MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by klamann | 2025-07-05 10:26:41+00:00
I think movies are a great example why stopkillinggames matters so much: If you bought a copy of Terminator on VHS or DVD or Blu-ray, you can still watch that movie today, tomorrow, or whenever you want. And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like. Even if everyone who ever worked on the movie is gone and the distribution company goes bankrupt or the director decides that making this film was a mistake and burns all the original film material, you can still watch the copy you bought, because you own that copy.

Now if however you bought a physical copy of "The Crew", which is a racing game with a nice single player mode, you can't play that game anymore today. Just because the publisher decided it's time to pull the plug, and no one who bought a copy of this game gets to enjoy it any longer in any form whatsoever. This piece of art is destroyed now, please move along, and don't forget to "buy" one of our other games that will probably be available for a couple more years until we pull the plug again thank you very much.

Game publishers are destroying works of art, stopkillinggames wants to preserve these works of art, and personally I'm on the side of people who want to preserve art.
by lproven | 2025-07-05 10:27:07+00:00
Maybe there are other levels so that it is not as simple as "this is not a cladogram".

A cladogram tries to show common descent and relatedness.

There are other meaningful analyses which are also true. Physical resemblance is valid: the concepts of legs, and wings, and lungs, and eyes, get re-invented over and over. "Animals that fly with wings" is a valid group but doesn't fit on the cladogram.

Cladograms are essentially 2D. Just going to 3D might not be enough, but while I can just about barely hold a simple 4D shape such as a tesseract in my head, computers make this easy. I never needed Excel's pivot tables, but thousands use them as a daily tool.

Maybe a 4D or even n-dimensional chart can usefully allow all these different categorisations to coexist, and for feeble human brains like mine to see different cross-sections of them?

And maybe if we can construct those, then they will expose interesting new conceptual relationships we didn't know about before?

Genetics has changed massively since my 1989 degree, with methylation and epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer, and shotgun DNA analysis. Who knows what non-cladistic relationships may be in there to be traced?

I mean, the genetics of lignin are not well known AFAIK, but the invention of lignin and hence woody plants was, what, very roughly 400MY ago.

The evolution of basidiomycota able to digest and eat wood was very roughly 300MY ago.

That 100MY interval formed coal. Coal and oil aren't dinosaurs. Coal is trees, oil is plankton, extremely roughly.

Fossil fuels caused the industrial revolution ~250Y ago and the emissions will very probably end technological civilisation by 2050 at the accelerating rate we are going.

So, 2 superficially minor bits of the evolutionary development of biochemistry 300-400 million years ago began and ended the reign of some slightly smart bald apes over the last 300 years. That's interesting. It would be interested to nail down how and why.

We came down out of the trees but the trees will have the last laugh: we will chop them all down or burn them, but their ancient Carboinferous era ancestors will burn us in revenge.
by xiphias2 | 2025-07-05 10:27:16+00:00
This is one reason, and another is that both Dennard scaling has stopped and GPUs hit a memory wall for DRAM. The only reason AI hardware gets the significant improvements is that they are using big matmuls and a lot of research has been in getting lower precision (now 4bit) training working (numerical precision stability was always a huge problem with backprop).
by liendolucas | 2025-07-05 10:28:04+00:00
I haven't read the whole article but a few things to remark:

* The prices for Nvidia GPUs are insane. For that money you can have an extremely good PC with a good non Nvidia GPU.

* The physical GPU sizes are massive, even letting the card rest on a horizontal motherboard looks like scary.

* Nvidia has still issues with melting cables? I've heard about those some years ago and thought it was a solved problem.

* Proprietary frameworks like CUDA and others are going to fall at some point, is just a matter of time.

Looks as if Nvidia at the moment is only looking at the AI market (which as a personal belief has to burst at some point) and simply does not care the non GPU AI market at all.

I remember many many years ago when I was a teenager and 3dfx was the dominant graphics card manufacturer that John Carmack profethically in a gaming computer magazine (the article was about Quake I) predicted that the future wasn't going to be 3dfx and Glide. Some years passed by and effectively 3dfx was gone.

Perhaps is just the beginning of the same story that happened with 3dfx. I think AMD and Intel have a huge opportunity to balance the market and bring Nvidia down, both in the AI and gaming space.

I have only heard excellent things about Intel's ARC GPUs in other HNs threads and if I need to build a new desktop PC from scratch there's no way to pay for the prices that Nvidia is pushing to the market, I'll definitely look at Intel or AMD.
by dweekly | 2025-07-05 10:28:15+00:00
Fascinating and (to me) unintuitive result that these cards don't seem bandwidth constrained at PCI 4x16; the update to PCI 5x16 doesn't seem like it has any measurable impact on performance, allowing a PCI 5x8 configuration that "saves" some of your lanes at seemingly no penalty.

I wonder if we will have to wait another generation of cards (and apps) to make full use of a PCI 5x16 connection?
by thisdougb | 2025-07-05 10:28:43+00:00
Earlier this year I made this https://doocot.sh/ for securely sharing secrets between people.

It's written in Go with no dependencies (or database). My intention was for an AWS image or something companies could run inhouse air-gapped from the Internet. Something like $10/m or so.

The cli is pretty easy to integrate with scripts: https://github.com/thisdougb/doocot

Longer term secrets were something I was looking at too. Pretty easy to extend this, but encroaches on Vault products and I felt that a harder sell to CTOs.

I've worked in infra/systems dev for years, and this sort of thing was bread and butter stuff.

Maybe I'll resurect it as an active project. What sort of feature/tool would get you to stop using Discord/Slack/etc for secrets?
by loherj | 2025-07-05 10:28:56+00:00
Yes. If you look at the diagram that plots the performance vs the amount of output tokens, you can see that R1T2 uses about 1/3 of the output tokens that R1-0528 uses.

Keep in mind, the speed improvement doesn’t come from the model running any faster (it’s the exact same architecture as R1, after all) but from using less output tokens while still achieving very good results.
by marviel | 2025-07-05 10:29:06+00:00
I totally agree!

this is the idea behind my recent post actually[1] where I recommend people use AI to write specs before they code. If all you have to do is a human is edit the spec, not write it from scratch, you're more likely to actually make one.

[1] https://lukebechtel.com/blog/vibe-speccing
by KronisLV | 2025-07-05 10:30:01+00:00
> If you’re arguing with a k8s purist, you’ll never convince them.

I feel like the whole article very much sounded like constructing a strawman and arguing against that. The way I see it, there can be advantages and disadvantages to either approach.

If you really find a good use case for serverless, then try it out, summarize the good and the bad and go from there. Maybe it's a good fit for the problem but not for the team, or vice versa. Maybe it's neither. Or maybe it works and then you can implement it more. Or maybe you need to value consistency over an otherwise optimal solution so you just stick with EC2.

Most of the deployments I've seen don't really need serverless, nor do they need Kubernetes. More often than not, Docker Swarm is more than enough from a utilitarian perspective and often something like Docker/Compose with some light Ansible server configuration is also enough. Kubernetes seems more like the right solution when you have strong familiarity and organizational support for it, much like with orgs that try to run as much of their infra as possible on a specific Linux distro.

It's good when you can pick tech that's suited for the job (that you have now and in the near future, vs the scale you might need to be at in N years), the problems seem to start when multiple options that are good enough meet strong opinions.

I will admit that I quite do like containers for packaging and running software, especially since they're the opposite of vendor lock (OCI).
by 0points | 2025-07-05 10:30:39+00:00
* IMPORTANT *

Daybreak is currently suing [1] successful everquest emu server The Heroes Journey, who lately has become more popular than Daybreak's own TLP servers by offering a new and unique form of EverQuest [2].

From the operators of the server:

"Good afternoon, Heroes! Many folks have become aware that Daybreak has filed suit against two of our Founders. Please know that, while we cannot comment on any specifics, we want you all to know that we are doing everything in our power to see this through to a positive outcome for our community and all involved parties. We have excellent counsel, the benefit of the facts on our side, and an abiding faith that reasonable people will see us as fans and not foes."

1: https://reason.com/volokh/2025/06/20/court-rejects-sealing-a...

2: https://heroesjourneyemu.com/faq/
by kragen | 2025-07-05 10:30:43+00:00
Not only were they already discussing it when I joined the list in 01992, cryptocurrency was a major, if implicit, part of Tim May's crypto-anarchist manifesto which I think he presented at Hackers in 01988: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/cryp...

He wasn't specifically calling it out as having a fixed money supply or even fungible tokens, though. And it wasn't until Satoshi figured out how to do without a central issuer like Xanadu, Digicash, or e-gold that we realized it was possible. At the time that Satoshi cut the knot, we were all convinced it was impossible because of Zooko's Triangle.

Chaum founded DigiCash in 01989, incidentally, based on a paper he wrote in 01982 presenting a cryptocurrency design for untraceable payments, but backed with dollars by a central issuer, like Tether.

However, there was always a strong association between cypherpunks and right-libertarian free-market ideology, which is where you find gold bugs and Austrian economists. You may remember that one of the minor plot points in Atlas Shrugged was that Galt's Gulch went back to specie money (tiny pennies stamped from gold) because its value wasn't dependent on government fiat.
by gexla | 2025-07-05 10:31:19+00:00
This! I was around looking for alternative "currencies" before Bitcoin even existed. But they were flawed,because they (such as Libertycoin) were shady centralized systems. Each of them were shut down by the US government. Bitcoin would have been the answer, but I lost interest before it became a thing (or it was already a thing and I somehow never come across it, because I never saw it as an accepted option.) This would have appealed to my geek nature. But I think I would have still lost interest in it after finding that Bitcoin also wasn't the answer due to difficulty in spending it. I likely would have cashed out at like $5 per coin to buy a bunch of pizzas.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-05 10:31:31+00:00
> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games

...and even if you're all in on video games, there's a massive amount of really brilliant indie games on Steam that run just fine on a 1070 or 2070 (I still have my 2070 and haven't found a compelling reason to upgrade yet).
by xoralkindi | 2025-07-05 10:31:57+00:00
People always forget about the great Wei Dai, who like Nakamoto is already sort of pseudonymous, he also created Bmoney which is allot like Bitcoin. He is also the creator of the Crypto++ cryptography library for C++ (bitcoin is written in C++) From all the OG Cypherpunks he ticks allot of the boxes.
by danlitt | 2025-07-05 10:32:47+00:00
I agree with you that it's a silly semantic argument. I would not be satisfied by replacing all the "buy" button by "rent". But I vehemently disagree with everything else you say:

> the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiences

> You don't own a right to enjoy other people's work

> If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right

I do, absolutely, think I am entitled to this. Why not? Do you really think it is a good thing that people can make something valuable, share it with people in a way they find moving, and then destroy it? Do you think it's a good thing when people burn books?

I feel like you are appealing to the way things are ("it's their right") and not thinking at all about how things should be. Why should it be their right? What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right? That doesn't mean obliterating intellectual property, it just means that for this fake pseudo-property we change the already-artificial rules very slightly to make society better. Why not?
by grumple | 2025-07-05 10:33:39+00:00
This tax issue (not a break - normally you can count employees as a businesss expense for the current year, this made software unusual) meant that startups or other tech companies were extremely disadvantaged in the short term, and had to pay way more in taxes than they should have. For startups, having to pay far more in taxes during the first few years of existence is crippling.

This fixes that problem. That encourages both investment in software and encourages software companies to hire.
by loherj | 2025-07-05 10:34:20+00:00
Fair point. More benchmarks are definitely good but I’m optimistic that they will show similar results.

Anecdotally, I can say that my personal experience with the model is in line with what the benchmarks claim: It’s a bit smarter than R1, a bit faster than R1, much faster than R1-0528, but not quite as smart. (Faster meaning less output tokens). For me, it’s at a sweet spot and I use it as daily driver.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-07-05 10:34:21+00:00
So in your ideal world the only way software can be distributed is in a way where it can be reused anywhere - in ways that maybe don't even exist at the moment

This doesn't really solve anything . It just ends up promoting SaaS. Where you never own the game at all and don't have access to any part of it. You only rent access to a server where the software resides and runs (ex Google's failed game streaming service)
by nodja | 2025-07-05 10:35:51+00:00
I'll take the bait.

> I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument

> "After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'"

> With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would everyone suddenly stop complain？ I doubt it

That's not what the campaign is pushing for, the campaign is pushing for not allowing such things in the terms of service in the first place, within reason. The simplest way we can explain it is if you're paying for a subscription (i.e. MMOs) then the current behavior is fine. If you're paying a one-time fee for a game that depends on server somewhere to even play the game, then the publishers would be required to make end-of-life plans so the server isn't required to continue playing, even if in a limited state. I.e. all the single player games that require online connections because publishers are pushing for single-player microtransactions now.

The campaign aims to stop publishers from adding unnecessary dependencies that can shut down the games. This would stop for example publishers from killing a game when releasing a sequel to the same game, forcing users to repurchase what is essentially the same game. The Crew is a good example of this (and what started the campaign in the first place), other examples are sports games and other games like CoD that get yearly releases and services for older versions get killed arbitrarily.

> They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.

The law and society decides that, game publishers want to of course control things end-to-end and rent-seek instead of sell, because having an eternal source of revenue is much more profitable for them, those have been established by the rest of society to be predatory. No consumer should be happy that adobe does subscriptions only, no consumer should be happy that apple controls their ecosystem end-to-end to the point that they get a cut of all monetary transactions in their system. Gamers already see similar behavior with Sony and Nintendo on the hardware side, and EA, Warner, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. are pushing things further on the software side. This campaign is meant to be a push-back from such behavior. There used to be a time where charging money for horse armor was a scandal, we'll never go back to those times, but most gamers agree that gaming has gone too far in nickel-and-diming the consumer, so this a pushback to at least not have publishers kill games because of their greed.

The law already restricts software sales in many ways, there's many cases of mass-refunds because software is sold with deceptive practices, or when they do anti-competitive shit like forced bundling or market dominance abuse.
by mcdeltat | 2025-07-05 10:35:56+00:00
Good point, we should commend genuinely novel efforts towards making baseline computation more efficient, like Apple has done as you say. Particularly in light of recent x86 development which seems to be "shove as many cores as possible on a die and heat your apartment while your power supply combusts" (meanwhile the software gets less efficient by the day, but that's another thing altogether...). ANY DAY of the week I will take a compute platform that's no-bs no-bells-and-whistles simply more efficient without the manufacturer trying to blow smoke up our asses.
by danlitt | 2025-07-05 10:36:10+00:00
> This is the thing people should learn to accept

> People need to vote with their wallet.

Seriously: why? If you think this practice is wrong, and you wouldn't participate in it, and you think voting with your wallet isn't utterly futile (i.e. it would cause some companies to change their behaviour) then why is individual, atomised action the only legitimate one? Why is it not legitimate to make a change in the law, as a collective?
by sebst | 2025-07-05 10:36:52+00:00
> What sort of feature/tool would get you to stop using Discord/Slack/etc for secrets?

An integrated solution for the whole environment. I pick a project, it opens the IDE, sets environment variables, fires up other services/infrastructure, lets me select secrets (that might be shared between projects), lets me share secrets (with other people)... Probably something like tilt, but simpler, integrated into an IDE, and with support for secrets.
by 0points | 2025-07-05 10:39:04+00:00
"More recently" (since 2003 or so), we use myseq which can run all on your windows desktop.

It now works by reading spawn data from the running everquest application, instead of looking at network traffic.

I still use it sometimes, but

a) modern macroquest has built in spawn tracker

b) server don't send loot data to clients so we cannot sneak preview it anyway
by mattlondon | 2025-07-05 10:39:56+00:00
Good luck.

I'd recommend finding a MOOC course that covers some of the fundamentals of computer science to make sure you have a really solid grasp of the fundamentals - the whys and how's etc. Data structures, algorithms, networking, databases, design paradigms (so Object orientated Vs functional Vs whatever), testing etc. If they use multiple programming languages in different classes then all the better as I think learning more than one makes it easier to grasp the principles at a more theoretical/abstract level and not just how language foo does it and you'll find your favourite language(s) eventually in your own time so don't give up if the class is in a language you don't know/like.

It's tempting to use AI - I'd recommend you think of it as a knowledgeable friend who you can ask questions - is there a better way to do this/what alternatives are there? What does this function do? Why does this code do this and not that etc etc. You won't learn if it just implements for you, but as a learning companion you can bounce ideas off of or help you out of a rut etc it is great.

It is tempting to concentrate on like a React Bootcamp or whatever to get "practical skills" to start going off and building things, but I think that is like the difference of being the person who is paid to only assemble flat pack furniture following instructions vs the person who is paid to design the flat pack furniture and all the smart little fittings and how it all goes together and will it be strong enough and fit in the box and meet the price point and look like what the designer wanted it to look like and so on.

Finally, don't worry about writing "bad code" or bugs. We all do it from time to time and no one is perfect.
by avianlyric | 2025-07-05 10:40:33+00:00
I think we’ll start seeing people focus on optimisation, we already see companies like Apple focus on it.

LLM are still to new, and still advancing to quickly for optimisation to take place. It’s like we’re back in the MHz wars of old between CPU manufacturers. The goal is just more performance, regardless of cost, because it was clear that even in the consumer space, people wanted more performance.

Then we hit a kind of plateau in last 10 years, where basic compute is so powerful that your average consumer is not longer upgrading every year for better performance. A 5 year old machine has enough performance for most people. Then the focus on energy efficiency kicked in, because people didn’t want faster computers, they wanted battery life and cheaper computers.

No doubt we’ll see the same with LLM, possibly quite soon. Claude Sonnet 4 and similar class models have enough reasoning performance, that agentic systems can be quite reliable. Which means we hit the base level of “reasoning” performance needed, and we can extend that “performance” in domain specific ways by lightly customising the agentic framework, with no need to fine tuning. The elimination of fine tuning to build domain specific agents is a huge game changer. But it also means that putting together a 10x or 100x efficient model, with “reasoning” performance equivalent to current gen LLM would also be a huge game changer. It opens up the possibility to apply this tech into spaces that currently require either lots of specialists knowledge to fine tune an LLM, or a huge amount of on tap compute to allow the agents to take enough turns to slowly “reason” they’re way through problems.

But a Claude Sonnet 4 that runs on a iPhone for example. That would make Apple’s complete failure to improve Siri look like a genius level move. Why bother with small incremental improvements using current tech, when waiting a few years, and just stuffing a full fat LLM and agent system into an iPhone will basically give you the ultimate Siri.
by scotty79 | 2025-07-05 10:40:36+00:00
It doesn't have to be only about video games. I'm hoping it's gonna be about all software and all software vendors will be obligated to leave their software in working condition after they sunset it. The best take on this I read is that companies must prepare a way to transfer the product to the community after they no longer find it profitable. And that would be wonderful for all products. Not just software.