skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem of "free to leave" is that that only works with unlimited resources. Why should I allow a random person into my house to eat my food and promise to assist, only to be free to leave at any time. And they have to go to another house, why would someone there do the same.

Being altruistic is great, but at some point you run out of necessary resources. And altruism dies at scale when resources dry up.
Show HN: SpeedBrain – Quiz app with Emotional Damage and engagement mechanics
SpeedBrain is a quiz app designed to make learning addictive through gamification and aggressive engagement tactics.

Key Features:

- Quick-fire questions with time pressure

- Four difficulty levels, including an "Emotional Damage" mode

- Power-ups, daily rewards, and treasure chests

- Global leaderboards

Tech Stack:

- Frontend: React Native

- Backend: Laravel

- Database: MySQL

Unique Aspects:

- "Emotional Damage" mode pushes difficulty to extreme levels

- Designed to maximize user engagement and retention

- Balances learning with addictive gameplay mechanics

Discussion Points:

- Ethics of designing potentially addictive educational apps

- Effectiveness of extreme gamification in learning

- Balancing user engagement with potential psychological impacts

We're particularly interested in feedback on our engagement strategies and the "Emotional Damage" mode. How far is too far when it comes to making learning addictive?

Would love for you to try it out and provide feedback.
You've misread, 95% is a 19:1 ratio.

I think this article presents dark matter as much more of a resolved question than it actually is. It's an unconfirmed hypothesis to explain observed reality. That's not mysticism, it's science in progress.

Perhaps one day a physical experiment will support or invalidate the hypothesis, or a competing one. Until then, we simply don't know the answer, so we think about it. If you don't like that, I guess you should stop thinking about it?
You don't even get to vote with the code at times, and sometimes you don't tet to vote with money.
And projects that get the money vote too hard and often end up in Mozilla situation, starving development of important or useful things for marketing features.

You can, however, vote with a fork, but then you end up in the "you forked it you maintain it" situation and big enough projects are too big for even a small team to properly maintain.
Case in point: the perennial ffmpeg fork.
I'm a novice. I have only used vscode and sublime. Both have a problem when copying code from elsewhere, where the indent will be wrong every time somehow. If that's what you're talking about, is there an editor that will figure it out correctly somehow? Thanks
It is absurd to act as if machines would do the same as human brains if you don’t even know what human brains do.
There are many fandoms that organize conferences and spend their free time posting on forums. That doesn't mean they'll get to fly on the Enterprise or in the TARDIS or anything else.

The exact same phenomenon is happening with Mars. People like the idea of it, it's a wonderful fantasy. The new frontier, exploration, etc. None of them truly understand the hardships and ugliness of a life on Mars. It's not a life of exploration, it's a life of living in a small basement and obsessively checking a hundred different life support systems that will kill you if even one fails.

Also, every time one of these Mars fandoms went beyond posting on forums and meeting and speaking about it, they showed just how silly their ideas are. They have no idea of logistics, of limitations of construction equipment, of the difficulty of operating it even in good conditions, of how many things break down with dust, of how much water construction needs, of economics and fundraising for such a project, and so many other problems that are already known - not even discussing the unknowns.

If anyone truly planned to have a colony on Mars, they would obviously start with a colony project somewhere in the Arctic/Antarctic, importing the digging equipment, importing all the needed water, using exclusively solar energy and so on. They could use the experience as training, but, much more importantly, to actually estimate the required equipment and materials. They would start a relationship with regulatory agencies and suppliers, they would get a taste of the type of fundraising they need to do. If they succeeded, they would also have excellent proof that they know what they're doing, of a realistic time-line, and so on.

The fact that no one is even talking about starting something like this is 100% clear proof to me that there is no serious thought being put into this Mars colony fantasy.
The only good thing about not lubricating your drivetrain is that replacing/fixing it won't be so messy!
Java was not. It was originally designed to be interpreted, and is still interpreted in many implementations (especially before any JIT kicks in).

In any case, those were just the examples I could think of OTOH. MSIL/CIL is another good example; I’m sure there are many others.
You are not free to perceive any information. In our society, some people have the right to decide whether or not you can watch a particular football game, look at a particular image, or know a particular prime number, as ridiculous as that sounds. Freedom of information consumption is an illusion from the days when law enforcement in the internet wasn't a thing.

Industry and state have a large interest in this and in just a few years they will have total information dominance. This won't require awkward measures like attacks on DNS or VPN providers. You simply won't be able to execute unvetted software soon. Chat control is just an example and the first step. The principle will be: You can only run software that fulfills all legal requirements, especially if said requirements monitor your well-behavedness.
We have end to end robot learning models that take nothing but camera input and instructions and directly produce the robot motions. There is literally no code left except for the sensors and actuators. It's all in the model.
"AI" word is unneeded. The company announced it will inspect and use your private content from a service you paid for.
Ahh! Thanks. I didn't see it because its not the official source, I only checked those two.
as an atheist who has been suicidal from around age 12, I'm not afraid of being dead, but actually causing my own death has been very difficult - it's not so much a logical fear as a mental block, it's like you're moving through very thick syrup trying to get the thing done, you're fighting a mental force that's holding you back, and eventually all the commitment and energy that you had invested in getting it done just seems to have dissipated and you just feel empty. I'm my case at least, the survival instinct has won every battle. unless of course we have quantum immortality, it would explain why I keep failing.
Bound to be emotive. No amount of debunking rids some of a belief Ned was a premature revolutionary, especially amongst the sovcit community.

Such is (--online) life
Volkswagen Willing to Pay $1B Just to Look at Rivian's Software
Sorry for the late reply: what I'm saying is that build-process fragility is bad. Ill-considered or slapdash dependencies can be part of that, as can runaway complexity. So can the choice of language, but so can the hackish bash-script example I confessed to from my own project.
Useful tip. Thank you
Some historicaland b&w footage might have sold the idea. We're hoarding low resolution half scan VHS of our family super8.
the cognate 'cook' in english also has a broad meaning (preparing food) and a narrow one (heating food to induce chemical change) but even the narrow one is not so narrow as to require boiling water

the problem with 'cooking bread' is that 'baking bread' is a set phrase, not that baking doesn't count as cooking
You would be wrong about that - boardgames-like wargaming is used by militaries all over the world, including the US.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0okOrVaLCA
As the planet gradually climbs above 400ppm as an average - or even low - everywhere, won't that mean these sensors become less and less accurate? Is there a plan to handle that?

edit: still precise, probably highly precise, but .... the mark just goes up and up?
Don't let perfection get in the way of done.
Does DAB really offer better quality? From what I know, stations opt for puny 64kbps streams which sound nowhere near as good as FM can.
Just like the right answer to "when should I let this person go?" is the first time the idea of firing him crosses your mind, maybe the right answer to this situation is the same:
You should be looking for a new opportunity and move on the first time that idea crosses your mind...

When you think something is off, it usually is... and waiting on it will not change its trajectory.
Classic Architecture Books
Yes, at some point we probably need to lift the adjustment above 400 for the automatic baseline calibration which is easily doable.
This description of open source fits with the plurarchy concept explored by Alexander Bard in Netocracy 2 decades ago.

From my point of view there are not only one open source community, there are a myriad of them.
I don't know if "perverse" is the word... maybe "avoidant". I can try to be more specific. Is it racist for a white person to use the n-word to refer to black people in casual conversation? As in, "I was walking to the shop and passed some n***s playing football."
Architect's Bookshelf
I wish AI came for my Android keyboard.

I regularly type in English, Czech, and Polish, and Gboard doesn't even know some of the basic words or word forms.
Amara's law -- "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
HFT firms have been using ML and AI for years. They simply called those things with a different name: statistics.

The result models are then fast enough for them to make trading decisions in less than a microsecond.
(2024).

Assigning a CVE to every second commit and refusing to assign CVEs to unfixed issues doesn't seem like correct usage of the CVE system. I expect that most Linux CVEs will never get a proper analysis or a CVSS rating.

To me it sounds plausible that the design goal of the Linux CNA is to show that CVEs don't meaningfully apply to the Linux kernel. Given how dependent on context the impact of some kernel bugs can be, if we were assigning CVSS scores for the worst case, practically all kernel bugs would be at least a 9.8/10.
I think this topic has been discussed countless times, and this post fails to add anything worthy to it.

My two cents: use result types, or their analog in your language for expected error conditions, and use exceptions for exceptional situations. Example for the former is parsing, which has an expected failure mode - something couldn’t be parsed as intended. Example for the latter is a network issue during an API call/writing a file/etc. Nonetheless, they are a homologous structure to a Result type in more FP languages, so it’s purely which is a better fit for the given circumstance.

I would also like to defend exceptions, as they are a very good construction with sane and safe defaults. They let people concentrate on the actual business logic, not sprinkling little bit of business and error handling logic all over the place; they do the sane thing by default: auto-unwrap the correct result, auto-bubble up if not handled at a given scope; and often unappreciated: they allow as fine- or course-grained error handling as needed, while it is only possible with some less than readable Monad magic with Result types. And most importantly, they never let an erroneous condition silently go unnoticed, you have to deliberately ignore them for that. With errno checking (c, go), and a bit less so with result types you can fall victim to that.

Edit: Oh, and they add stacktraces! That’s also a very important and useful feature of them, much more so than “grepping for this hopefully unique error code in the codebase to find where it might come from with zero further detail”.
Human can mostly only do these kinds of guesses for traveling salesmen problems embedded in 2d Euclidean space. But we have pretty good heuristics for these cases to kickstart a solver, too. Give a human a general graph with arbitrary edge weights, and they'll be dumbfounded.

(I don't think you even have to go all the way to an arbitrary graph, I suspect a decent sized graph with edge lengths embedded in 3d euclidean space will already confuse humans. Definitely once you get to 4d.)
I have a desktop application with a single error handler at its event loop. All that handler does is show the exception message in a messagebox and then the event loop resumes. This application has a "save file" option.

In this application it doesn't matter if the permission is denied, the path exists and is a directory, it was a network share that went away, or a disk write error, or out of memory, or a bug. If I press "Save" and the exception occurs, I can read the message and correct the problem if possible, and then just press Save again. It is incredibly robust and has effectively no error handling.

Of course, that doesn't handle all the cases that you describe. For example, for your case #1 I think that isn't a case that no more meaningful work can be done and isn't an error. Instead, you're just asking a question and then proceeding or not based on the answer.
I have quite a few books on this topic. Perla's was probably the first that I read and it is good, but to anyone interested in the topic I would first recommend Jon Peterson's "Playing at the World" ("A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games"). It's a book about how D&D came to be and covers many topics, but the section on wargames is very well researched and detailed (and I enjoyed the rest of the book as well).

My second recommendation is CG Lewin's "War Games and their History". It is a bit lighter on the history of military professional games, even if there is a chapter or two on that, but the chapters on non-professional wargames are amazing. The author has a personal collection of games going back to the 19th century and the book is full of photos and descriptions of obscure games that I really enjoyed reading about and that I never found in any other source. It covers games up to around 1950, so it does not get into any of the more well-known modern history of wargames (starting with Avalon Hill in the 1950's).
Yes, window.ai is a terrible name
Most open source projects are a money driven meritocracy. This is a good thing. There's a lot of open source. But much of it is running on commercial interest from the various companies that depend on it (i.e. every big software company you can name). They pay the bills. People get paid to work on open source projects and these companies wield their influence through these people. Whatever this is, it isn't charity mostly.

There are of course also a lot of hobby projects and a few idealistic ones. I run some of those small projects myself. But most of the bigger strategic projects have companies behind them and are all about what they need and want. This long tail of smaller projects is nice and all and there's a lot of value there and people run them for all sorts of reasons. But as soon as they become valuable, companies and commercial interests tend to get involved one way or another. Most people just don't have a lot of unpaid time to donate.

Either way, decision making is strictly hierarchical typically. You are welcome to fork and modify and do your own thing. That's what it means to be open source. You are not welcome to force push your changes upstream. Getting your changes accepted requires scrutiny, consensus, and negotiation that involves the upstream people in charge. Mostly those people get that power by virtue of being there, doing most of the work, and being qualified for the job. And then getting paid to do that job. In most well run projects getting your changes in is a relatively straightforward process. But when there are conflicts, upstream generally wins.

Rails is a good example where loads of people started making money doing rails related work 20 years ago or so. The author is the creator of Ruby on Rails and the CTO of a company that drives its development and where the framework was initially developed. It probably makes nice amounts of money from doing rails related work and it apparently made him quite wealthy. Good for him.
Overly complicated things, but also things that are so fragile that the slightest disturbance (such as a minor version change) in the foundations will make them collapse.
No, but in the general vicinity, in the Tweed Valley...
Wifi sensing is interesting, but you can combine a $3 ESP chip with one of these for a much easier project at lower cost: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2795.html

I use those for presence detection in my house. 3D print a small case and for < $20 you have highly accurate presence detection that also works when sitting still. Ideal for automatic light and climate control.
Not only this, but they are owned by nonprofits (The Patagonia Purpose Trust and Holdfast Collective organization) which uses income they get from the company for environmental causes.
It, according to Eric Lippert, was at least partially to fix the problem of vexing exceptions[1] that plagued Int32.Parse. Parse was first and it was kind of an unfortunate design decision to make a almost expected result (parsing to fail) throw an exception.

It's worth noting that nowadays Parse is just a wrapper around TryParse that throws (although this is an implementation detail)

[1]: https://ericlippert.com/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions/
I would expect better for a company owned by nonprofits.
Or maybe it’s done because people like to try and experiment new things, see what works and what doesn’t, with sometimes surprising results. I thought the name of this site was Hacker News, let people do weird things
Who are you aiming this at?

Unfortunately I’d never advocate for something like this at my work. Self-hosting doesn’t make sense in terms of total cost of ownership. I’d rather engineers spent time solving problems in our core business than making sure our wiki is online.
The code that catches an exception can continue, but the point was about the code that threw the exception. You throw an exception if you can't continue the work you're currently doing, for whatever reason. Of course, the rest of the program can very well continue: some other part will catch the exception you threw and decide what to do next. Ending the entire process is an extreme case, that should be reserved for only global problems - out of heap space errors, memory corruption, security violations, deadlock detection. Anything else should result in a more localized failure - killing a thread, a task, a request processor etc.

Also, there is little fundamentally different between throwing an exception and returning an error result. Everything I wrote above applies just as much to error results as it does to exceptions. Exceptions are just a language-level mechanism to help with a common error pattern: the code that detects an error condition is typically very far away from the code that can handle that error condition. When an error happens, the vast majority of the time, what happens next is that the error will be cascaded back through the call chain to a handler function of some kind. Along the way, some context will be added to the error, and some resources will be cleaned up. You can do this by hand, as you would in Go or Rust, or you can have the runtime do it for you, like in Java or C#. There are pros and cons to both (implicit vs explicit, how relevant is the context, etc), but fundamentally the program will take the exact same path.
I'm pretty sure that with time, they will be forced to let users choose the model. Just like it happened with the search engine...
> To me it sounds plausible that the design goal of the Linux CNA is to show that CVEs don't meaningfully apply to the Linux kernel.

I think it's hostile in nature. The core kernel devs have a horrible attitude toward security vulnerabilities.
https://archive.ph/UCSTS
Yes, my original wording was "to make the CVE system burn", but that got lost during my tone-down edits.
I have these all around the house, but not in the bedrooms. I use weight sensors to detect that someone is in bed and traditional PIR for motion in bedrooms.

Probably overly careful, but I didn't want to point a radar at my sleeping kids (and myself) for 12 hours per day. Similar for the WiFi access point upstairs, it's only in the hallway and not at maximum power.
Within the wargaming community, keeping these games non-computerized is a deliberate choice. The main intent of manual gaming is to maintain awareness of all the variables you are manipulating. Another benefit to manual gaming is the ability of non-programmers to easily tweak the system. A good exposition of the manual approach to wargaming is Philip Sabin's Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (2012).
Many services won't need an RDBMS, and for those that do there's a difference between the control plane of an application (development and releases), and the data plane (users using the service).

This is a complex and nuanced topic, but on my previous team of ~6 where we built a custom solution, we decided against using an RDBMS for multiple reasons, and on my current team where we use the same flagging system across 15 or so >1m requests per second services, there's no way it would work for us. If it works for your use case, that's great! But my advice for anyone else reading would be to put a lot of effort into considering the options as it's hard to change later and has significant impact on how the flagging system is used.

As for whether to use a commercial platform... my preference is probably to build my own with what I need in a system that I can modify as needed, or a commercial platform if there's one ready to go at a good price with the right feature set. I probably wouldn't use an existing open source option here unless I was forking it and treating it as my own from then on, as I find these things need flexibility and customisation. I've yet to see a great open source option.
Huh, this is interesting. Normally the reason to become a CNA is to reduce the amount of bogus CVEs that are issued for your project due to security researchers trying to pad their portfolio.

Linux seems to have taken the reverse approach, by just filing their own bogus CVEs instead. One for every bug fix going into the kernel, rendering the CVE system useless.
> whatever we're trying to do right now is really far away from the "success rate" of the nuclear family.

I think of many social/cultural arrangements as Nash equilibria. These can be very stable (over centuries even), partly because relative to many immediate deviations from them, they work. However, a big enough change (e.g., a change in productive forces) can be enough to destroy the equilibrium and change can occur rapidly and sometimes violently (e.g., the end of feudalism).

So we were in many ways operating in a local minima and I think we've been knocked out of it. Where we are heading is hopefully ultimately better, but it'll probably be bumpy getting there.

I don't think ultimately we'll return to a lot of the absurdities you're talking about. I suspect a lot of the speed-run level social changes we're experiencing is a bit of a mad thrash trying to find some new equilibrium but what we have is something that just doesn't work very well as a cohesive system.

As an aside, your point about children is particularly salient. They're the ultimate inheritors of the world that is being reinvented and thus far, I don't envy them their inheritance.
I wish all research articles were required to be 1 page or less. They aren't so i have to use those tools to speed up writing the boring parts