skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Retail Mage – A multiplayer Unreal game where GenAI NPCs go to shop
Hey HN! For the past year, our small startup has been focused on a single question: can we use generative AI to create genuinely new kinds of gameplay? Retail Mage is our first attempt at an answer.

I like to joke that Retail Mage is "late stage capitalism come for Diagon Alley." You and your friends are mages working the end of your shift at Mage Mart, seeking 5 star reviews from the wacky customers and trying not to burn the shop down, which sometimes happens.

We've built what we think is one of the more sophisticated implementations of GenAI in games so far. NPCs are powered by embodied AI agents that can observe their environment, plan actions, remember interactions, and engage in natural conversation. Going beyond AI agents, we also introduce an AI-based interaction system: Players and NPCs can just type or say what they want to do, and we translate that into the 3D simulation. This approach lets us bring "rulings, not rules" style gameplay to video games for the first time.

The technical journey has been... interesting! Some highlights:

- All inference runs in the cloud. We're part of Amazon's Generative AI Accelerator (the only gaming company)

- We manage inference ourselves, using some of the latest techniques in batching, forking and KV-cache reuse

- Over the last year, we've reduced our inference cost by 3 orders of magnitude

- After testing over two dozen models, we're currently using Google's Gemma

- We have our own in-house AI tools for Unreal Engine, including in-engine/runtime inference testing

- We developed our own natural language unit testing suite for our models and features

And we launch today! Try it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3224380/Retail_Mage/

Retail Mage is just the start. We have so many other prototypes and experiments. As a game developer, I'm legitimately excited to bring a new genre of games to players. Happy to answer questions!
I have a web app that allocates too much memory relative to what it actually needs and upgrading to .NET 9 reduced its usage by two thirds!

A pretty good result for just changing a dropdown in the project settings tab.
Can you offer up a .emacs that provides the same functionality as say, PHPstorm? I've tried, and not been able to reach that level of functionality.
I'll take a 60 hour work week and mandatory 12 hour weekend shifts for a total of 84 hours a week right now. I'll take minimum wage. How on earth are y'all getting and keeping jobs such that you can whine about not having enough time to spend your fortunes?
For those who don't get the reference, there was an incident where security research by University of Minnesota students/professors was conducted without communicating or receiving permission from anyone on the Linux side or from the Institutional Review Board (IRB).

It raised a lot of questions about conducting ethical security research on open source projects, whether security research of this nature counts as an "experiment on people" (which has a lot more scrutiny, obviously), etc.

"[...] Lu and Wu explained that they’d been able to introduce vulnerabilities into the Linux kernel by submitting patches that appeared to fix real bugs but also introduced serious problems."

https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22410164/linux-kernel-uni...
> IIRC jetbrains was a russian company, backed by people close to putin

Who are these people?
A good read if you want to learn (more than you ever wanted) about stack frame unwinding in conjunction with a JIT compiler.

The only correction I have: LuaJIT _does_ have 64 bit integers, e.g. 0x0123456789abcdefLL.
Clerks have much more limited time than one might think, and research is basically an added-on function that they never staffed for once courts started engaging in it.

“Facts” from amicus briefs make it in all the time without an apparent attempt at verification.

Perhaps they do check and then ignore their findings, but why bother with that?
ZX Spectrum was my first computer I used as a kid. Bring back so many memories :-) First programming I did was with Borland's Pascal. Long time ago...
Good on Jetbrains
Also unrelated to Stevie Wonder.
in cred ible
Choice quote:

> The Guardian has more than 80 accounts on X with approximately 27 million followers.

> The Guardian said content on the platform about which it had longstanding concerns included far-right conspiracy theories and racism. It added that the site’s coverage of the US presidential election had crystallised its decision.

> “This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism,” it said.

> “The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”
Thank you for pointing this out, will check your link instead.
Thank you, I was looking for something similar years ago and was surprised there wasn't rando product on aliexpress.
To each their own. I'm convinced it's just a visceral reaction to the square bracket syntax. Obj-C remains my favorite language of all time (although I haven't written it in years). Having a high level language that allows you to seamlessly drop into C felt like magic.
Fun & cursed fact, the ArchWiki has a rather long section on dual boot pairing. Pair in Windows or Mac then painstakingly extract various bits of pairing info from the OS and toss it into Linux, so you can dual-boot & keep the pairing. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth#Dual_boot_pairing

I've always wondered how feasible it would be to copy Bluetooth pairing information. This particular series of hacks seems to rest at least somewhat on it being the same Bluetooth host adapter. (But maybe the host side can spoof, trade IDs with the other device?)

Ideally I'd love to centrally and dynically manage what devices of mine are paired with what system... I think that might be technically feasible, as long as I'm not trying to pair multiple things with a single bt adapter.
The embedder is only 1.1M parameters, so it should run extremely fast.
i don't think anyone has done real-time multi-speaker dialog generation before
The Future of the Internet Is IRL
Rot Economics – An Interview with MIT's Daron Acemoglu
I'd give the opposite advice. Learning a new editor is fun and thankfully they are mostly inexpensive. You will build up a suite of editors that you use in different contexts and be able to talk about the differences based on experience and not just dogma.
I wonder (no pun intended) how much of this is driven by Marc's residual dislike of Amazon?

Amazon currently has a partnership with Grubhub to provide Grubhub delivery as a Prime benefit.

Amazon competed strongly (some might say unfairly) many years ago with Marc's first big startup, Diapers.com, and effectively forced him to sell to Amazon.

He later started Jet.com and sold it to Walmart - in many ways as a second chance to compete with Amazon.
The phrase "if it bleeds it ledes" hasn't been an industry cliche for 50+ years for no reason. Engagement numbers don't lie. Hyperbolic opinion pieces attract as many or more views as painstakingly researched journalism at a fraction of the price.
I find this and the emacs sentiment really weird. I use vim daily for quick edits, but for any sizeable codebase, especially new/unfamiliar, IDE's are just better. It's like depriving yourself of a bunch of tools and helpers for no visible benefit.
'from what I have heard'? From where?
Also had this concern sometime ago, and then did 2 minutes of research before no longer having this concern.
Author here. Thanks for sharing the blog post on HN; it was a nice surprise to see it in the first page.
Skimming the actual paper ... it seems pretty bad?

The thing about Beethoven's 9th and biological materials which is mentioned in the OP is just that, out of a very large knowledge graph, they found small subgraph isomorphic to a subgraph created from a text about the symphony. But they seem not to cover the fact that a sufficiently large graph with some high-level statistical properties would have small subgraphs isomorphic to a 'query' graph. Is this one good or meaningful in some way, or is it just an inevitable outcome of having produced such a large knowledge graph at the start? The reader can't really tell, because figure 8 which presents the two graphs has such a poor resolution that one cannot read any of the labels. We're just expected to see "oh the nodes and their degrees match so it has the right shape", but that doesn't really tell us that their system had any insight through this isomorphism-based mining process.

For the stuff about linking art (e.g. a Kandinsky painting) with material design ... they used an LLM to generate a description of a material for DALL-E where the prompt includes information about the painting, and then they show the resulting image and the painting. But there's no measure of what a "good" material description is, and there certainly is no evaluation of the contribution of the graph-based "reasoning". In particular an obvious comparison would be to "Describe this painting." -> "Construct a prompt for DALL-E to portray a material whose structure has properties informed by this description of a painting ..." -> render.

It really seems like the author threw a bunch of stuff against the wall and didn't even look particularly closely to see if it stuck.

Also, the only equation in the paper is the author giving the definition of cosine similarity, before 2 paragraphs justifying its use in constructing their graph. Like, who is the intended audience?

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2632-2153/ad7228#...
VMD: Visualize, analyze large biomolecular systems in 3D with built-in scripting
I'm not following them, I just see them in any damn mildly interesting thread out there.
Believe it or not, ignorance is not the main reason people don't use emacs
Yea, at this point I just assume everyone I see online gushing about OpenAI is being paid to do so
I encounter this take more and more, where jargony sciencey language is dismissed as "generated". We forget that actual people do write like this, and self-satisfied researchers especially so.

More likely, this author read a bit too much Deleuze and is echoing that language to make the discovery feel more important than incidental.
Hi! Having worked on this project, I can provide some details on why we didn't end up using the pressure sensor.

As others have stated, not all phones have pressure sensors, and the quality of the readings also varies a lot between different models. For example, we had one device where the readings would spike when squeezing the phone.

Transit also doesn't have permission to read the pressure sensor, and our use case wouldn't justify asking for it.
One thing I really dislike about compose is that its a CLI tool but it doesn't exist in library form with a similar API.

I wrote a backup tool for compose/swarm based setups based on restic but ended up having to reimplementing half of traefik because there was no more straightforward API and compose really is just a thin layer over docker.
I mean, I know people joke about it, but last time I saw one in a parking lot, I literally thought it was a dumpster at first.
But this is people that use their autocomplete, F8 step through debugging and the like.

I was like that about 20 years ago, working with Eclipse and later NetBeans for Java and Visual Studio for C# .net v1 (anyone remembers whole tomato extensions?).

I needed the IDE , the autocomplete, the debugger and all that. Nowadays, I do mostly Vim and Vscode for more complex projects. I don't know why, but I "grew out" of needing an IDE.
The sound of silence: Japan's no-conversation services
Those three go against our capitalist owners best interest and will never be done. Conspiracy baiting with aliens is easy, costs our owners nothing, and placates the masses.
The Most Dangerous Thing an AI Startup Can Do Is Build for Other AI Startups
For the authors, I suggest a TL;DR with some basic examples. People tune out pretty quickly. You want the 10s take away to be "I like it" and "this person has really thought through it". You have achieved the second objective with what you have.
It's the government not doing anything so it's easy to get conservatives on board and liberals will take anything they can get.
idk, I find I don't miss anything from heavyweight IDEs. I switched to neovim like 6 years ago. 95% of working with a codebase, familiar or not, is navigation and editing. LSPs enable pretty much any editor to intelligently navigate to definitions and find usages of a given construct. Anything beyond that is quickly hitting diminishing returns.

The one exception is maybe untangling particularly gnarly git conflicts.
I probably used vim exclusively for about a decade. I've worked with a handful of developers who've only used vim and I've only known one who was anywhere near as effective with it as most IDE users. A few examples

-- debugging with print statement because they don't know how to use a command line debugger

-- using find and grep to find files/methods

-- hand-formatting files because they don't have a inline formatter or something to notify them when they've missed a semicolon or spelled a method wrong.

I strongly encourage them to move to an IDE because I can't stand looking over their shoulder and watching them code so inefficiently. There probably are vim plugins to handle many/all of these things, but if a developer doesn't put the effort in to find them than they're just hurting they're own productivity.
Looks like they only spent $150M in cash and took on $500M of debt to do the ancquisition. They raised $250M from outside investors to pay for it. So sounds like they have $100M to try to make a go of it.

I expect the value to go way down as they squeeze all sides of the equation: drivers, restaurants, and customers.
Or at least have another job lined up before handing in your resignation.
I admire your dedication to empowering non-technical founders by turning their ideas into reality. Breaking through as a new agency without an established track record is undoubtedly tough, but your perseverance is commendable. One approach that has worked for others in your position is partnering with a startup for a revenue-share agreement or equity stake, allowing you to demonstrate real-world results while sharing risk. Alternatively, building a small, compelling demo or passion project that showcases your capabilities can attract attention and validate your expertise. Keep pushing—your hard work will pay off!
In embedded systems with hard real-time requirements, there are several ways to schedule tasks. Once the number of tasks you need to execute grows long enough, scheduling becomes a challenge. An RTOS is one way to manage these tasks with guaranteed, deterministic timing.

A concrete example: if you're in a car (an embedded system doing many things at once) and press the brakes, you want the car to be as responsive as possible. A real-time operating system will sacrifice other features of a general purpose OS to guarantee that the brakes are applied within a specified time interval after you press them.

Also, there are responses to a similar comment from when this was previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32329499
Clean and efficient
Recommended
How can you possibly be as productive as someone working in Visual Studio? I'm asking honestly - working without the solution explorer, being able to look at any immediate variable, instruction pointer dragging, and others seems like it would slow me down immensely.
And IIRC they just had some controversy of having a "default enabled" LLM harvesting or something like that no?
Egg producers weren't impacted by the avian flu. They just saw speculation and increased prices. Supply and demand Bros miss the most important thing: justifiable profit seeking.
Same for me - I had no idea how to program when we got it. Feel very lucky that my parents were forward thinking enough to know that computers were the future.
Said the Fox to the Chickens.
IMHO it's sort of the inverse*: its not that weird ghost kitchen things have $500 mil for acquisitions, its that Marc Lore has enough salesmanship to get private capital to lend $100M to get a turnkey delivery business for his food entrepreneurship, and the banker loans can pretty it up to sound like $600M, and the decision makers at GrubHub get a mildly-embarrassing outcome instead of an extreme outcome. (shutdown)

* I know a decent amount about finance, but don't practice it daily enough to find it second nature. I'd appreciate a similarly colloquial perspective from someone who reads me as naive.
This is so tiresome.

If you’re reading this you’re privileged.

Somewhere on this planet is a single individual human who is the very unluckiest and most unfortunate. Everyone else is privileged. Even that guy is lucky to be alive now and not 1000 years ago.

None of this makes OP wrong.
So ... performance-wise results seem to be quite apart from Intel/AMD?
Vim is great but I think VSCode really is the one tool to rule them all going forward. It's extremely well designed, snappy, and I think does the correct thing of first treating everything as a text file and allowing plugins to provide semantic meaning. I never liked visual studio because it was too specific to writing software and using the GUI to do what I wanted. Editing msbuild files directly was a pain for example. If I wanted to do some shell scripting or system debugging, I had to leave that environment.

Whereas with VSCode, I really never have to leave the VSCode environment to do what I want. I can pop open a shell within VSCode and don't have to switch windows. I can easily open random files not associated with my project and VSCode does the right thing (usually). It opens images easily, renders markdown well, etc. my favorite feature is that you can pipe cli output directly to VSCode in the shell and then it opens a tab displaying that output. You'd be so surprised how often that feature comes in handy.
From the comments:

> Sabine says:

> November 12, 2024 at 12:35 am

> Well played, Peter, certainly got me to click.

> [...]

Pretty sure I've seen her comment on there before in friendly fashion when she is referenced. (Yes, I have, for example: [1], [2].)

Woit's second paragraph is pretty explicit about the title, you don't need to dive into the comment to get the picture:

> Actually, the title and first paragraph above are basically just clickbait. Inspired by the class I’m teaching, I wanted to write something to advertise a certain point of view about quantum mechanics, but I figured no one would read it. Picking a fight with her and her 1.5 million subscribers seems like a promising way to deal with that problem. After a while, I’ll change the title to something more appropriate like “Representations of Lie algebras and Quantization”.

1: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13907

2: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13864&cpage...
Ah, but there's the catch. Resturants aren't meeting you there, Grubhub workers are. Resturaunts largely just optimize for takeout, and whether or not your food arrives warm is less of their problem and more of the Grubhub worker's issue. And as delivery drivers quit over low pay and their businesses go bankrupt, I really see no way for restaurants to support this behavior.

Additionally, you have to look at it from a pragmatic perspective. When I visit the East and West coast of the US, meal delivery is popular enough that you might think it's a booming business. Everywhere else it's pretty much dead though. In places where the cost of living isn't enough to compensate for a restaurant and their middleman (read: most of the US), you can't even find a driver most hours of the day. It's one of those nonsense businesses like Uber that seems like a great idea on paper but one that falls apart outside the Bay Area economy. Most places in America are not gentrified enough to pay peons gas money in exchange for hand-delivered McDonalds.
marc lore is underrated
Most tools work at the command line, making scripting a freebie.
> In another exercise, teens were asked to identify which of two pieces of content about Coca-Cola’s plastic waste was more credible: a press release from Coca-Cola or an article from Reuters. The results were too close for comfort for the report, with only 56% of teens choosing the Reuters article as more trustworthy.

So, at the end of the day, you're concerned over which article they're choosing to uncritically put their faith in? If this is the case then I'm not sure `news literacy` is worth anything.

I think you'd want "information literacy." The ability to find studies and understand them, to ask questions about them, and to do their own follow up work based off of them.

If all you're doing is asking them to choose between two articles then their world view is entirely controlled by publishers, and we've reduced them down to deciding which publisher is more credible, and given them no tools to ask important questions on their own. I can't think of anything less valuable for an education system to involve itself in.
I think Doordash realized people in middle America would pay to get Taco Bell and McDonald's delivered while Grubhub never really moved out of big cities.
Not OP, but I was confused as well, but found that a lot of people who did this had basically created an IDE-like experience with tmux, etc around vim, etc.

Not really my thing but I guess it works for them.
Ghost kitchens are the biggest scam in the food delivery world. why would anyone pay for an unsanitary kitchen to fry them up some frozen food?
...k
Lying about opt-out versus opt-in ought to be legally actionable. I'm not sure your point depends on that, but wanted to call it out.

Opt-in telemetry may well collect too much information _for a customer to be comfortable to use the feature_. However, it's an _option_ to an user instead of a _default_ for the user. Hence the categorical difference.

Some FOSS make opt-out inclusion a required feature. Forking a complex project isn't a reasonable approach in many situations.
It would help if greed would stop being an obstacle.
Rookie numbers. I learn a new one every hour.
Jelly itself does the sending, although we are exploring sending from your existing mail provider.
Of course it didn't blanket the world in fallout, which matters.
Let's suppose that's true, so what? Is Putin Satan now? I don't see anyone rushing to boycott US companies over its state policy...

Intellij is a great product, I would still use it even if it were Israeli.
I'm really curious to see where higher education will go now that we have LLM's. I imagine the bar will just keep getting higher and more will be able to taught in less time.

Are there any students here who started uni just before LLM's took off and are now finishing their degrees? Have you noticed much change in how your classes are taught?