MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wvbdmp | 2025-07-05 11:02:43+00:00
At least in Germany this seems to be based on a combination of market incentives, case law and “I’ll know it when I see it”. I believe theoretically, a govermnent agency could just decide to argue that e.g. Microsoft Word qualifies as a game. This would mean that it couldn’t be advertised or sold over-the-counter anymore, until Microsoft gets an age rating for it. There doesn’t seem to be an explicit legal definition, but the usual criteria are something like

– it’s intended for entertainment

– it isn’t intended for productive use.

In practise, publishers must get an age rating or stores can’t have the game on the floor and may only sell it to adults, so it’s kind of up to the publisher. You could probably just tie a preservation responsibility to that.

But really, all software should be preserved, so the distinction is kind of pointless anyway.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-07-05 11:03:04+00:00
That seems to tell us a lot about the correlation between smoking and lung cancer but I'm not sure how to read from it that there was enough data on non-smokers to talk with certainty about other environmental factors. My understanding is that after the push for women to start smoking around that time it would have been almost impossible to find study subjects who weren't at least exposed to high levels of second hand smoke.
by throw0101b | 2025-07-05 11:05:17+00:00
>> It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others.

> At which point in history was it not about exactly that?

Up until (at least) the 1960s. In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:

> This view was shared not only by scholars but, surprisingly, by many corporate executives. In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”

> Even the law bent, at least a bit, toward this “social” view of corporate purpose. When the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld corporate charitable donations in its 1956 A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. decision, it rested its judgment less on any benefit that would accrue to the company than on the belief that corporations had responsibilities beyond those owed to shareholders; corporations needed, the court held, to “acknowledge and discharge social as well as private responsibilities as members of the communities within which they operate.”

* https://www2.law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-hi...
by TZubiri | 2025-07-05 11:05:38+00:00
Yes. I didn't achieve it, but got pretty consistent.

The claim is that surely we can achieve it, not now but, say, 3 months down the road, or 2 years. Good models are cloud only now, but when they get more power (by Moore's law) they will run on device. At that point (and probably way before) we will have determinism.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-05 11:06:45+00:00
Lisp has one of the most powerful macro systems.

Also when people say Lisp in 2025, usually we can assume Common Lisp, which is far beyond the Lisp 1.5 reference manual in capabilities.

In fact, back when I was in the university, Caml Light was still recent, Miranda was still part of programming language lectures, the languages forbidden on compiler development assignments were Lisp and Prolog, as they would make it supper easy assignment.
by alt187 | 2025-07-05 11:07:58+00:00
> This is like seeing a brick wall 40 miles down a straight road and yet still managing to drive into it, and then blaming the wall.

Not really, no. For example, if you drive into the wall, you may die.

Another experience that feels like death is working in a company that implements on-call rotations.

It would be too easy to draw out a parallel between how you approach a free fanfiction website (the website should mystically owe you five 9's uptime) and the mentality that metastased in the industry.

Instead, I'm gonna take this opportunity to point out that the AO3 downtime affected you, as a non-user, enough to vitrify the admin, where hardcore users laughed it off (because they're not entitled toddlers).
by kragen | 2025-07-05 11:08:30+00:00
The other day I walked up to a newsstand and asked the newsguy if he wanted to buy US$100 of Bitcoin. He said sure, checked the price, did some calculations on his cellphone, and proposed an amount including a commission for him. I agreed, scanned his QR code on my phone, and posted my transaction to the network. I walked to a nearby shopping mall to pee, and then saw that the transaction was confirmed. I walked back to the newsstand. He handed me a US$100 bill.

I didn't sign anything, make any appointments, buy any insurance, walk into any offices, present any identification, or even tell the guy my name. The total time involved was about 20 minutes, but only because I wasn't using Lightning. I had a similarly informal and short, but more argumentative, experience with the previous transaction, at a winery whose owner loudly insisted that he hadn't received the money... until he realized he was checking the wrong phone.

You are so full of shit comparing this to a real estate transaction that I am at a loss for words. You're about as full of shit as the winery guy. He, too, was blathering all sorts of nonsense at me about Bitcoin that showed he didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

The scenario you're talking about is a 51% attack where big mining pools collude to ensure that nobody else can ever mine a block (because it might allow the laundering of tainted coins). That would be a global and extremely obvious disaster for the Bitcoin network, and it would be remedied by whatever measures were necessary to end the attack, possibly including a hard fork or strategic bombing.

Remember that the world's investor class now has 2 trillion dollars tied up in Bitcoin, and they do not want to see it collapse, and such a successful attack would greatly undercut investor confidence in the value of the asset. The Bitcoin crowd has enough pull that they extracted a pardon for Ross Ulbricht and got a friendly SEC head this year. Even before that, when one or another pool would grow to the point where it might be able to mount a 51% attack, it would get hit by DDoS attacks to bring it down.

You're comparing that to a bank declining a credit card transaction because you're in another city.

Governments have been pressuring Bitcoin miners for over 15 years; it's outright illegal in many countries. The hashrate dropped by more than half when the PRC outlawed Bitcoin mining. The effect on the functioning of the network has been pretty much undetectable.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-05 11:08:54+00:00
"Cate Hall is Astera's CEO. She's a former Supreme Court attorney and the ex-No. 1 female poker player in the world."

This article is countersignaling. It also happens to be directionally correct.

There is absolutely nothing low status about being present-day Cate Hall. But present-day Cate Hall probably tried and pushed through a lot of really tough stuff in part because yesteryear Cate Hall had this mindset. It so happened that she also had the talent to actually end up in impressive places.

The real lesson one should probably take from a person like this is that learning to eyeball your own strengths and weaknesses before you start down the long path of honing them is really important. If you are low status now but you have reason to believe you will become much higher status in the future by persevering, then persevere. If not...
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-05 11:10:44+00:00
> "This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI."

The central claim here is illogical.

The way I see it, if you believe that AGI is imminent, and if your personal efforts are not entirely crucial to bringing AGI about (just about all engineers are in this category), and if you believe that AGI will obviate most forms of computer-related work, your best move is to do whatever is most profitable in the near-term.

If you make $500k/year, and Meta is offering you $10M/year, then you ought to take the new job. Hoard money, true believer. Then, when AGI hits, you'll be in a better personal position.

Essentially, the author's core assumption is that working for a lower salary at a company that may develop AGI is preferable to working for a much higher salary at a company that may develop AGI. I don't see how that makes any sense.
by zeroCalories | 2025-07-05 11:11:17+00:00
I am much more sympathetic to the concerns about classic appliances becoming IOT slop, GNU, and stuff like right-to-repair, as these concern expensive, nearly non-negotiable, things you have to interact with.

But I honestly just don't care about video games. If a game company pisses me off, I'm just gonna not play it, and opt for one of the thousands of other games that came out this year. This is needless regulation, and will probably be counterproductive to your interests in the long run.

Not only that, this is such a small problem in the grand scale of things, that I don't know why we're giving it breath. Law makers have far more important things to concern themselves with. This feels like a South Park parody of hand-wringing nerds crying about video games because they have nothing else worthwhile in their life.
by diggan | 2025-07-05 11:13:00+00:00
All of them are less than 12 months old, and most of the results on the first search page been at one point on the frontpage.

Another search, limiting it to >50 points (so passed through the frontpage at one point) and within the last 12 months, showing ~26 results: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
by IshKebab | 2025-07-05 11:13:16+00:00
If you want an introduction to more basic branch predictors that TAGE evolved from I highly recommend this:

https://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~akella/270W05/mcfarling93combin...

It's old, but very clear. I tried to read the ITTAGE paper but it assumes you know all that already. Also it doesn't actually fully specify a branch predictor because there are various hashes you need to calculate and it simply doesn't say what they use.
by raincole | 2025-07-05 11:13:43+00:00
Yet, when buying WAS owning (when physical copies of games were prevalent), it didn't stop pirating. Quite the opposite.

You can have your own moral compass. But most people who pirated games didn't do that out of spite. They didn't do that to protest against game-as-a-service or microtransaction or whatever "unethical" practices that the industry adopted.
by Spacecosmonaut | 2025-07-05 11:14:22+00:00
Bitcoin is the only immutable peer to peer system ever created (barring advances in quantum computing, and even then the protocol can be updated). In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI content & virtual reality, I think there is tremendous value in a trustless and immutable peer to peer system. In fact, I think we NEED it, and should as a society happily bear the power consumption that underpins the security of the network.

Controversial, I know. However, already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine. There is currently no solution to this problem. In the near future, I imagine that the raw data of your camera will be associated with a token on a blockchain (not bitcoin, but a dedicated high-capacity blockchain). Such a system would allow us to determine that a picture was indeed taken with a physical device, and thus that the events depicted have a bearing in the real world.

My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous. Where everything of value is underpinned by a specialized blockchain. When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain. In virtual reality, every digital product has a specialized blockchain. Every kind of transaction; compute, assets, AI, will all be underpinned by trustless peer to peer systems.

All these specialized blockchains trade security for throughput. My bet is that Bitcoin will act as a security guarantor in our future digital society, where the state of every blockchain is periodically validated on the Bitcoin network. Thus, I bet that every transaction in the future will have an associated Bitcoin cost. Thats why I own a small amount of Bitcoin.
by AlexandrB | 2025-07-05 11:14:44+00:00
I'm confused. Who would think buying a car (any car) is an investment that would increase in value?

And just because the value of Bitcoin has gone up, doesn't mean it's not a scam. "Market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

Bitcoin continues to fail at its stated goal of being a currency - it's more like digital gold that, unlike actual gold, would be worthless in a real global crisis. A lot of bitcoin-adjacent stuff has also collapsed since 2017 (NFTs, FTX). The idea of putting everything "on the blockchain" also seems to have died.
by jhbadger | 2025-07-05 11:14:45+00:00
Some of them even lasted in the 1990s (in the US). I had a CRT monitor blow a capacitor in the mid 1990s and took it to a repair shop. It cost me something like $100 to have it fixed, but that was still way cheaper than buying a new monitor. But yeah, after that everything became throw-away because 1) the cost of someone spending a half hour or so figuring out what the problem was and then repairing it would be more than the item cost to replace 2) greater and greater miniaturization meant that discrete components that could be repaired were few and instead it was just a "black box".
by jorams | 2025-07-05 11:15:18+00:00
> I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs

The situation completely changed with the introduction of the AMDGPU drivers integrated into the kernel. This was like 10 years ago.

Before then the AMD driver situation on Linux was atrocious. The open source drivers performed so bad you'd get better performance out of Intel integrated graphics than an expensive AMD GPU, and their closed source drivers were so poorly updated you'd have to downgrade the entire world for the rest of your software to be compatible. At that time Nvidia was clearly ahead, even though the driver needs to be updated separately and they invented their own versions of some stuff.

With the introduction of AMDGPU and the years after that everything changed. AMD GPUs now worked great without any effort, while Nvidia's tendency to invent their own things really started grating. Much of the world started moving to Wayland, but Nvidia refused to support some important common standards. Those that really wanted their stuff to work on Nvidia had to introduce entirely separate code paths for it, while other parts of the landscape refused to do so. This started improving again a few years ago, but I'm not aware of the current state because I now only use Intel and AMD hardware.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-07-05 11:15:29+00:00
Have to admit (I added to a snark comment about Substack and productivity blogs when this was posted), it addresses a problem that is plaguing myself.

Still not sure if it will help me overcome this, but the "quitting point" concept and the drawing example made it a good read for me.

Not 100% the same, but I've also heard there is a correlation between procrastrination and perfectionism, narcisissm (not only grandiosity, also vulnerabity and low self-esteem):

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11353843/#sec3-ijer...

Relevant proverbs are plenty... "There is no failure except in no longer trying" etc
by pjmlp | 2025-07-05 11:15:48+00:00
Nowadays you could make the Java version quite similar to the SML one, if there would be a new edition.

I have been looking forward to ML like capabilities on mainstream since using Caml Light.

Regarding those books, while we used the Java version, alongside JavaCC, when time came to actually buy the book, I also got the SML edition.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-05 11:16:17+00:00
I was here, and they still keep saying the same thing. There was a recent submission about Bitcoin. People were still saying how it is a scam and whatnot.

Scam or not, many people have gotten rich off of it. I bet the people who kept saying it is a scam wish'd they bought when it was low, they would have been rich today, instead, they double down (because they completely missed their chance due to their opinion), which is to be expected.

Too bad, life goes on, and you most likely will never get ~10 BTCs for the price of a bread anymore.
by cornholio | 2025-07-05 11:17:38+00:00
Bitcoin is still a criminal ecosystem in 2025. Its only real use case still is enabling illegal transactions and evading financial regulations, and that maintains its speculative value; but that's still a scam not a true investment just like a business used as a front for Mafia appears stable until it inevitably comes crashing down.

But I don't think anyone claimed criminality is not profitable. It can literally make you President.
by bsenftner | 2025-07-05 11:17:46+00:00
Also, AGI is not just around the corner. We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Comprehension is the fusing of separate elements into new functional wholes, dynamically abstracting observations, evaluating them for plausibility, and reconstituting the whole - and all instantaneously, for security purposes, of every sense constantly. We have no technology that approaches that.
by FabHK | 2025-07-05 11:18:02+00:00
Nonsense. While thousands of commercial banks are formally shareholders of the 12 (not one) Federal Reserve Banks,

> the "ownership" of the Reserve Banks by the commercial banks is symbolic; they do not exercise the proprietary control associated with the concept of ownership nor share, beyond the statutory dividend, in Reserve Bank "profits." … Bank ownership and election at the base are therefore devoid of substantive significance, despite the superficial appearance of private bank control that the formal arrangement creates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve#Legal_status_o...

See also https://www.atlantafed.org/about/federal-reserve-system/just...
by hotpotat | 2025-07-05 11:18:15+00:00
The auditing is not quick. I prefer cursor to claude code because I can review its changes while it’s going more easily and stop and redirect it if it starts to veer off course (which is often, but the cost of doing business). Over time I still gain an understanding of the codebase that I can use to inform my prompts or redirection, so it’s not like I’m blindly asking it to do things. Yes, I do ask it to write unit tests a lot of the time. But I don’t have it spin off and just iterate until the unit tests pass — that’s a recipe for it to do what it needs to do to pass them and is counterproductive. I plan what I want the set of tests to look like and have them write functions in isolation without mentioning tests, and if tests fail I go through a process of auditing the failing code and then the tests themselves to make sure nothing was missed. It’s exactly how I would treat a coworkers code that I review. My prompts range from a few sentences to a few paragraphs, and nowadays I construct a large .md file with a checklist that we iterate on for larger refactors and projects to manage context
Show HN: Dstpierre/tpl a tiny lib making Go's templates more tolerable
by dstpierre | 2025-07-05 11:18:28+00:00
Hey, I'll start by saying I've had the authors of templ and Gomponents in my podcast and often use them.

But sometimes Go HTML templates is just what I need, and I never remember how the freaking parsing works so I have base layout and partials available.

I created tpl a long time ago and after running in prod for awhile now, I decided to release the v1.

It's nothing ground breaking, just a simple helper package that brings translations and i18n and an opiniated structure and parsing for Go HTML templates. There's some sane data structure that are mostly always used in all project, things like CurrentUser, Locale, Alert (for flash notification) and some Django's inspired template function like map, intcomma, naturaltime, etc.

Hope it can helps other, I'm using it which make it enough for me ;).

Dominic
by assuagering | 2025-07-05 11:18:43+00:00
If your economic analysis depends on "one of those super-rich players to pay" for it to work, it isn't as much analysis as wishful thinking.

All the 100s of billions of $ put into the models so far were not donations. They either make it back to the investors or the show stops at some point.

And with a major chunk of proponent's arguments being "it will keep getting better", if you lose that what you got? "This thing can spit out boilerplate code, re-arrange documents and sometimes corrupts data silently and in hard to detect ways but hey you can run it locally and cheaply"?
by bayindirh | 2025-07-05 11:18:44+00:00
I for one don’t care if anyone makes money from my code. It’s released as Free Software as a reason. I wrote something I needed, and I release it to the world to help other people.

However, when you look at the license of the software I release, there are some terms I put forward. In short, it’s called GPLv3+ or AGPLv3+ depending on the thing I have written. You can use/develop/fork/integrate/sell it. I don’t care, as long as you obey the license terms.

Don’t obeying these terms, and running with the code is wrong. Even if you put the laws aside, that’s unethical. This is what makes my blood boil.

I do not develop software as a job. I do it as a side quest, and more importantly as research. I don’t want my research to be laundered and closed down, but be available and free as much as possible. This is why I use copyleft licenses.

If you care about developer freedom, you write Open Source code with permissive licenses. If you care about users’ freedom, you write Free Software with copyleft licenses.

I care about users’ freedom, not developers’ freedom to rip any code and embed into their code bases, which permissive licenses are designed for.

This blatant selfishness of “we are doing something great, we need no permission” is angering me.

Otherwise, get my scrappy code and make a million dollars with it. As long as you obey the license, I don’t care. On the contrary, I applaud you.