MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reactordev | 2025-07-06 06:23:14+00:00
Correct. The backends to these online games isn’t complicated, but it is protected. They want the ability to resell the entire service to another game studio to run.

This has happened a lot in the past. EverQuest, Pirates, Lots of mmos have changed studios and with that, the backend services needed to run them.

Now, that said, there are a few countries in the EU that you could reverse engineer the server and it’s totally legal. Some of the best fun I’ve had were on private WoW or Lineage 2 servers.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-06 06:23:35+00:00
Actually after a little more thought, I think both my initial proposition and my follow-up were wrong, as is yours and the previous commenter.

I don't think these leaders are necessarily driven by wealth or power. I don't even necessarily think they're driven by the goal of AGI or ASI. But I also don't think they'll flinch when shit gets real and they've got to press the button from which there's no way back.

I think what drives them is being first. If they were driven by wealth, or power, or even the goal of AGI, then there's room for doubts and second thoughts about what happens when you press the button. If the goal is wealth or power, you have to wonder will you lose wealth or power in the long term by unleashing something you can't comprehend, and is it worth it or should you capitalize on what you already have? If the goal is simply AGI/ASI, once it gets real, you'll be inclined to slow down and ask yourself why that goal and what could go wrong.

But if the drive is just being first, there's no temper. If you slow down and question things, somebody else is going to beat you to it. You don't have time to think before flipping the switch, and so the switch will get flipped.

So, so much for my self-consolation that this will never happen. Guess I'll have to fall back to "we're still centuries away from true AGI and everything we're doing now is just a silly facade". We'll see.
by morsch | 2025-07-06 06:23:55+00:00
Cursory research indicates that in the EU, they are:

If charging the battery of an electric heavy goods vehicle or bus requires supervision or involvement of the driver, then this time needs to be recorded as 'other work.' On the contrary, if the driver can freely dispose of her/his time while the battery is charging, then the time taken for the battery to charge has no effect on the breaks or the daily rest of the driver. Any movement of the vehicle from the charging location would be deemed to be an interruption or an end to a break or rest period.

https://corte.be/images/documents/CORTE_ENF_007_2024_Elec_ba...
by jotaen | 2025-07-06 06:24:12+00:00
Just a brief feedback on usage of the website: I’m not sure I understand what clicking on one of the projects on the homepage does. It always takes me to the same profile site of some “Anonymous Lurker” (supposedly me?) with some text written in first-person. I find this flow a little confusing as it’s not clear to me what I’m supposed to do or get out of that.
by anonzzzies | 2025-07-06 06:25:04+00:00
> there is next to no boarding advantage

Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.

> about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.

Not sure how it is in the US (I used uber there on vacation in the past, but on vacation, I don't worry about prices too much), but here prices jump heavily during surge; often from 40->50->38 euros in a few minutes; I'll just keep an eye on the app for a few minutes and pick it at a good point. Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price. I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them (these two are related). The last one I took was 3 weeks ago; I was 10 minute drive to the airport from some horrible 'business hotel' and I had an early flight, so I checked out, ordered an uber at 5am and waited; in front of me stopped a 'real' taxi (both are now legal and need licenses, but Taxi have Taxi on top); the driver got out to welcome his client which was not me but obviously he thought I was. We talked for a bit waiting for his real client and then he asked how much uber was; E15 I showed him. He said; cancel it and give me E15. Ok, so I got in front, the other client in the back. We arrived, and while waiting to park up, he shoved a terminal in my face with E15 on it, so I paid. We got out, he got the luggage from the other guy who asked 'how much is it'; E72,-. Cheers bro; made almost E90 for a 10 minute trip.

Point being; hating uber (and I used to refuse to use them) is making your life very hard for very little benefit. The taxis needed a kick up the arse and they still didn't learn anything. Still need to order far upfront, their app sucks and far more expensive. Not sure how they can exist (of course I do, they don't know uber exists, how to use it or they refuse to use it). I find if you are with 2+ people, they are often cheaper than the trains which is quite mental really in a country where 'people should take the train if they can'.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 06:25:49+00:00
You may be interested in an article I wrote in ;login: 23 years ago: https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/june-2002-volume-2...

At the time Perl was the thing I used in the way I use Python now. I spent a couple of years after that working on a mod_perl codebase using an in-house ORM. I still occasionally reach for Perl for shell one-liners. So, it's not that I haven't considered it.

Lua is in a sense absolutely stable unless your C compiler changes under it, because projects just bundle whatever version of Lua they use. That's because new versions of Lua don't attempt backwards compatibility at all. But there isn't the kind of public shaming problem that the Python community has where people criticize you for using an old version.

JS is mostly very good at backwards compatibility, retaining compatibility with even very bad ideas like dynamically-typed `with` statements. I don't know if that will continue; browser vendors also seem to think that backwards compatibility with boring technology like FTP is harmful.
by delusional | 2025-07-06 06:26:15+00:00
This is not a problem if "Democracy" but of "American democracy". You dont have to accept donations. You dont have to allow bribery. Democracy is wonderfully flexible, and a law that anybody seen attempting bribery of an official (defined however you want to define that) is instantly ousted, and unable to be an executive officer at any company for a period of however many years, is completely compatible with democracy.

Good democracies are built around making it take only a single good person for a good outcome, whole requiring vast conspiracies to get a bad outcome. American democracy has failed by making it nearly impossible to do anything good, while providing the bad actors near universal access to do as they please.

I don't like Trump, but the very idea that Elon Musk should, by virtue of being the richest guy, have any leverage against him, chills me to my last democratic molecule.
by SilasX | 2025-07-06 06:26:55+00:00
It's relative. I operationalize "why is X true?" as "update my worldmodel to the point that X is not surprising". The typical way to do that is to show a more general rule that applies, and which implies X. But yes, you can keep asking the question about the more general rule.

Why do things fall? -> A special case of the general law of gravitation.

Why does reality adhere to the general law of gravitation? A implication of matter distorting the shape of spacetime.

Why is reality such that matter distorts space-time?
by pcwelder | 2025-07-06 06:26:58+00:00
You've essentially just trained your own LM instead of using a pretrained large LM.

Speaking generically -- any place in your workflow you feel the task is not hard, you can use smaller and cheaper LM.

Smaller LMs come with accuracy reduction, particularly in tail cases. So in the real world this doesn't work out.

Also is gumble softmax usage intentional? It looks like a straightforward classifier that just needs regular softmax.
by visarga | 2025-07-06 06:27:12+00:00
It's not about achieving AGI as a final product, it's about building a perpetual learning machine fueled by real-time human interaction. I call it the human-AI experience flywheel.

People bring problems to the LLM, the LLM produces some text, people use it and later return to iterate. This iteration functions as a feedback for earlier responses from the LLM. If you judge an AI response by the next 20 rounds of interaction or more you can gauge if it was useful or not. They can create RLHF data this way, using hindsight or extra context from other related conversations of the same user on the same topic. That works because users try the LLM ideas in reality and bring outcome results back to the model, or they simply recall from their personal experience if that approach would work or not. The system isn't just built to be right; it's built to be correctable by the user base, at scale.

OpenAI has 500M users, if they generate 1000 tokens/user/day that means 0.5T interactive tokens/day. The chat logs dwarf the original training set in size and are very diverse, targeted to our interests, and mixed with feedback. They are also "on policy" for the LLM, meaning they contain corrections to mistakes the LLM made, not generic information like web scrape.

You're right that LLMs eventually might not even need to crawl the web, they have the whole society dump data into their open mouths. That did not happen with web search engines, only social networks did that in the past. But social networks are filled with our cultural wars and self conscious posing, while the chat room is an environment where we don't need to signal our group alignment.

Web scraping gives you humanity's external productions - what we chose to publish. But conversational logs capture our thinking process, our mistakes, our iterative refinements. Google learned what we wanted to find, but LLMs learn how we think through problems.
by khaki54 | 2025-07-06 06:27:30+00:00
Hmmm this reads like the author neither understands Docker or Linux, many of the issues they seem to have is just stuff they don't know the right approach to tackling.

Imagine pairing with a mid/Sr and watching them scroll up 40 commands in the terminal and they are complaining that bash won't let them up-arrow 10 lines at a time. In this case, someone writes 5000 words about how they can't get certbot working with their docker setup. They would benefit a lot from working with someone who knows what they are doing.
by LocalH | 2025-07-06 06:27:38+00:00
That's why I said "at least on the C64". This particular bug probably also happens on the VIC-20, but I don't know if PET BASIC 2.0 is the same or not. I'd also imagine the "protection" would break if loaded on BASIC 7 or 10 (although 10 was never finished, but it was based on BASIC 7 AFAIK, so there's that).
by jrflowers | 2025-07-06 06:28:36+00:00
If your position is that nothing the US did, despite how well-documented and agreed upon it is, had any influence on the fall of the USSR, then I can see how it would be easy to get confused.

So if “what did the US do?” wasn’t a question and you actually meant to write “I as a matter of ideology do not accept any US involvement in history”, then okay, cool. Otherwise if you actually want the question answered there’s a ton of information available, likely even some from whatever ideological angle you would prefer, since, again, it was so incredibly well-documented.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(1985%E2%80%931991)
by bigpeopleareold | 2025-07-06 06:29:51+00:00
This is exactly what I have been thinking lately, starting with looking at Oberon. It seems to me that writing a simple GUI should be the same as writing a simple text-oriented script. GUIs have their own challenges, of course. However, doing the GUI equivalent of print() statements to show calculation output is a think a modern operating system should do, not have a distance between user and the graphic system. At the moment, it's a pretty ideal, but there are cases I wish their was less friction with it.

edit: I never tried, but isn't this where Smalltalk comes in?
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-07-06 06:31:51+00:00
As you know, getting an entry-level job at your age will be very hard. Your best bet is to look at what employers are seeking by examining current job openings and using them as a guide for what to study. Try to identify the fundamentals you need to learn. I would even recommend applying to see if you get any responses; even securing an interview would be a plus. This will help you get prepared for your real job search once you are ready.

Find a job at a company, any job you qualify for, that has an IT department where you want to work. Make friends in the IT department and see if you can get the manager there to offer you an entry-level position once you learn what you need to know to do the job. Being a good employee in one department can take you a long way if you want to transfer to another.

Additionally, give yourself a deadline. Do not leave it open-ended; it's too easy to meander and get nowhere. It's also unfair to your wife to carry the load indefinitely. Plan out your journey before you quit your current job and stick to it.

FYI, programing as a job is no where nearly the same as programming as a hobby. The job is full of pressure to get things done and you write code you may have little interest in.

Good luck!
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | 2025-07-06 06:32:11+00:00
It gets even more disturbing when the algorithm (or a disgruntled former date reporting you to a tired and underpaid customer support agent overseas) decides to ban you from the dating apps and suddenly your chances of meeting someone go down dramatically (60% plus of all couples meet online in the US), with the apps having become the middlemen for most of dating connections: https://www.vice.com/en/article/banned-from-dating-apps/

Good luck ever getting back onto the apps, especially if you've ever used facial verification to validate that you're you. Every future attempt to sign up again will be immediately blocked. No way to appeal. Dystopian.
by taink | 2025-07-06 06:32:37+00:00
Again, I don't see the problem with new regulation disabling old design.

And I don't see how your points make the game impossible to morph into a playable state. For one thing, that's not what the campaign advocates for anyway.

Let's start with the basics: why would it need to remain in a playable state? The game is free-to-play. You could make such a game without micro transactions and the new regulations would be powerless. Second, these regulations wouldn't be retroactive, so Pokemon wouldn't have to comply.

But let's assume they want to anyway. Let's review what's blocking according to you. First, servers. "Reasonably playable" can be a subset of the features. I mean, the game could be made to run offline and things would be fine.

But maybe the game is too coupled with multiplayer features. Again, you could allow the player to select server IPs, and allow people to run server binaries on their own hardware. The initiative is very lenient on what you would have to provide, and I can imagine people determined to run big servers would exist if they still want to play. Player limits and server choice are not a major problem for other community driven games (WoW private servers, which I would argue are vastly more complex than Pokemon Go, do not really suffer from this). There might be friction, but that's reasonable.

Who needs anti-cheat? The game would still be reasonably playable. If the servers have a problem with the induced load, they could moderate and/or introduce their own anticheat. That's completely outside the scope of the regulation, though.

Map tiling is not an issue either. First, this responsibility could be offloaded to community servers. Second, I'll admit I might be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure low resolution maps are available for free, maybe some under the Open Street Map project. I'm unfamiliar with it though.

I doubt that when developing the game smaller development servers did not exist so developers could test their changes. Or local mocking. Anything.

So... I don't think such a game would be impossible to make. Harder? Sure, maybe. I do believe, however, that when you ask for payment, you are also supposed to act responsibly and allow your customers access to what they purchased. If they purchased a service, they ought to know when it stops at time of purchase.

If you decide to pull the plug, that's on you to untangle. Either make the plug repluggable, or make it so it doesn't need the plug to be able to run. That's all there is to it.
by LocalH | 2025-07-06 06:33:02+00:00
Of course it does. The whole idea of "Stop Killing Games" is that developers should not be able to summarily kill off a game that people have invested time and money into, just because it's not making them enough money going forward.

Developers should absolutely not have that choice. It's fine if you want to run a live service game where the optimal experience happens during active support. However, unless you as a dev are willing to refund every single purchaser of the game, in full, when you discontinue a game, then you are stealing from purchasers. Moreover, even if you are willing to give a full refund to all players, it's really shitty to just rip an experience away from people, never to be experienced again (whether in a watered-down or limited form, or not).

It's the same reason I don't agree with perpetual copyright, nor a copyright owner's right to suppress a work's availability. In almost all jurisdictions, copyright is intended to be a limited time right, with the rights eventually entering the public domain. If people can't access the work when it would become public domain, then that work is effectively stolen from the public in a way that mere non-commercial copyright infringement can never be theft.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-07-06 06:35:12+00:00
"digital preservation"... isn't.

What file format? What storage medium?

Good archives are all about the long, very long term. Sometimes the "we're borrowing it from our ((great-)grand)children" long term.

The storage mediums we plebeians use in our daily activities are absolutely not archival-quality.

Stories abound of institutions struggling to access old numeric archives. Here's just one off of the top of my head: https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre...

The other aspect is that archivists are routinely underfunded. The scanning equipment and storage systems are expensive. The archivists need to be trained to use them. As something that is by nature rarely used, it routinely gets the budgetary short straw.
by kqr | 2025-07-06 06:35:12+00:00
Ha, fun bit of history! Many of the listed problems with Perl can be configured away these days. I don't have time for a full list, but as two early examples:

- `perl -de 0` provides a REPL. With a readline wrapper, it gives you history and command editing. (I use comint-mode forn this, but there are other alternatives.)

- syscalls can automatically raise exceptions if you `use autodie`.

Why is this not the default? Because Perl maintainers value backward compatible. Improvements will always sit behind a line of config, preventing your scripts from breaking if you accidentally rely on functionality that later turns out to be a mistake.

https://entropicthoughts.com/you-want-technology-with-warts

https://entropicthoughts.com/why-perl
by delusional | 2025-07-06 06:35:15+00:00
I can easily understand why it sucks from your perspective, but European tradition dictates that we make it suck for you and then you have to make it suck for your counterparty. We don't directly intervene with your freedom to write whatever contracts you please, only what you release to consumers.

That's intensely frustrating to be caught in the middle of. At times you end up feeling that the politicians are coopting you and your work for their ends, that they are underhandedly enveloping you in the public administration. That is in a way exactly what they are doing, but you have to remember that it's what your customers want. You are still making for your customers, they have just made their wants known though a process other than the free market.
by csours | 2025-07-06 06:35:23+00:00
Before you pay for boosts on a dating app, pay for good pictures.

Here is what a man seeking woman profile needs:

1. Good Pictures. Honest. Good lighting. Appropriate grooming and attire (whatever than means in your social context). Smile in a carefree way in most of the pictures.

2. Attractive man in the pictures.

3. No icks.

Yes the pictures are more important than being attractive.

As a matter of storytelling, the theme is "aspirational", but the particular aspiration is up to you.
by LocalH | 2025-07-06 06:35:50+00:00
The answer to that is simple, and has been used by other media (to the chagrin of fans of course). When it comes time to "kill" the game, make a final update to strip all such licensed material out of the game.

The companies that develop and publish games amortize plenty of things out into multiple years. That's why live service is so increasingly common. The same developers and publishers should also factor in that they might have to remove some assets when they want to stop providing active support.
by davkan | 2025-07-06 06:36:28+00:00
Bezos personally blocked the WaPo editorial board from endorsing Kamala resulting in multiple resignations and a 10% loss in subscribers. A paper that adopted the tag line “Democracy Dies in Darkness” bending the knee to an authoritarian who committed election fraud would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that these liberal journalism outfits consistently fail the public. The same thing happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s with Ullstein. And in Italy with their liberal papers. And with the Times running cover for Hitler’s regime under Ochs.
by qingcharles | 2025-07-06 06:37:37+00:00
This YouTube channel was adding millions more subscribers than MrBeast last month and was the highest gaining channel on the platform. It is just hundreds of AI-generated songs:

https://www.youtube.com/@MastersOfProphecy

I don't like any of the music, but I did stumble across an AI song I actually thought was pretty good the other day.

We shouldn't be worried about the ones that are obviously AI. We should be worried about the ones which are stealth and under-the-radar. This time next year I would imagine AI will have a #1 track somewhere in the world.
by jynelson | 2025-07-06 06:38:30+00:00
AI papers over underlying problems, it’s a very strong force to reinforce the status quo. i don’t have strong feelings about AI, but i feel like “the AI generates a terminal command line for you” is just not going to work, it only deepens the division between users who have to blindly trust it isn’t hallucinating and programmers who can check it’s correct. (and most people won’t think to use it in this way anyway because they’ve never heard of a terminal before.)
by InkCanon | 2025-07-06 06:38:50+00:00
My own experience with Dual N-Back 1) I did it for a month. Probably some improvement, although I did not have any specific test done. Probably the most tangible use is really feeling how working memory (and losing it) is like and having better control. In the same way you might suddenly realize how breathing is and controlling it after learning meditation.

2) The study specified dual N back imposes a pretty demanding regiment. It's 12 sessions daily, consecutively for ~month. It takes about 20 minutes each day of intense focus.

3) There's naturally going to be a lot of survivorship bias in reviews. But you could argue it doesn't make your intelligence worse, so there's only net upside.