MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LocalH | 2025-11-08 14:56:53+00:00
There's a weird perception that's floating out there claiming that video gaming cannot be "a sport", just because it's more mental than physical (although even that varies per game, for example high-level Guitar Hero players require extreme endurance and stamina). I also would wager a non-zero percentage of people with such mindset would also deny that chess is a sport, unless they grandfather it in due to the sheer age of chessdom.

It doesn't help that there is a partially overlapping mindset that believes that video games are for kids, something to grow out of. Since the vast majority of competitive gamers at the extreme top end are young adults, that theory is incorrect, but those who happen to be in the center of that Venn diagram would probably also deny that successful Twitch streamers have a "real job", etc.
by thenthenthen | 2025-11-08 14:57:21+00:00
Other than that the author wont survive one minute in China (I doubts they are interested to visit anyway), a lot of the reasons/rationales seem pretty weak. I also hate QR codes as menus, but not because printing a menu is easy, it is the human interaction that suffers. I can spend days without communicating with humans here… which is quite distopic. Although enjoyable every now and then (after a 80 hour work week for example…)
by Pooge | 2025-11-08 14:57:35+00:00
I see. Sorry if I came off as trying to invalidate your experience. That's not what I meant.

I've tried about 4 or 5 distros before settling on openSUSE Tumbleweed (now on my 4th or so year). Linux Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu, Solus, Manjaro...

Ironically, I find Tumbleweed (a rolling distro) more reliable than all the others I've tried. I can't say it's stable per se, but if something breaks you can rollback very easily. Doesn't break often, though.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-08 14:57:48+00:00
My friends and I share interests but they can’t all talk about the relative pros/cons of full frame vs. cropped sensors in digital cinema with me. That’s kind of the framing here if that makes sense. We share a lot of interest and can talk in depth about certain topics, but there are plenty of topics that I am interested in or just know a lot more about that none of them can really discuss with me, so I have to find those communities elsewhere
by petesergeant | 2025-11-08 14:59:04+00:00
Is there any market in the world where rival leagues of the same sport compete in the same geographic location? Maybe there aren’t new leagues because Americans don’t care enough about new sports?

Further, it’s the teams, not the leagues that make money, which I didn’t pick up in a brief skim of the article. Why would any team want to join an rival league? League monopoly seems like the natural fit, and let the competition happen between teams.
by preommr | 2025-11-08 14:59:27+00:00
Great start!

Just want to say, you did all the right things: Simple instructions, to the point and, and I can't stress this enough - examples. Like 9/10 when someone shares their language, they have little to no examples and it's the first thing people ask for.

I do think you could probably have a few more examples that are like the calculator and less of what's basically a one liner.

On the language: I like what's there so far. It's clean minimalist, and familiar.

The problem is that there's not really a USP that I can see. I get the rust but with reference counting, but I don't think that's even close to enough. There has to be a really really good reason for people to try and use a new programming language. And I don't really see the overall vision beyond a small hobby project (which is fine if that's what you were aiming for)

> Missing a killer feature?

Yes, very much so.
by fruitplants | 2025-11-08 14:59:38+00:00
Indian Premier League (Cricket) is not a US league. Some reasons mentioned in the post apply to IPL. And IMO some don't (nerdy billionaires). There's even an acquired.fm episode on it. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/indian-premier-league-crick...

"So successful in fact that it is the fastest growing major sports league in the world, growing 20x in value since 2008 to be worth more than $16 billion today."
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-08 14:59:42+00:00
Ratings on LMArena are too easily gamed.

Even professional human evaluators are quite vulnerable to sycophancy and overconfident-and-wrong answers. And LMArena evaluators aren't professionals.

A lot of the sycophancy mess that seeps from this generation of LLM stems from reckless tuning based on human feedback. Tuning for good LMArena performance has similar effects - and not at all by a coincidence.
by tamnd | 2025-11-08 15:00:50+00:00
Zig is so cool, but C is cooler.

I like how Zig feels clear and simple to start with. I like that it gives one toolchain and makes cross compilation easy. I like that it helps people see how systems programming can feel approachable again.

I also like that C has done these things for many years. I can use different tools, link libraries, and trust that it will still work. I can depend on standards that keep improving while staying familiar.

I think Zig is exciting for what it adds today. I think C is cooler because it has proved itself everywhere and still runs the world.
by audunw | 2025-11-08 15:01:52+00:00
Are you implying that Zig hasn’t been used in production? What about Tigerbeetle, Bun and Ghostty? I’m using Ghostty as my terminal right now.

I feel like Zig is aiming a lot higher. So that’s why it’s taking longer and also why people are more obsessed with it. The work on doing their own backend and incremental linker is impressive and interesting. So is their attempt at getting IO and async right.
by kj800x | 2025-11-08 15:02:12+00:00
Meta's security team seemingly does not care. My mom had her long-time Facebook account taken over during the summer. It was a credentials stuffing attack (she's now using a password manager with random passwords), and the bad actor immediately put on 2fa TOTP and signed up for some advanced security so the account couldn't be recovered without the 2fa.

We spent weeks trying to recover the account, but recovery codes weren't being sent through to her email or phone, the email and phone that has been on the account for 10+ years. The bad actor started making posts that she had cars to sell and to message her if they wanted to buy (also claiming that her sister was sick and she needed the money which is why she was selling the cars, completely untrue) Tens of her friends including her son reported the account as taken over and the posts as fraudulent. All responses from Facebook saying there was no indication of anything violating the guidelines, which is insane because all this behavior taken together screams account takeover.

Eventually, I reached out to a friend who worked at Meta who filed an internal report and we were hopeful that might actually fix it, but nothing ever came of it and when I reached out to the friend a month later he said the report was closed and he couldn't see any more details (for security reasons). If my mom meeting me in person, and me reaching out to my former teammate on a live phone call and proving my identity, and that teammate filing a report with the security team can't get it fixed, what can?

At this point, we think the original account is still up (we can't see, since the bad actor has blocked the entire family) and every new account she makes gets deleted for being a sockpuppet / ban evader.

She's devastated that someone ruined her online life like this, and that she was in Facebook groups for her career that she no longer has access to, she can no longer keep up with her friends and family. So many local businesses post their events and updates on Facebook and she has no ability to see these anymore.

We don't know what to do next. I'm so thoroughly disappointed with how Meta handled the situation. It's clearly an account takeover if someone looked at the account and the indicators. I think our next step is to write a letter to Meta legal alleging gross neglect after being presented with evidence of identity theft. Maybe that finally would get someone's attention. I'm nearly to the point where I would potentially spend thousands of dollars of my own money for a lawyer just to prove a point.
by atombender | 2025-11-08 15:02:20+00:00
I look at how people write TypeScript these days, and think about how the world might have been different if, 10-15 years ago, these functional languages had been a bit closer to the imperative world. OCaml allows mutation and side effects and could even feel a bit imperative if it weren't for the "let ... in" syntax.

Let's face it, syntax matters. We saw that with Elixir becoming much more popular than Erlang ever did. We saw it with TypeScript being able to introduce a fairly complex type system into JavaScript, and becoming successful among web devs by adapting to established ecosystem and offering a gradual approach, rather than forcing an entirely new, incompatible paradigm on it. The TypeScript story seems a little improbable in hindsight, but it was able to get there by offering an incremental path and making a lot of compromises (such as config options to allow less strict enforcement) along the way.

Personally, I think a new syntax for OCaml might actually be successful if done right. Sure, there have been multiple attempts (the "revised" syntax, Reason, etc.), but none of them are really willing to modernize in ways that would attract your average programmer. The toolchain also needs work to appeal to non-OCaml programmers.
by magnaton | 2025-11-08 15:02:54+00:00
Same experience here and upvoted accordingly. I stopped using/recommending VLC all the way back in 2012 due to Mr. Kempf's appallingly dismissive/aggressive attitude to carefully-expressed constructive feedback from multiple users after a regressive UI change (my handle here was "sillyrat" and then "silly-rat"):

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=98182&p=3281...

TL;DR: they decided to force the playlist to stay open all the time, thus killing "mini-player" mode; reaction to this was, unsurprisingly, uniformly negative (but expressed politely); Mr. Kempf's response was to attack VLC users; I did an end-run around him by opening a bug ticket so other developers would be made aware of the problem, and Mr. Kempf banned me for doing so; my ticket was approved and addressed by other developers, fixing the issue; Mr. Kempf tried to back-pedal pitifully.
by ben_w | 2025-11-08 15:03:25+00:00
Apple's Store is "Swiss cheese" security: full of holes, but still more cheese than hole.

It has some of the disadvantages, some of the advantages. It's not (and never was) perfect.

That said, at this point I am a disillusioned app developer: I no longer believe that the creation of an app is a good business idea in most cases.
by Apreche | 2025-11-08 15:04:07+00:00
It’s a sports thing.

If you go to some youth sports league, it is common that every kid will get a medal or trophy regardless of which team in the league won or lost.

But it also exists for adults. Go to the NYC marathon? Everyone gets a medal. I’ve participated in a lot of organized bicycle rides. The rides aren’t even competitive like the marathon is. They are not races. But at the finish line everyone gets a medal regardless of what distance they rode, or how quickly.

The harsh truth about the participation trophies is that boomers complain about them the most, but they are the ones responsible for them! I’m a millennial. I remember being in a youth basketball league in middle school. Our team did not win. At the final day, every kid on every team got a tiny trophy. I was very confused by this at the time. I expected only the best team to get anything. But who was running that league and decided to hand out those trophies?! Our boomer parents!
by treesknees | 2025-11-08 15:04:18+00:00
I tend to keep up to date on new firmware, but I’d love to be notified if a surprise firmware drops for an old device such as the Apple Watch SE1 or 12” Apple MacBook (2017). I don’t see older devices listed.

Also the Apple Watch models only go up to Series 5. Apple is currently on Series 11, so there are quite a few missing.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-08 15:05:40+00:00
A/B testing is radioactive too. It's indirectly optimizing for user feedback - less stupid than directly optimizing for user feedback, but still quite dangerous.

Human raters are exploitable, and you never know whether the B has a genuine performance advantage over A, or just found a meat exploit by an accident.

It's what fucked OpenAI over with 4o, and fucked over many other labs in more subtle ways.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-08 15:06:10+00:00
Proper C++ should use new, delete, custom allocators, and standard collection types.

Even better, all heap allocations should be done via ownership types.

Calling into malloc () is writing C in C++, and should only be used for backwards compatibility with existing C code.

Additionally there is no requirement on the C++ standard that new and delete call into malloc()/free(), that is usually done as a matter of convenience, as all C++ compilers are also C compilers.
by ThouYS | 2025-11-08 15:06:34+00:00
Apple is far gone, macOS has been buggy for a while. At first I thought this was in favor of iOS, but seeing how iOS usability has suffered, and how they are squandering their reasources on pointless redesigns.. I guess they are just another company now.

I guess it's a melancholic reality that only certain outstanding individuals can be relied on to produce greatness. Most of us are just not there.

Another such example is Python. Python is slowly being bloated by the people in charge, since Guido basically gave up, soon to be as shitty as C++ is.

I am afraid Blender and Pytorch will be next, seeing how the original visionaries have left or will leave in the not so distant future.
by whstl | 2025-11-08 15:07:35+00:00
This attitude towards wastefulness is how you have web apps that could run in a single machine but struggle to run in a server cluster.

And after a couple years even Postgres is struggling because the amount of queries is too massive because of abstractions that don’t lend themselves to optimization.

Also it’s how you have codebases that could be maintained by two or three suddenly needing dozens because the testing suite needs hours to run and people even celebrate when there’s no tests in sight.

Just anecdotal personal experience. But I saw this happening inside at least 4 successful companies that started with Rails but didn’t care about those problems, and ended up wanting/having to move to something else.
by 5555624 | 2025-11-08 15:07:54+00:00
> Fans only want to watch the very best players. Without TV money, new leagues can’t match salaries, and cannot attract top talent.

Is there enough "top talent" to fund a new league? Take American football: there are more players in high school, than college, because the game gets faster and better; the same goes from college to the NFL. The game changes, too; so. success in college doe not mean success in the NFL. There have been 88 Heisman Trophy winners; but, only 10 have made the NFL Hall of Fame. (The only two-time Heisman Trpohy winner is not one of those ten.)

Did (DO) the XFL and AAF have "top talent"? These were players who were not good to get drafted by the NFL. Sure, some players have from the XFL to NFL; but, that makes the XFL more like a minor league or developmental league -- a notch lower.
by infecto | 2025-11-08 15:08:19+00:00
I still am a fan of QR code menus but the west never executed on it well enough. In China I just order from the menu on my phone. No waiting for front of house. If I do have questions it’s easy to buzz front of house and they will come over. It’s simply China is ahead some areas of tech, cashless, QR codes everywhere, everything is an app.
by sheepscreek | 2025-11-08 15:09:48+00:00
I used their $50 plan and with the previously offered Qwen3 coder 480B. While fast - none of the “supported” tools I tried were able to use it in a way that didn’t hit the per minute request limit in a few seconds. It was incredibly frustrating. For the record, I tried OpenCoder, VSCode, Quen Coder CLI, octofriend and a few others I don’t remember.

Fast forward to now, when GLM 4.6 has replaced Qwen3 coder in their subscription plan. My subscription was still active so I wanted to give this setup another shot. This time though, I decided to give Cline a try. I’ve got to say, I was very pleasantly surprised - it worked really well out of the box. I guess whatever Cline does behind the scenes is more conducive to Cerebra’s API. I used Claude 4.5 + Thinking for “Plan” mode and Cerebras/GLM 4.6 for “Act”.

The combo feels solid. Much better than GPT-5 Codex alone. I found codex to be very high quality but so godawful slow for long interactive coding sessions. The worst part is I cannot see what it’s “thinking” to stop it in its tracks when it’s going in the wrong direction.

In an essence, Cerebras + GLM 4.6 feels like Grok Fast 1 on steroids. Just couple it with a frontier + thinking model for planning (Claude 4.5/GPT-5/Gemini Pro 2.5).

One caveat: sometimes the Cerebras API starts choking “because of high demand” which has nothing to do with hitting subscription limits. Just an FYI.

Note: For the record, I was coding on a semi-complex Rust application tuned for low-latency mix of IO + CPU workload. The application is multi-threaded and makes extensive use of locking primitives and explicit reference counting (Arc). All models were able to handle the code really well given the constraints.

Note2: I am also evaluating Synthetic's (synthetic.new) open-source model inference subscription and I like it a lot. There's a large number of models to choose from, including gpt-oss-120 and their usage limits are very very generous. To the point that I don't think I will ever hit them.
by MangoToupe | 2025-11-08 15:09:53+00:00
This doesn't strike me as that weird. Playing a guitar also takes extreme stamina, for instance, but it takes a great deal more technical skill to hit the rhythmn and fingering. (Or at least if that isn't the case, that's certainly the perception.) Many guitarists also write their own music, and the truly impressive ones improvise.

Many sports require full-body coordination. I would also consider, say, a skilled ballet dancer much more obviously impressive and intriguing than being the best video gamer in the world. The only reason one might not consider it a sport is that it's not as competition-oriented (and I may be completely wrong in that; I can't feign deep knowledge of ballet).

I don't think it's disparaging to not consider video games a sport, either, it just seems like a category error. Much of the skill is simply not visible to people not intimately familiar with the game, the mechanics, and what might be difficult about it. I would put it in the same category as, say, live coding, or watching an expert artisan at work. I also can't fathom, say, the skill it takes to operate a crane as a world-class expert, or ice carving, or fixing a mechanical watch, or blowing glass.

Frankly, I also don't consider most streaming to be a "real" job. But that's probably related to the fact that I don't respect most content that emerges. But you could say the same thing about podcasting, or being an opinion columnist, or a pundit/talking head. This doesn't mean it doesn't take skill or effort; I just think it's not producing much of value.
by api | 2025-11-08 15:09:54+00:00
Zig doesn't seem like a bad language, but I also don't see anything to make it hands down better than Rust for systems programming. So it kind of fails my "why yet another language?" test. I don't think another language can be justified by marginal improvements.

Rust passes that test because it's categorically better than C and C++ in several ways: much better type system, safety, better modules and code reuse, etc. It's complex, but as far as I can tell most of its complexity is required to offer its level of safety guarantees in a pure systems language without a garbage collector or any kind of true dynamic typing. To make a safe systems language you need to have a very rich type system that can prove safety across a wide array of situations. Either that or you'd have to go to the other far end of the simplicity-complexity spectrum and have a language with virtually no features, which would result in very verbose code and probably a lot of boilerplate.

Zig's coolest feature to me seems like "comptime" and the lack of a weird macro side-language, which is one of Rust's anti-features that feels bolted on. Don't make me learn yet another language. Of course sophisticated macros in Rust are usually instead written in Rust itself via procedural macros, but that is more unwieldy than "comptime."

Still not enough to justify a whole new language and ecosystem though. Again: don't make me learn yet another language unless there's a big payoff.
by jkafjanvnfaf | 2025-11-08 15:12:01+00:00
"Esports" is not a league. That would be like saying "sports" is a league.

There are leagues around some games (like the ones mentioned in the article). There are also events with "league" in the name that are not really leagues (like ESL Pro League). In any case, none of them are financially successful in the US.
by grayhatter | 2025-11-08 15:12:32+00:00
I've used for well oven a year now, and I identify with this comment... well no, but I used to. In between Zig, and another language I enjoy was Python, and it was breath of fresh air to come back to the C style that I know and love within Zig. I would have said exactly this, when I first started writing Zig.

Today, Zig is so much better than C. I used to refer to Zig as an improved version of C. But I don't anymore. C may have come first, but chronological roles reversed. If Zig is a programming language, than C is a toy trying to copy Zig's functionality and usability.

Calling C easier to use in a cross platform context is absolutely insane. If I was only concerned about $HOST I would consider using C. Today, when I might want to copy a binary to literally any other system, I wouldn't even consider C. Zig wants code to work. C wants code to compile. There's a stark and critically important difference between the two.

> I think Zig is exciting for what it adds today. I think C is cooler because it has proved itself everywhere and still runs the world.

I couldn't have put it better myself, the only thing C has over Zig is inertia. But I wouldn't consider that a selling point....
by narayanahari | 2025-11-08 15:12:33+00:00
Great feedback. Thanks for sharing. Totally Agree. AI coding is inconsistent today. We are seeing the same thing using Claude and Cursor daily. Some tasks work beautifully but others spiral.

Thats the reason i am thinking this tool is to offload small and well-scoped, low risk tasks that developers usually queue anyway. Things like making tiny UI changes, update some validations, write docs, adding more test cases.

I am thinking of this more of a "overnight helper" than a full dev replacement. If this tool can handle 3-4 tasks while we sleep and open clean PRs thats already 20-30% productivity bump for small teams. The goal is just get the continuous motion to increase productivity.

Some usecases that i am thinking 1. Minor or Major support tickets (update error codes, fix messaging, update validations) 2. Tiny UI changes (Change the text color of dark mode primary buttons to black, add more countries to the list) 3. Fix issues reported by static code analyzers 4. Increase test coverage by adding more UTs on these specific areas.

More of an entry level intern who can help in getting grunt work completed while the devs focus on the important ones.