MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Sprite Garden - HTML Canvas 2D sandbox and farming
by postpress | 2025-10-11 21:45:50+00:00
Sprite Garden: https://kherrick.github.io/sprite-garden/

A 2D sandbox exploration and farming game that runs entirely in the web browser. As a fully HTML, CSS, and JavaScript game, it is highly readable, hackable, and customizable. Included on "globalThis" is the "spriteGarden" global object with the game config and state readily available. Drawing with tiles is as easy as opening dev tools (use the menu in the browser as keyboard is captured), or entering the "Konami Code," for a full screen view and a map editor.

Controls (jump to get started):

- Jump: W, ↑, or Space

- Movement: W/A/S/D or Arrow Keys

- Break Block: R

- Plant/Harvest (select in inventory): F

- Place Block (select in inventory): U/I/O/J/K/L/M/,/.

Features:

- Share games from the world state manager

- Explore unique procedurally generated biomes

- Dig for resources like coal, iron, and gold

- Use collected materials to place blocks and shape the world

- Discover underground cave systems filled with resources

- Plant and harvest different crops with "realistic" growth cycles

Examples:

- Preparing a QR Code to be mined: https://gist.github.com/kherrick/1191ae457e1f6e1a65031c38c2d...

- Drawing a heart in the sky: https://gist.github.com/kherrick/3dc9af05bccc126b11cc26fb30a...

- Entering the Konami Code (map editor / fullscreen): https://gist.github.com/kherrick/effbe1463d9b78da046f27c5d42...

I'm unsure how the game should be taken further, or whether it should progress.

Some potential ideas for the future include:

- Input Box with JS Execution: Provide a safe, sandboxed input area in the game's UI where players can write small JS functions or scripts (instead of exposing it on globalThis).

- API Exposure: Expose a controlled API or object representing game state and functions, like terrain manipulation, crop growth, player movement, to the user script so players can automate or modify behaviors.

- Event Hooks: Allow players to register hooks into game events (e.g., world update, planting crops) where their custom code runs, enabling mods or custom automation.

- Multiplayer: Use WebRTC to allow many players in the same world.

- Actual gamification: Make reasons to play, health meter, powerups, plant combinations, enemies?

- Better mobile controls: Currently on screen, no swiping for movement.

- Easier building with blocks: Currently block position based on location of player.

Also featured on:

- Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9mv5d0990kct

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20251008155620/https://kherrick....

Feedback is highly welcome, and source is available at: https://github.com/kherrick/sprite-garden
by jcalvinowens | 2025-10-11 21:47:31+00:00
YMMV. I have a 4-drive 20TB mdraid10 across two different $50 USB3.0 2-drive enclosures, I've read petabytes off this array with years of uptime and absolutely zero problems. And it runs on one of those $300 off brand NUCs. The 2.5G NIC is the bottleneck on reads.
by dcminter | 2025-10-11 21:48:44+00:00
No, it's a 6 month release cadence. You might be confusing the initial release with a point release which are less regular. Edit: oh, my bad, I see the article author had the wrong year for 24.

22 was March 2024 23 was September 2024 24 was March 2025 25 was September 2025

This is much better than the old "release train" system where e.g Java 5 and Java 6 were released in Sept 2004 and Nov 2006 respectively!
by hinkley | 2025-10-11 21:49:25+00:00
I saw a How it’s Made-esque show on aluminum recycling just a couple years ago, which is when I learned that aluminum-lead alloys are a thing, and have to be separated. They used a pneumatic blast picker, an x ray machine, and real time image processing to separate the lead from the other alloys. I’ve seen other such systems before, and in those the camera was usually around 30ms up the conveyor from the picker and it pushes the targeted materials into a separate hopper. The scan is parallelized to keep it real time.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-11 21:49:29+00:00
Yes, but a core feature of contemporary digital ID is age-only digital attestation -- that is, yes this unnamed person is old enough.

The absence of such means that there are few ways for people to verify their ages without handing over scans of their IDs to far too many organisations.

In the UK we do have one means to do this that is not widely used yet: since all mobile phone providers attempt to block adult content by default until the owner proves they are an adult (a pretty long-standing pre-existing child safety/parental control initiative by PAYG providers that has evolved to be standard across all contract types), the question of "can you prove you are 18" can now be delegated to the MNOs. But not all the age verification agencies are doing it.
by anigbrowl | 2025-10-11 21:49:38+00:00
This is such a norm in society now; PR tactics take priority over any notion of accountability, and most journalists and publishers act as stenographers, because challenging or even characterizing the PR line is treated as an unjustified attack and inflated claims of bias.

Just as linking to original documents, court filings etc. should be a norm in news reporting, it should also be a norm to summarize PR responses (helpful, dismissive, evasive or whatever) and link to a summary of the PR text, rather than treating it as valid body copy.
by tombert | 2025-10-11 21:50:24+00:00
I don't use a laptop, but I use something fairly adjacent: the Beelink SER6 (https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-4-75GHz-PCIe4-0-Supports-HDMI...), which is basically a gaming laptop converted into a small desktop. For the most part, it has actually been pretty great. It's quiet, has a CPU that is much better than I expected, and a decent enough GPU to do hardware transcoding for Jellyfin without much issue.

I use USB chassis of hard drives to work as the "NAS" part, and it works fairly well, and this box is also my router (using a 10 GbE thunderbolt adapter) though my biggest issue comes with large updates in NixOS.

For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, when I do a very large system update (rebuilding Triton-llvm for Immich seems to really do it), the internal network will consistently cut out until I reboot the machine. I can log in through the external interface with Tailscale and my phone, so the machine itself is fine, but for whatever reason the internal network will die.

And that's kind of the price you pay for using a non-server to do server work. It will generally work pretty well, but I find that it does require a bit more babysitting than a rack mount server did.
by thisismytest | 2025-10-11 21:50:28+00:00
Oh, yeah? So do you! Oh, God, whatta - whatta dumb thing to say, right? I mean, you say it, "You play well," and then right away I have to say "you play well". Oh, oh, God, Annie. Well, oh well, la-de-da, la-de-da, la-la. Yeah.
by elicash | 2025-10-11 21:50:43+00:00
Thanks! Happy to answer any questions.

I definitely need a rules page. But I think more than that I need to more clearly communicate during gameplay where people are in the hand. So for example, if you're playing with 2 pawn rounds and then 2 piece rounds (and, say, with "bet after each piece" turned on) there should be some visual representation of where the player is in that sequence at any given moment.

Or if you have the "bet every 11 moves" setting turned on, there should be a countdown while playing in the chess phase how many more moves until the next betting round.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-11 21:51:12+00:00
Bold to claim something you've authored on Stack Overflow is older than C2, the og wiki.

The earliest version I could find on IA is from 2003 (https://web.archive.org/web/20030606033520/http://c2.com/cgi...), last edited in 2002 at that point, but wouldn't surprise me to page was initially created in the 90s.
Show HN: WordPress plugin that lets readers fix your articles (via AI prompts)
by chelm | 2025-10-11 21:51:20+00:00
Made this after accepting I'll never update my 200+ old posts, but readers still want answers from them. Plugin adds "Ask ChatGPT about this" buttons – but readers can customize the prompt. Tracks what they change it to as WordPress comments (yes, reviving that feature). Turns out people ask: "counterarguments?", "ELI5?", "technical details?", "what's missing?" – exactly the content gaps I should fill. It's basically admitting your content isn't complete, but making that useful. GDPR-compliant, local analytics, works retroactively. Bad idea or pragmatic solution?
by onetimeusename | 2025-10-11 21:52:23+00:00
The Reason article said there was no reason to interpret this as a threat and that it was entirely just political. The article made it seem like the memes were held completely out of context. It mentioned there happens to be a nearby Perry High School just by chance but the nearby Perry High School is the central reason why this was interpreted as a threat. This was posted in a group that was organizing an event at the high school. I could see how someone might construe this as a threat more clearly from the tennessean article if they were being overly cautious. Also the sheriff mentioned the arrest was not done for legal speech content but more for the coincidental possibility this was a threat. Reason didn't elaborate on this.

The Reason article is making this seem like it's entirely political and unreasonable. I don't think an arrest should have been made, that is too far. This seems like an unfortunate coincidence but someone looked at all this and reported it as a threat. The fact Perry High School's name is highly relevant here was not included.
by dehrmann | 2025-10-11 21:52:24+00:00
> Unreal engine 1 looks good to me, so I am not a good judge.

But we did hit a point where the games were good enough, and better hardware just meant more polygons, better textures, and more lighting. The issues with Unreal Engine 1 (or maybe just games of that era) was that the worlds were too sparse.

> over saturation of samey games

So that's the thing. Are we at a point where graphics and gameplay in 10-year-old games is good enough?
by kace91 | 2025-10-11 21:52:40+00:00
Not really. GDPR deals with privacy and personal data handling.

There are directives about transparency in the costs or charges tied to a sale, but it is not immediate that it covers including new ads as an extra burden on the consumer.

Same for other directives regarding misleading advertising and the like, hard to prove that this new anti feature goes against the advertised product. it’s all very indirect and hazy, we’re in need of more protections for consumer to truly own their hardware.
by perching_aix | 2025-10-11 21:52:49+00:00
I'm fairly mixed about it, personally.

Being able to inspect post and comment history allowed for finding people who are absentmindedly lying, or are otherwise intentionally and persistently abusive. I believe this was the whole original motivation about such a history being available, even.

On the flipside, it does lessen the potency of various avenues of abuse. Some people would get harassed and stalked thanks to this history feature for example, and it trivialized targeted information extraction too. It also allowed for petty censorship, i.e. some subs would auto-ban people who commented in various other subs.

One might also criticize it for being a minor bandaid over a gaping hole. Your username and user avatar you still carry across subs and are not autogenerated. This means that with sufficiently wide scraping, your posts are still perfectly correlatable, collectable, and subscribeable. Within subs, the same applies to your user flair. This has benefits, i.e. it allows you to block users who you identify as inherently malicious, but it also means that all the aforementioned benefits apply only in limited ways.

Trust requires the sharing of information, privacy requires the obfuscation of information - and so I think these concerns run contrary to each other, resulting in the many solutions of the world not committing fully to either, as they are extreme and unrealistic positions in isolation. Difficult world.
by guax | 2025-10-11 21:53:35+00:00
Modern IDEs will show you the type of anything at all times. I do not understand your point unless you're doing raw text editing of Java source.

Those keystrokes are not just saved on writing, they make the whole code more legible and easier to mentally parse. When reading I don't care if the variable is a specific type, you're mostly looking whats being done to it, knowing the type becomes important later and, again, the IDE solves that for you.
by tverbeure | 2025-10-11 21:54:11+00:00
There is absolutely no way an FPGA would make sense. The requirements for AV1 and H265 far exceed the hardware resources of lower budget FPGAs. For the same process, FPGA logic density is about 40x lower than ASIC, and lower budget FPGAs use older processes.

A h265 or AV1 decoder requires millions of logic gates (and DRAM memory bandwidth.) Only high-end FPGAs provide that.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-11 21:54:16+00:00
Isn't it cute when there's absolutely no rationale behind a new rule, and it's simply an incursion made in order to break down a boundary?

Look, scanning with AI is available!

Wow, scanning with AI is now free for everyone!

What? Scanning with AI is now opt-out?

Why would opting-out be made time-limited?

WTF, what's so special about 3x a year? Is it because it's the magic number?

Ah, the setting's gone again, I guess I can relax. I guess the market wanted this great feature, or else they wouldn't have gradually forced it on us. Anyway, you're a weird techie for noticing it. What do you have to hide?
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-10-11 21:55:15+00:00
It really seems as though Microsoft has total contempt for their retail/individual customers. They do a lot to inconvenience those users, and it often seems gratuitous and unnecessary. (As it does in this case.)

...I guess Microsoft believes that they're making up for it in AI and B2B/Cloud service sales? Or that customers are just so locked-in that there's genuinely no alternative? I don't believe that the latter is true, and it's hard to come back from a badly tarnished brand. Won't be long before the average consumer hates Microsoft as much as they hate HP (printers).
by watersb | 2025-10-11 21:57:16+00:00
What AA or AAA battery should I use for industrial applications?

I recently got a set of warning lights for car adventures. Like a chemical flare light but these LEDs run on batteries.

It was probably a stupid idea. Deleted paragraphs here about the risk/reward balance of attempting field repairs by the side of the road.

However, it did get me thinking about the longevity and safety of AA and AAA batteries in a device that needs to be kept in the car.

We get freezing winters, and direct sunlight in the summer will strike you down. (American Southwest mountain state.)

What's the best battery for a digital tire gauge that I keep in the glove compartment?

Should I keep it in the trunk instead? The worst of the summer heat is made worse by the greenhouse effect of the car's interior.

Yes, I should use an analog pressure gauge that works without batteries. I also carry one of these. The digital one is easier to use and generally gets the same readings as some more expensive, less portable test equipment.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-11 21:57:44+00:00
Have you ever cared for someone with late stage Alzheimer or other forms of severe dementia? The reality of it is that a person who suffers from this is simply not the person you knew, by any measurable definition. They don't remember you, they may well fear and hate you. They change moods at a moment's notice, they live in a state of either lethargy or accute anxiety, suddenly waking up in a place that they don't recognize or remember ever living in, nor remembering how they got there. Their life essentially becomes a series of TikTok reels in which they are the main actor, or a vivid dream. Not only are they not the same "self" that you loved, they are usually not even a coherent "self" beyond a few tens of minutes.

And, just to make everything as heartwrenching as possible, in this series of short reels their mind is swiping through, they occasionally become the person you had loved, for some minutes. And you know that these moments will never get more common, only rarer, but you can't help but think that they're "still in there".

It is my firm belief that any sense of "me" would be long dead by this time. Keeping my body and scraps of my consciousness alive only to torment my loved ones, caregivers, and neighbors would be a cruelty that would serve no purpose. I hope that I don't ever have to make this choice, but I also hope that, if I am ever diagnosed, I will have the chance to make this choice and avoid such suffering.
by tomhow | 2025-10-11 21:58:20+00:00
> What a shit-show the EU has become, in fact it was always been like this, as far as I can tell

Flamebait about nations/regions is not acceptable on HN. We've had to ask you before not to do this. We have to ban accounts that keep doing it and ignore our requests to stop. Please, once again, remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by badsectoracula | 2025-10-11 21:59:13+00:00
> it’s odd how quickly people handwave away graphics in a visual medium.

There is a difference between graphics as in rendering (i.e. the technical side, how something gets rendered) and graphics as in aesthetics (i.e. visual styles, presentation, etc).

The latter is important for games because it can be used to evoke some feel to the player (e.g. cartoony Mario games or dreadful Silent Hill games). The former however is not important by itself, its importance only comes as means to achieve the latter. When people handwave away graphics in games they handwave the misplaced focus on graphics-as-in-tech, not on graphics-as-in-aesthetics.
by crote | 2025-10-11 21:59:33+00:00
> some regional tender processes have gotten even worse, where the state prescribes or outright buys the rolling stock

Isn't this done in an attempt to resolve some of the issues you mentioned?

If you don't want the absolute cheapest old run-down toilet-less rolling stock, the tender has to be quite specific about the minimum requirements the rolling stock is expected to meet. This in turn means an operator switch leaves the new operator having to quickly obtain a bunch of highly-specific rolling stock with the old operator having to get rid of a bunch of now-worthless highly-specific rolling stock.

The logical result is that the old operator sells the rolling stock to the new operator. Or, you have the rolling stock owned by a holding company, who leases it to whoever happens to be operating the tender. Same with the maintenance shops.

So why not cut out the middle man and have the rolling stock and maintenance shop be government-owned? The end result is the same, but it's cheaper for everyone involved.
by IgorPartola | 2025-10-11 21:59:42+00:00
For me it was important to have ECC RAM and laptops pretty much never have that. My personal recommendation is an old IBM/Lenovo workstation tower as the base. I bought one for $35 on eBay and added $40 of RAM (32GB). A $10 UPS from Goodwill with a $25 battery from Amazon, and whatever hard drives you want. I run Ubuntu and ZFS on it but next time would probably opt for FreeBSD for a nicer OS.
by taftster | 2025-10-11 21:59:45+00:00
And then I realize I need to change that schedule. And would like to do it without recompiling my code. Oh, and I need to allow for environment specific scheduling, weekdays on one system, weekends on others. And I need other dependencies that are environment specific.

I much prefer Spring's XML configuration from the old days. Yeah, XML sucks and all that. But still, with XML, the configuration is completely external from the application and I can manage it from /etc style layouts. Hard coding and compiling in dependency injection via annotations or other such behaviors into the class directly has caused me grief over the long term pretty much every time.
by tverbeure | 2025-10-11 21:59:55+00:00
I don’t know the details of AV2, but going from h.265 to h.266, the number of angles for angular prediction doubled, they added a tool to predict chroma from luma, added the ability to do pixel block copies and a bunch of other techniques… And that’s just for intra predictions. They also added tons of new inter prediction techniques.

All of this requires a significant amount of extra logic gates/silicon area for hardware decoders, but the bit rate reduction is worth it.

For CPU decoders, the additional computational load is not so bad.

The real additional cost is for encoding because there’s more prediction tools to choose from for optimal compression. That’s why Google only does AV1 encoding for videos that are very popular: it doesn’t make sense to do it on videos that are seen by few.
by breve | 2025-10-11 22:02:05+00:00
> The amount of infrastructure required to build out

If you don't want to build infrastructure then the easy solution is to stick with petroleum. That infrastructure is already built out.

> They’re just saying random stuff

No, they're doing research and development.

> so you don’t buy an EV

Toyota's a big car company. Toyota sells lots of different cars.

Toyota sells BEVs. You can buy a Toyota BEV right now.
by baxuz | 2025-10-11 22:02:09+00:00
Yeah but that doesn't have much value as you lose the value indicator.

If you don't need a value indicator, you don't need a circular knob as an affordance. You can have a whatever as it just reacts to your input.

If you do have a value indicator which is "infinite", such as a numerical value display, it's better to make it interactive and place the interaction on top of it, instead of splitting the UI between a value indicator and the input.

A lot of software does this.
by jm4 | 2025-10-11 22:02:28+00:00
Amazon sucks. They are one of the greediest companies there is. What they do with online shopping, logistics, AWS is incredible. They are in a different league and could generate more revenue than any company could ever need by just doing those things well. But that’s not enough. They have to stuff ads into everything and find every possible way to piss off customers all in the name of another buck.
by JavierFlores09 | 2025-10-11 22:02:33+00:00
Stuart Marks and Nicolai Parlog recently had a discussion about checked exceptions in the Java channel [0]. In short, while they mentioned that there are certainly some things to improve about checked exceptions, like the confusing hierarchy as well as the boilerplate-y way of handling them, they're not necessarily a failed concept. I do hope they get to work on them in the near future.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnfnF7otEnk
Show HN: Vello's high-performance 2D GPU engine to .NET
by wiso | 2025-10-11 22:02:39+00:00
VelloSharp v0.5.0-alpha.1 is now available, delivering Vello’s high-performance 2D GPU engine to .NET atop the wgpu 3D backend. Integrates cleanly with Avalonia, WPF, and WinForms to modernize rendering pipelines without disruptive rewrites.
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-11 22:03:04+00:00
That is so far outside of reality. How do you think your VOIP calls work? They don't paginate data. They just pipe from one buffer to another where the second buffer is a network socket. The network socket doesn't care what the data looks like or how big it is. It will just push forward what its fed until either end of message or socket termination.
by bigbuppo | 2025-10-11 22:04:07+00:00
This is once again strongly suggesting that Microsoft is thoroughly doomed if the money they've dumped into AI doesn't pan out. It seems to me that if your company is tied to Microsoft's cloud platform, you should probably consider moving away as quickly as you can. Paying the vmware tax and moving eveyrthing in house is probably a better move at this point.