skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Alphanum: 2025/2048 = 99%

That is a semi-correct calculation of the wrong number. Base45 does not use all 45 characters in every slot. It goes 16 bits at a time, so the character storing the upper bits only has 2^16/45^2 = 33 possible values.

The most straightforward way to measure efficiency is to see that base45 takes 32 source bits, and encodes them into 33 bits. The way you're calculating, that's only 50%

But the better way to calculate efficiency is to take the log of everything (in other words, count how many bits are needed). Numeric is log(1000)/log(1024) which is 99.7%. Alphanum is 99.9%. Base45 is 97%.

And I don't know where that kanji number came from. It stores 13 bits at a time, mapping to 8192 shift-JIS code points, and the vast majority of them are valid. It's pretty efficient.
If you start out being popular among people who prefer one approach to reporting and opinion, and unpopular among people who prefer something entirely different, and then you incrementally move away from what you used to do, at the same time as the second group of people have plenty of other options to choose from ... this is precisely what you'd expect.

WaPo was viewed as a liberal, slightly left-of-center newspaper that did excellent investigative reporting. It therefore was all but ignored by those whose preferred version of the news is presented by e.g. FOX News.

As it has taken some subtle and some not-so-subtle steps to move away from its reputation, that has done nothing to encourage FOX News viewers to read it, and a lot to discourage its former audience from continuing to do so.

So one "side" has declined, and the other "side" has no reason to increase.
Is there a strategy here, or is this all emotional. Or is the strategy like, we can reduce social security spending if more old people die of the flu?

This isn't entirely cynical, I do assume there are some pragmatists who might think this way.
I'm not asking you to justify something that was unjustified in the first place -- I'm asking you to justify what you're asking people to do now. Why is it worth everyone's time and effort to migrate back to using "master" rather than "main"?
I literally cannot understand why this being downvoted.

Why should Canada be compelled to use a private US based platform owned by a person who is advocating for Canada to no longer exist.
Another indicator that the time of capitalism is over and the time of techno-feudalism has begun. All hail the algorithm, may it be satisfied.
FWIW, it works on the Steamdeck, natively, without Proton -- so it's a native Linux game in other words. Apparently a lot of folks are playing it on desktop Linux, as a result. It's just not "officially supported".

I'm a one-man dev operation, so it's strictly a matter of opportunity costs of my time. Linux and Mac are miniscule gaming markets, like 1% of Windows, but could potentially generate a significantly proportionately greater burden of support. So I have to be careful there.
It's always annoyed me and in fact Jon Stewart made fun of it in an interview with Ezra Klein of... the NY Times.

Democracy is not a reverse vampire that sleeps in a tanning bed. It's perfectly fine with darkness. Democracy Dies in Ignorance would be a more objective & rational motto, even if it is a bit preening and hysterical. Democracy Thrives In Knowledge is a bit more upbeat and gets the point across. Or even Democracy Compels Free Speech which Bezos would probably endorse in spite of his self-contradictory behavior here.

(Yes, he did make a bad call.)
> Rust developers are insanely productive.

If your baseline is a language that is missing some features that were in standard ML, sure. If you were already using OCaml or F#, Rust doesn't make you any more productive. If you were already using Haskell or Scala, Rust's lack of HKT will actively slow you down.
>I can't comment on the reality of a 3d game with a complicated art pipeline, however. But for a game like Ballionaire, Unity or Unreal would have been a mistake.

Going from Zero to Working 3d Game is very quick in Unity as long as you do everything the Unity way.

Going from Zero to Working 3d Game if you need to create functionality from scratch in Unity is a heartbreaker.

I am actually planning to take one of my old projects and rebuild it from scratch in Godot, for exactly this reason.
EXch: Analysing the Infrastructure of North Korea's Favourite Mixing Service
The major weekly paper in my country does this. It's always nice to read, even though I wish the articles were longer x)
What is your opinion about the top bad review on Steam? Have you addressed those issues or perhaps you disagree with them? Posted here for reference

> Really fun game at first, and it has a lot of potential. Unfortunately you are very strongly incentivized to NOT UNLOCK ANYTHING (i.e. the meta-progression).... because after you unlock many additional items and get to the higher difficulties, the vast majority of runs become impossible since there are way, way too many items in the pool and way, way too few rerolls (and no ban feature for some reason), so you end up with random unrelated crap almost every run and auto-lose because of it, as strong synergies are mandatory to win on the higher difficulties. It feels really bad having to fish RNG over and over again just to get a run that's actually winnable. They could easily fix this with many solutions, like: stronger reroll tag affinities, more choices per round, item bans, 10x the amount of rerolls, builds/profiles with more limited pools, map-specific limited pools, etc. etc. If they fix this massive roadblock then this game has the potential to be a amazingly fun.
A functioning democracy requires competent participants, how is this controversial? Otherwise we might as well just have RNG decide.
Stock assets: the first “AI”. Honestly still a better option than AI for most anything in game dev with a few workflow-oriented exceptions.
The game took one year to make and I am a severe workaholic, so, I found it easy to just put the pedal to the floor for exactly one year (and then simply die afterwards, lol)
> Shame few complained when it became a one sided mouthpiece for the leftist establishment.

Did it? Why did only few complain?
What's an example of that pivot from CNN's website today?
There is no strategy here except to disempower the establishment.
> This is easily corrected in C by adding a small extension

It's so easy that thousands of developers trying for 40+ years haven't been able to do it yet.
So the Fox was forced to respond to competitive pressure from a new entrant. Companies are fighting over customers. Sounds like exactly how a competitive free market is supposed to function.
There is no job security. I live in an EU country which has very strict rules about layoffs (you need to give notice + severance).

Well here I am 6 months after being told I'll be laid off, and my previous employer hasn't paid me anything yet :-)

I was contracting for a few years before that, and I liked that better because at least it's honest. The contract clearly says the company can terminate the contract at any time without recourse.
You sort of have to use both. OCR and LLM and then correlate the two results. They are bad at very different things, but a subsequent call to a 2nd LLM to pair together the results does improve quality significantly, plus you get both document understanding and context as well as bounding boxes, etc.

I'm building a "never fill out paperwork again" app, if anyone is interested, would be happy to chat!
Oh thanks for the link, this is really great!
There's nothing interesting about the "republic" part.

All democracies have something things that make impossible-to-hard for majoritarian legislating to affect. The US is no different in that respect, other than the precise things that are deemed out of reach of the majority, and how hard it is to change that.
> If they ever become convinced that winning elections is impossible then they'll fall back to violence to get their way

Unfortunately, in reality, they believe the election is rigged, win the election, and still believe that elections are rigged so next time they don't win, its definitely rigged.
I would love to know what data the state of Florida possibly has that needs to be stored on the moon.
At least Framework released a new Desktop

And they tried to be fun with it!

The 3D printed tiles on the front are a very cool idea and just perfect right now I think! :-)

https://frame.work/au/en/desktop
This is sort of the inverse of the sunk cost fallacy. We are where we are, if we want to move back, it's not implicitly rational to move back solely for the opposite reason that we moved forward.

Moving back has additional costs, it doesn't simply undo the costs of moving forward.
Is that specifically related to the Germany ccTLD or because you live in Germany? What would be the consequences of just... not doing it? Who even knows where a website author lives or publishes from?
I love the animated stickman!

building myself html games myself[1] with my own game engine. Getting players is really hard. I was betting on SEO, but results will take a long time. do you think getting a publisher worth it? I was reluctant putting the game on steam too since I think the target players wont be there

Happy to hear recommendations!

https://pixelbrawlgames.com/game/blast
USD$0.30 to $0.40 per egg in Fiji.
The problem with competitive market ideals is that money is a positive feedback loop. The more money you have, the more you set the rules, the more money you get, ad finitum until eventual money singularity.

Capitalism is useful, like fire is useful. You just need to be careful to keep your fire under control and doing useful things.
I don't think there is such a legal obligation, because videos like this one exist where devs do share the exact financials of their Steam releases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPMfcaUulYU
Lately? When was it not like that?
One news organization, at least, is brave enough to deliver this vision:

https://theonion.com/opinion/point-counterpoint/
They have conditional access capabilities.

https://support.1password.com/firewall-rules/

(have implemented to attempt to mitigate this vulnerability, but if there is malware active on the device, it will eventually have access to the clipboard or otherwise unencrypted secret)
"main" is better than "master" because it's shorter. The noxious politics are irrelevant at this point.
Yes!! postfix gang
Typescript's type system is Turing Complete (at least it was for 2.2) [0].

Regexes fundamentally can't do that [1].

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/14833

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
Ok I'll believe you if you give specifics. Here we have the WaPo publisher specifically saying he will bias the paper towards libertarianism. What's a similar example on the other side?
With everything going on in the world right now, why are you choosing this particular hill to die on? It doesn’t matter.

However, I do agree that the word “master” has a lot of different meanings that don’t have to do with slavery, so I don’t consider the word offensive by default. But I don’t think changing a default text label is worth getting on a soapbox about.
> not sure I'm familiar with supreme court opinions, but are those drafts public?

No, they're infamously secretive. I think far too secretive, and that's a part that I don't think needs to be emulated.

While I do think there's value in having the drafting process "out of the public view" for an op ed, I'd agree in transparency after the fact. I could see just publishing all the revisions, editors notes, etc online alongside the actual final pieces.
Faster speeds are great and all but what I'd like to see prioritized is Wifi at the 900mhz band so we can have a long range option that penetrates through walls. We must be at the point where we can manage to have relatively usable speeds in lower bands right?
> But it's very telling that more oligarchs are trying to control the _flow of information and ideas_ to the masses. A key requirement of fascism.

People only notice this problem when the oligarchs that they don't agree with are doing it.

https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/hillary-clinton-warns-...

When Hillary outright said as much last year it wasn't even a blip on HN's radar.
Maybe he saw the same polling lots of people saw at that time?
The primary benefit of taxing the shit out of billionaires is not actually the revenue it produces, but the fact that it means that we don't have billionaires.

"People with more money than God own and influence media" has historically not been a recipe for social stability.
Thank you very much !!! Really appreciate this :)
What was the argument for why it couldn't?
I grew up using HP RPN calculators and it was actually easier in the long run. It isn't in the keystrokes either, but because when I was calculating an algebraic expression, I would have to setup a "query plan" in my head on how I would input all the values and then often I could simplify things as I entered them. I got rather good at manipulating algebraic expressions as a result, and it served me well in college.
The article glossed over a key detail. He stored his work credentials on his personal 1Password password vault which no one should ever write down nor take passwords home with you. This could have been just a personal thing between him and this hacking group and not involved Disney.

On top of that, it seems Disney was allowing single sign on to Slack. My guess it works sort of like LucidChart where it redirects to like Corporate ADFS or single sign on systems.

I am not clear if Disney has MFA setup for their employees. My work uses ID Authenticator and it’s on my mobile phone.

I don’t know why Disney isn’t using something like Teams.

Anyways just guesses on my part
You make a good point. I suppose that when I say "open source" what I really mean is more like "free software, but not necessarily the GPL", because that's what I care about, while I don't care much about businesses or their concerns: but you are right, this does ignore some of the term's broader meaning and the motivations people had for establishing it.
In January I tried going vegetarian. It turned out to be a very easy transition, much easier than I expected, but the most surprising change was the quality of my BMs.

It took about a week to adjust, but since then, it’s perfect quality poops every time. I’ve since adopted a flexitarian diet, and only had meat a couple times since the beginning of the year.

I have no idea whether it would help you in any way, shape or form, but I’m a much happier pooper since dropping western-style meat consumption.
No questions but congratulations on your game and success! It's a great idea.
Do you need a bigger example than the tantrums thrown when they were verboten from endorsing a lackluster presidential candidate?
This makes me wonder whether the usual order for function application is an artifact of the S-V-O sentence structure in western European languages. Maybe if Euler had been raised in a language with a S-O-V sentence structure, we would write (x)f instead.

Plus, reverse function application/composition works better with our tendency to write the domain of the function before its range. Given f : A -> B and g : B -> C, the composite function is written as g o f which is mildly annoying.
This reminds me of the high quality, addicting PopCap games. Very nice!
I am also working on a project after being laid off, though I got hired elsewhere. Any suggestions on how to promote your work? I am fairly far away from that but it will be a harder thing for me I think
What are your solutions to these issues? All I see is ranting at others, which doesn't solve the problems.

Regarding "unhinged" immigration, you haven't said anything that indicates people on the left support it (whatever it is - the hyperbole masks any real meaning).

> other Western countries who actually have borders

Other Western countries have similar immigration problems - it's a major issue in the EU, for example.
Yeah the manga scanslation world is really big so I have no doubt there are differences in each of the points, except:

> I've never heard of pre-teens being part of these groups, but I guess no one would really advertise that they are a pre-teen

I was a pre-teen when I started scanslating. I did this for ages and did all the roles that were available back then. I started editing/managing and head TLing multiple projects as a teen. I "retired" in college. I don't want to dox myself too much but the pipeline from scanslater to low-pay intro commercial translation work was very common back when I did it, since it's easy to hit N2 if you were TLing from Japanese and many of the better TLs were N1 or better. While this isn't the case for me, many of the TLs were heritage speakers. From the Discords I'm in these days I'd say the age distribution remains very similar, with a mean around 16. I mean it makes sense, who wants to do this much work with no pay?
Or the converse, feed all of twitch chat to Claude and see if it can output the correct button presses.
It was intentional that the game got harder by broadening the pool of drafts. The design goal was that you need to develop your skill to build more flexible boards, that don't rely on just forcing a single synergy to materialize.

Unfortunately, I don't think the game communicates this goal well, AND prevailing design trends (rogueliTe, which this game is NOT) I think have trained players to expect that games should get artificially EASIER over time by increasing the player's power level.

It's a point of the design I'm willing to concede, so it's something I do hope to address. But not increasing the power level as in a roguelite, just by preserving the density of drafts and taming dilution a bit.
A couple of decades ago, I attended a lecture by Tony Hoare about program correctness. He used the producer-consumer problem as an example and by starting with pre/post conditions and refining them, he arrived at a (proved) correct program. I went back from the lecture thinking this is so easy, I can apply this as well. Sadly, I realized one has to be Tony Hoare to produce code out of logic with his level of ease.
> I'm sure you've noticed that having over USD 100mm gives you a different set of rules to play by

I've heard about that.

I do notice my less wealthy friends also use different rules. They tend to be more hands-on solving traditionally police matters. They also sometimes seem to be rather careless of liabilities. I've definitely considered using money to solve some of my worst problems.

Not so many people in NZ with US100MM so I've never had much to do with them. We have 3 billionaires here.

I have little knowledge of the people you mentioned.
According to Dorsey, they didn't want to block Trump, they caved in to advertiser requests.

"But [the Trump ban] was right for the business, because if we didn’t act on it, we probably would have lost all our advertisers, which would affect the business and stock price. But it was wrong for the world and the internet, given the fact that we could do it in the first place. No one should be able to do that."

https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik...
How does that explain the NYT and WSJ (and NY Post) in the same city? The current LA Times?
With your sample size of n=1 you came to the wrong conclusion about HN moderation. To then expand that experience to justify tearing society apart is quite the reach.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5305269/tesla-state-dep...
>> "Personal liberties"

> Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".

"Personal liberty" is a euphemism for discrimination against "out groups," based on their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or political orientation. The Masterpiece Cake Shop debacle[0] was framed on the right as an issue of religious liberty.

"Free markets," the other "pillar" in the Bezos letter, is obviously a euphemism for opposing government regulation or oversight. In this case, I imagine it means in particular opposition to labor unions.

[0] https://fedsoc.org/case/masterpiece-cakeshop
Oh, that's interesting. I assume some of the syndication gets fanned out to smaller local papers?
Last I spoke to a nurse about this she explained something interesting to me - in selecting the next flu shot they actually watch the opposite hemisphere to predict most likely strain to vax.

So despite US shenanigans rest of world may still be OK
I've been a pretty heavy HN user since highschool and it just felt like such a cool place to be.

There were always so many deep interesting topics from people with all sorts of interesting backgrounds.

Theres been a shift for a while but it I hate to say that it now feels like an AI, trump, Musk yap fest.

I don't hate AI, use it every day and work in the space.

The life has just been squeezed out of this place. It makes me sad that honestly I can find more interesting discussion on Reddit at this point which is truely disappointing considering that's not great quality either.

I've been using lobste.rs more recently and they do actually have pretty good active tech discussion there.

I don't know how / when it happened but it feels like HN is somehow becoming a tool for disinformation.... :(
Congrats, great to hear a success story. I wish I had the time to do this too. How did you pitch to the publisher so they would find you during development? How did you find a publisher?
>tbf most newspapers have a certain agenda to push

that's not the issue here though. Bezos is directly ordering the opinion editor to tow a certain line, and that is not a common practice at any reputable newspaper I am aware of (which is why the responsible editor, David Shipley immediately quit). I am German and I have friends working in the news sector. A corporate shareholder trying to dictate the topics would be considered a breach of ethics. Pretty sure that's the case at highly regarded newspapers in the US too.
solar radiation immediately feels like a huge problem... the more i think about the scenario the more problems i come up with
Direct Democracy was always a bad idea, because unqualified people exert influence. It’s why we are a Republic. The only influence one needs in government is through a representative. That’s it. You don’t need a representative to execute the laws. Why does the public even vote for a President? The President isn’t supposed to represent the public. That’s the job of the literal Representative. Senators shouldn’t represent the public as well.

The founding fathers had it right when they created an electoral college that wasn’t decided by a popular vote. The electoral college should be a bunch of PhDs, of any field, selected by sortition. That’s it. That’s how you get smart people to design government.
Who is the Leftist Establisment? Because it isn't Democrats. Ask any real leftist and they will tell you the Democratic Party is centrist.
Maybe I've spent too much time with Forth, but the given example didn't look bad at all to me. Quite the contrary. The moment I reached line 2 (i.e., ",20 = count let"), I knew exactly what was happening. My mind immediately switched to postfix-mode. From there, everything made sense: logical, intuitive, even aesthetically pleasing!
There are Hopi people in those photos?.. advanced culture
I'm pretty satisfied with the amount of type checking in C++ and Java. You can go crazy with it but the people who write those languages usually have the good taste to not go overboard with complex type tricks.
I think we genuinely need this to raise the bar on interview standards much higher. Especially using Rust which LLMs are very clumbsy with getting correct with one shot.

> What could we improve in our current user experience?

Just make this as the next standard for tech interviews by using Rust this time.
Road worthiness is not reliability. Headlight off by 1% doesn’t mean car is totalled.

Stop spreading misinformation.