skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the things you mentioned are leftovers from the Soviet days, and are presently in decline.

> Their economy is growing

As the other commenters said, that's a war economy, plus some creative bookkeeping/regulation.

> and they are integrating with several other regional players.

The past few years have shown the CSTO¹, EEU², CIS³, etc. are a joke.

> They are energy and food self-sufficient

So are Canada, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia…

> relatively large and well educated population

Aging and dying. "Demographic crisis". Same for Japan, but at least Japan's doing better in most other metrics.

> launch payloads into space on the regular

"Regular", in the sense that the launch rate collapsed by over 80% in the late 1980s, and hasn't recovered⁴, even as the US and PRC have been exploding.

> export complex things like nuclear reactors.

So do Germany, France, Canada, the Netherlands— Most advanced economies, really.

> On the military side, they are one of the only that could sink an entire carrier battle group or an entire city in a flash.

Their flagship needs a tugboat following for when it bursts into flames⁵. They've built a grand total of 36 "5th-generation" combat aircraft, which are apparently less advanced⁶ than most countries' newer 4th-gen fighters⁷. They've even used up their stockpiles of tens of thousands of ancient tanks (at least the ones that hadn't already been rusted and looted irreparably) at a rate⁸ they'll never be able to replace.

Nuclear weapons aren't hard if you have a civilian nuclear energy sector. Rockets are old tech unless you're looking at non-chemical propulsion, reusable boosters, etc. Lots of countries could do those things within a couple years if needed, but we don't because they don't usually make enough sense unless you're already a superpower in other ways⁹.

Russia does a large number of flashy things, but it's for prestige, momentum, and autarky, and they can do less and less of it each year, rather than expressing any actual economic power.

They probably could have done quite well by focusing on tech/cultural, manufacturing, and resource exports. But wealthy nations won't buy from them now they've gone mask-off with the genocidal aggression, and their civil society is too corrupt to the core to fix itself.

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Nagorno-Karabakh_War#Ru...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Economic_Union#Econom...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93Commonwealth_o...

4. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327132/payloads-launche...

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admir...

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-57#Stealth

7. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/stealth-aircra...

8. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/08/09/russian-ta...

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency
> for what I thought they did

At one point Ward was talking about taking out the global banks. Carta raised too much money and then didn’t know what to do with it.
I advise doing what the others said. Encourage him and have fun and don’t worry about whether or not a game gets made. When he’s playing games, you might point out how you think the developer implemented things (even simple things).

I got into coding when I was 13. The only game I ever really made was a top down shooter with SML because I 1) learned that games are hard work 2) had no idea where to get assets besides ripping sprite sheets which I didn’t have the attention span for 3) I found more joy in the coding itself than making a game. I always had some dinky project going and it was almost never a game. Hell, I had more fun making a GameBoy emulator than making games!

These days, now that I know what I’m doing, I have an idea for a game I’d like to make. I wonder if I’ll ever get around to it? It’s ambitious, but I think doable solo (minus the art). It’d probably be a 5-10 year project. A big part of the reason I haven’t started it is I know how much not fun parts there are involved, like tuning algorithms.
As a Tech PM, I can say,remote work definitely increases productivity. I noticed, employees tend to work more when diligently when they were allowed to work remotely.

In case of complex Troubleshooting, this is definitely an added advantage , as people can focus more and solve these issues comfortably.
Is it still enforced/rule that you can't charge a lower price for a subscription outside the app store? Perhaps thats why streaming services like netflix and max still charge the same price but spend that "Apple tax" to pay other kinds of distributers/promoters like american express, mobile carriers, etc. to offer promotions, bundles or discounts. I think this is how the largest players in the app/subscription market are trying to penetrate the apple tax fortress.
Eh, honestly, depending on where you live your yearly electricity bill might justify an upgrade considering you’re running it 24/7. You might want to check your idle wattage with a kill-a-watt and look at your price per kw hour on your electric bill.

Basically you can outperform that rig with an Intel Atom N100 with 1/10th the TDP of the A10-5800K. You could jump on Amazon and grab a Beelink mini PC or similar for about $200 and have an entire system that maxes out at 35W, idles at about 12-13W.

If you save 20W of power on your idle and your power costs 20 cents per KW/h the new system would pay for itself in less
than 6 years. If you’re in a country like the UK or Germany your payoff is 3 years or less.
yeah why not just use unity.

Tell him the first step is to build a working game with 2% of all the features he wants.

Then you add features one by one. That helps with the accomplishment aspect. You guys may never reach 100%, but this is the most likely way to get there.
I've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience) using LÖVE.
Considering the code I have up in the next i3 workspace right now, I think it's safe to use the present tense for me with respect to vim -- and with respect to not using syntax highlighting.
> and they would kill to do anything else with their time

And yet they don't. That is not because they are bored, but because they fear the possible failure.
OpenAI’s own models. They’re also available commercially via API and are pretty affordable.
Not OP, but I think their point was clear - they seem to wish that compilers offered their own ASTs / tools for working with ASTs, so that tools like tree-sitter wouldn't exist at all.

It makes sense - tree-sitter is in large part a reimplementation of many, many parsers, and supporting a new language means duplicating yet another parser. The tree-sitter grammars are doomed by nature to forever chase the latest features in any evolving language, and reaching full compatibility turns out to be a ton of effort in many cases.

That said, language design being the freewheeling "if you can dream it, you can make it" thing it is, though, I doubt it's realistic to expect every language to have a fully-reusable, standardized parser - people just won't ever be that consistent, IMO.

Those who want consistency will need to provide it themselves, in the form of tools like tree-sitter.
No, but I have noticed that modified smartphone processors (like Apple’s M series) are now faster and more efficient than traditional desktop and laptop processors. I welcome their introduction into Windows laptops.

I’ve also noticed that there are emerging AI applications that cannot be run on-device by today’s smartphones. I would very much like an LLM Siri that doesn’t need a network connection.
I would expect that neural rendering could be integrated into UE5 while still keeping the amazing tools ecosystem. And, accordingly, I would expect them to remain market leader anyway. Also, looking back, Epic has been incredibly fast at integrating other bleeding edge research results into their engine, like Nanite geometry-as-texture and Lumen global illumination. And when it comes to training neural rendering pipelines, their Quixel dataset will surely be extremely helpful.
No, the beneficiaries of generative AI are the users because they set the prompt and use the outputs. Providers make cents per million tokens. It is a people empowerment technology.
as with many in the comments, what worked with my son is Roblox create.
THey can quickly transfer their imagination in blocks and figures and define the game they'd like to play!
Managing 50+ remote workers taught me that results matter, not hours. It's all about the output. Work asynchronously, focus on the end goal, and as long as it's legal and ethical, the 'how' and 'when' are often irrelevant. Traditional managers struggle with this mindset, often due to their own managers outdated approaches.

The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming, no syncs. Scrap these time-wasters and you'll be surprised at the productivity spike. If not, then you likely don't have the right people working for you.
Doesn't sound likely to me.

I looked it up and what happens is that over long time periods in sunlight, CFCs lose a chlorine radical, and that chlorine radical lives for a long time and catalyzes ozone to turn into normal oxygen molecules.

So it would only even possibly be effective if you have so much CFCs and so much light that it builds up a bunch of chlorine, enough to get rid of all of the ozone. My guess is that even if those reactions occur in the context of a home (which seems like a big if) they'd be so slow and require so much chlorine and CFCs around that you'd be dead before you could celebrate.

Not to mention you'd have to be releasing CFCs in ~every building constantly, which would destroy the ozone layer orders of magnitude worse than we did decades ago.
My sister snagged a Mac SE that was bound for the landfill from her physics teacher in High School (c 2000). It's not just an old Daily Driver like we're discussing, or like it was when she intercepted it - it's proper retro computing now. But I just realized that 23-4 years later it's still sitting, climate controlled in our parents' house. Next time I'm there I should try to see if it's still bootable and if not how to get it there...
That’s a compelling argument, and if I had to form an opinion today, that’s probably what I’d go with.

On the other hand, people said recklessly idiotic stuff all the time. Some guy in the news today is in court to determine now much he owes a woman who successfully sued him, and he still kept saying wild stuff about her.

Certain people seem pathologically incapable of STFU. The person who wrote the comments we're discussing could be one of them for all I know.
Which proxies do you think are bad / why? The moment you go more coarse than documenting every single worker's perfect timesheet and working out their direct individual output, you're introducing some kind of proxy. What you wrote applies to every economics statistical analysis so far.
They use their own models, and we don't know anything about their architecture (I believe), but you can use them with the OpenAI API.
What’s the go-to alternative? I’ve heard of Shareworks [1], but their sign-up process is nonsense.

[1] https://www.morganstanley.com/atwork/cap-table-management
LlamaIndex docs, LangChain docs, Youtube vids on intro to neural networks, tutorials on RAG, cross encoders, etc. should keep you busy for 20-40 hours at least
> But it’s old. We need something modern, that represents current ways to make documents from code.

I'd love something newer than TeX/LaTeX. Something with consistency (is it \$CMD{...}, \begin{$CMD}...\end{$CMD} or \{$CMD ...}?), better error messages, more specific and targeted warnings (most hbox-full warnings can be ignored, but many can't!), support for specifying `-Werror` (like gcc) and other things like that.

> I bet within my lifetime most scientific publications will move to a PDF tool that ingests CSS.

Maybe[1]. CSS and HTML needs a lot more functionality though. They have no page counter, no chapter counter, section counters, etc. No river detection, run detection, orphan detection, etc. No automatic reference manager[2], no automatic referencing of chapters, sections, tables, figures, etc. Missing correct hyphenation breakpoints.

Additionally, some things are there, but in a poor (for typesetting) way - inter-paragraph spacing must be faked (no, `:after` isn't a good way to specify `inter` spacing), no way to prevent what should be an atomic element (say ... an mbox containing a paragraph and an image) being broken across pages, no way to float an element to the next point in the document where it will fit (LaTeX does this by default, and it annoyed me no end when I could not find a way to get HTML documents to stop breaking my pretty short table across a page, and instead just place it on the next page).

Another thing that I think are a poor fit, but others think are superior, are the scripting facilities for creating new commands: doing `\newcommand or \newenvironment` is a lot less friction than doing an entire custom element. It's so little friction, that for an invoice I can simply do `\newcommand{\client}{\textbf\emph{The Client PTY LTD}}` and then use `\client` everywhere in the document.

I'm looking forward to a new LaTeX/TeX that fixes all those things. Maybe CSS+HTML would eventually get them, but many of those things are table stakes for typesetting, and yet they are not even on the horizon (or roadmap) for CSS+HTML.

[1] Could be I'm wrong. Like I said in another response, I'm no expert in CSS or HTML.
[1] This can be easily resolved with a custom web component

> And that way is CSS. I bet within my lifetime most scientific publications will move to a PDF tool that ingests CSS. We just need to find something open-source and clean that has no missing functionality.
The return of the joystick
The article complains about the Touch Bar escape key. This standard Mac key combo saved me during all those Touch Bar years (and it’s still my primary way of hitting escape):

Command+.

Works on iPad with keyboard case (on which I use vim in iSH) too!
Message Bridge – iMessage and SMS on retro hardware
Manta Network achieves Top 3 status in Ethereum L2 with $850M TVL.
Manta New Paradigm offers 5% native yields alongside attractive rewards.
Manta Network, a prominent multi-modular ecosystem designed for zero-knowledge (ZK) applications stands at the forefront of innovation in the crypto space by introducing two networks that redefine the landscape.

The first of its kind, Manta Pacific, establishes itself as a distinctive Layer 2 (L2) ecosystem operating on the Ethereum platform. Tailored for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-native ZK applications, Manta Pacific offers a scalable and cost-effective gas-fee environment. It simplifies the deployment of ZK applications by seamlessly integrating Solidity, providing solutions within the Ethereum ecosystem.
This. My son has been doing some amazing things with Godot.

For a 9yo, you might need to help. Take that opportunity.
When I first encountered Tailwind, I sincerely thought it was satire—that its authors were making a really clever and elaborate joke about the state of front-end dev.

Then, I encountered the raving fans. That's when I knew the shark had been jumped.
Humans sell books and music by the millions. Streaming and copying/printing is mass production too
I'm lars dot doucet at gmail dot com, ping me anytime!
Even the cheap work trucks have built in onstar and such now. If OP doesn't want to be tracked, they'd need to disable that somehow.
Harmony Turbines
> are still the only hospital without driving half an hour to 'the big city'.

By design.

Look up Certificates of Need. They are an application a prospective new hospital needs before breaking ground, to make sure an area isn’t “overserved” by hospitals (i.e. protecting profits).

Certificates of Need were lobbied for by … drumroll … hospital owners.
Fujitsu is sorry that its software helped send innocent people to prison
I've used many engines and shipped many games, including commercial titles (I don't derive a salary from the game industry, though).

I think I'd recommend something like GameMaker. I've never used it myself, but it's a self contained IDE that has everything to make decent 2D games.

I'd advise against the pitfall that 3D games lure you into. That includes engines that are 3D with a 2D "mode". There is so much leaky abstraction, and the doco will be intermingled with 3D all over the place, leading to frustration and unnecessary complexity.

If a game is fun in 3D, chances are you could write a game in the same vein in 2D and carry the idea and execution across. 3D games are beyond ridiculously hard to execute on by oneself (well), and require exponentially more work to complete.

There is no gain, in terms of discovering the joy of making games, in diving in 3D first.

If you prefer a more programming centric approach, with no IDE, I recommend Love2D. It's a joy to use, well documented.

If you want a full blown low level approach, I recommend Raylib. It's fantastic and fun to use as well. But at this point, you're swimming in the deep end.

Also worthy of note is PICO-8. It's a fantasy console that can be easily ported on 'open' console (such as the ambernic), making your game feel alive, being played on a hand-held console. But as for the learning experience, I found it to be more of an expert's getaway retreat, rather than a good first choice for an engine. That said there is enough material out there and small enough API, to pick it up rather quickly, all batteries included.
You can maintain your original page numbers even with actual pages being different (say, two pages 4 with the reflown page size 50% of the original)
<3 Thank you for writing so beautifully and sharing so openly. Can I ask if you've sought support or community in other parents who have gone through similar losses and are battling this newfound duty? I can't figure out whether that would help or hinder. Perhaps the latter if it is too morose or retraumatizing.
You could start with a text adventure.

It's how I started back in the 90s, and it's so simple he could do most of it himself.

It'd let him focus on story, basic programming (if-statements) and if you wanted to add 3d you could generate some 3d images with one of the cool new AI tools.
> how much water is in that well?

Given the viscosity of air vs. water, one might assume there's no water in the well. Also, given some surface area of a bear, and air pressure from a cushion of air formed under the falling bear, the fall speed does seem a little high, at least for a calculation with that number of decimal places, but perhaps the well was located in the crust of the earth where gravity's a tad higher.

Living bears are also buoyant, and will be slowed down considerably on meeting the water, so the bear is unlikely to have reached the bottom of a water-filled well for a long period, if at all.

To answer OP, I'd say the bear is brown, because of the mud from the base of the (somewhat empty) well. However to an outside observer, given the lack of light in the well the shade of brown might not be discernable. A human in the well with the bear will see the colour of the bear as a low relative concern compared to A) being in a well and B) being in a well with a bear.
I wasn't implying Windows never had an Accessibility API. However, it took Microsoft until around 2010 until they actually added their own built-in screen reader, Narrator. Before that, the API was there, but if you wanted a capable screen reader, chances were high that you would pay a relatively high price for it. These days, Narrator is even almost useable, although I dont know any blind users who actually use it on a daily basis.
Let me address that last point of project scoping: it's a great skill to teach, and the right way to do it is to introduce Venn diagramming. This is a serious tool for any kind of creative project.

The way to use Venn diagrams is to distill "the game" (which, for any pre-teen, and for most first-time adults too, is going to be a jumble of features and assets) into its absolute core: the big picture, philosophy, principles, themes, "design pillars". The core is the overlap of all the specific stuff: when you implement something, it has code, it has visuals, it has audio, and it should all relate to the core. So, Tetris, Sokoban, and Minecraft are all about "playing with blocks" at some level, but they differ in that the core also contains some other aspect of play. Every piece of media that works for its audience - they find it believable and engaging - is representable in the diagram.

So when your son asks for this or that feature, have him work through it on a diagram, filling in "what sound does it make" and similar kinds of details while you address the big picture parts that are hardest. Make lots of little diagrams. You'll eventually hit on one where you can reasonably hope to prototype it with your chosen tool. That's good enough, when you are 9 years old.
Pretty sure these are based on (relatively) inexpensive KrCl excimer lamps, which are available on Aliexpress and such. The big question in my mind is whether or not it's a big enough dose to actually sterilize a room.
Looks like an Orthodox Christian family? If so I will write your baptism names down at church if you are willing to share them.
> How does one prove that Apple does not use data from customers for its commercial gain. The company is ridiculously secretive and non-transparent.

Apple does use customer data for commercial gain. But it does so anonymously and in an aggregated fashion. I think it’s fair to be skeptical here, but Apple does take their users data privacy much more seriously than their competitors. I think it helps to understand where their value proposition is aligned compared to the competition.

At Apple, privacy and security are core features of the product. They tend to push personalization features down to the device level to avoid building customer profiles in the cloud. They are generally ok with not releasing a feature if they cannot do so in a way that respects data security and privacy.

Compare this to Google, whose philosophy is that customer data is important to protect, but they expect their customers are alright with Google building a highly tailored profile to them. Google tends to process customer data in the cloud and shares this profile across their product lines. They believe that they can build better products and features by centralizing customer data.

For Apple, there isn’t any reason for them to try to get a secret edge by telling the public they’re not using data and secretly doing so. Their customers would be rightfully weirded out if they saw over-personalized products in ways they didn’t authorize. A large part of their competitive moat is actually denying companies like Facebook access to their users data.