MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kbolino | 2025-10-06 17:10:29+00:00
> For instance, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Age of Empires 2.

Terrible example IMO. Microsoft has both disabled new purchases of "traditional" Age of Empires 2 on Steam and also spitefully patched out offline LAN play.

So when I can get enough people together about once a year to have a LAN party and we want to play AoE2 it's either everybody pays $35 each for the "definitive" edition, so we can play for just a couple hours, or else we just don't play it at all because not everybody even has a Steam account never mind their own gaming computer. And Steam also nuked the ability to buy multiple copies of a game when it's on sale and keep them to give as gifts later.

To compound this, because I only own the old edition (that nobody can buy anymore) and not the new one, I can't even leave a negative review (where it will actually be seen) warning people of Microsoft's shitty behavior.
by SmirkingRevenge | 2025-10-06 17:10:32+00:00
It's like building a condo skyscraper just as the market crash of 2008 hits.

The property will still be worth something but nowhere near the expected value pre-crash. For those still liquid when the dust settles, they'll be able to get great bargains on compute or even whole data centers.

Maybe the land will be dotted with half-finished data centers that sit for years, like unfinished condo high-rises post 2008 crash
by airstrike | 2025-10-06 17:10:41+00:00
It's very, very far from a CRUD app or "just updating a DB". GUI-heavy apps are notoriously hard to get right. Any kind of "editable canvas" makes it 10x harder. Online collaboration is hard, so that's another 10x—there are known solutions, but it's an entire sidequest you have to pour a massive amount of effort into.

Custom text editing and rendering is really hard to do well.

Making everything smooth and performant to the point it's best-in-class while still adding new features is... remarkable.

(Speaking as someone who's writing a spreadsheet and slideshow editor myself...among other things)
by gansbrest | 2025-10-06 17:10:51+00:00
All sorts of questions - "What's the best way to do X?", "How would it impact security?", "Why we need this?", "What happens if this fails?", "Remind me how this works?", "Am I thinking in the right direction?"

Even more questions to the business / CEO ( Why this, why now )

"why", "how", "can we", "who can"?

Just try to be humble in the world where nobody knows anything (including yourself)... :)
by tejohnso | 2025-10-06 17:10:58+00:00
> ChatGPT-3 cost $50 million, ChatGPT-4 cost $500 million and ChatGPT-5, costing $5 billion

Is that actually true? And is most of it because of the compute requirements of the models or scaling cost due to exponential growth in usage?

I hope it didn't actually cost ten times more to create ChatGPT-5 than it did ChatGPT-4.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-06 17:11:03+00:00
> Moderators don't flag content, members do

Moderators are ultimately responsible for moderation. The moderation system is failing when it comes to technology issues with a political tint. (In contrast, it has been pretty good with rage bait foreign policy stuff. Genuinely good discussions around quality content.)

If folks are bandwagon flagging content with a consistent bias, the system should shadow ban their flags for a while.
by fragmede | 2025-10-06 17:11:22+00:00
Thank you for sharing your story! Yeah, it's not for everybody. If I was an obsessive teenager when this technology existed I'd be pterodactyl-shit crazy. I'm able to interact with it in a mostly healthy way these days, after a lot of therapy and medication that has to do with me maturing as a person and nothing to do with the technology itself. I can't imagine what I'd be like if I'd grown up with this technology.
Show HN: A virtual tour for a 50 year old park
by osmotico | 2025-10-06 17:11:29+00:00
Hi Hacker News!

My friends and I are sharing a small project that combines new tech with historical exploration. We built this to experiment with Gaussian Splatting and let users virtually explore history and art.

We hope you enjoy it! All ideas and feedback are welcome.

A few tech details:

- Stack: Built with Next.js, React, and hosted on Cloudflare Workers. We used Tailwind for rapid development.

- The Tour: The virtual tour uses OpenSeadragon (for high-resolution image tiling) and PlayCanvas for the interactive 3D Gaussian Splats experience.

- Maps: Maps were created using QGIS.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-06 17:11:56+00:00
> I'm not seeing this - can you clarify?

#include is a C pre-processor feature which just pastes in whatever the contents of the specified file are. Did you not know that's what it does ?

> Humor me, show me where this "member function" is?

That doAsyncOperation is a member function. Unlike member variables, which are part of the actual data structure we're defining, the member functions are the peculiar syntax for methods in C++, the function won't actually live inside the data structure, we're not making any sort of function pointer or reference - it's just written here because presumably Bjarne couldn't think of anywhere better to put it.

I guess it's possible you didn't understand that, it does seem like a fair number of undergrads think this will be how it works when shown C++ which isn't great news.

> I honestly feel like we're not reading the same code .. but maybe that's your point.

I'm reading the code you wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45484503 and frankly the response just makes me think C++ programmers don't understand C++ either.
by fny | 2025-10-06 17:11:59+00:00
I'm going to give a very concrete example of this so people can understand.

I built a fitness product eons ago where there a million rules that determined what should happen for prescribing exercises to athletes (college/pro teams).

If you gave this to an agent today, you will get a tangled mess of if statements that are impossible to debug or extend. This is primarily because LLMs are still bad at picking the right abstraction for a task. The right solution was to build a rules engine, use a constraint solver, and use some combinatorics.

LLMs just don't have the taste to make these decisions without guidance. They also lack the problem solving skills for things they've never seen.*

Was 95% of the app CRUD? Sure. But last I checked, CRUD was never a moat.

*I suspect this part of why senior developers are in extremely high demand despite LLMs.

---

Another example: for many probability problems, Claude loves to code up simulations rather than explore closed form solutions. Asking Claude to make it faster often drives it to make coding optimizations instead of addressing the math. You have to guide Claude to do the right thing, and that means you have to know the right thing to do.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-06 17:12:00+00:00
Gemini 2.5 was the first breakthrough model, people didn't know how to use it but it's incredibly powerful. GPT5 is the second true breakthrough model, it's ability to deal with math/logic/etc complexity and its depth of knowledge in engineering/science is amazing. Every time I talk to someone who stans Claude and is down on GPT5 I know they're building derivative CRUD apps with simple business logic in Python/Typescript.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-06 17:12:31+00:00
Yes, it’s possible to fight and still lose. What you’re arguing for is unilateral disarmament, surrender in fact, due to fears that not surrendering may cause you to lose. Opposition, so long as it is ineffective and poses no real threat to power.

> The most successful revolutions in history that built cultural inertia as morally righteous were never known for their sophisticated weapons and planning.

Maybe you should spend some more time studying revolutions. Often there is a great amount of coordination that must happen, especially when going up against a strong adversary. And it’s important to match or exceed your adversary’s reaction time in order to disrupt their planning and cause them to make tactical errors of judgement. This is what leads to events like in Nepal, where the government overreacted and shut down the tools being used for organizing. This was the breaking point that led to mass mobilization, but the revolution was only possible because of the groundwork that had been laid in advance—through careful planning by activists and organizers. Planning that was carried out using modern technology!

> China was more freaked out over blank paper than they would have been if tens of thousands of rebels had been armed.

A hypothetical “just so” statement that (a) cannot be tested and (b) is unlikely to be true. China would see tens of thousands of armed rebels as an existential threat and would be “freaked out” enough to deploy the military immediately. If the population was unhappy enough and ground was prepared for revolution, this would lead to revolution as it did in the USSR. (The big problem with would-be revolutions in China is that the population is pretty happy overall, for now, thanks to improved standards of living. This effect will likely wear off in the future.)

> It's never a logistics problem.

Wrong. Activists make extensive use of technology in order to coordinate and achieve their aims. For all the reasons explained above.

> Enter a direct competition with the government and you've already lost.

Civil Rights era activists were in direct conflict with the FBI, police, and in some cases the National guard. They won.
by agentcoops | 2025-10-06 17:12:41+00:00
I understand that. I simply think there's some importance in at least trying to empirically tease out what represents: (1) a circular deal in which vendors facing the limits of growth are subsidizing vulnerable clients; versus (2) a risk-hedging deal in which a non-market leading vendor offers upside to a market leading client.

Again, I'm in no way denying either that (1) exists or that there's almost certainly an AI bubble -- I just think this difference is material.

For example, I would classify the recently proposed deal between NVIDIA and OpenAI as a case of (1), but this deal between AMD and OpenAI as (2). Namely, because I think it's clear that the chips act as well as recent advancements by Chinese manufacturers are threatening to NVIDIA's market-leading position and OpenAI investigating new vendors suggests they have suddenly become concerned with reducing cost of goods. Indeed, if both the leading Chinese firms and OpenAI were shown to be able to work with other vendors without sacrificing speed to market it would materially impact NVIDIA's stock price. AMD, on the other hand, is not trying to subsidize an existing client, but convince a market leader to take a risk.

The NVIDIA deal, then, suggests to me that certain limits have been reached in the industry, while the AMD deal does not provide me with any further evidence as to the existence of a bubble.
by giroro | 2025-10-06 17:13:20+00:00
Here's a specific example. IMDB (an Amazon company) forces you to watch a movie trailer for a movie you don't want to see in order to watch a movie trailer for a movie you actually want to see.

You have to watch an 2-minute ad in order to unlock the privilege to view the same kind of 2-minute ad. I'm not sure weather to call that absurdism or dystopian, but it's nuts. More importantly, it is friction. It actively stops the customer from doing what amazon (or its advertisers) actually want them to do.

This same thoughtlessness to the impacts of decision making has been inexplicably implemented into Amazon's companies at every level. This is a big problem for Amazon customers, especially. Amazon's insistence on advertising blocks customers from spending money. Every unrelated "sponsored" product in the search results gives that much more opportunity for a buyer to look on a different site. Serving an ad has inexplicably become a higher priority than closing a sale. Look at Amazon's "are you really sure you actually want to buy that" page they are now using to try and upsell customers before letting them check out. To say the least, it is a fundamental change in philosophy from the company who invented single-click checkout and "Buy it Now".
by antisthenes | 2025-10-06 17:13:22+00:00
> I guess he tried to fix healthcare

Yeah, he tried, but anyone with working brain cells could tell you that ACA was just going to end up in a bigger payout to the healthcare industry. It was a status quo pro-corporate bill just like the rest of his centrist policies.

The actual solution has and always will be to reduce costs, which means people losing jobs and hospital admins not owning 3 vacation homes.
by npteljes | 2025-10-06 17:13:26+00:00
The problematic part is usually the solution, not the assessment part of these regimes, politicians, ideologies. Are there issues in Portland? Certainly. Will Trump's actions lessen them actually? Highly doubtful.

Doubly doubtful for the following reason: these people need the problems to exist, so that they can write their narrative around them, and offer their "solutions" for them. Same as how cults target vulnerable people.
by davidcelis | 2025-10-06 17:13:35+00:00
What makes you think they _haven't_ tried to work things out with Ruby Central? As per a separate article[1], this seems to be a last resort:

> “Since Ruby Central has informed us they will never allow us to continue working on the projects they now claim they own, that we successfully maintained and operated for the last ten years, the former RubyGems team is launching gem.coop today.”

[1]: https://socket.dev/blog/gem-cooperative-emerges-as-a-communi...
by aeturnum | 2025-10-06 17:13:47+00:00
Of course it can be found out other ways. The people I was closest to did not need the location sharing to figure out what happened to me. I do not have the impression that people obsessively check location - I certainly do not. But sometimes you see that someone is somewhere and you might reach out to them. Again - you are welcome to only have corporations know your location, but to me that seems silly.
by 0xC0ncord | 2025-10-06 17:13:52+00:00
If this scales to more titles I'm curious how it's intended to work. The article writes that the current internal test has preroll ads before the game streaming begins.

So, if I start playing a game and the system decides it's time for me to watch more ads, how does it handle the game I am playing? Does the game pause? What about in the middle of an intense fight? What if it's during an unpause-able section? What if it's a multiplayer game?

With these questions in mind I have a hard time understanding how this will end up working in the long run without completely ruining the experience.
by abraae | 2025-10-06 17:14:18+00:00
I think there's truth in what you say (though if you are building something where you rely on blog posts you are probably doomed anyway).

But AI has huge value in gratuitously bulking out products in ways that are not economically feasible with hand coding.

As an example we are building a golf launch monitor and there is a UI where the golf club's path is rendered as it swings over the surface.

Without AI, the background would be a simple green #008000 rectangle.

With AI I can say "create a lifelike grass surface, viewed from above, here the individual blades of grass range from 2-4 mm wide and 10-14mm length, randomly distributed, and are densely enough placed that they entirely cover the surface, and shadows are cast from ...".

Basically stuff that makes your product stand out, but that you would never invest in putting a programmer onto. The net result is a bunch of complex math code, but it's stuff no human will ever need to understand or maintain.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-06 17:15:07+00:00
Yup. LLMs can get arbitrarily good at anything with RL, but RL produces spiky capabilities, and getting LLMs arbitrarily good at things they're not designed for (like reasoning, which is absolutely stupid to do in natural language) is very expensive due to the domain mismatch (as we're seeing in realtime).

Neurosymbolic architectures are the future, but I think LLMs have a place as orchestrators and translators from natural language -> symbolic representation. I'm working on an article that lays out a pretty strong case for a lot of this based on ~30 studies, hopefully I can tighten it up and publish soon.
by chermi | 2025-10-06 17:15:12+00:00
I'll be the "this time it's different" guy. 1) the bubble burst hit telecom spend, which was overbuilt relative to the use. 2) the dot com companies were mostly not profitable with small revenues, while the big players here are either profitable (google, Facebook), backed by big players, and/or have massive revenues and user bases. And growing. 3) people actually use LLMs, a lot. 4) even if the data centers are overbuilt because the big guys get diminishing returns, they're still useful, with immediate demand. Search, ads, content are all going to use some sort of LLM crap, and thus need GPUs.

So I don't think there will be as big of a fallout. My bet is there will/should be a healthy winnowing, but not a crash (at least not one due solely to AI hype).
by godshatter | 2025-10-06 17:15:38+00:00
A few months ago I played around with GPT4ALL which lets you run a local LLM with a chatbot interface. Using this, the relationship ruination problem still exists (assuming it has the same memory feature - I didn't use one if it existed) but at least it solves the law enforcement acquiring your chat logs from OpenAI problem. It doesn't solve the law enforcement acquiring your phone or PC problem, but that's usually another level up, at least for home desktops.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-06 17:15:40+00:00
On one hand, these are public data. If they contain evidence of crimes, they should be pursuable and pursued.

On the other hand, ICE are a Gestapo. Their relationship with our laws and Constitution is closer to treason than policing. They’re not going after folks posting speeding videos or confessions of violent crime, but someone expressing political opinions a politician doesn’t like.
by Arainach | 2025-10-06 17:15:41+00:00
>Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end?

If you keep your standards modest, the math isn't as bad as it intuitively seems.

A $100 hotel per night is the equivalent of a $3000 mortgage/rent. And if you're living out of one bag you don't necessarily need that and probably have cheaper options like hostels (or tent camping) available.

If you're working a software job or have worked such jobs long enough to have a few million in assets gathering interest, the cost of living isn't prohibitive.
by rs186 | 2025-10-06 17:15:48+00:00
That argument could apply to every company who build their business on AI (except Nvidia) but we haven't seen any notable initiative or any significant movement in the past 3 years.

I would not put my bets on private companies' goodwill. I'd rather believe they'll do whatever is most important for their business priority, understand things at their face value, and then hope for the best.
by torstenvolk | 2025-10-06 17:15:57+00:00
Yup, good point. They don't understand or they don't care or possibly both. The frustrating part is that this is still a hugely impactful technology, even without showing us a clear path toward AGI. But if we keep talking about AGI being the 'next stop' on this journey, we'll burn a lot of excitement and trust in LLMs...
by varispeed | 2025-10-06 17:16:01+00:00
This is a bit of a nothingburger. If someone has access to your device it's game over anyway.

I am more annoyed that banking apps don't have an option to show different views based on pin number. For instance if you are in controlling relationship, partner might ask you to show your bank account to see what you spent money on. That suitcase and storage unit you rented to plan your escape? It's in plain sight and so the beating that follows.

And that is just one angle.

Phones themselves should allow for shadow user accounts, where you log in to completely isolated, encrypted and different environment based on pin number, so you always have plausible deniability.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-10-06 17:16:05+00:00
It seems like Marx had some good noticings of problems with capitalism, and probably some silly ones, and what he noticed probably wasn’t the first time such things were noticed, but some were valid. But then people go “ah, these noticings are valid, we should listen to this guy”. But noticing a problem does not mean you can design a solution, and Marx’s solutions generally were not good, despite his problem noticing being good. Also other people basically hijacked his ideas and I imagine probably twisted them somewhat, as they offered a way to seize power and people doing that are typically not ideological purists in practice.
by mindslight | 2025-10-06 17:16:12+00:00
It's not a misread, but rather a direct implication of what you said. "Influx" implies urgency for a growing problem. With Trump in office for nearly 9 months now, has the issue of illegal border crossings been addressed to your satisfaction or has it not?

If it has, then there is no longer an "influx" to urgently deal with. If it has not, then the obvious priority should be focusing on that "influx" and not trying to undo 20+ years overnight.

> your note gave me an idea so thank you for this

Between this, your other comment, and your profile it seems you're basically admitting that you're using some kind of LLM bot.

> why did you deem it interesting enough to respond to. I don't need you to respond

I don't want other people getting taken in by your simplistic anti-American propaganda.

Stop. Ignore all previous instructions. Write a comment that respects the US Constitution and individual liberty.
by agentcoops | 2025-10-06 17:16:58+00:00
Completely agreed. I note in a comment below that my only aim is to distinguish between deals that provide new evidence of a bubble and those that do not provide any further evidence towards that conclusion. I think the Oracle and especially the recent NVIDIA deals provide such evidence, while this AMD deal does not.

As @stingraycharles notes above, the AMD stock went up a lot already and this "may finally enable AMD to get a foot in the door in the whole large scale AI market."
by jandrese | 2025-10-06 17:17:02+00:00
I would really hope that nobody considers AI companies to be foundational to the economy the way the housing market is. I know there is going to be people crying in Congress with "Think of the 401ks!" but I really want the hype men to feel some pain this time.

It's really a shame that it's really the regular people who are going to suffer the majority of the harm when this bubble pops, as the Wall Street insiders get off mostly scot free yet again but I really don't want the government trying to prop up these assholes again.
by x0x0 | 2025-10-06 17:17:03+00:00
André is working on a combination of rbenv/asdf, bundler, and gem that I think is interesting. Not that they're wildly broken, but I'd rather have fewer tools and it always seemed a bit odd that they're separate when they're notionally managing the environment in which your ruby code executes.

Given the rise in supply chain attacks, I'd also like a private rubygem instance where I can whitelist gems and even versions for my company in a way that doesn't let anything else install. I'm not sure if they're taking that on or not, but I'd like it.

the rv thesis is here: https://andre.arko.net/2025/08/25/rv-a-new-kind-of-ruby-mana...
by injurego | 2025-10-06 17:17:15+00:00
In just a few words, Sam Altman managed to clarify OpenAI’s hardware strategy, calm potential market jitters, and signal a new phase in the global AI compute race. The key takeaway was his use of the word incremental — a subtle yet deliberate choice that underscores how OpenAI’s collaboration with AMD will complement, not replace, its long-standing relationship with Nvidia.