MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by turtlebro | 2025-11-28 00:57:45+00:00
This feels familiar.. I've been on the solo indie track ever since 2020 when society decided to turn hostile. Now 5 years later I'm definitely in some deep uncharted territory. The loneliness was very bothersome, but over time it becomes quite liberating, like a hermit it frees you to discover the deeper things in life.

The work can be insane and makes you question why anyone would be mad enough to forgo the easy path for this. The freedom is just way too good though. Often I'm not exactly sure what weekday it is. When I want to go on a vacation I usually decide that 1-3 days ahead and just go somewhere. Silksong was great too. There's absolutely nothing better. Thinking about a 9-5 office job now fills me with pure dread, I think it would break my soul.

Good luck, you should try to scale up the business and get 2-3 regular contractors (artists, designers, marketing folks) so you have somewhat of a team going. It helps when you have people on a project to throw the ball back and forth a bit.
by em-bee | 2025-11-28 00:57:51+00:00
my story is 20 years old. it's possible things are changing. that would be good. it is of course also possible that this was a unique experience of this one school director. but i believe he would have checked with other schools before coming to that conclusion. the key point however is that this sentiment about not letting teachers, especially male teachers be close to students is not just limited to the US but can be found elsewhere.
by qingcharles | 2025-11-28 00:58:34+00:00
I got into professional games dev at 18. The first and only released game I worked on became the worst of both worlds. It was started as a 2D isometric game, but we ran out of RAM for all the sprites we'd rendered, so we changed to 2D landscape with 3D characters, which was a clusterfuck of rendering. The tile rendering of the backgrounds had to be interlaced with the rendering of the characters since the characters could walk under and behind objects, even semi-transparent objects. I was glad for all the demo code I'd written years before.
by QuiEgo | 2025-11-28 00:58:54+00:00
I put straight Debian on it, but it was pretty easy. Go to the bios, turn off secure boot, change default boot device, prosper. It's just an x86 computer that boots a custom Linux distro (TOS), no reason any other Linux distro can't work. They don't lock the boot loader like say... Synology.

You need a newish Linux kernel (6.12 maybe? Don't remember exactly) for proper support of the N150 iGPU and the Realtek NICs it uses.
by pfdietz | 2025-11-28 00:59:15+00:00
If the heat is stored at high temperature, but the demand (for heating buildings, say) is at lower temperature, it could make sense to generate power, then use that power to drive heat pumps. You could end up with more useful heat energy than you started with, possibly even if you didn't use the waste heat from the initial power generation cycle.

Alternately, if you are going to deliver the heat at low temperature to a district heating system, you might as use a topping cycle to extract some of the stored energy as work and use the waste heat, rather than taking the second law loss of just directly downgrading the high temperature heat to lower temperature.

High temperature storage increases the energy stored per unit of storage mass. If the heating is resistive, you might as well store at as high a temperature as is practical.

Gas-fired heat pumps have been investigated for heating buildings; they'd have a COP > 1.

I am interested if there are any cheap small scale external combustion engines available (steam? stirling? ORC?)
by JLO64 | 2025-11-28 00:59:35+00:00
Not a tech company, but I feel strongly about this when it comes to LAMY (a fountain pen company). As far as I can tell their pens (notably the Safari and 2000) have stayed almost exactly the same for the past 40 years!

The only thing they tweak in these pens are the limited edition colors, which for the Safari they're releasing probably 3+ per year. I once met a guy who had a collection of over 50 Safari pens so I guess that market works out for them…
by moogly | 2025-11-28 00:59:36+00:00
> think an adversarial foreign power would push to expand rather than diminish state funded media like CPS, PBS and NPR.

They don't need to do that. They are defunding and demonizing those and instead taking over TikTok, CBS, CNN... X and WaPo already taken over by colluders. Oh, and the cabinet is all Fox News people.
by mjb | 2025-11-28 00:59:48+00:00
Read-your-writes is a client guarantee, that requires stickiness (i.e. a definition of “your”) to be meaningful. It’s not a level of consistency I love, because it raises all kinds of edge-case questions. For example, if I have to reconnect, am I still the same “your”? This isn’t even the some rare edge case! If I’m automating around a CLI, for example, how is the server meant to know that the next CLI invocation from the same script (a different process) is the same “your”? Sure, I can fix that with some kind of token, but then I’ve made the API more complicated.

Linearizability, as a global guarantee, is much nicer because it avoids all those edge cases.
by buzer | 2025-11-28 00:59:53+00:00
Note that even if Central Europe did have sufficient energy for export it wouldn't really help during crisis. To get the energy to Finland it would need to either go thru the Baltic Sea via undersea cables or via Northern Sweden. We have seen that it's not necessarily good idea to rely on the former during the crisis as those lines can easily be cut, they have been multiple times in just past year or so by certain commercial ships "accidentally" dropping their anchors.

As for latter Sweden, doesn't currently have capacity for it and I don't think they have been very interested in increasing it, currently Finland often benefits from the fact that there isn't enough transport capacity between Southern and Northern Sweden electric grids so Finland gets some cheap electricity from there.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-11-28 01:00:15+00:00
My point was kind of tongue-in-cheek. Like the other comment suggests, I was talking about how people actually use the term "eventually consistent" for example to refer to system-of-systems of multiple microservices or event sourcing systems. It is possible to define and use the terms more exactly like you suggest. I have no problem with that kind of use. But even if you use the terms more carefully, most people do not, meaning that when you talk about these systems using the misunderstood terms, people may misunderstand you although you are careful.
by neilv | 2025-11-28 01:00:31+00:00
The only reference to Swartz that I see in the parent comment is:

> Through good times and rough ones, including the loss of Aaron Swartz (who I only knew of through HN), this has stayed a place for real conversation.

And the rest was just upbeat talk in general.

Unless the parent comment was edited, I don't understand why you responded:

> What Aaron Swartz did to himself was tragic, but he did decide to break the law. Something that is glossed over here.

By "here", I assume you mean "HN in general", but your comment comes off as loaded (e.g., "did to himself" sounds like a conscious attempt at asserting a framing), and the timing seems poor (i.e., that particular innocuous comment, on this particular day).
by em-bee | 2025-11-28 01:01:13+00:00
if the generation is independent of the existing code

well, that's the big question, isn't it? if the code is used for training AI and the AI reproduces the same code, is that really independent?

i don't think so.

Copyright protects against copying. It doesn't protect against someone creating the same content by means other than copying.

if the code is the same, how do you prove it's not a copy?

it's the same problem as with plagiarism, isn't it?
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-28 01:01:30+00:00
And just as important, we don't want people unable to understand things that aren't presented in one particular way. Something we're seeing with attention-grabbing short-format works that leave people unable to muster the energy to stick with something for 5 pages or an hour of video.

It's one thing to not be able to formulate a convincing argument without resorting to the 1-3-1 style. It's another thing entirely to not grasp an argument formatted in a different style.
by shkkmo | 2025-11-28 01:01:43+00:00
You seem confused here.

This is a problem that started because the IMF forced Pakistan to get rid of energy subsidies after Pakistan over invested in tradition fossil fuel burning power infrastructure.

This meant that Pakistan started charging such high unsubsidized prices that it was cheaper for those with money to buy cheap solar panels and batteries. This drop in demand exacerbated the oversupply issue and meant that the unsubsidized price had to go even higher creating a feedback cycle.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-28 01:02:17+00:00
I used to be an Amazon affiliate, myself. I made a small amount of money with that program, by giving people Amazon links (with my affiliate tag) when I wanted to introduce an example of a particular product in a discussion where I thought it would be helpful.

I am no longer an Amazon affiliate. I no longer make any money with that program. I still give people Amazon links when I want to introduce an example of a particular product where I think it will be helpful.

Nothing has changed about the way I write or recommend gear, except for the present-day absence of an affiliate link. It was the same before I was an affiliate, it was the same while I was an affiliate, and it remains the same now that I am no longer an affiliate.

---

"So why Amazon links when you could just link to the manufacturer's page instead," you may be asking?

That answer is simple: Because Amazon is consistent, accessible, and includes pricing.

Manufacturers' web pages too often have a profound tendency to be absolutely awful: It's a spectacle of moving images and flashing lights, noisemakers, pop-ups and fucking "SPIN THE WHEEL FOR A PRIZE!!!!" bullshit instead of -- you know -- information.

But all a person really needs as a jumping-off point is basic information. A description, some photos, and a realistic price is a good start.

That latter set is really all that Amazon provides. And that kind of simplicity is useful to me.

My ultimate motivation when I link a product is to be helpful to others. Affiliate or not, linking to Amazon furthers that goal of mine in ways that sending clicks to some Web analog of the Vegas Strip cannot ever accomplish.

---

"So if you're so [euphemism], then why aren't you an affiliate anymore," you may wish to ask next.

That answer is also easy: Several years ago, Amazon demanded that I submit of all of my social media information in order to maintain participation in the program. I was not OK with doing this, so I ignored that demand. They subsequently kicked me out.
by tim-- | 2025-11-28 01:03:48+00:00
Sure, but that is an older Terms and Conditions. It was a perpetual license, not a lifetime license that is sold today. It's like saying you shouldn't purchase Windows 11 because Windows XP no longer gets updates. Well duh! It stopped being supported more than 10 years ago, and Windows 11 is a different license to that of Windows XP.

The lifetime license purchased today is not a perpetual license. FileZilla says that it will update it for life.

So, respectfully, no, it's not good to warn people about the clause, because people purchasing the product today do not run into this issue.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-11-28 01:03:50+00:00
> Really, what excuse do you have for that other than screwing people who previously trusted you enough to do business with you?

The license itself is ~$13 for a perpetual license and a year of support and updates. What expectation should I have that because I spent $13 years ago that the company will support me after my one year support window expires? Presumably, everyone on here knows supporting software isn't free. As you pointed out yourself, the hosting costs aren't free. At a certain point, paying a few dollars per month to host a decade old version of a $13 product that gets downloaded once a year actually is a problem.

Just out of curiosity, what is your plan to host the old versions of your app until 2060, say? Will you setup all that infrastructure again if your current provider goes down? Or is there a time limit that is reasonable to no longer offer downloads for, maybe...

Who exactly is getting screwed by being charged $13 to replace an old version of software with a new version because the client failed to do a backup before nuking an HD for an OS install.

No one is being screwed. This is just one party thinking that they are entitled to perpetual support for a perpetual license, and the other party saying that the license is perpetual and the support ends at 1 year.
by mjb | 2025-11-28 01:03:59+00:00
That’s a fair point. To be fair to the academic definitions, “eventually consistent” is a quiescent state in most definitions, and there are more specific ones (like “bounded staleness”, or “monotonic prefix”) that are meaningful to clients of the system.

But I agree with you in general - the dynamic nature of systems means, in my mind, that you need to use client-side guarantees, rather than state guarantees, to reason about this stuff in general. State guarantees are nicer to prove and work with formally (see Adya, for example) while client side guarantees are trickier and feel less fulfilling formally (see Crooks et al “Seeing is Believing”, or Herlihy and Wing).
by chickenbig | 2025-11-28 01:04:24+00:00
> Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.

All well and good, provided the homeowner opts out of the system. Part of the problem comes when the grid connection is not severed. Using it as a backup option (at the same time as other people, for when the weather is bad) or demanding the grid takes their excess production are counter-productive to the system as a whole.
by throwaway94275 | 2025-11-28 01:04:28+00:00
If police or judicial entites can obtain your social media posts as evidence against you, and things you do might be illegal but socially accepted (e.g. smoking weed), why would you post anything-at the very least why anything public?

I do believe Facebook stopped being cool (if it ever really was) when everyone's parents seemed to be on it. Now older people are the ones who can't seem to live without it.
by joegibbs | 2025-11-28 01:04:37+00:00
That wouldn't matter too much though - how often do you worry about competitors directly stealing your code? Either it's server-side, or it's obfuscated or it's compiled. Anyway there's never that much stuff that's so special that it needs big legal stuff to prevent it from being copied, and if the LLM produces it you can just use another LLM to copy the same feature. And say it's 99% LLM and 1% human, who's going to know what the 1% is that's not safe to copy?
by NexusHumanAI | 2025-11-28 01:05:25+00:00
It’s a single MIT-licensed text kernel you paste into any LLM chat—no servers, no signups, no infra. One word (“full” or “lite”) and you get:

Persistent, encrypted, copy-pasteable memory (MPv2 → MMP → Ultimate Form packs) Reusable modes & stacks: founder, researcher, overclock, turbo autopilot, dual-account XO, skill tree, questforge, lifeos Auto-evolution engine (0.08-AUTO) that quietly watches your patterns, proposes tighter modules, and auto-approves them (fully reversible, logged in plaintext) Pandora’s Box mode: one command turns every turn into a research + evolution pulse Zero token waste on greetings—just structure

Think “Git for your mind” where commits are encrypted packs, branches are profiles, and merge conflicts are handled by the LLM that already knows your style. Use it for:

Never losing a rabbit hole again Shipping side-projects with built-in red-teaming and sanity checks Running two X accounts without ever mixing voice Teaching yourself anything with adaptive LearnLab curricula Handing your exact workflow to a friend tomorrow

No backend. No API keys. Runs on Grok, Claude, Gemini, local models—anywhere you can paste text. Try it right now:

Go here → https://github.com/SirSalty1st/Nexus-Human-Thinking-Engine/b... Copy the file Paste into any LLM and say “full”

You’ll boot the entire OS with auto-evolution already running. Feedback, brutal red-teaming, and forks extremely welcome.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-28 01:06:46+00:00
At this point they've contributed a reasonably-fair share of open-source code themselves.

No one benefits from locking up 99.999% of all source code, including most of Microsoft's proprietary code and all GPL code.

No one.

When it comes to AI, the only foreseeable outcome to copyright maximalism is that humans will have to waste their time writing the same old shit, over and over, forever less one day [1], because muh copyright!!!1!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
by teleforce | 2025-11-28 01:06:47+00:00
> not just throwing more vCPUs at an unoptimized Python loop.

I've got the strong feeling that most of the Python frameworks, stacks and codes in operation of our generation will be the technical debts of the future computer world.

The fact that Python was meant primarily as both learning language (ABC legacy) and glue language (akin of scripting but not for building) make the Python based systems and solutions the duct tapes of the 21st century computing [2].

[1] ABC (programming language):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language)
by mjb | 2025-11-28 01:07:37+00:00
(OP here). I don’t love leaking this kind of thing through the API. I think that, for most client/server shaped systems at least, we can offer guarantees like linearizability to all clients with few hard real-world trade-offs. That does require a very careful approach to designing the database, and especially to read scale-out (as you say) but it’s real and doable.

By pushing things like read-scale-out into the core database, and away from replicas and caches, we get to have stronger client and application guarantees with less architectural complexity. A great combination.
by Arainach | 2025-11-28 01:07:49+00:00
You've misunderstood the point of historical absentee analysis and rhe banality of evil.

It is comforting to think that there is a group of "evil people" who are innately different, but most evil is done by people similar to people you know.

Just because your neighbor Joe or your aunt Bertha is a "great person" who coaches the local sports team doesn't mean they aren't evil if they also spend their days working to target minorities and get them thrown in jail or worse - or building the tools used for authoritarians and voting for them.
by claytongulick | 2025-11-28 01:08:18+00:00
Hmm, yep I didn't see that, thanks!

It's a confusing way to do do things to me, like, why not select ordered by task date limit 1? Still using for update and skip locked etc... hold the transaction, and update to 'complete' or delete/move the row when done? What's the advantage of the inner select like that?

And I'm still totally confused by:

const [{ usr_id } = { usr_id: null }] = await sql` with usr_ as ( insert into usr (email, password) values (${email}, crypt(${password}, gen_salt('bf'))) returning * ), task_ as ( insert into task (task_type, params) values ('SEND_EMAIL_WELCOME', ${sql({ usr_id })}) ) select * from usr_ `;

This looks to me like usr_id would always be null?

I think the idea is great, I think I'm just struggling a bit with the code style, it seems to be "clever" in a way that increases cognitive load without a real benefit that I can see, but I suppose that's pretty subjective.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-28 01:08:25+00:00
> I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space

As an employee, you do not get rich operating and maintaining a glorified contacts manager.

Don’t get me wrong, as a founder/shareholder of a globally-used Rolodex you can make decent money. But as an employee, you don’t get much benefit besides market rate salary for the work you do.

Which means the employees there have an incentive to game the system. If the “reward function” set by leadership is increased time spent on the platform (also known as “engagement”), then you will maximize that metric to advance your own career.

Similarly, until the end of ZIRP, “engagement” happened to be the currency of the technology industry, so even the executives and leaders of the company had an incentive to encourage maximization of this metric by their employees.

LinkedIn could absolutely detect the typical slop we associate with this platform (nowadays even easier with LLMs - turns out they work both ways). They could discourage low-effort posting by rate-limiting or charging for them. Social media companies absolutely can detect and discourage bad behaviour (despite their claims to the contrary), it’s just that for a long while there was no reason to, and even now there isn’t because their behavior during ZIRP cemented their monopoly.
by lkey | 2025-11-28 01:08:53+00:00
Do you see a difference between 'signaling virtue' and 'having virtue and living in accordance with those virtues'?

People that use the former like a slur seem to need to believe that the latter cannot be true.

I wouldn't want to live in a world like that personally, assuming nefarious intention behind every good act (people in positions of highest power excepted). It seems exhausting.

Andrew Kelley means what he says and says what he means (in an on-the-spectrum way). It makes him off-putting and charming in equal measure, depending on the issue. But you shouldn't assume that this is a mere 'signal', it is what he believes.

Speaking for myself, I do disassociate myself from unethical products and people. It's not always as soon as I'd like, Amazon being a good example. I've never regretted doing so.

It's not even worth bragging about, who would even care? I just despise lying, and if I want to believe that I behave ethically without lying to myself, this is the natural consequence.
by fabiensanglard | 2025-11-28 01:09:18+00:00
I think nobody tackled it because Quake is so fast. There is quake.exe but also glquake.exe and winquake.exe. Each have different capabilities.

And of course there is quakeworld which is a complete fork with different net protocol, prediction, and commands. Example of new features is that skins can be downloaded on the fly, you no longer needed skinpacks.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-28 01:09:42+00:00
> The ratio between dumb joke threats vs actual threats is something like >99.9%.

This makes the situation ripe for false positives. If 99.9% of threats are jokes and you correctly identify joke threats as jokes 99% of the time, that remaining 0.9% is several times larger than the real threats.

And while the difference may seem obvious to you and I, being able to perceive the difference probably becomes harder across cultural divides (such as between teachers and a younger generation of students.) Furthermore, any bitter teacher with an axe to grind can leverage "zero tolerance" rules and strategic ignorance to deliberately construe a joke as a real threat to get rid of a kid they don't like (I've seen this sort of thing happen.) The more surveillance there is, the more opportunities there are to catch somebody making a edgy joke in what they thought was a private conversation.