MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ak_111 | 2025-05-20 08:51:39+00:00
I appreciated Dilbert, but then he started showing up in my timeline amplifying pro-Gaza bombings tweets.

I was surprised and disappointed with that as those Hasbara takes were the geopolitical propoganda equivalent to pointy-hair boss's office politics speech balloons ("the only way to rescue the hostages is to bomb everything, including the captors... and the hostages").
by yakcyll | 2025-05-20 08:51:52+00:00
It's worth remembering when deciding on rolling out your own engine that this is a multi-layer trade-off as well, I have an anecdote on this.

I have decided a couple years back that my setup will have a hand-rolled physics engine, specifically for the reasons you outlined - having complete understanding over what the code does, how it's structured and how it manages data - but after starting actually-not-so-arduous process of getting it together, it quickly became rather clear that whatever I could implement would pale in comparison to solutions that are robust, field-tested and generally created by professionals.

Physics development in particular is known for wonky nonsense, but there are better and worse heuristics and ways to deal with their shortcomings; a handful of books and Youtube presentations still couldn't prepare me for the actual depth of the problems ahead. What I have now works, is relatively stable in initial demos and I am proud of it, I'm going to tweak and use it in the game I'm working on. It is however pretty obvious already that a lot of time is yet to be spent on massaging jank out of the equations.

I wholeheartedly recommend spending more than several weeks on implementing various subsystems if one either is generally interested in how these things work or silently wishes for that badge of honour (it shines brightly). However, as they say, if you want to make games, do NOT make an engine. Not just because of the time it takes - it doesn't have to take that much (even though it usually does) - but also because along with total control over the medium for expressing your creative vision, it gives you total responsibility for it as well. Sometimes it's better to work in the confines of rules set out by actual engine developers.
by cornholio | 2025-05-20 08:52:25+00:00
For now, the reasoning abilities of the best and largest models are somewhat on par with those of a human crackpot with an internet connection, that misunderstands some wild fact or theory and starts to speculate dumb and ridiculous "discoveries". So the real world application to scientific thought is low, because science does not lack imbeciles.

But of course, models always improve and they never grow tired (if enough VC money is available), and even an idiot can stumble upon low hanging fruits overlooked by the brightest minds. This tireless ability to do systematic or brute-force reasoning about non-frontier subjects is bound to produce some useful results like those you mention.

The comparison with a pure financial swindle and speculative mania like NFTs is of course an exaggeration.
by impossiblefork | 2025-05-20 08:52:32+00:00
We've only had LLMs for seven years, and it's all basically all refinements of the transformer with minor additions.

I think there are paths to substantial architecture improvements-- things resembling edge transformers, things like adding extra tokens sort of like how that is done in vision transformers etc.

For this reason I think employment doomerism isn't very unreasonable. The architectures aren't here-- we simply haven't figured out how to substantially improve the transformer, but it's surely possible.

I myself made experiments recently where I got improved performance on some demanding toy problems. There must be hundreds of people working on this kind of thing, and even if there aren't the general research is building knowledge that will eventually guide people to design better architectures.
by miroljub | 2025-05-20 08:52:49+00:00
Yeah, I totally agree with what's being said here. It's a tough pill to swallow when you realize just how entrenched Microsoft is in the business world, and how difficult it would be to get everyone to make the switch to Linux.

I mean, think about it - most companies are still stuck on Windows 10 or 11, and they're using all those Microsoft services like Teams, Outlook, and Exchange. It's like they're trapped in this Microsoft ecosystem, and it's gonna take a lot more than just a few people saying "hey, let's switch to Linux" to get them out of it.

And don't even get me started on the IT departments in these places. A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing. They're using Windows 11 at home, but they have no idea how to deal with all the outdated Windows 7 machines that are still being used in manufacturing.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been really smart about this. They've managed to get their products and services woven into the fabric of how we do business on a global scale. It's gonna take a lot more than just a few open-source projects to change that.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-20 08:52:53+00:00
AAA and AAAA games became (expensive) gateways to microtransaction based money extraction application, in my opinion.

I enjoy older, smaller games nonproportionately more when compared to big titles which require much more resources and time. Yes they look nice, yes they use every documented and undocumented feature of my GPU, yes "it's so fluffy", but it is not enjoyable, esp. with shoved down microtransactions.

If we're talking FPS, give me any Half-Life (and Portal) title and I'm good. Gameplay first, unique art direction, good story, and a well built universe which is almost palpable with lore.

If we're talking RTS, C&C series, Dune Emperor, Supreme Commander and StarCraft is enough.
by meheleventyone | 2025-05-20 08:53:19+00:00
The full quote is:

> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Sometimes the best way to tackle that 3% is upfront when you're deciding on your system architecture.
by Gud | 2025-05-20 08:53:28+00:00
Scott Adam is the reason why I chose not to pursue a career in IT, despite my love for computers.

Today I am an on site high voltage test engineer. People respect what I do and let me do my work in peace, mostly.

Reading the horror stories I so often see coming from the IT world, I am grateful to use my computer skills mostly as a hobby. Although my computer and networking skills do come in useful in my profession, I’m glad it’s not the source of my income.
by Arwill | 2025-05-20 08:53:29+00:00
>On the other hand, if you want to make a hyper-realistic, open-world RPG, then rolling your own is probably not a good idea.

I would say its the exact opposite to that. For that genre, its best to roll your own engine, or pick something open-source. The list of problems that i firsthand experienced:

There are lots of features and options in the engines, but they are not all usable at the same time. One feature disables the other. You look at the list of all the nice things the engine can do, but then at some point you figure it can't do (or can't efficiently do) what you absolutely need. All those awesome looking graphics are not practically usable, simply not performant or not compatible to be usable.

There are features that only work in "baked" mode. You "bake" it in the engine editor, and there is no way of changing that at game run time. Unreal is the most limited in this, but Unity is not much better. Some game developers reverse-engineer Unity internal asset formats with a hex-editor, so that they can change feature behavior at runtime. At that point, rolling your own engine makes more sense. One example i saw was a developer reverse engineering the light probe group asset file, so that he could add a new light probe group at runtime.

Engine API's change drastically from version to version. All the code and scripts need refactoring, all the time. You run into a breaking bug, and the only solution is upgrading, but upgrading means breaking your whole codebase.

You need to go trough the engine's abstractions, and bad luck if that can't be done efficiently. An example of this: Unity HDRP applies screen-space ambient occlusion (among other effects). It applies the effect over the whole screen. If there is a third-person view of the character from close or first-person hands/weapons rendered, then even over that. That results in a white halo around the first-person hands/weapon, looks bad. In a custom engine, the solution is simple, apply the full-screen effect before the first-person hands are rendered, then render the hands without the effect. Its a matter of switching the order of a couple of lines of code.

The solution is github and the BSD/MIT/Apache licensed game engines and libraries.
by danielbarla | 2025-05-20 08:53:45+00:00
I get the argument, and sure, it's viable in certain circumstances. But it's a few weeks _per area / topic_. In my opinion there are enough areas in a typical engine that you could study them for a year and not get through the material. There's graphics, audio, networking, physics, etc. I think the sweetspot is to understand each well enough that you have some insight into what the engine is doing for you, not necessarily to be able to (re-)implement it.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-20 08:54:05+00:00
Microsoft is absolutely selling them as pa and already selling a lot. I think HNers being mostly software developers live in a bubble when it comes to the reality of what LLMs are actually used for.

Speedy minutes are absolutely not a template away. Anyone who ever had to write minutes for a complicated meetings knows it’s hard and requires a lot of back and forth for everyone to agree about what was said and decided.

Now you just turn on Copilot and you get both a transcript and an adequate basis for good minutes. Bonus point: it’s made by a machine so no one complains it has bias.

Some people here are blind to how useful that is.
by jabl | 2025-05-20 08:54:09+00:00
Not incidentally, 1524mm is exactly 5 feet. Which was the rail gauge widely used in the southern US states. The Russian tsar hired someone who had been building railroads in the US south to design his railroad, and here we are.

The 1520mm was some Soviet effort to "metrify" their railways while keeping compatibility with existing rolling stock.
by Y_Y | 2025-05-20 08:54:25+00:00
Yes. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, but I think website redesigns are just a marketing thing (and fun for web developers) and rarely benefit the user. Nasa ADS has a fantastic (if super old-looking) site for many years that was clean and fast and did the job, they spent a lot of time and effort jazzing it up with pictures and javascript, and now it still just does the same thing.
by JdeBP | 2025-05-20 08:56:57+00:00
Yes. In those days of long ago, I saw the .COM extension with my own eyes and ran QBASIC /EDIT directly just for kicks.

Once upon a time, this knowledge was one of those non-secret secrets that made it onto the letters pages of the computer magazines and into every "MS-DOS secrets" book out there. (-:

And yes, Windows NT 4 had the MS-DOS QBASIC.
by arkey | 2025-05-20 08:56:58+00:00
> buying x times the exact same car when times comes to change cars is kinda just weird.

I would totally do that if I could. I have done it with shoes when I've had the good insight of thinking about it. I do it often with clothes when I find a good product that suits my needs. And I wish I could do it with my very-average-but-reliable car.

I'm dreading the moment I have to buy the next one and take the risky decision.

I am very fortunate to have an above average salary for where I am from, but what surprised me from going to pretty much broke to quite well off, is that my life didn't become flashy, it just became VERY comfortable with normal, everyday things.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-05-20 08:57:12+00:00
In Spain it's ongoing, very slowly, since the first international gauge high-speed rail line started operation in 1992.

It's a slow and quite annoying process. For example, to reach my region, trains from Madrid have to change gauge because my region still has the old one. Apart from spending around 10 minutes doing this, this has caused a lot of problems because it essentially means there is a single model of 300 km/h train that can make it here (others don't support gauge change) and to top it, said model turned out to be highly unreliable. This created a lot of political tension because of course we wanted 300 km/h trains like other regions, but now we're stuck with these lemons and our regional politicians push for gauge change, but the national government doesn't want to do it yet as it affects freight trains.

I hope at some point we get the change done in the whole national network, although generally it moves at a glacial pace. It makes sense to have seamless connection with France and the rest of Europe, and to be able to use the same trains everyone else does.
by Gravityloss | 2025-05-20 08:58:58+00:00
There's different frontiers. Good farmland used to be the big thing. And trade routes, like natural harbors or navigable rivers. So in many parts of the world, most of the best places were already taken and the "frontier" was worse land. But not so in Americas, because there was available land for reasons. You could have "fertile frontier".

Over time when farming technology improved, people could live self-sufficiently in worse places. Transportation technology changed as well. Railways, highways. And now remote working and data centers. So there have been frontiers also in the old world in that sense. The king of Sweden in the 1500s declared some eastern frontier areas as tax free for some time, as he wanted people to settle there to control those areas (in accords, some of it might have been Russia...). Many places have waxed and waned over the centuries. When Estonia gained independence for the second time, some Finnish farmers went there as there was excellent farmland that was very underutilized.

With modern knowledge you could even build up a great place to live almost anywhere. Good policies and cheap energy. Maybe fresh water is the hardest physical requirement.
by alkonaut | 2025-05-20 08:59:11+00:00
No, there is a threshold for the amount of subscriptions/SaaS I tolerate, and it’s basically a tiny handful of them and they’re occupied by streaming services etc. So your feeling is right, when it comes to me at least.

The App Store model of small one-off payments works for this use-case. But no matter how useful a web tool is I don’t think I’d ever sign up for a small monthly fee for it. The ”mental overhead” of that is absolutely massive.

Sadly even one off payments for web tools are a poor UX since there is no central broker to take care of it. Next time I visit I (maybe a different browser etc) it’s a hassle.

I’d much rather just use a worse tool that is free. Because SaaS fatigue is real. Sorry hobbyists and startup dreamers I’m not paying money for your SaaS. Not because it’s not good enough but because it’s nearly impossible to be good enough to make me go through a subscription process. Even as an older person who can afford it and is used to paying for things, I’d much rather waste hours of my own time than pay a subscription. Importantly, I’d also much rather pay $100 once than $5/mo even if I don’t foresee using it for more than a year.

Make it an App Store app and you can easily get $10 from me though, is the sad reality of it.
by szszrk | 2025-05-20 09:00:12+00:00
I would gamify workarounds for each of your points like it's a speedrun of Mario. These are typical low quality laws. You prohibit things randomly with good intentions and low focus on how this would be abused.

This just makes it way harder for small studios to operate, you tell them how to make business, you seem to know in advance what players want and what they don't.

1 - I would release a half baked game very early, then push basic content as DLCs for years and remake 2 years after "initial release". Or simply call it an Specific Hardware Targeted Port and release it 6 months after, by adding some crap like better accelerated shadows.

2 - as above. Original will be mostly useless.

5 - since the "initial release" is now just a random alpha demo, I have all the time I need to announce DLCs

6 - easy, my base prices will be 500 USD, I will aggressively discount. Like a Telco operator.

7 - I would make sure to break single-player game definition. Is Death Stranding single or multiplayer? I'd do something similar.

...
by jeduardo | 2025-05-20 09:00:29+00:00
6 years ago when I used Hetzner, it was widely known as unreliable, a provider where you could get hosting that delivered good performance for a cheap price. The tradeoff always was that you needed to treat each machine almost as EC2 Spot: it could go down at any time.

You also needed to consider that when this happened, the data inside the machine was mostly lost. Finally, you also needed to plan to graduate out of it as soon as you had enough money to go either to a colocated data center or the "real cloud".

I kept Hetzner as a backup provider in more than one company, mainly to have real machines for take home tests, back when hiring was plentiful. Even so, we often faced problems with the machines going down due to hardware or networking issues, and the need to rebuild them from the ground up. Those mirrored all tales of woe everyone in the department had from years of working with Hetzner, sometimes losing production data because the rules of the game were not followed.

So it seems that 6 years later their scale has increased but the experience remains the same. On the bright side, kudos to Hetzner for teaching waves of engineers about reliability and disaster recovery during all these years.
by benno128 | 2025-05-20 09:00:56+00:00
Yeah for sure: run it inside a virtual machine, or do some sort of docker magic.

You kind of need to pretend you are a whole computer for a programming language to be happy. There's built in assumptions they're running on a "real" computer. They assume they've got full access to network and disk. Installing packages often requires compiling C extensions, or running native binaries. All that stuff means the best way to sandbox is to virtualise a whole computer.

It's fun to do it with WebAssembly though, you get a lot of guarantees and it's quite light weight.
by consp | 2025-05-20 09:01:01+00:00
> they stated the mission was to make the delivery of end-to-end well-defined software a fully solved problem within a decade

You should look into the "business language as a programming" platforms and see how they are doing. Trying to eliminate all IT except for the bare minimum for years and going nowhere. I'm sceptical at all the "AI" companies branding their own product as the panacea. It is all marketing.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-05-20 09:01:23+00:00
Al Gore played a big role in getting political (and hence economic) support for the expansion of the Internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno... :

> Al Gore, a strong and knowledgeable proponent of the Internet, promoted legislation that resulted in President George H.W Bush signing the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. This Act allocated $600 million

> In the early 1990s the Internet was big news ... In the fall of 1990, there were just 313,000 computers on the Internet; by 1996, there were close to 10 million. The networking idea became politicized during the 1992 Clinton–Gore election campaign, where the rhetoric of the information highway captured the public imagination.

Your parent comment is either joining in on the ridicule side or at least in misquoting:

> Gore became the subject of controversy and ridicule when his statement, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", was widely quoted out of context. It was often misquoted by comedians and figures in American popular media who framed this statement as a claim that Gore believed he had personally invented the Internet.[54] Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-20 09:02:23+00:00
The system is already badly misaligned. Even ambitious students may consider it a better use of their time to use tools like LLMs to grind out more standardised points than use them to gain deeper understanding of a subject they may not consider important. Any STEM student targeting finance is basically uninterested in most of the subject matter, for example. This also far predates AI.

The suckers who actually want to learn will get even more badly screwed in such a system unless the assessment is balanced to favour actual knowledge. And not only at final assessment but from start to end because if you get screwed in the short term because your low marks while you get to grips with the subject gets you penalised, it takes a lot of foresight and fortitude not to buckle and just spam for points. Doing it "right" requires more teacher engagement, more parental engagement and generally more autonomy, effort and money all round. And even then you have the ever present problem of which group do you spend each marginal unit if effort on: the stronger or weaker students?
by spwa4 | 2025-05-20 09:03:07+00:00
The current prosecutor, Karim Khan, is the one that introduced the dependency on Microsoft platforms. He has not made any initiative to undo this, in fact as pointed out here, he's increasing that dependency further with internet services.

So calling this lessons learnt makes no sense. He hasn't learnt his lesson and is not displaying any intention to start now (given that he comes from a British/Pakistani family of conservative party politicians, which is also a family of sex offenders, that seems about par for the course)

It's weird how one needs to keep explaining to US and EU people: almost all governments do not take decisions based on how they'll affect people and/or the government involved. Different governments have different priorities. The decisions of the UN are targeted towards keeping their members happy and paying. The vast majority of governments worldwide are governments that were conquered by a group or even a family. These people see controlling government as a business and the business is to use control of the government to extract the maximum for that family. And joke all you want about Trump, it can be 1000x worse, and it generally is. The ICC isn't that bad, but it's pretty bad.

If you want to know what the ICC is (and isn't) about, read about how they went about prosecuting a Dutch citizen (their host country). It reads like a Blackadder script. The guy was accused, the Dutch government threatened, suddenly the accusation got dropped, he got knighted by the Queen in a New Year ceremony, got a pay rise. The ICC got a new building.

Google "DutchBat".