skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A News Service That Almost Never Emails You (By Design)
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Notably News – a short-form news service that delivers micro updates by email. Instead of constant notifications or daily digests, you get just a few key updates per year on a subject, covering only the most important events.

I follow a lot of different topics but don’t want to rely on social media, Google Alerts, or traditional news sites that flood me with updates, clickbait, or opinions. I just want concise, neutral updates on the most significant events.

I first tried to build something similar ten years ago, leveraging my (very minimal!) academic experience in text summarization. But at the time, I couldn’t get it to work well. Now, modern LLMs make doing this feasible.

HOW IT WORKS:

1. Pick a public figure (or several) to follow

2. We use (mostly!) Wikipedia to watch for updates, then summarize them.

3. Receive short, neutral updates via email – just a couple of sentences when something big happens

WHAT NEXT?

Right now, I’m focusing on tracking famous people. When I first attempted this in 2014, I tried to cover everything at once (which was… a mistake). This time, I’m taking more of a step-by-step approach.

I’d love your feedback, inc what topics or categories should I add next?

Try it out: https://www.notably.news/

Minimal sign up: Just choose who you care about and enter an email address; no spam
(Almost) everything wrong with modern gaming in a neat little package.

>unfinished base game
>81% on metacritic, 52% user reviews on Steam

>Misuse of the term "early access" to indicate advanced access 5 days early
>5 content packs on release already
>oh wait not all of them are included in the Founders Edition, some are just promises for later content packs

>mobile game UI, a huge mess (maybe because Luigi wasn't there to fix 25% of the UI bugs like in 6....[0])
>mobile game artstyle, Civ4 looked better than this in *2004*
>they switched from Lua to JavaScript since civ6

>horrible performance, crashes, stuttering and ridiculous system requirements
>skin-focused, leader-focused pseudo-RPG "gameplay"
>who needs engineers or auto-explore in a Civilization game anyway?
>empire switching straight stolen from Humankind but worse
>obligatory quests included

>Denuvo, gimped modding "support" (just the usual)
>Atomic Age stripped from the release deliberately, to be sold back to you as DLC later
>AI? that doesn't sell DLCs....
>storefront disguised as a game

yeah this game is a disgrace to Sid

(apologies for the formatting, I'm not good at this)

[0] https://preview.redd.it/thanks-for-your-contribution-to-civi...
More honest version:

https://youtu.be/JBqVVBUdW84
macOS system requirements are min: M1 8 Core 8GB RAM, recommended: M2 Pro 10 Core 16GB RAM.

Does this mean that the game is Mac optimized? Previous versions also have Mac support but wasn't exactly optimized much IRRC.
Probably the best turn based strategy game out there. Spent a few hours on this latest edition over the weekend has all the same core mechanics as 6 with a new ages system. Feels pretty fun so far!
There is also `nix-alien` (I am the author BTW), that automates the process of listing all program dynamic libraries (as long they're not loaded at runtime) and creating the `shell.nix` file with `buildFHSUserEnv`.

And also `programs.nix-ld` now, that allow you to impurely include libraries available to all programs. It does some LD_LIBRARY_PATH hacks, but AFAIK it worked well enough for me when I had this in my system (I don't anymore since I barely run dynamically linked executable from other sources).
Aside from the series become a DLC-fest, what has changed in terms of general gameplay since Civ 4?
Vscode and visual studio now add parameter inlay hints so

Foo(10, 20)

In your code gets rendered in the IDE as

Foo(X=10, Y=20)

Which solves a subset of the problems named parameters solves, namely the readability of the code.
I've put around 20 hours into this game at this point, and I think the criticisms are way overblown. The UI is a bit clunky in spots, but the game is very solid, and very fun. I've played every Civ since IV, and mechanics-wise, this is my favorite one (actually, Alpha Centauri... but this one is a close second). I have not found it particularly buggy (as opposed to clunky).

It feels like with every game release there's this army of perpetually pissed of gamers just waiting to pounce on anything, and when you play it it's like "this is what people were so mad about?". Same thing with Dragon Age a few months ago: everyone talked about it like it was some disaster, but I played it, and it's... fine? I mean, it's not the greatest game ever, but it's not terrible. It's not as good as Inquisition, but better than Dragon Age 2. It's certainly nowhere near as bad as Mass Effect: Andromeda.
> it was named from our point of view.

Actually it was named from the perspective of Spanish explorers. Originally Gulf of New Spain but by 1569 had become Gulf of Mexico.
Inheriting both surnames is traditional, picking one is nontraditional or foreign.
The interesting option is between using a conjunction or not (Paul Davis Thefirst or Paul Davis y Thefirst), which seems mostly a matter of sounding better or, as Wikipedia suggests, disambiguating between first names and surnames (if it precedes the conjunction it is a surname).
If you really mean Civ 4 then that’s easy to answer: hexes and one unit per tile.
>
Once AI achieves runaway self improvement predicting the future is even more pointless than it is today. You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot. There are no past examples to extrapolate from.

You take these strange dystopian science-fiction stories that AI bros invent to scam investors for their money far too seriously.
Who's optimizing LLM inference on CPUs? Any notable projects?
I am interested in knowing if anyone working on deploying the latest LLMs(upto 7B ones) efficiently on CPUs?
Our ability to predict technological "replacement" is pretty shoddy.

Take banking for example.

ATMs are literally called "teller machines." Internet banking is a way of "automating banking."

Besides those, every administrative aspect of banking went from paper to computer.

Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades.

It's actually shocking how little network enabled PCs impacted administrative employment. Universities, for example, employ far more administrative staff than they did before PC automated many of their tasks.

At one point (during and after dotcom), PayPal and suchlike were threatening to "turn billion dollar businesses into million dollar businesses." Reality went in the opposite direction.

We need to stop analogizing everything in the economy to manufacturing. Manufacturing is unique in its long term tendency to efficiency.other industries don't work that way.
I know that MySQL uses backticks, Postgres/Sqlite uses double quotes, and MS SQL Server uses square brackets, when using keywords for a column or table.
I also have 2 mandatory days but they are completely useless. Due to the hotdesking I'm sitting next to people I have nothing to do with. On the same calls as i am doing at home because my entire team is in other countries.
Pretty cool, nice job!

And wouldn't it be semantically more correct to put the <style> tag into the <head> and turning the <span> into a <p>aragraph?
Since this is targeting beginners I'd think it's important to convey such fundamentals. But it might as well be that the HTML rules have changed since I left the game. It has been many years for me!
> Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control.

> it is necessary to focus on the following more important concept: So, what will happen next?

These two statements seem contradictory. These kinds of propositions always left me wondering where they come from. Viewing the universe as deterministic, yeah, I see how "preventing what is to come is not within our control" could be a true statement. But who's to say what is inevitable and what is negotiable in the first place? Is the future written in stone, or are we able to as a society negotiate what arrangements we desire?
Civ 5 was fantastic though? Certainly a whole lot more approachable than 4 ever was.
If you write "a,b,c" you can't know whether you forgot ",d" either, because if you wanted to type ",d" but got distracted and forgot it, the habit of leaving no trailing comma will lead to just "a,b,c" without ",d". And you can't know whether you forgot or mistyped a whole query either. What is this argument even, seriously? It's so weak that it is on par with suddenly having a stroke while programming. Which guardrails should we invent for that case?

SQL is fundamentally unsafe "forgot the item"-wise. It doesn't allow dynamic column selection, there's no type safety, nothing. If you want guarantees, maybe make a proper language with guarantees rather than justifying random side-effects of a comma being a syntax error sometimes.
NEET and McDonald's
Show HN: Social Media Crossposting Tool with API Access
Hey HN,

I am a solopreneur managing 3 SaaS projects, growing them mainly through organic social media content.

I was spending like 2 hours a day just distributing content - absolute nightmare.

Existing tools were either overpriced or lacked API access, so I built Crosspostify: a simple way to save time and focus on what actually matters: creating content

If this sounds useful, check it out. Would love your feedback!
Both 5 and 6 were quite weak titles on launch, and they improved massively over many years. It seems like the starting point for 7 matches this trajectory.

There is some criticism that features have been removed to be re-added as DLC. I wonder if this is just that it is really really difficult to make a great strategy game, and putting out an imperfect title and iterating is the only way we know how.
I fell for the €30 upsell so I could play it this weekend and get the extra maps and civs. Unfortunately, Steam errored the transaction, so now I'm out my money with no game, waiting for support to resolve it. I was glad for the macos release and wanted to support (and play!), but I've learnt my lesson on handing over control before the product is delivered. I'll wait for the UX/UI updates and a price drop, still plenty of fun to be had in civ5.
Friction Logs
> I'm not an engineer anymore but I'm still confident in dev jobs prospects.

I am somewhat confident in dev job prospects, but I am not confident in the qualifications of managers who sing the "AI will replace programmers" gospel.
https://old.reddit.com/r/CivIV/comments/lfq173/how_does_civ_...
Everyone who saw the speech, saw the three (!) Heil Hitlers and the ensuing smirk that said “whatcha gonna do, suckers?”.

Pretending at equivocating just to troll will tank your own credibility.
Does a game like this really need much per-os optimization? I would guess the graphics are not the bottleneck, and the AI/sim code is not really that platform dependant
It’s been my experience that JS has been used to replace a lot of lower-level languages (with mixed results, to say the least).

But JS/TypeScript is now an enterprise language (a statement that I never thought I’d say), with a huge base of expert, disciplined, and experienced programmers.
Because a high level developer will still have to fix all the shit the AI gets wrong, and therefore won't be "2x more productive" like I read in many places.

If they're that much better with AI, they were likely coding greenfield CRUD boilerplate that nobody uses anyways. When the AI generated crap is actually used, it becomes evident how bad it is.

But yes, this will reduce team sizes regardless of it being good or not, because the people making those decisions are not qualified to make them and will always prefer the short-term at the cost of the long-term.

The only part of this article I don't see happening is programmers being way more expensive. Capitalism has a way of forcing everyone to accept work for way less than they're worth and that won't change.
I would say that AI is not to blame here. It just accelerated existing process, but didn't initiate it.
We (as a society) started to value quantity over quality some time ago, and, apparently, no-one care enough to change it.

Why tighten the bolts on the airplane's door yourself if you can just outsource it somewhere cheaper (see Boeing crisis)?

Why design and test hundreds of physical and easy-to-use knobs in the car if you can just plug a touchscreen (see Tesla)?

Why write a couple of lines of code if you can just include an `is-odd` library (see bloated npm ecosystem)?

Why figure out how to solve a problem on your own if you can just copy-paste answer from somewhere else (see StackOverflow)?

Why invest time and effort into making a good TV if you can just strap Android OS on a questionable hardware (look in your own house)?

Why run and manage your project on a baremetal server if you can just rent Amazon DynamoDB (see your company)?

Why spend months to find and hire one good engineer if you can just hire ten mediocre ones (see any other company)?

Why spend years educating to identify a tumor on a MRI scans if you can just feed it to a machine learning algorithm (see your hospital)?

What more could I name?

In my take, which you can say is pessimistic, we already passed the peak of civilization as we know it.
If we continue business as usual, things will continue to detiorate, more software will fail, more planes will crash, more people will be unemployed, more wars would be started.
Yes, decent engineers (or any other decent specialists) will be likely a winners in a short term, but how the future would unfold when there will be less and less of them is a question I leave for the reader.
Wow this is bringing back youth-hood memories. Great to see this page is still around. Thanks for bringing this up. SelfHTML has been an invaluable tool for my younger self.
I'm curious why you think so? I agree totally with the parent comment; when I iterate on a SQL query the most common place to make changes is near the end of the SELECT block, adding and removing and refining column expressions. I do the exact same "comma first" trick to make my life easier.
How to use deepseek R1 out of mainland China
Altman: OpenAI not for sale, especially to competitor who is not able to beat us
I don’t doubt that Vim is an efficient tool for you. In the end it’s just a text editor. Editing text is not the hard part of writing code. I do not understand the impulse to judge people according to their largely inconsequential choice of editor (and I must say it seems to be disproportionately users of certain editors who are susceptible to it!)

The part of your post that I responded to talked about exploring highly tinkerable projects. I guess you’re saying that you like that Vim is explorable and tinkerable even though you don’t waste time exploring it or tinkering with it. That’s fair enough, but I hope you can at least see the sentiment that I was responding to.
Well, I would like to keep my thoughts even after I leave the company, without having to save my opinions in a text file.

And with respect to email, the "instant messengers" have this property of being, you know, "instant", which sometimes is a blessing, but in the field of reviewing books, a thoughtful and demanding process, is more of a bane, and the communication model of a "topic" and "a long and thoughtful message citing multiple contributions of other participants" is quite fitting.
For corpos, I view things the opposite way: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.
This shows the durability of brands despite the buyouts of the last few decades that have collapsed them all into the same car company. I really do not like this trend, I think it's been bad for innovation and consumers. Real innovation has had to come from outside - from China, such as startup BYD ("build your dream", previously Xi'an Qinchuan Automobile Co).

> Opel, Peugeot, Citroën, Vauxhall, Alfa Romeo and Fiat

All of those had long separate histories before Stellantis. Although when I checked Vauxhall/Opel (basically the same cars except Vauxhall is the UK branding) have been GM subsidiaries since the 1920s!

PSA Peugeot Citroën merger was in 1976.

Daimler-Benz + Chrysler merger was in 1998.

Fiat Chrysler merger was in 2014.

Stellatis was the merger of PSA Peugeot Citroën and Fiat Chrysler in 2021.
What job title are you thinking of using?
Will this drastically reduce the pricing then?
Why would turboprops make sense? Jets/turbofans are more efficient at high altitudes where there's less air friction as well.

This is why turboprops are so common in ultra short haul where there's no point in climbing so high. They're more efficient at lower altitudes.

And I don't really see the relation between engine type and cabin space
Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101
They did it the other way around, every Netflix series is now designed like a soap opera, to be watched in the background.
We need to reboot Bryan Cantrill's "Don't anthropomorphize the lawn mower" talk with a new edition titled "Don't anthropomorphize the internet document simulator"
I remember when the original iMac was the best selling model of computer among all brands. A title Apple retained until, IIRC, they offered multiple colour options.

MacOS was still something like 5% or so of the overall market.
The first element is modified less often than the last element. Often it's just an "id" column or something. Comma-first is a net win.
It seems unlikely that he'll get in any trouble with the SEC this time around.
>
We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.

These people are however not experts in pretending to be a obedient lackeys.
>Like how struct designated initialisers have to be in order of member declaration due to object lifetime rules or something like that.

It matters in which order sub-objects are initialized - if you have a class with the members A and B, and B takes pointer or reference to A in its constructor and does something with A, A better be already initialized. Sub-objects are initialized in the order of their declaration and having different order of designed initializers would be confusing. In fact, exactly that problem we have in C++ with the list of initializers of base classes and data members in constructors.
It's alright. I played a couple of games. It's very pretty. I don't like the age system, just seems like throwing away your progress each time it resets.
4>5>6>7
I remember saying the same about higher-level languages.

Discipline can be applied to any endeavor.
What I mean by Zeitgeist is this: once an event begins, it becomes unstoppable. The most classic and cliché examples include Galileo’s heliocentric theory and the Inquisition, or Martin Luther initiating the Protestant movement.

Some ideas, once they start being built upon by certain individuals or institutions of that era, continue to develop in that direction if they achieve success. That’s why I say, "Zeitgeist predicts it this way." Researchers who have laid down important cornerstones in this field (e.g., Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, etc.)[1, 2] suggest that this is bound to happen eventually, one way or another.

Beyond that, most of the hardware developments, software optimizations, and academic papers being published right now are all focused on this field. Even when considering the enormous hype surrounding it, the development of this area will clearly continue unless there is a major bottleneck or the emergence of a bubble.

Many people still approach such discussions sarcastically, labeling them as marketing or advertising gimmicks. However, as things stand, this seems to be the direction we are headed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugvHCXCOmm4
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1i2nugu/ilya_s...
I don't think distracting drivers with ads in their jeep even when stopped is safe or even acceptable...
No comments about the VR version?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lavuwKvZki8

Curious to see how well this will run seeing that it will launch on the Quest store only, so no PC VR?
The release day of Civilization n is always the best time to buy and play Civilization n-1.
This still implies that the person who is currently paying freelance programmers is 1) good with LLMs 2) knows some html and js 3) can deploy the updated website.
Perhaps an addition could be added, however, for third-party header files and functions.
What is wrong with me?

I tried several modern Civilizations but I keep coming back to Freeciv. Freeciv from 1996 with its Civ II ruleset is more fun for me than Civ 5 or 6.

I never thought of myself as conservative or sticking-to-the-old just because I am used to it. Or am I?
That's bizarre, they look so unnatural with all the straight coastlines. That would have been so easy to avoid I assume it must be an intentional design decision?
Elon Musk Offers to Buy OpenAI for $97.4B in Unsolicited Bid
> LLMs and Code assistants always were primarily a means to copyright-wash all available things so they could be freely incorporated into commercial products without the problems of having literal copies of stuff you shouldn't have in your code.

Great observation!

> Of course this has to backfire.

I fear, that BigCorp will find ways to make this legal. Facebook is obviously sure that they can.

> However, I'm of the opinion that this is a good thing. Copyright is a sham and needs to be abolished.

As others have posted, copyright is a great thing! When someone puts a lot of work into something, like writing a book, or drawing a painting (or writing software), they should have strong rights that protect this work. The problem with the current copyright laws are again big corporations like Disney, who fought nail and tooth to prolong those rights into maddening lengths.

So I'm honestly a bit flabbergasted. How can you realize that corporations are using LLMs to steal from millions of creative people, are about to make billions of dollars with it and come to the conclusion that this is a great way of dealing with this, because "fuck copyright"?
After you have plenty of units on the map the performance drops significantly. Also, when the devs don't make accomodations specifically for the OS some UX issues can appear like showing OS UI when you move your cursor up to the edges. On top of that, macOS has some interaction conventions and gestures that might not exist or work in a different way on Windows and when those are not implemented the macOS way it gets very annoying.
Speaker With Expertise
>hides what the code actually does.

As does any function call.
I do not trust any study used by the guardian.

Just from the heading "far-right" already a buzzword to signal to the left who the "evil" people are. And who determined who is "far" right. In propaganda news, this term is used for 10 years or whatever to describe everyone who dares to have a single opinion that is not left. "Far-right" is now used to everyone who is actually just right (often double meaning).

The heading also says "the left" so did the study compare an actual small group of "far right" people vs "the left". What were the metrics used for saying someone is "far-right"? And if they actually made the group small, then OF COURSE they get the outcome they wanted.

Or did the compare vs the "far-left"? Let me guess, of course not!

Or did they just compare "the right" vs "the left" and the Guardian just calls them that in the headline.

I frankly do not really care, I do not buy this shit. If someone wants to tell me in the comments guess I care, but I am not looking at that study because I know the outcome was already pre decided.

Only dump people still read the Guardian and other legacy media.

// Bahahahaah "Dutch study of tweets by MPs in 26 countries" says someone in the comments. Yeah, it's even WORSE than I thought. See I do not even to look into shit like this, I already know from the stupid headline it's complete utter bullshit.