Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | CobrastanJorji's comments login

Xenogears, Spyro the Dragon, Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye, Resident Evil 2...

Could be a good idea, but I suspect asking people what they think about political candidates enjoys such core first amendment protection that banning it would require amending the Constitution. And practically, nobody in power will want to ban them because they're a tool for staying in power. Same reason that we'll probably always have a two party system.


Your link suggests: "If a mine is under the first clicked tile, it is moved to the upper-left corner, if the upper left corner is occupied, the mine moves to the right of the corner tile." If that happened here, the square would still be a mine.


What a convoluted solution.

I always assumed it did things the way I did when I wrote my minesweeper game: it only generated the mines on the first click, avoiding the clicked tile.

I wonder why they did it that way?


Probably performance. It's an old game, it seems faster if the mines can get generated before the user first clicks, and then move the mine if their first click was on a mine. If you wait for them to click to generate then the entire generation step has to run before the user notices.


I don't know for sure, but they probably didn't plant it at first and later it was simpler to move mine elsewhere than to change the way mines are generated.


What if the upper-left corner and the one to its right are mined?


"The function checks if it is the first click, and that the square being clicked is a mine. It then tries to move the mine to the upper-left corner. If unsuccessful it tries the square to the right of it. If all of the first row is occupied by mines, the function tries to put the mine in the leftmost square of the row below, and so on."

https://web.archive.org/web/20180618103640/http://www.techus...


What does the function do if the entire board is mines?


See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-REcpPz3vw It causes some strange bugs to occur!


An array out of bounds access.


Found the tester :)

Jokes aside, I love it how in a group of software engineers someone can always think of an even more unlikely, but somehow realistic edge case.

For me, one of the marks of a senior engineer would be to then either go "we'll just not allow the board to be filled with entirely mines in the builder", or "well, if that ever happens: just let it crash". A practical solution to a theoretical case. Whereas the more junior engineer would spend the next few days researching and refactoring the algorithm to address this case. Obv. "it depends", letting my insuline pump "just crash" isn't cool, but minesweeper, meh.


It BSODs!


I was going to say that $200 seemed awfully expensive for a programmable kitchen timer.

I've had a project idea for a while that would require a bit more juice. In short, I want to make a music practice timer for ADHD kids that avoid actually playing music during practice time. I want it to be beefy enough to run some simple ML for detecting instruments being played, and I only want the timer to count down while the instruments are playing. I picture it looking a lot like the clock above, but with something like a Raspberry Pi jammed inside so it's got enough power to reliably detect "violin."

Any ideas on hardware for that?


"Identifying Different Musical Instrument Sounds Using Fourier Analysis in LabVIEW" Rather than "ML" du jour, I would say that a fast Fourier transform would get you sufficient data to determine if practicing or talking or silence.


Definitely valid callout. I was also looking for an excuse to play with audio ML, but you're totally right that just examining a Fourier series could very likely do a great job of determining whether a given type of instrument is being played.


Which an FFT on an ESP32-S3 with it's Xtensa LX7 vector extensions can be quite fast

https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/16asjx9/esp32s3_do...



The adversarial child would be playing recordings into the timer within minutes no?


I'm assuming the child is question is not so much adversarial so much as ADHD. They'll be actively looking to divert their attention to more stimulating activities than playing an instrument but not attempting to cheat the system. And I'm assuming a parent is present but not necessarily in full control of the child. Or it could work equally well for an adult in a similar situation.


For the non-adversary who wants something similar in nature, that might help them practice, why not? Not everyone is trying to cheat.


i'm building a low volume product. if you add the cost unfortunately you will see it's impossible to do something of good quality and low volume with much lower price.

you don't only add the sum of the electronic parts, but materials, r&d, payment for the one who does the assembly, marketing, taxes & accounting, shipping package, refunds and defects, payment for someone to produce it or the usage of your existing equipment, etc. if you add all of these, you will see that it's not cheap.


Hate to burst your bubble, but as an amateur musician I fear this would backfire, or at least fail to result in any improvement in playing ability. Silence and time are absolutely critical to playing music. By analogy, measuring 'time spent drawing bow across strings' would be as useful to a violin student as 'time spent pressing foot on accelerator' would be to a driving student!

From my own experience learning to play the organ, I have improved least when I play relatively fluidly, practising with music well within my abilities. On the contrary, the most improvement has come when I've slowed down, allowed myself to count the timing, repeat sections, read the sheet music more carefully or even just take a break entirely. So although silence won't improve one's playing by itself, I think it's a natural by-product of an effective studying technique that, if at all possible, shouldn't be discouraged with such a timer.


It's a great point. For a contemplative learner deeply focused on what they're doing, this is definitely a bad idea. I'm aiming at sort of the opposite kind of learner.


There could be an allowance for time spent not playing music. Keep the timer going for a few minutes after the music has stopped. Require a minimum ratio of music playing time to overall time. So, after a lengthy silence, only playing music will advance the timer.

But, yeah, it may or may not be helpful.


The ESP32S(1?) that's inside is fairly powerful as embedded mcus go but that said...

If you need grunt and you don't specifically want the aesthetic of an led matrix panel you'd probably be better off with an old phone or tablet based thing.

The TC001 afaik doesn't have any mics inside anyway.


It's my (layman) understanding that it's more or less a wiring diagram. Synapse #8217492 connects neuron #27472 and neuron #27865. It's a graph with 140,000 nodes (neurons) and 54.5 million edges (synapses). And then some labels for them like neurotransmitter type, which class of brain operations they're associated with, its size and position in 3D, etc.

They have a cool website that lets you browse the data: https://codex.flywire.ai/


Is the data such that it can be modeled in software?



Depends what you mean by "modeled". You can probably create a visualization of it, but the data doesn't include any information about the dynamics of the system, how the neurons behave. So, you can't "simulate a brain" to any extent with this data, if that's what you were thinking.



The display specs are pretty impressive. Mostly superior to the Valve Index, which costs $500 without the controllers ($1000 with the controllers and trackers) versus $320 for the Question 3S (including controllers!).


The Valve Index is five year old hardware inexplicably still being sold at its original launch price to this day, it really isn't relevant anymore.

Even the Quest 2 had a higher display resolution, four years ago, for $300 at launch.


Okay, so besides other Meta Quest, which consumer VR headsets should I compare it against? The only ones I know of are the Valve Index, the Sony PlayStation VR2, and the HTC Vive Pro 2.


Pico 4 and Pico 4 Ultra would be direct competitors (similar price range, closer in specs and capacities)


Probably fair, although neither of those are sold in the US.


As is the Meta Quest 3S.


Sure, but I need an Apple account to use an iPad or an iPhone, but I don't need to log into my Apple account to browse hardware on my computer.

I hate Facebook in general, but I like that Meta is investing in a hardware platform. I can live with needing an account to use a piece of hardware, if the hardware is good. I have a quest3, I like it. But they care so much about tracking you that it undermines their hardware and the adoption of it.


They could have the best VR hardware in the industry by 100x and I would still avoid purchasing their headsets.


The closest I've seen is a single tweet from Musk that says "High time this happened." So I guess the reason is that Elon Musk wanted it to change. I kind of wonder how many accounts Musk follows that have blocked Elon Musk.


Bluesky's Twitter account is appropriately crowing about their superior blocking features: https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1838292181909672312:

> damn that's crazy. Anyway on bluesky, users have named the blocking function "the nuclear block" because it's such a powerful tool to reduce harassment and dogpiling. You should have control over your experience online.


There seems to be an extreme obsession with blocking, banning, censoring, demonetizing, deplatforming, firing, unbanking, un-personing. And this is from people whose opininions already completely dominate mainstream media and all of public life. This is not healthy.


There is no site more perfectly suited to turning people off the fundamental democratic value of free speech than Elon Musk's Twitter, circa 2024.

The front page is just brazen anti-Semitism and racism at this point. And no, I am not referring to some reasoned debate of the Gaza War or social issues, I mean literal memes with hook-nosed men, their captions explicitly referring to the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. I mean photos of black children with captions about low IQs. It's truly abhorrent. Open a no-follows, no-cookies Twitter account right now, and see how long it takes you to get something like this on the front page of Twitter. It won't be more than 30 seconds.

I have truly never seen anything like it. Perhaps it's old hat for some of you 4Chan types, but it's profoundly shocking to the average person. If Gen Z or their successors kill the First Amendment, it will be because Elon groomed them to think that this deluge of darkness is what free speech is all about. It is not.

Twitter is an echo chamber that offers direct financial incentives for being the most vociferous hater, the most demented racist, the most extremist politician. That's a thumb on the scales, which kills off any notion that what emerges out of Twitter is the product of open and free discourse.


>If Gen Z or their successors kill the First Amendment, it will be because Elon groomed them to think that this deluge of darkness is what free speech is all about. It is not.

Cut the melodrama. This isn’t the first time there has been racism on the Internet. MySpace and then Facebook were both loaded with it and 4chan has been there all along. The Internet in the late 2000s was far less filtered than X today.

You’re just dealing with coming down from a massive swing to extreme censorship in the 2010s so it seems scary.


Only Americans could see social media a decade ago and think that is extreme censorship


Bull. You can't lie to me about ordinary Internet in the 2000s, because I was there.

For context, this is a sampling of literal front page content from Twitter, on an new account with no cookies or follows, via a VPN, from a day in late August when I ran this little experiment:

- A meme of a dark-skinned man saying 'You never wuz been judged by yo skeen cola' and a white man replying 'How are you in college?'

- 'The Mirror Test: White Babies Recognize Themselves at 15 Months, Black Children Not Until 6 Years (Science Video)', with the caption: 'I'm guessing this is what a 30 point higher IQ average does'

- A still from a Hilter speech, Nazi flag visisble in the background, caption 'the world owes this man an apology'

- An image of "Fr. Leonard Feeny" with the quote 'Having a television in your home is like having a Jew in your living room'.

- A meme of Sully from Monsters Inc. smiling, with the caption 'Mfs entering heaven when they see Adolf'

Again, I want to stress this, this is the Twitter front page. To suggest that Facebook and MySpace were suggesting content anywhere near this revolting to average accounts on Facebook or MySpace is just a lie. They were not. Did racist content exist somewhere in the dark recesses of those websites? Probably. Was it being suggested to the average person within thirty seconds of opening the equivalent to the front page? Absolutely not.

Convincing the average American that ordinary moderation of content like the above is 'extreme censorship' is how you get Americans who decide they're actually OK with that.


>Bull. You can't lie to me about ordinary Internet in the 2000s, because I was there.

So was I, sites were filled with racist shit it took a lot of work to filter out. You’re just getting hung up on the idea of a Twitter front page. If Facebook had a front page of virally shared stuff, it would have been filled with racism, conspiracies, and whatnot.

Companies usually curated their front page to avoid that kind of stuff, but nobody looks at the front page so it doesn’t really matter. The content you were exposed to as a user was filled with racism.

I take it you didn’t play video games because online gaming was also absolutely packed with people yelling and typing racist and homophobic shit. It wasn’t until many years into Xbox live that they figured out to put the people with each other based on shit talking. It wasn’t until Rocket League brought in the other platforms that they enforced people personally attacking each other.

>Convincing the average American that ordinary moderation of content like the above is 'extreme censorship' is how you get Americans who decide they're actually OK with that.

You’re trying to rewrite history. What you’re calling “ordinary” is very new. Setting aside what the “right amount” is for moderation, it’s indisputable that moderation at scale is a very recent invention. The job of “internet moderator” in 2005 didn’t exist. Now Facebook employs thousands of them and uses AI and crowdsourcing to do it at immense scale.


Before Twitter the nazis would go to the town square of Jew filled towns and march. Americans have been dealing with this for ages and found it legally tolerable.


You're conflating two different things.

You have the right to say all kinds of horrible things without fear of arrest and imprisonment. This is good. The First Amendment rocks. Skokie is good precedent.

There is no logical follow-on from that that would require me to listen to, or publicise, or give equal airtime to, or care about the stupid things you say. None of that has anything to do with free speech.

Most people don't go to Twitter for racism, and yet they're getting their faces rubbed in racism every time they go, and being told that's just free speech, get used to it. The natural consequence of this is the turning of people against free speech, with deeply deleterious effects for the republic.


What am I conflating? No one is required to go to Twitter. They are occasionally required to go near the town square, and they tolerate Nazis in their face even there.

I don't see something particularly novel here.


> The front page is just brazen anti-Semitism and racism at this point

We have plenty of that here. A year ago I would have mailed dang, he used to block „Elders of Zion“ posters quickly.

Today it‘s clear that antisemitism that doesn‘t literally post Elders stuff is welcome on HN, and there‘s no reason to report it anymore.


If most people want the internet to be a network TV sitcom level of content, so be it, but it will be a loss.


> And this is from people whose opininions already completely dominate mainstream media and all of public life

Which people and which opinions? Be specific here.


Media literacy in 2024 needs to include being aware of (((dog whistles))).


> whose opininions already completely dominate mainstream media and all of public life

How do they completely dominate mainstream media? Twitter is mainstream.


Even twitter is kind of fringe. Fox News is "mainstream" in the US.


Bluesky is fortunately a honeypot where crazy people all flocked to so that they could post predictions on when Twitter would collapse (highest option: 2 weeks). I think the most effective tool on bluesky is being on bluesky so no one can read what one says because you’re constantly blocking each other even though everyone’s got the same views.


Bluesky is the weirdest echo chamber of white liberal queer Americans, it feels like entering a museum or a theme park where everyone is the same, posts the same things, and agrees with each other to demonise the same things.

With Twitter being the cesspool of humanity—but with a ton of variety and opinions—I don't know which is worse, so I use neither.


That's a little unfair of a description. It comes down to who you're following, I guess. For example, something like 70% of Bluesky's content is in Portuguese.


Last I tried it, I wasn't following anyone so was sampling the public feed, and most posts were about identity politics or how bad Twitter is compared to BlueSky. An echo chamber, certainly you wouldn't find anything about Arstotzka nor Cobrastan on there right now.


Some kind of "brilliant" billionaire had put his clown shoe down and blocked Twitter's 5th largest, and conveniently predominantly Portuguese speaking population


Elon actually did everything to keep X online in Brazil, even to the point of recommending people to use VPN's after the authoritarian-seeming regime in the country forcibly blocked it, and going as far as to bully SpaceX which is an entirely separate company from X.

But of course someone will say "he blocked it" the same way they say he's actually on the side of Russia in the Ukro-Russian war even with his massive out-of-pocket Starlink donations to Ukraine. War is peace, truth doesn't matter to these people I guess.


Hi Elon!


How you think that the whole world would be fine just lying through their teeth just because some people don't like the guy for petty reasons, makes me think you really have little respect for the whole world, or little respect for being honest and truthful.


Lying? Pot meet kettle :)


I don't care about your pots or kettles. Me and the guy are autistic enough to not really be capable of intentional lying. Which pretty much encompasses the term.

You lie all you want. It won't make you liked among good people. Like here, you just look like someone trying to win internet points from other dishonest people on the back of actual efforts toward freedom of speech. I don't even want to think how shit the world would be with the old Twitter still around, with their way of "steering" conversation (hard banning speak they don't like)


> Some kind of "brilliant" billionaire had put his clown shoe down and blocked Twitter's 5th largest, and conveniently predominantly Portuguese speaking population

Is the supreme federal court's judge of the country with said population a billionaire? I had no idea.


Did the supreme federal court judge force twitter to break that nations laws?


Parent said "block Twitter", not "break laws".

(You wouldn't argue that Zuckerberg forced Facebook or Instagram to break Russian laws, or that Sundar Pichai forced Youtube to do the same, would you?)


X actually has both. But I've seen people call places "cesspools" even if one from a thousand members is considered "undesirable".

You probably should recalibrate your senses here, or you'll never find anything "balanced".

And just stating the obvious but your feed is built by the algorithm and the defaults which it shows have little weight after you find relevant people to you to follow


I disagree. Not getting abused and drowned in hate is not the same as an echo chamber.


An echo chamber can be pleasant and welcoming.


But you use it with a negative connotation, and trying to portray it as just as bad as enduring constant abuse.

I don't want to be abused. I just want to discuss my hobbies in peace without alt-right people showing up and telling me to kill myself.


And everybody is posting screenshots of their X posts.

That they only make to „educate“ X people, but bsky followers should really see their good work.

I mean, just be on X if most of your bsky posts are really X posts.


>appropriately crowing

Well that's a subjective statement if there ever was. Steering in to polarizing and insulating people from actual honest public discourse isn't progress.


blocking makes even less sense on a decentralized app.


Are there any Mad Magazines of today? Are there some publications that we'll look back on in 20 years and say "that really shaped humor and it's crazy how many interesting people seem to have all read this when they were young?" Are they online?


Web sketches and memes will probably be looked at that way, but as far as a satirical publication that has sight gags and comics...maybe the Onion, but maybe not as contemporary as some of its pretenders, of which the Hard Drive is the only one that's remotely as funny.


There is Mad Magazine reboot from DC Comics, comes out every other month. I just ordered it yesterday (in response to this HN thread), so we'll see how it is. I figured for $20 for a year it was worth a try, see what the son thinks of it. https://www.dc.com/mad


This may interest you: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=totally+mad+magazine&ia=web

> "Totally MAD" is a collection of the issues of MAD Magazine from the start until 1998 published by Broderbund


There's also an updated set on DVD called "Absolutely MAD" which goes to 2006: https://madcoversite.com/cd.html


Magazines are basically dead. It's YouTube channels that are molding kids humor now.


The Viz Comics is similar


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: