MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by riedel | 2025-07-06 07:23:14+00:00
Moving stuff out of the standard library seems like a reason. However, I think this all is a weird mix of arguments. IMHO new process spawning is a feature and not a bug in the use cases where CGI is used. Most of the stuff is low traffic config interfaces or remote invocable scripts. There was this trend to move stuff to fcgi. We had tons of cases of memory leaks in long running but really seldomly used stuff like mailing list servers. To me cgi is the poor man's alternative to serverless. However, I also do not really completely understand why a standard library has to support it. I have bash scripts running using the Apache CGI mod.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-07-06 07:24:23+00:00
I am wondering why they used the link so much that it was able to be used against them. Submersible loses benefits if it requires an external service.

Launch. Submerge. Drunkenly move in the direction of the destination. If N days since last check-in and/or uncertainty in location, ping mothership. Repeat. Only lean on communication channel for final handoff stage.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-06 07:25:06+00:00
If you want more ideas, I don't know how I came up with them, but you can think about them:

Contextual Flags: Automatically activate flags based on context (e.g., URL, time of day, user-agent). Why: Users get adaptive flags without manual checks.

Flag Usage Statistics: Log flag activation events for analysis. Why: Users see which flags are popular without complex integrations. Shadow Flags (for A/B testing): A flag that quietly activates for a subset of users (e.g., 10% of traffic). Why: Out-of-the-box A/B tests without external systems.

Flag Groups: Allow grouping flags (e.g., "UI") and managing an entire group with one command. Why: Simplifies management of related flags. Automatic DOM Updat: Automatically update DOM elements with a special attribute when a flag changes. Why: Zero UI integration; users add a data-flag attribute, the library does the rest.
by motorest | 2025-07-06 07:26:41+00:00
> My point is that there are people low on the agreeableness scale, and they can often be exceptional engineers.

Not true. Every single egregious asshole who is unable or unwilling to work in a team environment is quite bluntly incompetent. No degree of perceived hard skills mitigate how incompetent these types are. Engineering is predominantly a social activity. Team output is amplified by a collaborative environment. If you fail at basic tasks such as coordinating work and you manage to antagonize anyone around you then your net contribution to the project is negative.
by sveme | 2025-07-06 07:26:48+00:00
When people starve and have no means to revolt against their massively overpowered AI/robot overlords, then I'd expect people to go back to sustenance farming (after a massive reduction in population numbers).

A while later, the world is living in a dichotomy of people living off the land and some high tech spots of fully autonomous and self-maintaining robots that do useless work for bored people. Knowing people and especially the rich, I don't believe in Culture-like utopia, unfortunately, sad as it may be.
by protocolture | 2025-07-06 07:26:52+00:00
>But eventually the market will fix this, right? People will feel sick of being manipulated and move elsewhere?

You can literally go outside and talk to people. There's no moat around dating apps. Human beings continue to exist in meatspace. I am yet to see a dating app contract that prevents you from being casually approached by strangers. Heck matchmakers still exist.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 07:27:20+00:00
That's intended as an unreasonably high upper bound. On my cellphone, in Termux, python3 -m cgi takes 430–480ms. On my laptop it takes 90–150ms. On your server it probably takes less.

I agree that tens of milliseconds of latency is significant to the user experience, but it's not always the single most important consideration. My ping time to news.ycombinator.com is 162–164ms because I'm in Argentina, and I do unfortunately regularly have the experience of web page loads taking 10 seconds or more because of client-side JS.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-06 07:27:21+00:00
> which was more interested in owning the patent than making a product.

I really hope that after copyright protections (insanely long, IMO) get revamped in the LLM aftermath, we start focusing on patent law. Patents were always in my mind a way to protect small_inventor from big_bad_corp, and give them a breathing room to get a product to market. We should really focus on this, and make patents moot as long as a) a working prototype is not demonstrated, b) the patent holder doesn't pursue the tech, c) a small domain-specific timeframe (less for medicine for example) and d) it's really really generic (i.e. a method to have LLM agents work in a loop - no, bobby, everyone can do that.)
by whatevertrevor | 2025-07-06 07:27:53+00:00
I'm not sure I understand the point you're making. I'm trying to say games aren't becoming niche any time soon. Of course I'm going to use the umbrella term to say that? Yeah there are many sub-segments, arguably many more than say movies, but that only strengthens my argument. It can cater to so many different sort of audiences.

> more and more people will realize games are a waste of time for them and go on to find other hobbies

This is what I'm arguing against, more and more people will realize exactly what sort of games they like and home in on that is a much more likely scenario.

And just in case your point is that games used to be more engaging and fresh, well, Indie games exist. So many games are doing many new things, or fusing existing genres into something fresh. There's a lot more variety to be had in games than most other media.
by progre | 2025-07-06 07:30:38+00:00
To me, the funniest part of why Principica was bankrolled by Edmund Halley is that is was supposed to be funded by the Royal Academy. Only, their previous publishing project "The history of fishes" had faceplanted and they had no money.

Also, when Principica was funded and Halley was himself short on cash, RA decided that they could not afford to actually pay him money (he was the RA secretary). Instead he would get copies of The History of fishes
by javitury | 2025-07-06 07:31:21+00:00
Regarding Uber, I agree that their price transparency is very much appreciated.

However it's not rare to find bad drivers on Uber. On Christmas this year I took an uber from the airport, the driver had supposely arrived but he was nowhere to be seen. We called each other and I could hardly hear anything. After wasting about 30 minutes (and battery almost depleted) we finally found each other. It turns out he didn't know how to speak English or the local language. He had two phones, one he used to call a colleage who could (barely) translate english for him, the other phone he used to talk to clients, and both phones were placed mic-to-speaker to bridge the calls. What about the extra time that the driver wasted? I was billed for it and I had no way to dispute it. I could only report this behavior in a review to a driver that didn't seem to be him (was the main driver subletting his account?).
by TFYS | 2025-07-06 07:32:32+00:00
It's not the centralization that's the main problem. Centralization of those services can make sense. It's how and why those centralized services are run. They're run like dictatorships, for the purpose of making the dictator and his friends richer. They should be run democratically, for the purpose of making the lives of the users better. Breaking up monopolies is just a temporary solution, because the systems of capitalism will always create them again. The underlying system, the how and why, needs to change.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-07-06 07:33:16+00:00
Yeah it's mostly nostalgia and selection bias speaking. Easy to remember all the flaws of games you have played recently and compare them to the handful of classics you can remember from the 90s.

There was so so so much trial and error in games in the 90s, with some you basically had to press different inputs to even figure out what does what. No QoL features, really poor save systems that forced you to play the same section over and over, terrible voice acting, crappy B-movie plotlines (this hasn't changed that much tbf but there are some amazingly written games too at least to somewhat counterbalance that) etc.
by vodou | 2025-07-06 07:33:41+00:00
I really understand your frustration. Everyone developing in Python for a long time has felt it a bit too often when breaking changes (even between minor version updates) once again ruins the day.

But I also understand that the world is not perfect. We all need to prioritize all the time. As they write in the rationale: "The team has limited resources, reduced maintenance cost frees development time for other improvements". And the cgi module is apparently even unmaintained.

I guess a "batteries included" philosophy sooner or later is caught up by reality.

What do you mean by "character assassination" carried out against Tim Peters? Not anything in the linked article I presume?
by jagrsw | 2025-07-06 07:33:46+00:00
> I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.

Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window.

Analysis: This user loses disengages during 75% of the time and belongs to a group of 5% who do the same. The expected revenue for this group over a longer period and with multiple users is 24% lower than for the average user. Action: Since 80% of theirs engagements last for at least 12 hours, ads should be shown and prices increased only within the first three hours.

Hope this helps :)
by protocolture | 2025-07-06 07:34:00+00:00
>My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.

Eh I wouldnt speak for all of us. I like having the ability to reward contractors with some extra cash for a job well done. The issue is structurally relying on it.

Shit, when I was 14 or so I worked as a baggage handler. And I will never forget the time we took on an overflow job from an american cruise liner at circular quay. Not only was I getting 20 bucks an hour (decent pay at the time), but I took home an extra 1100 or so completely tax free. Nothing as australian as cash in hand.

>That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door

Its always moral to break unjust laws. The taxi monopolies needed to be broken. Having those laws challenged thanks to the donation of US VC money was just a bonus.

Actually theres still work to be done. Sydney CBD is still extremely hostile to rideshare.
by dvh | 2025-07-06 07:34:16+00:00
They could swam before they have been built, or to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum: "Life, err, finds a way". Are you one of those people who believe dams can protect you from bull sharks? Do you know why faucets have little mesh on the outlet? That's right! Tiny bull sharks could bite your fingers when you wash your hands.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-07-06 07:34:18+00:00
>> As an animal rights activist, this will do wonders for the movement.

The article says allowing the virus to rip through flocks could kill "billions of birds" [1]. Is that really OK with the movement?

___________

[1] Allowing widespread infection of commercial flocks would kill billions of birds, drive poultry and egg prices up, as well as destabilize local economies and global trade through import restrictions imposed on U.S. products, the authors wrote. Simultaneously, it could also foster reservoirs of H5N1, increasing the virus' odds of making the leap to humans — and gaining the ability for human-to-human infection.
by nurettin | 2025-07-06 07:35:03+00:00
Coding isn't really the hard part. I learned it on a commodore with casette tapes.

Sure you need the general sense for architecture which comes from experience, but it is not a long list. Learning about computer hardware and assembly from scratch is what made it all come together for me. Algorithmic complexity, data structures, development tools were all a mystery and "just things to memorize" until I learned about logic gates, developed transistors from those logic gates to get memory circuits, developed binary full adders, a bus, a basic cpu with a few registers and a program pointer and actually programmed it with its own instruction set. All you really need for this is pen and paper. Then move on to multicore, multiprocess, scheduling, then move to simd and graphics hardware. If you have several months to dedicate, I'd say go for that.
by timeon | 2025-07-06 07:35:49+00:00
> 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.

I've been in taxi just about three times in my life and zero in Uber. Usually just take bus/tram/train, walk or bike. Car for utility in the country. I think I do not live in fantastic futuristic city (it is in eastern Europe) but at least it is not dystopia.
by tehbeard | 2025-07-06 07:35:56+00:00
Because parents and the general public won't see that it's Bob's private server for $game. They see $game_name by $developer/publisher.

Mojang (creators of Minecraft ) is an unfortunate good case study for this. It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft brand.

I don't agree that we should be coerced into being in the kid safe padded play area, but I ain't blind enough to not see why we are.
by anon7000 | 2025-07-06 07:36:42+00:00
Today I visited the shit website known as Fandom, and within a second of scrolling the page, the entire page was ads. Not joking: https://imgur.com/a/8QzBZGM — and it’s not a contrived example, this is the first thing that happened after reaching the page via a search for some character in a show. This is the default new user experience for Fandom, at least some portion of the time. How is this acceptable to the employees and executives of that company?

The CTO, Adil Ajmal, says “we help people worldwide go deeper on their favorite games, entertainment, and culture.” How can I possibly do that with the absurd number of ads on the page?

The money incentive in software right now is to make it extremely shitty. We need ways to incentivize people, and especially executives, to make friendly decisions for their users.

Right now across the industry, many people are getting promoted and hired for decisions that are extremely hostile to their customers and visitors. Whether it be for replacing support with an unhelpful, dumb AI bot, or marginally growing revenue by shoveling ads down your unwilling throat, we are not incentivizing products that are good and friendly to humans.

Seriously, fuck all the investors who are incentivizing this BS.

Of course, we need drastic changes to the economic system (the counterproductive incentives exist everywhere), but you have a choice in the matter. It’s possible to build a good product and make good money and make some revenue growth without being absolutely insane about it. Companies are betting that customers won’t catch on. Facebook might be a good example. It’s turned into such a shithole that no one in a certain age range wants to deal with it anymore, outside of very specific niches. The primary feed & product has failed.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-06 07:37:43+00:00
Perhaps chartreuse and teal?

More seriously, my understanding is that the octopus retina does not have color receptors, just aggregate light, I.e. brightness.

But the octopus practically has a sub-brain behind each respective eye, and the eye brains can extract color from the slight lensing differences across frequencies.

They are amazing magical creatures.

Taking that approach, and some sort of ocular lathe, and we can fix this.
by jpc0 | 2025-07-06 07:37:49+00:00
Containers correctly used make things much easier.

“I need to build this software stack for Debian 10 on Arm64 but I am running arch on x86” -> Docker container with Debian cross compilation toolchain and all is good. “But I need a modern compiler”, install it in the container, problem solved and you know the system depa match.

“This software is only validated on Ubuntu 24.04”, container.

Everyone has already mentioned have a dev environment that exactly matches prod save hardware, containers.
by seydor | 2025-07-06 07:39:34+00:00
ads are the most benign form of extraction. They attack your attention but that's just about it. The manipulative algorithms, the walled garden, the subscriptions , the extractive surcharges, the anticompetitive rules , those came after ads and they are far worse and far more profitable. Wish we could go back to a free, ad-supported internet, but the whole internet is now a front for stockholder ponzi schemes.
by mavamaarten | 2025-07-06 07:40:27+00:00
I also think many comments are a bit too eager in claiming "oh just publish the code" and "oh just let users host X". It's obviously not that simple. The biggest one for me is that single player games should still be playable offline after servers have been sunset.

I'm sure that with current games, licenses were indeed acquired for a certain limited time. But if you start development and you know you'll have to sunset it according to the rules one day, I'm sure you'll come up with other licenses or just a way to strip out content like that.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 07:41:05+00:00
I would have phrased it, "serverless is a marketing term for CGI scripts."

I have bash CGI scripts too, though Shellshock and bash's general bug-proneness make me doubt that this was wise.

There are some advantages of having the CGI protocol implemented in a library. There are common input-handling bugs the library can avoid, it means that simple CGI programs can be really simple, and it lets you switch away from CGI when desired.

That said, XSS was a huge problem with really simple CGI programs, and an HTML output library that avoids that by default is more important than the input parsing—another thing absent from Python's standard library but done right by Django.
by cortesoft | 2025-07-06 07:41:23+00:00
I think the genetic variation you get when times are plenty will only hover around the mean, though, until some restraint pushes it a specific direction.

Here is a simplistic example of what I am trying to say:

Imagine you have a population of creatures, and they have some gene (or combination of genes) that controls how much cold they can tolerate. Some can tolerate very cold weather, some can barely tolerate any cold weather, and some are in the middle. They all can live happily, and mate randomly, meaning the individuals who have a high cold tolerance will (on average, since most other individuals by definition will have lower cold tolerance) mate with an individual who has lower cold tolerance. In other words, the next generation will genetically regress to the mean.

This continues on as long as all the individuals can survive at basically the same rate.

Now, imagine there is suddenly a very cold winter, and the individuals who can't tolerate cold die off. Now, there aren't any (or many) individuals with low cold tolerance for the higher tolerance individuals to mate with, meaning it won't regress back to that mean (or more accurately, it will regress back towards the new mean based on a population without the susceptible to cold individuals). Now, that genetic variation you get from generation to generation might reach new extremes that it never would have gotten to during times of plenty.
by udev4096 | 2025-07-06 07:41:31+00:00
Oh, so you're sick of it but unwilling to do anything? How about do something about it? I am glad to see the consequences of convenience that you all crave. It's just going to get worse. There is always a choice, whether you believe it or not. Opt-in and realize they own you or opt-out and don't be a slave
by pointlessone | 2025-07-06 07:41:36+00:00
Saas offerings are safe as they don’t let you Buy a thing. They’re very transparently a service. Same with timed licenses. It’s clear what you’re paying for. Most of the time.

With games it’s often not the case. You buy them and then at unspecified moment you might lose a significant portion of functionality or the whole game. At the time you buy a game you don’t know if it’s for a time, what time, or what will stop working.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-07-06 07:46:54+00:00
> megawatt-hour territory. A tank full of diesel fuel

A full diesel tank on a truck is circa 13 megawatt hours

A bigger risk than the energy density (or how bomb-like it is) must be the self-sustaining fires.

Per mile driven, electric trucks have less fires than diesel ones but when they go on fire, they can be harder to put out.

It's different risk profiles, diesel can run downhill in an accident and create a fairly hard to contain situation. BEVs don't really do that but they reject attempts to snuff them out.

I like the Edison Motors concept a lot. Diesel generator running at peak efficiency charging a small battery. From a fire hazard point of view, probably worst of both worlds when it does go up in flames but i'd still expect less fires than conventional diesel trucks, based on nothing but the gut feeling that the drastic simplification of the drive train results in fewer ignition opportunities.
by muppetman | 2025-07-06 07:48:42+00:00
Right? I got his email too and man, I love what he does, I'm glad he's recovering from his illness etc. I've donated many times. But it's insane for him to think this was targeted. This was some bot/AI gone rogue. Or similar.

If someone wants to take you DOWN they will. And not by downloading a bunch of a files a heap.
Ask HN: Are recommender systems getting worse?
by 0xPIT | 2025-07-06 07:48:54+00:00
I feel that all my recommended contents, like on Instagram, YouTube, or in shops is really dumb more-of-the-same.

YouTube is a really bad example, watch one video about one artist, the feed will be full of just exactly that artist. And one can’t get rid of those “recommendations”.

But the same is true on most other platforms. It’s even worse if you are somehow specific. If you look for a specific premium brand, it will still recommend low-end stuff. If you are left handed, it will still recommend right handed stuff.

How does this really convert well for the platforms? What seems to prevent everyone to show users good, useful relevant recommendations?
by dijit | 2025-07-06 07:49:36+00:00
I can’t speak for them because I never worked on them, but you’d be surprised how often a piece of music or a graphic is copyrighted. One of thousands of your common textures gets a bit too close to something else and suddenly you need a license.

Fun fact: a lot of game audio is licensed too, sound effects and such.

Regardless, the issue of sublicensing goes beyond what you’re allowed to let people do, it also goes into the idea that you’re often forced to disallow people from harvesting those assets from the game, or allowing the game to turn into derivative works - and because you yourself do not actually own the asset, you’re forced to confront it.

To avoid these issues, games would have to be very small (2D? Chiptunes? idk how small), but it’s one of a million tiny issues that comes up in game development, and each one of those tiny issues risks not allowing you to release the game.

Games are really, really hard to make, there are so many issues waiting to kill it- and even if you manage to make it, there’s no guarantee it’s successful, so spending time on these things is stealing time from making it fun or viable.