MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-09-07 10:12:19+00:00
We're talking about X-COM: Enemy Unkown, the Firaxis game, right? I had so much fun with this game that I don't even remember that RNG issue as being an issue. Most likely, if I failed a "certain to land" shot and the squad was in a really, really tough spot, I'd just shrug and re-load a save [1]. I mean, it's not Nethack, is it? [2]

In any case, I really don't get it. So you point your gun at an alien and you see a chance to hit at "85%". What do you do? Do you think to yourself "oh, cool, that's a certain hit"? It's not: there's a 15% chance to miss.

I think ragequtting over that is just the standard phenomenon, in both strategy games and real life, that people never make contingency plans, they just make one plan and assume there's no chance of failure because they're so smart to plan ahead and the competition is clearly too dumb to have any plans of their own. In my book, any plan where one imagines themselves emerging triumphant after beating all the odds like the dice are loaded in their favour by the gods is not so much a "plan" as a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

And I, for one, don't find those fun. YMMV, but let's not assume that everyone enjoys the same things, in games or in life.

P.S.:

>> There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.

You mean, they still have hit chances but they don't tell you what they are so they can tweak them behind your back, so you win enough to buy their next game? Oldest trick in the book [3].

____________

[1] I hate losing men.

[2] There's an "Iron Man" mode but that turns out to only play the Black Sabbath song in a loop.

[3] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

They wanted Mel to modify the program so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console, they could change the odds and let the customer win.
by dvdkon | 2025-09-07 10:13:09+00:00
Yes, local datetimes shouldn't be used to represent instants. But I think you can still add days or hours to them.

Don't think of the hours here as units of time, just as parts of the datetime. It's the same as with months: A month doesn't have a defined length in seconds, but you can still add X months to a date without worry, because you aren't using them as units of time, but as "units of calendar". Duration vs Period in java.time parlance.
by Ygg2 | 2025-09-07 10:13:22+00:00
Well according to your definition only one language could have ever fit the description.

It had to have a commercial game engine: so C++ or C#. It had to have cross platform GUI with Qt features - so C++, maybe Delphi. And it had to have seat at GPU standards so C, C++ and Python.

Forget Rust. C doesn't fit your criteria. Or Java. Or C#...

By cherry picking your criteria you can create an argument that pre selects one language.
by WCSTombs | 2025-09-07 10:14:11+00:00
It's cool that one of their screenshots shows off the desktop cube effect. It's just a fun and mostly pointless thing that gives the software a bit of personality. On its own I don't think it amounts to much, but it combines with the rest of the KDE sphere to convey a sense of joy that at least for me is a pretty central aspect of open source and free software culture. That vague perception is probably not the main reason I'm still using KDE now, but it sure doesn't hurt, and it did help guide me toward KDE in the first place.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-07 10:16:20+00:00
The crucial difference isn't technology, as others have described Rust's technology is actually an option for C++ though NIH means the committee will prefer anything else. The real difference is cultural.

The difference in API shapes in their respective standard libraries is because of culture not technology. Easy to see example: In C++ the two fundamental sort functions are named sort and stable_sort. In Rust those same two sorts are named sort_unstable and sort, a subtle but crucial safer choice. Or compare C++ vector::pop_back against Rust Vec::pop
by akio | 2025-09-07 10:17:23+00:00
No. Local time should nearly always be used to represent the time of future physical events (along side a geographical location, such as an address).

Your method of using a named time zone like “Europe/London” is generally wrong for future physical events, and leads to bugs if and when the actual physical location of the event changes named time zones (which does happen).

If I say meet me in person at 10am March 5th, 2030 in Dnipro, Ukraine, that's specific to a location, not a named time zone.

Why? Because perhaps in 2030 Russia has taken over Dnipro and moved it from Europe/Kyiv to Europe/Moscow.

Our meeting time has obviously not changed, but its exact instant on the universal timeline has changed.

Physical future events are not a fixed instant on the universal timeline, they are a local time + a location.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-09-07 10:18:41+00:00
I'm not sure where our disagreement lies or if there even is a disagreement besides perhaps some terminology. I'm happy to adopt your distinction between local and nominal, but that's not really the point.

My point is very simple. We cannot store all date/time values as a point in time (instant). There are important use cases where the exact point in time cannot (yet) be determined when we store the date/time value.
by rdsubhas | 2025-09-07 10:18:48+00:00
In most countries in the world, 24 hour time is just not human (user) friendly.

Programmer-friendly for debugging? Sorry No. I don't mind the extra T in between and I'd actually like to see the timezone or zulu in logs when debugging.

A counter view would be: it's half-human-half-computer inclined, but not objectively good for either.
by lenkite | 2025-09-07 10:19:53+00:00
It simply makes fentyal shipment far more burdensome. The U.S. had the highest de minimis threshold in the world ($800). The U.S. was receiving over 1 billion small parcels annually from China under de minimis. Narcotics traffickers exploited this flood of legitimate low-value parcels to hide fentanyl shipments. There was also less mandated official documentation and less scanning of such de minimis shipments.

Other nations with low thresholds (Canada, EU, etc) forced traffickers into bulk smuggling channels, which are riskier and more expensive.

Fentanyl is incredibly potent - ~2 mg is a lethal dosage. 1 kilogram can produce 500,000 doses. With a $800 exemption, traffickers could legally send parcels far above what other countries allow, maximizing the value per shipment while still looking like ordinary e-commerce.

All this is VERY well-known. I would strongly suggest doing some basic research instead of making "nativist crowd" allegations.
by abanana | 2025-09-07 10:21:36+00:00
No, I recall once being surprised at seeing it in XP back in the day, on a particularly old PC that had had its OS upgraded from 9x.

Older AT power supplies were entirely mechanically controlled using the power button. ATX power supplies added the ability to turn on or off via software. That screen was shown on PCs using an AT PSU because Windows couldn't shut it down itself, it had to ask the user to do it.
by pembrook | 2025-09-07 10:22:09+00:00
I'm no fan of Chinese authoritarianism, but you could say exactly the same about the US government. This is not a good rebuttal.

We're just 3 years from the US government shutting down all businesses during Covid? In WWII the US forced its entire manufacturing sector to retool from consumer products to war equipment. Detroit went from producing cars to producing tanks. Until recent decades the US had a mandatory draft where they took young men from their families involuntarily to go die in the jungles of Vietnam. I could cite a million other examples.

Not liking the data because it conflicts with the narrative you have in your head does not mean the data is wrong.
by williamDafoe | 2025-09-07 10:22:27+00:00
The 7000 series of CPUs is NOT known for running cool, unlike the AMD 5000 series (which are basically server CPUs repurposed for desktop usage). In the 7000 series, AMD decided to just increase the power of each CPU and that's where most of the performance gains are coming from - but power consumption is 40-50% higher than with similar 5000-series CPUs.
by littlestymaar | 2025-09-07 10:23:22+00:00
> Vaccine injury is real, it's scientifically validated

Yes, vaccines, like all medicine have adverse side effects sometimes.

> and it has injured and killed more people than COVID-19

This is bollocks. Vaccines have possibly killed a few thousand people, when the disease's death toll is counted in millions. Same for nonlethal problems.

> Myocarditis is not reversible, and no wonder so many young people suddenly died from CVDs without prior history.

Yup, Myocarditis and other cardiac problems are one of the most common serious consequences of COVID-19…

Again the prevalence of those is much worse among non-vaccinated than among vaccinated, even though the vaccine like the disease is a risk factor (but much less than the virus).

It's surprising to see Facebook antivax groups narrative popping up on HN…
by MrJohz | 2025-09-07 10:24:17+00:00
I mean, that's much the same as working with web APIs or any other kind of interface. Your DTO will probably be different from your internal models. But that doesn't mean it can't contain invariants, or that you can't parse it into a meaningful type. A DTO that's just a grab-bag of optional values is a pain to work with.

Although in practice, I find clap's approach works pretty well: define an object that represents the parsed arguments as you want them, with annotations for details that can't be represented in the type system, and then derive a parser from that. Because Rust has ADTs and other tools for building meaningful types, and because the derive process can do so much. That creates an arguments object that you can quite easily pass to a function which runs the command.
by ozim | 2025-09-07 10:24:17+00:00
First of all design patterns were not some god given solutions. Those are solutions gathered from existing implementations and authors just gave names to those solutions.

So they will be present in well designed systems just that they are not called by their „book name”.

Then I clearly see it in all new frameworks just that each framework has their own name for implementation of the pattern.

Patterns were mostly named so people can discuss easier about solutions that are there.

I will quote first sentence of foreword from my copy of the book „All well-structured object oriented architectures are full of patterns.”
by numpad0 | 2025-09-07 10:24:56+00:00
These SPF craze sounds a bit ridiculous once you realize how sunscreens work: sunscreens are just ZnO and/or TiO2 dispersed in oil. They're fundamentally just base white oil paint(in the way donuts are topologically just coffee mugs).

The core operating principle of sunscreens is that, the more your skin is covered in opaque inorganic metal oxides, the less it is exposed to harmful UV lights. There would be a lot of little tricks and additional paints to make it less irritating and less crazy looking to wear, but the point is, sunscreens fundamentally rely on opacity.

I think just knowing that lets one have a lot more of intuition about sunscreens than reading bunch of sales brochures on SPF or PA figures or wondering if the fancy ones are worth it.
Ask HN: Why is my Windows computer running 10,000 threads idling?
by Maro | 2025-09-07 10:25:32+00:00
I noticed today in my Windows 11 Task Manager that I have ~10,000 threads. If I kill all traces of Chrome it's still at ~8,000. Sorting by thread count, System is ~500, Explorer is ~350, then it tails off. I do wonder why Dropbox.exe needs 250+ or Steamwebhelper.exe (Steam itself is not running) needs 100+ threads to operate.

It's not a problem, my computer is super fast, I just wonder how we got here from super optimized Quake engines..

Screens: https://postimg.cc/gallery/JyYkNDg
by bob1029 | 2025-09-07 10:25:53+00:00
I've got a 5950x that I can reliably crater with a very specific .NET 8 console app when it would otherwise be stable 24/7/365, even under some pretty crazy workloads like Unity.

I think a lot of it boils down to load profile and power delivery. My 2500VA double conversion UPS seems to have difficulty keeping up with the volatility in load when running that console app. I can tell because its fans ramp up and my lights on the same circuit begin to flicker very perceptibly. It also creates audible PWM noise in the PC which is crazy to me because up til recently I've only ever heard that from a heavily loaded GPU.
by everdrive | 2025-09-07 10:26:13+00:00
This pattern is actually how I decide whether or not a piece of software is worthwhile. First Windows install, what do you do? spend an hour or so attempting to disable or remove all the junk being pushed on you and fix terrible default settings. It's been a while for me with Windows, so I haven't had to battle with the online account requirement, Onedrive, etc. But, the general pattern remains. If an OS or software is just packed with stuff that's hostile to you, then it's either got to go (Windows) or be minimized as much as as is feasible. (smartphones & apps) This is actually what turned me off Ubuntu. It's not even close to being as bad as Windows, but I realized that on a fresh install I was attempting to get rid of snaps and the "buy premium" message when running apt, and a couple of other things.

If something is being pushed on me, it's obviously bad for me, and good for the pusher.
by goku12 | 2025-09-07 10:26:36+00:00
There should be some way to define the CLI argument format and its constraints in some sort of DSL that can be compiled into the target language before the final compilation of the application. This way, it can be language agnostic (though I don't know why you would need this) without the need for another runtime. The same interface specification should be able to represent a customizable help/usage message with sane defaults, generate dynamic tab completions code for multiple shells, generate code for good quality customizable error messages in case of CLI argument errors and generate a neatly formatted man page with provisions for additional content, etc.

In fact, I think something like this already exists. I just can't recollect the project.
by williamDafoe | 2025-09-07 10:26:51+00:00
"Stronghold" is a joke phrase, is it not? Intel had ZERO progress in integrated graphics from 2013-2020. ZERO. That's the reason why "it works so well" - because they NEVER improved the performance or architecture! Sure, they diddled with the number of CU's, but as far as graphics architecture, they never changed it, and it was POOR to begin with (couldn't do 1080p esports very well ...)
by nopelynopington | 2025-09-07 10:27:41+00:00
There's a good book by Malcolm Gladwell called "the bomber mafia" that's all about the airforce doctrine of indiscriminate bombing to break the population and the rebel faction within the airforce who advocated high precision bombing instead. Crippling industry instead of punishing civilians.

They eventually lost out to the former, culminating in horrific napalm raids on Japan that continued even after the atomic bombs were dropped and had more casualties
by vascocosta | 2025-09-07 10:27:44+00:00
It's my understanding that this particular funicular system uses eight shoe brakes, where rubber pads basically clamp a metal track (from above and below) causing friction.

Hearing some local experts, they often mention that this is physically not enough to stop a 14 ton vehicle (plus passengers) going downhill when the slope is as high as 18%. So basically even if in perfectly working condition, the bake pads or wheels would just slide down the tracks as there's not enough friction for the resulting force.

Maybe something like a rack and pinion railway or some other kind of drastic metal locking mechanism are the only realistic way to prevent catastrophic events when the cable breaks/detaches, considering the masses and slopes involved here?
by drysine | 2025-09-07 10:28:03+00:00
"Apart from their problems with WhatsApp and Telegram, many Russians are now getting used to life without mobile internet altogether, as entire cities face regular cut-offs.

Since May, every Russian region has seen mobile internet go down.

Blackouts surged through the summer, with up to 77 regions hit by shutdowns simultaneously at the peak, according to the Na Svyazi (In Touch) project.

The authorities justify the measures by the need to protect people and infrastructure from attacks by Ukrainian drones - Kyiv's response to Russia's relentless and deadly bombardments of Ukrainian cities."

Seeing how three Ukrainian drones are deliberately targeting the same high rise apartment building[0] in Kazan, I very much welcome those dreadful authoritarian mobile internet blackouts.

[0] https://t.me/readovkanews/91042
by energy123 | 2025-09-07 10:28:52+00:00
Data science where you need to keep ~50GB of data in RAM and do intensive things with it (e.g. loop over it repeatedly with numba). You can't get use out of more than 4 cores because memory bandwidth is the only limitation. The data is too big for AMD's cache to be a factor.

Threadripper is built for this. But I am talking about the consumer options if you are on a budget. Intel has significantly more memory bandwidth than AMD in the consumer end. I don't have the numbers on hand, but someone at /r/localllama did a comparison a while ago.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-09-07 10:28:58+00:00
I've never played the original X-COM, though I played the two Firaxis games to death. I have 132.2 hours on X-COM: Enemy Unkown (the Firaxis game) and 327.5 hours on XCOM2, both of which seem like an undercount (especially the first one).

I thought I had the original game in my GOG account but it turns out I only have a clone (Xenonauts). I haven't played it at all and I bet I wouldn't have played the original XCOM either if it was in my GOG account.

The reason? I'm sad to admit that but it's the graphics. I can sometimes play older games, e.g. arcade games from the '80s or '90s, but I really struggle with most older graphics games. That makes me sad because there are some real gems that are now older than 20-30 years and I'd really like to be able to enjoy them, but I can't.

There's a time to play, and a time to admire graphics, I guess. Oh Ecclesiastes, you were so right.
Ask HN: What security/compliance tools work for non-technical small businesses?
by cnohall | 2025-09-07 10:29:10+00:00
I've been noticing that many small businesses struggle with basic website security, GDPR compliance, and accessibility. Most existing tools seem designed for either developers or large enterprises.

The common pattern I see: WordPress sites with outdated plugins, no security monitoring, confusion about GDPR requirements, and accessibility as an afterthought.

For those who work with small businesses - what tools or approaches actually work for clients who aren't technical? What's the right balance between automated scanning and actionable guidance?

Looking for practical solutions that have worked in the real world.
by thyristan | 2025-09-07 10:29:35+00:00
> And pick-ups are very unpopular here, unless you're a farmer there's no point in such a large open loading bed.

And even if you are a farmer, an american pick-up seems to be a rare choice around here. If you see something pick-up-like, it's usually more a variant of UniMog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimog .

And for the "small-time farmer without enough money to buy lots of equipment" (rare nowadays), tractors with tons of included functions were often more practical: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fendt_GT (no english version, sorry). Since Germany is more dense and distances are smaller, low speed is less of an issue I guess, compared to the US. And you can pull real farm equipment, which a pick-up car usually cannot.
by styanax | 2025-09-07 10:29:37+00:00
Been running Linux on laptops since around 97 (Dell Inspiron 4000 clone, PII-400 I couldn't afford the PIII-450, Red Hat 5.x); over many years and laptops it comes down to: use a Thinkpad T-series or a Dell Latitude/Precision (modern times, not the XPS or Inspiron) and your Linux experience will be quite smooth. (sometimes card reader hardware doesn't work if they used some weird chip, which Dell seems to like to do with those devices)
by williamDafoe | 2025-09-07 10:29:53+00:00
Just FYI Google runs their data centers at 85 degrees F (about 30 degrees C). I think Google probably knows more about how to run Intel CPUs for longest life and lowest cost per CPU cycle. After all they are the #5 computer maker on earth. What Intel is doing and what they are recommending is the act of a desperate corporation incapable of designing energy-efficient CPUs, incapable of progressing their performance in MIPS per Watt of power. This is a sign of a failed corporation.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-07 10:31:38+00:00
There are several commercial game engines that were C before being C++, same applies to industry standards in the graphics and games industry.

Console devkits included.

Also the fact that C89 (minus one or two things) is a subset of C++ is still a reality that many studios take advantage of.

Java is indeed not used at all in the commercial games industry, unless the authors only focus on desktop or Android.

There is a reason why the very first thing Microsoft did after Mojang's acquisitions was to rewrite Minecraft into C++ for mobile platform and game consoles. They only don't get rid of Java version due to the modding community.

C# is only used thanks to Unity and even that is powered via C++ engine, and a compiler that translates MSIL bytecode into C++.

Yes, Rust still has a lot to catch up in this GUI and games industry.

On VFX, it isn't even part of the reference platform for the industry,

https://vfxplatform.com/
by kragen | 2025-09-07 10:33:50+00:00
Mostly true, but not absolutely:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varronian_chronology

> The Varronian chronology was adopted by the Roman state during the first century BC and gave rise to the traditional years ab urbe condita ("from the founding of the city"); most especially, those dates were used in monumental Augustan-era inscriptions, the fasti Capitolini and the fasti Triumphales.[40]
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-07 10:33:59+00:00
The generals were looking for the 1914 style maneuver warfare. They didn’t understand and didn’t learn the lessons of the us civil war that the capability of production made defeat of the enemy in the field impossible. French strategy was attack, period.

They didn’t contemplate the impact of the lines moving out to 1000 yards, machine guns at the company or platoon level and the idea of the entire state as the enemy. Germany ultimately collapsed because their society was sucked dry.

Calling critiques of a conflict that slaughtered 20 million as propaganda is probably one of the more ridiculous statements I’ve read in awhile.
by michaelt | 2025-09-07 10:34:10+00:00
The "Dark Rock 5" marketing materials say it provides a 210 W TDP [1] and marketers seldom under-sell their products' capabilities.

So if your CPU is drawing "more than 200W" you're pretty much at the limits of your cooler.

[1] https://www.bequiet.com/en/cpucooler/5110
by rikafurude21 | 2025-09-07 10:34:20+00:00
I would go as far as to say slaves of a dictatorship. Most likely threathened with death, including the hackers' entire family, if they dont follow the line. Considering these factors, how much do you think they actually "support crimes against humanity"? North Koreans filter their students very early on to find the smart ones and teach them hacking in specialized military camps. Whoever this hacker is, he probably has been handpicked and groomed for the job hes doing.