skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you! The biggest difference in our approach is the goal of allowing for custom assistants. What we've found is that most developers work in entirely different environments, whether that be IDE, tech stack, best practices, enterprise requirements, etc. The baseline features that we've come to expect from a coding assistant are amazing, but to truly meet people where they are it takes something different for everyone. Over the last two years we've seen tons of people customizing, and with hub.continue.dev we just want to make that accessible to all, and hope that people will share what they learn.

We're going to keep building at the edge of what's possible in the IDE, including focusing on Agent mode (https://docs.continue.dev/agent/how-to-use-it), next edit prediction, and much more. And we're going to keep making it easier to build custom assistants as the ecosystem grows!
Minis - you can print them on paper, you can use dice, you can 3D print them, you can use minis from other games, you can use Pathfinder minis.

Maps - you can print them for free (minus ink & paper costs), you can draw your own, you can use maps from other games. Even if you're playing a published adventure, you can still find maps for free online.

Books - you can pick them up second-hand, you can pirate them, you can borrow them. I also never fully understood the stigma against home-brewed campaigns - I strongly prefer both playing & running homebrew.
If Apple advertised a toggle that protects you completely but let the users decide the mitigations, it would severely damage its standing as a secure phone when it would inevitability get exploited. (Targeted) Apple users are usually not technical.
"The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of itself."
Appreciate it!!
I bought a MBA M1 in 2021 (replacing a 2015 MBP) and it's really a nice machine, but the OS is not as nice. I'm running Fedora Silverblue on 2 other computers and while Gnome is not as polished, the whole ecosystem actually let you adapt it to your workflow, which macOS does not.

I don't really use a lot of pro software for non-programming tasks, so I don't miss them. Flatpak and GTK based applications are more than OK for the majority of tasks I have to do. And for the rest, it's easy to write some scripts. The main pros for me were no annoyances from corporate headquarters (pushing whatever services) and sensible configuration choices.
This is incorrect. Everyone uses Excel, not CSV. There are billions of people on this planet who know what to do with an .xlsx file.

Do the same with a .CSV file and you'll have to teach those people how to use the .CSV importer in Excel and also how to set up the data types for each column etc. It's a non trivial problem that forces you down to a few million people.

.CSV is a niche format for inexperienced software developers.
Doing it with a camera/computer requires identifying the objects that need to be drawn in "Piranesi Perspective". The mathematics of laying out the objects is quite simple, but rendering a raster image into a view such that the key objects have this perspective probably isn't possible. You would need to vectorize the image in a general way. I don't know the state of the art in that field, but it sure seems hard.
There is a spec for an alternative key encoding to avoid this problem [1].

It seems to have a fair bit of support.

[1]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/
> If you make a predefined path for every possible commute in the city, you will run out of money before getting very far. So ultimately, I would say a train is the closest thing to your ideal.

This doesn't seem to make sense. Surely a tram is still closer to it than a train. You're comparing the cost of trams to every home vs...the current number of trains? Why make that comparison?
I just had this experience with my girlfriend last week. she could not fathom this particle man I kept singing about was an actual song.
> They are implementing a clean new version.

Much of reverse engineering involves analyzing existing code, and this is not a secret. There are forums where people discuss and share their reverse engineering findings. Without this, creating a nearly 100% compatible clone, such as one that can use the original game files, would be nearly impossible.
> society's shifting attitude towards fantasy role playing games,

That's kind if my point though. Society has not had a shifting attitude towards "fantasy role playing games", it has had a shifting attitude towards "Dungeons and Dragons"

Society has not at all heard of any of the alternative fantasy role playing games, which may as well not exist as far as society is concerned

I love ttrpgs. I want it to be a big hobby like board games are currently. You're right I don't like WOTC as a company, but my primary motivation is to see other titles become more know and played, because there are so many great games out there

My "disagreeing strongly" part was meant tongue in cheek by the way
COW vs. BEEF: busting the biggest etymology myth in linguistic history
My "After Burner II" demo running on a real Commodore 64 with hundreds of scaled sprites, sampled audio, RGB565 colour, and higher resolution. Using my Mega Wang 2000 Turbo Edition hardware.
The SDK can be downloaded here: https://martin-piper.itch.io/bomb-jack-display-hardware/devl...

I plan to make the hardware available to purchase after one more hardware revision to optimise performance.
That’s true in theory, I’m not sure about in practice. It could also be the case that a company says “human support is too expensive, throw in a chat bot to stem the tide”, see the number of calls drop, and call it a success. Never mind how many potential customers are lost (which actually requires competence to measure.)
Turn off the animations. Everything becomes significantly faster.
I've told my personal worst here a couple of times. So this time I'm going to talk about a co-worker named Ed.

On an embedded system, we had this bug that we couldn't find. It was around for a month or two. Random crashes that we couldn't reproduce, couldn't even debug. We started calling it "the phantom".

Finally Ed said, "I think the phantom showed up after we made that change to the ethernet driver." We reverted it, and the bug disappeared.

We never found the bug in the source code. But Ed debugged it using the calendar.
It's definitely doable to make the bar disappear with a tiny bit of CSS. Did it myself in the past and the Firefox team does it partially for their vertical tabs feature
Joe Rogan's latest interview is with a hardcore anti-vax doctor, Suzanne Humphries. Through the whole pandemic I never heard this perspective. It is so taboo that it has been effectively suppressed unless you go looking for it. Her persona is seriously non grata on Youtube et al. Rogan is a crack in the dike. There are a lot of astonishing claims that she claims to backup in her book. But Joe's interview is sympathetic and credulous, and he's shown that he can move the needle on such topics. It will move a lot of vaccination needles away from arms.

If Humphries is right, medical scientists, practitioners and the rest of us have earned far more epistemic humility than we have accepted. That's a tough pill to swallow.
This reminds me of a bad vuln in Drupal years ago (2014, I think?).

Alot of people think Acquia, being started by the creator of Drupal, has special control of the open source project, but at the end of the day they really don't have that kind of control.

So when the security team found this vuln, they coordinated with as many Drupal hosting platforms as they could, and immediately Pantheon, Platform.sh, and Acquia had all blocked the exploit at the firewall level by the time the CVE was announced.
The level of what?
No, the CS map predates the novel by almost 20 years. Almost certainly they were just both inspired by the same artist.
Tell HN: OpenAI added heavy censorship on GPT4o image generation yesterday
It won't let you use famous people anymore.

It won't even let you use any real people. If you upload a picture of yourself and tell it to generate a Studio Ghibli style picture, it'll tell you it can't use real people.

This is the response I see:

"I wasn’t able to generate the image you requested because it didn’t follow our content policy. Specifically, generating images of real people—even in a stylized form like Studio Ghibli—is not allowed."
Hallucinate === Lie
It's very funny that this article that I mostly agree with has a chat bot in the bottom left corner that wants to discuss why chatbots are a bad solution

> It seems we're exploring why Jakob and I think chatbots might not always be the best solution! I see you've already been introduced, so let's dive deeper. Given our discussion on chatbots, what are your thoughts on the hybrid interfaces Jakob mentions towards the end of the article?
I love mixxx, but I bet this apple music thing will never support open source dj software. They are too afraid of folks pirating the music.
Depends on the community I believe. I can only talk about how we are experiencing things, but all our players are really just happy to share the love for the hobby.

We have several things that helps break the "core group" problem in our case:

- We have several tables playing the same part of the adventure just with different players. This helps our players try out different DMs and their specific style of DMing as well as different player groups.

Did you not like the social interaction you had with a specific group? Just ask to be seated at a different table and try out a different vibe.

- We also organize regular (special) events. But D&D related an non-D&D related. This breaks down the "we're just here to play D&D" barrier but creating an actual community. We sometimes go for drinks, bowling etc.

- We actually encourage players to form their own groups outside of our D&D organized plays. And this is actually what we see happening. Players come in and play the campaign for a year and when the campaign concludes they just start their own private group and continue to play because they really like the group they are playing with.

Everything depends on the person of course, but all we can do is facilitate a nice and welcoming community.
> In particular IT, where new project continually spring up to dethrone others

Yet, it's lasted 31 years, which is a pretty insane amount of time in tech. This on top of being kept up to date, good structure, really good contributions and advancements.

On the other hand, you look at centos, redhat, and oracle and their debacle. How much did they fragment that area.

And then we have Debian just chugging along.
Where are the goalposts then? If the answer is always "you are prompting it wrong" then there are no goalposts for agentic development.

Where is the consensus position that is demonstrably more effective than traditional development?

My observation is that it's somewhere close to "start this project and set an overall structure", after that nobody seems to agree.
> Expecting our users to write a pitch-perfect prompt is like asking the average person to control their computer via the command line.

I admit I lean more on the "command line pilled" side of things, but to me this analogy implies that the chat interface, specifically prompting, are fundamentally intractable as an interface to AI.

Every operating system is necessarily built on compiled/interpreted text, and therefore has the ability to "fall back" to a command line interface to have finer grained control over basically everything.

Even mobile devices, completely 100% GUI, where native terminal emulators are unusable (except for the truly dedicated) are wired this way as soon as you scratch the surface of app development.

I think this analogy has to hold for AI, no? The entire current ChatGPT renaissance is built on the concept of prompting. There are no examples of breaking the mold in this article that don't rely on an underlying "chat" paradigm. Voice agents? Just turning a vocal interface (something predating GPT3) into... prompts for an LLM. Gemini summarizing documents? A button that has a prompt pre-written and ready to go.

Carrying forward the analogy, there will be a "GUI" where your AI agent will provide a streamlined experience that is extremely powerful in matching your context most of the time, but then if you want to tweak anything yourself one of the most powerful ways to do this is to get down into the "command line" of what chat interfaces control what or how these underlying prompts are structured/ordered.
Well since the ones that had the job before hid all the connections this is a move in positive direction nontheless.
<a aria-hidden="true"> ... </a> will result in a link ignored by screen readers.
How and why, any idea? Do they have some kind of backend check verified with Google that might return “naah, not a Googled device”? By the way which apps?
I thought the same as the person you're replying to, once - and then I tried to go through the (original 5E) PHB's character creation rules, and realized that they are actually written very badly, and that I've come to rely heavily on DNDBeyond for character creation.

I haven't looked at the 2024 5E character creation part of PHB, but I can't imagine it's worse, lol.

> Pathfinder might not be any better as a starting game, but there are much easier beginner games out there. The only problem is no one has heard of them because D&D eats absolutely all of the oxygen in the TTRPG space

I couldn't agree more! Pathfinder is too crunchy for new players who don't already have experience playing TTRPGs, and are sure they want that level of mechanics in their game. There are so many RPGs out there, ranging from one-pagers that could probably be printed on an index card (The Witch Is Dead), to something on par with 5E's complexity that nevertheless has a lot of interesting mechanics and stories to tell (Wildsea, Spire).
TeXmacs Workshop
> People used to get dopamine hits from writing code that works, fixing cars, climbing mountains, playing music, and asking other people out on dates.

Those all sound vastly more positive both on a personal and societal level vs getting dopamine from your phone
Why Are Micro Center Flash Drives So Slow?
I have contributed to proof assistants, and while programming is part of mathematics, it is not all of it. Obviously, a proof assistant is a program, but its concepts don't need to be all about programming. If they are, that is to the detriment of the mathematics done in the proof assistant.

Another comparison you won't like: Insisting to phrase everything in terms of electrical engineering is quite useless for most applications running on a computer.
It's well written but completely unjustified in its criticism of UK universities or their role given the resources required to train SOTA models. Are any US universities training SOTA models? No. Your point about the need for private venture capital is exactly correct. I think some kind of new funding stream needs to be identified for doing this. The US is forcing China to sell TikTok's US arm for national security reasons. We could try to do something similar in return for granting US Big Tech companies access to Europe - I guess the digital tax is a step in this direction. But it seems challenging to enforce that given the current power dynamics.
>other than nationalistic ones

Welcome to Europe where every country has a different language that's not English. You call this nationalistic, but how many people in the Anglo-sphere would be comfortable working in foreign languages?

A lot of workers, especially older ones, still aren't fully comfortable in English beyond ordering a pizza on vacation abroad, and the older ones also have a longer tenure and a bigger voice in the company. And European companies are a lot older than US companies due to a lot of factors.

Plus, most often, European companies build products for local markets rather than the international markets, which means local language knowledge is mandatory besides English, so then when a lot of the product management, sales, marketing, customer support is all done in the local language, how can you expect to have the SW dev team to be the only insular one without speaking the local language?

>which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers

There's no skill shortage in IT work. Every open position gets enough applications form local candidates in this economy. The skill shortage is in poorly paid hard labor jobs that nobody likes to do like elderly care or construction or that requires doing night shifts.
> There is a heavy focus on staying in character and roleplaying over just having a good time.

For some people, that is having a good time! Most of the games I'm in, I'm significatnly more interested in the stor & characters than combat, etc. (Although, yeah, we do chat & have beers, etc.)

> The absolute worst version of this are people who seem to want to treat it like a therapy session. They genuinely seem to be trying to work through personal problems through their characters. I understand the desire to explore things in a "safe space" like an RPG but to me it's such an inappropriate venue for that sort of thing.

I think it's totally fine, as long as everyone at the table is fine with it. A session zero is definitely a requirement to play D&D, imo.
Show HN: Floating web-cam canvas sketches to image generations
Over the weekend I built an app that lets you draw through your web with hand gestures and generate images from them.
I posted a demo on Twitter here: https://x.com/johnathanchewy/status/1904576943783031206.

Happy to keep integrating additional features upon request. Probably will start with 3d asset generations first!
Your comment is a personal attack. It adds nothing else to the discussion. We don't do that sort of thing here.
There's a bit of irony in this article having a huge distracting button asking me to interact with the author's chatbot.
Microsoft did this very extensively. Many Non-English versions of Excel do save CSV-files with a semicolon as a separator and it probably was handled differently too in normal Excel files.
But it goes even further, it affected their scripting languages even to this day with newer languages like their BI script (forgot the name of the language). For example, parameters of function calls aren't separated by ',' anymore and ';' is used instead. But only in the localized versions.

That of course means that you have to translate these scripts depending on the locale set in your office suite, otherwise they are full of syntax errors...
Could that also be, because the money is fake now? It does not actually follow the value, created out of thin air (?)
This is a bad argument. Even the most authoritarian and vile government atrocities come wrapped in veils of excuses, plausible deniability, etc etc. It’s one of the more creative government exercises in everything from reeducation camps, dubious sterilization programs, false flags, anti-terrorism, settling, and even justifying your ideology with bogus science like racial biology. You sprinkle doubt and narrative for your own approval ratings, for other nations, the media, etc. Even if your goal is genocide. Not even saying that’s Netanyahus goal, just refuting this simplistic Disney villain classification of genocide.
Presumably the skater who attempts a trick a dozen times before finally nailing it is having fun.
That'll only work if somebody is willing to do the job for a lower price. The US may be in a different position the next time around.
Research outside the US = 15 years amortization?

https://www.grantthornton.com/insights/alerts/tax/2023/flash...

The TCJA amended Section 174 by removing the option to expense SRE expenditures, instead requiring taxpayers to capitalize and amortize SRE expenditures over a period of five years (attributable to domestic research) or 15 years (attributable to foreign research)
I don't want to scare you... but here's a function from a codebase at work. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron/blob/5fd1c3588a45ad...

That's ninety lines of type constraints.
> Country B realizes they can manage themselves.

That's a thing we were taught in "Civic Culture" in grade 5 -- that slaves can become masters through hard work and making the master dependent on them.

But now I see it more in a figurative way, because it rarely happens with actual slaves, but in a more metaphorical way, it certainly can happen.
If your job is to solve the situation, your best hope is to figure out what change caused it; understand that change; and then do whatever needs to be done.

In a large complicated application where a change to the environment revealed a crash, finding out what changed in the environment and thinking about how that affects the application makes a lot more sense than going back through application changes to see if you can find it that way.

Once you figure out what the problem is, sure you can probably fix it in the application or the environment, and fixing the application is often easier if the environment is Chrome. But chrome changed and my app is broken means look at the changes in Chrome and work from there.
Perhaps. But it takes a lot of story telling to be able to spend your days voting for higher taxes on law-abiding citizens, and your nights helping the worst in society evade those taxes…
Complex systems are by definition high dimensional. We often build them with fault tolerance and soft "failure modes" to prevent catastrophic events. However, the dimensionality and complexity mean that almost every sufficiently complex system is ALWAYS running in a "degraded" mode. However once this is normalized, the failure when it occurs is usually catastrophic, and determining proximate cause (often work grouped as "root cause"), much less fixing it, is made even more difficult.

The rapid exponential growth in complexity seen in semi over many decades has created guardrails (eg horrific yield/field failures) in modeling and verification that prevent a lot of problems. I do worry that as Moore slows (multi-chip modules are not Dennard scaling) we will lose some of this anti-fragility.

Of course the other side of this is Muntzing (the removal of any part that doesn't cause immediate failure):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
Your style of explaination and animation are exceptional.
Don't forget years later that they had a music video for Dr. Worm air on the Nickelodeon show, Kablam!:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkVHdUkMJdk&pp=ygUIZHIuIHdvc...
The hate against chat interfaces is missing the real opportunity here. Consider the calendar interface the article describes: that we've managed to actually make it function within chat means we've roughly automated pretty much everything except the human interaction that's left. That's pretty amazing!

The article goes on to claim that hybrid UI's are the future. I disagree, the future is figuring out how to automate prompt generation so I don't need to even interface with the UI to begin with. Hybrid UI's are a patch over something that can't be efficiently automated yet.

The opportunity is the "yet".
I think GDP is a biased indicator when states are competing with each others. Industrial output makes more sense IMHO.
> one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places like the US

I think there is a distinction between avoidance (typically considered legal) and evasion (fraud and illegal). Everyone should practice avoidance, using the system as designed. IME, evasion is much higher in countries with say a VAT than the US. Paying cash for transactions, even rather large ones, is common in order to avoid 10-20%+ VAT.
If your customers and employees are using Excel then stop going against the grain with your niche software developer focused formats that need a lot of explanations.

I need to interface with a lot of non-technical people who exclusively use Excel. I give them .xlsx files. It's just as easy to export .xlsx as it is to export .CSV and my customers are happy.