MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by svat | 2025-11-13 01:33:26+00:00
From the very first announcement of this, Google has hinted that they were doing this under pressure from the governments in a few countries. (I don't remember the URL of the first announcement, but https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-... is from 2025-August-25 and mentions “These requirements go into effect in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand”.) The “Why verification is important” section of this blog post goes into a bit more detail (see also the We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer), but ultimately the point is:

there cannot exist an easy way for a typical non-technical user to install “unverified apps” (whatever that means), because the governments of countries where such scams are widespread will hold Google responsible.

Meanwhile this very fact seems fundamentally unacceptable to many, so there will be no end to this discourse IMO.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-13 01:33:44+00:00
I strongly believe that both Texas and California are poorly run and the problem is political but not partisan in nature. I like to leave them out, because both states are the ire of so many people and the brunt of so many arguments

And all of those arguments utterly leave out the other 48 states which vary quite a bit in who runs them and who mostly has power and yet do a pretty good job. There are plenty of conservative states in the US that do a good job of running the government and even representing their people and do not take part in stupid shit for partisan political points and even have rather varied ways of doing things. There are plenty of states run by liberals that are doing very well and are perfectly able to solve numerous problems legislatively following standard legislature procedure and have no problem even compromising across the aisle and listening to varied needs.

When people use Texas or California in their arguments as shorthand to say "D/R can't run a government", they are lying and are too stupid to look around and pay attention to the 48 examples of mostly functional government by both parties with tons of experimentation and programs to pick and choose from.

That is, IMO one of the core issues with why our Federal government struggles so bad. People are failing to look around and notice that 1) Government can function just fine actually 2) We have tons of examples of it 3) Government functioning well doesn't have to be partisan 4) government can easily meet the needs of its people and improve hard problems if you allow them and if you pay attention to it.

It's very relevant to the current thread which is full of people who seem to think this is the first time the US has ever made any change, especially one about removing a coin from circulation, or people who think having a layered sales tax regime is "complicated" despite being solved long ago by every single commodity POS company, or that POS software needs updates to change it's behavior.

Just a lot of people who don't even know the first thing about what they do not know making fairly loud proclamations about things they didn't even realized have been solved forever are insurmountable problems.

Like.... We are humans. We essentially invented math for inventory and tax reasons. We created a system of tamper evident and resistant debt assets out of carved bone and wood sticks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

we split the fucking atom

We can fucking remove the penny from circulation.
by echelon | 2025-11-13 01:34:09+00:00
Genie delivers on-the-fly generated video that responds to user inputs in real time.

Marble renders a static Gaussian Splat asset (like a 3D game engine asset) that you then render in a game engine.

Marble seems useful for lots of use cases - 3D design, online games, etc. You pay the GPU cost to render once, then you can reuse it.

Genie seems revolutionary but expensive af to render and deliver to end users. You never stop paying boatloads of H100 costs (probably several H100s or TPU equivalents per user session) per second.

You could make a VRChat type game with Marble.

You could make a VRChat game with Genie, but only the billionaires could afford to play it.

To be clear, Genie does some remarkably cool things. You can prompt it, "T-Rex tap dancing by" and it'll appear animated in the world. I don't think any other system can do this. But the cost is enormous and it's why we don't have a playable demo.

When the cost of GPU compute comes down, I'm sure we'll all be steaming a Google Stadia like experience of "games" rendered on the fly. Multiplayer, with Hollywood grade visuals. Like playing real time Lord of the Rings or something wild.

Interestingly, there is a model like Google Genie that is open source and available to run on your local Nvidia desktop GPU. It's called DiamondWM [1], and it's a world model trained on FPS gameplay footage. It generates a 10 fps 160x160 image you can play through. Maybe we'll develop better models and faster techniques and the dream of local world models can one day be realized.

[1] https://diamond-wm.github.io/
by Aachen | 2025-11-13 01:34:25+00:00
Oh! I thought I had found the crucial piece finally after ~500 words, but there's indeed better news in the section after that! Thanks, I can go sleep with a more optimistic feeling now :)

Also this will kill any impetus that was growing on the Linux phone development side, for better or worse. We get to live in this ecosystem a while longer, let's see if people keep damocles' sword in mind and we might see more efforts towards cross-platform builds for example
by nixpulvis | 2025-11-13 01:34:26+00:00
I don't know much about macOS these days, but I was under the impression that Casks were for applications, and normal formula were for things installed in your PATH as standalone binaries. The .app needs a few extra things bundled up.

EDIT:

I looked it up, the issue is that homebrew explicitly doesn't want .app formulas: https://docs.brew.sh/Acceptable-Formulae#stuff-that-builds-a...

IDK what they expect. Every open source application developer needs to pay $99/yr now?

I mean you can always get the DMG from the releases on GitHub, so I guess we can just point people there and abandon homebrew. https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/releases
by rtkwe | 2025-11-13 01:34:39+00:00
There's not currently a way to officially put SteamOS on Steam* hardware. Plenty of people have done it but there's the usual compatibility issues where the image is built for the very specific hardware Valve installs it on so there's often wake from sleep and fan control issues. All solvable but it's not the level of turn key of even a mainline linux distro.
by foxglacier | 2025-11-13 01:35:10+00:00
My point is that the form is too burdensome. You said there were instructions in the guide, implying that makes it easy enough. However, even with the help of the guide, it's still too much work. You're suggesting consulting a professional which is ridiculous. This is not even "one's taxes", this form is specifically for people not paying tax to America. I can only assume it's even more difficult for people who do pay American tax.

Don't forget that this is for a random one-man business in another country doing a $100 job for a US client. The cost of what you're suggesting is completely disproportionate to the value of the transaction.

> Isn't it clear that you are to look at the FATCA regs for additional definitions?

Not at all. The form tells you to look at the instructions, not the FATCA regs. I have no idea what FATCA regs are or what FATCA even is. That's just more obscene over-complication.

Yes, the IRS does dump a bunch of jargon on you and leave you to Google it. "Google" here means searching the laws and regulations but probably Google itself because it's easier.
by terribleperson | 2025-11-13 01:35:50+00:00
You do not need big hands to use a classic steam controller, you just need to shift your grip. It's actually hard to use a steam controller with big hands. With long thumbs, the proper grip doesn't land your thumbs in the middle of the track pads.

Failing to better communicate the proper grip for the steam controller was a real fuck up on valve's part though. They should have tried to communicate it through design, making it harder to hold wrong.

I am kind of concerned about the size of the new controller, but valve seems to have decided there's no place in the market for a controller without sticks.
by 0_____0 | 2025-11-13 01:36:08+00:00
It can wear on you a bit if you make lots of coffee but I went years with a Hario skerton hand grinder until my partner got sick of it and got us a reasonably priced election burr

Truly you could be making great coffee at home with <$75 of equipment. Gram scale, eBay secondhand conical hand grinder, department store kettle, pourover funnel, filters.
by snarfy | 2025-11-13 01:36:16+00:00
Dapper can be a better fit depending on the scenario. It's dumb objects. You fill them yourself with actual SQL statements. There is no change tracker. You are the change tracker.

The main issue with EF is ultimately there is an expression builder that maps linq expressions to sql. This mostly works, until it doesn't, or it does but has strange generated sql and performance. If all you are doing is CRUD or CRUD adjacent then it's fine. But for some complex stuff you spend a lot of time learning the innards of EF, logging generated statements, etc. It is time better spent writing good sql, which something like Dapper allows.
by jhancock | 2025-11-13 01:37:28+00:00
Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I've been using AI tools most days the past 2+ years. Occasionally I get good results. I spend heaps of time rewriting/reviewing.

Vibe coding can work if both the programming techniques and problem domain are well understood by the LLM. For the work I do, this means front end stuff.

Back end stuff is where the problem domain sits. I spend so much time explaining the problem domain to the LLM that its best I just write it all myself instead of cleaning up the piles of code the LLM will spit out. So no vibing on the back end...just crack open the AI assistant for debugging.

I don't see companies replacing $150/hour programmers with AI. Not yet. I think what we are seeing is companies spending heaps of money/attention on AI to the point of not making hiring decisions on programmers.

Just prior to the first dot com boom, companies were reinventing themselves with systems replacing those built in the 60s through 80s. These new systems were sophisticated and if done right, game changers. The dot com boom hit with very simple tech: click -> load next static page. This consumed all the attention. I think thats what we are experiencing now more so than a clear job replacement.
by arjie | 2025-11-13 01:37:35+00:00
When the iPad came out in 2010, online commenters also ridiculed it. The jokes were so repetitive that people complained about them[0]

/r/technology is sadly not available from that day but the Internet was full of the same few jokes:

iPad?! More like maxipad amirite? iPad? So they glued 4 iPod Touches together? Lol, Apple making the same thing others already made but worse?!

Sadly, /r/technology on the day of the Airpods release is also missing. But I was able to find some threads on it soon after[1]

The thing of greatest value to most "netizens" (haha) is ridicule. They love dunking on stuff. In fact, even today if you go to reddit's front page you will almost certainly see a post from /r/clevercomebacks or /r/murderedbywords or so on and so forth.

I don't blame them. When I was young, I too found this enjoyable for reasons that seem so alien to me today I cannot even comprehend why I did it. I, a Linux using child, called the IE and Windows users "Microserfs" in moments of great wit. Perhaps pg was right in that dunking is adaptive for those primarily seeking engagement[2]

That's not to say that anyone is wrong or right about whether some product is good. I thought the iPhone sock was some kind of joke release, but I've definitely passed the point where I know what appeals to the kids (six-seven skibidi). It's just that a gauge that always reads 1.0 on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0 is not a gauge that you can use diagnostically.

0: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/auwq1/im_already_tire...

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/51r158/no_apple...

2: https://x.com/paulg/status/1659156372427087874?s=20
by whizzter | 2025-11-13 01:38:30+00:00
Games are still mostly polygon based due to tooling (Even Unreal Nanite is a special variation of handling polygons), some engines have tried voxels (Teardown, Minecraft genererates polygons and would fall in the previous category as far as rendering goes) or even implict surface modes by composing SDF'y primitives (Dreams on Playstation and more recently unbound.io).

All of these have fairly "exact" representations, and generation techniques are also often fairly "exact" in trying to create worlds that won't break physics engines(big part) or rendering engines, often hand-crafted algorithms but nothing really that really stopped neural networks from being used on a higher level.

One important detail in most generation systems in games is that they are often built to be controllable to work with game-logic (think how Minecraft generates the world to include biomes,villages,etc) or more or less artist controllable.

3d scanning has often relied on point-clouds, but were heavy, full of holes,etc and have been infeasible for direct rendering for long so many methods were developed to make decent polygon meshes.

Nerf's and Gaussian splatting(GS) started appearing a few years back, these are more "approximate" and totally ignore polygon generation instead relying on quantization of the world into NN-matrix-"fields"(NERF) or fuzzy-point-clouds (GS), visually these have been impressive since they managed to capture "real" images well.

This system is built on GS since that probably meshed fairly well with neural network token and diffusion techniques for encoding inputs (images, texts).

They do mention mesh exports (there has been some research into polygon generation from GS).

If the system scales to huge worlds this could change game-dev, and there seems to be some aim with the control methods, but it'd probably require more control and world/asset management since you need predictability with existing things to produce in the long term (same as with code agents).
by IlikeKitties | 2025-11-13 01:38:38+00:00
The issue is that of network effects. Making it harder to sideload for example f-droid makes the already small market for it even smaller, leading to less apps. It also forces people developing Apps that they don't want to reveal to be developing for completly valid reasons (Imagine developing a porn app in saudi arabia or an abortion support app in the USA) to validate against google aka the US Government.
by gpm | 2025-11-13 01:38:41+00:00
8 days ago Google and Epic announced a proposed settlement and modification of a permanent injunction that Epic won, I believe this proposed settlement would likely have prohibited Google's plan to forbid installation of third party apps (excluding app stores from the definition of apps) unless those app developers had paid google a registration fee. The proposed settlement is here [1], the relevant portion is

> 13. For a period beginning on the Effective Date through June 30, 2032, Google will [...] and will continue to permit the direct downloading of apps from developer websites and third-party stores without any fees being imposed for those downloads unless the downloads originate from linkouts from apps installed/updated by Google Play (excluding web browsers).

6 days ago the court expressed skepticism as to the proposal and announced that they'd have a hearing, with testimony from expert witnesses, as to whether it would prevent the market harms that the original injunction was trying to cure [2].

Today Google announces this, effectively confirming that they're backing down from their requirement that third party app developers pay google prior to distributing their apps.

Nothing (yet) is explicitly tying these together, but I can't help but suspect that this move is in large part being made to convince the court that they're actually intending to honour this portion of the proposed injunction even though Epic would have little reason to enforce it.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
by dmix | 2025-11-13 01:39:27+00:00
I use mouse/keyboard primarily and never noticed an issue even with bluetooth. I don't play multiplayer so wifi is not a factor in latency.

I do have a USB wireless dongle for my xbox controller which apparently is faster than bluetooth. I also now use wireless dongles for my mouse/keyboard but mostly just for ease of use. All 3 USBs are connected via dock.
by Lammy | 2025-11-13 01:40:05+00:00
Google have their own reasons too. They would love to kill off YouTube ReVanced and other haxx0red clients that give features for free which Google would rather sell you on subscription.

Just look at everything they've done to break yt-dlp over and over again. In fact their newest countermeasure is a frontpage story right beside this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45898407
by jaccola | 2025-11-13 01:40:12+00:00
In this current generation, "world models" is basically a marketing term. You can research gaussian splatting, novel view synthesis, neural radiance fields (nerf), etc... I find Mr Nerf is good to follow: https://x.com/janusch_patas

There is another thing called world models that involves predicting the state of something after some action. But this is a very very limited area of research. My understanding of this is that there just isn't much data of action->reaction.

Same issue with gaussian splatting/nerf really, very little data (relative to text/images/videos) of text -> 3d splats. I'd guess what world labs are doing is text -> image -> splats, but of course it is just speculation.
by conductr | 2025-11-13 01:40:31+00:00
Of course you’re absolutely right and the whole thing just illustrates how dysfunctional the US is. I mean, this edict originated in a tweet or whatever it’s called now. Even after months, nobody could be bothered to think about how to properly execute it that solves the various concerns. We really can’t solve the simplest of problems any longer our politicians just cause noise with no signal and just actively undermine everything they touch. Not even talking specifically about the person you might think I am, this is a systemic issue.
by brailsafe | 2025-11-13 01:40:34+00:00
BBC trying to make a couple extra bucks with this ad after that oopsy with Trump. Coverage is coverage, veiled by mockery or not.

To people with bad taste who buy stupid garbage for thousands, such as any of the hideous big shoes of the last decade adorned with a fancy label, this is already on order.

Can't wait to hear the ATP hosts spend 45 min "not" glazing this thing like they do with every iPhone case

Ultimately, it's a fashion thing, it'll sell, I can't blame them for putting it out there, but I'd definitely wonder about any friends buying it
by saulpw | 2025-11-13 01:41:03+00:00
Supposing that it does become part of a new star, and some "nearby" civilization had sufficiently precise instruments...would that be a detectable anomaly? Like some atoms of Plutonium still haven't decayed, and isn't that weird that Plutonium's spectral signature is present in this new star? Or is that just something that happens because some plutonium is created in a supernova and might just have been floating around anyway.
by jordanb | 2025-11-13 01:43:57+00:00
MKBHD's point is that this would have worked the way you describe it a decade ago, but is Apple's brand and fans the same as they were back then? At some point doing something like this just makes you look greedy and out of touch.

If Microsoft had tried to sell a "limited edition" zoom sock for $220 it would have produced a lot of mockery and no sales.
by pants2 | 2025-11-13 01:44:33+00:00
To some degree this is normal - for example I worked at a med device startup where we got investment from one of our manufacturing partners. That helped with growth which in turn meant more manufacturing work for them, and presumably they'd be happy to invest in another round and keep the flywheel going as long as there is some real outside demand.

I honestly think it's a great model for incentive alignment and not that sketchy on the surface. For the manufacturer, it's guaranteed revenue with upside convexity. For the startup, it's better terms and priority from the manufacturers since they have a stake in your success.
by germandiago | 2025-11-13 01:44:49+00:00
As a person who looks always at Java and C sharp with curiosity, I am a bit divided.

For me C#'s value is obvious in the frontend and also games compared to Java (except for mobile, where Java can be used but Kotlin seems best).

But for the backend I always wonder if I should invest more on C# or Java as I go.

Also, it worries me that Java is a memory hog, which C# seems not to be. I like to have lean server-side software, to the point that my usual approach has been to use C++ paired with Capnproto, but if I had to go with something a bit more high-level for web work, I am not sure.

Currently I am investigating Clojure for non-critically-fast backend. It seems to be a lot of fun and since I am using https://fennel-lang.org/ (replacing part of my Lua code) and I expect https://jank-lang.org/ to become something at some point, maybe it is worth to stick to it?

How would someone that has more data than me compare Java vs C# in terms of performance as-in "what machine you need in the cloud" to do useful stuff, mainly for backend work, asynchronous, in terms of CPU and memory for both?
by estearum | 2025-11-13 01:45:04+00:00
There were decades of safety data when previous vaccines came out?

Anyway:

1. All vaccines have liability protection.

2. You could know of literally 10 people who had significant adverse effects (which you don't) and, given the scale of vaccine rollout, it would still be mathematically safer than pretty much every drug on the market.

Sorry, but you've been successfully lied to on this topic.
by leptons | 2025-11-13 01:45:16+00:00
>Anyone that likes to tinker in electronics I recommend they try their hand at at least one tube project (probably an amp of some kind).

Only if they are aware of the voltages and current often associated with tube setups. One bad move can be painful, or fatal in some cases.

I used to work on guitar amplifiers, doing modifications on tube amps. Messing around with the internals demanded my focus, a level of attention most "tinkerers" aren't likely ready for. Not trying to gatekeep here, just suggesting it may not be something for "anyone that likes to tinker".
by inopinatus | 2025-11-13 01:45:28+00:00
So-called “homebrew” has only ever grudgingly provided the barest minimum of hooks to locally build your own variants of their packages, and compares most unfavourably to, say, maintaining your own easily-rebased fork of a BSD-style ports tree. Don’t even get me started on its janky dependency resolution, versioning, “services”, and lifecycle.

The hostility and self-righteousness from the maintainers in the thread linked above just adds to the general shittiness of using it at all, and yet somehow it seems to be the lowest common denominator choice for far too many teams I’ve worked with, I suppose by sheer inertia.
by tppiotrowski | 2025-11-13 01:46:02+00:00
I remember thinking there's a small arbitrage opportunity in countries that don't have pennies and nickels. In NZ I believe stores round to the nearest decimal (.02, .01 => .00 and .03, .04 => .05). They lose on some sales but gain on others. However, they don't round if you use a CC.

Here's one for the FIRE folks: if it rounds up, use a CC and if it rounds down use cash. Use all those pennies you save using your CC to retire 3 minutes early.