MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by buran77 | 2025-05-25 09:04:25+00:00
> Same for MS-DOS, at least in the early years

Same for Windows throughout its history, at least for home use. But unlike WinRAR, Windows didn't run on goodwill. MS understood the power of market share and network effects. The staying power of Windows in the enterprise comes from every new hire being familiar with Windows, its concepts, maybe even the tooling. The home user gets its dose for free because the enterprise user (and other shady deals) pays enough to cover for that.
by einpoklum | 2025-05-25 09:04:41+00:00
> WinRAR became infamous for offering a "30-day trial" that never actually expired. Instead of cutting off access or locking features, it simply asked users to consider purchasing it if they found it useful. It ran on goodwill

No, it did not. It ran on annoyance. If you wanted to avoid having to dismiss the "30-day trial" dialog on startup, you needed to pay. And some people paid. I'm not saying that it was immoral, it was just... annoying. Plus, for most (?) of WinRAR's existence, you could really do very well with alternatives such as the 7zip utility - www.7-zip.org , that was perfectly free-as-in-beer.
by mg74 | 2025-05-25 09:05:06+00:00
Hard agree. The first-past-the-post single representative election system that is the foundation of the two party system in the US is breaking the country. It encourages politics where the current winner has no reason nor expectation of compromising on anything; now is their time and they are justified in breaking everything the previous winners did. It encourages politicians to act like babies, not grownups.
by azalemeth | 2025-05-25 09:05:23+00:00
Nexuiz (foss multiplayer quake) and beyond all reason (supreme commander rts) are both excellent and have large online communities. Battle for Wesnoth (turn based) is also fantastic. 0 ad has been coming along for ages (rts). We're missing a good, well written and big RPG but a lot of other things do exist ...
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-25 09:06:00+00:00
Dave Barry writes like that, all the time (a lot less so, these days). He uses it for comedic twists, and usually integrated with other tricks.

His writing is known for a very smooth cadence. You reach these “lumps” in the narrative, and can almost miss them, which, for me, multiplies their impact.

I’ve always considered him one of the best writers that I’ve read. He probably gets less credit than he deserves (although I think he’s won a Pulitzer), because of his subject matter; sort of like Leslie Nielsen, or Victor Borge, who were both masters of their art.
by jwitthuhn | 2025-05-25 09:07:13+00:00
The DAW Reaper also uses a similar approach and for that alone I would highly recommend anyone interested in audio production give it a try.

Everyone else in the industry uses online activation. Whenever they take those servers down you lose your ability to install and use the software you bought.

With programs like WinRar and Reaper, even if the company producing it disappears tomorrow and takes all their servers with them, you can continue to make full use of the software you bought in 'free trial' mode and that is huge.
by seanheelan | 2025-05-25 09:07:31+00:00
It's certainly not the first vulnerability found with an LLM =) Perhaps I should have been more clear though.

What the post says is "Understanding the vulnerability requires reasoning about concurrent connections to the server, and how they may share various objects in specific circumstances. o3 was able to comprehend this and spot a location where a particular object that is not referenced counted is freed while still being accessible by another thread. As far as I'm aware, this is the first public discussion of a vulnerability of that nature being found by a LLM."

The point I was trying to make is that, as far as I'm aware, this is the first public documentation of an LLM figuring out that sort of bug (non-trivial amount of code, bug results from concurrent access to shared resources). To me at least, this is an interesting marker of LLM progress.
by lesostep | 2025-05-25 09:07:35+00:00
>as long as we can separate good from bad we can train a neural network to sort out the topology for us.

10-ish years ago, I saw a project training networks to guess biological sex from face photos. They carefully removed makeup, moustache, hair, etc, so the model would be unbiased, yet they only reached 70 to 80% correct guesses. Yet it seemed like a great result, and they were trying to reach 99%.

First thing I did after reading their paper, was seek a paper where people would try and guess the biological sex from similar photos. And people weren't that much better at it. The difference between people and machine guessing was 1 or 2 percent.

I asked the guys that run the project, how they proved that such a division, based only on a photo, was even possible. They didn't understand the question, they just assumed that you can do it.

They couldn't improve their results in the end. Maybe they sucked at teaching neural networks, or maybe a lot of faces just are unisex if you remove gender markers.

I bring this anecdote because this guys, in my eyes, made a reasonable assumption. An assumption that since they in most situations can guess what's in someone pants by seeing someones face, the face has this information.

The assumption that we could somehow separate good from bad, when we rewrite school books every year, when we try to calculate "half-life of knowledge", when philosophy as a science isn't over, and every day there are political and ideological debates about what's best, is a very-very unreasonable assumption.
by Dove | 2025-05-25 09:07:57+00:00
It's normal for achievement in any given genre to have a golden age. It can happen at any time and for mysterious reasons, but I think it is very common to have a golden age right when something new begins to mature and gain cultural momentum. I think that happened with cars and airplanes and movies and TV, to name just a few examples.

Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected.

Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again.

All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love.

For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts.

That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
by throwaway21371 | 2025-05-25 09:08:03+00:00
> But that reflection-driven magic is also where the pain starts. As your graph grows, it gets harder to tell which constructor feeds which one. Some constructor take one parameter, some take three. There’s no single place you can glance at to understand the wiring. It’s all figured out inside the container at runtime.

That's the whole point. Depdendency Inversions allows you to write part of the code in separation, without worrying about all the dependencies of each component you create and what creates what where.

If your code is small enough that you can keep all the dependencies in your head at the same time and it doesn't slow you down much to pass them all around all the time - DI isn't worth it.

If it becomes an issue - DI starts to shine. There are other solutions as well, obviously (mostly in the form of Object-Orientified global variables - for example you keep everything in GameWorld object and pass it everywhere).
by einpoklum | 2025-05-25 09:08:37+00:00
Part of the problem they had just before the switch to ribbons (i.e. with Office 2003) is how they were semi-hiding not-commonly-used menu items by default, so that you had to click an arrow-button on the bottom of the menu to get the full set if items.

I have to say that from my experience, ribbons make it harder for people to remember where buttons/functionality is located, and harder to remember that it even exists, relative to full menus + toolbars. And yet - newbies used to MS Office keep clamoring for ribbons, ribbons, ribbons (e.g. in LibreOffice).
by imiric | 2025-05-25 09:10:10+00:00
You seriously can't think of any legitimate value that an entirely digital currency can have?

Try asking an LLM. I'm not going to regurgitate what can be easily found elsewhere, or just deduced with a bit of thinking.

The constant groupthink negativity around this topic on HN is exhausting. It's just as bad as the hype.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-25 09:10:57+00:00
Dependency Injection has a fancy name that makes some developers uncomfortable, but it's really just all about making the code easier to test. Basically everything that the class depends upon has to be informed during construction.

This can be done manually, but becomes a chore super fast - and will be a very annoying thing to maintain as soon as you change the constructor of something widely used in your project to accept a new parameter.

Frameworks typically just streamline this process, and offers some flexibility at times - for example, when you happen to have different implementations of the same thing. I find it funny that people rally against those Frameworks so often.

To make things more concrete, let's say you have a method that gets the current date, and has some logic there (for example, it checks if today is EOM to do something). In Java, you could do `Instance.now()` to do this.

This will be a pain in the ass to test, you might need to test, for example a date when there's a DST change, or February 28th in a leap year, etc. With DI you can instead inject an `InstantSource` to your code, and on testing you can just mock the dependency to have a predictable date on each test.
by draven | 2025-05-25 09:11:05+00:00
I have one, I used it a few times. Once for a 3 days backpacking trip, it was difficult starting it in the morning as temperature was only a bit above 0 degC. Then for another 3 day hike where I used it to boil water for two persons it took so long that other people were done eating where we started.

I also had the fuel bottle leak in my pack (and the friend I was hiking with forgot his gas canister), fun times.

Now I'm mainly using a small gas canister (100g) and a small titanium burner (20g I think?) and I find the (small) added weight worth it.

Alcohol stoves are great if you have time and it's not too cold, plus it's easy to take only the fuel you need. With gas canisters you have to take the whole thing, and after a while you may end up with several partially empty canisters and have to weight them to take the one with the amount of remaining fuel the closest to what you'll need for your trip. I have 3 or 4 of those at the moment.
by mancerayder | 2025-05-25 09:11:26+00:00
Thanks for that link. I was a fan of the original Dragon Age: Origins and hated what came after. Everything has to be an action hack and slash, brainless but pretty.

They got it wrong and I hope it hurts their pocket book.

We struck gold with Kingdom Come: 2 which is indie and RPG and perfect in every way. EA should have stuck to sports games.
by consistentlytop | 2025-05-25 09:11:40+00:00
Games are looked at the same way like other businesses, if there is a way to make money they will take it. They are backed by investors who want to see returns. Long be gone the times games were about gaming.

And the biggest problem is, if there's demand for these practices they will keep appearing. If people keep giving into the micro-transactions why would developers stop implementing them?

It also depends what kind of games you want to focus on, competitives require new content = $$ for development vs single player one time purchase.

And that's another topic for discussion, where you're paying/supporting the game and don't see the love/quality. You can see how sloppy publishers became, e.g. Blizzard with Overwatch as prime example, being overtaken by Marvel Rivals (chinese devs). They use the same tactics but make peope feel heard with their feedback, dev communication, and implementation speed.
by pydry | 2025-05-25 09:13:52+00:00
It's not just not needed for small projects it is actively harmful.

It's also actively unhelpful for large projects which have relatively more simple logic but complex interfaces with other services (usually databases).

DI multiplies the amount of code you need - a high cost for which there must be a benefit. It only pays off in proportion to the ratio of complexity of domain logic to integration logic.

Once you have have enough experience on a variety of different projects you should hopefully start to pick up on the trade offs inherent in using it to see when it is a good idea and when it has a net negative cost.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-05-25 09:14:39+00:00
To be fair, gundmc's original comment was rather prosocial as these things go:

>I find this use of "Catholic" pretty offensive and distasteful.

They didn't claim their preferences were universal. Nor did they attempt any personal attack on the person they were responding to. They simply described their emotional reaction and left it at that.

If everyone's initial default was the "gundmc approach" when they were offended, the internet would be a much nicer place :-)

So yeah, as far as I'm concerned, everyone in this comment chain is simply lovely :-)
by ololobus | 2025-05-25 09:14:53+00:00
The title and overall ‘take’ are very broad, it starts with

> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.

But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then.

Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons:

1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well

2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc.

3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great.

UPD: formatting
Show HN: Chaining VEO 2's 8-second clips into 2-minute videos with sync audio
by abilafredkb | 2025-05-25 09:15:24+00:00
The technical challenge: VEO 2 only generates 8-second clips with no audio. I needed to create longer marketing videos, so I built a system that chains multiple clips into cohesive 2-minute videos with synchronized narration. The core technical problems I solved: 1. Script Continuity Across Clips VEO 2 doesn't maintain context between generations. I built a script parser that breaks longer narratives into 8-second segments while maintaining visual and narrative continuity. Each segment gets contextual prompts that reference the previous clip's end state. 2. Seamless Visual Transitions To avoid jarring cuts between clips, I analyze the final frame of each segment and use it to inform the opening prompt of the next segment. This creates natural visual flow across the 8-second boundaries. 3. Audio Synchronization Pipeline Since VEO 2 is silent, I integrated Google's Gemini Flash audio model with a custom FFmpeg pipeline:

Parse the script timing Generate audio segments that match video pacing Use FFmpeg to sync audio with video transitions Handle audio crossfades between clip boundaries

4. Cost Optimization At current VEO 2 pricing, a 2-minute video costs ~$60 in API calls. I built request batching and caching to minimize redundant generations. The system can theoretically generate longer videos, but I capped it at 2 minutes due to cost considerations. This powers the video generation feature in my marketing tool Smarketly, but the core chaining technique could work for any VEO 2 application needing longer content. Technical questions I'm still working on:

Better frame-to-frame consistency algorithms More efficient prompt engineering for visual continuity

Happy to share code snippets or discuss the technical implementation!

But you can check what i'm building this on by visiting https://smarketly.lema-lema.com
by roenxi | 2025-05-25 09:15:52+00:00
> But with a frequentist interpretation we have to imagine a large number of parallel universes where everything remains the same except for the mass of Saturn. That's overly prescriptive of what probability means.

That isn't much of an argument to the mathematicians. Nobody ever came up with a compelling explanation for what -1 sheeps look like and yet negative numbers turned out to be extremely practical. If it is absurd and provably works then the math community can roll with that.
by zeristor | 2025-05-25 09:16:20+00:00
Delivering big projects can’t be taken for granted.

The Eurotunel seemed to have been delayed when they belatedly realised they hadn’t realised cooling was needed for all the fast trains passing through.

The Elizabeth line seemed to be beset by bonuses for management, skewering things, and the realisation that everything needed to have paperwork evidence for safety.

Meanwhile Paris is building a huge new phase of the RER, and Melbourne is re-jiggering their rail system too.

HS2 and the cost keep escalating.

Is there a running list of huge gotcha’s for gigs projects?
by mycatisblack | 2025-05-25 09:16:22+00:00
Come to think of it, our societies have a lot of mechanisms to ensure that human fossils will be close to non-existing. In my part of the world, bodies or even the smallest remains are retrieved. Even if it means dredging a lake. And when they dredge the lake they find a different body or clues to solve a decades-long disappearance mystery. What I’m getting at is that our bodies always end up in a wooden box or incinerated. Neither of which is conducive to fossilisation.

I wonder if there could be a way to opt for “likely natural fossilisation” in your testament.
by _pdp_ | 2025-05-25 09:17:56+00:00
Obviously this should not be taken as a representative case and I will caveat that the problem was not trivial ... basically dealing with a race condition I was stuck with for the past 2 days. The TLDR is that all models failed to pinpoint and solve the problem including Claude 4. The file that I was working with was not even that big (433 lines of code). I managed to solve the problem myself.

This should be taken as cautionary tale that despite the advances of these models we are still quite behind in terms of matching human-level performance.

Otherwise, Claude 4 or 3.7 are really good at dealing with trivial stuff - sometimes exceptionally good.
by usrusr | 2025-05-25 09:18:49+00:00
You don't even need AI for the death of shared media culture. Just look at the end of broadcast and the rise of subscription services: movies like Star Wars or Back To The Future could only reach their status as cultural icons through the low and wide end of the licensing ramp. A successful cinema release might make a movie the talk of the month, but long lasting cultural relevance only came from broadcast repeats. Stuff that stays on a subscription will only ever reach permanents and hoppers.
by sireat | 2025-05-25 09:18:58+00:00
As you get older, you have to become much pickier which if any wheels to reinvent.

As others said reinventing the wheel is fantastic for learning, but not so for production / real life stuff.

So for example implementing your own transformers from scratch - great for learning but for 99% it would not meaningfully change how you use LLMs for mundane things.

So only when the domain is really really meaningful to you, you could consider reinventing the wheel and even then do not expect any immediately payoffs.

Those 4000 weeks pass by awfully quickly.

You have to pick your battles / wheels.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-05-25 09:19:26+00:00
The trust is already gone. He was voted in twice and there was enough support for the party as a whole that none of the other branches of government can contain him.

Plus he said that he intended to make the changes such as his supporters would never need to vote again. Things have already been dismantled in such ways that it will be impossible to build them back as they were.

Not to doom and gloom you out of hoping for the best but the Rubicon is rapidly fading into the distance.
by CaliforniaKarl | 2025-05-25 09:19:30+00:00
Also…

* Regarding the sealed food, I have reported faulty packaged-food items to the manufacturer two or three times, and in each instance was provided with a coupon for a free replacement.

* Regarding the store not having an item that they thought they did, you may find that there was no agreement in place requiring them to make it right, especially if no payment was exchanged, or if said payment was refunded. You may be limited to the “court of public opinion” that is Google Maps reviews etc..

But for the other two items, small-claims court, optionally preceded by a strongly-worded letter from a lawyer: You may find that an hour of lawyer time is worth it, to write such a letter and to generally act as a ‘sounding board’ for your issue.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-25 09:19:42+00:00
In the proxy server that I wrote back in 2000's, relying on the Windows NT/2000 scheduler for multiple CPUs was a big performance hit.

Threads would jump around cores, killing most performance gains by using multiple threads.

The workaround was the typical getting the amount of CPUs and park each thread on their own one, this alone made quite an observable improvement.

I think by Windows Server 2003, this scheduler issue was already sorted out.
by BSDobelix | 2025-05-25 09:20:48+00:00
The problem is to try making art/entertainment "professional" and primarily a money making machine.

>Why do video games kinda suck now

Well they don't, just the so called AAA/A studios produce the same shit over and over (like a fast and furious allegory). Just look at "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" for a recent example why modern games don't suck. The Disney's of gaming are dying and it's a win for every consumer.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-05-25 09:22:04+00:00
> One thing you need to keep in mind is that in the US things are stacked against people who would want to protest or engage in any kind of activism.

This is the kind of exceptionalism that got you into this mess. You don't think things are stacked against the populations in countries like Turkey and Serbia?

Yes of course France is very different in terms of the freedom of the population, but why is that? Because they demanded it!