MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-11-07 13:57:32+00:00
There have been serious efforts at software engineering, like the OOP movement in the 1980s and 90s to construct software very methodically.

Programmers hate it and rejected it.

To be fair, it does tend to create its own pathology. Instead of a layer cake made of congealed spaghetti, you tend to get over-engineering.

https://github.com/Hello-World-EE/Java-Hello-World-Enterpris...

Software engineering leads to software over-engineering because unlike in physical material engineering there is no capital or material cost to push back against complexity. You can just add things, and add things, and add things, forever, and it costs very little (a bit of RAM and CPU but that's cheap).

I have this weird hypothesis that part of why methodical "correct" software engineering fails is that it succeeds. It is able to manage complexity, which allows complexity to grow without bound. A mountain of ugly shit will start crashing in mysterious ways if it gets too complex, which has the virtue of limiting complexity.

A root problem is that programmers tend to add complexity, not remove it, and the incentive structure of the software business tends to encourage this. Each new bit of complexity or layer is something you could build a business around, or a feature you could sell. Nobody pays for simplicity. It has value, often massive value, but it's not intuitive. In what other domain would you pay more for the absence of something? This would make sense in software since simplicity is harder than complexity, but it feels weird and wrong.
by Razengan | 2025-11-07 13:57:42+00:00
I mean coding gameplay logic. The game engine can remain in C/++ or whatever.

Gameplay and game mechanics are fairly different from making other types of programs. Things like stats, buffs/debuffs, conditions, and their dependencies on each other.

It's all sort of a vague middle ground between typed vs untyped, static vs dynamic, inheritance vs composition, sequential vs asynchronous, and other oddities that make it distinct from other domains.

> You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it.

But what if coding could correspond almost 1:1 to the design?

I've been attempting some of it here: https://github.com/InvadingOctopus/comedot

with stuff like abstracting the idea of "Actions" that could be anything from a verb like "Look at" in a text-based adventure, to clicking on spells/weapons buttons in a turn-based strategy game, or a Dash move in a platformer etc.

Fantasizing about elevating those concepts to being core keywords in a hypothetical language is my equivalent of counting sheep to fall asleep :)
by bjourne | 2025-11-07 13:57:56+00:00
> “We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it, and we don’t want it either.”

I wonder if those who market illegal Israeli settlements counts as "legitimate advertisers": https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/31/meta-profits-as... I have a hunch that "legitimacy" is directly proportional to the dollar amount of the ad bid...
by jitl | 2025-11-07 13:58:01+00:00
Otel collector or complete Otel stack with data storage and ui etc?

The collector is a helm chart, someone on my project added it to our K8s clusters last week. It was like 30 lines of YAML/Terraform in total. Logs, trace forwarding, Prometheus scraping. That bit is easy.

Idk about deploying the ui/storage. I’ve used Grafana Loki stuff in Docker Compose locally without much head scratching for local development.

https://github.com/grafana/docker-otel-lgtm
by wongarsu | 2025-11-07 13:58:12+00:00
If you advertise your model as a therapist you should be requried to get a license, I agree. But ChatGPT doesn't advertise itself like that. It's more you going to a librarian and telling them about your issues, and the librarian giving advice. That's not illegal, and the librarian doesn't need a license for that. Over time you might even come to call the librarian a friend, and they would be a pretty bad friend if they didn't give therapeutic advice when they deem it necessary

Of course treating AI as your friend is a terrible idea in the first place, but I doubt we can outlaw that. We could try to force AIs to never give out any life advice at all, but that sounds very hard to get right and would restrict a lot of harmless activity
by joshmn | 2025-11-07 13:58:16+00:00
I replied to another comment about further context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845763

In short, I made sure that the subject matter was right—"how can I stream the Lakers when I am in Los Angeles"—and that there was no schilling. I ensured that users were otherwise active in the communities that they were posting in, and that it wasn't just spamming referral links. Everything had to be tasteful or I'd kick them off the platform, which happened once after the person told me they were going to do it anyway.
by saubeidl | 2025-11-07 13:58:30+00:00
On a related note, there's a fork of OpenMW that lets you play the game multiplayer with your friends: https://tes3mp.com/

Unfortunately, it's a bit outdated (based on 0.47), but OpenMW devs have announced their intention to add multiplayer to upstream as well.

Additionally, one can't talk about Morrowind fan projects without mentioning Tamriel Rebuilt, a 24-year-and-counting effort to build all of Tamriel within Morrowind. It's not done yet, but it already has twice as many quests as the base game [0], massive landmasses, joinable factions and a city that's way bigger than anything the base game has to offer, all while staying lore-friendly and neatly integrated.

Times are good for Morrowind fans.

[0] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-quest...
by pessimizer | 2025-11-07 13:58:32+00:00
You don't think that attacking police officers should be criminal? You don't think that attacking people should be criminal? You not only think you should be allowed to throw sandwiches at cops, but sandwiches at me, too?

I think weakening the protection against law enforcement being assaulted raises the likelihood that law enforcement will instantly react with violence under any vague threat.

edit: I warn that if you, a stranger who doesn't like me, throws something at me, you're going to be looking at more than a fine, immediately. I'm black, if every racist on the street gets one sandwich I'd be able to open a sandwich shop.
by infecto | 2025-11-07 13:58:48+00:00
I think the plot flew way over your head. We were comparing costs and for my reading, saying gaming rig is more about consumer grade hardware and not so much an assumption that you already have one. After all I assume we would be buying a 5090 for the vram and at current market price that’s $3k alone. You would probably end up spending at least $20 in electricity and cooling every month of you are running it near 24/7.

So again, the economics don’t really make sense except in specific edge cases or for folks that don’t want to pay vendors. Also please don’t use italics, I don’t know why but every time you see them used it’s always a silly comment.
by mr_toad | 2025-11-07 13:59:00+00:00
> You can cross the galaxy in a second as far as special relativity is concerned.

Sure, but the rest of the universe will keep on changing. In 90 billion years it’s going to be a very old universe. Galaxies will become consolidated and isolated, fewer young stars will be born. Only the dim light of red dwarf stars will shine among a graveyard of dead stars.
by LRVNHQ | 2025-11-07 13:59:21+00:00
The average weekly hours of US employees is ~34 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP

"Only" 5.2% of US job holders hold more than one job https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm

If you want to argue that this doesn't add up with "The overwhelming majority of people who work around 40 hours a week have plenty of free time." then please provide sourced numbers rather than baseless internet doomerism.

Oh and I'll add that the average commute time in the US is among the shortest in the OECD, since the long commute boogeyman always end up popping up in these discussions.
by fouronnes3 | 2025-11-07 13:59:38+00:00
I don't see how the yearly tech support I do with my parents at Christmas will not one day converge to an outright ban of the internet. I am now demoing the level of sofistication of AI powered scams, telling them that it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my face and voice. I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a clone.
by mcphage | 2025-11-07 13:59:41+00:00
> The man was a bystander who assaulted a police office

They went to trial for this, and it was determined that the man DID NOT assault a police officer. They tried repeatedly charging him with felony assault, were unable to get a grand jury to agree with charging him, and so instead charged him with a misdemeanor assault, whereupon he was found not guilty.

Do not continue repeating that this man assaulted a police officer. It was definitively determined that he did not.
by tptacek | 2025-11-07 13:59:44+00:00
Helps to have more of the quote:

He said that programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'”. The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant.
by alphabettsy | 2025-11-07 14:00:01+00:00
The man was prosecuted and the jury found him not guilty.

I would be curious to know what their reasoning was.

I think mine would be that since these agents seem to face absolutely no consequences for their far more egregious actions. Why should something so minor result in jail time. To be clear, I’m not talking about their lawful actions. I’m talking about them assaulting and abusing people and excessive use of force that’s been captured on camera all across the country.
by torginus | 2025-11-07 14:00:17+00:00
There's something off-putting about how Rust people communicate. Like you're talking to people selling something, or people with ulterior motives. They love talikng about memory safety as that's the only thing standing between humanity having secure and reliable software. They love external audiences, as their brand of fearmongering, virtue signaling and offering of panacea-like solutions resonates with a certain kind of risk-averse decision maker, who tend to in power in uncomfortable numbers.

First of all, Rust's 'fearless concurrency' largely boils down to 'no concurrency' - Rust has about as much concurrency as Javascript - you can copy objects between threads, but not share memory beyond that, with certain libraries allowing some escape hatches in Rust's case.

Additionally the case for aliasing control leading to better and safer code that's easier to reason about just isn't really true in practice - it's so rare that, for example your function can accidentally can alias memory in strictly typed languages - and when it does it's kind of intentional. The concern pretty much only manifests in memcpy, as the ugly hack of 'strict aliasing' - assuming 2 pointers of incompatible types pointing to different bits of memory - works very well in practice.

It even helps with situations people complain about in Rust, like when object A and B (both mutably borrowed) take a reference to a some common service object (which is super common) - but that sort of code simply doesn't compile in Rust.

All in all, I don't dislike Rust as it is but the project's tendency to do activism trying to bully its technical skeptics into submission (which is unfortunately what all activism really is - when you lost the argument, try to louder than the other guy and paint him as reprehensible) - they focused on fixing the technical issues. There has been research into ownership schemes, some exist that are less restrictive than Rust's while offering the same safety guarantees.

In my personal opinion Rust is not done on the conceptual level - by 'done' I mean Rust serving its purpose as the language it claims to be. Maybe there will be Rust 2.0 which will overhaul the ownership system completely or maybe there'll be another language that will do what Rust does but better.

Edit: I wish I could claim I'm some sort of tin-foil conspiracy theorist, but I'm commenting under an article written by one of the key people behind Rust, and it reeks of this attitude.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-07 14:00:41+00:00
> I have to wonder: would the suicide have been prevented if chatGPT didn't exist?

I'd say yes, because the signs would have to surface somewhere else, probably in an interaction with a human, who (un)consciously saved him with a simple gesture.

With a simple discussion, an alternative perspective on a problem, or a sidekick who can support someone for a day or two, many lives can and do change.

We're generally not aware though.
by joshmn | 2025-11-07 14:01:16+00:00
I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves.

You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
by Majromax | 2025-11-07 14:01:42+00:00
> You just write down your math equations as JAX and you're done.

It's natural when your basic unit is a whole vector (tensor), manipulated by some linear algebra expression. It's less natural if your basic unit is an element of a vector.

If you're solving sudoku, for example, the obvious 'update' is in-place.

In-place updates are also often the right answer for performance reasons, such as writing the output of a .map() operation directly to the destination tensor. Jax leans heavily on compile-time optimizations to turn the mathematically-nice code into computer-nice code, so the delta between eager-Jax and compiled-Jax is much larger than the delta between eager-Pytorch and compiled-Pytorch.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-11-07 14:02:13+00:00
Sorry, I was not likening LLMs to the entire gamut of therapy, only saying they seem - to me - to be a tool akin to that of diary-writing.

Interesting idea about pen&paper - I've been using computer keyboards (and way back an occasional typewriter) for most of my life and have written way more through a keyboard; it's more immersive for me as I don't have to think where as with a pen I struggle to legibly express myself and can't get the words out as quickly. (I'm swiping on a phone now, which is horrible; even worse than using a pen!)
by nyeah | 2025-11-07 14:02:50+00:00
I agree 100% in spirit. Electrical transmission lines were not understood when Fourier did his work. Maxwell wasn't even born yet. And the math ultimately unleashed by Fourier transforms goes way beyond applications.

In cold hard dates, though, Fourier was already using his series to solve heat transfer problems in 1822.

I don't agree with the bizarre idea that every bit of research should have a clear utility. I'm just being careful about dates. And I think FTs kind of were invented with a view towards solving differential equations for physics. Just not electrical ones.
by mdtrooper | 2025-11-07 14:03:03+00:00
I love this kind of free software (or open source) project.

It is a hard work for several years.

I think that the goal or finish of this work is the engine and a new (similar to old close game) set free assets (sprites, 3D models, maps, music...). And I know few projects in this point, OpenTTD and FreeDoom.

Are there more projects in this point?
by sausagefeet | 2025-11-07 14:03:39+00:00
Certainly there are specifics between the type systems that differentiate. TypeScript generally chooses to enforce types in an ergonomic way whereas OCaml chooses to enforce types in a sound way. Whether or not that is a meaningful differentiator for someone is up to them.

This blog post shows the elements of OCaml that motivate us to use it. Is it complete? No. Maybe it should be more explicit that we like using OCaml, and these technical aspects aren't unique but certainly benefits we see.
by zaphar | 2025-11-07 14:03:41+00:00
Those two type systems are not the same. Typescript has some soundness issues in the type system. They are there because they have to work seamless with javascript so it's understandable. And they improve many codebases that would have been otherwise written in javascript. But they do not in any way give you the same level of guarantees that OCaml, Haskell, or Rust would give you.
by seec | 2025-11-07 14:03:53+00:00
Some anecdotal evidence of its terrible qualities are the major degradation of software quality in the Apple ecosystem. In particular the rewrites or brand new softwares feel much worse than it used to be.

I feel like if it was a good language, it should make things better; of course there may be some other confounding factors but it's hard to not link the software quality problem to the Swift push.
by ruszki | 2025-11-07 14:03:54+00:00
I think it really depends on how much you use it. For example, there is no way that I would pay for Facebook. It annoys me greatly that I’m forced to use it a few times per year, and I have to sell all of my data for it, but unfortunately I don’t pay just to avoid data gathering about me, because it happens anyway, no matter what I do.

But I pay happily for YouTube, because I use it daily, and my home country’s propaganda was annoying enough to make it worth.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-11-07 14:04:09+00:00
This is as much about UFOlogy as it's about SE. But there's also Science in Ufology, for example statistical analysis of reported UFO sightings or video analysis of UFO Videos. I think this applies to software engineering as well.

Here's an example I found enlightening: It's about the HTTP3& the QUIC protocol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rYPXgCKamM So much real engineering went into that, from fossilized infrastructure that doesn't allow certain ipv6 extension headers, to assumptions about the great firewall of china and it's inner workings and more.
by wslh | 2025-11-07 14:04:42+00:00
> That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems fairly low.

That probably depends on your definition of a scam but I'd argue we need to resynchronize that definition. They are scams, because the people behind them know what they're saying is plainly false, and they exploit the explosion of digital networks (like ads) to spread those lies. In the 20th century, the channels for scams were far narrower and easier to pinpoint.
by 7thaccount | 2025-11-07 14:04:51+00:00
If you ever want to see how they think, just check out the myriad UFO subreddits. It's pretty wild.

Everything is aliens and a government cover up to those folks....even when you prove it's a floating trash bag they think you're a fool. There are a few rational commenters, but a lot of people that want to believe so bad they fall for all these grifters selling pseudoscience books and seminars.
by omnicognate | 2025-11-07 14:05:48+00:00
Hey, I didn't say it would be fun :-D

Tau-Zero by Poul Anderson explores this, BTW. It's a great little sci fi novel about a spaceship doomed to accelerate at 1G indefinitely.

It is significant from a colonisation PoV. With sufficient acceleration capability and the ability to survive travelling through the interstellar medium at extreme velocity (rather than getting vaporised by a mote of dust), a single generation of humans could in theory colonise the whole galaxy within their own lifespans. Indeed, some of them could even come back together and meet again after visiting those distant worlds, on an Earth many millions of years older, if their worldlines end up with similar proper times.
by mister_mort | 2025-11-07 14:06:13+00:00
I think this effect might not be limited to video games - I remember when I was learning 3D modelling and rendering a few decades ago I started to break down scenery in my mind automatically, a permanent "how would this be made or faked in a program if you were to do it".

I think excessive concentration on a new skill can just create that pattern in your mind, no matter what the source.
by PetitPrince | 2025-11-07 14:06:15+00:00
As a member of the western community of player who practice Tetris the Grand Master (a series of arcade version of Tetris that focus on speed) since its beginning in 2004-ish, I can attest that the Tetris effect happens when you're beginning to seriously play but then disappears relatively quickly. With well over 2000 hours of play across versions and counting, I don't have any of this effect.

The same can be said Bemani-style rhythm game (Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, ...): when listening to music I could imagine potential sheet music I could play in the games, but it's no longer the case (and I don't have clocked as many hours on it).
by pelagicAustral | 2025-11-07 14:06:43+00:00
I think age plays an important part in the decision to move away from a place. I think in your 20s or very early 30s you have far more leeway to kind of go away and start again, but a lot of the hope to actually be able to find that unicorn workplace fades away as you approach your late 30s. Once into your 40s, depending on your trade, you're dead on arrival unless you successfully manage to rebrand yourself as a consultant, whatever the fuck that means.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-11-07 14:06:57+00:00
That was not what I tried to say. Brogue, like other similar games, can be played in a TUI mode, in the terminal, or with a GUI. Same game, just different UI implementations, and both tend to be about equally laggy, or usually the GUI version is probably less laggy, since you can just blit glyphs without the overhead of terminal escape codes etc to draw the same symbols in the TUI. And Brogue just uses SDL, not a game engine, so that is not relevant at all.

But your snarky reply is probably also wrong anyway, since I would be surprised if there is no business software made using game engines. Tesla is known to have used (but not anymore?) Godot for making GUIs for their in-car displays for instance. I have bought applications (not games) made using both Godot and Unity. Not saying it would be a great idea, in general, to use those engines for business applications, but people are not known for always using the best possible tools, are they, and it certainly would work in theory?

Not very familiar with Unity, but Godot has very nice GUI widgets. Same style of WYSIWYG editor like old Visual Basic or Delphi really. You drag widgets to place them on the screen, set properties, add scripts to react to different events. The entire Godot IDE itself, a very non-trivial application, is implemented using Godot's own GUI framework.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/ui/index.ht...
by mcphage | 2025-11-07 14:07:08+00:00
> me, lightly touching miette with the side of my foot: miette move out the of way please so I don’t trip on you

> miette, her eyes enormous: you KICK miette? you kick her body like the football? oh! oh! jail for mother! jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

(Via @TriciaLockwood)
by array_key_first | 2025-11-07 14:07:09+00:00
Depends on where you are.

In the US, privacy policies change every week. And they don't gather consent - they just say "you're using our thing? Okay you consent". They'll send you an email with their new privacy policy. Which you don't read, because it's awful to read. And even if you do read it, it doesn't matter, because it's completely fake. The policy doesn't tell you how they actually use your data. It just says they can use any data for any purpose.