skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, which is one of the most influential gaming storefronts on the planet.

It might just be me, but that actually seems pretty reasonable.

What I've seen a lot is companies, during growth, accepting less-than-ideal candidates, maybe without a good onboarding, which then end up as deadweight in the worst case, and underperformers in the best case.

This, combined with a tendency to keep people around who have been there a long time, and the people themselves knowing they're not going to be let go, could result in massive companies and hundreds of people per product.

Yes steam is big, but it's not a product so complex you'd need over 100 people to maintain it. I assume other companies need so many people because tasks don't get done, and the logical step is to add people, not remove people.

Staying lean means staying agile (in some definition of the word), and that can speed you up.
It is one of those typical moments for all big corp when fight for customer is less important than fight internally for employee survival. In this case, AI is the tag to keep oneself "relevant" and in the job.
Well I'm in the market for a new gaming pc, and because I dont want to do some meta analysis of reports of which intel chip will crash on me, I'm going with AMD.
How the Top Emerging Technologies of 2024 will impact the world
When I read people talking about replacing lithium batteries I think of the decades of reading about material X replacing silicon in IC's and solar cells.
No it is not a referral link. I have searched for the book and then removed anything that looked like it would keep state/extra info. In retrospect, indeed posting a title would have been a simpler option :) thanks!
Is there a reason why game developers can't just sell a key on their website using Shopify/WooCommerce/etc. and distribute the game files publicly via a CDN?

Assuming they can get their game discovered via some sort of non-store channel (e.g. Reddit, social media, YouTube, Twitch, ads, etc.), the user can simply search the web for the game, find the website, click "buy" and proceed.

Probably a bit more work than publishing on Steam but not that much. Seems worth it for large budget games or games that are very popular in a specific niche discoverable outside Steam.
As a hobbyist freelancer with no access to resources like JSTOR, contacting the authors is often the only way I can obtain access to academic papers. It works great!

Incidentally, that book might contain information on when to GC; I haven't actually finished it yet.
I can empathize with the feeling but this is the case in many many contexts. Reading the intent of a user without a clear mental model of software is difficult, sometimes impossible.

I know no os that changes the format of an image when a user changes the file extension, for example, which is a pretty similar situation.
Ash HN: What are some good resources on building a relational database?
I was hoping to build a simple relational database as a side project, focussing mainly on learning how the internals and the algorithms used work, as I never plan to make this a published product of any sort.

So far I have the CMU Advanced DB course (https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2024/) and the Database Internals book.

While I'm learning a lot about how databases work, I have no clue how to start writing my own, so I was wondering if there were any resources for building a relational database, I've only found some for KV Stores. Hopefully something less intimidating to get started than having to read SQLite code.
New large value estimates for Dirichlet polynomials
Inside the Three-Way Race to Create the Most Widely Used Laser
"Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn't mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s."

Doesn't look like it: median income in 2019 was $44K, in 2001 it was $31K. That's adjusted for inflation. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States

I don't like it when the facts look wrong after two minutes' googling.
Perhaps it would be more helpful to try to understand what underlying mechanisms have created situations in which apparently self destructive tendencies are expressed in large societies (not just Texas but in general). What can we do to improve on this?
I actually think this might be undervalued, having used Wiz extensively and seen what’s on their roadmap for the next year. The question is if Google will let them continue to be the leading multi-cloud CNAPP platform or if they are going to muck around with it and try to fold it into Chronicle
Another inexcusable sharp edge of computing that nobody cares about. I propose we recognize it for what it is - a sharp edge, and don’t act like people are stupid for doing what seems intuitive and logical.
For me, it was very obvious at the end. Technical but not programming. Felt like I was winding down. Circumstances were such there wasn't a lot of mobility within the company. Was somewhat disappointed that I didn't get a package as part of some layoffs but I assume powers that be didn't want to voluntarily lose headcount.

Ended up hanging around for a year effectively working part time. Not sure that was the right idea or not (had lots of vacation which I pretty much all took) but year+ passed by and it was pretty obvious at that point I couldn't drag my feet any longer and didn't have the interest or need to do a job search.
Microsoft could certainly compete, if they invested more into improving the experience on Windows, and released their own handheld device.
Try being shot at, and grazed by a rifle bullet, knowing that you came within a whisper of death from someone armed and specifically hoping to kill you yourself, there with your own blood running down your face, and then still having the presence of mind to stand up and pump your fist in the air. Imagine all this at the age of 78 and with no previous combat experience or with situations where you were being shot at.

No, it would not be easy and far from common to take that in apparent stride so quickly as he did. It was indeed impressive regardless of what you think of Trump the candidate in all other regards. You saying anyone would raise a fist is absurd.
There is zero chance that a mega-project like pumped hydro can be undertaken in the US in the current regulatory environment. NEPA review allows even clearly green projects like solar and wind to get bogged down in environmental review lawsuits. A project with major environmental impact like destroying an entire valley ecosystem to build a dam would be DoA.
They were builders, they had businesses building for other people and invested their own money and time into these buildings for their own family.

Luck in exactly what sense ?

Yes, they did not die of dysentery on the trail, so evidently some luck was involved, but the wealth building seems very intentional and causal.
> But what's a little surprising is that July is peak demand for every region.

Majority of homes use natural gas for heating in the winter. If they used electric heat instead, the difference would be enormous.
What value do they provide that you cant get from a provider like Crowdstrike?
You need to put an affiliate disclosure.
I 10x with NVDA, but I got lucky. It's like winning the lottery.
See, you’ve caught yourself in the trap. Lots of builders fail, look at the YC startup failure rate.

Even investing in broad equity index funds is luck (sequence risk).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40378138

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011...
Why do you think the US was so rich and vibrant in the 1950s and 1960s?

All that wealth from the industrial growth over the WW2 years.
I did some spot checks and the cadence and intonation of their speech feels so natural. The sentences flow. It's the best I've ever heard. Thanks for doing this.
I think it's that along with a few other things. One is the media and that's nothing new. Don Henley's excellent song 'Dirty Laundry' is all about how the media loves to have bad things happen (dirty laundry) for them to report about. Another is the internet. There's something about engaging electronically that causes (I believe) people to forget that they're engaging with other people. In other words, they (generally) react more crass/aggressive than they would in person. I also believe that there is a growing acceptance (among both major parties) that the ends justify the means. This is actually the one that frightens me the most. It seems like as time goes by you see more of it. It's a dangerous path and we'll be suffering the consequences more and more.
Noah is a smart person and that's why I'm surprised that his essay is so transparently dumb.

"I think income is a lot more important than wealth."

If you keep receiving all the income you want and I'll get exclusive rights to all of your wealth, surely you got the better side of this deal then? Or is there more nuance at play and blankets statements about the relative importance of income and wealth are simply pointless.

"if you have a house, no one owes you that house"?

In this case of property ownership, your rights granted to you by society is the result of an agreement by the society you're a part of not to use the resource that you've been granted exclusive rights to. The allocation of control over resources is the essence of economics. It's the whole point of the field of study. I cannot believe he's setting up an argument about how that doesn't really matter because there isn't a lot of resource control without legally associated debts.
> I contributed 50% to a bond fund, as well, but that is like, 10% of the total, nowadays.

That's one of the ridiculous aspects of fixed-percentage allocations: by constructions those allocations tell you that you should get rid of the things that are making you the most money, and put it into the things which are underperforming instead. (I get that you didn't do that, I'm just got reminded of it.)
Whoa, didn’t realize I need this. I’m constantly rebasing stacked branches.
Alternate and maybe more interactive explanation:
https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
> That doesn't change the fact that there are plenty (in absolute numbers) of individual investors who consistently beat the market. Whether that's because of luck or something else is rather hard to tell.

It's actually not very hard to tell; if it was because of something other than luck, you'd expect that beating the market in the past would have some predictive value of their ability to beat the market in the future.
> "and provide a video demonstrating proof of deletion."

...
In the context of a discussion about wealth, its true that the financialization of real estate and runaway values of the greater Silicon Valley were a stroke of luck, but when talking about building wealth, housing has intrinsic value that I think takes a lot of that kind of SV luck out of the picture.
The capture is from an A1200 with fastram, but A500 with 1 MB also provides a playable experience at roughly 10-12fps. Which is still faster on A500 than Alien Breed 3D on a stock A1200, and at more or less 4x the screen size.
Graphite makes this workflow a lot easier.
I feel like this type of technical achievement is difficult to appreciate without some understanding of the underlying hardware. For example, those of us who had an Amiga many years ago might stare dumbfounded and gasp in bewilderment as we try to understand how this was made to work on a 7.14 MHz 16 bit machine with half the memory only available to the CPU every other clock cycle. Is it possible to help others appreciate this technical achievement or is this "art form" destined to die out in a few years?
I meant construction developers as a trade for others.
Oh, they can and were. But bad actors scrape github constantly for access keys. If you commit yours to a repo, some script somewhere will find those keys and use them to spin up EC2 boxes mining bitcoin or use SES to send scam emails within minutes. You can invalidate the keys and scrub your AWS account once you notice the issue - it just depends on how much damage the bad actors are able to do before you do that.

In my case, our CTO was messaging me (either Slack or Hipchat - whatever we were using at the time) within an our or two. Iirc they only managed to accrue a few thousand dollars in charges before we got it under control.
"if we do online meetings all of you can work from home"

any other questions ?
> Wealth inequality is just a radical left fairy tale to villainize the hard-working 1%.

The problem with that mindset is that we know how it's going to end up: it's not only the 0.1% or 1% that are going to suffer the wealth tax. It's the 30%.

At first the "tax on billionaire" was supposed to be that: a tax on billionaires. But then there are already publications explaining how "taxing anyone who has more than a million (a million, not a billion) would bring x in revenue for the various countries".

Also note that it's never about distributing that money to the poor: it's always about the state getting more money. Money which is then spent in state-friendly companies.

For example the EU is hard at work now imposing a mandatory, EU-wide, tax on all its citizens to "finance EU projects". It's not a tax to give money to poor people. It's a tax to give money to companies like Thales and Airbus and a shitload of sycophantic companies that'd be bankrupt if not for the state' intervention.

Just look at how government are managing the insane money they get: do you think they're doing a good job when they're at, say, 130% debt-to-GDP ratio? Why would I want to encourage such irresponsible spenders by giving them even more?

When a country like France, which is badly in debt and has huge deficits, has about 60% of its GDP that is tied to public spending, it's not the fault of "the rich" if the country is not doing well. It's the fault of the people governing that country.

So, no, thanks but no thanks. I don't want any "let's tax the rich" discourse because I know that it's the middle-class, not the rich, that's going to end up getting owned.

Just like fighting the four horsemen of the infocalypse is an excuse used by the states to gain every more power, attacking the rich is an excuse for the state to gain ever more power. It's not about helping the poor.
This is based on US Senate data. Does it include state and local lobbying?
Honestly? The quality of the output is as expected, I wondered how it would manage something like Shakespeare which depends so heavily on iambic pentameter, instead AI does what it usually does which is drone on at a slightly too fast speed, with no natural pauses and no delivery. Honestly as with most things you would be better paying for a human performance than relying on this.

I wish the OP well, and the project is nicely designed. But AI simply isn't there for this yet, not without a lot of individual hand holding and extra work.
I do AI consulting and I did some audio related projects where I basically resold ElevenLabs + quality control. EL is much better than OpenAI imho.

Monetizing is good but there is no value proposition in the product.

The chances I'll get something I'd like to listen are low because:
- AI errors
- AI lack of emotion
- You picked a voice I've heard in thousands of automatically generated youtube videos and that I came to hate.

There is no chance I'd buy this, I'd rather buy an audiobook made by a human.

Now, people may not understand that - but then they'll be disappointed, bother you for a refund (chargebacks are 15$ a pop if you don't) or just speak badly about the project. Repeating sales potential is pretty bad imho.

I hope I don't come across as rude.

If you are really set on this idea I'd recommend to generate 1 book, make it perfect until it reads like it should and then sell it on as many platforms as you can (Amazon mainly I guess). Maybe use a custom cloned voice so it will sound unique and constistent across all books.
You don't need a website but you have one so you might as well use it for marketing and maybe to gauge interest for the next book to process.

An audiobook is a good product in itself.
Possibly not without modern hardware to develop on!

(We also don't seem to have been given any info about which system the video was recorded from. It's possible it was recorded from an A1200, maybe even likely in order to show the game looking its best. The performance might be worse enough on a genuine OCS Amiga that you wouldn't actually want to play it, impressive though it might be that it does actually run in some form. Similar to Wing Commander or Frontier: Elite II.)
This sounds clever but many funds did exactly that. What’s your point?

S&P + nvidia was better than just S&P over the last 5 years.
> cloudflare is blocked here

Not affiliated with cloudflare at all, just curious - where is "here" and why is a major edge cloud provider blocked?
Their docs aren't GPT-generated though - at least, that's what I think
Does this work with `git pull --rebase`?
Yes. I buy it. It’s Windows 3.1. What? You think someone should’ve picked it up in the GitHub PR UI? I say again, Windows 3.1!
On some level not all power being elected is good. Provides some balancing force for an electorate with... I'm not sure what to call it... volatile whims?
Generative AI can't cite its sources
They basically have. Half Life has been Open Source for a while, Portal and Half Life 2 were both more-or-less open along with the Source SDK. Team Fortress 2 and CS:GO aren't technically open, but their source does exist in the wild and can even be built on modern machines.

That still leaves DOTA, Artifact and Half Life: Alyx without any proper source code, but the stuff people actually care about has mostly been freed.
It is legal to do so. C# pointers == C pointers, C# generics with struct arguments == Rust generics with struct (i.e. not Box<dyn Trait>) arguments and are monomorphized in the same way.

All of the following works:

byte* stack = stackalloc byte[128];
byte* malloc = (byte*)NativeMemory.Alloc(128);
byte[] array = new byte[128];
fixed (byte* gcheap = array)
{
// work with pinned object memory
}

Additionally, all of the above can be unified with (ReadOnly)Span<byte>:

var stack = (stackalloc byte[128]); // Span<byte>
var literal = "Hello, World"u8; // ReadOnlySpan<byte>
var malloc = NativeMemory.Alloc(128); // void*
var wrapped = new Span<byte>(malloc, 128);
var gcheap = new byte[128].AsSpan(); // Span<byte>

Subsequently such span of bytes (or any other T) can be passed to pretty much anything e.g. int.Parse, Encoding.UTF8.GetString, socket.Send, RandomAccess.Write(fileHandle, buffer, offset), etc. It can also be sliced in a zero-cost way. Effectively, it is C#'s rendition of Rust's &[T], C++ has pretty much the same and names it std::span<T> as well.

Note that (ReadOnly)Span<T> internally is `ref T _reference` and `int _length`. `ref T` is a so-called "byref", a special type of pointer GC is aware of, so that if it happens to point to object memory, it will be updated should that object be relocated by GC. At the same time, a byref can also point to any non-GC owned memory like stack or any unmanaged source (malloc, mmap, pinvoke regular or reverse - think function pointers or C exports with AOT). This allows to write code that uses byref arithmetics, same as with pointers, but without having to pin the object retaining the ability to implement algorithms that match hand-tuned C++ (e.g. with SIMD) while serving all sources of sequential data.

C# is a language with strong low-level capabilities :)
Housing value is land value. Did you buy or build in the right location? Luck!

Did commercial real estate know WFH post Covid was going to obliterate CRE values? Again, bad luck.
Steam has to deal with local tax regulations, censorship rules, distribution rights, etc…
Show HN: Baymeet – Find Biking and Hiking Partners Nearby
Hey we are two bay area software engineers who are big hiking and biking enthusiasts. We have found it hard to meet new people who share our passion, so we built baymeet.com!

Let us know if you have any feedback!
https://archive.is/ElVeA
Retiring early is more about expenses than income. If you can't retire early with $100k income, you probably can't do it with $300k either.

Most people can't do it, because their expenses grow to match their income. They want bigger and better everything, and they always find new "mandatory" expenses. Especially if they have kids.
Perhaps "outside" means "resident on the boundary of", a la holograms and Maldecena's AdS/CFT work, and so still within reach of experiment?
Some devs do essentially do that in addition to Steam. You're missing a million and one features on top of simply running the game itself if you restrict yourself to that, though.
Almost all games can be run without steam.
Too bad nobody ever makes their own keycaps ...
It is interesting how much easier the stats for 50th percentile plus are easier to find than anything below that. Also only 2 minute of googling, but 6/6 pages I checked provided either median or median as well as 60-99th percentile. None showed anything below.

Not speculating on what those stats are, and I'm sure they're out there somewhere, but certainly less available or SEO'd.
Yep the copy needs to change to "Discord-alternative"
JR Yamanote line is a circular or loop line in the middle of Tokyo not unlike Circle line for London Tube.

Naturally circular line will be the most popular since other lines are moving radially from city center thus travelling between two nearby places can take longer by changing trains if they're not on the same the line.

Case in point, Bordeaux city in southwest of France currently has no circular tram line (yet) hence most of the public transport users are relying on the buses to go to the nearby places that are close but on different tram lines.
Try:
https://shepherd.com/book/why-we-sleep (even though it is general it is still great imp).

Or, this book by this scientist on sleep: https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-science-of-dreams

It is heavily about dreams but touches on so much more.
my apologies, I just shipped this in prod. But you're right I'll add the disclosure + T&C stuff right away!
Correcting myself: I was thinking of a different can apparently. That 12% ABV can mentioned in the article corresponds to 4.4 shots of vodka (using standard US 1.5 oz shots of 80 proof vodka.)
The left likes to constantly watch and complain of how much money others have.

It's amazing how petty they are, behaviors frequently seen in 5 year old children, and in leftist adults.

Waaaah waaah, the size of his cake is bigger. Waaaaah
> every email through "git send-email" contains my original IP address for everyone to see

Is this the fault of git or your SMTP provider? I looked through a mailman archive and couldn't find my client IP address. The first Received headers refer to my email host.
good. because if you are storing kinetic, better to use a flywheel or something with less environmental impact
Commonly Identified Brain Networks
I haven't noticed this yet, but I was used to reddit which is a lot more obvious.
Only recently there was the Biden Trump debate, I looked it up on reddit and figured I'd just read the comments and see what the highlights were. Apparently Trump made an ass of himself again. I scrolled for a while and didn't see a single Biden comment, I was surprised he made it to the end without anything happening worth mentioning. Oh, but it was Reddit, of course, I sort the comments by "controversial" and it's the same as the "best" comments but about Biden making an ass of himself.
Shit website.
Two words: chargebacks and fraud. Keeping this to a manageable level requires scale.
You should try listening to some non-fiction, such as history, philosophy, biographies, etc.

It's already great for that purpose.