the world are going to have to evaluate this in the context of how much additional engineering work it is to support and debug multiple GPU architectures for their ML stack, but thinking long-term/strategically these companies should be highly motivated to negotiate these kinds of contracts to avoid lock-in and get better discounts.
My RF knowledge is hobbyist only but I think the word you're looking for is "modulation", e.g. LoRa is able to work over significant distances at low power because of its clever chirp spread spectrum modulation method.
Wait, what should we do if courts are unfair or corrupt?

Because honestly, …we’re way past that point in pretty much every country of the world. People are too demoralized or weak to do anything about it, but just for intellectual curiosity, what is supposed to happen when something abnormal happens in our societies?
when preview stopped opening video files that had a codec other than ProRes or H.264, it just felt broken to me as well. for the longest time, one of the first things i'd add to any new OS install were the QT extensions of the other codecs. now, that's no longer supported.
It depends. More reputable contracts such as Uniswap and Compound use immutable contracts. This is how Ethereum was designed to be used. Unfortunately, many others use the "proxy pattern" which is a weird hack allowing the code to be replaced by an admin account. This makes sense for development, because it allows code to be deployed iteratively, but IMO it needs to stop.
https://archive.ph/TUmGl

Boils down to: just do the thing, don't be anxious about it.

Doesn't have anything to do with optimization.
Shrug. F-4s were doing this in the early 80's.
Not many global brands with multibillion dollar IP willfully rebrand.

Funny enough though, not only did Twitter do it with X recently, but Facebook rebranded recently to Meta and it’s still common Meta is referred to as “Meta formerly Facebook”, even in the wiki article that is included in opening sentence.

I don’t think it’s so much a reflection on the new brands it mor a reflection on the value of the old brands which still carry a lot of value for SEO purposes which is likely was articles/blogs probably tend to include the former brands.
Playing pedantic?
The U.S. healthcare customer most likely pays a larger fraction of the cost to develop new health products (drugs, equipment, etc.) compared to other parts of the world. Because of how the payment system is structured in the U.S., profit and R&D cost recovery that incentivizes new developments can be recovered with higher prices.

The U.S. is the number one producer of new drugs:

“the U.S. leads in the discovery of approved drugs, by a wide margin (118 out of the 252 drugs). Then Japan, the UK and Germany are about equal, in the low 20s each. Switzerland is in next at 13, France at 12, and then the rest of Europe put together adds up to 29. Canada and Australia put together add up to nearly 7, and the entire rest of the world (including China and India) is about 6.5, with most of that being Israel.” [1]

The U.S. also leads the world (or is near the top) in other healthcare technology development:

“The answer to the question, ‘what country leads the world in medical innovation?’ is the United States. Medical industry professionals all over the world would have to agree that the top medical technology currently being used around the world has ties to the U.S.” [2]

Somebody has to pay for the new technologies and keep the profit incentives active. Somebody has to pay for the research centers to keep going. The U.S. customer is on the hook. We just need to figure out how to make sure those without the means can still get excellent healthcare. I don’t think we are there yet-by a long shot.

Of course, none of this excuses the middlemen and crooks (hospitals, clinics, charlatans, etc.). That can only be fixed with fierce enforcement.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/where-drugs-come-c...

[2]
https://sterlingmedicaldevices.com/thought-leadership/medica...
Not to my knowledge. How would such a system even avoid false positives, much less achieve market penetration?
Nah they definitely aren't as bad. People using speakers in public are actively choosing to annoy people when they could have used headphones. There's no headphone equivalent for drones.

Drones are also way way less common than shitty music players.
I wonder when computers will start taking our intonation into account too. That would really help with understanding the end of a phrase. And there’s SO MUCH information in intonation that doesn’t exist in pure text. Any AI that doesn’t understand that part of language will always still be kinda dumb, however clever they are.
Called an efoil, they also have non electric versions that are much cheaper
Oooh okay that makes sense.

Thank you.
Tell that to all those Russian oligarchs that got their assets frozen
I'm generally opposed to these types of upgrade backdoors, but USDC might be the one project where it is acceptable. You are already trusting them to hold the actual dollars in a bank account.