MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Half-Life 2 running on your browser
by source2web | 2025-05-26 10:17:31+00:00
Hello Hacker News!

I’ve been working on a side project that ports the entire Source Engine to run in the browser using Emscripten. (Yes, the same engine that powered Half-Life 2, Portal, CSGO, and more.)

It’s still a work-in-progress some features are missing and the launcher is in development but core engine functionality is up and running.

I’d love feedback, ideas, or contributions. If you’re curious, feel free to check it out, star it, or open a pull request!

Here's the link to the source code - https://github.com/OrbitaStudios/LambdaComplexSource
by fzeroracer | 2025-05-26 10:18:09+00:00
Probably the most unfortunate thing is that the whole AI garbage trend exposes how little people care about the craft leading to garbage results.

As a comparison point I've gone through over 12,000 games on Steam. I've seen endless games where large portions of it are LLM generated. Images, code, models, banner artwork, writing. None of it is worth engaging with because every single one has a bunch of disjointed pieces shoved together combined.

Codebases are going to be exactly the same. A bunch of different components and services put together with zero design principal or cohesion in mind.
by b112 | 2025-05-26 10:19:44+00:00
This also seems, to me, like composer/npm issues.

An entire generation of devs, who grew up using unaudited, unverified, unknown license code. And which at a moments notice, can be sold to a threat actor.

And I've seen devs try to add packages to the project without even considering the source. Using forks of forks of forks, without considering the root project. Or examing if it's just a private fork, or what is most active and updated.

If you don't care about that code, why care about AI code? Or even your own?
by bayindirh | 2025-05-26 10:19:53+00:00
> Some copyright here and there does help keep food and water on the table.

While I'm a strong Free Software proponent, I'm not a zealot and insist on a black or white approach.

Yes, some software can be closed source, I agree, but it shouldn't be the bedrock software, i.e. anything required to enable hardware (firmware, OS, and preferably the utilities).

For the record, I'm paying for a couple closed source software packages on Linux which provide very unique feature s. These are inSync and Pagico.

On top of that, you can always sell GPL software (remember, you shall ship the source with the product. opening it it to everyone is not a requirement). On top of it, you can sell support or special versions. curl has a special version for paying customers, and ccid driver developers sell ccid compliance testing.

So, there are always alternatives, and the reality has more shades of gray than two distinct colors.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-05-26 10:20:04+00:00
If you are in the EU, do contact your representatives. Do NOT stay out of this. Remember that they only need to pass this once.

https://commission.europa.eu/about/contact/representations-m...

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-26 10:20:06+00:00
FWIW, when I thought about it in the larger enterprise context, I realized that I also hold a seemingly opposite view. I presented that elsewhere in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44087215

TL;DR: the goal of enterprise frameworks isn't to make Perfect Software Framework or to make code beautiful, devoid of bloat, or even easy. Their goal is to make programming consistent and predictable, to make programmers exchangeable. It's to allow an average developer to churn around working results at a predictable pace, as long as the project is just standard stuff, and they don't bring their own opinions into it. Large businesses want things this way, because that's how they think about everything (see also: Seeing Like a State).

Of course, this doesn't mean the framework authors succeed at that goal either :). Some decisions are plain stupid. But less than one would think.
by csomar | 2025-05-26 10:20:15+00:00
I was just struggling with getting a standard/template npm package up and running with a few customizations. Ended up just following one of the popular npm packages. This is Claude 4 and although it is good at writing code, I feel like it gets dumber at certain tasks especially when you want it to connect things together. It very easily messes one thing up and then when you include the errors, it spirals from there into madness.

> Am I just not using the tools correctly?

No, there is no secret sauce and no secret prompting. If LLMs were capable, we'll see lots of new software generated by it given how fast LLMs are at writing code. Theoretically, assuming a conservative 10token/s speed and a 100M token for Chromium code base, you could write a new browser with LLMs in only 115 days.
by schroeding | 2025-05-26 10:20:57+00:00
IMO "not ideal" is still a euphemism. Even if you do this, often throwing away decades of branding, there is a high chance that Lieferando aka Just Eat Takeaway.com will still not only register a similar domain again, but that it will rank higher than your website anyway, even with the "worse" domain.

You have a small restaurant, often using things like WiX or Squarespace, against a tech company with a dedicated SEO team. Good luck.
by eesmith | 2025-05-26 10:21:00+00:00
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/kermit-frog-commenc...

> The speech — written and spoken by puppeteer Matt Vogel, who has performed Kermit since 2017

It's considered special because of the historical connection between Kermit, Jim Henson and the University of Maryland.

Why do you think the graduating students had no idea of what was going on?

Kermit/Vogel was also part of the 2024-25 Arts & Humanities Dean's Lecture Series Featuring Kermit the Frog in September, https://calendar.umd.edu/2024-25-arts-humanities-deans-lectu... , making these two visits symbolically bookends for the academic year.
by wutwutwat | 2025-05-26 10:21:26+00:00
A thing I always go back to, regardless of what language I'm working in, is the checks performed by strong migrations

https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations?tab=readme-ov-fi...

It's pretty popular, and has even been ported to other languages

https://github.com/Artur-Sulej/excellent_migrations
by metalman | 2025-05-26 10:21:35+00:00
as to the "shibuya" crossing , ya whatever, take it as a given that I have been to many different crossings in big citys and other places...not on any maps the comanality is to create an almost overwhelming spectacle and engage people in such a way that they open up there wallets.... the internet (phones, now "specs") as an always on jittering, jiggling, flashing, binging,bonginging, personal , tic tock, shake down street, is though floundering a bit, as we are all now a bit world weary, short on time, and utterly lacking in a home to go back too and tell our tails of the big city and flashing lights, gaining our own brief spot, at the center of things. yes?, no? just check out the fearsom demand for add blockers, calm down and sleep meds, burn out stories, etc, etc ,etc or ,the very deep sigh when someone I am doing a deal with was commenting on all of the financial shenanigans going on vs/vs trade, tarrifs, and all that, and I said yes....but maybe we will slow down and have a more circular economy, and live better....
by teleforce | 2025-05-26 10:22:31+00:00
>Many biological organisms surpass human cognitive capacities in much deeper ways. The desert ants in my backyard have minuscule brains, but far exceed human navigational capacities, in principle, not just performance. There is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top.

Chomsky made interesting points regarding the performance of AI with the performance of biological organisms in comparison to human but his conclusion is not correct. We already know that cheetah run faster human and elephant is far stronger than human. Bat can navigate in the dark with echo location and dolphin can hunt in synchronization with high precision coordination in pack to devastating effect compared to silo hunting.

Whether we like or not human is the the top unlike the claim of otherwise by Chomsky. By scientific discovery (understanding) and designing (engineering) by utilizing law of nature, human can and has surpassed all of the cognitive capabilities of these petty animals, and we're mostly responsible for their inevitable demise and extinction. Human now need to collectively and consciously reverse the extinction process of these "superior" cognitive animals in order to preserve these animals for better or worst. No other earth bound creature can do that to us.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-05-26 10:22:46+00:00
No I don't think it'd help that much with a weapons program. The starter kit would be mostly focused on QA, compliance, configuration management, cost modeling, etc. and would not include any non-public information about like how to optimize a core for high-quality plutonium or U-233 production or how to do the chemistry needed to separate plutonium from other actinides and fission products. And of course it would say nothing at all about weapon design. That said, vast quantities of normal core design knowledge are widely available.
by rambler7 | 2025-05-26 10:23:32+00:00
Completely unscientific (quick AI research) of top car models imported from the EU to the US + their approximate (end consumer) prices in the US (first price) vs Germany (second) with roughly same specs.

Volkswagen Tiguan ~$28,880 ~$39,500

BMW 3 Series (330i) ~$44,500 ~$66,200

Mercedes-Benz GLC ~$47,100 ~$64,500

Audi Q8 e-tron ~$74,400 ~$82,000

Volvo XC90 ~$56,000 ~$87,900

Land Rover Defender 110 ~$60,600 ~$73,500

Porsche Macan ~$62,550 ~$88,000

BMW i4 eDrive40 ~$57,300 ~$66,000

Aren't the end-consumer prices all that matters in the end? Plus its mostly what most people would describe as luxury vehicles - so few percent here/there is just a smoke screen.

The other way around its also just Mustangs, Corvettes, Jeeps, Cadillacs, Teslas - again much cheaper in the US than the EU.
by maeil | 2025-05-26 10:24:01+00:00
> Although Western states are very pro Israel.

They're not, you're simply misinformed. The US and Germany have been. Countries like Ireland, Spain and Scotland have not. A lot of others have been somewhere inbetween, often as weakly-held beliefs. It's been very low on the list of priorities for people in country like Belgium, they might have been nominally pro-Irsael, but without caring particularly much. Now that Israel has been genociding for a year, except for those first two almost every Western state is largely pro-Palestine.

Unless you're purely talking about governments instead of the populace, but that makes no sense in this context of talking about social media.
by noosphr | 2025-05-26 10:24:30+00:00
A c program is understandable even if it isn't efficient. It's also deterministic, or close enough that it shouldn't matter.

An llm project that can be generated from scratch every time is maybe understandable if you use very good prompts and a lot of grounding text. It is not deterministic unless you use zero temperature and stick with the same model forever. Something that's impossible now. Six months ago the state of the art model was deepseek r1.
Show HN: VexFS – A Kernel-Native Semantic Filesystem for AI Agents
by lspecian | 2025-05-26 10:24:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I started building VexFS yesterday — a kernel-native filesystem that stores vector embeddings alongside files, supports semantic search (brute-force now, HNSW later), and exposes everything through a minimal IOCTL + mmap interface.

Think of it as:

A semantic memory layer for local AI agents

RAG without a vector DB

Vector search as an OS primitive

It’s early. It barely works. But it boots.

Why? Because if memory’s not snapshotable, it’s not memory. And maybe, just maybe, agents deserve a /mnt/mem they can mount natively.

When I asked Gemini what it thought of the idea, it said:

“An OS-level semantic context layer like this could enable more powerful, context-aware, and efficient AI systems.”

Not sure if it's a brilliant idea or a kernel panic waiting to happen. Either way, I’d love your feedback (and flames).

→ https://github.com/lspecian/vexfs
by freetanga | 2025-05-26 10:25:01+00:00
You could argue the opposite to all your points.

1) Unions are asking that Capitalists share a bigger slice of the fruit of workers labor back with the workforce. Forcing a link between that and private spending and eventual consumerism is skipping a few steps in the logic.

2) Voters vote on a number of reasons. Taxes are one, but they range from geopolitical, immigration, healthcare, education, safety, access to housing among others. And then there is the charisma and quality of the candidate. Saying people vote left or right for one single issue is simplistic, and not very genuine. It could also be that significant groups of people abuse the social support tools, and people get tired of paying taxes for someone else to benefit by not doing their share.

3) You are clearly well off and are being a bit selfish. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, and would like to save some money for their future, which seems smart considering that goverment funds will crumble (as stated in this article). Other people work because they have done so for 30 years and sadly their life are empty outside of it. Assuming people work 100% just because they are too materialistic or attached to wealth feels a bit unfair to what most of society goes through.

Don't mean to critise, but in face of your strong opinion, I wanted to highlight that as Flaubert said, "There is no truth, just perceptions".
by Elinvynia | 2025-05-26 10:26:23+00:00
For anyone downvoting this: look into how many people are currently infected. Compare that to early 2020.

Yes, the people who were prone to dying already did so years ago. But the rate of long term disability in every single country is skyrocketing.

The average person has had 4.7 covid infections by now. Now look into the literal thousands of studies of long term effects of that.

Future generations will never forgive us for throwing them under the bus.
by BSTRhino | 2025-05-26 10:26:29+00:00
Yes, in the end I just made this decision pragmatically and it's not a grand statement about how I think programming languages should work. I felt that it would be possible to add gradual typing to Easel eventually, and so chose to prioritise other programming language features.

One of the original "agitators" which caused me to make Easel was because I was so surprised at how popular the modding tools for my previous game were with first-time coders. The modding tools used JSON, which might sound primitive, but if you look past the JSON it was actually defining a hierarchical declarative language for defining game behaviour. I have many theories for why first-time coders could just pick it up, but one of them is I think the hierarchical shape meant everything could be written inline, without indirection or jumping around. This format allowed all these gamers to just accidentally fall into coding and it was quite impressive how far they got without any help.

But those old modding tools were quite limited really, and that limited how much coding people could learn. So for years I just kept wondering what would happen if someone made that magic hierarchical declarative shape unlimited by merging it with a traditional imperative programming language. Would it allow gamers to accidentally fall into learning actual coding? It took me about 2 years to squash together these two seemingly-opposed paradigms and make the Easel programming language. Doing this required slimming down on the other language features in order to iterate quickly on this big problem, so that's how we ended up not having strong typing, amongst other things. But I don't regret what I chose to prioritise, and I hope to address this in the coming years!
by bayindirh | 2025-05-26 10:27:24+00:00
> the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet.

This is not the right solution for me. Pocket was the perfect one, even in the first iteration. I don't want discovery. I want a personal box/shelf which keeps a list of what I want to read and what I have read. Permanent copies was a great add-on while it lasted too. Because I want the version I have seen. Not the edited/updated one.

Perch doesn't work the way I want. In fact, it's the direct opposite of what I need.
by gyomu | 2025-05-26 10:27:40+00:00
There are two kinds of engineers.

Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before.

And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best.

The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former group aren’t all utterly dominating the market and obliterating their competitors with their revolutionary products and blazing fast iteration speed.
by protocolture | 2025-05-26 10:27:52+00:00
I find the code quality is an LLMs first priority. It might not execute but it will have good variable names and comments.

I find that so far their quality is horizontal, not vertical.

A project that involves small depth across 5 languages/silos? Extremely useful.

A long project in a single language? Nearly useless.

I feel like its token memory. And I also feel like the solution will be deeper code modularisation.
by imhoguy | 2025-05-26 10:27:56+00:00
> but also claim the Google Maps listing using the website.

And they may even comply with "Delivery-only food brands" policy [0] of Google Business Profile. Although I think their strategy it is stepping on thin ice and risking ban, including search index ban of the main domain.

[0] https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?sjid=1244...
by incomingpain | 2025-05-26 10:28:34+00:00
I just checked to see if @TheAtlantic published this on X. They didnt; but they are active on X. Here's a recent post from them.

https://x.com/TheAtlantic/status/1926899872432574835

>Imagine if your favorite neighborhood bar turned into a Nazi hangout.

There's really only 1 demographic who is prominent anti-jew or anti-israel on X. I dont really interact with them much these days. Yesterday @JJ_mccullough did a poll of his audience about israel.

16% fierce supporter of israel, 26% support but have doubts, 37% they're very indefensible, 11% oppose israel's existence.

If X was such a nazi hangout, I'd expect that poll to go much more differently.

Here's something that happened in Toronto

https://x.com/Awesome_Jew_/status/1926761520530166009

They say over 50,000 people should up for 'israel walk' or really to support the jews in this unprecedented time of antisemitism. In my circle of followers there was a ton of support for jews; certainly no nazis.

>The week prior, Ye (formerly Kanye West) released a single called “Heil Hitler” on the platform.

1 guy making a controversial video to try to stay relevant? Probably having a mental health issue? I went to look for this. His account isnt available in search.

Caution: This profile may include potentially sensitive content

On his whole account. Then each post is censored as well with the same warning.

Not exactly a nazi hangout when the 1 example is rather difficult to find.
by mr-karan | 2025-05-26 10:29:04+00:00
I'm working on Logchef: https://github.com/mr-karan/logchef

It's an open-source (AGPLv3), purpose-built log analytics UI specifically for ClickHouse. I've been using ClickHouse for logs and love its power, but found the existing UIs either too heavy, too focused on ingestion (which we already have covered with tools like Vector/Promtail/Fluentbit/Logstash etc), or not ClickHouse-native enough.

Logchef aims to be a lightweight, powerful log explorer that sits on top of your existing ClickHouse setup.

Key things:

- Schema-agnostic: Works with your existing ClickHouse log tables. No need to change how you store things.

- Dual Query Modes: Simple search syntax (e.g., level=error service=api) for quick looks, and full SQL for complex analysis when you need to dig deep.

- Lightweight & Focused: Single binary, easy to deploy. It doesn't do ingestion, letting you use best-of-breed tools for that.

- Team-centric: Built with multi-tenancy for teams and access controls for different log sources from the get-go.

I've got a demo running at https://demo.logchef.app if you'd like to try it out. It's still evolving, so feedback (especially from other ClickHouse users) would be super valuable!

Wrote an announcement post with a bit more detail: https://mrkaran.dev/posts/announcing-logchef/
by Bluestein | 2025-05-26 10:29:14+00:00
> MD truly was the light that burned twice as bright for half as long. reply

... this is so well put. MD was absolutely groundbreaking.-

I have always wondered how it came to be that it "failed" (quotes) in the market? A'la Betamax vs. VHS ...

... bet it'd make for an interesting analysis.-
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-26 10:30:09+00:00
"Attempted comedy" is the most charitable take I could give it (and truthfully, I implied something else).

My point is, their statement is quite obviously wrong, but it sure sounds nice. If you don't agree, I challenge you to provide that track record "of non-stop lying, scamming and bllsh*tting right in people's faces for years". Like, for real.

I'm not defending 'sama here; I'm not a fan of his either (but neither I know enough about him to write definite accusatory statements). It's a general point - the line I quoted is a common template, and it's always a ham-fisted way of using emotions in lieu of an argument, and almost always pure bullshit in the literal sense - except, ironically, when it comes to politicians, where it's almost always true (comes with the job), but no one minds when it comes to their favorite side.

Bottomline, it's not a honest framing and it doesn't belong here.
by ZaoLahma | 2025-05-26 10:30:21+00:00
I would never use an LLM for trying to generate a full solution to a complex problem. That's not what they're good at.

What LLMs are good at and their main value I'd argue, is nudging you along and removing the need to implement things that "just take time".

Like some days back I needed to construct a string with some information for a log entry, and the LLM that we have suggested a solution that was both elegant and provided a nicer formatted string than what I had in mind. Instead of spending 10-15 minutes on it, I spent 30 seconds and got something that was nicer than what I would have done.

It's these little things that add up and create value, in my opinion.
by rambler7 | 2025-05-26 10:31:00+00:00
I mean - isn't the whole discussion on tariffs based on the premise that EU is (mis)using the US somehow? Consumer prices don't show that at all - no matter imported or exported goods, in the end everything is still much cheaper in the US.

A part of this is VAT of course but some prices are still much lower in US even when you discount the VAT amount.
by bestouff | 2025-05-26 10:31:13+00:00
Yeah, I know Renault 5 E-Tech export power through their CCS port (V2G, V2L, V2X) but it seems to be AC only.

Edit: IMHO AC power-out is good, because it simplifies a lot plugging to car to your home or to some appliances, but I understand why you would want to access DC directly.
by fullstackchris | 2025-05-26 10:31:27+00:00
CodeVideo - https://github.com/codevideo

Basically, event sourcing for the IDE - build entire software lessons and course videos without actually recording anything.

You can get up and running pretty quickly at our studio https://studio.codevideo.io

Or locally with the CLI tool: https://github.com/codevideo/codevideo-cli