skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This post brings up a really important point about how economies in games, especially large online games like Diablo 4, can be influenced by real-world market dynamics. It’s fascinating to think about how in-game currencies, like gold in Diablo 4, can sometimes feel just as crucial as real-world money when it comes to advancing in the game. Players are often faced with the decision of whether to grind for hours to get what they need or take a shortcut by purchasing gold.

Personally, I’ve used services to buy gold for Diablo 4 (https://wowvendor.com/shop/diablo-4/product/buy-d4-gold-boos...), and it has definitely made my gaming experience more enjoyable. Instead of spending countless hours farming gold, I can focus on what I enjoy the most—exploring dungeons, upgrading my gear, and engaging in PvP. While some argue that buying in-game currency can disrupt the balance, I think it’s a matter of personal choice and how you want to spend your time in the game. As long as it doesn’t break the competitive integrity, it’s a convenient option for players who don’t have the time to dedicate to the grind.

In the end, it's interesting to see how these in-game economies mirror real-world economies in some ways, and how players have adapted by using services like gold-buying to make their gaming experience smoother. It’s a topic that will likely keep evolving as more games adopt these systems.
The video looks like it's being played in reverse
I mean, yeah, that's kind of the problem.
If they were truthful, you'd think the picture was frozen, signal issues etc.
Is heart rate directly proportional to calories burned?
Show HN: Smell – A framework for aligning LLM evaluators to human feedback
We've built SMELL (Subject-Matter Expert Language Liaison), a new framework that combines human expertise with LLMs to create feedback-informed, domain-specific LLM evaluators. One of the biggest issues with current evaluation methods (heuristics, assertions, LLM-as-a-judge etc.) is that it's difficult for them to match up with and capture human preferences.

SMELL addresses this by putting human feedback at the core of the evaluation process. It scales up a small set of human-provided feedback into evaluators that reflect the standards and nuances of specific industries or use-cases. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, you get evaluations that actually align with human judgment in those areas.

If you're curious to try it out, we've made it easy by offering both a notebook and a hosted API so you can test SMELL with your own LLMs and datasets:

- Notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1wCRwU5KQvnRSDxkubU9...
- Hosted API: https://smell.quotientai.co/

Check out the blog post for more details: https://www.quotientai.co/post/subject-matter-expert-languag...

We are in the process in writing up the findings into a paper, and are planning to provide the full details on SMELL (incl. prompts).

If you’re interested in building a custom judge tailored to your specific use case, or if you'd like to contribute to our research, we'd love to collaborate! You can share your datasets with us at research@quotientai.co. We'll publish results based on the data you provide, with full attribution and recognition of your contributions.

In the meantime, we'd love to hear your feedback and see what you think!
Apple Has a New Smart Home Strategy: Screens Everywhere
The arms themselves could have sensors on them. Inductive loops sensing the presence of the stainless steel structure?

Also, I doubt centimeter scale precision would be needed; the arms have some compliance in them, I'm sure, as well as the ability to control how far in they swing.
If you’re interested in playing new Doom (2) levels, there is an extremely active community releasing unbelievably good levels regularly for free. Even John Romero himself has released 2 entirely new campaigns, the 2nd one late last year. Start from https://www.doomworld.com/cacowards/ and dive in.

I’ve been on a Doom binge for the last couple of months playing great mod after great mod, but nothing prepared me to the absolute humongous monstrosity that is Eviternity 2. This is GOTY 2024 and there is nothing that can possibly beat it! https://eviternity.dfdoom.com/

Edit: ok, this mod is kinda hilariously bad, and does not at all represent the Doom modding community. There are dozens of other 30-plus-level releases out there that are way, way better! For the curious, here is the discussion: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/148659-doom-iii-doom-i...
Even $50 is within "going to the moon for my honeymoon" range. Wow.
America's new millionaire class: Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs
That's because the selection of numbers is a little bit weird. The 70 billion on the cost side are composed of 38 billion for construction and maintenance, 14 billion for traffic police and 18 billion for public funds spent for accidents. The generated income is only taxes on fuel and the tax car owners have to pay.

If you include the cost of the traffic police, there is way more stuff that you can include on the income side like taxes on car sales and part of the cost comes also back to the government in the form of taxes. There is likely also a large part of the costs that is missing. Doing this properly is a lot of work and doing it precisely is hard to impossible. These sort of things almost always include estimates for the higher order effects.

Btw: I googled the study[1] and apparently it was funded by the "Netzwerk Europäischer Eisenbahnen e.V." (Network of European Railways Association). I would take any statements and numbers with a huge grain of salt.

[1]: https://www.htw-berlin.de/forschung/online-forschungskatalog...
No breadth first search is still complete given an infinite branching factor (i.e. a node with infinite children). "Completeness" is not about finishing in finite time, it also applies to completing in infinite time.

Breadth first search would visit every node breadth first, so given infinite time, the solution would eventually be visited.

Meanwhile, say a branch had a cycle in it, even given infinite time, a naive depth first search would be trapped there, and the solution would never be found.
A lot of people smarter than me think it is supported by MWI. Max Tegmark, for example wrote about this in Our Mathematical Universe[1]. No "teleportation" is required, you simply aren't observing the universes in which you die. So there is a selection bias.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...

edit: Note that I do not agree - as some do - that you can extrapolate from this that MWI means we are all immortal. The "continuous fade" argument made by Tegmark is quite convincing, as are other objections to this idea.
I also lucid dream occasionally. Very rarely things are very detailed, most often the colors and details are just as bleak and blurry and keep changing as these videos. I walk down a street, take a turn (or not), its almost guaranteed I can't go back to where I came from. I usually appreciate when I can track back the same path.
> Somehow, the filename { causes rc.exe to think the filename token is actually the preceding token, so it's trying to interpret ICON as both the resource type and the file path of the resource. Who knows what's going on there.

> [...]

> Strangely, rc.exe will treat FOO [in place of the resource type, followed by EOF] as both the type of the resource and as a filename (similar to what we saw earlier in "BEGIN or { as filename").

Having written a stupid lexer recently, I’m almost certain I know what’s going on there. The lexer has a lexeme type global that it always sets, and a separate lexeme text global that it only sets for text-like tokens (numbers, identifiers, strings, and bare filenames, which it does not interpret other than to tell where they end, that being the easiest way to deal with ANSI C’s pp-numbers) but not for punctuation or EOF. Now have the code that looks for the resource filename blindly reach into the text global without first checking the type global (not even to check if it’s EOF), and you get exactly the behaviour above.

(Alternatively, the type could instead be returned by the next-lexeme function—that’s what my stupid lexer currently does, anyway, though I’m considering changing it. The result is the same.)

> For whatever reason, rc.exe will just take the last number literal in the expression and try to read from a file with that name [...].

I think I’m skilled enough to fuck that up too: the code to read the filename calls the expression parser (which is either not supposed to be called at EOF, or returns EOF that you’re supposed to check for in case that happens) and then blindly reaches into the lexeme text variable.
>I can see how frustrating it might be

It's certainly not frustrating for me, I ask a question maybe once a year on SO, most of their content is, in my chosen disciplines, not technically interesting, it is no better than looking up code snippets in documentation (which most of the time is what it really, really is)

I suppose it's frustrating for SO that people no longer find it worthwhile to ask questions there.

>advanced / off the beaten path

show me an advanced and off the beaten path question that SO has answered well, that is just not worth the effort to try to get an answer - if you have an advanced and off the beaten path question that you can't answer then you ask it on SO just "in case" but really you will find the answer somewhere else or not at all in my experience.
Most non derivative distributions started as Linux from scratch.

Also, most of the embedded linux folks have at least tried lfs at least once. And almost all of them do the exercise of creating a custom linux distro (either via automated lfs or via some other kind of tooling like yocto or buildroot).

Too bad openbsd people can’t even conceive something like this possible.
Exactly. Private companies like space X would not exist if NASA didn't deliberately make the market for Private space companies. That's what governments do, make markets.
Well, he even says one of his criteria is he doesn’t want a long commute. There’s cheaper housing in LA. You just won’t favor it given other options.
Wonder how much UCLA administrators get paid compared to faculty?
Randomness doesn't look random.
I get useful info from SO all the time, so often that these days it’s rare I have to ask a question. When I do, the issue seems to be it’s likely niche enough that an answer could take days or weeks, which is too bad, but fair enough. It’s also rare I can add an answer these days but I’m glad when I can.
> They were tolerated for years

This sounds like dictator speak. "Tolerated" by who? The community embraced them, it's matt and his private-equity-associated, for-profit corporation that didn't like their success.

Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
gig economy
How is he homeless? Can someone break down where that 70k goes? It's about $5.8k/month gross.
It's culturally acceptable to get a roommate in LA - especially to live in a neighborhood like Westwood.

Furthermore, he could live 20 minutes away in another neighborhood instead of Westwood - which is LA's version of Lower East Side in NYC - and get a 1bdrm for $1800-2400.

This is truly out of touch, because so many Los Angelenos have a combined household income at or below $70,000 yet are able to raise families and live a middle class life in LA.

This does not mean that lecturer pay shouldn't be increased - lecturers in humanities fields at UCLA get paid WAAAAY worse than $70k, and would fight to get that kind of a salary alone.
Interestingly cheap redundancy is also how life does things for the most part. Most biological organisms just replicate a lot to guarantee success, so it's clearly a good strategy and an efficient use of energy.
I thought this research didn't reproduce with primates ?
Gotcha, a better name for it is fantasy app.

Let's have the fantasy app do exactly as you're recommending.

Now, the fantasy app also happens to store its file using this filename format:
{uuid}.json

What objections are there to parsing the uuid from the filename and using it to sort?

Assuming you again mention the filename not be a valid UUID:

Is it possible to account for that and fallback to the safe behavior? :)
'The Genetic Book of the Dead': Reading Starts with DNA
I have a 16 year old nibbling. Very popular. They shared their phone social life with me just last week. They have 2200 unread text messages and 700 active Snapchat conversations. Not a great student. At home, never comes out of their room. Up past midnight on their phone.

There’s no way allowing them access to their phone during school allows for any schooling to happen. This is what the school system is up against (in certain kinds of privileged high tech communities).

They may already be too old for a hard shift, and it’s too enabled by their home life situation, but their school career already feels set.
Ward Christensen (of BBS and XMODEM fame) has died
The current system is not an extreme. Only concentrating power into the people who will pick what is good for society is extreme.
yes, this. as others have pointed out: of course it is (understatedly) terrible that so many people who work various types of jobs cannot pay their bills. all that i see happening here is that the low income bar for being able to survive and live a decent life is getting higher and higher; it is not that there are not many others who also should be able to live a decent life.

(and yes, i do understand the difference between a lecturer and a professor, and i do understand about roommates, and i do understand about living in a cheaper cost-of-living area. i think these are all reasonable points. but i still think that it would be nice if someone could live a good life a distance from work that doesn't make their commute an absolute dread and still be able to afford basic things. yes, i believe everyone deserves this, no matter what type of work that they do. no, i don't think that's the direction we are currently headed.)
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-genetic-book-of-t...
It’s not like those are better. I switched back from Fedora KDE a month or so ago. If it isn’t mouse scroll wheel it’s fractional scaling in X11 applications. And if it isn’t that then it is broken hibernation. And if it isn’t that it is broken fan control. And if it isn’t that then it’s device driver support. And if it isn’t that then it is that one application that supports Linux but actually doesn’t well enough to be usable.

There is always something messed up. At least with Windows, people have spent time building scripts to remove the garbage.
2022: Discord is not indexed by search engines, it sucks

2024: Discord is not indexed by AI slop generators, it's great
To my understanding, none of that would have been relevant here. Users copied the executable (disguised as a folder) from the external media (which was one of their own devices, and would have been in the "set of allowed devices" under such a scheme) which was a perfectly normal input device (not some BadUSB hack). It probably wouldn't be hard to get a malware launcher appear "signed", either. Even if we disallow self-signing, the launcher only needs to be a wrapper to start Python (which can be supplied alongside). Such wrappers are provided by Python[1]. I don't know if these are signed normally, but it seems pretty easy to imagine.

All the technical "hacking" happened on the non-air-gapped side, so that that computer would put malware onto the USB with a deceptive presentation (an .exe with an icon to look like a folder and with the same name as an expected folder, while the actual folder was hidden). The rest is social engineering (and Windows not showing the .exe extension).

[1]: `pip3.exe` is an example; it's hard-coded to run the Pip module from `site-packages`, but `pip.py` could be replaced. More to the point, these wrappers are automatically created by Setuptools, to run an arbitrary script specified in the build process, from a "stub" included with Setuptools. (All of this is to work around the lack of support for shebangs, of course.) I don't know if Setuptools can or does sign these wrappers. Probably not.
I’m guessing when making an artistic depiction of something going very fast in space, that sort of parallax helps? The goal of consumer content (including the ones by spacex) isn’t to be realistic, it’s to entertain

That said, “the expanse” is an exception here - they make it look as realistic as possible, including the battles where ships don’t even see each other. Stars barely move on it too
ATM, I have 220 in my pc, another 200 in my laptop, and 100+ in my phone.
But a few weeks ago, I deleted arch from my pc, and I had firefox with ~1500 and floorp with more or less the same, altough distributed in several workspaces.
I spent a lot of time closing tabs.
My problem is that I use tabs both for current work and for saving ideas/things, so I had to go through all the tabs, adding it to pocket when it deserved.
If anyone needs motivation of such unmanaged users, I actively use this feature. I have my own Google Workspace on my own domain. Years ago when I bought a Nest product I found that I couldn't use a Google Workspace account to access Nest. No problem, I create a consumer Google account under my Google Workspace domain. The email looks just like a Workspace account. And it doesn't need any additional Workspace licenses. (I no longer plan to buy any more Nest devices so I'll delete the account once my last Nest product stops working.)
Yes, there's probably a similar effect, with a key difference being that smoking and drinking can be masked a bit easier if it's not an emergency (e.g. sobering for a day before going in) where there's no lying about one's weight.
I thought it was plausible given the accuracy of F9 landings, though I still wonder how it will work at scale if one failure destroys the landing site. That could ruin the cost benefits.

Where his vision hit a lot of speed bumps is second stage reusability. Starship is a beautiful second stage to throw in the ocean. They’ll probably get it landing but the heat tiles will require a lot of refurbishment between flights. They’re going to have to figure something else out.
This opens up immense possibilities for exploration
I think reading “u” takes longer than reading “you”.

With “u”, I have to pause for a moment and think “that’s not a normal word; I wonder if they meant to type ‘i’ instead (and just hit a little left of target)?” and then maybe read the passage twice to see which is more likely.

I don’t think it’s quite as much a contradiction. (It still could be more gruff than needed.)
You're correct, it's hilariously unrealistic (IIRC requires actual superluminal speed), but people have been conditioned to accept it by various scifi media.
It's a game change
It is if you want to continue educating new physicists.

'How the world works' is not set in stone. The current dysfunction of the academic system in the US (the world?) wasn't always this bad. We can educate the next generation, make scientific advancements, and not have professors starve on the street to make that happen.
> boom, now you have a lightweight physics engine

lightweight, but producing several hundred watts of heat.
Oh, darn.

I had an online text chat with him on Compuserve back in the 80's; he was surprised anyone knew who he was. Nice guy.
Remember on the first launch when, on the way up, there were hydraulic units exploding off the side and the engines started exploding taking out more hydraulic units? Heh that and all the concrete flying up on ignition was like watching a heavy metal music video.
Does this limit charging even when the MacBook is turned off? That's the major difference between Al Dente's free and paid versions.
I suggest imaging a city where drones are also cars, like robotaxis, no one in the city control nor own, but the sole means of transportation... Does that ring a bell?
I mean, there are tradeoffs with both approaches. It seems to me that Node’s stateful approach is used by other web servers and languages too.

The main tradeoff is you’re now reloading the entire server for every request in PHP. If you have a massive server or framework, that might not be the fastest thing in the world.
We're talking about stackoverflow right? The website is a veritable gold mine of carefully answered queries. Sure, some people are shit, but how often are you unable to get at least some progress on a question from it? I find it useful in 90-95% of queries, i find the answers useful in 99% of queries that match my question. The thing is amazing! I Google search a problem, and there's 5 threads of people with comparable issues, even if no one has my exact error, the debugging and advice around the related errors is almost always enough to get me over the hump.

Why all the hate? AI answers can suck, definitely. Stackoverflow literally holds the modern industry up. Next time you have a technical problem or error you don't understand go ahead and avoid the easy answers given on the platform and see how much better the web is without it. I don't understand, what kind questions do you have?
Adding in my anecdata:

I've been tracking HRV since 2018 (I wear an Apple Watch 24/7, aside from charging).

Over 6 years between 2018-2024, I went from being 70 lbs overweight / very out of shape, I then lost all of the weight in 12 months, started going to the gym, became physically fit, and I continue to exercise by cycling 3-4 days a week (sustained heart rate 165 for at least an hour).

Despite going from basically an overweight couch potato to someone very physically fit and strong cardio system from cycling, there has been virtually zero noticeable trend with HRV.

On the flip side, I've noticed resting heart rate correlates extremely closely with cardio fitness and stress. Resting heart rate tends to go up in stressful months or months I don't workout as much. HRV seems to just always be a flat line.

I'm also very skeptical of Vo2 max. For some reason, the watch only records maybe 2 or 3 data points per month at most. Sometimes it doesn't record anything for an entire month even though I'm doing high intensity cardio weekly. Apple rates my Vo2 max as "below average" and similar to HRV, it's a flat line. Seems to not be correlated with my perceived fitness level.

I haven't noticed any correlations with being sick. My impression of all of these metrics (including resting heart rate) is they're maybe useful, but only in the long-term to see trends over time. They aren't very useful for predicting short-term health events, in my experience.
His code is crap, I'm not even sorry for saying this. For the case he is working with, OOP is absolute must.
When I was living in Cambridge (MA) in the early 2010s, it was unthinkable to not have a flatmate or four. By far the most economical situation was to rent a 4 or 5 bedroom house. Doing this, you could easily have a sub-1k rent within a 10 minute walk of the Harvard or Central T stops.

Not to “kids these days” it or anything, but the entitlement over not being able to afford a private, one-bedroom apartment in a fantastically-popular city center is just absolutely mind-blowing.
The flipside to this is you can’t get answers to anything _recent_, since the models are trained years behind in content. My feelig is it’s getting increasingly difficult to figure out issues on the latest version of libraries & tools, as the only options are private Discords (which aren’t even googleable)