MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by astrobe_ | 2025-04-04 12:27:15+00:00
Yes, and it isn't for every player. Funny story time: I bring online sometime a Luanti [1] server to playtest the game I made in a multiplayer context. One time someone joined and after a few minutes visiting, they asked "So, what is the goal?". I wasn't expecting that. MC may be popular, but one doesn't join a Luanti game server by accident, and most of them are MC- or at least MMORPG-like.

Still, although there's no set goals like in other games, this style of game has to have "affordances" for goals. Even the building activity in MC is not "free", as monsters are there to get in the way of the players' projects.

I also think that the social aspect is crucial, in the sense that having fun building things doesn't last, because one eventually runs out of ideas. Showing to others what you have achieved is an important part of it. Does art exist without an audience ? [2]

I think it is interesting to note that the fact that MC's world is fully editable by players is what drove the choice for the voxel technology, which was the only one allowing it with a normal PC at the time.

[1] https://www.luanti.org/ [2] https://thehoya.com/opinion/eye-of-the-beholder/
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-04-04 12:27:25+00:00
> and didn't do anything anywhere near as shitty when I was that age.

Being honest could you even have done it at 15, hard to be virtuous about not doing something you're not capable of.

I used to boast about hacking stuff to my friends at that age, couldn't actually do it though, wasn't smart enough was just teenage bravado.
by tananan | 2025-04-04 12:27:29+00:00
You are reading into something that isn't there. The study doesn't have to do with music making you more capable of socializing.

The hypothesis being tested is that in the absence of social interaction, people will turn to surrogates in order to make up for the perceived lack. Specifically, they test if music can be such a surrogate. They do some surveys and a kind of silly experiment to provide evidence that yes- it can.

The reason it is rightly called pointless is that it brings nothing actionable to the table.

You cannot extract advice from showing evidence for a common-sense observation: If you feel a certain lack, activities you find pleasurable can diminish that lack.

And look at the experimental setup: They make people play an online game with others where certain people are excluded from playing. It turns out that people who are hyped from listening to their favorite song found this less jarring, hence showing that music can be a "social buffer", i.e. make up for a perceived social exclusion.

Let everyone individually conclude how insightful this experiment is.

EDIT: Misunderstood the nature of the "Cyberball" experiment, fixed
by kalenx | 2025-04-04 12:27:41+00:00
By this logic, having a car in 2025 is "just completely unreasonable". Taking plane in 2025 is "just completely unreasonable". Use of AC unless life threatening circumstances is "just completely unreasonable". Wasting rainwater and use drinkable water to wash your car (or yourself, actually) is "just completely unreasonable". Eating cashew/almond or other highly water intensive crops grown in a dried out area (California...) is "just completely unreasonable".

Note that apart from the rainwater one, I do none of the above, so I'm not even pleading for myself and my "way of life". I'm just showing how easy it is to boldly state that "it is obvious, we just all have to be reasonable" while, in fact, _not_ being "reasonable" yourself.
by vitus | 2025-04-04 12:27:49+00:00
Eh, it has, though.

Half of it is about setting up a bigtable for hosting the data. I don't know of any team that's set up a new bigtable in the past 5 years; if you're really going all-in on the cloud ecosystem (per AppEngine) you'll stick it in Google Cloud Storage (where you'll note the file size limit is... 5 TiB) and call it a day. (Also: PCR zones are basically dead.)

The other half is about setting up monitoring, where the mentioned choices are Diplomat (which I don't think anyone's used in about a decade) and Borgmon (which is barely staffed and strongly, strongly discouraged for any new use cases). Borgmon readability hasn't been enforced in years. And again, if you're spinning this up in GCP, just set up some cloud monitoring.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-04 12:28:01+00:00
So if I am a plumber what could I do, then? Stay home and wait for chance wrong number calls? Would going door to door to adverti... hmm to have a chat still be allowed?

I know people at a nearby Church also work hard to organise classical music concerts. They'll be disappointed when no-one show up because no-one knew about them.

Advertising is extremely important to a healthy, open society.
by terminaloutpost | 2025-04-04 12:28:03+00:00
I have used the Windows Store version of Remote Desktop since it landed. I really liked it. When the news broke a few weeks ago they were going to deprecate it in favor of Windows App (tried, didn't like), I decided I would create my own launcher since a large part of my job is automation with PowerShell. This won't be for everyone, but if you live in Windows and need to connect to remote servers and you like Windows Terminal and PowerShell, you may find this to your liking.

Code free to use. Pasted here: https://pastebin.com/EGArXbFi
by brookst | 2025-04-04 12:29:06+00:00
At the risk of pedantry, is that true? Something that doubles annually sure seems like exponential growth to me, but the orders of magnitude are not at all the same rate. Orders of magnitude are a base-10 construct but IMO exponents don’t have to be 10.

EDIT: holy crap I just discovered a commonly known thing about exponents and log. Leaving comment here but it is wrong, or at least naive.
by sota_pop | 2025-04-04 12:29:44+00:00
The latest Mac minis have a great reputation although it’s been a little over a decade since I’ve personally used a MacBook as my daily driver. Every year I tell myself “this is the year I buy one of those Apple silicon MacBooks”. I have a Lenovo P50 collecting dust and primarily use a desktop tower I built for personal or my employer’s Lenovo X1 Yoga for work.
by djtango | 2025-04-04 12:29:54+00:00
In the abstract, they are totally fine but in practice sports has hundreds (thousands?) of years of tradition and culture imprinting into the fabric of society making it "normal".

In the UK football is so deeply engrained they talk of doing public holidays for when the England team finally wins a major international cup IIRC. The Olympics had/has some special subtext in international relations. So following sports has been deeply normalised in ways that probably polarises other similar practices (but for other interests) into seeming very fringe
by bognition | 2025-04-04 12:31:16+00:00
Minecraft is the metaverse. My son has played hundreds of hours of Minecraft with friends on his switch while chatting with them on a Messenger kids audio call.

He has been able to build and foster connections with friends who live on the other side of the country.

I’ve listened in on their conversations and they engage in imaginative free play as if they were in the same room. It’s a very different experience then when they play a goal directed game like Mario kart or smash bros.

Minecraft feels a very nice space in his life in ways that other games do not.
by nickpeterson | 2025-04-04 12:31:18+00:00
People waste small fortunes on hvac stuff. I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that most homes just need more insulation and sealing and then a relatively inexpensive hvac system.

Same thing with solar panels, people will drop 40k on solar just to save $200 a month on electricity when insulation would have reaped half the savings for 1/10th the price.

People just like buying gadgets.
by al_borland | 2025-04-04 12:31:47+00:00
I used the Remote Desktop app on macOS at work. It was replaced by the new Windows app.

I’ve been using it for a few months. First launch is jarring, as it’s a massive window instead of the tiny saved connection window I used to have. But after resizing the window and tweaking a couple things, it’s functionally the same now.

Though I’m not a heavy user these days. I have a VDI I connect to a few times per month, and the occasional Windows server.
by erichmond | 2025-04-04 12:31:59+00:00
I came here to say exactly this. I can't tell if it's because I'm not a traditional "tech" person, but 90% of the best minds I've seen are nowhere near tech in general.

Having a brilliant mind, going to an "elite" school (because someone told you it's elite), joining a FAANG company, building software that you deep down know is killing society, but doing it because the "problems are fun and money is great" is antithetical to what a "best mind of a generation" would truly be.

It's wasted talent with few redeeming qualities for society and a lack of innovation/creativity around using your talents to improve the world.

A "best mind of the generation" would find a way to be successful without riding such a lazy conveyor belt of life.
by neuroticnews25 | 2025-04-04 12:32:12+00:00
I wonder if it may be beneficial even if you're not naturally willing to do it, similar to how introverts feel better after acting extroverted [0] [1]

[0] https://archive.is/Ipdxc

[1] https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/29931/119109...
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-04 12:32:19+00:00
> useful to society

On the contrary, the "respect" towards others is a condition to societies. Otherwise, all you'd had would be "accomplices". And also since Edward Bunker told us that actually, "dog eat dog",

> will actively hurt your own life

in a pool of free rogues you'll be at severe disadvantage as opposed to a society.

> One only lives once so you better make sure

you will achieve what you should. That includes¹ being something good, not just having some fleeting goods.

--

¹Edit: I wrote 'includes', but that's rhetoric - I meant "mostly is".
by SonuSitebot | 2025-04-04 12:32:35+00:00
1. At sitebot, we focus on AI-driven solutions for businesses, but these bookmarklets remind me how simple automation can make life easier. Has anyone experimented with AI-powered bookmarklets, like quick content summarization or auto-filling forms based on context?

2. As someone who works across frontend and backend development, I still find bookmarklets incredibly useful for quick debugging and automation. While browser restrictions have tightened, tools like Tampermonkey or custom browser extensions can still help power users retain control. What are some creative ways you've found to keep bookmarklets alive?
by drumhead | 2025-04-04 12:32:53+00:00
No Hyper-economy, like China or the EU is going to stand about and take what seems like economic intimidation from the US. All the unaffiliated nations are going to be collateral damage in this clash of the economic titans.

The best thing everyone can do is maintain low tariffs and try and strike free trade deals with each other. But the consequeces of Trumps Trade war are going to be disasterous for smaller developing nations and their economies. We'll see more poverty, more political instability, civil wars, coups and other unpleaseant activities.

The USA will probably get higher inflation while the rest of the world sees lower inflation if not deflation.

We'll have to find a way of getting through this window of misfortune to the other side, where I suspect we'll all be poorer and less free.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-04 12:32:56+00:00
I assume these kinds of articles are rage bait for clicks.

Present a story (if it’s even true) of an outlandish situation as if it representative of something, but not outright saying it, leaving it to the reader to feel outrage, or schadenfreude, and then they send it to their friends to gawk at the idiocy, etc.

A common one is “we earn $300k per year but are only middle class and can’t afford to save for retirement”.
by vanderZwan | 2025-04-04 12:33:13+00:00
The list of "other weirdness" at the end mentions:

> +0 vs. -0

Which feels kind of odd, since that's mostly floating point weirdness, not JS weirdness. Unless they mean the fact that you can force V8 to initialize a zero-value as a double using -0 as a literal (it tends to optimize 0 to integers). But that has no effect on real-world code unless you use Math.sign, or divide by minus zero.
by RajT88 | 2025-04-04 12:33:20+00:00
I used to live near a nice downtown with a riverwalk. I liked to take my guitar and go play under the bridge at night. The bridge was concrete and the reverb was crazy good. (Does that make me a troll? A troll posting on the internet??)

I found it terribly soothing. Sometimes I'd bring a friend with and we'd play together.
by ludston | 2025-04-04 12:33:22+00:00
You can take the position of "achievement isn't a feeling of power" if you'd really like to, in which case I simply say find and replace all prior uses of "feelings of power" with "feelings of achievement" and the argument still stands. I'm happy to use whatever definitions you want. Taking joy from your success in doing things (whether you refer to it as achievement or power) is simply not an valid ethical justification when it is at the expense of violating other peoples right to control of their possessions.
by diggan | 2025-04-04 12:33:23+00:00
I initially picked up programming because I wanted to create things (well, initially break things, but moved on from that), and the programming was one way of doing that. I only learned how to structure my programs, because they became hard to change. I only learned testing and refactoring, because I noticed I was faster when the code was better and more tested, even if the upfront cost was slightly higher.

If I was 14-15 around this time, when I first picked up programming, but had an LLM on my side, I'm not sure what the outcome would be, to be honest. I'd use them, that's for sure, but once I got a working application out of them, would I be curious enough to understand as much as I understand now, if it wasn't required? Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-04 12:34:10+00:00
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform

Google Cloud Platform is a part of Google Cloud, which includes the Google Cloud Platform public cloud infrastructure, as well as Google Workspace (G Suite), enterprise versions of Android and ChromeOS, and application programming interfaces (APIs) for machine learning and enterprise mapping services. Since at least 2022,[9] Google's official materials have stated that "Google Cloud" is the new name for "Google Cloud Platform," which may cause naming confusion.

(Yes it’s a Wikipedia link. But if you go to the article it includes citations)

Microsoft does not include Office sales with its Azure revenue.
by terhechte | 2025-04-04 12:34:56+00:00
How is the moral dilemma of employer-controlled brain implants or eugenics equal to AI? The reason the quote can be applied is because it is a genuinely useful technology to lots of people. That's not the case for eugenics robots.

Did you grow up watching Data (Star Trek), C3PO (Star Wars), KITT (Knight Rider) thinking "Who comes up with these violent sadistic ideas"?
by diggan | 2025-04-04 12:35:24+00:00
> They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.

That sounds... Good?

Lots of people run into using whatever is vogue without even thinking twice about it. See the massive move to using cloud for absolutely everything, money be damned, and you'll see what I mean. Cargo culting is a huge issue in the industry.

At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less productive, compared to the vast majority of the ecosystem.
by bananapub | 2025-04-04 12:36:11+00:00
the headline is perhaps unclear, so from the article:

> The US labour watchdog froze two cases against Apple days after Donald Trump nominated an attorney who represents the tech group to be the agency’s top legal official.

> Trump last week nominated Crystal Carey, a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, to be the NLRB’s general counsel. She is listed in the agency’s records as an attorney acting in Apple’s defence in both cases against the Silicon Valley tech group.

the level of just complete capture of the regulatory state by random rich companies is amazing, even beyond trump's first time bullshit like "Appoint the CEO of Exxon to be Secretary of State"
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-04-04 12:36:24+00:00
Heh... Interesting that you bring in Rijkswaterstaat as a counterexample, because I remember it from the story about the Botlek bridge and how they could not fix it for a couple years and when the root cause was identified, it turned out to be rust in an ethernet port [1].

[1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-rea...
by NilMostChill | 2025-04-04 12:36:31+00:00
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-adm...

Though I'm counting that as future potential costs and deaths.

Ignoring the obvious opinion of the author, anybody who has ever worked on any sort of medium to large scale migration, refactoring or rewriting of a computer system knows that's a comically ridiculous timescale and when it inevitably fails there will be consequences, counted in both money and lives.

But that's a (very near) future fuck-up that he will almost certainly spin or move the goalposts for.

That you can draw a direct line to right now, not much other than all the cuts to critical infrastructure.

To be clear, I'm not arguing against cuts and efficiency initiatives, i'm saying he's an idiot who doesn't know what he's doing, so his implementation will be shoddy and dangerous.

See: The Cybertruck, The Boring Company, The Decline of X.

As you are implying though, nothing major so far, aside from USAID i suppose (or the VA), does removing systems actively (and provably) preventing deaths count?

These are systematic problems that will take a while to shake out into their inevitable consequences.

He'll probably still fail upwards though, unless he gets luigi'd or just drops dead of a ket induced heart attack or something.
by qsort | 2025-04-04 12:36:43+00:00
I use macOS and the rest of the pseudo-office suite. It's okay. But Numbers is just bad. It takes forever to open files and perform even trivial operations. I do a lot of data engineering and people's "creative" usage of Excel is the bane of my existence, but there's a reason why it's used everywhere: it's that good. None of the clones even hold a candle to the real thing.
Stripe took $829,678.97 after 120 days
by solsibay | 2025-04-04 12:36:46+00:00
Hello HN

I am contacting here because Stripe is refusing to communicate with me as humans, their chat keep converting the chat to email and email keep sending this: "If a balance still remains in your account after eligible payments have been refunded, it will not be made available to you. This is in accordance with Section 5.6 of "Stripe Payments" under "Stripe Service Terms" in the Stripe Services Agreement (if you are in a region outside of the US or EMEA, this policy should be referenced alternatively under "Section C: Payment Processing Services" of your region's corresponding Stripe Services Agreement): https://stripe.com/legal/ssa#services-terms" 120 days passed since our account got deemed too high risk despite having 0 chargebacks

Our website is https://bayuserpro.com/ we are a marketplace that uses AI to help businesses to advertise and get % of their sales. Every seller have their own Stripe accounts, they connect their account to ours, and when we bring them paying user we charge %.

So now, how is this legal that Stripe can refuse to pay us our funds and hold $829,678.97.

And concerning part is, there are no refunds, no disputes $829,678.97 has been sitting there for last 4 months without ever being touched.

Is this why Stripe does not go IPO so they do not have to disclose their shady practices of stealing people's funds?

acct_1PH9EbFcbviG0Uct this is my account id and I am writing this here because it is TOO big of an amount to hold without any communication and I have no other choice. I do not want to be one of cringe people who complain online about providers online in HN but this is too big to ignore, I have to put my ego aside and actually write this out

Please if someone knows how to fix this let us know, we waited our funds to be released and now Stripe simply stealing them
by UncleSlacky | 2025-04-04 12:37:11+00:00
There are very very few people who can be classed as "British subjects", the vast majority are British citizens since at least 1983.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_subject :

"Currently, it refers to people possessing a class of British nationality largely granted under limited circumstances to those connected with Ireland or British India born before 1949. Individuals with this nationality are British nationals and Commonwealth citizens, but not British citizens."
by bumby | 2025-04-04 12:37:20+00:00
Because we are inherently social creatures. It’s arguably what allowed us to move to the top of the animal hierarchy.

Consider this: if you were to ask a parent “would you rather your child grow up to be wildly intelligent but have sociopathy to the point of being utterly alone, or frankly average (or even dull) intellectually but have a rich social life with meaningful relationships, which would you choose?” I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to take the former.
by diggan | 2025-04-04 12:37:45+00:00
> AI is very open source

ML ecosystem tends to be very open source, true, LLMs a bit less so.

So far there are only a few useful open source models (mostly courtesy of Chinese companies), otherwise a lot of the models are either hidden behind paid APIs or falsely marketed as open source but come attached with terms and conditions, use policies, forbidden uses, requires signing agreements upfront and so on.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-04 12:37:46+00:00
I think you're seriously underestimating the cost of redoing insulation. If you have an unfinished attic and your walls are fine, then yeah, laying down some new fiberglass is easy, but otherwise, it basically requires gutting all the walls and top floor ceilings. The cost (here anyway) is significantly more than $4k, and the disruption to daily life will make it feel double.
by stephencanon | 2025-04-04 12:38:06+00:00
Absolutely correct. Given that they're in California and the house wasn't new construction, we can pretty safely assume that it was under-insulated compared to what's possible. Doing a proper audit and fixing air leaks and insulation is usually the most cost-effective improvement you can make to a house (getting it right to begin with is even more cost-effective, but lots of builders still don't know what they're doing).

As sibling notes, it can be invasive and disruptive vs. just replacing some appliances in a few days, but it's still more cost effective (and will allow your eventual replacement HVAC system to be sized smaller, netting additional savings when you do that).
by firefax | 2025-04-04 12:38:21+00:00
>The iphone has lacked innovation under Cook. Last 3 iterations (since 13) have been virtually identical.

Why do things need "innovated" constantly? Why keep making the phone slimmer rather than replace the battery with something more efficient, maybe add back the headphone port?

The original iPhone was a great leap forward, UX wise, but much like with a pickup truck at a certain point you'd expect minor tweaks with the yearly models.