Pikamander2

Feature suggestion: A filter to search for castles of a specific size (e.g. over 20 acres)

The average age of Congressmen has increased, but much of that can be attributed to modern medicine and gerrymandering and the incumbent effect letting existing Congressmen stay in office for longer periods of time.

As far as the presidency goes, it's hard to draw any strong conclusions due to the small sample size and flawed two-party system. Our last two presidents have been very old, but neither was particularly popular with the voter base as a whole. Plus, Bill Clinton and Obama were very young and were elected just a decade or two prior and enjoyed a higher margin of victory and approval rating.

Synonym functionality is good as long as there's an easy way to disable it, either globally or by wrapping the term in quotes.

One of HN's quirks, for better or worse, is that the lack of ability to downvote submissions encourages "controversial" content to rise to the top.

On Reddit, if 500 people like a submission and 500 people dislike it, then it'll end up with 0 points and fail to reach /r/all

But on HN, the same content will end up at 500 points since only the people who like it can affect its rank (unless it dies after getting mass flagged).

The end result is that HN's system favors "hot takes" while Reddit's system favors "preaching to the choir".

The two systems have their pros and cons, but personally I dislike being unable to downvote articles that are full of nonsense.

California has a similar issue where all beaches are legally supposed to be public, but owners of beachfront properties often have different ideas...

https://nypost.com/2024/02/29/business/california-hoa-with-f...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/02/california-w...

https://www.hcn.org/articles/public-lands-a-battle-over-beac...

In my experience, liberal use of CDATA is often the only way to get third-party data-importing software to work correctly.

Whether it's efficient is a far second to whether it successfully imports the data.

Looking at you, WP All Import...

I haven't tried using it with my phone, but this Arteck one has served me well on my desktop PC.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09WDJNBT1

Huh, the more you know. I've seen Richard Garfield's name mentioned a bunch over the years, but somehow I've never seen this fact brought up before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garfield

What is fun?

Here is a list of things that make a game of Magic The Gathering fun to us.

No Discard. It sucks to have no spells to play.

No Land destruction. It sucks to be unable to cast spells.

I've always enjoyed these kinds of house rules that let you customize TCGs to your own liking.

A while back, I bought a bulk box of common Pokemon cards and put together some decks where I limited the cards to basic or stage 1 Pokemon, no high-impact coin flips, and a single EX card per deck. I found that setup to be more enjoyable than the official format.

But ChatGPT has been popular since early 2023, and even before it there was no shortage of low-quality content on the web.

If anything, this model being trained up to 2025 is a positive sign that the "circular LLM training" problem hasn't (yet) become unmanagable.

The year-long delay is probably just due to how long it takes to test/refine a cutting-edge model. It's surely possible to train one faster, but Google wouldn't want to release a new model unless it's going to top the usual benchmarks.

While we're mildly on the topic, one of my favorite old Flash games was the Nick.com trading card game.

It wasn't really a game in the TCG sense, but more of a collecting/bartering game similar to the Grand Exchange in Runescape.

There isn't much surviving media of it since people rarely recorded game footage back then, but someone made a website of it with some screenshots:

http://www.animeexpressway.com/rugrats/ecards.htm

(Sadly, it doesn't have any screenshots of the trading screen, which was the fun part)

Can confirm. The main reason why I don't sell stuff on eBay more is because of the high shipping costs and frequent scams.

Facebook Markerplace has issues of its own, but if you agree to meet up at a safe public location to buy/sell the item in person, then it mostly alleviates those two issues aside from the small chance of receiving counterfeit bills.

If Gamestop and eBay merge, then they could (potentially) offer a better deal to buyers/sellers by either buying certain items directly, shipping them at lower costs, or having an employee "verify" the item before it ships so that the seller receives better protections.

That's assuming that this is truly an ambitious merger rather than just being some kind of exit liquidity scam that gives Ryan Cohen a golden parachute right before he peaces out.

Personally I just increase the specificity as needed.

.thing

.thing-container .thing

html body .thing-container .thing.thing.thing.thing

The best analogy that I can think of is cruise control on a car.

Do you need it? No. Is it nice to have? Yes.

The strict "no tech" premise of these tractors feels comparable to someone disabling the cruise control feature on their own car because they read an article about BMW locking heated seats behind a subscription.

I don't know much about tractors, but I would think that surely there are some modern benefits that these Ursa tractors are missing out?

However, the article claims that they're selling really well, so maybe at that price point the tradeoffs are still worth it.

The premium plugins are arguably even worse.

Unlike the free plugins, they're not reviewed by the WordPress.org team, and if you stop paying for them then you'll lose access to their future plugin updates, including critical security fixes.

I wouldn't say that their code quality is noticably higher, either; there have been countless CVEs for premium WordPress plugins over the years, and no shortage of discontinued/abandoned premium plugins that are no longer being maintained but are still installed on thousands of sites.

Gmail's spam detection has some real headscratcher moments every now and then.

Some days it'll mark legitimate transaction emails from major companies as spam even if you've been receiving emails from them for years.

And then right afterwards it'll allow an obvious scam email with a PDF attachment from some random Gmail account that you've never contacted to go straight to your inbox.

The real embarrassment is how little effort there's been to limit/reform the pardon system since then.

Pardons have valid uses, but it's wild that a single person can unilaterally pardon donators, family members, former presidents, etc, without needing so much as a simple majority confirmation vote in the House or Senate.

The questionable pardons that we've seen over the last few years (and the Nixon pardon) are just the tip of iceberg in terms of how badly they could be abused.

I'd imagine it won't be long until we see a president issue a preemptive pardon to themself at the end of their term, because there's nothing in the constitution that says they can't.

Fast Food Tycoon 2 (AKA Pizza Connection 2) was absolutely amazing. I spent so many hours customizing my pizzas and filling up the competing pizzerias with cockroaches and woodworms (and occasionally kidnapping their employees).

The English version had some bizarre translation quirks, but those just add to the retro charm.

One time I found a bug where the game would crash if you followed a courier into an enemy HQ building while they had guards inside (I guess they kill the courier, which then leads to a null reference or something?). When the game crashed I was so scared that I had broke my grandpa's computer. Good times.

The only thing it was missing was multiplayer. I hope that somebody creates a full OpenRCT2 style remake of it someday; it has so much potential for online multiplayer and wacky mods.

Oh no, here we go again

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MShv_74FNWU

If you want your brand new phone to be filled with adware apps and obnoxious default settings, sure.

1994: Where do you want to go today?

2014: Where do we want to go today?

2024: Here's where we're going today.

Selective reasoning is a hell of a drug.

40 State Attorneys General Want To Tie Online Access to ID

Here's the actual title of the article, which is much more concerning than the HN title.

4,613 points

96% upvoted

Removed by a single moderator for subjective reasons while the sub's front page is full of crap

Ah, the quintessential Reddit experience.

It seems to work fine on a scaled down desktop browser though, and the existing game UI should be suitable enough to fit on a standard phone screen, even if the text is a bit hard to read.

I think OP just made a small mistake with some of the CSS/JS that handles resizing the game window on mobile viewports. In some cases the buttons are outside of the game, and in some cases the game window isn't using up the full screen real estate.

That changelog is wild; it closes out dozens of issues that have been open on Github for 5+ years. I assume that's related to this being the first new major version in years.

Has anyone done any benchmarks yet to see how jQuery 4 compares to jQuery 3.7?

The game's container doesn't appear to scale down correctly on Chrome or Firefox for Android.

I can't see some of the UI buttons regardless of whether I toggle desktop mode or portrait/landscape.

Here's John's Reddit post about his discovery, which he deleted for some reason:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/1phvika/did_i_jus...

Nominative determinism strikes again!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

You might want to consider getting rid of the Google product logos to avoid a cease-and-desist.