skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One of the hardest things as a DM, in my experience, is creating a balanced encounter without fudging

Just fudge. I know it might seem dishonest, but I think I fudge at least a little bit in probably 80% of my encounters. The most important thing isn't accuracy from the DM's perspective, it's fun and accuracy from the players' perspective. Unless the players catch wind of the fudging, it literally only has upsides:

- You waste less prep time fine-tuning stat blocks and can spend more time on the interesting and material aspects of prep, like designing NPCs, dungeons, etc.

- It makes the combat encounters more interesting, because encounters that would be super one-sided in either direction are instead close and nail-biting

- It allows you to end a boring encounter quicker or prolong unexpectedly interesting encounters

- You can create cool moments where a monster fails an attack at a crucial moment or succeeds when the odds are stacked against them

...etc. I think well-executed fudging is a complete win-win situation, as long as your players don't find out.
No you don't. See Hebbian learning (neurons that fire together wire together). Bonus: it is one of the biologically plausible options.

Maybe you have a way of seeing it differently so that this looks like a gradient? Gradient keys my brain into a desired outcome expressed as an expectation function.
Valid, my younger kid forgets a lot of stuff without that kind of reinforcement.
Tesla's UI experience is just about as shitty as of other automakers. And you don't have the escape hatch of CarPlay/AA.
if you accept a large portion of your compensation in the form of stock, then you are pretty much a de facto believer.
Australian academics refuse to attend US conferences for fear of being detained
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677917.
Yep, San Francisco's BRT line has been a huge success (despite being typically way late and over-budget). And actually SF has had 'proto-BRT' for a long time, but IMO they still need more subways.

Bodega does have a growth boundary, per google. (IMO the lack of that is the 'root of all evil' of USA development patterns.)
I tried fennel for a game jam and honestly was pretty disappointed. The way lisp languages are pitched here, I thought I was in for a mind opening experience, but instead the end experience was pretty much identical to lua in ever meaningful way, the only differences felt surface level (I.e. using closures, and parentheses).

I'm forever indebt to lisp for giving JS it's saving graces (closures and FN as first class citizens), but I think we some honestly on what the end experience really is.
For those wondering why the number is so low: "For the purposes of this report, ‘wealth’ refers to an individual’s ‘liquid investable wealth’, which only includes their listed company holdings, cash, bonds, and crypto holdings (namely, items that can be cashed in quickly). Real estate assets are excluded."
I could see some cases were the tools are user data specific. You upload some csv and now there are some tools customized for slicing and manipulating that data.

It's totally possible to build tools in way that everything is static but might be less intuitive for some use cases.
I would say that any serious student of interface design would do well to survey many of the popular 2D and 3D CAD packages just so they can experience exactly the kind of issues you're talking about.
When Beers says:

> According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does...

The "according to the cybernetician" part makes it pretty clear that we're now entering some kind of abstract space that cares not for the stated intentions of humans. It seems that what's "very hot right now" is to ignore the first part.

I think it's an especially reasonable position to take when the system in question has no designer to disagree with anyhow.
That's interpreting a lot from just four words. Opinion probably wasn't the best word for what I was referring to, but more-so their reference point for claiming that it is arguably his best work. My comment may seem dismissive to someone who hasn't read PKD, but VALIS is generally never considered a contender for his best work. To suggest that it is seems absurd which is why I responded as I did.
Janet is very small, apparently smaller than Lua, and is also intended to be embedded into native-code programs. Hence, I suppose, the decisions that make it "too" simple: it apparently is not intended for writing large amounts of code.
...which is not Emacs based but written in Common Lisp. It is equally hackable, though.
Subs: https://download.subtitle.to/?title=%5BEnglish%20(auto-gener...
> It was amazingly satisfying to all my players, and it's also the exact sort of thing that I don't think the current batch of SOTA LLMs (even with the temperature cranked to 1) would ever think of in a MILLION years.

That actually seems like it'd be a pretty easy one for an LLM to get to. I tried

You are a highly intelligent and creative D&D campaign planner. Imagine a creature that is immortal with mechanics like The Picture of Dorian Gray - its soul is protected in a painting and that gives its body immortality. Please brainstorm some interesting ways to defeat this antagonist that might connect to other aspects of a campaign, suggesting new ideas.

and on the 2nd run on a small local LLM got "*Reflections and Mirrors*: The creature's soul is reflected in mirrors and reflective surfaces, making them vulnerable to attacks. The party must use mirrors to their advantage, luring the creature into a trap or using them to distract it while they attack." and "* *The Corruption of Beauty*: The immortal creature is a symbol of beauty and corruption. To defeat it, the party must find a way to strip it of its beauty and corruption, using it against itself. This could involve using a magical artifact that amplifies the creature's own corruption, or finding a way to expose its true nature and render it powerless.".

It seems quite reasonable that a large modern LLM could come up with exactly that idea in far less than a million years. Art, mirrors and defacing art are all pretty standard sounding themes for handling that sort of monster.
It typically takes me maybe an hour to update my dependencies? I run type checks and e2e tests as part of that to have a relatively high degree of confidence that nothing has been broken. Also splitting the change into multiple steps (i.e. do minor/patch upgrades first, check nothing's broken, run a major upgrade, check nothing's broken, etc) means it's fairly to see where something is causing problems and needs to be handled more carefully.

I do this typically every couple of weeks, and it takes up almost no time at all in comparison to time spent on other work. Someone needs to review the eventual PR created, but that's also typically fairly easy. NPM makes this all very easy to do. In Python I've used tools like PDM or uv to handle dependencies similarly.
Yes, I think Prolog had pl even before Perl came around, but Perl snatched it away,
I wonder if it related to those studies showing couples have more of a shared memory, to manage tasks better. When playing memory games they tend to do much better than two strangers placed on a team.

What if this leads to less of a cognitive workout over time vs having to manage everything yourself which increases dementia risk?
Sad, Short and Perplexing Life of Computer Whiz
I know I was a bit over-the-top, but I stand by this logic that is far more general than "CPAP-as-an-answer" (but I do personally think it applies here but that is moreso speculation):

> "...If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known."

The reasoning is that there is a large capacity and infrastructure of trained professionals and insurance expectational-warp. If the medical visits and drug prescriptions were decimated the financial side of things would collapse. The reason they turn a blind eye to what we think of as truth-oriented science is that early career professionals have mortgages and debt and so are themselves locked-in to playing their cards in favor of institutional self-preservation. When this gets out of hand they begin to habitualize a rationalization-like thinking that is purely self-serving.

I am of the opinion that we are far past the point of corruption (it is unconscious in the professionals themselves), but it is mostly a question of debt thresholds and group psychology.

My reasons for saying you should yourself as a sleep apnea patient should just figure it out is that that is how pessimistic I am about such professional blindness. To be honest I'm leaving out the main problem with CPAP because by your response you just aren't ready to engage in creative thought (no offense that is almost all of humanity). Most of the intellectual and professional world sets a bar so damn low its like they are playing limbo. Meanwhile patients are like zombified robots programmed to trust the white lab coats like lambs to the slaughter.

Just like political debate is self-perpetuating such that a negatively defined identity is preserved and valued over mediation and understanding, most professionals use their brain power to self-sabotage away from institutional-skeptical inquiry as its too uncomfortable to self-sacrifice reputation, income and eventually their careers.
Yeah, I've been burnt badly by that before.

Which is part of why my founder co-matching profiles mention that I'm looking to spread the equity wealth around among early hires, more than is usual.

If a prospective co-founder is turned off by that, without a really compelling reason, then we'd probably clash on other values as well. And I'd also think there's a good chance they'll backstab me when they think they can.
We have gradient free algorithms: Hebbian learning. Since 1949?
I used GPT 3 to help write my halloween one shot a few years ago.

The outcome was pretty good. As a language model it had quite a good understanding of tone and context. In fact it ended up adding (without my notice, I was quite tired) a whole layer of subtext, after the game my players were like "Ok now explain the goo!" and it turns out, that in 2 handouts, and 3 scene descriptions GPT had added linked, veiled descriptions of some space goop that I hadnt planned for.
One way to look at the problem is to try to determine _why_ is that you can't find the documentation. I assume you used your wiki's search function - then why couldn't you find it?

Are you not familiar with keywords, so your search results return nothing? In this case, a glossary or a list of (company-specific) synonyms might help.

A common cause of empty search results is if the pages are so short that you need exact keywords to bring them up. In this case, adding explicit "Keywords:" section, including any error messages in full and adding a paragraph of motivation can help the documents to be found.

Are there too many matches, so you get overwhelmed and miss the correct page? In this case you'd want to work on titles, or go the other way and clean up the pages. Some basic category organization will be helpful too.

Sometimes the search is just bad. No excludes, or words don't match half of the time, or random matches, or knowledge is spread across half-a-dozen websites... This is hard to fix, but bringing up a separate search system (or AI agent nowadays) might still be easier than rewriting every single page to accommodate broken search.

In the worst case, you'll may try to give up on "search" completely and try a strict hierarchical organization, like Yahoo web directories in 1995. This may work great for introductory topics, but I don't think this will work for every single doc. There is a reason no one uses web directories anymore.
Depends on the mine design but generally you need to be able to apply somewhere around 4-5PSI to the trigger to set one off. General designs are made to be buried after arming so it wouldn't do to have a very light trigger mechanism.
I quite liked this article, actually, and I'm quite an MCP stan. These all seem like legitimate problems that the burgeoning ecosystem needs to figure out. Some of them will be logically solved inside the MCP spec, but I also think some won't.
Controversial take, but... Clippy was adorable. It made office that much warmer, and totally didn't get in the way.

Unlike that AI crap in google suite, which I still have not figured out how to disable, and constantly gets in the way. Awful.
What would you posit are the median case and the best case scenarios?
Yeah. I’m finding Gemini to be very verbose. Getting better results with Claude Sonnet. But Gemini has the larger context window.
Can you explain for the uninitiated what that means? Is that like PTSD?
by that logic cookies could leak sensitive data too
Things like google are still possible. Operators would need to whitelist services.

Alternatively shared resources similar in spirit to common crawl but scaled up could be used. That would have the benefit of democratizing the ability to create and operate large scale search indexes.
I'll admit did not expect a wild Michael Phelps.
On Linux you can use:

xsel --clipboard | sed -E 's/##/#/g' | sed -E 's/^([[:space:]]*)-([[:space:]])/\1*\2/g' | xsel --clipboard --input
Our quantum assembly parser got updated to the QASM 3.0 spec
The main reason I use a phone case is to stop the phone slipping from my hand in the first place. My current and previous phones (Pixel 8 & 5) are alarmingly smooth on all sides.
Trump says he'll announce new chips tariffs over next week
Could there be a link to having children causing sleep deprivation for a few years as well as catching plenty of additional contagious diseases during infancy? (colds, flu...)
Not getting into some back-n-forth when I agree with much of this, and doing what I can locally.

> Again, literally nobody is arguing that! You have constructed a complete straw man of urbanist.

I actually made my post to head the scarecrows off at the pass. Otherwise these HN threads tend to just turn into reddit fuckcars.
It really just isn't, especially when it comes to the app. I've dealt with Ford in the past and Kia in the present, and it's like having a carrier-supplied dumb phone vs an iPhone in 2007. Completely separate experience.
Show HN: GitHub Detective – Investigate what a GitHub user has been up to
All—

Lazy Sundays are for fun vibe coding, and this particular weekend, I decided to play around with the GitHub API. Ended up building this little app: GitHub Detective.

It fetches the latest activity of a user, but in a nice way—you can filter by categories like PRs, issues, comments, etc., and easily navigate to them.

You can also generate a sarcastic analysis of the user based on their activity, then download and share it with friends. :)
> But if there was only a simple mechanism and a precomputed lookup table, it doesn't feel intelligent.

I think a flaw of the argument is that the way it is framed makes it sound like the system is simple (like a "lookup table") which tricks people's intuitions into thinking it doesn't sound "intelligent". But the actual algorithm implemented by the "Chinese room" would in fact be insanely complex. In any case, I think Searle's intuition here is simply wrong. The system is in fact intelligent, even if it's just a series of lookup tables.
In my experience, all worthy date/time libraries use time zone IDs from the "tz database". Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

Searching the list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones

I cannot find an entry for "Pacific Standard Time" nor "Vancouver/Canada", but I can see: "America/Vancouver".
JVM has no notion of a function, only of a method! You don't have something to piggy-back on. Java stdlib from 15 years ago (to say nothing of 25) is a realm of heavy OOP and mutability everywhere, something you may not want to adapt your Lisp code to.
The problem is that immigration is a temporary solution for that.

The real advantage of immigration is targeted immigration to "artificially" boost your economy like if there's an emerging new field, you can get ahead by creating a visa program to attract as many of those workers as possible.
> See Hebbian learning

The one that is not used, because it's inherently unstable?

Learning using locally accessible information is an interesting approach, but it needs to be more complex than "fire together, wire together". And then you might have propagation of information that allows to approximate gradients locally.
Yeah, some local billionaires want to build "San Francisco by the Sacramento Delta", and it's been nothing but NIMBY opposition. My guess it will be McMansions in 20 years instead. Politically, we can't even build one high-density suburb.
Provably shouldn't have included that dude's phone number in the photo of his note.
my take on this is that "2 week notice" should probably apply to businesses as well?
Ah, I wasn't aware AMD had a line of FPGAs.

Given the density of the PDF, I saw AMD and AI in the title and assumed the scientific community was trying to get AMD GPUs to work. This makes more sense.
Not to sound like a shill but Nix solves this very elegantly: tests are just a special kind of build (usually with a synthetic output like "echo ok > $out") and can therefore be "cached" like any other build. But because build recipes are deterministic, and Nix uses sandboxed, pure build environments, "caching" is just a special case of "uploading build artifacts". Meaning your cache = build artifact server ("binary store"), and it's shared between everyone (CI, build farm, dev laptops, ..), again because build recipes are deterministic. Meaning: if your laptop (or VM) is the same architecture as your CI you can just run your CI steps locally and push that to the shared store, and your CI will now automatically see the tests have already been run and not run them again. And vice-versa. Across all branches and all collaborators who share that same cache.

This is all deterministic and doesn't require any human in the loop: the test result is hashed by all of the inputs, so you never accidentally spuriously pass a test locally which shouldn't have.

It requires almost no setup at all. There are SaaS which make this basically turnkey (cachix, nixbuild.net, garnix, ..). Getting your app to build in Nix in the first place, though? Years of tears.

Nix lives in this group of tools where "easy things are hard, hard things are easy", and this is a classic example.
> One "statement" per line is bog standard

This isn't really true. Most non-Lisp languages I work in, like JS or Ruby or Python, have things like long_expression =\n long_other_expression, or long_expression\n.another_long_expression\n.another_long_expression.
Sure, but try creating a list of maps with string keys and values that can be ints, strings, lists, or maps, or protos for that matter.

I've recently been writing quite a lot of unit tests for SQL, and the biggest pain point is setting up the state of your data, because SQL is just not an ergonomic language in which to do that. Mostly I've just ended up writing YAML describing the rows I want in a database (and I use proto fields in DBs so some nesting there), and using a utility that converts that can load that YAML as a table.
Adding to this, stock prices should be plotted on a log scale since it is log returns that are roughly normal, and then 0 really makes no sense.
I don't remember the details of their arguments, but Graeber and Wengrow think this is a misleading image. IIRC one of their main thrusts was that over long periods of history, groups of humans have adopted and abandoned stationary agriculture at will, as conditions indicate.

I suppose that makes us as domesticated as e.g. lions or chimpanzees, which have been known to e.g. share food with humans ("work for them") in the wild but it's not their reason for existence.
> spaceX is the only entity on the planet with this technology.

Rocket Lab is in talks to purchase Mynaric, a German company which specializes in laser links.

https://spacenews.com/rocket-lab-to-expand-into-laser-commun...
The research seems to mainly show single people are less likly to have someone to report their cognative decline.
> Remote CI runners are fantastic for repeatable builds, comprehensive test suites, and parallelized execution. But many apps don't need all that. Maybe yours doesn't either.

My reading of that is that if you need repeatable builds, comprehensive test suites, and/or parallelised execution, then this is not the tool for you.

I think a checkbox, suggested in another comment is a worse implementation.
There's mSATA (NVMe?) adapters for the trash can Mac Pros. They used to be pretty cheap ~$20. They're just a small pin adapter for the drives.
In theory, you'd think so.

In practice, due to the phenomenon described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662738, it's less relevant than you think. Specifically at Google, there have been reports of high performers, recently promoted with excellent ratings before and after the promotion, getting the sack.

In my experience, people who do good work do so because they enjoy the work and feel motivated, not due to any kind of performance management system or threat. Destroy the joy or motivation, and you've just destroyed a large part of the performance of these self-driven people.

People often talk about "10x engineers", but not how it's possible to destroy a 10x engineer and turn them into a (let's be generous) 2x engineer, and I think capricious layoffs are a great way to do just that.
It's also important to understand how all these are achieved with so little ($683k donated in 2024) Considering how much php code is out there the budget php foundation has at its disposal is very small. I wished more companies sponsored.
Reading this post and comment section makes me shake my head. This looks like a near clone of Java JSR-310 (new date/time APIs), which was headed by the original author of Joda Time (Stephen Colebourne). Java 8 (and JSR-310) was released in 2014 -- 11 years ago(!). Amazingly, Python has suffered with their date/time libs this whole time with very little concerted effort to create new date/time APIs in the standard library. It's pathetic. I know I will be downvoted for this post, but I don't care. The Python standard library has so many of these awful weaknesses that other languages handle better. Except for machine learning R&D, I never recommend to use Python for any enterprise project except trivial ones. You are walking into a double trap of (1) weak types and (2) weak standard library.
I agree with the flagged comment that there might be other traits people that are single or choose to be have, than those that feel driven to marriage or susceptible to the pressure of doing it

It does take a level of impressionability to agree to that kind of contract with those terms, which could already be considered a cognitive decline
"I'm told this comes as a shock to my managers and other Chrome team leaders. I'm told it's not based on merit"

If your manager is shocked by one of their team being laid off, the manager is probably next.

Of course the OP was told it wasn't based on merit, or any other arguable-in-court characteristic.

But it was. Someone decided Google was better off this way, or that OP was better off working somewhere else.
I think the commenter is asking "why can't that standard protocol be http and open api?"
The Domestic Product
"You don't need to ask, they'll tell you" - a claim that the people who work there will brag about it.

And while there may be some truth to it, keep in mind that you hear about the ones that will tell you, you don't hear about most of the ones that don't.
Oh I'm not trying to make any claims about any type of energy infrastructure in particular.

I'm just saying that even if the game is merely to contribute as much as possible to this Big Bang that we're living in, we're still gonna lose if we focus on short term gains a the expense of our survival.