MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-24 17:24:33+00:00
For games its generally not worthwhile since the performance is almost entirely based on gpu these days.

Almost all build guides will say ‘get midrange cpu X over high end chip Y and put the savings to a better GPU’.

Consoles in particular are just a decent gpu with a fairly low end cpu these days. The xbox one with a 1.75Ghz 8core AMD from a couple of generations ago now is still playing all the latest games.
by cyberax | 2025-08-24 17:24:44+00:00
> LOL. Can't find any modern research can you?

I quoted newer research in the next post. For your information, the article was actually from 1997.

And if you don't like the old research, the first investigation of the greenhouse effect was done by Svante Arrhenius in 1889.

> Nah. There's so much noise about hydrogen because the fossil and chemical industries in Germany rely on hydrocarbons.

And the second largest consumer of natural gas in Germany is household heating. It has to be replaced by electric heating, but it's not feasible with the current generating capacity.

> We will likely keep a fleet of gas turbines around for emergency reserve duties for the coming decades.

No. Germany will paint gas turbines in green color and then keep burning natural gas from Qatar, the USA, Nigeria, etc.
by kev009 | 2025-08-24 17:24:56+00:00
Netflix, at least the Open Connect org, was still open ended adjacent to whatever NTech provided (your issued laptop and remote working stuff). It was very easy to get "exotic" hardware. I really don't think anyone abused it. This is an existence proof to the comment parents, it's neither a startup and I don't see engineers screwing the wheels off the bus anywhere I've ever worked.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-24 17:24:58+00:00
Dude, Gabe could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and all it takes is for 0.2% of Steam shares to be given to a secondary person, for any reason, due to a legal order (as he owns only 50.1%) to cause the takeover.

Valve is also facing a class action lawsuit for anticompetitive practices. If they lose, even though they will almost certainly survive, watch the tables flip upside down fast.
by dmacvicar | 2025-08-24 17:25:00+00:00
Genuine curiosity. Why would you buy a laptop with nvidia for the purpose of running Linux when it is known to be problematic?

I use Linux since ~ 28 years, and having seen all the trouble with Nvidia drivers, I just avoid it. I just pick an Intel graphics Thinkpad, likely the previous generation to the last one, check compatibility in the Arch wiki and then buy it.
by btown | 2025-08-24 17:25:33+00:00
There's some nuance here. The compiler flags SQLITE_DEFAULT_SYNCHRONOUS and SQLITE_DEFAULT_WAL_SYNCHRONOUS are set to FULL by default, which does fsync on each commit.

https://sqlite.org/compile.html

But there is a thing called NORMAL mode which, in WAL and non-WAL mode, does not fsync on each commit. In WAL mode, at least this doesn't cause corruption, but it can still lose data.

https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous is very explicit that the thing called NORMAL does have these risks. But it's still called NORMAL, and I'd think that's something of a foot-slingshot for newcomers, if not a full-fledged footgun.
by ViktorRay | 2025-08-24 17:25:40+00:00
Yes all regions should be able to support teachers.

But the original comment wasn’t about supporting teachers. It was about buying a house.

My comment in reply was saying that if buying a house is so important to these teachers there are many places in the USA they can live to do that.

You can still live in nyc or the other places as two elementary school teachers in an apartment. There’s no human right that says a house (compared to an apartment) is a required part of life.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-24 17:26:01+00:00
We didn't put elemental lead in gasoline, it was a very different molecule with a single lead atom. Given how dense lead is, you want to source it from as physically close as you can. A foundry making pipes in a city with a lead mine nearby will obviously use the local lead.

For gasoline, all production had to be centralized in a few refineries. The lead would have been shipped in, and would have been largely the same quality and age, likely coming from the same mine, or geographically close mines. Plus the absolute quantity of lead added to gasoline is relatively small. In the 60 years the US used TEL, we processed about 8 million tons of lead. Averaged out, it's 133 thousand tons a year. It would only take a few mines to provide that much. Probably not more than five or ten, but I can't immediately find good data on this.

One would expect that the lead used in gasoline is pretty homogeneous across time, and that intensive lead use (as in casting into solid metal object like pipes) would use the nearest available source, and use that source for as long as possible.
by alphazard | 2025-08-24 17:26:24+00:00
The codebase is not where the design usually lives. It's where the implementation lives. You could imagine a rewrite into another programming language which would preserve the design but completely replace the implementation.

You should practice writing design docs. Don't worry about what the doc is supposed to look like, and definitely don't work off of a template. The most important thing about the doc is that another human could do the implementation if you gave it to them.

The doc can also function as a "proof of consideration". If you choose to do something one way, but there are other possible ways to do it, you can acknowledge the other possible ways, and say why they are worse. By preemptively acknowledging an alternative, you have proved to readers that you considered it.

All a "good" system designer is doing is considering a larger design space than most, and consistently finding good points in the space. Pick a problem, sample points in the design space, tell me why some points are better than others, and write it all down.
by sgarland | 2025-08-24 17:26:46+00:00
My memory must be faulty, then, because I was mostly building it on an Athlon XP 2000+, which is definitely a few generations newer than a Pentium Pro.

I’m probably thinking of various other packages, since at the time I was all-in on Gentoo. I distinctly remember trying to get distcc running to have the other computers (a Celeron 333 MHz and Pentium III 550 MHz) helping out for overnight builds.

Can’t say that I miss that, because I spent more time configuring, troubleshooting, and building than using, but it did teach me a fair amount about Linux in general, and that’s definitely been worth it.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-24 17:27:01+00:00
Doesn't change a thing. All things are derived from fundamental principles.

IT Security is an arbitrary methodology derived from fundamental principles, but it doesn't change the fact that it's arbitrary.

I can make up dozens of ways to make something "secure" that doesn't follow convention. Why isn't he using biometric data like saliva DNA testing to verify identity? And why are they using a channel that anyone can peek at? Send the signals and credentials over a blinking laser light and therefore we know if the laser is disrupted we have someone trying to peek at the encrypted signal.

See what I'm saying, I can arbitrarily come up with dozens of ways to make things not only just as secure, but MORE secure. IT security is mostly memorization of convention. These conventions are derived from fundamentals, they are not principles themselves. There are thousands of orthogonal methodologies to achieve the same level of secureness but the set we use for IT are just an arbitrary selection out of an infinite amount of possibilities.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-24 17:27:02+00:00
There's a difference between memory and learning.

Would you rather your illness was diagnosed by a doctor or by a plumber with access to a stack of medical books ?

Learning is about assimilating lots of different sources of information, reconciling the differences, trying things out for yourself, learning from your mistakes, being curious about your knowledge gaps and contradictions, and ultimately learning to correctly predict outcomes/actions based on everything you have learnt.

You will soon see the difference in action as Anthropic apparently agree with you that memory can replace learning, and are going to be relying on LLMs with longer compressed context (i.e. memory) in place of ability to learn. I guess this'll be Anthropic's promised 2027 "drop-in replacement remote worker" - not an actual plumber unfortunately (no AGI), but an LLM with a stack of your company's onboarding material. It'll have perfect (well, "compressed") recall of everything you've tried to teach it, or complained about, but will have learnt nothing from that.
by aruggirello | 2025-08-24 17:27:14+00:00
I was somewhat suspicious that a probe could perform such a feat, but the article mentioned Avi Loeb, an award winning Harvard scientist [1], the author of the proposal, even went as far as computing required trajectory, ignition etc. so I assumed he had all the necessary data, and it was possible.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Loeb

I don't think considering his proposal might have damaged NASA's reputation. I also don't think the interstellar object is an alien probe, I just was excited we got a chance at looking at an interstellar object, that may be totally unlike Solar System objects, and possibly far older. Crap?
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-24 17:27:29+00:00
So what happens when you stick two French grids next to each other and you can't rely on your neighbors fossil fuel plants to absorb your over production by throttling down?

The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now.

You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver.

Here's a history refresher:

The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors

Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...

How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum?

That does not sound very logical.
by fsloth | 2025-08-24 17:28:04+00:00
” but it only did so by stochastically parroting hallucinated slop”

I’m not sure what the argument here is. That you should only use the most primitive tools available?

”LLMs suck” arguments sound exactly like ”IDE:s suck! True engineers writes everything in notepad.exe”. Or ”debuggers suck! Use only printfs!”

People have different ways of cognition and different strategies of problem solving and tool use. The fact you can’t understand other persons tool use is not an argument against those tools. It simply points out the tools may not be usefull to the critics mode of cognition or problem solving. Not that the tools suck.
by doublerabbit | 2025-08-24 17:28:26+00:00
I only have 2mb ADSL, each world on VR Chat is something about 300mb+ in size not including VR Avatars. I'll join a world with folk, and they'll jump worlds before anythings loaded.

I wear glasses so I have to use special lenses to enable me to see in-game. These costed an addition 150 euros.

The XREAL Air 2 look appealing but I am unable to buy inserts for. This make's them useless to me.

> "While we plan to offer lenses for the Air 2, its updated frame design makes self-assembly of the lenses too difficult"

If where we lived in a fantasy world where everyone had a 10Gbit connections, perfect eyeballs. Yeah, it'd be great tech, practical too. But those without are left out like left-handed folk.

My Valve Index is sitting untouched behind me. I bought this in 2021, Why can't companies offer a version for those with a prescription? One size fit's all doesn't work here.
by jackblemming | 2025-08-24 17:28:43+00:00
The only thing that matters is setting up a near monopoly where you have a chokehold. Valve did this with steam. Now it literally does not matter what asinine and silly business practices they do internally as long as they keep the money printer functioning. A lot of people do not understand this and think stupid things like, “if we copy Valve’s flat hierarchy, we’ll be as successful”.
by pfaphotoresist | 2025-08-24 17:29:05+00:00
> then treat it to wastewater standards before discharging to the municipal wastewater system.

Are there PFAS chemicals in the semiconductor photoresist and then in the water?

Do municipal wastewater standards require removal of PFAS?

Similarly, they're all okay with dumping water used to wash out coal plants into the rivers: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+10%25+coal+plant+wash+...
by arcticbull | 2025-08-24 17:29:29+00:00
> Which falls to 7.6% when counting the useful energy and not staring yourself blind on the electricity grid.

Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.

> Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.

France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.

> Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.

Are you able to quantify this are compared to renewables or are we just assuming? Remember in terms of costs, it's basically entirely construction -- fuel costs almost nothing. So even if reprocessing is relatively expensive, adding cost there won't really change nuclear energy prices.
by tazjin | 2025-08-24 17:30:27+00:00
Of course they do in Moscow too, the metropolitan/commuter areas exist in most big cities. Seems to be about 8 million less than Moscow for Paris, 6 million less for London, based on what Wikipedia currently says about the respective metropolitan areas.

For what it's worth, I lived in London for some time and its commuter rail system is much less integrated and much more confusing (with different companies, incompatible tickets and so on). In the city it's fine, though the tube isn't very comfortable (except for, ironically, its oldest lines which have luxuries such as ventilation).
by starchild3001 | 2025-08-24 17:30:29+00:00
What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI. The real grind is in all the invisible layers on top; balancing the loop, tuning difficulty, creating assets that don’t look uncanny, and building enough polish to hold someone’s attention for more than 5 minutes.

That’s why we’re not suddenly drowning in brilliant Steam releases post-LLMs. The tech has lowered one wall, but the taller walls remain. It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. LLMs are doing the same thing for code, and image models are starting to do it for art, but neither can tell you if your game is actually fun.

The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? That’s when we start moving beyond "AI as productivity hack" into "AI as collaborator in design." We’re not there yet, but this article feels like an early data point along that trajectory.
by variadix | 2025-08-24 17:30:41+00:00
Names are also a good way to determine how to draw boundaries between data, between code, etc. If you can give something a concise, descriptive, and intuitive name you can usually pull it out into its own function, type, etc. and it will _improve_ readability, since the name adds information and abstracts the implementation well. Names are also a good heuristic for whether your abstractions and boundaries are good. If they require verbose, misleading, or unintuitive names you may need to redraw those boundaries and abstractions.
by GolfPopper | 2025-08-24 17:30:59+00:00
While I am not familiar with this particular instance, universities will often have a permanent professorship, or chair, with a specific focus that is named either after a renown expert in the field who taught at that institution, or after the person or organization who funded (endowed) the establishment of that position.

As for Loeb himself, I'm only passingly familiar with him in passing because of coverage since ‘Oumuamua, but it seems like he is a fairly typical asgtrophysicist who decided for some reason that he would launch a crusade declaring anything entering the Solar System from interstellar space must be an alien probe or spaceship.
by wredcoll | 2025-08-24 17:31:01+00:00
Was there ever a serious belief that nobody drank water? That seems a bit much.

I can think of a fiction book that rather heavily pushed the idea, but it seems like a few minutes of thought would show that there's no way to produce/transport/store enough beer-type liquid for people working on a farm.

Conversely, an aristocrat/noble who travelled to a different continent might conceivably attempt to only drink beers/etc.
by galangalalgol | 2025-08-24 17:32:07+00:00
That is in interesting viewpoint. Firstly, evolution on long time scales hits plenty of local minima. But also, it gets semantic in that illusions or delusions can be beneficial, and in that way aid reproduction. In this specific case, the idea is that the shortcut of using the model of models as self saves a pointer indirection every time we use it. Meditation practices that lead to "ego death" seem to work by drawing attention to the process of updating that model so that it is aware of the update. Which breaks the shortcut, like thinking too much about other autonomous processes such as blinking or breathing.
by runjake | 2025-08-24 17:32:20+00:00
> These workers are often exploited and treated as expendable.

So, common ground with a lot of Hacker News audience?

Don't take me too seriously here, and not to excuse anything but what would these people be doing if they weren't data labeling? How would they be treated differently?

Presumably, they'd be working for some other multinational, because overall their quality of living is better than working at whatever other local industry exists?

The data labeling job itself strikes me as something dystopian. As if we're the work mules for our AI overlords.
by sitkack | 2025-08-24 17:32:38+00:00
Right, optimize for horrible tools so the result satisfies the bottom 20%. Counterpoint, id Software produced amazingly performant programs using top of the line gear. What are you trying to do is enforce a cultural norm by hobbling the programmer's hardware. If you want fast programs, you need to make that a criteria, slow hardware isn't going to get you there.
by zekrioca | 2025-08-24 17:32:59+00:00
That person you are arguing with is not arguing with you in good faith. They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach. The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling, and they could not come up with a better idea if things go bad, I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
by p_ing | 2025-08-24 17:33:04+00:00
While not the same issue, I took four 500GB Samsung 850 EVO drives and created a Storage Space out of them for Hyper-V VMs. Under any sort of load the volume would reach ~1 second latency. This was on a SAS controller in JBOD mode.

Switched to some Intel 480GB DC drives and performance was in the low milliseconds as I would have thought any drive should be.

Not sure if I was hitting the DRAM limit of the Samsungs or what, spent a bit of time t-shooting but this was a home lab and used Intel DCs were cheap on eBay. Granted, the Samsung EVOs weren't targeted to that type of work.
by fcpguru | 2025-08-24 17:33:22+00:00
Code to make this site is all open source:

https://github.com/andrewarrow/starchive/blob/main/podpapyru...

It uses a firefox extension to let you mouse over any youtube video. That tells the backend to yt-dlp the video id for the transcript. Then uses golang templates:

https://github.com/andrewarrow/starchive/blob/main/templates...

to render static html serverd by github pages.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-24 17:33:32+00:00
That would be very distressing, but the important things (eg. Proton, Gamescope, OpenXR) they built would live on in their legacy. Plus, the PC games industry can survive just fine without Valve - but Valve can't survive without the support of PC gamers. Anyone succeeding Gabe would have to accept that, or squander what little value their shares possess.

Products like the Steam Deck or Steam Controller don't need any Valve software to play games. Valve knows a post-Steam world will exist one day, and they're fine with that. From a consumer standpoint, I respect that.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-08-24 17:34:19+00:00
For me, software design is more comparable to business system and organization design. It’s just that instead of humans executing the processes you design, it’s machines doing it.

I don’t think business system and organization design is approached like bridge design either, is it?

Also, bridges, houses and surgeons can physically kill people if something goes wrong. Software that can physically kill people, such as that in airplanes or missiles, is actually treated quite differently from most software, I think? I don’t have experience in those industries those so I can’t comment on the specifics of how is it different, but my impression is that things are a lot more rigid. Business organization design also can’t directly kill people.

In general, I think that there is a fundamental tension between looseness and flexibility of operations and innovation. If you are super rigorous and have set in stone best practices, it is going to be harder to find new ways of doing things that work better.

I’m not really bothered if people don’t consider software to be a serious engineering discipline. I’m not sure I do either. If someone wants that kind of thing, I’d recommend they go into a different engineering discipline, rather than trying to make software like that.
by danjl | 2025-08-24 17:34:26+00:00
As a much lower bar, I'd love it if more of the LLMs used for coding were actually multimodal, accepting images of games as part of the context. In general, LLMs are far better at generating web apps than they are at pure 2D or 3D games that use graphical APIs. There's far less training data, and there's no way to test anywhere close to what you can do with testing on a DOM. In an interactive game, with physics, animations and game logic, the AI just falls on its face because of the complexity.
by reify | 2025-08-24 17:34:34+00:00
How about Hot cross buns

yaml support; Yummy And to My Liking

500g strong bread flour

10g easy bake yeast

50g caster sugar

1 x level teaspoon mixed spice

1 x level tsp cinnamon

1.5 x level tsp grated nutmeg

0.5 x level tsp ground ginger

1 x level tsp salt

340g luke warm milk, full cream milk,

80g butter, melted in microwave and whisked with milk

110g currants or mixed fruits

50g chopped mixed peel
by p_ing | 2025-08-24 17:36:15+00:00
Gamers also fall into the read/write number trap. When tested, that type of workload performs just about the same from PCIe 3.0 through 5.0 due to the 4KiB often random access. And in some cases, there was only a minor delta between PCIe 5.0 NVMe and SATA SSD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl8wXT8F3W4