MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjr00 | 2025-04-28 21:26:18+00:00
> And yet, if making your own game engine makes it intellectually stimulating enough to actually make and ship a game, usually for near free, going 10x slower is still better than going at a speed of zero.

Generally, I've seen the exact opposite. People who code their own engines tend to get sucked into the engine and forget that they're supposed to be shipping a game. (I say this as someone who has coded their own engine, multiple times, and ended up not shipping a game--though I had a lot of fun working on the engine.)

The problem is that the fun, cool parts about building your own game engine are vastly outnumbered by the boring parts: supporting level and save data loading/storage, content pipelines, supporting multiple input devices and things like someone plugging in an XBox controller while the game is running and switching all the input symbols to the new input device in real time, supporting various display resolutions and supporting people plugging in new displays while the game is running, and writing something that works on PC/mobile/Switch(2)/XBox/Playstation... all solved problems, none of which are particularly intellectually stimulating to solve correctly.

If someone's finances depend on shipping a game that makes money, there's really no question that you should use Unity or Unreal. Maybe Godot but even that's a stretch. There's a small handful of indie custom game engine success stories, including some of my favorites like The Witness and Axiom Verge, but those are exceptions rather than the rule. And Axiom Verge notably had to be deeply reworked to get a Switch release, because it's built on MonoGame.
by _mlbt | 2025-04-28 21:26:26+00:00
> The output WASM of this simple program is 5.6MB binary, which can be pruned a bit via wasm-opt tool, just make sure that it doesn't break anything for you. Luckily when compressed (gzip, brotli, etc) the binary becomes just ~2.5MB in size.

That’s much better than I expected! Very impressive work here. It actually looks viable for certain applications.
by tweetle_beetle | 2025-04-28 21:27:00+00:00
A Yoto player might work. They're designed for children. They have two knobs (with momentary switch) to control everything (and a small on/off button). They're designed to be usable by children who cannot read, primarily through Yoto cards.

These are just NFC type cards with with some kind of DRM. They allow your player to connect to an API, download the audio content (books, music) and store it locally for instant playback whenever the card is inserted.

Normally I hate vendor lock in stuff like this. But surprisingly they also sell "blank" cards. Using the app you can load any audio content "onto" them (same deal - audio is sent to cloud so it can be redownloaded if local storage runs out). These are pretty cheap and can be "wiped" and reused as many times as you want and you can write on them or mark them up. You can even design a specific image to show on screen when your custom card is inserted.

The hardware is good quality too and can survive daily life.

https://yotoplay.com/
by lproven | 2025-04-28 21:28:34+00:00
That's not the point.

The point is that it is easy to interconvert units in the metric system: they're all interrelated and all of them can be expressed in terms of other units.

A litre is the volume of a cube that is 10x10x10cm. A cubic cm of water weighs a gram. Therefore, 10 cubic cm of water weighs 1kg. In other words, a kilo is the weight of a litre of water.

It takes 1 calorie of energy to heat 1g of water by 1ºC. So to heat a litre by one degree takes 1000 calories, or 1 kilocalorie. To boil it, you need to raise its temperature to 100 degrees, because that's the boiling point of water. From room temperature of say 20º that means

100-20 = 80 80 x 1000 = 80,000 80 kcal

This is useful. You can work out how much energy you need, using a pencil and paper.

This makes it easy to convert. Units that are easier to convert are more useful.

Whereas, as Josh Bazell put it:

« Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities. »

That's stupid. They can easily be related, but the people who devised this batshit set of scaled random numbers a few centuries ago didn't think of it.

It's not "what you're used to is better".

It's "one system is easier to work with than the other, and lets you do things the other system does not permit you to do."

Metric is objectively, demonstrably better than imperial.

And the common response of "oh but my system is what people feel" is also total bullshit, because that is 100% what you're used to.

A warmish day is feels like 20º to me. A hot day feels like 30º. A burning can't think straight day is 40º. Below freezing is below zero: it's simple and intuitive.
by lelandbatey | 2025-04-28 21:28:41+00:00
One way to address it: change very slowly. You can strangle the bad incentives by reducing their perceived utility by introducing alternatives. The bad incentive exists because it's trying to do something. Ideally, you set up a companion incentive that gets the system a little more in the direction everyone wants, you systemically allow folks to effectively "choose their incentive", and eventually you phase out the old incentive. Problems with this are: it's glacial, and it doesn't solve everything instantaneously. Folks don't like either of those things, so you probably need to use other tools of political change to make those things more palatable.

In general, it's a lot of work, it's all in the details, and it takes forever. So lots of folks will fall back on the "why not just give the small dictator(s) all the power?"
by alganet | 2025-04-28 21:28:45+00:00
Everyone is a member of the secret service with different clearances. Also, everyone is an informant. Also, everyone is a mutant. Also, everyone is a member of a secret society. Being a mutant, informant, or a member of a secret society is a crime.

The computer is your friend! Everyone loves the computer. Just don't let it know that you are a mutant, an informant and a member of a secret society.

As I said before, exactly like the Paranoia GURPS plot.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-28 21:29:01+00:00
these 0.5 and 0.6B models etc. are _fantastic_ for using as a draft model in speculative decoding. lm studio makes this super easy to do - i have it on like every model i play with now

my concern on these models though unfortunately is it seems like architectures very a bit so idk how it'll work
by metalman | 2025-04-28 21:29:29+00:00
it's been a long time since I have had a windows machine, but I might need one for certain business stuff......and I am dreading it, one: I only have celular data and can not maintain a 24/7 internet connection for a wintop, and 2: I realy realy hope it can be debloated and generaly house broken, and will just do the things, and not expect daily, hourly updates. I like the idea of building a machine with the intention to sell it, but then maybe changing my mind and keeping it, sort of a reverse puppy dog sale, on myself :)
by artpani | 2025-04-28 21:29:41+00:00
Setting up new projects shouldn’t be a chore. We built DevExp (dx) to fix it. -Secrets stay local (or sync across devices). -Tunnels with unlimited subdomains + WebSocket support. -Full HTTP/WebSocket traffic inspector. -Git profiles per project — no more editing .gitconfig. -Instant deploys to lightweight Deno isolates.

Coming soon: embedded DB, password manager, dotfile manager, boilerplate generator — all inside the CLI. waitlist: https://devexp.pro
by nextn | 2025-04-28 21:29:49+00:00
Have ad publishers pay users, instead of pay ad companies.

Instead of make an ad that already consumes the visitor's attention to also consume their cpu, and this to enrich the ad-tech company, consider making a website pay the visitor for having their attention consumed by the ad instead of pay the ad-tech company.

This would be open to abuse by visitors, where visitors reload a page over and over to get paid. To prevent this type of abuse, require visitors to submit money as collateral to the website. Users pay $x per month to be part of this "ad network". If users view and get paid for more pages than their submitted collateral, they keep the money the ad paid them but they don't get their collateral back. In a way this forces users to pick which pages to visit.
by peterashford | 2025-04-28 21:30:22+00:00
I disagree. The issue, which the article mentions, is iteration time. They were having issues iterating on gameplay, not UI. My own experiences with game dev and Rust (which are separate experiences, I should add) resonate with what the article is expressing. Iterating systems is common in gamedev and Rust is slow to iterate because its precision ossifies systems. This is GREAT for safety, it's crap for momentum and fluidity
by tpxl | 2025-04-28 21:30:27+00:00
> Why would I enter into a commercial relationship with you if our first interaction is you misrepresenting yourself or worse, outright lying to me?

A 'security' consultancy posted an article on LinkedIn on 'critical security vulnerabilities' they found on the web app from a company I worked at. The company hired them to do an assessment. The most critical vulnerability was a bug on a login page preventing registration.

So not only does cold calling work, bad-mouthing on social media seems to be a viable strategy. I'd have blacklisted them.
by neilv | 2025-04-28 21:30:45+00:00
That's awful about your friends, and I agree there appears to be a huge general problem with that kind of thing. I hope the FBI are able to help, on at least a case-by case basis, if they can't solve the pipeline problem.

I still think there's a large problem with a dominant mode of interaction we're seeing by much of the left-leaning (it's pervasive online, and transparent pandering and manipulation in left-appealing news shows), and that it's hurting more than it's helping.
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-28 21:30:45+00:00
I guess we'll see how I'm doing in 20 years to compare, but as of now, my dad is a former California public employee on a pension who had to move to the middle of the desert to stay within his budget, does all domestic work himself, and regularly needs to ask me for money. "Minor nobility" is a laughable characterization of his status in life.

For what it's worth, it's also quite illuminating these days to compare injury history with him. We've had a lot of the same stuff happen, but when it happens to me, he always overestimates the effect because he's still suffering from never recovering properly thanks to a lifetime of no-premium but shitty Kaiser HMO treatment that used the lowest-cost option for literally everything, whereas I had to pay for stuff but at least got the latest available surgical procedures and proper supervised rehab, so my injuries actually healed and I'm not just suffering for the rest of my life like he does.
by harshaw | 2025-04-28 21:31:06+00:00
This isn't so much about the Author's story but the space. He is correct that marketplaces are hell, and especially auto repair market places. I was one of the several devs that went through trying to make Openbay work (a US based market place for auto repair). We actually did have service providers signed up and we did have a way to acquire customers who wanted auto repair. So you had the illusion of product market fit - but the problem is that it's really really hard to get people to actually click "buy this brake job" and then, more importantly, they have no reason to come back to your app because 1) you don't need brake jobs all that often and 2) they can just go back to the service provider. And many shops are happy to still take phone calls as their default way of booking work.

The reason the company existed is the rich founder was upset that a shop wanted to charge him a fortune to get his BMW M5 repaired. He wanted better quotes. So we built a marketplace to get better quotes. But that's not what real customers want (because most people have Toyotas not M5s). And also we didn't do the customer development / research to understand how repair shops work. You want to know how my repair shop manages their repair schedule? They have a paper calendar and write down your phone number and the job. sure there are better ways to manage the work - but this paper mechanism has worked for them for years and why change it? And you know what - I go back to the shop all the time because I trust them. Ultimately people tend to have a fairly personal relationship with their local mechanic. You can build a leadgen product but the ultimate relationship is between the customer and the repair provider.

TLDR - everyone should understand the lean startup. /working backwards model and relentlessly focus on the customer.
by jmorenoamor | 2025-04-28 21:31:10+00:00
They have data and probable causes, but nobody will tell until forensic studies take place, which seems a good decission. No need to spread speculations.

A cold start from zero generation took 6 to 10 h. No casualties, hospitals and crtitical infrastructure kept working all day.

Whatever the cause, this has been a great test of the emergency protocols.
by prennert | 2025-04-28 21:31:20+00:00
Incredible to see this play out here and good to see that this got unflagged now. I only saw this earlier (while this submission was still flagged) due to someone somewhere else mention that https://news.ycombinator.com/active exists.

Probably worth keeping an eye on it from time to time to get an idea what did not make the cut for whatever reason.

More on topic, I am wondering if this scenario shows that even wide-spread gun-ownership does not protect against state power (lawful or not). If ICE agents would kept getting shot during these type of arrests by people thinking they are about to get abducted by a gang and using their gun in self-defence, ICE would not do it this way. Therefore I am thinking that the agents are confident that just signalling that they represent a US federal (?) agency is enough to prevent bystanders and arrestees (?) from escalating.
by echelon | 2025-04-28 21:31:24+00:00
Rust is actually quite suitable for a number of domains where it was never intended to excel.

Writing web service backends is one domain where Rust absolutely kicks ass. I would choose Rust/(Actix or Axum) over Go or Flask any day. The database story is a little rough around the edges, but it's getting better and SQLx is good enough for me.

edit: The downvoters are missing out.
by r3trohack3r | 2025-04-28 21:32:06+00:00
This is one of the key insights in my early SRE career that changed how I viewed software engineering at scale.

Components aren’t reliable. The whole thing might be duct tape and popsicle sticks. But the trick for SRE work is to create stability from unreliable components by isolating and routing around failures.

It’s part of what made chaos engineering so effective. From randomly slowing down disk/network speed to unplugging server racks to making entire datacenters go dark - you intentionally introduce all sorts of crazy failure modes to intentionally break things and make sure the system remains metastable.
by quantified | 2025-04-28 21:32:10+00:00
So, what are the chances that the pendulum swings to lower-level programming via LLM-generated C/C++ if LLM-generated Rust doesn't emerge? Note that this question is a context switch from gaming to something larger. For gaming, it could easily be that the engine and culture around it (frequent regressions, etc) are the bigger problems than the language.
by nostrademons | 2025-04-28 21:32:18+00:00
Caltrain has passing tracks at Sunnyvale and Brisbane. There are joint plans with CAHSR to add 4-track segments at Millbrae, San Mateo (between Hayward Park and Hillsdale), Redwood City, and Palo Alto (California Ave).

The Millbrae tracks are part of the new station design: they are removing one of the 3 BART tracks (superfluous because BART terminates at Millbrae) and using the space to construct two dedicated HSR tracks on the inside of Caltrain, as well as a HSR platform.

The San Mateo area is relatively straightforward: Caltrain already owns the land, it is currently surface parking lots for the Hillsdale station as well as the land used for the old station (which was moved a few years ago).

Redwood City is elevating the entire Caltrain/HSR track above the city as part of their grade separation strategy. The new viaduct will be built with 4 tracks instead of 2.

The only major sticking point is Cal Ave, where there is limited space and an unfriendly city.

5-6 passing track sections should be plenty for running blended service.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-04-28 21:33:02+00:00
Rust is very easy when you want to do easy things. You can actually just completely avoid the borrow-checker altogether if you want to. Just .clone(), or Arc/Mutex. It's what all the other languages (like Go or Java) are doing anyway.

But if you want to do a difficult and complicated thing, then Rust is going to raise the guard rails. Your program won't even compile if it's unsafe. It won't let you make a buggy app. So now you need to back up and decide if you want it to be easy, or you want it to be correct.

Yes, Rust is hard. But it doesn't have to be if you don't want.
by danans | 2025-04-28 21:33:13+00:00
> It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark?

Many officials in the current administration who are wreaking havoc on the US economy went to the top universities, like Harvard, Columbia, etc. Attending those universities doesn't imply responsibility or sense of duty to public service at all.

CA does have "high caliber" public officials, but it also produces very corrupt ones. As everyone knows, CA has exported many from both categories to the national stage.

CA is not like Denmark in many ways. California has huge wealth inequality, and its economy and governance are heavily influenced by plutocrats from industries that grow via massive scaling properties, like tech, entertainment, and agriculture.

Two of those industries have a history of labor exploitation, and the other has been actively trying to snuff out the power and leverage it mistakenly gave to its workers over the past several decades.

Without a doubt, Denmark has problems also, and it has plutocrats, but its politicians hold them more accountable to the populace that CA does.
by a3w | 2025-04-28 21:33:31+00:00
AGIs probably comes from neurosymbolic AI. But LLMs could be the neuro-part of that.

On the other hand, LLM progress feels like bullshit, gaming benchmarks and other problems occured. So either in two years all hail our AGI/AMI (machine intelligence) overlords, or the bubble bursts.
by dcatx | 2025-04-28 21:33:32+00:00
I'm hacking on Trailbound, a hiking and backpacking planning tool. The goal is combining a light version of the routing capability of Caltopo or GaiaGPS with more granular "leg" mapping based on how I learned to plan off trail trips and sharing functions that make it easy for my wife to know where I'm going to be, who I'm with, and who to contact if I'm not back in touch when I said I would be.

Its been a blast to build. At one point I was hosting my own ORS server but that's extremely silly to do when Mapbox has a very generous free tier. Learning about all of the open source tooling and open data available in the mapping world has been incredible.

The cost of the Hetzner box it runs on isn't much more than a Caltopo pro subscription with the added bonus of being much easier to share with non-hikers.

A quick demo: https://www.loom.com/share/a5f7a7c23457400aa92b3f0f71a0008f

The app: https://go.trailboundapp.com

No marketing site, no onboarding, or any real UX attention paid to the app at this point, it is mostly Just For Me and will probably remain that way once I land a job again.

I'm starting to chip away at an iOS app so I can get offline access to maps and routes, but I'm not a Swift dev so the going is slow.
by kccqzy | 2025-04-28 21:33:36+00:00
I would prefer an adaptive approach where the user also enters perceived difficulty and the app learns the correlation between heart rate and perceived difficulty to figure out the zones. I consistently have high heart rate during exercise: a normal walk might get my heart rate to 130, and a moderate run (10:30/mile) might get my heart rate to 180. A very fast run gets my heart rate to 215 (this is beyond the max measurement of the Apple Watch which is 210bpm; I had to use a Garmin HRM to get this measurement). I don't really trust the zones information iOS calculates by default, and it seems like I also can't trust the zones in this app. Switching to the Karvonen method makes the numbers look believable, but I'm not sure where the intensity comes from.
by dmitrygr | 2025-04-28 21:33:41+00:00
Honey, a new incantation to summon Cthulhu just dropped.

pub fn randomize_paperdoll<C: Component>( mut commands: Commands, views: Query<(Entity, &Id<Spine>, &Id<Paperdoll>, &View<C>), Added<SkeletonController>>, models: Query<&Model<C>, Without<Paperdoll>>, attachment_assets: Res<AttachmentAssets>, spine_manifest: Res<SpineManifest>, slot_manifest: Res<SlotManifest>, ) {
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-04-28 21:34:14+00:00
Because there is absolutely no incentive for anyone involved to make them cheaper.

This also explains why the industries response to people complaining about costs is to propose a new tech that costs even more.

If you make solar panels and they don't continually get cheaper and better then someone will buy them from the factory down the road that is getting better and cheaper.

With nuclear you're basically throwing yourself on the mercy of large government contract construction corporations.

Might as well give a scorpion a lift across the river. They can't change their nature even if it kills their contracts too.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-28 21:34:56+00:00
So we are clearly having the same experiences using LLMs, I can tell based on your comment.

I was doing exactly like you. There is a budget with Cursor and I hit it one day. I was "iterating" with the LLM and getting it to make small tidy up fixes. Tiny "rename that function" or "move that logic from here to there" kind of requests after the initial PR was written (or the dreaded "fix this error", "fix this new error" dreaded loop). That adds up in the course of a day. It also tends to go sideways. Sometimes "just tweak this little thing" ends up with the LLM completely borking a working solution. So I started to get it to do the first major PR and then I would come and clean it up after.

Now I have a new strategy that seems better. If the LLM doesn't one shot my request there are two reasons: first I asked it to do too much and it got confused, second I wasn't clear. So now, instead of iterating I blow away the imperfect attempt and start again. I break the task down even smaller and/or I give much more precise description.

This is proving, for now, to lead to a better end result (for me, in my project, how I do things, YMMV, etc.) I spend more time on the initial prompt with the goal to have 0 iteration. That means giving it as much context as it needs and explaining in minute detail exactly what I want.

While this works for me, I do find I sometimes resist writing a detailed and clear description for tasks I could just do myself. That is what my comment was referencing. I have to relinquish that desire if I am to embrace this new approach fully.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-28 21:35:20+00:00
It shouldn't be that bad. A little fogging oil when put away and drain all the fuel. Then a little starting fluid on the first couple start attempts. Usually they start fairly quickly if they're in decent shape. And that's just for pull starts. My electric start mower starts right up after even 5 months of not running with stabilizer in the fuel.