skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments.

I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say.

All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports.

Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed.

As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over.

But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.
https://archive.is/BHkJA
Some implementations of mipmapping store a single medium-resolution image and either sample fewer pixels or duplicate neighboring pixels when drawing. You don't need extra memory for that. Literally just mapping a subset of the pixels from the texture stored in memory.

When enough pixel duplication occurs you may want to enqueue a request for a higher resolution texture to be loaded into memory and let the resource pool decide. You can see this in effect in some older games where you're able to "outrun the horizon/frustrum" so to speak or when too many objects spawn and the level of detail is terrible for a while until the game catches up. Otherwise this is just a most-recently-used cache. Mipmapped textures can either be many prescaled static copies on disk or precomputed from the single full resolution asset on disk while loading a level.
Both things are true: Things change and our perception of things changes.

I'm not the OP so I can't say for sure, but I consider it a near certainty from my own (similar) experience that he's both viewing his time at google through the rose colored glasses of youth and novelty and is correct about the negative changes to the company's culture.
I like when people bring their values when they do business. Especially when those values are more than “make money”, and expressed in more ways than product design.
This is Google's constant struggle in the AI space. They can hire the best talent and give them exorbitant salaries, but by virtue of already being a $2T company their stock price is simply not going to make a 100x jump no matter what they produce. Even if an AI researcher at the company doesn't care about power or independence or anything of that sort, just from a financial perspective it makes a lot more sense for them to join a startup or found their own. Just look at how many of the authors of all the seminal AI papers from Google Brain are still at the company. If you are a top mind in the AI space why would you want to share the spoils of your work equally with 200K other Google employees?

In order to have a fighting chance Google needs to spin off their AI efforts and issue stock independent of $GOOG.
Just wanted to observe that there's no need to stress about allocating exactly the amount of physical memory you'll need in memfd_create(). Linux will always allocate pages on-demand (regardless of overcommit settings), so any unused virtual memory costs you essentially nothing. Given that, you should feel free to allocate at least several GB in a memfd (I've actually done this with 32TB, but that large an amount can conflict with overcommit policy, which you may or may not have control over). In general (for 64-bit address spaces) you should never need to worry about reallocating a memfd based on the amount of physical memory you need.
Thanks for this. If you can find a copy, I have found “The Annotated ANSI C Standard” by Herb Schildt (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media 1993) to be very useful.
The big change between the subscriptions of yore, e.g. magazine subscriptions in the days before the internet, and the subscriptions of today, is that payments used to be push and now they are pull. The magazine used to have to beg and plead with you to send them a check, but now vendors can set up an automatic debit continuing into perpetuity.

The regulatory environment has not caught up (although the article explains how it's starting to). It turns out that recurring pull payments tend not to be cancelled, resulting in a system where massive overpayments for actual services consumed are the norm. This is not economic efficiency leading to useful consumer innovation, it's rewarding the players who lodge the darkest dark patterns. Occasionally that includes, as described elsethread, the illegal practice of "just straight-up not honoring the 300 page contracts that they had written" — although unethical practices such as making it deceptively difficult to cancel are presumably more common than outright lawbreaking.
> Either the pilot mildly goofed the flare and "dropped it in" slightly at the end

It's funny, I'm sure it's much more difficult in a plane, but this sounds like such a similar experience to thinking you've braked smoothly but accidentally having your final complete stop become sharp because you've overestimated how much speed you've shed.
TLDR: milk is produced in closed system now, meaning dust from the barn doesn't get in it. They added 1 part per thousand of hay dust to the milk, and all the holes came back
Google does something similar with Google Lens, though I can't tell what its current status is. Might work outside of the US.

One of the links on their information page is broken: https://health.google/consumers/dermassist/
I think that's Google hemartia. They execute really well initially, but falter on maintaining and nurturing ideas and products. The internal incentives regarding promotions and pay amplify the problem. Maintaining or improving a product isn't as impactful to one's career as creating an entirely new one. They have a half dozen chat apps because they unintentionally created an engineering "crabs in the bucket" situation. Not to say they are anywhere near as bad as the companies who do it on purpose a la stack ranking though.
Could just be another confounding variable like education, general cultural change, etc. I mean if “increased standard of living” meant “everything stays the same but taking care of kids is now easier” I would expect an increase in fertility. Obviously we shouldn’t simplify too much, but I don’t think increased standard of living alone makes much sense as explanation. I think something else is probably driving it.
> supports types for better speed

AFAIK, Symbolics Genera mostly ignored all static type declarations at compile-time. Thus there was no speed effect from static type declarations.
I can vouch for this. In my experience, both the printer and original ink have lasted 7 years (and counting) with very infrequent prints. Just a few head cleanings from the maintenance menu if it's been a while and it still works. It's still 3/4 full.
food for whom? not all corn is equal, and isn't just a switch from fuel/food for people.
>... if you are not getting value out of a subscription (that you signed up for), go and cancel it.

You're not wrong, necessarily, but the world isn't as black and white as you would like it to be. There is nuance to things, and not every subscription is as easy to cancel as you seem to think it should be.

I cancelled my NYT subscription about a year before California required them to make it a one-click process. I had to sit on the phone with them for 90 minutes in order to make it happen. Various holds, multiple reps pushing different "packages" for me rather than just outright cancelling. I literally had to argue with them in order to make it happen.

I had the time then. I didn't mind, though I sure was annoyed as hell. These days, with the job I have, and my outside-of-work life situation being what it is, 90 minutes isn't exactly an easy chunk of time for me to block out just so I can cancel a $25/month subscription. I could end up finding time for it, sure, and that - to your point - is absolutely on me. But it's not as easy to do that now as it was when I'd signed up for it years back. And you know, deep down, just as well as I do, that shit isn't ever as black and white as your attitude would like it to be. You can call it an "excuse" all you want, but that's a disingenuous take.
> I've yet to meet any Christians who don't contradict other Christians, while being 100% convinced their personal beliefs are correct and all those other interpretations are wrong.

Christian means "Christ-like", it's not surprising that different people have different interpretations of what that means.

But my experience has been the stronger someone proclaims their christianity, the less trustworthy they are in general.

That may seem paradoxical, but consider that I'm not christian which means they feel more justified in treating me as an out-group.

The most die-hard christian I've ever met once got into a fist fight with one of his tenants for being late on the rent. He also, at one point, climbed onto his roof with a compound bow every night for several weeks because some thieves stole a generator and he wanted to catch them coming back.

He also one time told me this story about he was doing a job (he had a lawn care business) and this group of mexicans just randomly attacked and beat the crap out of him. No, I didn't believe the ass-whooping was undeserved.
Why doesn't GOOG spin them off?

Now that I think about it, it seems this might be precisely what's occurring. It's possible the approach involves the Scientists "independently" seeking funding, resulting in their Director being sidelined, while the upper echelons of leadership have the opportunity to invest in the start-up. The same leadership that initiated the oppertunity.

Anyway, all hypothetical but this is what I'd do.
> Almost everything is "outside of physics",

No, it's not.

Many things are outside of "known" physics, sure. But I didn't say "outside of known physics". I said "outside of physics".

When I say "outside of physics" I mean "meta-physical", as in, processes that are not part of physical interactions of this world. Things that, if you somehow had Maxwell's demon tracking every single quark, lepton, and boson, even then you still wouldn't be able to account for.

It's a discussion of what is _theoretically knowable_, not a discussion of what we currently do know.
NASA deliberately funded private space flight capability. Your slight seems misdirected.
More than plausible; it's happening again right now within the UK justice system itself - https://csan149.substack.com/p/justice-at-risk
This should be the case, and as sibling comments notes, 2 of them are being investigated.

Unfortunately though, police forces around the world are not tasked with solving and prosecuting cases like this, which involve at least, extreme malfeasance, and more likely, malice with the goal of protecting oneself within X public/private institute they have a position in. This is a massively high profile case, so it will get some attention.

Instead the task is for the police is increasingly to mediate minor interpersonal disputes between individuals (easy wins) and ignore anything bigger and more complicated.
Reminds me of the recurring conversation on HN about how people should stop driving cars and just walk everywhere.

It's like, yeah, in an ideal world, all 8+ billion humans could pick up craft coffee as they stroll 5 minutes to their big tech employer who doesn't actually care when they show up. There's legitimate criticisms for how cities have been designed, but going further by vilifying car owners in the present and suggesting everyone could just walk or ride a bike to work is a level of being out of touch that only Silicon Valley types could achieve. Even politicians aren't as brazen with such silliness. As if the rest of the world can choose where their employer is located, how far their groceries are, or how much child support they have.

Just be a tech bro, bro.
For lobster at least, the sweetness of the meat decreases as a lobster gets bigger though it's more than just the same level of flavor compounds being spread across a smaller amount of total mass.
> iPhone: There is now a usable internet-connected general-purpose computer in your pocket. AirPods: We got rid of the piece of wire between your earbuds.

Most people who have AirPods didn’t have earbuds with the wire. Those who did didn’t wear them like AirPods. The iPhone is a computer in your pocket you interact with through touch. AirPods are computers in your ears you interact with through voice. Especially with LLMs, the latter is a huge step forward.

Also, the processing power in an AirPod outclasses Apollo 11’s; if we’re going to go full tech reductionist, it’s still a feat.
I was about to recommend the same book - lots of good nuggets of wisdom in here, without the dogma you sometimes find in this kind of literature.
That's mostly true, but there are some ergs (regions entirely buried in sand) in US deserts, and ergs are also a relatively small part of the Sahara.
Well, it doesn't make sense that this still happens. You'd think there would be policies and training to prevent this sort of thing nowadays...
> No mystical beliefs happening.

Not in that text, but you cleverly avoided addressing my actual complaint, which I indicated by quoting the specific text of yours I was agreeing with before posting my disagreement.

There is a mystical belief here though:

>> What is up with people throwing out science these days?

>> How did we go from:

>> Our simplified model Ignored friction.

>> to

>> We have no idea what is real, throw away all technology and lets live in the trees.

I asked in response:

> How many people actually do this though, as opposed to how many people's models contain other people doing this?

Your reply:

>> Was going to add some citations, but really there are too many.

>> Just search 'anti-science' in the US.

>> There are literally hundreds of articles, and studies slicing the data by any metric you desire.

Here you are speaking as if ALL returned hits (ALL instances of anti-science) match your prior framing: "We have no idea what is real, throw away all technology and lets live in the trees."

So, you dodged my criticism, while representing that science, and pro-science thinkers, are better at thinking...while demonstrating otherwise.

That most any pro-science person I engage with tends to follow this methodology is a part of the reason for my anti-science stance: the combination of deceit/disingenuousness combined with implied superiority (times the percentage frequency of this behavior in my experience) bothers me.
Can I say how much I hate Medium these days? Remember when it didn't suck and was doing such a good job of not sucking that all sorts of very serious people created Medium accounts to start blogging? What the hell happened, Medium?

I started reading this story, got about halfway down, and the story stopped and I got this big centered H2 reading "Create an account to read the full story."

Fine, I want to read the rest. I create an account. I go back to the story. Now the story still stops at the same place but the big centered H2 has changed to "Jorgi, read this story from Tom Smykowski — and all the best stories on Medium" and there's an "Upgrade" button. That was not our deal, Medium! You said I could create an account to read the full story.

So I click the button and it takes me to the signup page, of course on the "pay annually tab," with a small white button on a white background that reads 'monthly' for other options. Fuck you, Medium.
Swine fever threatens food source for millions as disease hits wild herds
That seems surprising, and I've been a game dev before I switched to mobile.

How large is a "large" tilemap?

And what is it that makes them particularly hard in the AAA space?
> Perhaps, but if they're unstated, what prevents you revising your principles after the fact, to fit your actions?

then you're not a principled person, that's why actions speak louder than words.
I run Ceph in my lab. It's pretty heavy on CPU, but it works well as long as you're willing to spring for fast networking (at least 10Gb, ideally 40+) and at least a few nodes with 6+ disks each if you're using spinners. You can probably get away with far fewer disks per node if you're going all-SSD.
Only America has confused that date format!
Mostly children and elderly people though, and raw cheese isn't the lead cause for such contamination, despite regulation processed food is quite high as well (with the record in recent years going to … Nestlé, who else. /r/fucknestle)
> 1981 A first 3D game called Tempest is published

Battlezone is actual 3D, and 1980.

I'm not saying that is first, either, just that 1980 < 1981 and that Tempest is more of a form of 2.5D. (I remember it being an interesting, fast-paced game with good sound, but fundamentally it's just Space Invaders rolled into a tube.)

> How to workaround too little RAM problem? Let’s load pixel graphics if player is far away and call it mip mapping:

MIP mapping is not primarily a RAM problem solving device. It's a way of precomputing the shrinking of texture images for when they appear in the distance, so that they don't have to be antialised on the fly.

Thus is a CPU saving device, and requires extra storage. However, not much more! The half-size texture needs only 25% more storage, and the quarter-size another 6.25% or so.

The renderer has to consider the depth and index into the appropriate scale of the texture. I don't remember all the details, but I see to remember that it's dynamic. Like when the textured surface is in deep perspective, the distant pixels are derived from the smaller scale data, while the near part from the larger scale.

It could save RAM if we can avoid the detailed textures for objects that require them and are all far away. I.e. lazily load the detailed texture as the objects are approached, and free the memory when they recede again.
If someone you know (a customer, in this case, with an existing relationship) wants to keep paying you, why go out of your way to say no?

unless there is a specific reason you think they screwed up - like they say they want to cancel, but hit the wrong button or something.

Or you know they’re dead and can’t cancel.

Otherwise it just inconveniences them if they want it, since you cancelled it out from under them.

Bad business, and probably rude unless there is a concrete reason you have to believe otherwise.
Show HN: Claude and ChatGPT can't do basic operations?
Fascinating experience in trying to get Claude and ChatGPT to do basic data analysis. I pasted a list of 290 locations into each tool and asked each one to tell me the percentage each location represented in the data set as well as a count for each location.

Both of them were wildly wrong for different reasons.

Claude completely miscounted the number of instances for one location. https://imgur.com/a/ShaORko

And then it kind of tried to gaslight me about it. https://imgur.com/a/ehbQ9hu

(EDIT) ChatGPT incorrectly counted instances and then reported that one location it said had 189 instances (actually 91) represented 99.47% of the dataset. Other locations had also incorrect percentages and the total percentage was far over 100%. This seems to be because despite identifying the instances individually, it was calculating using a total of 190 instances. https://imgur.com/a/yNcAHZB

Presumably this has something to do with the data format, but it was simply a copy-paste from a single column in a Google Sheet, which strikes me as a pretty standard format for data. I also pasted the same data into a different Google Sheet and it behaved normally.
In general med tech = so expensive your eyes bleed and your brain melts.

I'm assuming they've dropped in price a pretty good amount now, but digital x-ray machines with the require software were near hundred thousand price range and typically tied around some windows operating system. So if the controller came with XP, never expect to go to a new operating system. The companies general answers were, oh, you need a controller with a new OS, spend another $100k for the next gen, which unless you're pumping out huge numbers of xrays was just not going to happen.
I think by now you could start an entire collection of retrofuturistic ideas and expressions that at some point signified progress before falling out of fashion. What I think is interesting though is that sometimes expressions that were thought of as well and truly dead reappear or take on a changed meaning. Two examples:

The e- prefix. It used to be ubiquitous around I think the 90s, but then at some point must have gotten rapidly unpopular and basically vanished. The only place where it survived was in the term "email" as some sort of linguistic fossil. Though recently it seems to come back in terms like "e-commerce", "e-cigarette" or "e-paper".

Cyber-. I think the roots actually predate the computer age with the 19th century field of Cybernetics. From that it took on a strong role in 80s science fiction at the beginning of the internet with visions of augmented humans and livable virtual worlds. Then Gibson gave us the "cyberspace", which became mainstream and for some time described the actual internet - before at some point taking on a terribly stale and outdated feel like "information superhighway". But for some reason the prefix eventually reemerged with a different meaning and today seems to mostly refer to security or military matters with relation to the internet. I'm not sure how exactly this change of meaning happened.
you don't think other groups would have fought for survival?
Theoretically, incompetence can be unevenly deployed if you assign incompetent people more predominantly to specific regions or cases.
Life in the Algorithm
The Foolishness of Self Destruct Switches
Also garage. https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
The Rock Problem [video]
Programming isn't hard. It isn't easy either, but it isn't hard.

I think the thing about programming is that so much of the "old" world misunderstood how it was hard. There is a lot more creative process stuff involved with programming, and not nearly as much that is codified, that you need to study, as in other fields like physics. And so, it gives people wide leeway to footgun themselves. Just as much, going the other way, it puts a premium on the ability to think and reason in abstractions, to which point, we don't have as strong a "liberal arts" for the STEM world as we do for the literary / humanities / cultural world.

So yes, on one hand, programming is not as hard as physics (to make one example of it). But on the other hand, I knew a person or two doing research in physics who complained how much their work was held back because their colleagues didn't appreciate the effort it took to process all the data that came from their experiments. Folks didn't appreciate how critical all that code was to their research. We see this sort of dynamic replicated throughout the rest of the world.
Tech "Humanists" Are Inhuman