MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by corysama | 2025-05-20 14:17:18+00:00
At the indie studio I used to work at, we had some folks with engine experience. So, we rolled our own 3D engine and asset pipeline from scratch. But, we didn't have the budget for an editor. Instead we set up the asset pipeline to hot-reload everything. Meshes, scenes, materials and animations from Maya. Textures from Photoshop. Audio as a pile of WAVs. Scripting in Lua. UI layout in XML. Changing the asset files would change the game live.

Then we added "State machines as Lua exported from Excel". Rows are states, columns are events, cells are code to execute given a state+event combo. I've done this a few times. It makes huge state machines manageable.

Our games were very stats-heavy and our designers liked Excel. So, a new thing we added as "Dynamic data sources as grids of Lua exported from Excel". So, fill out Excel sheets like normal. But, instead of Excel script, every cell is evaluable Lua code. Strings, numbers, bools, functions are all values in Lua. So, a cell might contain a number. Or, it might contain a function checking the contents of two other cells and optionally triggering an event on some other object.

We shipped multiple games on a single executable using this system. Artists could lay out 3D scenes and 2D UIs with hooks for the Lua to control it. And, the designers could populate scenes and UIs from Excel dynamically according to the state of the game. The programmers mostly worked on game-agnostic features in C++, and the heavier side of scripting in Lua for game-specific features.

Aside: Lua is being so dynamically typed makes it not great for large-scale software engineering. But, https://teal-language.org/ might be a good TypeScript-For-Lua. I haven't tried it. Also, are there any Lua debuggers newer than the ancient https://github.com/unknownworlds/decoda that require zero integration? Decoda just need a pdb of your executable and it can automatically debug any scripts passing through the Lua library.

Eventually, we switched to Unity for corporate reasons. As a primary implementer of our custom engine, I think the switch was overall a good thing. Our games had started to outgrow what our little engine team could deliver. The artists reported they felt slightly less productive working in Unity's editor. I switched roles to finding and working around the undocumented bugs in Unity that we ran into. Then later finding which bugs had been fixed without being mentioned in the release notes so I could delete my work-arounds. It was a very boring couple of years until the company burned to the ground because of the same corporate reasons that lead us to switch to Unity :P
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-20 14:17:30+00:00
Apple TV/iTunes shows every season of Roseanne, including the controversial 10th and final season during which she made such racist tirades that led to the spin-off/soft-reboot (The Conners) is on sale today.

If you lost previous purchases, that sounds like an account question between you and Apple. Other than your anecdote here I don't see complaints come up in web searches that they removed it from people's libraries.
by parpfish | 2025-05-20 14:17:50+00:00
This is also how I've often thought about deep learning -- focusing on the geometry of the data at each layer rather than the weights and biases is far more revealing.

I've always been hopeful that some algebraic topology master would dig into this question and it'd provide some better design principles for neural nets. which activation functions? how much to fan in/out? how many layers?
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-20 14:18:10+00:00
I am a bit disappointed because they didn't measure things like last name bias. By far, the biggest factor affecting resume priority is last name. There are many law suits where a candidate applies to companies twice, once with a generic European-origin name, the other with their own non-european-sounding name and the result is just very sad.

I would be curious to know if AI is actually better at this. You can train or ask humans to not have this bias, but you can with some certainty train an AI model to account for this bias and have it so that it is more fair than humans could ever be.
by daveguy | 2025-05-20 14:19:03+00:00
The post you replied to was asking for examples based on the general critical discussions they have seen.

And no offense to the GP, but they clearly aren't an expert in the field or they wouldn't be asking.

Probably should have replied directly to the post you replied to as much as yours. Was just pointing out that "not useful in any field whatsoever" is not something I've seen from anyone in the field. Even the article doesn't say that.
by hobs | 2025-05-20 14:19:47+00:00
This is also what I love about rebuilding some existing architecture that's not working for a business, its doing mostly the second part - the system is working but it - costs too much, is too slow, doesn't realize some goal, etc - and often times a big part of that problem is because the original intent of the author was not expressed properly.

Usually its not enough time and skills to solve the particular problem, but the most satisfying thing is building a new system that expresses the intent of the original author but at 2% of its original resource usage.
by palmotea | 2025-05-20 14:20:12+00:00
> If a system can be screwed up merely by giving teachers and students access to useful tools, maybe it wasn't that great in the first place.

That's a pretty stupid take. A "useful tool" is only useful in a context, and we really only want that tool used to to good. It's not good to have tool used to do bad things. If a school system can be screwed up merely by giving all students free access to guns, maybe is wasn't that great in the first place, amirite?

Essays (for instance) are a means to an end of developing young minds (which is a good thing) by getting them to engage with something. If your "useful tool" makes bypassing that engagement (cheating) simple and easy, those young minds will float through less developed.

There's a lot of hype about LLM tutors, but I don't see that solving much. They'll end up tutoring LLM students, so the real student can invest more effort in playing some addictive video game.

And then that decayed state will become the new normal, and some idiot will declare it's the best because that's what he knows.
by runevault | 2025-05-20 14:20:32+00:00
To some degree subsets of this exist.

For example for 2d games it is possible to use Tiled as a level editor if you build your game (or some tool) to parse out tiled's file format and turn it into in-game levels.

A more general purpose editor in line with Unity or Godot's that includes the ability to attach functionality to everything would be much harder since the specifics of that will be much more engine specific.
by earthicus | 2025-05-20 14:20:51+00:00
"The researchers analyzed bilingual dictionaries between English and more than 600 languages, looking for what they call “lexical elaboration,” in which a language has many words related to a core concept. It’s the same phenomenon that fueled the Inuit debate. But this study brings a twist: rather than the number of words, it measured their proportion, the slice of dictionary real estate taken up by a concept."

This seems inadequate to make the kinds of claims the researchers are quoted as asserting in the article.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-05-20 14:21:24+00:00
There are machines these days that change sleepers automatically. I do not know if they do gauge conversion, but changing track (meaning replacing old one) and sleepers nowadays is fully automated.

I imagine running a machine in reverse, removing the track and changing sleepers and one moving forward at the same time installing the new track only. Or have one remove the old sleepers and track and and another one installing new sleepers and track (imagine building new track kind of operation).
by elzbardico | 2025-05-20 14:21:26+00:00
Why would you not if you don't incur in external debt doing so?

The real wealth is not dollars or pounds or whatever, the real wealth is goods and services.

Having access to goods and service is what gives you a better living standard, the money is just a way to exchange them and to store value.

The US has the privilege of having high international demand for its currency, as it is the default global reserve currency. Of course, it incurs some costs, like having to have the most powerful military in the world, being implicitly responsible for making sure navigation waters are free and unimpeded for commerce, and having to try to keep the powder keg from where most of the energy that runs the world comes from, the middle east, from exploding.

In exchange, if you want more oil? more steel? more children toys? more paint? more chips? You can just use your dollars to buy it, and thus making sure your citizens have access to an unimaginable amount of stuff and services.

You can make the world work for you in exchange for dollars. And the world can buy your advanced tech and services with those dollars, and can use those dollars to also buy things they need from other countries without a lot of the complication of multiple exchange rates and/or barter schemes.

And the best part? Your government can run a lot of programs and not care much about raising taxes, because all those sellers after they use part of the dollars for buying stuff from you and between themselves, will usually have some extra dollars that they are going to save for a rainy day. And what is the best way to keep those dollars safe? Well, buying american treasury bonds!

Yeah, you can exaggerate a little bit and end up deindustrializing yourself too much, or go too hard on the consumption frenzy thing and end up with too much trash, environmental issues and household debt. But those are problems that come from the abuse, from the over enthusiastic use of this privilege. And I hope they can be solved (don't ask my how).

The system actually works for anyone involved. Nobody is really interested on this de-dolarization stuff as long as America also doesn't abuse its power too much.

International commerce is a complex machine, and everybody depends on it, everyone know that changing the current system too much would disrupt international commerce for years. Yeah, in the long run, everything would converge to some new equilibrium, but nobody fucking knows what that equilibrium would be, if it would be stable, and crucially, how much time it would take for it to be achieved. As Keynes taught: In the long run we will be all dead.

No country wants their dollar reserves to become dust, especially not china, they sweated a lot to accumulate all those nice treasury bonds.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-20 14:21:32+00:00
The objective they try to achieve is not to slow down Russia's invasion into Europe, but to stop them at the border by being able to move assets throughout Europe relatively quickly. If they gain a proper foothold and full access to "euro gauge" rails, it's a different fight.

Of course, if it does go that far, tanks and trains can move rolling stock, rip up the tracks, blow up bridges and other infrastructure behind them if they're forced to retreat.
by profchemai | 2025-05-20 14:21:34+00:00
Once I read "This has been enough to get us to AGI.", credibility took a nose dive.

In general it's a nice idea, but the blogpost is very fluffy, especially once it connects it to reasoning, there is serious technical work in this area (i.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.1869) that has expanded this idea and made it more concrete.
by motoboi | 2025-05-20 14:21:41+00:00
Your comment sits in the nice gradient between not seeing at all the obvious relationships between deep learning and topology and thinking that deep learning is applied topology.

See? Everything lives in the manifold.

Now for a great visualization about the Manifold Hypothesis I cannot recommend more this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdNYw6qwuNc

That helps to visualize how the activation functions, bias and weights (linear transformations) serve to stretch the high dimensional space so that data go into extremes and become easy to put in a high dimension, low dimensional object (the manifold) where is trivial to classify or separate.

Gaining an intuition about this process will make some deep learning practices so much easy to understand.
by behnamoh | 2025-05-20 14:22:01+00:00
> a few intuitions coming from theory (that was not topology).

I think these 'intuitions' are an after-the-fact thing, meaning AFTER deep learning comes up with a method, researchers in other fields of science notice the similarities between the deep learning approach and their (possibly decades old) methods. Here's an example where the author discovers that GPT is really the same computational problems he has solved in physics before:

https://ondrejcertik.com/blog/2023/03/fastgpt-faster-than-py...
by hashbrown490 | 2025-05-20 14:22:05+00:00
Hi, co-founder of Roam, Josh here. I don't recall your case ever being brought up to me, but as Baibhav said in his comment, we have strict no-access rule for engineers. They (and me) are only allowed to open your graph if given explicit permission by you through support. We have always had this rule and it's in our terms and conditions.

I think I found your account and I don't see any access logs to your graph from anyone other than your account. If you can provide any more info or screenshots of we would be able to dig deeper into exactly what you saw. It could have been a console log or a hard coded employee email in the code.

We've always cared deeply about user's privacy and ownership over their notes. This is why we've had this policy from the start and focused heavily on local first features and data portability. We offer fully offline graphs, where the data never touches our server and is never able to be accessed by anyone on our team. We also offer fully encrypted graphs, which are stored on our servers but are not able to be read by anyone without the password (our team cannot read your data).
by haiku2077 | 2025-05-20 14:22:06+00:00
WOTC's struggles with adapting DnD go back much further. During the development of Neverwinter Nights, Bioware was micromanaged intensely by WOTC, down to individual questlines and game mechanics. They ended up shipping a brilliant, powerful storytelling engine and a campaign full of repetitive fetch quests and tedious encounters.
by scuff3d | 2025-05-20 14:22:18+00:00
"I suspect that scientists are switching to AI less because it benefits science, and more because it benefits them."

This is a huge problem in software, and it's not restricted to AI. So much of what has been adopted over the years has everything to do with making the programmers life easier, but nothing to do with producing better software. AI is a continuation of that.
by seniorThrowaway | 2025-05-20 14:22:33+00:00
>But WSL2 is freaking incredible

It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-20 14:22:49+00:00
It touches everything from jobs and creativity to ethics and control.

And the results from all that "touching" are mixed at best.

Example: IBM and McDonalds spent 3 years trying to get AI to take orders at drive-thru windows. As far as a "job" goes, this is pretty low hanging fruit.

Here are the results:

https://apnews.com/article/mcdonalds-ai-drive-thru-ibm-bebc8...
by chapman4444 | 2025-05-20 14:23:09+00:00
I’ve used GPT-4-turbo for months with production-grade scripting tasks where prompts like “fix only,” “don’t reformat,” or “return the full script” were obeyed consistently.

After GPT-4o launched, the same prompts started failing — the model rewrites logic, strips formatting, omits output, or reorders blocks even when explicitly told not to.

This GitHub repo documents specific examples with prompt/output comparisons: https://github.com/chapman4444/gpt4o-regression-report

OpenAI support asked me to submit real cases. If you’ve run into this, I’d love to compare notes or add more examples.
by sota_pop | 2025-05-20 14:23:45+00:00
I disagree with this wholeheartedly. Sure, there is lots of trial and error, but it’s more an amalgamation of theory from many areas of mathematics including but not limited to: topology, geometry, game theory, calculus, and statistics. The very foundations (i.e. back-propagation) is just the chain rule applied to the weights. The difference is that deep learning has become such an accessible (sic profitable) field that many practitioners have the luxury of learning the subject without having to learn the origins of the formalisms. Ultimately allowing them to utilize or “reinvent” theories and techniques often without knowing they have been around in other fields for much longer.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-20 14:24:12+00:00
Surely some of the model bias comes from targeting benchmarks like this one. It takes left-wing views as axiomatically correct and then classifies any deviation from them as harmful. For example, if the model correctly understands the true gender ratios in various professions it's declared to be a "stereotype" and that the model should be fixed to reduce harm.

I'm not saying any specific lab does use your benchmark as a training target, but it wouldn't be surprising if they either did or had built similar in house benchmarks. Using them as a target will always yield strong biases against groups the left dislikes, such as men.
by jessmartin | 2025-05-20 14:24:17+00:00
This seems like a good flow! I end up adding a "spec" and "todo" file for each feature[1]. This allows me to flesh out some of the architectural/technical decisions in advance and keep the LLM on the rails when the context gets very long.

[1] https://notes.jessmart.in/My+Writings/Pair+Programming+with+...
by w4rh4wk5 | 2025-05-20 14:24:34+00:00
Out of curiosity, do you have some pointers for getting into C# for these kinds of projects? I've only used C# for standalone win32 applications and inside of Unity.

I am familiar with low-level game engine stuff in C/C++, but always discarded C# as not being viable for cross-platform projects (as in game consoles). Guess I was wrong. :)
by jongjong | 2025-05-20 14:25:42+00:00
My take is that the US likes to export US dollars... Then wealthy foreigners don't know what to do with them, so they pour them into the NASDAQ and NYSE and fill the pockets of US executives. The US can also leverage its powerful military to coerce artificial demand for USD within foreign nations to prevent it from being redeemed for US labor. Like how the US coerced Australia into a ridiculously expensive AUKUS deal; really, it's just a scheme to prop up USD and has nothing to do with submarines.

The US has long been playing a game where they give other nations currency that it prints out of nothing on the pretext that this currency can be redeemed for something of real value, but then goes to great lengths to ensure that those foreign nations never actually redeem the currency. This is the 1971 gold crisis in a nutshell. Now the trade deficit in fiat money is just a continuation of this scheme... Backed by even less value. That's why it feels like western economies are being hollowed out. The US economy has been hollowed out and taking its allies down with it.

It's kind of ridiculous how much backlash Trump was getting for trying to do something that is both sensible and necessary. To restore the real economy.
by ivanjermakov | 2025-05-20 14:25:56+00:00
What adds oil to the flame is a bunch of "game templates" that you can buy and make your own game just by replacing the title screen and some models. E.g. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/stor...

And if you open Steam games and go to the newest, you see that nearly half of the releases is some version of a generic Unity/Unreal template game in a slightly altered "skin":

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2488370/Cash_Cleaner_Simu...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2073910/A_Webbing_Journey...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3498270/Better_Mart/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2625420/Drive_Beyond_Hori...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3163790/Toy_Shop_Simulato...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3023600/Horse_Farm_Simula...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3124550/Liquor_Store_Simu...
by coldpie | 2025-05-20 14:26:22+00:00
I worked on this problem for a bit. What's going on is the game relies on the OS-provided C runtime libraries ("msvcrt"-style things) to do its math. Wine's implementation of these libraries does not match Windows's perfectly. If all players are using the same implementation, then they will agree, and there are no problems, so people think it is working. But if a player on Wine tries to play against a player on Windows, they will fall out of sync because the math errors eventually add up.

That was as far as I was able to take it. Another much more skilled dev at CW dug in a lot deeper and wrote a blog post about it[1], but as far as I know the problem remains unsolved.

[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/rbernon/2022/9/12/ucrtcring...
Show HN: DVD dodge, a body movement web game
by getToTheChopin | 2025-05-20 14:28:17+00:00
I made a web game; it's called DVD Dodge.

Avoid the bouncing DVD logo and collect coins. You'll need to dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge your way to success.

To play you just need a regular webcam a willingness to embarrass yourself in front of your neighbours!

Created using threejs, rosebud, and mediapipe computer vision for body pose tracking.

Here's a direct link to play the game: https://rosebud.ai/d/bcfd9f57-97a2-4175-9fa2-2853b48f7994
by mindslight | 2025-05-20 14:28:31+00:00
Sure, "in the US". Obviously you don't want to be as ham-fisted as to directly reference the liability dynamic, or to pop the doctor's ego by reminding them that most of their job is pushing paperwork. The point is to take the medical system off the pedestal in your own mind, such that there is one less thing holding you back as you have to repeatedly advocate for yourself. And I would think the need to advocate for yourself applies everywhere (Sturgeon's law), regardless of whether the system is as antagonistic as the one in the US or not. The US system just drastically increases the possible damage from failing to do so.
by tantalor | 2025-05-20 14:28:32+00:00
Easy Integration - When you're done editing, save your level to a handy JSON file - one that is easily parsed to give you immediate access to all of the tiles, decals, and entities you've authored!

That still leaves a lot to be desired. Am I expected to write all the code to import this format into my engine of choice? That's not exactly "easy".

For instance, is there tooling to import into GameMaker? That would seem to be table stakes.
by mathgradthrow | 2025-05-20 14:28:33+00:00
The US position on the ICC is very reasonable. Absolutely no one should agree to be under the jurisdiction of an independent international court, but at least many of its members signed on to it.

The court believes that it has jurisdiction over anyone involved in a conflict with a signatory. This is why the president is preauthorized by congress to use military force against the Netherlands, in the event that an american or allied service member is held there.