MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by klibertp | 2025-08-05 16:57:25+00:00
There's an entire genre of games (immersive sims) that focus on experiencing the world with little to sometimes no skill required on the part of the player. The genre is diverse and incorporates elements of more gameplay-focused genres. It's also pretty popular.

I think some people want to play, and some want to experience, in different proportions. Tetris is the emanation of pure gameplay, but then you have to remember "Colossal Cave Adventure" is even older than Tetris. So there's a long history of both approaches, and for one of them, these models could be helpful.

Not that it matters. Until the models land in the hands of indie developers for long enough for them to prove their usefulness, no large developer will be willing to take on the risks involved in shipping things that have the slightest possibility of generating "wrong" content. So, the AI in games is still a long way off, I think.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-08-05 16:57:26+00:00
oh. the measure is how much code was used to implement it. at about 200 lines of javascript (to parse the text, convert it to json and render it as static HTML) it's at least a thousand times fewer lines of code as the early scala code that implemented twitter.

[edit - though it looks like handlebars (that I use for generating HTML from templates) has about 30k lines in files that end in .js, so maybe twitter is 30m lines of code?]

[second edit - hmm... maybe i'll change the name to "mini-blog" to signal it's a blog that's 25% the performance of a "mainframe-blog" but 10% the cost. though "mini-blog" might be more appropriate: halfway between a "normal" blog entry and a "micro-blog."]
by yawpitch | 2025-08-05 16:57:35+00:00
Mist is kind of the exact opposite of what their bodies turned into. Compression does really, really interesting things to meat and bone sacks with lots and lots of tiny airspaces. They wouldn’t have been conscious of anything, but they would have been more mince / paste / goo / frothy clot than anything as clean and homogenous sounding as mist.
by rpdillon | 2025-08-05 16:57:39+00:00
Not going to do all your legwork for you, but there are tons of fields that are changing rapidly because of AI. In Material Science, there's a thorny problem of how to accelerate material development, or even how to perform non-destructive testing of materials.

> AI, primarily through generative AI models, has dramatically changed our approach by accelerating the design process significantly. These models can predict material properties from extensive datasets, enabling rapid prototyping and evaluation that used to take years. We can now iterate designs quickly, focusing on the most promising materials early in the development phase, enhancing both efficiency and creativity in materials science. This is a huge leap forward because it reduces the time and cost associated with traditional materials development, allowing for more experimentation and innovation.

> One notable application is using deep learning models to infer the internal properties of materials from surface data. This technology is groundbreaking, particularly for industries like aerospace and biomedical, where non-destructive testing is crucial. These models can predict internal flaws or stresses by analyzing external properties without physically altering the material. This capability is essential for maintaining the integrity of critical structures and devices, making materials safer and more reliable while saving time and resources. Other recent advances are in multimodal AI, where such models can design materials and understand and generate multiple input and output types, such as text, images, chemical formulas, microstructural designs, and much more.

https://professional.mit.edu/news/articles/revolutionizing-m...

There's lots of other examples.

New ways to create COVID vaccines: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09442-9

More effective than humans at reading medical scans: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/ai-transforming-glob...

AI is already intensely useful, and will only continue to improve.
by jrm4 | 2025-08-05 16:57:46+00:00
Hmm, it could? From a fundamental POV, all the technology can do is act as a public ledger, executing and confirming transfers of money from one "account" to another. There's a whole lot of stuff being experimentally built on blockchains, so what you're looking for is possible.

I will say -- "immutability" isn't necessarily the horror that people make it out to be. Which is to say, oh $500 gets transferred from A to B incorrectly. The fact that you literally can't "undo" that doesn't much matter -- you just transfer 500 from B to A on a 2nd transaction.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-05 16:57:48+00:00
Just ignoring the massive devaluation of the dollar underway, the complete loss of the US' geopolitical standing (which China is rapidly taking over), and just the general economic collapse the US is likely to face (though don't worry, Herr Trump is going to fire everyone that doesn't sharpie fake numbers in)...

...the dissolution of the union. Already representatives from one state -- one that is actively destroying democracy to serve the agenda of rapist Trump -- are sheltering in the opposition camp's state, under the protection of its governor.

How long do people think this nonsense is going to continue? How long will better states endure having this human trash lording over them with their grievance and grift (remember that "free for the taxpayer" jet? Actually will cost taxpayers a billion dollars to be transferred to that criminal thief)?

Soon enough tax withholding will happen, there will be a struggle, and the divisions will arise.
by pahkah | 2025-08-05 16:57:58+00:00
This particular bribe was reported on over a year ago, when Trump was raising money from oil execs for his campaign. It seems likely that the overall push against clean energy (pushing for dispatchable generation, canceling tax credits for green energy projects) is related. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
by garciasn | 2025-08-05 16:58:10+00:00
It's in Central MN. It is 11 miles, straight line, from a town of 2200 and 15 miles from a town of 4400. The closest town is 8 miles as the crow flies of 700 and only has a gas station and a couple of bars. There's a bar and volunteer fire department 4 miles as the crow flies that has a population of 48.

Believe me: this is rural. Until investment from the federal government and/or forced lower-bound limits on 'broadband' back about 6 years ago, the only option was 768/300 DSL.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-05 16:58:17+00:00
> The problem with oceangate is that their CEO was an arrogant narcissist who thought he knew better than everyone, and if anyone stood in his way he would explode with anger at them and fire them. It was a company with absolutely no culture of safety and a cult of personality where people were punished for being honest.

Sounds like someone else that's been in the news these last few months.
by _hark | 2025-08-05 16:58:40+00:00
Very cool! I've done research on reinforcement/imitation learning in world models. A great intro to these ideas is here: https://worldmodels.github.io/

I'm most excited for when these methods will make a meaningful difference in robotics. RL is still not quite there for long-horizon, sparse reward tasks in non-zero-sum environments, even with a perfect simulator; e.g. an assistant which books travel for you. Pay attention to when virtual agents start to really work well as a leading signal for this. Virtual agents are strictly easier than physical ones.

Compounding on that, mismatches between the simulated dynamics and real dynamics make the problem harder (sim2real problem). Although with domain randomization and online corrections (control loop, search) this is less of an issue these days.

Multi-scale effects are also tricky: the characteristic temporal length scale for many actions in robotics can be quite different from the temporal scale of the task (e.g. manipulating ingredients to cook a meal). Locomotion was solved first because it's periodic imo.

Check out PufferAI if you're scale-pilled for RL: just do RL bigger, better, get the basics right. Check out Physical Intelligence for the same in robotics, with a more imitation/offline RL feel.
by acc_297 | 2025-08-05 16:58:46+00:00
This is a common agreement to have with industrial power users. I know in Quebec during the coldest days in winter industrial users are required to scale back.

I would hope there aren't too many large utility jurisdictions which would curtail citizen consumers in favour of industrial users in the event of a demand surge.

On a related note. It's worrying to me how quickly we've accepted that we're going to boost electricity consumption massively prior to achieving anything close to the carbon intensity reduction targets which would mitigate the worst of climate change effects. It's all driven by a market force which cannot be effectively regulated on a global scale for multinational tech firms who can shop around for the next data centre location with near total freedom. And with advances in over the top fibre networks etc... a tonne of AI demand can be met by a compute cluster on the other side of the world (especially during model training) so the externalities related to the computing infrastructure can theoretically be completely dumped somewhere far away from the paying customer.
by michaelrpeskin | 2025-08-05 16:59:14+00:00
yes - I often think about what I would do if I "won the lottery" or similarly got a significant amount of cash. Even though I have a low mortgage rate (refied in the middle of COVID), I'd probably still pay off my house. I know it makes absolutely no rational economic sense, but not having a mortgage payment and knowing that I own my house would give me a piece of mind that as you say is hard to put a dollar amount on.

I know there are people out there that like maximize returns with leverage and all of that - and the math all makes sense! - but I'd prefer the simplicity of not dealing with it.
by hammock | 2025-08-05 16:59:22+00:00
People forget that all doctors were quacks (to borrow your meaning, loosely) until 1847 when the AMA was founded to promote medical licensing; and/or until Flexner’s report to Congress that there were too many unlicensed doctors not using enough pharmaceuticals (1910), the standardization of allopathic medicine and founding of the Federation of State Medical Boards (1912)
by altairprime | 2025-08-05 16:59:30+00:00
It’s still possible to avoid this scenario. For example, imagine how conservative tech-hostile politicians would react if they understood how passkeys gives big tech authority over their money. Or when police discover that they no longer have the ability to extract passwords with a wrench. Or how parents won’t be able to access some accounts because the kid stored a passkey outside of iCloud and now it’s parent-proof. Massive outrage is due to tech over this, considering historical trends, but either no one realizes the benefits of them — or everyone doesn’t care because it’s worth not having their password stolen.

The standards body did a really excellent job solving the problem. Is outrage deserved? Is this better or worse than our freedom? I would watch that debate if someone posted a video of a panel discussing the contradictions! Because I’m not sure where I stand, either.

But I just cannot stand the obliviousness that everyone has over attestation. It’s not a done deal yet. I just haven’t seen tech suggest anything to do about it, and that continues to worry.
by arp242 | 2025-08-05 17:00:21+00:00
Everything has been getting worse since the React rewrite(s). Everything is just so much more slower and janky. And things like the "back button" keep acting weird (I reported this several times, after a long delay they fixed it several times, and it just keeps breaking a few weeks later – I've given up).

Some of the design decisions are also just baffling, like having "New Issue" in a small modal instead of just a full-screen page (only if you have templates set for some reason). Having less than half the screen being used is not helpful, and only going to reduce the quality of reported issues because it's just shit UX. Baffling. I genuinely wonder if the people designing/building this have ever used GitHub themselves (they reverted some of the other misguided "how on earth did you think that was a good idea?!" features, but not this one).

I have so many more gripes and bugs; clicking "show raw" generally works better for viewing code (or just cloning locally). It's just embarrassing. But it's all pointless to report because nothing gets fixed and it all just keeps getting worse.

GitLab was a "GitHub clone", but I guess now GitHub is turning in a "GitLab clone" by making everything a slow janky barely working mess.
by richwater | 2025-08-05 17:00:25+00:00
You can indeed do so, but it requires a skillset way behind new grads, bootcamps and giving up the prevailing leadership mantra of "All engineers are fungible so just throw that random team over to learn React and it'll be fine".

Front End Engineer roles pay less than general Software Development Engineers at pretty much every FAANG and so you see a lot of FEEs want to transition. Not much senior talent gets kept in that kind of pipeline.
by slg | 2025-08-05 17:00:47+00:00
You are not engaging with the heart of the question. If "The number of people killed (civilian and military) was irrelevant", why do you think it was necessary that they were killed? If "The difference was in the psychological effect of a new type of weapon", why could the goal of forcing surrender not be accomplished by demonstrating that new weapon in a way that wouldn't kill hundreds of thousands? Why are options like dropping the bomb in Tokyo Bay, further off the coast, or in less populated areas not treated as serious alternatives? Why did the bombs have to be dropped on cities?
by alyandon | 2025-08-05 17:00:47+00:00
When I bought my home in 2009 (suburbia in major metro area) - AT&T was offering a whopping 6mbps DSL connection for wired internet. At the end of 2024, they were still only offering 6 mbps DSL.

This year - they rolled out fiber. So, it only took 16 years - maybe you'll get lucky.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-05 17:01:11+00:00
> Just because parents are looking for screen-free activities doesn't mean they're anti-screen.

The fact that they're highlighting the screen-free nature of these activities is what makes it perjorative. Otherwise they would just be "activities for kids". This sort of thing:

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/kids-activities/

> When you see a gluten-free option on a menu, do you feel so attacked?

No, because some people genuinely can't tolerate gluten.

Putting "screen-free" in there serves zero purpose except to guilt people who let their kids watch videos occasionally into thinking they're doing something wrong.

It's obviously not a good idea to let your kids watch TV all day. Nobody thinks that. But you don't need to feel guilty about letting them watch Saturday morning cartoons or whatever. That's my issue with this "screen-free" guilt trip.
by FredPret | 2025-08-05 17:01:33+00:00
If you just need a place to store your code, self-hosted Gitea is very easy.

Your discoverability will drop to close to zero, and Actions are trickier to set up. Plus, you'll have to come up with a backup plan.

But, you'll be hosting your code on your machine, Microsoft will be out of the loop completely, and you won't be feeding the AI monsters if your repo's are set to "private".
by redundantly | 2025-08-05 17:01:40+00:00
I tried that, but had two problems:

When migrating a VM from one host to another it would require cloning the LVM volume, rather than just importing the group on the other node and starting the VM up.

I have existing VMware gusts that I'd like to migrate over in bulk. This would be easy enough to do by converting the VMDK files, but using LVM means creating an LVM group for each VM and importing the contents of the VMDK into the LV.
by igor47 | 2025-08-05 17:02:08+00:00
I *strongly* disagree with Trump climate policy but I can give it a shot.

Basically, fossil fuels have been a machine for lifting people out of poverty and creating economic growth. If you overlay charts of growth on top of charts of energy use, they're almost one and the same. Now, a bunch of head-in -the-sky liberals come along and decide we can't use these fuels anymore, and instead should use... Windmills? And their reasons are obviously fake. The climate has always changed, and isn't changing so much now, maybe even cooling recently. Their dire predictions keep failing to come true, and all their evidence comes from more liberal SJW University snowflakes.

Worse-- all the stuff they want to deploy comes from communist China, while we have tons of oil and gas right here at home.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-05 17:02:09+00:00
>With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money.

There are two perspectives on this. From the user's standpoint, when I finally wired up my house and we were no longer using wifi, all the streaming video was just flawless, no more stuttering. And I was only sharing that air with devices in my own house and the two closest neighbors. I wouldn't want to have to share it with all of North America.

The other perspective is from the point of view of the ISPs themselves (the ones not Starlink). Can they pay off the cost of the infrastructure, and then make a profit? And it turns out that they can. Just not a quick one. If they can't profit on it this quarter, many see no incentive. Someone needs to light a fire under their asses.

These are both obvious, and if you "don't see how", maybe you need to look.
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-08-05 17:03:18+00:00
What gets me is the egocentric perspective it has naturally produced from its training data, where you have the perception of a 3D 6 degrees of freedom world space around you. Once it's running at 90 frames per second and working in a meshed geometry space, this will intersect with augmented virtual XR headsets, and the metaverse will become an interaction arena for working with artificial intelligence using our physical action, our gaze, our location, and a million other points of background noise telemetry, all of which will be integrated into what we now today call context and the response will be adjusting in a useful, meaningful way what we see painted into our environment. Imagine the world as a tangible user interface.
by hajile | 2025-08-05 17:03:19+00:00
It seems like none of the really good language proposals have much traction. Proper Tail Calls have been in the language for TEN YEARS now, but v8 and Spidermonkey still violate the spec and refuse to implement for no good reason.

Record/tuple was killed off despite being the best proposed answer for eliminating hidden class mutation, providing deep O(1) comparisons, and making webworkers/threads/actors worth using because data transfer wouldn't be a bottleneck.

Pattern matching, do expressions, for/while/if/else expressions, binary AST, and others have languished for years without the spec committee seemingly caring that these would have real, tangible upsides for devs and/or users without adding much complexity to the JIT.

I'm convinced that most of the committee is completely divorced from the people who actually use JS day-to-day.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-08-05 17:03:21+00:00
> it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint

My guess is that they're worried that you'll download data and then copy it out of the device while the device is offline. An employee could even "lose" the device, giving an attacker unbound time to extract data from it.

Another equally likely explanation is that the exec in charge of their cloud services gains more prestige due to his solution being universally adopted internally, or some other crap along this line.
by bbor | 2025-08-05 17:03:40+00:00
IDK I think this is on purpose: https://nitter.net/sama/status/1952759361417466016#m

we have a lot of new stuff for you over the next few days! something big-but-small today. and then a big upgrade later this week.

EDIT: nevermind, I spoke too soon! I guess this was referring to GPT 5 later this week. https://openai.com/open-models/ is live
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-05 17:04:35+00:00
> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. That said, I've always felt satellite internet to be yucky but I'm used to "satellite internet" adding 1000ms to your latency and uploads that actually run over your telephone line.

Depends on what you declare a "good expenditure of money".

The thing about running fiber is that it's not particularly expensive to do. dig trench, install infrastructure, rebury it. Hell, if you have a utility pole, you can omit steps 1 and 3, so long as you're okay with the line being exposed to the elements.

Launching satellites is very expensive to do. There are very high barriers to entry that prevent meaningful competition from occurring for satellite internet providers, which is why HughesNet was crap for all of those years. It took NASA funding a commercial crew program to get a rocket built that could put payload in LEO for "cheap", and there's only two or three options that can reasonably be expected to operate that way.

I'd rather have a lot of competition for installing and operating fiber infrastructure than having an effective duopoly for running performant satellite internet.

I'm under no delusions that will occur in rural areas under the present regime in DC.

As for an exodus from cities and suburbs, no. There's no amount of internet speed that would make me move to a place where there's reduced services and infrastructure in every other category, like schools, hospitals (this is a big one), water, sewer, transit, etc. and there are millions more like me.
by mmarian | 2025-08-05 17:04:39+00:00
> LinkedIn posts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mveteanu/recent-activity/all

I think it would be better if you focused on personal opinions and experiences than generic tech topics; I cover in more depth here: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/blog-engagement-ti...

> Mini personal website: https://mveteanu.me/

Make the photo smaller, resolution is too low for laptop screen; copy is a bit too word-y for me.

> My various X posts: https://x.com/mveteanu/

Only certain kinds of content do well there, as you probably can tell :)

> do I sound like the kind of leader you’d want to work with?

For me it would be good to see your personal takes on tech leadership. And I'm not talking about generic takes, but authentic stuff that maybe is more controversial. Eg my personal take is that the optimal amount of code a tech lead should write on their own is 0.
by manifoldgeo | 2025-08-05 17:04:41+00:00
Mozilla still uses Mercurial for Firefox development [0]. They're in the process of moving to git and GitHub [1]. I don't know the status of the move, but I contributed a bit to Firefox's build system via Mercurial, and I am glad to see they're moving to git since it's the industry standard. Mercurial felt so alien when I was using it. Git has its own share of UX problems, but finding support for Mercurial was much harder for me, precisely because nobody really uses it anymore.

References:

0: https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/

1: https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/firefox-dev/c/Qnfy...