MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jchw | 2025-04-09 16:26:38+00:00
I absolutely do think TGM versus mode is interesting. I'm not sure how to feel about it, but the lack of random garbage is a very big plus.

> And there are powerup items to spice things up, which admittedly vary widely in power level and can be very swingy. Although that's not necessarily bad as it allows players of different skill levels to play together (although the stronger player will still win most games),

This seems to be a tricky thing to balance in competitive games. It's boring if the more skilled player wins every single match even in fairly close matchups, but it's also frustrating if any specific win/loss is dictated specifically by random chance or "unfair" game mechanics. This seems to essentially force game design to go a little off the path and overcomplicate things a little to try to make the game more interesting.

I strongly recommend taking a look at Puyo Puyo (particularly Tsu) if you are a competitive puzzle game enjoyer. It is a seriously good multiplayer puzzle game. Where Tetris is an excellent single player game and a good multiplayer game, Puyo Puyo is an excellent multi player game. You can see the game design issues play out especially over the early iterations of it; they pretty much nail the formula in Tsu, so most of the changes from thereon just kind of add additional complications that can make the game a bit more interesting and add some ways that someone can feasibly win a match against a better opponent.

Among the many puzzle games people play somewhat competitively (Tetris, Panel de Pon, Dr. Mario even,) I think Puyo Puyo is the one that deserves much more attention. Not that I think the game design behind Tetris multiplayer shouldn't be iterated on, but after seeing and studying high level Puyo Puyo play, it just makes it feel like Tetris multiplayer will never be able to have the same amount of depth. Of course, it's still plenty enjoyable, especially if you are playing Tetris multiplayer somewhat more casually. I definitely used to play a lot of online Tetris with friends. (Also, although it wasn't something I played a whole ton, I did spend a few hours on Tetris 99. I wasn't really the greatest at it because I'm just not that good at spamming setups but I was able to net a few wins.)
by Lendal | 2025-04-09 16:26:51+00:00
People are generally in agreement against lower wages and higher property prices, but when it comes time to sell the store, they're gonna sell to the highest bidder. If that bidder wants to put in something that has the effect of putting more locals out of business and lowering regional wages, it has the effect of extracting wealth from the local community. But that's the next generation's problem. I want my cheap stuff now. I want the highest price for the assets I'm turning over to the 1%, which only wants to extract wealth from the community long term.

I believe there's no way to resolve this except to use the tax system to put society back in balance. Regular workers need to be able to afford to live a normal life again. The Dollar Generals of the world have become too good at wealth extraction. They look good in the short term, but over time through extremely low wages they drain local communities dry until they become a husk of what they were. Then people can't afford to fight against Dollar General and Walmart any more. They need the lower prices to survive, but in making these bad deals they further impoverish their own communities.

The people who say they want to "keep the coffee shop character" are focusing on the wrong thing. That's a bad strategy. They need to be looking at the long-term economics of their communities and bringing that danger to the forefront. It's not about character. Character doesn't pay the bills. It's about wealth extraction. About lowering regional wages to the point your community becomes dependent on government assistance and can no longer afford to shop anywhere else but Dollar General.
by Sonnigeszeug | 2025-04-09 16:26:53+00:00
You do understand that Chinese Companies can easily just hire people from abroad?

You also do know how many companies moved their knowledge to China on purpose right?

The knowledge on how to build things, is learnable even if you don't just 'hack' everything.

And there is a lot of signaling happening, that china has surpassed American and European companies in R&D. CATL for example.

Whatever China did or still does, its a land with 1.4 Billion people vs. 340 Million.

Also we achieved, around the globe, a level of expertise around so many topics, that we do not talk about huge differences. If an engine from china is a few % less efficient than the high techv ersion from germany, but the labor cost is fundamental different, than you just loos.

And the prices are significant different. So significant, that if USA doesn't change, it will not be able to compete.

Even a 104% tarif does not change the competitivness of China in a lot of areas.

All of this is only a problem in capitalism btw. and with the upcoming robot revolution, the 'richness' of manufacturing will never again go to the workers ever. This time is over. We need to figure this out
by yobbo | 2025-04-09 16:27:09+00:00
chroot was (is?) the recommended way of installing gentoo which is pedagogical.

There are various handy (chroot) techniques that are probably considered "old school" now. For example, having a "rescue partition" which can be booted into remotely, and from there reinstall or repair the "main os". This is necessary when repartitioning remotely, for example.
by mmcromp | 2025-04-09 16:27:37+00:00
I'm glad you had a relatively good experience but for many mid "average" software engineers, this is absolutely the case.

And by "average" I mean:

- did not go to prestigious college

- do not have 8 years of specialized experience

- have not worked at faang level company

- struggle to do multiple leetcode hards in an interview

- are not cheating with ai tools and/or straight up lying about experience

i can, with full confidence, tell you that the reports of these developers sending out hundreds (if not thousands) of applications without any progress is absolutely the norm at this moment.

You don't need to believe me, just look at the data. There's been hundreds of thousands of software developers laid off in the past years and not enough job openings to make up for it.
by tpmoney | 2025-04-09 16:28:53+00:00
The “market” for almost any definition of that you can choose is demonstrably happy with “shit things made fast” provided that the “shit” thing still mostly works. Within rounding error, no one is paying for any artisan hand crafted products. Today it’s AI, last decade it was Chinese products, before that it was Japanese products. If you can get an 80% solution for 50% of the price, most people are doing that. How often do you “sort by price” when shopping? When was the last time you bought the more expensive higher quality version of something you don’t have a passion for?

Or if you want to keep it in the realm of computers, “worse is better” clearly won out. The world uses Linux, not Unix much to the chagrin of the people who wrote the Linux Haters Handbook (regardless of how tongue in cheek that might have been).

And the take away from history should be that AI might be “shit” now, but it will improve. If you don’t remember the days when “Made in Japan” was a marker of “shit”, that’s because things that are “shit” can improve faster than things that are “not shit” can maintain their lead.
by acdha | 2025-04-09 16:29:01+00:00
It’s not that simple. As Shor noted, most of the weak Democratic voters were motivated by economic concerns (Gaza was also a big factor for roughly a third, too). The fact that they stayed home in 2024 doesn’t mean that they will next time, but it absolutely means that Democrats need to give them a convincing reason to show up. His analysis of social media trends is similarly incomplete: he identifies the degree to which it’s influential but misses the billions of dollars plowed into promoting right wing content, just as the age gap analysis sees a real phenomenon (younger voters aren’t as likely to vote for Democrats) but misses whether the explanation is that they’re ideologically conservative or economically more precarious and swimming in a sea of propaganda blaming Biden for the pandemic fallout, which has affected every incumbent party around the world. Again, that doesn’t mean that the Democrats don’t need to do a lot of hard work but I think it’s a mistake to see it as “they’re all movement Republicans” rather than “we need to focus on economic inequality”.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-09 16:29:02+00:00
> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now

The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference.

The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing. Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. It's not actually where we want to be. While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored. Or bogged down in extra export red tape thanks to Brexit.

To improve reality, we have to start from reality, not whatever vision of the past propaganda "news" channels are blathering about.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-09 16:29:15+00:00
You always depend on someones good graces. What difference does it make if they are an american you are dependent on or a chinese person? Still a human at the end of the day. Its the political leaders that want you to say that an apple and an apple are different species. It doesn’t reflect the reality that we are all equivocal humans on earth. The sooner we get out of our nation state well of stability as a species, the sooner we advance technologically to the next level as a species.
by srvaroa | 2025-04-09 16:29:33+00:00
"When AI is able to deliver coding tasks based on a prompt, there won’t be enough copies of the Mythical Man Month to dissuade business folks from trying to accelerate road maps and product strategies by provisioning fleets of AI coding agents."

Submitted yesterday, but no luck :D

https://varoa.net/2025/04/07/ai-generated-code.html
by lokar | 2025-04-09 16:29:40+00:00
I think a lot of confusion and frustration about this is the assumption that all programming is the same thing.

I have seen areas with just tons of boilerplate, straight forward UI stuff, basic test skeletons, etc that I guess could work with AI.

But personally, in 30 years I’ve just never done much of that kind of work. Probably because I find it boring. I go look for hard or novel problems, or data structures and APIs that are causing problems (overgrown and hard to use, buggy, etc). A lot of the time is just figuring out what the authors expected the code to do, and anticipating what we will need for the next few years. I don’t see AI helping much with that.
by giantrobot | 2025-04-09 16:29:53+00:00
> You could argue tariffs are a little better because in theory they result in more jobs at home.

No serious person would argue this because it's ridiculous. Tariffs on components of finished items don't do anything to help manufacture those items. The only way to increase manufacturing with tariffs is to target them to very specific industries or segments of industries and use the proceeds to subsidize the industries you want to create.

Manufacturing just about anything at scale to make it affordable/desirable requires leveraging a deep efficient supply chain. Everything from raw material harvesting to manufacturing to warehousing to transport. It takes decades and a lot of investment and real estate.

Asinine tariffs won't do any of that. They're effectively just a regressive national sales tax.
by amiantos | 2025-04-09 16:29:55+00:00
Your statement appears to be composed almost entirely of vague and ambiguous statements.

"AI bubble seems close to collapsing" in response to an article about AI being used as a study aid. Does not seem relevant to the actual content of the post at all, and you do not provide any proof or explanation for this statement.

"God knows how many billions have been invested", I am pretty sure it's actually not that difficult to figure out how much investor money has been poured into AI, and this still seems totally irrelevant to a blog post about AI being used as a study aid. Humans 'pour' billions of dollars into all sorts of things, some of which don't work out. What's the suggestion here, that all the money was wasted? Do you have evidence of that?

"We still don't have an actual use case for AI which is good for humanity"... What? We have a lot of use cases for AI, some of which are good for humanity. Like, perhaps, as a study aid.

Are you just typing random sentences into the HN comment box every time you are triggered by the mention of AI? Your post is nonsense.
by westurner | 2025-04-09 16:29:55+00:00
> On September 20, 2024, Microsoft announced that Windows Server Update Service would no longer be developed starting with Windows Server 2025.[4] Microsoft encourages business to adopt cloud-based solution for client and server updates, such as Windows Autopatch, Microsoft Intune, and Azure Update Manager. [5]

WSUS Offline installer is also deprecated now.

And then to keep userspace updated too, a package manager like Chocolatey NuGet and this power shell script: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/s...
by pfannkuchen | 2025-04-09 16:29:56+00:00
That doesn’t really make sense to me.

The market cares about dollar returned vs dollar invested. If some piece in the middle of the chain goes up and end customer prices go up as well, that doesn’t directly affect investors at all.

The way it could and likely will affect investors is if people start buying fewer shoes, but that is a different process than what you are describing.

If I’m off base can you help me understand what you are saying?
Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows
by the_king | 2025-04-09 16:31:06+00:00
Hey HN - It’s Finn and Jack from Aqua Voice (https://withaqua.com). Aqua is fast AI dictation for your desktop and our attempt to make voice a first-class input method.

Video: https://withaqua.com/watch

Try it here: https://withaqua.com/sandbox

Finn is uber dyslexic and has been using dictation software since sixth grade. For over a decade, he’s been chasing a dream that never quite worked — using your voice instead of a keyboard.

Our last post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39828686) about this seemed to resonate with the community - though it turned out that version of Aqua was a better demo than product. But it gave us (and others) a lot of good ideas about what should come next.

Since then, we’ve remade Aqua from scratch for speed and usability. It now lives on your desktop, and it lets you talk into any text field -- Cursor, Gmail, Slack, even your terminal.

It starts up in under 50ms, inserts text in about a second (sometimes as fast as 450ms), and has state-of-the-art accuracy. It does a lot more, but that’s the core. We’d love your feedback — and if you’ve got ideas for what voice should do next, let’s hear them!
by yapyap | 2025-04-09 16:31:08+00:00
> I think the issue is that it's so tempting to lean on AI. I remember long nights struggling to implement complex data structures in CS classes. I'd work on something for an hour before I'd have an epiphany and figure out what was wrong. But that struggling was ultimately necessary to really learn the concepts. With AI, I can simply copy/paste my code and say "hey, what's wrong with this code?" and it'll often spot it (nevermind the fact that I can just ask ChatGPT "create a b-tree in C" and it'll do it). That's amazing in a sense, but also hurts the learning process.

In the end the willingness to struggle will set apart the truly great Software Engineer from the AI-crutched. Now of course this will most of the time not be rewarded, when a company looks at two people and sees “passable” code from both but one is way more “productive” with it (the AI-crutched engineer) they’ll inititally appreciate this one more.

But in the long run they won’t be able to explain the choices made when creating the software, we will see the retraction from this type of coding when the first few companies’ security falls apart like a house of cards due to AI reliance.

It’s basically the “instant gratification vs delayed gratification” argument but wrapped in the software dev box.
by lossolo | 2025-04-09 16:31:24+00:00
> Yeah, it's real easy when you employ an army of nation-state hackers to break into and steal R&D and tech from US Fortune 500 and aerospace companies to then use it internally and give to private industry in China.

All of this is old, tired news. They're leading in many areas now, so at least in the fields where they lead and innovate, they couldn’t have "stolen" anything.

If you would like to get more up to date:

1. "China has become a scientific superpower"

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/06/12/...

2. "China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced Industries"

https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...

3. "How Innovative Is China in Nuclear Power?"

https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...
by amiga386 | 2025-04-09 16:31:29+00:00
It's Bouncy Castle's particular situation. The Java build tools are totally fine with resolving thousands of version dependencies so everyone is happy. You can depend on A which in turn depends on B version 1.2 and also depend on C which depends on D which depends on E version 1.1 and you only end up with one version of B included, version 1.2. Java execution environments also support all kinds of classloader isolation so you have multiple versions of the same jar and classes, all in the same JVM, only visible to the components that wanted to see them, so there's no clash.

But Bouncy Castle - and almost nothing else - adds another dimension across its artifact names. This is not standard! You now have to watch your dependency trees like a hawk to see that some other artifact doesn't bring in <artifactId>bcprov-jdk14</artifactId> to fuck with your <artifactId>bcprov-jdk18on</artifactId>, and if they do, you need to slap an <exclusion> on that dependency's dependency.

The reason Bouncy Castle does this is because it chooses to support some very old versions of Java, that predate JDK 9 introducing multi-release jars (https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/specs/jar/jar...) which removed the need for different named jars for different JDKs (...but only from JDK 9 onwards)

So, in general, the Java tools have this solved, unless you're Bouncy Castle.
by jfengel | 2025-04-09 16:32:00+00:00
It's an interesting hypothesis, but it requires us to look more deeply into American antipathy for each other. We've been fighting these culture wars for as long as we've been a country. They led to a shooting war less than a century later, and after that we kept taking it out on each other in the form of Jim Crow, anti-communism, Vietnam war protests, and red-states-vs-blue-states.

The boredom may have given these things free time to sit and stew, but it has also been a deliberate political strategy. We've always exploited our ideological differences for political gain. We just finally perfected the formula, first via 24-hour TV news, then via social media.

Neither the boredom nor the antipathy seem especially tractable. The antipathy has existed forever. The boredom may be new, but it was so easy for the antipathy to rush in to fill the void. It tells people that they are fighting for virtue against the forces of evil. It pushes emotional buttons in a way that no hobby (not even sex) will ever match.

Other countries are managing it, or were. Europe has more leisure than Americans do. And while they, too, are nodding in the direction of culture wars, they're not as far along the curve as we are. I don't know if we can apply any of their lessons, but it seems like a place to start.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-09 16:32:12+00:00
Maybe there are some products that this argument works for, but certainly not footwear I'm sure.

The US exports ~1 billion worth of shoes per year, and imports ~25 billion (mainly from Vietnam and China), according to https://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts/2023...

I also think the argument is bad in general, because more/similar exports than imports would only really hold for the countries least affected by the new tariffs, anyway.
by antris | 2025-04-09 16:32:17+00:00
US has been "coming for us" for decades. What the US does does not fit neatly into its own borders.

Extraordinary rendition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

Coups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
by ck2 | 2025-04-09 16:32:42+00:00
I was going to link the excellent solereview article but it looks like that's exactly what the post is about.

I used to be able to buy good running shoes on clearance every year at $30-$50

Even through 2020-2021 or so

But not anymore, now even on "clearance" they almost never drop below $100 and never ever to $50
by teddyh | 2025-04-09 16:33:30+00:00
• Info¹

• Gnome Devhelp²

• Zeal³

• Local RFC archive⁴ dumps (by Debian⁵)

• Man pages

1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/info/

2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp

3. https://zealdocs.org/

4. https://www.rfc-editor.org/

5. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/doc-rfc
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-04-09 16:33:39+00:00
> is going to be interesting

It all depends on the security pyramid you have, and how much risk are you okay with. I store all my passwords in Dropbox .kdbx file, but I need these always in case of emergency, even from a different device. So I must not enable 2FA on Dropbox. The password to it (and the .kdbx file) lives only in my memory. I hope not to get hit in the head.
by eorthling | 2025-04-09 16:33:56+00:00
I've spent the majority of my adult life in small towns, some co-opted by chain stores and some resisting. Have to agree that the terrible space usage and car-centric design of these buildings has a huge impact. I don't totally get the "keep your money local" angle - nobody is going to locally produce toilet paper or toothpaste or affordable home goods that you need today and don't exist in thrift stores, but yes the chain stores don't source local goods even when locals are desperate enough to sell for competitive prices, and that's not good for your local economy.

But another aspect I didn't see mentioned is the disruption of skill and network development. The jobs these places bring are largely entry-level menial jobs. Anyone who takes that job is not learning business skills or apprenticing in something their town needs. Not only that, but the new chain store is not going to build relationships with small businesses in the region, leaving your town more exposed to national/global economic disruptions.

I've also heard gossip about some dollar generals in small towns being fronts for drug activity, but I don't know.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-09 16:34:00+00:00
This is exactly right. It also depends on how all the AGI promises shake out. If AGI really does emerge soon, it might not matter anymore whether students have any foundational knowledge. On the other hand, if you still need people to know stuff in the future, we might be creating a generation of citizens incapable of doing the job. That could be catastrophic in the long term.