skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to get players for a multiplayer game?
Hi,

I'm currently trying to build a player base for a multiplayer game I've created and I'm struggling to get players. I've tried various ways of marketing but while some are quite effective for players to try the game it usually results in that they try it one by one and rarely multiple people at the same time.

Things I've tried:

- created a web version of the game (this was essential as almost nobody downloads the native apps - but perhaps it is specific to my game)

- I'm trying to be online when others plays (I have a notification when people are on the server)

- building a Discord community (only few joins)

- for another game in the past I've tried to put a popup message that mentioned specific hours for playing in the hopes that people would try to be online at these hours (it had no effect)

- posting on various reddits and indiedb/moddb, that worked but only rarely there would be multiple people online

Things I've dismissed:

- posting on Facebook and other similar sites, I don't have any experience with these and not sure it would be effective

- paid advertisment, I don't have a budget for it and don't think a general advertisment would work (it would need to be VERY specific to actually work - I've only witnessed it once in a specific Minecraft community where it was actually effective)

- posting on itch.io, it doesn't seem to have much to offer for propagation of your game and there are too many games already making it even harder

The game I'm trying to bootstrap is CellSplit, a survival 2D arcade game (an open source clone of Agario): https://www.cellsplit.org/

I've created it to solve the problem with teamers and griefers that plague the original game.

However my question is also a general one, how one can build a player base for their multiplayer game? Anything else to try?
Yep! Although when it comes time to book I'd recommend the Android app because that experience is better (less login jank).

It'd be nice if we had something that showed a calendar with prices for each box airline style, though. Someday...
I switched all my Bulma sites to https://daisyui.com/ since it works with Tailwind.
This is sadly too true for the Channel Tunnel railway linking Britain with France. The post-Brexit border security easily takes in excess of half an hour as several hundred passengers shuffle single-file through the scanners. Although it is still marginally faster than flying for me due to my distance from an airport (as well as Britain's underdeveloped domestic aviation sector in general) the time spent at the station usually exceeds my actual journey now.

What's most stupid about security for rail passengers is that the original fear from 9/11 doesn't even apply - you can't hijack a train and crash it into a skyscraper!
Have you done any comparative economics? That is where you take what it "cost" in terms of money for goods or services at a given time and compare that to the cost of the same (or equivalent) goods and services in the present time. Some things like property ownership won't work because the rules changed so much between then and now but meals? Etc? might work.
I don’t understand why the US doesn’t have a data sovereignty law as a requisite for doing business here. If you sell to Americans the data needs to be specifically live only in US data centers and no where else, and access must be based on US soil.

A few Europeans countries have this, or something like it, if I recall correctly
Including HN comments, I see...
The Distracted Mind During a Crisis (2020)
Shameless plug for my own offering in this area - Kojo (15 years old and still going strong!): https://www.kogics.net/kojo

It's based on Scala, supports turtle (imperative) graphics, picture (functional) graphics, gaming at different levels (imperative, functional, OO), and more...
They fixed a few bugs already I think. But it still looks like crap (lower resolution?) on my tablet and I have to force the onscreen keyboard on manually (normally comes on by itself).

Oddly enough the video itself looks fine when playing, but not the browser interface.
I decided to practise some “千字文” in fountain pen calligraphy after mind struggling as well for the character ”嚏“
Honestly, considering the state of the world and how things are shaping up, it’s such a hilariously obvious pipe dream that such a system would be some omnipotent/hyper competent super-god like being.

It’s more likely just going to post ragebait and dumb tiktok videos while producing just enough at it’s ‘job’ to fool people into thinking it’s doing a good job.
I’m not really sure how you’ve ended up classifying TfL as a “low-ambition, low-performance” org. As transit agencies go TfL is one of the best on the planet, they’re constantly innovating and pushing the envelope of what’s possible. Every time they build a new line, or order new rolling stock, they use it as an opportunity to invent something new (which doesn’t always succeed). Everything from automated trains, to more complex and capable signaling systems, improved cooling and better customer signage.

A “low-ambition, low-performance” transit organisation doesn’t run train services with a train every 90 seconds at peak, transporting 4 million people per day without a major incident or loss of life. There are nine Underground stations with annual passenger counts larger than the entire BART system in the larger Bay Area.

The Underground system alone (only part of TfL responsibility) is the world fifth largest metro system outside of china by ridership.

TfL built its own ticketing system, and invented the entire idea of using contactless bank cards for ticketing, including negotiating with Visa and Mastercard to create brand new rules for transit agencies. A system that it now sells to other mayor transit systems, such as the New York Subway.

TfL isn’t without faults and problems, like any large public organisation. But to dismiss it as “low-ambition, low-performance” is to ignore many decades of safety operating the worlds oldest metro system, and developing and exporting new ways of improving transit for the travelling public.
I agree with the sentiment, this is just how people work. We aren’t constructing frameworks from first principles, we hear ideas from peers and filter them through our experience. Journalists just insert themselves in that process, using local ethics and archetypes against their audience.
Yes. My Samsung has an FM radio. A lot do.

https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?chkFMradio=selected returns 7010 models, lol.

edit: oops you mean specifically RDS. Of that I'm not sure. I just opened the "Radio" app on my phone (for the first time ever!) and you did have to have the headphones plugged in to receive, but I couldn't see anywhere in the really basic looking app for RDS info to show up.
Shake-down? The article is relatively light on details. However if Apple promised these payments and didn't go through with them it's a simple case of Apple not fulfilling their obligation.
Yes, it's enshrined in UK law so that museums get opportunity to buy detectorists' finds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996
> We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection.

I don't know for sure whether superintellegence will happen, but as for the singularity, this is the underlying assumption I have the most issue with. Smart isn't the limiting factor of progress, often it's building consensus, getting funding, waiting for results, waiting for parts to ship, waiting for the right opportunity to come along. We do _experiments_ faster than natural selection, but we still have to do them in the real world. Solving problems happens on the lab bench, not just in our heads.

Even if exponentially more intelligent machines get built, what's to stop the next problem on the road to progress being exponentially harder? Complexity cuts both ways.
What's your dose regimen like?
Client attestation is a mechanism for servers to get cryptographic proof from a client about what software the client is running. Modified browsers, or software like yt-dlp, would have a harder time providing such proof. How hard a time would depend on the security hardening of the attestation mechanism. It'd almost certainly be broken, just as most attempts at DRM get broken, but it would be one more speedbump.

There are legitimate purposes for attestation; for instance, server attestation can allow a user to run software on a server and know that software matches a specific build and hasn't been subverted, so that the client can trust the server to do computation on the client's behalf.

But one of the leading uses of client attestation is DRM.
Don't forget that git was made for Linux and Linux isn't a monorepo and works great with tens of thousands of devs per release
It's always in 10-30 years. GPT is the closest to such a thing yet still so far from what was envisioned.
Is there any place where metal detection to search for historical artefacts is illegal on private land?
I agree with the overall point (the last paragraph).

Beyond the math, tube capacity at peak times is an extremely scarce resource, and should be allocated to the most valuable uses: those willing to pay, and under-16s who need it to travel to school. The "Older Person's Freedom Pass" cannot be used before 9am, which seems reasonable to me. I wonder why there's no restriction for the evening rush hour.
The traditional solution is to slap a big tax on imports cf Thailand and cars. Somehow I don’t see the governor of Bali instituting checks at DPS for this.
Why? IMHO the best travel is not about how fast you can get there. Seeing the land from the ground is an immense experience. More so than a car since interstates are dug out, the land trains cross is amazing. Wild horses in the southwest, mountains in the west. And - you can walk around, observation car, dining car (nothing quite like making bar friends on a train), with close to zero risk of getting tased!
US trains are not worth it in coach. A Greyhound bus is more comfortable with the same amenities and takes about the same time.

If you have lots of money to burn, a train with the sleeper car or roomette is a better experience. You can at least lay down and have more room to relax, the windows are less grimy, you get better shades, lights, and much more room to lay down and relax.

The whole point of mass transit is it's not a car, so comparing it to driving is apples and oranges.
Turn PDFs into brainrot using AI
Nation state backed industrial espionage is a winning strategy!
The US has the pull to make foreing companies not sell their products to countries sanctioned by the US.

TSMC can't sell a lot of products to China, neither ASML.

You can't fly to Cuba directly from the US, neither can import their Cigars.

Venezuela, Iran and Russia along other's can't access their international reserves deposited in American Banks.

It is just a different scale and for completely different reasons. If anything, other countries are learning to play by the same playbook for their particular reasons.
Nothing’s out there. All there is out there is sea, and birds and fish. And 20,000 tons of waste brine.
I was going to write ‚Mazurek not mazurka’ but it seems official english name is a wrong noun declination…
Cuban Cigars.
That's madness.

"instead of writing 100 class names"

"use semantic class names"

What a loop.
I recently wrote my own PE loader and found handling TLS data the most annoying aspect of the process: https://landaire.net/reflective-pe-loader-for-xbox/
Technically speaking, you can migrate out of Arc pretty quickly just by importing bookmarks into whatever other browser you use and downloading the new extensions. I used it for a bit and went from Chrome to Arc to Firefox in probably around 45 min of migration time.

Everything but the UI is open-source Chromium so the main risk is just telemetry.
Another indictment of "transparent" UI (as if we even needed one).
you don't need such complicated and hard to remember passwords--use something like bcrypt
Because this idea obviously is not on the interest of american business. We don't live in 1950 anymore where the US alone was half world's GDP.
Depends on your definition of “serious”.

You see a lot of “just take the train” in centrist and left-leaning British media (example provided below).

Easy to imagine in the UK. Not so easy from, say, Perth, Western Australia.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-h...
sometimes you do just get lucky. but you can only get lucky if you're actually doing stuff (not just learning about it)
I'm trying to start an educational YouTube channel in the vein of CGP Grey or 3b1b with a focus on CS. The first video is taking me a long time. It seemed like a natural leap from blogging, but the effort is exponentially higher.
It's not obvious to me that there is double counting. The study says, "Individual carbon emissions can be divided into personal consumption emissions, emissions through government spending, and emissions linked to investments." Someone needs to be accountable for corporate emissions, and that someone is the owners. That's entirely reasonable.

If a dollar is spent by a corporation on a person, and that person uses it to buy something else that took carbon to produce, yes, you could imagine double counting the emission. But that can be fixed simply by rolling up the carbon emission to the ultimate consumer: a person, a government, or the owners of a corporation. Corporations can pollute by themselves: buying and using corporate jets, for example. Those can't be attributed to upstream consumers.

If anything, this undercounts the emissions of the super rich, since they also are responsible for a good portion of government spending, too--either directly, because of the outsize taxes they pay, or indirectly, because of corporate taxation of profits of companies that they own. But since they don't control that government spending (at least in theory) it seems OK to not attribute it to them.
Designing Bug-Proof Engines
Update on that: I contacted the developer and he fixed that problem in a matter of minutes. Pretty cool!
Kind of in love with you right now.
Is a big problem for passenger trains in the US, freight has priority. Creates these long stops. Worse, if a passenger train is late, then suddenly it has to wait for a large unexpected and unplanned number of freight trains.
Ask HN: How do I support multiple file versioning (any file type) using diffs?
Hi Friends.

I'm trying to do multi-version support for my users so they can upload the same file (same name) and have a version history.

For example, user uploads "Site Details Oct-2024.docx". They make some changes, upload the file again. Instead of giving them an option to Keep/Replace, I'd like for them to be able to have a version history that they can view/revert/etc. Less clutter, better organization, and most importantly it will make it easier for them to see what actually changed.

Right now I'm doing the naive way - uploading that updated file and storing the distinct files. The downside is that this will Nx my storage. If they have a 2mb file with 5 revisions, my current approach will use up 10mb.

I have no idea how this stuff works, so I did some googling and also asked chatGPT.

I found something called xdelta and bsdiff. Has anyone used this before? Seems like neither are actively maintained.

If you know any other way to do this also please let me know.

Text files are pretty straightforward, but again for formats like PDF docx etc. I am not sure how to do this.

I'd be happy if there are node/go/python bindings (in that order of preference), but no worries if not I can figure it out.

Thank you!
"This is ahistorical."

The A380 is from 2007, the A319neo is from 2016.

So not the turning point. 2007 is the point in time when Boeing thought they had won, not 2016. From that point on it went down, with Boeing hybris.

If you look at the sentiment from the times,

"Battle for the future of the skies: Boeing 787 Dreamliner v Airbus A380", Guardian 2013

or

" The market for big planes has fragmented and there is simply not enough demand for jets the size of the 747 or bigger to justify the huge development costs of an all-new jet such as the A380, according to the Boeing view. So it has bet its future on a midsize jet, the 787 Dreamliner. [...] Now, critics say Airbus made the wrong bet on the A380." [0]

[0]: https://www.aviationpros.com/home/news/10384535/huge-mistake...
instead of writing 100 class names For every element, every page, every project, again and again…

<button class="bg-indigo-600 px-4 py-3 text-center text-sm font-semibold inline-block text-white cursor-pointer uppercase transition duration-200 ease-in-out rounded-md hover:bg-i">
Tailwind Button
</button>

use semantic class names sunglasses emoji

<button class="btn btn-primary">
daisyUI Button
</button>

Heck, how did we miss that for almost three decades? That's my favorite style now.
> Why don't the common people in the West rise up against this perverted shit? 2400 pounds per year just to have the privilege to take the bus/metro?

Still cheaper than owning a car. The average driver in London pays £3200 a year for the privilege. Most Londoners don’t bother, cars are slowest, most expensive, and least pleasant way to move around the city.

As for the cost, that because a series of Tory governments stripped TfL of all its government funding. TfL has to cover all its cost from fares, advertising, and some other ancillary business. Hence the higher than average ticket prices.

I would also say that there’s nothing wrong with taking the bus/metro. Busses turn up every 5 mins, metros every 90s-180s. Everything is clean, comfortable (we have fabric and padding on our busses and metro seats) and reliable. Although rush hour can get very cramped and sweaty at its peak.
Or is ChatGPt4 4k TV, which is good enough for almost all of us and we are plateauing already?

https://www.reddit.com/r/OLED/comments/fdc50f/8k_vs_4k_tvs_d...
From what I read, trying to crack AES 256 with quantum is like cracking 128, so impossible
this assumes that the point of school is to maximize student learning. i think it's better to look at it as free daycare so that adults can work. the whole system makes more sense in that context
I'm building a music file manager using Electron. I'm deferring the actual music playing to VLC, but I need a way to sort through my many audio files to quickly select and launch what I want to hear.
In practice DaisyUI makes it easy for people who use Tailwind to quickly build prototype UIs. Later they can go back and replace the DaisyUI classes with Tailwind.

In less words, if you can’t stand Tailwind then DaisyUI is not for you.
Show HN: SupraVM for Containerized VM
Containerized VM combines the lightweight, portable nature of containers with the strong isolation and full virtualization capabilities of VMs. A simple Desktop-as-a-Service solution with SupraVM is at https://github.com/SupraAXES/SupraDaaS.
I'm quite positive freight just has right of way because of the rail ownership. Are you quite sure it is the other way round?
> Just everyday people talking to each other. But video. And realtime.

Does video add not a dimension of friction over sending text? For one, you can't scan a video the same way you can scan text.
While I really want to agree with you because I spent 10 years of my education with people who were exactly the bottom 20% which was beyond frustrating, unfortunately the resources are limited, so if you try to create a society where the top 10% has all the opportunities to develop to their full potential, you'll end up leaving behind the other 90%, which will make average voter even less informed about the world around them.
Big Bath
Elon Musk on Battery Industry Technology
"Every industry has a certain amount of BS but the battery industry might be a candidate for the industry with the most amount of BS. Battery technology is very complicated. The amount of range you need in a battery is the same amount of range your bladder has. There is no magical breakthrough.

Both Tesla and SpaceX are desperately interested in anything that works, unfortunately, its rarely the case that something proposed to us actually works.

We used to rate every new battery technology we heard on a scale of 1-10. Nothing got above a 4.

If you feel you have better battery technology with greater range, compete with Tesla. Kick our ass."
Decoy hard drives may work against coercion
There is waydriod as a successor thou.
Oh hurrah, I think that link is what I've been looking for for nearly a decade. I ran across it, or something like it, a long time ago and could never find it again. I don't remember all the special syntax, I think the one I found was written more in plain English with more examples (and I don't think the one I found back then mentioned ghoti either), but can't be sure it's been so long - maybe it was just that page and I don't remember it. It does have around the same number of rules I remember though.
“The US fears Chinese military capability” is one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages.

There’s a limit to how capable the leadership of a military can be without any real world experience aside from harassing the ships and aircraft of other nations with dangerous interception maneuvers.
Clace runs natively on Windows and macOS, it does not have to run in a container. It can then start containers, either Linux or Windows (the specs https://clace.io/docs/container/overview/#app-specs are Linux by default)
Don't over-dramatize. Valves are important, but they are a relatively simple mechanical units. My kitchen has valves used many times a day and serving years in a row. While rocket valves operate under more complex conditions, they also usually designed and manufactured with more care. So yes, valves can fail - but they also can be made reliable.
Because mutation testing (should) generate a lot of mutants, which you then need to run your unit tests against.
Moving sculpture aims to show how everything is interconnected
> It does work very well for certain parts of the world, like the Gulf carriers (hence why Emirates has so many).

I know they purchased many, but how did it work out for their bottom lines? Also, are these carriers concerned with bottom lines as much as national prestige?
This article seems to suggest that atomic application updates at the server side is by itself a solution to application versioning, which it isn’t. As long as client-side asset caching is enabled, which it is by default for all web applications, then the neatly separated application versions will get all mixed up in the browser. One solution would be to serve each application version under a different path prefix.
The shrimp example is kind of strange. Like you said, it's an extremely common character, and not a difficult one either. But beyond that, if you look at it he got the radical, 虫, correct. The phonetic element, 下, is a fundamental character that I doubt anyone forgets to write.

It just seems like such an odd outlier example. Like talking about a friend that spells "been" as "bin." I'm sure it could happen, but it's not indicative of a broader trend.

The story was reported by Victor Mair, though, who is extremely opposed to using characters and often exaggerates the issues with them.

Personally, I've seen a lot of Chinese people's written notes, and I don't think I've ever seen them resort to pinyin, even among people that didn't go to college. I just asked a few Chinese friends about this, and they told me they never resort to pinyin either.
I think it makes sense. All news media is now a target. Support for actual news reporting and the first amendment has never been lower in my opinion. Why paint a target on yourself?