roganartu

The most relevant example of this for the games industry is probably Steam’s refund policy. They allow you to refund a game if you bought it less than 2 weeks ago and have less than 2 hours playtime recorded.

This is their policy for all users, but was a direct result of an Australian consumer watchdog lawsuit [0].

[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...

> But why not just use the AI? Because you can still use the AI once you're seriously good.

Perhaps because the jury is still out on whether one can become “seriously good” by using AI if they weren’t before.

Another feature of this is that if your primary PC crashes, which happens sometimes especially with some games, your stream doesn’t go down too. This is more important for streams with more viewers and longer runtimes, as restarting the stream drops all the AFK viewers who may still be contributing ad revenue (or just boosting active viewer count which has other flow on benefits too).

You can see this effect in long streamathons/subathons as twitch automatically kills long streams so you’ll see multiday streams get cut up either manually by streamers or automatically by twitch every 24h or so, and the viewer count drops significantly and takes quite some time (many hours) to recover.

I haven’t watched any scenes from Bluey before (though I have a newborn now so I suspect that will soon change), but I lived in southbank for a few years during uni, basically right beside the cultural center bus stop.

I watched the clip and within a few seconds I knew exactly where in the parklands they were. Very cool, thanks for sharing. I had a similar feeling of under representation (for lack of a better term?) most of my life and while classic shows like Kath and Kim or either of the soaps show pretty quintessentially Aussie home interiors and outdoor areas, it still feels very Sydney/Melbourne.

The other show recently I’d say gave us that Brisbane feel (and a bit of homesickness, we live in NYC atm) was Love on the Spectrum: Australia. One of the guys is a bus driver in Brisbane and we’d often pause it to try and figure out if we could recognise which route.

I don’t think this really has much to do with fidelity/clarity, so much as accuracy. One could have an extremely high fidelity visual of a bike that is incorrect and you wouldn’t say they had aphantasia as a result.

I have aphantasia, I have no voluntary visual component to my mind as far as I can tell. I also have quite a good memory. If I were to draw a bike from memory I suspect I would make similar mistakes as those.

One thing I have noticed in the threads that come up about aphantasia is comments either directly or indirectly calling into question its validity. I want to share a test I got from another HN comment, so I won’t take credit, that I have found to be the easiest way to explain to people how completely absent the visual component is for me.

Close your eyes and imagine a ball bouncing across a table. Imagine the sound it makes as it goes. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. What colour is it?

Most people I ask answer this question without hesitation. It’s easy, because they were just looking at it, maybe still are. I have asked this question of various friends tens of times, and I still don’t know what colour the ball is for me because it doesn’t exist. I know what a bouncing ball looks like, I know the sound it makes. I know what colour it could be. But I’ve never seen it.

That is aphantasia. It’s not foggy, or blurry, or “low fidelity”, it’s just nothingness.

You simplify the tax code so that, like the vast majority of other developed nations, these situations do not apply.

However that requires a centralization of power that is politically unpalatable in the US currently.

In practice, I think that this issue largely persists in the US because of tipping culture though. It perpetuates an acceptance of final cost uncertainty that makes the insanity of all the examples you describe seem somehow not so weird after all.

Notoriously difficult to find one with a landing strip inside, however.

I’m Australian and have been living in the US for the last 7 years, working for the same employer the whole time. I was originally on an E3 which was renewed twice, before transferring to a H1b and finally a greencard.

The E3 is not “automated” in the sense that some interactions with CBP are. You have to attend an interview at a consulate outside the US (my first was in Sydney, renewals were all in London) and while it’s not really stressful or has a high rejection rate it’s not something I’d personally risk without a lawyer having prepared the paperwork.

As for how I communicated this when applying for jobs, I always selected that I needed sponsorship and then the first sentence in my cover letter explained that I’m eligible for an E3. I interviewed with probably 100 companies back then and only one of them that I got to a first phone screen with cared about the visa thing and it was because they wanted to fill the headcount asap. Once companies get to a certain size they are either ok with sponsorship for all roles or not ok for any, and it’s just something that gets handed off to legal after a hiring decision is made. I wouldn’t worry about the companies that automatically cull your application based on needing sponsorship.

> I wonder how that latter price compares to the price in the US

My guess is not favourably for the US. My wife was diagnosed with MS about a year before we moved to America and, since I knew we were moving and was thinking about insurance, I asked the pharmacist once what they billed the govt per dose (monthly). We paid $40 out of pocket and the govt paid $1300 AUD.

Our insurance in the US pays nearly $10k USD/m for the same drug.

Which is bad, from a consumer protection perspective.

The retailer should absolutely be on the hook. They are the ones with a working relationship with the manufacturer, and hence are best positioned to be able to hold the manufacturer accountable.

As an Australian who lives in the US atm, they are right to be grateful for the ACCC (consumer protection watchdog). I certainly am now. In the US you have to rely on retailers who treat good consumer protection as a competitive advantage like Costco, REI, Best Buy, sometimes Amazon, etc. In Australia you can easily hold any retailer accountable (and they’re all just generally better behaved with this stuff anyway, so you rarely have to force them).

Not everything is zero sum. The important element is not whether or not it is mutually beneficial to the companies, but whether it is detrimental to some other party.

Price fixing, wage suppression, monopolizing etc are all detrimental to the customer, employees, or other businesses, but it is possible to collaborate or “cease competition” in certain areas for mutual benefit in ways that are not detrimental (and in fact, are also beneficial) to others.

The first town on the list is a place famous for building houses underground due to the heat on the surface being too extreme. It’s also in the middle of nowhere.

The rest are country towns, not suburban ones. Where you need to drive hours to get to anything approaching what you might think of as “downtown”, and even then there’s not gonna be a lot there.

The reality in Australia is that the vast majority of the population lives within 100km of the east coast. It’s not like America where there are literally thousands of decent-sized small towns (tens of thousands of people), there just isn’t enough population for that. Almost half the population lives in two cities (Melbourne and Sydney) and neither of these are affordable places no matter how far out into the suburbs you go.

Unlikely. The trades that caused KCG to collapse [1] were not reversed (~$400m in losses).

Any firm worth their salt has risk systems in place to prevent runaway trading too, and those aren’t black boxes like AI/ML. They’re limits set for specific strategies or teams etc, and typically require approval from firm partners to increase past certain levels.

Collapses of firms are far more often caused by lapses in proper risk management than bugs in code. The KCG collapse looks like a bug on the surface but was ultimately a misuse of accounts that sidestepped these risk systems, so they couldn’t stop the runaway caused by the bug.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group

The beauty of open source is that the community will either figure out how to make it easier, or collectively decide it’s not worth the effort. We saw this with stable diffusion, and we are seeing it with all the existing OSS LLMs.

“It’s too hard, trust us” doesn’t really make sense in that context. If it is indeed too hard for small orgs to self host then they won’t. Hiding behind the guise of protecting these people by not open sourcing it seems a bit disingenuous.

As the post points out, Python web frameworks have historically not prioritized improving the performance of serving static files, and that seems… fine?

If we assume that all projects have a finite amount of engineering effort available, then triaging is expected. The best practice for production web applications for decades has been to serve them from behind a reverse proxy. From there, it is usually fairly trivial to use path matching to serve static files from the reverse proxy itself, a tool that is much better suited to this purpose and can easily saturate any link you throw at it without breaking a sweat.

It seems perfectly reasonable for the maintainers of these web frameworks to defer improving the performance of static file serving indefinitely given this.

“It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person” and other variations are usually used in a facetious manner. Basically, it’s sarcasm.

The people using this turn of phrase are effectively saying “good, he deserves it for being a bad person”.

> I will want to win, but you can't win, you can only dominate

It is common for EVE players to refer to quitting as "winning EVE". I won EVE around 7 years ago after falling 800-hours-in-6-months deep into the optimisation black hole you describe and realising it was immensely fun but unsustainable.

There is a lot of empty space in EVE, but there's also a lot of activity. The fact that your empty space can rapidly turn hostile forces you to take a certain approach to gameplay that I've yet to experience in any other game. I used to live in wormhole space, which feels even more empty than regular EVE space as there is no "local chat" listings of people in the same system as you. Corps that live in wormhole space generally just assume that there are cloaked spies everywhere (and they're usually right).

I also don't think permadeath is a reasonable parallel. Your pilot's skills in EVE are not lost on death, and these are required to pilot certain ships as well as gating some other things in game. XP for these skills are simply gained over time from a queue. On death, you respawn as a new clone, retaining all your skills but losing all the physical possessions you had on you at time of death. These have an in-game monetary value, which is where the desire to avoid dying comes from. There are two categories of possession you can lose this way: your ship and everything in/on it (called the fitting), and your implants. Implants augment your skills, and can be rather expensive. Once they are inserted, they cannot be removed without being destroyed, so it's quite common for people to go out and have fun in cheap ships after losing an expensive clone before later reinserting expensive implants again.

I miss EVE too, but I also simply don't have time to give my old characters the justice they deserve anymore.

Perhaps this is a byproduct of the UI (which I totally agree is bad), but this is not true.

`git reflog` contains a full history of all refs you’ve been on in chronological order. Unless you explicitly delete them, dangling refs are not cleaned up immediately. If you rewrite history and realise you made a mistake, you can likely recover by simply resetting the mutated branch to something from the reflog, even days or weeks afterwards (the default reflog retention is 30 days).

There are plenty of ways to describe the Australian federal government’s handling of Covid, but to use the term “concentration camps” is unnecessarily inflammatory and not a sentiment that is shared by Australians.

The problems were not in the overall handling in general (in fact, everyone I know is ok with the way they locked down, at least the first 12-18 months or so anyway), but in the lack of a coherent plan for how to exit that situation. The federal government abdicated it’s responsibility, relying heavily on states to handle things that require more scale and coordination than they are capable of.

These discussions would be more productive if you didn’t project your country’s desire for “freedom” at all costs onto those that make different social trade offs. We are not oppressed by a nation state and we don’t need you to liberate us, thanks.

I’m sorry but this is a dangerously inaccurate summary of Australia’s gun laws and how they are perceived socially. For starters, private gun owners are not actually allowed to use their firearms in self defence. There have been some cases previously where people have and have been acquitted on grounds of self-defence, but if you use a gun on a person you are 100% going to be arrested, jailed, and charged, at which point you better hope you have a good lawyer.

It’s also extremely uncommon for even farmers to have shotguns. They fall under a different, much much more restrictive category (similar to pistols) and are generally not used by farmers who instead opt for bolt action rifles for pest control.

Additionally, it’s worth pointing out that the idea that a country needs a “well armed militia” is very American (or at least, not at all Australian). None of my Australian friends or family want this, and everyone I know is very happy with our gun laws and the social safety they afford us. I’m sure there are some Australians that disagree, but the widespread sentiment is overwhelmingly that Howard did the right thing in rapidly enacting sweeping gun reform after the Port Arthur massacre.

Your assertion that a non-primary-producer can only own a bolt action rifle is also incorrect. Anyone with the appropriate license can own a pistol or a shotgun, the requirements around frequency of sporting event participation are just much greater for these categories of firearm as we consider them much more dangerous to society and so (reasonably, imo) dramatically limit their ownership to only those who actively and responsibly use them for sport.

Finally, the scrutiny a person comes under for owning a bolt (or lever) action rifle is fairly minor. You need a safe place to store it (the state provides requirements, and the police will inspect it before granting the license, and also perform occasional spot checks), you need to be a member of a sport shooting association, and you need to participate in one shooting competition that is certified by that association per year. This is easy to do for someone who wants to own a gun in the city, as the only legitimate reason to own a gun for a non-primary-producer is sport shooting at a shooting range anyway. The most valid complaint I can think of is regarding this is that the storage requirements make it practically impossible for a renter to own a gun, as the safe must be either really heavy (making it very expensive) or permanently affixed to the building (a modification most Australian rental agreements forbid).

> and the product looks somewhat like an off brand Nutella and doesn't smell as bad as it tastes...

As an Australian, I found this part of your statement confusing, as (unlike Marmite) Vegemite tastes great.

More seriously, even in small doses (ie: not spread on like it’s jam or peanut butter) it’s still an acquired taste. Australians just get a head start, eating it on toast for breakfast regularly from a very early age.

> there is always at least one leftover jar of Vegemite in the pantry (Aus version of this)

This is an insult to Vegemite.

When you’re an interviewer and you’ve asked the same question enough (tens of time is plenty, really) you’ve seen it all and it’s really obvious when someone has seen the question before.

People who haven’t seen the question before always stumble somewhere. There’s something they didn’t notice at first and need to account for, their solution is not structured optimally for the follow ups, they iterate over some possible solutions while thinking out loud to eliminate them etc.

It’s honestly not that hard to tell when someone is pretending they haven’t seen it before.

I have 2600 hours in Rocket League. It's a fair bit for a "casual" player, but it's got nothing on pros (who are mostly up over 15k hours these days). I have some friends I play fairly regularly with, but we don't usually play against each other we play with each other.

The main reason I still play is to continue improving, and I don't think I could ever do that effectively if I was limited to only playing against people in my local sphere. My rank typically puts me somewhere in the top 1% of players (and honestly, I'm not even that good. The skill ceiling is insanely high), online match making may be frustrating sometimes but it's the easiest way to find opponents who will push those boundaries.

Would a hosted server work well for people who are much lower ranks who are primarily playing to just mess around with friends? Probably. I would quit tomorrow if online matchmaking went away though.

> There are other viruses like this as well (ones that most people get/have but aren't dangerous). I was on one medication where I needed to be tested monthly because if I got one particular (normally harmless) virus, the suppression caused by the medication meant I would probably die.

For those curious, I’m going to guess and say this might’ve been Tysabri (natalizumab) and that the virus in question is JCV (John Cunningham virus). After approximately two years on Tysabri, people who test positive for JCV antibodies (approx half the population of the US) have an extremely high chance of developing an often-fatal brain infection called PML (Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy).

Tysabri was originally pulled by the FDA due to PML deaths back in the early 2000s, but later got reapproved after the link to JCV was discovered. Nowadays patients get tested for JCV antibodies every 6 months. The treatment is considered quite safe now, with the caveat that if you test positive you cannot get Tysabri anymore. Most people don’t switch from negative to positive, but it happens occasionally.

Source: my wife has a rare form of MS and has been on Tysabri for about 5 years now, relapse free. Modern MS drugs are a scientific marvel.

I’ve been doing this for a while, and it’s a neat trick. I noticed the same uptick in stackoverflow clones recently as some other commenters here have, and quickly blocked them too via this method.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that the blocking happens client-side, and that these spam results often end up taking up multiple results slots. This means that sometimes you will get an empty or close-to-empty Google results page.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to configure Google itself to never return me results from particular domains instead.

> Keeping the dependency information in a database, which is queried during the resolution process, allows us to choose dependencies using criteria specified by the developer instead of merely importing the latest possible versions, as pip's backtracking algorithm does. You can specify quality criteria depending on the application's traits and environment. For instance, applications deployed to production environments must be secure, so it is important that dependencies do not introduce vulnerabilities. When a data scientist trains a machine learning model in an isolated environment, however, it is acceptable to use dependency versions that are vulnerable but offer a performance gain, thus saving time and resources.

This seems like a really bad idea to me. I could understand and perhaps get behind the idea that you might use something like this to find the optimal version of a package to use in a given project, but unexpected differences between your development environment and production are a common source of outages.

It also requires using a different package manager called Thamos: https://thoth-station.ninja/docs/developers/thamos/. This tool then outputs requirements files compatible with Pipenv, pip, or pip-tools (though notably not Poetry).

That being said, all of the examples and config seems very centered around ML use cases, with the Thamos config accepting settings for OS, cpu, and cuda versions. Is variance in performance between otherwise-compatible versions of ML packages really that big a problem?

Yeah, I agree with all this. Amusingly, from your extended list I have also written a non-trivial amount of Java, JS, and Perl too which perhaps demonstrates your point further.

I hadn’t before considered the laziness part of Haskell, perhaps I simply hadn’t made it far enough to be aware of it before. Maybe that perspective will help me next time I feel the urge to try out fp again.

fwiw to your point about other languages, Rust has certainly presented a challenge due to new paradigms but it’s never felt insurmountable. The rust book is truly an incredible piece of writing that imo makes the language so much more accessible than it would otherwise be.

> If people who only know JS and won't learn anything new can't contribute then that's a cost worth bearing.

I think this is an unfair and unnecessarily-snarky take.

My list of languages is fairly long these days. I’ve written php, ruby, and go in reasonable volume for mostly personal projects. I used to teach embedded C at uni. I write python professionally every day. Recently I’ve even started playing with rust (and had some success thanks to the awesome book). The list is far longer, these are just the ones used the most. I’ve been writing code in some capacity for the last 20 or so years (first self-taught, then at university, and more recently professionally full-time).

Despite all that, and not for lack of trying, for whatever reason purely functional languages are the only ones that elude me. Every couple of years I try Haskell or erlang again and I just get nowhere fast.

Maybe it’s because I was never very good at maths, maybe it’s because I haven’t had sufficient motivation, or maybe I just haven’t found the right monad blog post to convert me. All I know is Haskell remains chronically out of reach to many experienced and inexperienced devs alike.