MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by prmoustache | 2025-11-07 19:27:34+00:00
My opinion is that while assets could be licensed differently, proprietary licenses for code should be illegal and only code released under an osi approved open source license should be published, commercially or not.

This should apply to all softwares not only games. That would make portability accross operating systems easier, and allow consumers to enjoy and maintain the products they buy forever, even if the original developers do not want to support and provide updates anymore.
by supersrdjan | 2025-11-07 19:27:41+00:00
I agree that those are impressive skills that are becoming rare and make us compare unfavorably to old schoolers. But I am also impressed by trackers who can follow a trail in the bush by observing clues invisible to ordinary people. All kinds of skills fell into disuse when the problems they solved lost importance.

But we will never run out of problems to solve and new problems will call for new competencies.

I wonder what are some of these new competencies. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Can you?
by zer00eyz | 2025-11-07 19:28:09+00:00
Uhhh....

11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.

Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.

Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money.

Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
by _menelaus | 2025-11-07 19:28:48+00:00
I disagree completely. Its important to condemn terrorism and genocide on both sides. I have no tolerance for that. Its absurd to try to convince me to ignore this, or to try and excuse the IDF because the other side is bad too. Hamas is bad. Nazis are bad. The IDF is bad. The Israeli state is bad. Israeli society is rotten. These are all true and useful statements. I don't understand why you would spend your time on the internet trying to argue against this.
by mbac32768 | 2025-11-07 19:29:03+00:00
The Windows support is bad because OCaml is a PL designed by people who are deep in Linux life. Windows is not something that keeps them up at night. (Which isn't to say they didn't try, just, you know, not as much as it takes)

One of the things people often neglect to mention in their love letters to the language (except for Anil Madhavapeddy) is that it actually feels UNIXy. It feels like home.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-07 19:29:38+00:00
> I’m sorry but there is no way you can demonstrate a universal aesthetic.

What do you mean by "aesthetic", because I've already made the distinction between objective beauty and subjective taste. If my explanation is true, then it follows that there is an objective ordering of beauty (of at least two kinds: with respect to the same form/end, and between forms and ends). Then, there's the question of how competent someone is at recognizing this order. And finally, there are contingent factors that will affect expressed volitional preference as a function of factors like attainability or character flaws or whatever.

Making beauty a matter of purely subjective response makes it more mysterious and nonsensical, not less.

> Your opinion of other people’s tastes does not reflect on their taste — it reflects on yours.

How do you know this? You haven't demonstrated this claim. I've at least explained the basis for mine.

I claim that on the contrary, yes I can. I can claim that someone who thinks rape or murder are beautiful has objectively deranged tastes, because these acts are intrinsically ugly.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-07 19:30:03+00:00
There's always an implicit reasonableness requirement on these things. "Up to" isn't a wildcard that lets you do anything you want. It will protect you if you struggle to maintain top speeds during peak hours, or if a technical fault cuts speeds in half for a few days. But if you provide 1/1000th of what you claim to offer, "up to" won't stop a judge from observing that you're not really providing what you said you would.
by OJFord | 2025-11-07 19:30:26+00:00
What makes you think it hasn't long been using a large language model for it though? Maybe not Large Language Model, the term seems to have come with ChatGPT et al., but Google's been doing machine learning for a long long time; the transformer architecture paper (kind of the groundwork for the current wave) was published by a Google team in 2017.

A lot of new Google features are branded 'AI', because it's so hyped it has broad consumer awareness, but a lot of Google features for a long time have used AI and just been brandless or at least 'AI'-less features.
by arcfour | 2025-11-07 19:30:37+00:00
Describe three hypotheticals to me of what you think will happen in the following circumstances:

* Kid who is told "no" by his parents

* Kid who is told "yes" by his parents

* Kid who "can't" sign up for social media because it's illegal to do so at their age, who then signs up for it when it becomes legal.

I would really like to see what you believe the outcomes of these three scenarios would be, because I doubt any of them are truly catastrophic, considering we are, at best, merely delaying the onset of social media use by the kid by just 2-3 years.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-07 19:31:09+00:00
> "about:profiles" wasn't a debug view, it was the "normal" profiles UI; it was the only way to get to the ProfileManager without closing Firefox and reopening it with a CLI flag. For most of its life in Firefox it never had a menu item or toolbar button.

I did not knew that. I have used the ProfileManager for years and have not know of "about:profiles". Where is even the button on that page to launch the ProfileManager? I only see options to launch a specific profile or Restart with or without Add-Ons. This doesn't really look like the official page to handle Profiles and more like an afterthought.

Also about:profiles currently tells me this, because I started another profile:

> About Profiles

> Another copy of Firefox has made changes to profiles. You must restart Firefox before making more changes. This page helps you to manage your profiles. Each profile is a separate world which contains separate history, bookmarks, settings and add-ons.

What kind of useless behaviour is that? I can't open another profile as soon as another profile was opened? Honestly the claim, that this is supposed to be the primary interface to Profiles doesn't sound believable. This seems to be more something like a diagnostic tool/power user tool to access half-way internals in the same spirit as about:processes or other about: pages.

Also opening the Profiles Manager through some other Firefox instance seems a bit pointless to me, because you normally use Profiles to have process isolation and prevent one frozen Firefox instance from blocking another to start.

> it was the only way to get to the ProfileManager without closing Firefox

You can open the Profiles Manager without closing Firefox?

> For most of its life in Firefox it never had a menu item or toolbar button.

That seems to be an easy change that doesn't need redesigning the Profile mechanism.

> Firefox has never used native controls.

I suspected that, that's why I added a question mark and "-like". I ment that it feels, behaves and conforms like a native tool and is really usable and integrated.

Also are you sure about that? Because when I change my GTK+/GNOME theme, it also instantly changes the layout, icons, colors, etc. in the Profile Manager as well as in the other Firefox Chrome at runtime. Normally only GTK+ programs do that, not even KDE programs do it and certainly not some customly rolled UI toolkit. For example programs like Google Chrome(ium) give a shit about the OS theme. So if Firefox really uses some self-made UI toolkit, than they did a REALLY good job, because it looks and behaves exactly like all the other GTK+ programs. But I always thought that Firefox uses a GTK+ fork.
by jerf | 2025-11-07 19:31:36+00:00
Yes. The nice thing about this is that it's one function, about 20-30 lines, rather than a "framework".

I've been operating up to this point without this structure in a fairly similar manner, and it has worked fine in the tens-of-thousands-of-lines range. I can see maybe another order or two up I'd need more structure, but people really badly underestimate the costs of these massive frameworks, IMHO, and also often fail to understand that the value proposition of these frameworks often just boils down to something that could fit comfortably in the aforementioned 20-30 lines.
by levzettelin | 2025-11-07 19:31:42+00:00
Music being "good" is subjective. A programming language, however, can objectively be better if it allows a subset of programmers to better solve certain problems.

The reason for why OCaml is not more popular, thus, is that this subset is small. The reason for this may be either (a) habit or (b) it's not that much better than other languages. I'm gravitating to (b). OCaml guys seem to be quite dogmatic for the wrong reasons.
by trvz | 2025-11-07 19:31:54+00:00
Even the first paragraph is wrong:

> There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you click a YouTube video in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It flows through something called an "internet exchange point"—a giant room full of routers where hundreds of networks connect directly, swapping traffic efficiently and, crucially, for free.

When you open a Youtube video page, the video is probably loaded from Google's caching servers located in your ISPs network.
by 9rx | 2025-11-07 19:32:24+00:00
> The domain that exports the API should also provide a high fidelity test double that is a fake/in memory implementation (not a mock!)

Not a mock? But that's exactly what a mock is: An implementation that isn't authentic, but that doesn't try to deceive. In other words, something that behaves just like the "real thing" (to the extent that matters), but is not authentically the "real thing". Hence the name.
by ScamLifeguard | 2025-11-07 19:32:49+00:00
Not a joke at all these days, I was at home with my mother for 2 weeks helping her with stuff around the house, watching how she uses her phone, scrolls facebook, clicks on everything, it was really shocking for me. I looked around and didn't see the product I wanted to help me help her, so we started a company to try and give tools to help make it easier for people like us (techy people) who want to protect our loved ones. Our original idea was around education/elearning and we have expanded to doing real integrations to just stop the spam from getting in inboxes (gmail, SMS, call filtering).
by anaishowland | 2025-11-07 19:32:49+00:00
I’ve released a computer-use dataset that we originally collected to train and evaluate GUI and browser agents.

The dataset has 3,167 completed tasks: 2,220 browser tasks and 947 desktop application tasks, spanning 294 websites and 173 applications. Domains include shopping sites, research tools, productivity suites (Office, email, etc.), and other everyday software that people actually use.

For each task, we provide full screen-recording video (about 17 GB total), around 14k screenshots at key action moments, roughly 2k DOM snapshots for web tasks, detailed keyboard and mouse event logs with timestamps, and system metadata for the recording machine. In total the release is 49.2 GB and is MIT licensed.

The data was captured with our own Windows screen recorder, Captr, which we have also open sourced: https://github.com/anaishowland/Captr_MacOS https://github.com/anaishowland/Captr_Windows

Docs and small usage examples for loading the dataset with the Hugging Face datasets library are here: https://github.com/anaishowland/computeruse-data-psai

Intended use cases are reinforcement learning from human computer interactions, training and fine-tuning GUI agents, and benchmark-style evaluation of existing models on realistic multi-step tasks.

Happy to answer questions about how we recorded, cleaned, and structured the data, and would love to hear if anyone ends up using it.
by abathologist | 2025-11-07 19:32:50+00:00
All fine and good if you don't like it for whatever reasons, but AFAIK, people have been using OCaml software as parts of tech stacks in critical industries for around 20 years. So unless you have some qualifications to offer,

> I don't think OCaml is ready for production

seems to indicate your thinking is just not based on fact. This position is further belied by the stack of successful production applications you can see at https://ocaml.org/industrial-users/businesses.
by lenkite | 2025-11-07 19:32:50+00:00
Sure for basic, dead CRUD, the choice of middleware language rarely makes any difference.

But even bog-standard business processes eventually find the need for data-processing, crypto and parsing - the use-cases where people code Elixir NIF's. That is why for example you have projects like html5ever_elixir for parsing HTML/XML. Another use case is crypto - you have NIF's for several crypto libraries. Data processing - there are NIF's for Rust polars.
by aatd86 | 2025-11-07 19:32:56+00:00
I thought the smiley would make the 'Nope' less argumentative. Sorry if you felt it was offensive.

This was in response to: > Side-note: the deontological argument is an argument for the existence of God, which uses the same principle as the grandparent

which was not actually true. This is not the same principle. Maybe the way I expressed the idea wasn't too clear. A close principle, would be Descartes' cogito perhaps...

The question of whether a concept exists even in the absence of the human mind is easy to answer. Without arguments to authority, it suffices to realize that every past event that predates a human being is a concept for that same human. Every future event, even what one is likely to do the next day, is also a concept.

Besides, why human? this is too anthropocentric. It should be extended to animals at the very least.

Or let's have another example: you don't really perceive UV light, and let's say you've never been told that it exists and you live in a cave. You will never interact with it. That does not mean that it does not exist. Whether as a physical concept or merely a pure concept which is then a probability. Even if that probability is 0 or negative even (negative??? we are veering quantum :).

It's probabilistic, not all of these concepts are realized materialistically (for future events that is).

An apple exists even in the absence of humans. So does its concept. Awareness of the existence of this concept is a different thing. One must not forget that, as wise and introspective as some of the ancients were, they were also prone to a lot of cognitive biases such as anthropocentrism.

In essence, my original point is closer to the one of greek philosopher Parmenides.

But this is again not about physical existence. Matter is just data with a set of properties and interaction rules. One of them being existence. A physicist would call matter a special kind of spatial perturbation perhaps.

On a whole other note, I am curious: what made it appear as if English was a second language? :)
by stego-tech | 2025-11-07 19:33:03+00:00
As I’ve stated in other comments, the reason western governments don’t do this more often boils down largely to regulatory capture. Every single time there’s been a large mobilization of efforts to regulate some aspect of tech - municipal broadband expansion, cable box standardization and openness, right to repair, DMCA reform, privacy reforms, mandatory binding arbitration clauses, EULA’s, provider monopolies, etc - tech money floods into regulators and political races to counter the will of the mobilizers and their supporters. Then those same ghouls repeat mantras like “disrupt” and “deregulate” to convince people that actually it’s a good thing you only have three cellular networks, one cable provider, one telephone provider, two operating systems, and four media conglomerates to choose from. At one point these slimeballs claimed anyone who used anything else (like Linux, or GrapheneOS, or FOSS) was obviously a criminal who wanted something for nothing, such was their fear of an open ecosystem.

Regulations get a bad rap because for decades the only ones to really get passed have only entrenched existing players and (rent-seeking) business models while blocking new entrants or competitors. I’m 100% in agreement with you that every single state and country should have an internet network that’s open access and governed solely by that country’s constitutional law - a sort of digital state, if you will, with which they can court business and interest groups alike to represent their interests globally. Instead, we’re presently stuck with a “whoever donates the most money to politicians wins” model, and that means the open internet exists in spite of the interests of Capital, not because of their good graces.
by andy99 | 2025-11-07 19:33:55+00:00
Anyone remember the news story about Metallica copyrighting G and F chords? It’s sort of like that, true or not it’s so on brand that people just accept it, it doesn’t tell you something you did already know about how google (or Metallica) behave.

https://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=575...
by ScamLifeguard | 2025-11-07 19:34:16+00:00
It's so funny how millennials grew up and we were told "Don't trust the internet, you can't cite wikipedia, the internet is all a lie" And now, I look around and the people who engrained that in us just never listened to what they were telling us. And somehow, no one thought to tell that to Gen Z so they just just get scammed a ton.
by gruez | 2025-11-07 19:35:11+00:00
>11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.

1. source?

2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?

>Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.

Again, nowhere near 30% though

>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...

30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
by paulbjensen | 2025-11-07 19:35:58+00:00
I think the scepticism around whether the AI firms can provide the return on investment for their capital expenditure plan is completely understandable.

It reminds me of a mini-story within Michael Lewis' Flash Boys - there was a massive project to drill through the solid granite of Pennsylvania mountains in order to lay a new fiber-optic cable so that High-Frequency-trading firms could use it to get their data quicker between Chicago and New York. It was done at huge cost, I think around $300m. The Fiber-optic cable could transmit data between the locations in around 13.1ms - 13.5ms.

However, an alternative option of Microwave towers was setup and installed to transmit data between the same locations. The Microwave Tower could do the same, but around 8.5ms-9ms, ~30% faster. And it didn't cost anywhere near as much.

I worry that not only are those current capital expenditure plans wildly unaffordable, but also that the risk of an innovation rendering all that infrastructure obsolete can't be ruled out. It's a massive gamble.
Show HN: Three Emojis, a daily word puzzle for language learners
by knuckleheads | 2025-11-07 19:36:11+00:00
I'm in the process of learning German and wanted to play a German version of the NYT’s Spelling Bee. It was awful, I was very bad at it, it was not fun. So I built my own version of Spelling Bee meant for people like me.

Three Emojis is a daily word game designed for language learners. You get seven letters and a list of blanked-out words to find. When you discover shorter words, they automatically fill into longer ones—like a crossword—which turns out to be really useful for languages like German.

Each word also gets three emojis assigned to it as a clue, created by GPT-5 to try and capture the word’s meaning (this works surprisingly well, most of the time). If you get stuck, you can get text/audio hints as well.

It supports German and English, with new puzzles every day. You can flag missing words or suggest additions directly in the game. The word lists include slang, abbreviations, and chat-speak—because those are, in my opinion, a big part of real language learning too (just nothing vulgar, too obscure or obsolete).

Every word you find comes with its definition and pronunciation audio. If you want infinite hints or (coming soon) archive access, you can upgrade to Pro.

Feedback is very welcome, it's my first game and I'm certainly not a frontend guy. Happy spelling!
by rurp | 2025-11-07 19:36:18+00:00
The whole system is a mess. As wasteful as it can be, all residential use is only a small fraction of water consumption in this region. An order of magnitude more is used to grow water intensive crops in the SW deserts, and those farmers are only paying on average 1/10th the price per gallon for that same water as people pay for their home use. In many cases the farmers are incentivized to not be more water efficient, because the old water rights can be use it or lose it. They are essentially being paid to waste obscene amounts of water.

Municipal use and waste get the most attention because they are by far the most visible use, but most policies there are just tinkering around the edges and hardly move the overall numbers.
by logifail | 2025-11-07 19:36:18+00:00
> prohibition breeds desire

Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.

My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."
by iryndin | 2025-11-07 19:36:20+00:00
Make sense, thanks for sharing! I've thought about that and have this in my plans.

> How hard it was to get access to those daily updated zone files?

Some are easy, some are harder. Few months ago I've built and launched zone file data provider (https://allzonefiles.io) that DomainExplorer uses. Having that, accessing zone files is fairly easy.
by dmje | 2025-11-07 19:36:52+00:00
Read literally anything about brain elasticity and then come back and tell me those “just” 2—3 years are unimportant. These are key, critical years for development. Pretty much all the studies are saying it’s fucking us, and particularly our kids.

Personally I want to do something about this, and IMO every move in the direction that helps even in a small way is a good one.
by pixelpoet | 2025-11-07 19:37:14+00:00
Very brave of them to speak out, but TBH I'm not sure I'd do it if I were worried about anonymity - their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it.

In any case, a longtime friend of mine was senior graphics programmer on GTA5, and I was very close to interviewing with Rockstar in Edinburgh at his recommendation. But then I remembered how gamedev burnt me out at age 19 (my first job, at Lionhead), and how I've never been burnt out since, and decided against it. Been in offline rendering since then and never looked back.