MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gigamegs | 2025-04-28 19:33:26+00:00
Major update: general Bug fixes, improved Stage & GFX, new BG GFX: Infinite Cosmic Space String v2, new GFX: Nebula, new GFX: procedurally generated Platform, 1x new weapon, faster rendering, Shader GFX.

Mirrors: 1) https://tetramatrix.itch.io/old-school-retro-mini-game-space... 2) https://tetramatrix.github.io/spaceship/
by joenot443 | 2025-04-28 19:33:49+00:00
I think Ed maybe buries the lede a little bit with all the ranting. About halfway through the piece he drops this chart[1] which personally left me shocked.

To my knowledge, a 10,000% growth in revenue over 7 years isn't a reality once you're at that level of volume. Asking 4o about this projection acknowledges the reality -

"OpenAI’s projection to grow from approximately $1 billion in revenue in 2023 to $125 billion by 2029 is extraordinarily ambitious, implying a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeding 90%. Such rapid scaling is unprecedented, even among the fastest-growing tech companies."

Am I missing something? I like OAI and I use ChatGPT every day, but I remain unconvinced of those figures.

[1] https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcTvV_KScCMt...
by gruez | 2025-04-28 19:34:11+00:00
>Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.

Because with a big project like this, everyone wants to claim some slice for themselves. The optimal route crosses counties like Fresno, which means they can veto the project (or at least delay it). They use that as leverage to extract benefits for themselves, like changing the route so it passes through their county seat.
by jaxtracks | 2025-04-28 19:34:12+00:00
I've just started running windows 11 on a transformer tablet I couldn't get Linux to fully support. I was dreading it and expected to find it so annoying that I would sell the device since all I hear is messaging like this, but I've actually been really pleasantly surprised.

I ran a powershell script I found to de-bloat it and remove ai features and telemetry, then installed chocolatey and WSL and had all my usual apps and my Nix managed dev env going inside and hour. I don't see what all these AI features are that people are complaining about, and I don't see ads or anything.

Yeah, I prefer Linux and am always weary of Microsofts tactics in open source, but what specifically makes Windows so incredibly awful?
by cuuupid | 2025-04-28 19:34:24+00:00
It's actually doing really well but it has not much to do with them being a red state and everything to do with them having an aging or tourist transit population that needs to get between cruise lines and theme parks.

Besides those cases there are not a lot of reasons to be transiting that route, or at least not nearly compared to the number of folks that would want to transit SF <-> LA. Totally different needs that are easier to address, and less pressure to prove out value / fewer digestible alternatives.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-28 19:34:48+00:00
The reason Google has the best Wi-Fi AP location database is because they knowingly violated wiretapping laws, when they rolled out Streetview, and they were only fined a cool 13 million for it.

https://epic.org/documents/investigations-of-google-street-v...

They were ordered to destroy any data related to the collection from Streetview, and they did it seems, but they may not have deleted any of the data that had already been copied/integrated to other separate services like GiS, where they may have simply just moved that wiretapping to the edge devices to facilitate geo-location similar to how Apple uses Wi-Fi points as landmarks as a plausible (we aren't wiretapping), while still physically mapping based on radio signal, and also indirectly on calls through AI.

https://www.courthousenews.com/google-must-face-claims-of-ai...

The only learned lesson they had seemed to be that you don't make a public-facing API that allows searches of locations based on BSSID, or MAC address to the general public (which is what they had for Streetview).
by tdb7893 | 2025-04-28 19:34:59+00:00
So I think the best argument against this is that the US has done massive infrastructure projects in the past. Some cities had (and some still have) decent public transportation and we've done large canals and even the interstate highway project. I've also seen local infrastructure (and I mean actually local, on the city/county level) be very impactful in the community.

My experience is that unless the community really wants the infrastructure it won't get done and I've seen a lot of opposition to forms of transport that aren't just roads (with the most extreme case of a vocal group in a town not wanting a rail line into the city because they were worried people from the city would come out to their town. They literally didn't want too easy of transportation into/out of the city).
by ziddoap | 2025-04-28 19:35:16+00:00
I also would have liked to have seen the pro/con lists for each of the potential choices.

I've been toying with the idea of making a 2d game that I've had on my mind for awhile, but have no game development experience, and am having trouble deciding where to start (obviously wanting to avoid the author's predicament of choosing something and having to switch down the line).
by susam | 2025-04-28 19:35:18+00:00
The "sunbeam" in Pale Blue Dot is imaging artefact indeed! From <https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/solar-system-portrait-ear...>:

"Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun."

See also <https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss85590.042/?sp=17>:

"Because of the way that sunlight is scattered off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special importance to our small planet. But this is just an accident of geometry and optics. The Sun emits its radiation equitably to all directions in space."

Also, from the posted article itself:

"Indeed, even the hint of perceptual salience – the sunbeam in which Earth is suspended – isn’t a genuine feature of Earth’s position in the cosmos but an artefact of the image itself."
by forrestthewoods | 2025-04-28 19:35:48+00:00
Rust is not good for video game gameplay logic. The ownership model of Rust can not represent the vast majority of allocations.

I love Rust. It’s not for shipping video games. No Tiny Glade doesn’t count.

Edit: don’t know why you’re downvoting. I love Rust. I use it at my job and look for ways to use it more. I’ve also shipped a lot of games. And if you look at Steam there are simply zero Rust made games in the top 2000. Zero. None nada zilch.

Also you’re strictly forbidden from shipping Rust code on PlayStation. So if you have a breakout indie hit on Steam in Rust (which has never happened) you can’t ship it on PS5. And maybe not Switch although I’m less certain.
by scarletphoenix | 2025-04-28 19:36:10+00:00
In my mental model of an offline app, I expect instant responses. However, I know to the complexities of apps, the diverse wants of a big, diverse user base that it can be hard/impossible for an app to be well-architected enough to achieve this ideal.

Failover is hard, and there generally aren't hard rules for what to do if data isn't available or how to communicate to a user in a specific offline situation on how the current state of an offline app affects what they see -- and even when they would care or what they could do about it when they do care
by lelia_florina | 2025-04-28 19:36:16+00:00
Thanks a lot for your detailed feedback!

For now, Card-Snap is focused on printable, physical flashcards because there are already many digital flashcard apps out there.

That said, I can see how a super-minimal, distraction-free viewer could be useful for setups like using a dedicated tablet.

Just curious — what made you want something new rather than using existing flashcard apps like Anki, Quizlet, or Brainscape?

(It would be really helpful for me to understand what’s missing or frustrating in the current options.)

Thanks again for taking the time to share your ideas!
by coder543 | 2025-04-28 19:36:42+00:00
Huge demand for copper hasn’t brought its price down to the price of stainless steel, has it? Most definitely not, so it seems like Econ 101 was incomplete. Not all goods are perfectly elastic. Inelastic goods do not get cheaper with more demand.

Tantalum is in demand today, yes. Tantalum capacitors are a well known application, but it is used in all sorts of things.

My point was that even if tantalum were free, a material that is 96.5% copper is still not going to be significantly cheaper than copper, which I think is a pretty self-evident outcome.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-28 19:36:52+00:00
Very well said. It's not just scientists, I've seen the same thing happen across the board -- including here on HN.

Yes, incentives exist that can make doing the wrong thing easy and even personally advantageous. That doesn't excuse or forgive doing the wrong thing -- that thing is still wrong and people doing it are responsible for their own behavior regardless of "incentives".
by ValentineC | 2025-04-28 19:37:04+00:00
> My top choice for this kind of thing in 2025 is GitHub, using GitHub Pages. It's free for public repositories and I haven't seen GitHub break a working URL that they have hosted in the 17+ years since they first launched.

As someone who's interested in keeping online things around for a very long time, GitHub's owned by Microsoft now, and Microsoft's needs can change at any moment.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a better alternative for people who "lose interest" in their projects, short of non-profit organisations like Internet Archive or Apache Foundation taking over.

Maybe the best solution is to just have mirrors of the Git repo and pages hosted elsewhere like GitLab, and let search engines do the work of finding the software for anyone interested.
by mlyle | 2025-04-28 19:37:21+00:00
> This would work if we could run state governments like mini "countries" but there is not enough interest from the electorate and thus very little oversight so they end up in a bad way.

Which is circular; there's less attention because we don't.

> I would like very much for California's state legislature to be on par with, say, South Korea (similar population size & dispersion with great bullet train infrastructure).

About 1/4th the land area of California and much more .. "square". The long line in South Korea is 275 miles long; versus roughly 800 miles for the California HSR system. And California's system is facing a public that's much less accustomed to and receptive to rail, and endpoints that basically require you to have a car anyways.

We should have spent all this money on making local rail awesome. It'd make a much bigger difference in day to day life, would pay off quicker, and would prepare the ground for doing HSR.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-28 19:37:47+00:00
The California HSR reveals pretty much every problem with building anything in the US: private property, local interests and grift.

It also shows that mandating the speed in the amendment was probably a bad idea as it's greatly increased the cost projections.

China has a command economy so simply doesn't have to deal with eminent domain (and challenges thereto), environmental challenges (as much as environmental protection is a nobel goal, laws in California like CEQA have really been weaponized and the sole purpose is to stop any development whatsoever by local property interests), etc.

The route is being changed so include towns of 30,000 in the Central Valley. It's running down the I-5 corridor last I heard because that's where these small towns are vs the faster route to the west.

Just build connecting lines if connections to small communities are important. The primary purpose should be LA to SF&SJ.

If the HSR runs a train from LA to SF before 2050 I'll be shocked.
by hinkley | 2025-04-28 19:37:57+00:00
I think one of the critics of ITER points out there’s not enough beryllium production on the planet currently to supply more than a few fusion power plants. And it’s rare enough that maybe it couldn’t be ramped very high.

By the ITER design they use beryllium to multiply neutrons to make their supply of Helium 3.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berylliosis does not sound fun.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-28 19:38:02+00:00
C# is a very highly underrated (and oft misunderstood) language that has become more terse as it has aged -- in a very good way. C#'s terseness has not come at the cost of its legibility and in fact, I feel like enhances it in many cases.

> The maturity and vast amount of stable historical data for C# and the Unity API mean that tools like Gemini consistently provide highly relevant guidance.

This is also a highly underrated aspect of C# in that its surface area has largely remained stable from v1 (few breaking changes (though there are some valid complaints that surface from this with regards to keyword bloat!)). So the historical volume of extremely well-written documentation is a boon for LLMs. While you may get out-dated patterns (e.g. not using latest language features for terseness), you will not likely get non-working code because of the large and stable set of first party dependencies (whereas outdated 3rd party dependencies in Node often leads to breaking incompatibilities with the latest packages on NPM).

> It was also a huge boost to his confidence and contributed to a new feeling of momentum. I should point out that Blake had never written C# before.

Often overlooked with C# is its killer feature: productivity. Yes, when you get a "batteries included" framework and those "batteries" are quite good, you can be productive. Having a centralized repository for first party documentation is also a huge boon for productivity. When you have an extremely broad, well-written, well-organized standard library and first party libraries, it's very easy to ramp up productivity versus finding different 3rd party packages to fill gaps. Entity Framework, for example, feels miles better to me than Prisma, TypeORM, Drizzle, or any option on Node.js. Having first party rate limiting libraries OOB for web APIs is great for productivity. Same for having first party OpenAPI schema generators.

Less time wasted sifting through half-baked solutions.

> Code size shrank substantially, massively improving maintainability. As far as I can tell, most of this savings was just in the elimination of ECS boilerplate.

C# has three "super powers" to reduce code bloat which is its really rich runtime reflection, first-class expression trees, and Roslyn source generators to generate code on the fly. Used correctly, this can remove a lot of boilerplate and "templatey" code.

---

I make the case that many teams that outgrow JS/TS on Node.js should look to C# because of its congruence to TS[0] before Go, Java, Kotlin, and certainly not Rust.

[0] https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/
by xboxnolifes | 2025-04-28 19:38:33+00:00
It's not that work is meant to be miserable, it's that if work wasn't in some ways miserable/frustrating/unrewarding/etc, more people would be doing it for free.

Or rather, you wouldn't need to pay people to do things they already enjoy doing. So, the things you need to pay people to do must contain some things that people don't want to do for free.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-28 19:38:49+00:00
Part of this is because VCs are hoping for a repeat of the Web 2.0 boom, where marginal costs were zero and billions of people were buying smartphones. If you check YC’s RFS (just an example), they’re all software: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs

Everyone asks “what if this is like the internet” but what if it’s actually like the smartphone, which took decades of small innovations to make work? If in 1980 you predicted that in 30 years handheld computers would be a trillion dollar industry you’d be right but it still required billions in R&D.

There are a ton of non-software innovations out there, they just require more than a million dollar seed to get working. For example making better batteries, better solar panels, fusion power, innovations in modular housing, etc.
by mistrial9 | 2025-04-28 19:38:50+00:00
unfortunately it is worse than that.. a basic and non-trivial State of California project was being done in an office near me, and I knew some of the people. So I saw a bit about how it progressed.. lots of requirements, lots of people from multiple unrelated and slightly competitive groups. The work was mostly intellectual assesment and evaluations with a lot of reports. The thing was funded at professional values.

About six months of work with lots of progress meetings with State of California bureaucrats to "keep them informed" .. and lo-and-behold.. as the required deadlines started getting closer, the State reps changed requirements, made amendments to deliverables.. the last three weeks, even MORE change orders "non-negotiable" .. I have never in my life seen major requirements changed on a multi-party project in the last weeks of a deadline like that. It was like the bureaucrats drank a lot of something, felt the "excitement" and HAD to change things to be "involved and hands on" .. it was STUPID and caused DAMAGE. There was no choice -- the State was paying.

That is how they do things in "infinite income" Sacramento ?
by dabinat | 2025-04-28 19:38:57+00:00
This article reminded me of the time a guy wanted to pitch his startup idea for me to develop. He wanted me to sign an NDA before telling me, as the idea was so great that I would obviously steal it, which I refused.

So all he would tell me is that it was “the next Twitter”, and from what I could gather, he would retain the majority of the equity and I would do all of the work, while he lobbed ideas at me from on high.

I passed on it, but only because the red flags were extremely obvious. I could certainly see a situation where I might have been sucked into something more subtly exploitative.
by emporas | 2025-04-28 19:38:59+00:00
We will use better technology for electronic transactions. Most of banks worldwide still use COBOL for most (all?) their software infrastructure.

You can do as many electronic transactions as you wish without internet or electricity, provided you have something with charged battery. Problem is the transaction cannot be verified without internet, but when internet gets restored, all transactions can be applied.

That technology exists for more than a decade, so banks will implement it in 20 or 50 years. Most sane people will not wait patiently for half a century till some software engineer implements electronic transactions with COBOL, and we will use some kind of blockchain much sooner than that.
by Jensson | 2025-04-28 19:39:00+00:00
I believe in the Scandinavian model. Which means socialized healthcare and free higher education, atheist education, and abortion rights, but also means voter ID, kick out illegal immigrants, right to work, no affirmative action in college admission etc.

I think you Americans are crazy both on the left and the right, I am criticizing the left more since that is more represented here, there is no need to criticizing the right since so many do it already.
by cuuupid | 2025-04-28 19:39:16+00:00
You're right and everyone -- including government contractors -- has been quietly shouting this for ages, but existing efforts have already been ideologically co-opted and new efforts are too brash and can't wrap their head around spending more to save more.

Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA, albeit only the worst parts. They're hard at work adding as much red tape as they can imagine to procurement of software and recently boasted about their collective organization answering a whopping 1200 emails in a month.
by Juliate | 2025-04-28 19:39:28+00:00
Nature is reliable in that we have rules (physics) and practices (engineering) to base our process upon.

People aren't reliable, for a specific value of reliable.

We expect of technology(machines, software, AI, whatever) to be: deterministically reliable (knowing their failure modes), and significantly more reliable than humans at what they do (because that's what we rely upon, why we use them to replace humans at what they, in ways humans can't: harder, faster, stronger).
by monkeyelite | 2025-04-28 19:39:29+00:00
It’s incredible how many projects and articles have been written around ECS with very little results.

Quake 1-3 uses a single array of structs, with sometimes unused properties. Is your game more complex than quake 3?

The “ECS” upgrade to that is having an array for each component type but just letting there be gaps:

transform[eid].position += … physics[eid].velocity = …
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-28 19:39:37+00:00
This is what I was referring to.

Though I can also understand the child comment on your comment as well. I think that is a reasonable statement as well.

This is a really weird ethical dilemma that I still hold, as a hobby creator myself (just not at a scale of really earning money,but boy I sure would want to ), I want to earn money from it but I also want to distribute it freely, I am not sure how I can get both.
Show HN: Skyrim like skilltree for gumloop's AI automations
by edgyquant | 2025-04-28 19:39:46+00:00
hey everyone, i built a skill tree for learning different ai tools and apis.

this is a new one for gumloop, a visual no code ai automation tool.

- large companies like instacart and webflow use gumloop with up to 1/3 of their employees automating workflows.

- my co-founder @mraspuzzi and i have helped dozens of people ship their first gumloops in 1-1 sprints, and decided to make this skill tree platform for more access. and it’s free!

- each node is a project or subskill to help you go 0 to 1 in building your first no code ai automation

if you want to learn more about the skill tree check out intro post on x: https://x.com/DylanEMHolland/status/1916937286467653663

and if you want to try the skill tree, it’s free here: https://skilltrees.ai/tree/gumloop

this is first version, so we’re looking for feedback. feel free to roast in the comments below.

shout-out to @max and @aron and the team (yc w24) for such an interesting platform!
by pkaye | 2025-04-28 19:39:47+00:00
The Florida Brightline is limited to 125 mph. Also no grade separation which is needed for higher speeds. Generally countries use grade separation when speeds exceed 110-120 mph. California really needs the 200-220 mph to make the trip worthwhile so it needs to be grade separated. A lot of the work done so far in California is the overpasses over freeways and roads its crossing.

Brightline has had a lot of fatalities due to lack of grade separation.

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/death-train-a-timeline-of...
by joshcsimmons | 2025-04-28 19:39:50+00:00
Congrats on the launch the tool looks phenomenal.

I’m conflicted because n8n does feel like the right level of abstraction but the UI and dated JS runtime environment are horrible. I don’t really want to write my own memory functionality for my AI agents but wondering if it’s worth it just to have a nicer UI and more modern JS env.
by waleedlatif1 | 2025-04-28 19:40:05+00:00
yeah! for stagehand, I actually stitched together a way for you to login and authenticate on platforms without the LLM's ever seeing your login credentials. in the prompt, you can specify the username as %username% and provide the credentials right below, and then we use selectors to enter that value into the DOM and hand it back to the agent once the login is completed. you can also get structured output. afaik, stagehand themselves don't even offer these three in their SDK and there's no way to login without giving the LLM your credentials. it isn't the best, but its the only place I've seen you can get secure login + agents + structured output