MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slau | 2025-07-06 06:39:43+00:00
It’s really not a quagmire.

When you EOL the game and release the server, just strip the licensed content. Remove the logos. Nobody gives a flying toss anyway.

People want the community and the GAME. They don’t care whether the actual logo is there.

Heck, if the game connects to a community server, have it hide all licensed content. you’ve satisfied your contractual obligations. Whether people mod the game or not to re-add things has no bearing on you.
by wim | 2025-07-06 06:39:57+00:00
A backend can be part of the functionality though, such as for real-time collaboration and syncing. But you can have ownership and longevity guarantees for both the data and the service as long as you can eject [1] from the cloud and switch to self-host or back at any time, which is what we do for our notes/tasks IDE

[1] https://thymer.com/local-first-ejectable
by afiodorov | 2025-07-06 06:39:57+00:00
We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.

This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.
by akg_67 | 2025-07-06 06:40:32+00:00
There are subreddits dedicated to these kind of topics, for example /r/AmerExit /r/movingtojapan /r/expats (that I know of) with wealth of info. I am sure there are dedicated Facebook groups too. You most likely will find people and orgs that can help with migration in such targeted groups. As I understand, most desirable countries have seen multi-fold increase in inquiries and applications from US.
by userbinator | 2025-07-06 06:41:14+00:00
No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.

I hate when applications stuff other controls (like browser tabs) into the title bar --- leaving you with no place to grab and move the window.

The irony is that we had title bars when monitors were only 640x480, yet now that they have multiplied many times in resolution, and become much bigger, UIs are somehow using the excuse of "saving space" to remove title bars and introducing even more useless whitespace.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-06 06:43:30+00:00
I keep telling it will be the second coming of how Netbooks went down, but people are too busy praising Valve for translating Windows APIs, instead of actually building a gaming ecosystem on Linux technologies.

The same kind of technologies that power Android NDK, and to lesser extent PlayStation Orbis OS, with its FreeBSD roots.

AAA Game studios don't see a reason for directly supporting Linux and if Valve is willing to do that for free, even better.

Learn from OS/2 and Netbooks history.
by silisili | 2025-07-06 06:43:32+00:00
I've always been a bit flummoxed we haven't expanded a ton on this given how long it's been.

I'm not sure if it's wrong or right, and not smart enough to posit much, other than it -feels- wrong. But it wouldn't take a ton to convince me otherwise.

You'd think by now we'd have more supporting evidence of such a concept.
by LocalH | 2025-07-06 06:44:25+00:00
Also, part of the issue is the death of private servers. Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers. Older games can be easily played on private servers to this day, as the community of any moderately popular game will almost always step up to provide the service. Even games you might not expect would be that popular or games that never had private servers - for example, Rock Band 3 only ever supported connecting to Harmonix servers in an official capacity. This support is also discontinued (they still operate the Rock Central servers, but only for Rock Band 4). Yet right now, thanks to reverse engineering, there is a fan-operated server that you can connect to with a slightly modified game. You can even download the fan-created server software (written in Go) and stand up your own server for your friends or for whatever other reason (maybe you want to run a small tournament and use a private GoCentral server to record statistics and have a private leaderboard).
by jjani | 2025-07-06 06:44:31+00:00
I'm happy to be convinced, but so far this isn't really helping the point. What you've described applies to an extraordinarily small percentage of games. I'm looking at my Steam library with ~170 games. I see ~8 that have real brand names, 7 being shooters that contain gun brands - which have never cared about these things, given they're already appearing in the context of people killing each other in the first place - and the other 1 being Football Manager (an offline game).

> I can already hear people thinking: but, most games don’t have any third party intellectual property. But that’s less true than you think, even fantasy games will inevitably wind up copying something from our world that is not completely generic.

Then please give us some proper examples we can learn from.

> Rockstar for example will almost assuredly have issues with using the shapes of famous buildings and licensing issues if they make their radio stations too easy to pirate.

GTA is hardly a "fantasy game", its entire schtick is getting as close to the real-world setting as possible, going as far as to parody real-life brands. They're quite unique in doing so, an extreme outlier.

Take a look at the current top 10 games on Steam by player count. You'll see that indeed the only real-world brands featured are potentially gun brands, and none of them have things like famous buildings. DOTA, Apex Legends, Stardew Valley, Rust, Palworld, Elden Ring and a bunch of idlers and shooters (CS2, PUBG, Delta Force).
by drdaeman | 2025-07-06 06:44:50+00:00
Uhh, I see that really made a very poor word choice when I wrote “‘real’ racism”. My bad, words are hard.

Given that you’ve chose “fake” as the antonym, I think I can see where we differ, and that I misused the term “‘real’”. In my mind I would’ve picked something like “less intentionally”. I’m not even sure if I can imagine what a fake racism could possibly be like: racism is an idea, and I don’t really get what fakeness for ideas means.

I will try to remember and be more careful with the word “real” in the future. Appreciate your comments.

And, yes, that was real racism, of course - in the way you’ve used the expression. Or rather, there’s no such thing that “not real racism”, and “not ‘real’ racism” was a confusingly bad phrase.
by necovek | 2025-07-06 06:45:43+00:00
I agree that files solve some rudimentary cases, but they do not even allow simple conflict resolution. Eg. compressed files, including container formats like OpenOffice (text files in a ZIP archive IIRC), might be simple to apply changes from two sides if they are in distant parts, but syncing full files simply barfs.

Note that this does not even need two users: I hit this problem with a desktop and laptop and self-hosted NextCloud myself.

In general, a filesystem that actually stored both raw data (to fail-over to), but also a per-format event log, and maybe even app specific events (imagine a PNG changes, we could have any change recorded as raw bytes, generic bitmap image operation like "modify pixels at x,y to ..." and app-specific log like "gimp: apply sharpen filter on polygon area ...").

This would allow the other side to attempt to do the smartest sync it has (if it has a compatible version of gimp, it could decide to apply the filter, otherwise fall back to raw pixel changes if no conflicts, and then fall back to full file contents reconciliation).

Just like MIME handlers get registered, if file systems provided such change logs, some could have very advanced sync systems with this support from "filesystems".
by slau | 2025-07-06 06:46:01+00:00
Just open CS2 and go to the community server tab. There’s a little notice telling you that you might be exposed to unmoderated and unsafe content.

Apparently in 2025 corporate lawyers have forgotten how to write a disclaimer. It’s all BS to protect their short term games.

I would spend way more money on games if they didn’t have a ~5 year life span.
by aryehof | 2025-07-06 06:46:54+00:00
My immediate thought is that you do not need to learn “computer science”.

It is for academics, those looking to differentiate themselves from the other 2000 CS equipped applicants for a job, those wanting interviews answering useless data structure and algorithm questions, and those writing applications in the domains of the computer and data sciences, and computing infrastructure.

Most software is outside of this, though that might surprise many HNs who assume that is the only type of software there is. Well maybe they will cough up “crud apps” if pushed.

Just learn to program and learn the applicable standard libraries associated with a programming language. Stop overthinking it. An 8 year old can do it - you can too.
by jynelson | 2025-07-06 06:47:44+00:00
two thoughts: 1) did you read the linked post on malleable software (https://nothingisnttrivial.com/vines.html)? it has a very good distinction between “functional risk” (is the business logic right) and “technical risk” (was the logic implemented correctly), and says—correctly IMO—that the more control we give to end users, the lower the functional risk is.

2) sometimes it’s ok for software not to scale (https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situateds...). sometimes people are solving a problem just for themselves, not for a business. i want it to be possible to build situated software in an afternoon without spending a month studying how terminals and stacks and data structures work.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-06 06:47:48+00:00
> We're still super early, but already these agents are showing flashes of brilliance, and we're gaining more and more conviction that this is the right form factor

Slow down cowboy; we're seeing "flashes of brilliance" and "that this is the right form factor" for writing code only!

I'm still waiting for AI/LLM's to be posing a danger to jobs other than those in software development and the arts.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-07-06 06:48:04+00:00
I thought the mention of faith was interesting:

>When I couldn’t get sober, he told me not to give up hope, and he urged me to find my faith. It didn’t have to be his faith or anyone else’s, as long as it was rooted in forgiveness.

I'm not religious, but one of the things I admire religion most for is the concept of redemption. I think this is something that secular culture could work to learn about from religion.
by crackrook | 2025-07-06 06:49:23+00:00
I know we have data that shows just how harmful the war on drugs has been, but I'm curious if we have data showing that legalization in a modern society, with global supply chains and marketing campaigns, does not result in a bunch of people who previously wouldn't have done drugs - for fear of legal consequences, or just because they're hard to obtain - suddenly doing drugs. I'm genuinely interested to know, this isn't something I've made up my mind about.

I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier.

Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.
by trinsic2 | 2025-07-06 06:50:23+00:00
I'm not understanding why we have to have a model that replicates SaaS pricing for local-first software?

Obsidian is doing a pretty good job selling sync functionality to their free client. Because the have a really good markdown editor implementation IMHO with community plug-in support that IMHO beats every PKM cloud tool out there that competes with them.
by raincole | 2025-07-06 06:50:24+00:00
Really?

Perhaps this person lived in a fantastic futuristic city before. But for a lot people, getting a cab was not a good experience. Uber singlehanded changed that.

And dating apps are not middlemen for dating. They're middlemen for dating outside your social circle, which is always a mess. Whatever subscription you pay to the app per month is probably cheaper than a single drink at a bar anyway.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-06 06:51:43+00:00
Of course, "the powers that be" can want things to change, but not want to pay the cost required to truly change it.

As hyperbole, you can stop all court cases, assume everyone is guilty if they're arrested, and give everyone capital punishment. That would most likely end cartel issues rather quickly, but it would absolutely mess with society to a dangerous level. El Salvador took a (less hyperbolic) extreme approach, and it dramatically reduced crime, but it's not clear that citizens are actually happy with this outcome as.

Of course, it could be possible that leaders are corrupt, but it could simply be that the cost to fixing things is very high.
by jynelson | 2025-07-06 06:51:49+00:00
yes!!! this is exactly the direction i want to go with the post on “terminal of the future”—we should reimagine a structured terminal, where the interface isn’t dependent on emulating a VT100.

have you seen https://www.warp.dev/modern-terminal? they’ve made really a lot of progress here, they just locked it all in a platform and then didn’t have the vision to let you metaprogram it.
by FuckButtons | 2025-07-06 06:52:29+00:00
I see where you’re coming from, but I think teasing out something that looks like a clear objective function that generalizes to improved intelligence from llm interaction logs is going to be hellishly difficult. Consider, that most of the best llm pre training comes from being very very judicious with the training data, selecting the right corpus of llm interaction logs and then defining an objective function that correctly models…? Being helpful? From that sounds far harder than just working from scratch with rlhf.
by thephyber | 2025-07-06 06:52:40+00:00
GPS is only a confirmation of positioning. It doesn't free you from having a pilot in the vehicle.

Starlink opens the possibility for remote command & control. It opens up the possibility to fully remote drone capabilities.

Starlink should probably be disabled except to rarely report sensor data and accept new routing commands, so law enforcement can’t use EM scanning to find the source.
by trhway | 2025-07-06 06:54:36+00:00
There is very little natural in the unnatural environment of the human developed areas. That train has long left the station. That includes the natural predators. With those natural predators gone, cats are doing the job of those predators. Whether you call the cats invasive or not - the label doesn't matter in that situation, somebody has got to do the job.

And the main invasive species is humans. The humans invade and change the environment, and the cats are actually natural in that new environment.
by cedws | 2025-07-06 06:55:03+00:00
Or just stop playing the game. Like a parasite, dating apps only survive while their host is alive. You can pay for pictures, spend hours a day scrolling, pretend to be someone you’re not, blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”Maybe you’ll eventually win if you keep pulling the lever. But then you’ve just contributed to the problem.

It’s just not worth it in my view. I gave up. Being a singleton is going to become the new normal in the next 25 years, many Western countries are going the way of Japan and South Korea.

The good news for George is he’s a high profile, decent looking, wealthy dude. He’ll be fine.
by perihelions | 2025-07-06 06:55:35+00:00
This is safety-critical software: one mistake will blind a person.

> "Importantly, the device additionally uses millimeter-wave radar to scan its field of view for larger objects such as people and pets. If any of these are detected, its mosquito-zapping laser will not fire."

I note the startup doesn't actually disclose the laser output power anywhere, or what regulatory class that power level falls in. It's federal law[0] that commercially-sold lasers are labelled with this information.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/21/1040.10
by userbinator | 2025-07-06 06:56:11+00:00
If the power has failed and the machine does not restart when it comes back, the rotary control will remain in the ON state when the machine is off.

A better example may be a solenoid button, used on industrial machinery which should remain off after a power failure, which stays held in when pushed, but pops out when the power is cut. They are not common outside of such machinery, because they're extremely expensive. In the first half of the 20th century, they also saw some use in elevators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385826
by DanielVZ | 2025-07-06 06:57:17+00:00
It’s interesting how it’s not turtles all the way down (as I understand it at least). The things you learn of one scale do not completely translate to the next but serve as the “shadow” projected by the next level down the line. And this probably brings up the complexity that lets us exist and perceive. I say probably because who knows what else is going on in the universe.

All this to say who knows if we are ever going to learn the fundamental why if there is one.
by matsemann | 2025-07-06 06:57:18+00:00
There are so many foot guns, just don't do it.

Php users tried with addslashes(), realized there are cases it can't handle, made a sql variant in mysql_escape_string, realized it's open for abuse since you can mess with the character set. Then made mysql_real_escape_string and later mysqli_real_escape_string, which even them have some flaws depending on the db charset.

So if you find the concept easy, I'd wager it's because you don't handle some exploit path.
by poisonborz | 2025-07-06 06:57:37+00:00
These are weak arguments but there are valid ones why I would not think this has a footing, even if I support the attitude. What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine? You can't just rip/disable licensed items out, they may form a significant part of business code. Code and APIs would be needed to be documented. Why just games? What about abandoned Saas offerings? These restrictions might creep over.

I hate live service games like the next guy but legal advisors can bend these to form powerful counter-arguments.
by kergonath | 2025-07-06 06:58:33+00:00
That’s not how it works. The EU does not care about what Apple does in the US. It’s Apple’s choice to either tweak their products to adapt to the laws of their different markets or apply these changes across the board. We’ve seen that with recent iOS versions where EU regulations imposed changes, some of which were done only for devices in the EU.

For some time Microsoft had EU specific versions of Windows.

EULA sometimes differ depending on location because a lot of the bullshit software companies get away with in the US is illegal in other parts of the world.

Another extreme example is the hoops companies have to jump through to sell in China. Again, this generally does not affect the same products in the rest of the world.

It is a problem that we know how to solve.
by jynelson | 2025-07-06 06:58:35+00:00
this is SO COOL thank you for sharing!!! i love that you mention this is collaborative, i really think people can do so much if they just have a little guidance on how to get started.

the lack of trust is so real—this is one of the reasons i focused so heavily on autosave and rollback in the post, because it gives people the freedom to experiment without being afraid of breaking things.
by haveyoucinsdrd | 2025-07-06 06:58:53+00:00
Hardcovers last longer, resource use is real. Cheap things is a regressive tax on the lower incomes who have to replace cheap stuff faster. They can’t save for better stuff.

When it comes to media like movies… really? Still? The resource use of Top Gun and Star Wars is bonkers. Can’t we just have local theater and you know socialize?

Do we need the movie to come together and socialize over?

I so thought we were done with that stuff around Spider-Man 3. MCU and Star Wars sequels made no sense to me.

Is our attention always going to be coupled to Saturday mornings in 1990s?

Boomers did all the drugs and made music and corny fun shows like SNL and somehow convinced us to stare at computers iterating on word problems like it’s fucking middle school while staring at these over the top delusions of grandeur to borrow from Han Solo.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 07:00:26+00:00
That's a great read, thanks! And I didn't know about autodie, though I do use perl -de1 from time to time.

Perl feels clumsy and bug-prone to me these days. I do miss things like autovivification from time to time, but it's definitely bug-prone, and there are a lot of DWIM features in Perl that usually do the wrong thing, and then I waste time debugging a bug that would have been automatically detected in Python. If the default Python traceback doesn't make the problem obvious, I use cgitb.enable(format='text') to get a verbose stack dump, which does. cgitb is being removed from the Python standard library, though, because the maintainers don't know it can do that.

Three years ago, a friend told me that a Perl CGI script I wrote last millennium was broken: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/rfc-index.cgi. I hadn't looked at the code in, I think, 20 years. I forget what the problem was, but in half an hour I fixed it and updated its parser to be able to use the updated format IETF uses for its source file. I was surprised that it was so easy, because I was worse at writing maintainable code then.

Maybe we could do a better job of designing a prototyping language today than Larry did in 01994, though? We have an additional 31 years of experience with Perl, Python, JS, Lua, Java, C#, R, Excel, Haskell, OCaml, TensorFlow, Tcl, Groovy, and HTML to draw lessons from.
by foo42 | 2025-07-06 07:00:31+00:00
you can get the same issue with icons too. The one that gives me anxiety is the microphone with a line through on a button. I _am_ muted or I should click to _mute_. If my kids are arguing in the background and it's an important call it can feel like a high stakes thing to get wrong and often times it only becomes clear what state I'm in by toggling a few times. Does the icon change to a mic without a line when I click or does the previously shown mic with a line now get coloured in, what does _that_ mean?
by hot_gril | 2025-07-06 07:00:47+00:00
Idk about the internal affairs, I just really don't like Python for web backend kind of things. It's taking them way too long to sort out parallelism and packaging, while NodeJS got both right from the start and gracefully upgraded (no 2->3 mess).

Also I used Python way before JS, and I still like JS's syntax better. Especially not using whitespace for scope, which makes even less sense in a scripting language since it's hard to type that into a REPL.