MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-08 18:24:14+00:00
This is a really good writeup. Something the author doesn't mention is that shrinking your data structures is also helpful for cache cohesion: if your structures are smaller, more of them can fit in smaller CPU caches (even if the game engine is striping resources of the same kind to simplify ripping across them every frame, this can matter).

The only counterweight I'd add is that if you later decide to add multiplayer, that is very, very hard if the engine wasn't set up for it from the beginning. Multiplayer adds complexity that exceeds simple things like getting on the network and sending messages; synchronization and prediction are meaningful for a realtime experience and are much easier to get to if you've started from "It's multiplayer under the hood but the server is local" than "We have a single-player realtime game and we're making it multiplayer." But that's not a reason never to do this; not all games need to be multiplayer!
by TrueGeek | 2025-04-08 18:24:19+00:00
I sold an app once to a company in the same situation. Neither one of us had sold / bought an app before so they asked me how many hours it took to write and what my hourly rate was. Then they offered half the number I quoted, which I thought was fair.

They paid a lot less than it would have cost to rewrite and I made a lot more than if I had just kept it as a free hobby app.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-08 18:24:20+00:00
The key word that I am objecting to is always. Trade-offs aren't some law of physics, and when they do it isn't in some cartoon way that always balances out.

Having trisomy 21 or exons in your myosin genes don't give you superpowers in another part of your life. There are people with excellent memory and social skills, and people that lack both.

By way of analogy, nobody would say that all possible airplane designs are equal and there are only trade-offs. Some are superior in every possible respect to others.
by anfal | 2025-04-08 18:24:33+00:00
Just to clarify — I'm not trying to promote a product here. I'm genuinely trying to understand if others are running into this problem too.

I’ve talked to a few devs who said their AI tools confidently suggest incorrect SDK usage, especially when docs change frequently.

They also mentioned that they either manually copy and paste the relevant doc page (highly unoptimized) or keep the docs opened in parallel in a browser tab.

Would love to hear if that's happening to others, and if so, how you're working around it. Manual doc digging? Custom tools?

Also happy to go into how I’m approaching the solution if anyone’s interested.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-08 18:24:34+00:00
Language changes, sure, but only because people change language. The changes, and lack of them, are always the result of an ongoing negotiation and evolving consensus as to what words should mean and how they should be used.

Sometimes prescriptivism is pretentious nonsense (like hypercorrection), status-seeking bullshit, or bullying masquerading as erudition, but sometimes it's just an explicit contribution to that ongoing negotiation and consensus.

When one of my students submits an essay containing the word 'over-exaggerate,' I correct it, striking out 'over-.' The word appears in dictionaries, so in that sense it's standard, and my correction is wrong, but it is an ugly, stupid word and should never appear in academic writing (and literate college students should know that). In my students' writing, it has increasingly replaced the simpler, better "exaggerate."

It's my responsibility as a teacher to encourage my students to think about the choices they make and the language they use, especially in an academic context, but I'm also hoping to cultivate the habit more broadly of just thinking about their choices, understanding that there are choices, and recognizing that the alternative is to be at the mercy of whatever consensus they're receiving from pop culture.

In most contexts, outside of a classroom, I won't bother with the correction, because it would be obviously unwelcome and inappropriate, but it has its place.

The line between descriptivism and prescriptivism is also very porous. Usage largely determines correctness, so unless you want to throw correctness completely out the window, there are going to be gray areas where either usage isn't widely agreed or where it really is necessary to correct language that falls afoul of standard usage regardless of whether the incorrect use will eventually be deemed correct.

Anyhow, 'disinterest''s disputed sense fills a hole in the language: 'uninterested' is a word; 'uninterest' isn't. People have solved the problem by collapsing the two words into one -- so that 'disinterest' and 'uninterest' are synonyms -- and throwing away the meaning of disinterest they use less often.

If I accept this, English loses some of its complexity and color. I don't want that.

Moreover, key texts and concepts become harder to appreciate if its sense corrupts this way. What do people think "disinterested justice" is if they don't know the meaning of the word? This kind of literacy is, I think, a basic building block of critical thinking. One can't think effectively, particularly in a social (political) setting, if one can't use words effectively.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-08 18:25:27+00:00
The median age of the House is 57.5 years old and the Senate is 64.7[0]

Its really not great. There's very few representatives that have any life experiences of someone in the 30s or 40s. I'd argue that makes them out of touch on a host of very real, very pressing issues.

The other thing to think about is the age of those with the levers of power. Its one thing to be elected as a House member or to the Senate, its a whole other thing to sit on key powerful committees, be the leader of the party in the respective chamber etc. and the most powerful folks in congress trend into the 60s+

[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/16/age-and-g...
by mndgs | 2025-04-08 18:25:28+00:00
SEPA also works for SEK now, other EU currencies are in pipeline.

Swift is just a messaging standard and a message exchange network (distributed). SEPA is that, plus a settlement system (in a nutshell). That allows for speed and much more (instant payments, request to pay, pay by phone number, credit/debit transfers, etc).

You're bound to deal with currencies once you make any kind of transaction that originates in one currency and settles (finishes) in another.
by devmor | 2025-04-08 18:25:30+00:00
I was actually thinking of that paper when I wrote that comment, hence the frustration that we don't actually know the intermediates.

Still, perhaps the stepped output we get may hint at that kind of "cheating" and can be used in reinforcement... or perhaps that kind of reinforcement will just make the LLMs better at cheating. The problem is definitely a lot more complex than the trivial way I referenced it, at least.
by kkukshtel | 2025-04-08 18:25:45+00:00
The article itself is just some Forbes slop, but:

I know this sounds like some bullshit futurist thing some overpaid consultant like Shingy would say, but: the seeming coming convergence of advanced AI ("thinking machines"), quantum computing ("very fast data transfer machines"), and cold fusion ("efficient cheap energy") see to be a real paradigm shifting flywheel we will be staring down in a few years.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-08 18:26:17+00:00
> what about if the government simply puts you in a cell and beats you until you give them your crypto keys?

The thought does occur to me. Quite frequently in fact.

My parents lived through the military dictatorship. They once asked me to stop posting online because they were afraid I'd become some kind of target. I'm not kidding.

> The only hope for any system is if the people fight to not live within these kinds of fascist systems.

Brazilians in general tend to agree with you. That's the end game of quite a lot of brazilians. "The only solution for this place is the airport", they say.
by jjani | 2025-04-08 18:26:20+00:00
The "everything is securities fraud" meme is really unfortunate, not quite as bad as the "fiduciary duty means execs have to chase short-term profit" myth, but still harmful.

It's only because lying ("puffery") about everything has become the norm in corporate America that indeed, almost all listed companies commit securities fraud. If they'd go back to being honest businessmen, no more securities fraud. Just stop claiming things that aren't true. This is a very real option they could take. If they don't, then they're willingly and knowingly commiting securities fraud. But the meme makes it sound to people as if it's unavoidable, when it's anything but.
by labrador | 2025-04-08 18:26:26+00:00
Here's my entire instructions to ChatGPT in "Customize ChatGPT/What traits should ChatGPT have?" It's only partially working

I'd like the default tone and voice so I can track how OpenAI may be changing it as they develop

update: adjust your personality so you don't praise me at the beginning of your response. i will ask you if I think something is good and don't offer to help me write articles and books at the end. I will also ask you when the time is right.
by miki123211 | 2025-04-08 18:26:54+00:00
Also true about IBM I (AKA AS400), which is also still in somewhat wide use.

Most People seem to at least know that mainframes and Cobol exist, even if they've never seen them. IBM I (and its primary language, RPG) are similar in importance to the global economy and just as different from Nix and Windows systems, but they seem to be far less known.

They're also far easier to get access to, there's a free modern system that you can get an account on at pub400.com. With Z/OS, you're stuck with Hercules emulating some ancient version from the 80's which there's barely any documentation for.
by jandrese | 2025-04-08 18:26:55+00:00
You still get guide data if you hook up an Ethernet jack and let it download data online. You need a USB Ethernet adapter, but even a cheap one is fine.

I remember there was even a slot (I think it was PCI electrically?) on the gen 1 TiVos you could buy a real ethernet card for and then cut a slot in the case to run the cable out.

That was a long time ago. I can't imagine there are that many Gen 1 TiVos still in use. I think they were SD only. Certainly don't support ATSC, so you would have to have a compatible converter box if you have it hooked up to an antenna.
by chubot | 2025-04-08 18:26:55+00:00
Hm OK well thinking out loud, $100M / 3 is $33M / year?

I don't know much about Tailscale, nor about how much it costs to run a company, but I thought it was mostly a software company?

I would imagine that salaries are the main cost, and revenue could cover salaries? (seems like they have a solid model - https://tailscale.com/pricing)

I'm sure they have some cloud fees, but I thought it was mostly "control plane" and not data plane, so it should be cheap?

I could be massively misunderstanding what Tailscale is ...

Did the product change a lot in the last 3 years?
by johnea | 2025-04-08 18:27:02+00:00
I like running, and I don't even wear shoes, from nike or any other maker.

The wet sand on the beach at low tide is the ultimate running surface.

And getting away from streets and cars and noise and barking dogs and most of the rest of our idiot primate species is a major mental refreshment, as well as a physical improvment.

I highly recommend it...

p.s. I enjoy sitting too, but like most engineers my work already has me sitting WAY too much. And the authors complaint about corporate "big run" is then followed up with how they start each weekend at a corporate coffee corps. Sad lack of awareness, really.
by xracy | 2025-04-08 18:27:06+00:00
At the top you're saying that no one has seriously committed to it, and at the bottom you're saying there's not an easy/quick/cheap solution.

But I think the thing you have to consider, and the thing US companies should fear, is if the Tariffs make this a case for a serious commitment. If I'm in the EU right now, I'm looking at all of my dependencies on US, and I'm wondering how many jobs I can create by investing in separating myself from these services ASAP. And given that the US is about to be crippled in their buying power of any silicon I would fully expect to be able to build out Data Centers in the very near future on the relatively cheap because the competition just got hamstrung in the market.

Additionally, you can turn up software pretty quickly and just iterate on it with a small number of developers. The problem they have to solve isn't "how do I write software?" The problem they have to solve is "how do I deploy that software." And the US just gift-wrapped them cheap DataCenters by starting a trade war with the major chip manufacturers.
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-08 18:27:21+00:00
> It will be automated with a fifth or less required to setup and maintain.

It is genuinely a hard problem. Even 50 years ago or so, simply having two hands and reasonable health was a gateway to a decent-paying job. These jobs have kind of evaporated, and aren't going back. That's a bit part of the nostalgia for manufacturing, I would imagine.

In an ideal world, you would ramp up free education, churn out more skilled labour. But for many reasons, this isn't happening and isn't likely to happen soon. So what should societies do with all this "unskilled surplus labour"?

UK has sort of given up, and since 1970s whole regions of England rely heavily on continued social transfers. I.e. the bankers and the oil rigs pay for the budget, the budget pays for former miners. But that's increasingly unsustainable, not to mention massively unattractive to everyone involved.

US seems to (maybe?) follow a note darwinian approach. But this is, it seems, also not working. Bringing back manufacturing, as you say, won't fix it either. It feels like there is a whole class of people without access to good jobs or education to reskill.

Other than spending a lot of money on this, like Switzerland, I don't really know how to fix it, it is genuinely a hard problem in a liberal country. Would be keen to hear suggestions.
by jajko | 2025-04-08 18:27:31+00:00
Thats a bit naive take to respond politely, I presume you don't have kids. You can't guard them till 18 100% of the time. Parenting adds value when parent is around and that time you can safeguard, which in school they're not.

Ever tried to discuss not having a phone with 16 year old teenager? That's a sure way to to make him/her a target for school bullies. They are still extremely vulnerable to addictive things I've mentioned.

Companies are amoral and are driven by profits and nothing else, some long term considerations are up to society to enforce via regulations down companies' throats. Also seemingly foreign concept to you.
by MaxfordAndSons | 2025-04-08 18:27:48+00:00
Sweet! I love erasure (aka blackout) poetry.

If anyone want to see some high quality examples of the form, check out:

- O Mission Repo, by Travis McDonald, an erasure of the 9/11 Comission Report

- A Humument, by Tom Phillips, an erasure of A Human Document, a victorian novel of manners; A Humument is unusual in that each page is beautifully and thematically hand painted over by Philips, not just blacked out or erased as is more typical of the form.

- Radi Os, by Ronald Johnson, an erasure of Paradise Lost
by Nezteb | 2025-04-08 18:28:14+00:00
Another good name would have been "Barify".

I use a combo of xbar [1] and Menubarx [2]. I used to have several widgets just for system stats but eventually moved to mac-stats [3] for that.

[1] https://github.com/matryer/xbar

[2] https://menubarx.app/

[3] https://github.com/exelban/stats
by asaddhamani | 2025-04-08 18:28:26+00:00
Yes, but increasingly rarely.

I mostly use Perplexity for search, sometimes ChatGPT. Only when I am looking for something _very_ specific do I use a traditional search engine.

Dropping usage of search engines compounded by lack of support led to me cancelling my Kagi subscription and now I just stick with Google in the very rare occasions that I use a search engine at all. For a dozen searches or so a month, it wasn't worth it to keep paying for Kagi.
by aequitas | 2025-04-08 18:28:33+00:00
Congrats. I missed the HN post, but I found your game through https://lemmy.zip/c/dailygames.

Glad to hear you will still be making the puzzles yourselves.

There is one point of feedback and it's that I would like to have a native keyboard on iOS instead of a virtual one. For the rest this game is great.
by wavemode | 2025-04-08 18:28:42+00:00
Search is primarily a portal - you know a particular resource exists, you just don't know its exact URL.

You hear about this new programming language called "Frob", and you assume it must have a website. So you google "Frob language". You hear that there was a plane crash in DC, and assume (CNN/AP/your_favorite_news_site) has almost certainly written an article about it. You google "DC plane crash."

LLMs aren't ever going to replace search for that use case, simply because they're never going to be as convenient.

Where LLMs will take over from search is when it comes to open-ended research - where you don't know in advance where you're going or what you're going to find. I don't really have frequent use cases of this sort, but depending on your occupation it might revolutionize your daily work.
by perrygeo | 2025-04-08 18:28:51+00:00
Thank you. At this point the renewable energy cheerleaders have resorted to greenwashing; we need voices of reason to hold us accountable.

The headline was clearly written to tell a story - that renewables are winning. According to what metric? If the goal is to reduce dependence of fossil-fueled carbon emissions (remember that pesky detail?) then renewables are evidently failing at their core objective. It's observable truth but a very uncomfortable one, as shown by the number of people downvoting - most would rather shift the goalpost than admit failure.
Show HN: I built an iOS app to practice Trancendental Meditation
by Ic3creaM | 2025-04-08 18:29:24+00:00
I recently got into Transcendental Meditation and wanted a dedicated app to track my meditation progress and streaks. After searching, I couldn't find anything that specifically met my needs for TM practice tracking. There is an official app from the Maharishi Foundation, but after trying to register, I was placed on a waitlist with no clear timeline for access. Rather than wait indefinitely, I decided to build the app I needed myself.

This is a simple personal project born out of necessity - I built it for myself first, but thought other TM practitioners might find it useful too
by specialist | 2025-04-08 18:29:51+00:00
This is probably just me projecting...

u/justonceokay's wrote:

> The solution to bad code is more code.

This has always been true, in all domains.

Gen-AI's contribution is further automating the production of "slop". Bots arguing with other bots, perpetuating the vicious cycle of bullshit jobs (David Graeber) and enshitification (Cory Docotrow).

u/justonceokay's wrote:

> AI will never produce a deletion.

I acknowledge your example of tidying up some code. What Bill Joy may have characterized as "working in the small".

But what of novelty, craft, innovation? Can Gen-AI, moot the need for code? Like the oft-cited example of -2,000 LOC? https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

Can Gen-AI do the (traditional, pre 2000s) role of quality assurance? Identify unnecessary or unneeded work? Tie functionality back to requirements? Verify the goal has been satisfied?

Not yet, for sure. But I guess it's conceivable, provided sufficient training data. Is there sufficient training data?

You wrote:

> only focus on adding new features

Yup.

Further, somewhere in the transition from shipping CDs to publishing services, I went from developing products to just doing IT & data processing.

The code I write today (in anger) has a shorter shelf-life, creates much less value, is barely even worth the bother of creation much less validation.

Gen-AI can absolutely do all this @!#!$hit IT and data processing monkey motion.
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-04-08 18:30:47+00:00
Oh please don't misunderstand me: We will end up using solar (or wind, which is really just solar with an extra detour), mostly because we have about 4 orders of magnitude more energy available there than we need. I just wanted to put the (admittedly impressive sounding) number of 3,100 GWh annual battery production capacity in perspective.

And to further qualify that: The capacity is increasing rapidly (but we will need it)
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-08 18:30:50+00:00
There are tons of dog breeding programs that have no downside, it's just the ones that do have a downside that are notable.

With respect to wild parrots, it's not obvious that improvement is possible, let alone has disadvantage. Assuming it is possible, there are numerous reasons why it might not already exist. No advantage, low negative advantage, negative incremental advantage, and low probability are all possible reasons. Not every viable state has a viable incremental path to it.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-08 18:31:16+00:00
> Germany and Japan haven't focused super heavily on achieving a trade deficit

They have. For Germany maximizing their trade surplus was one of their primary goals for many decades. Amongst other things that’s why they accepted the Euro (easier than devaluing DM).

> As you said, Germany has huge problems with her welfare state

I never said that.

And Germany specifically has quite low government debt and a very high trade surplus. Yet.. it’s not doing better economically than the US. Welfare hardly has much to do with that.. e.g. US government excluding all private spending spends about the same as Germany as % of GDP on healthcare. Total social spending is not that massively higher either (~23% vs ~28%).

> ordering packages of chinesium temu crap

Sure, but that’s by and large insignificant. If we look up US imports by category consumer goods don’t really make up that much.

Also, I don’t really see how can tariffs do much besides lowering productivity and increasing prices.

Like that complete nutjob Lutnick said they want “millions and millions of people in America screwing in little screws to make iPhones”. That just makes no sense, you want to minimize the amount of easily outsourcable low productivity jobs in your country.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-08 18:31:24+00:00
That is the definition of capitalism people use when they want to apply the term capitalism to something that sucks.

Allowing people to own physical items as business inventory or production equipment and compete with each other for the customer's dollar is entirely possible without the existence of copyright or patents. You would then be relying on some combination of open source, charitable contributions and patronage, industry joint ventures, personal itch scratching, etc. to create writings and inventions, but books and the wheel were created before patents and copyrights were.
by laidoffamazon | 2025-04-08 18:31:39+00:00
It’s not just TC though. TC is an imperfect proxy for ability and class. If I’m just permanently in the underclass - unable to be compared to you people - it’s obvious that y’all wouldn’t even see me as human.

I have no accomplishments, nothing to be proud of. Freshmen at MIT have more potential and prior accomplishments than I do.