MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ninkendo | 2025-11-08 15:23:36+00:00
I would be fine if cutscenes were feedback, or reward for gameplay.

But that doesn’t explain games where as soon as you start it up for the first time, there’s a minimum of 20 minutes of (often unskippable) cutscenes before you can even control a character. Or cutscenes at the beginning of a level/mission where you kinda have to watch it to know what’s going on at all, but they’re like 10 minutes long, so you’re gonna be there a while. Sometimes even those ones are unskippable. I remember playing Jedi Fallen Order and I just left the couch and cleaned the kitchen for a while because I could not have given a shit less about the story they were pushing on me, and I came down and it was still going.

Games need to respect my time. You turn the NES on, press start, and there’s Mario on the left side of the screen. You’re playing now. You turn on Forza Horizon 6 or whatever and it’s 20 minutes before you can control a car, at minimum. And that’s a fucking racing game, with no story I would ever possibly give a shit about.
by jtsiskin | 2025-11-08 15:24:23+00:00
Interesting puzzle. 32385 is 255 pick 2. My guess would be, to hopefully make interpretation easier, they always had the larger number on one side. So (1,2) but not (2,1). And also 0 wasn’t included. So perhaps their generation loop looks like [[(i,j) for j (i-1 -> 1) for i (256 -> 1)]
by kmeisthax | 2025-11-08 15:24:27+00:00
Yes, but most of those problems aren't inherent limitations of government. They're specific missteps that could have been avoided, like:

1. The suburbanization of cities turning road-building into a Ponzi scheme and transit into a guaranteed money-loser. Lowering the density of cities dilutes the tax base while increasing the need for roads and cars to carry people on them.

2. America's absolutely stupid decision to privatize Conrail without retaining ownership over the trackage. Wall Street infected all of the Class I railroads and convinced them to downgrade their own infrastructure. Imagine if your local city had sold all the roads to a private company.
by zbentley | 2025-11-08 15:24:29+00:00
I think we’re using different definitions of “compile time”.

I know who you are, and am sure everything you say about the mechanisms of BEGIN is correct, but when I refer to “compile time”, I’m referring to something that happens before my program runs. Perl5’s compilation happens the first time a module is required, which may happen at runtime.

Perhaps there’s a different word for what we’re discussing here: one of the primary benefits of comptime and similar tools is that they are completed before the program starts. Scripting languages like perl5 “compile” (really: load code into in-memory intermediate data structures to be interpreted) at arbitrary points during runtime (require/use, eval, do-on-code).

On the other hand, while code in C/Zig/etc. is sometimes loaded at runtime (e.g. via dlopen(3)), it’s compile-time evaluation is always done before program start.

That “it completed before my code runs at all” property is really important for locality of behavior/reasoning. If the comptime/evaluation step is included in the runtime-code-load step, then your comptime code needs to be vastly more concerned with its environment, and code loading your modules has to be vastly more concerned with the side effects of the import system.

(I guess that doesn’t hold if you’re shelling out to compile code generated dynamically from runtime inputs and then dlopen-ing that, but that’s objectively insane and hopefully incredibly rare.)
by cs702 | 2025-11-08 15:25:37+00:00
TL;DR: Steve Jobs shut down efforts to incorporate advertising in Apple's software, because it would enshittify[a] the customer experience.

Everyone here on HN likely agrees that he was right never to cross that red line.

The path from "great user experience" to "enshittified user experience" consists of crossing such red lines, one after the other, for short-term profit.

---

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
by pavelai | 2025-11-08 15:26:02+00:00
I understand your intensions, but for compiled languages usually it takes years to be accepted by developers as a mature language. It is so even for Go and Rust. Both of them has giants behind them and, again, it took many years for them. As a solo developer you could make it more specific to become popular in some particular field and then to scale it. If the learning is too simple for you, then you can choose anything else. But if you wanna grow, turn it into product. If you want it to be more popular as a server side programming language you can add some language constructions to make it easy to write routers, parse requests data and react on it maybe with pattern matching. Hope this would help you to find your way to make it bigger. Good luck
by ramraj07 | 2025-11-08 15:26:04+00:00
My point is that (I think) they became popular because of their UI and UX. They remagined how a small touch screen user experience could be most intuitive if you dont come with legacy mindset. For people used to keyboard and mice this might look weird but snap makes sense to the newer generation.

If all the other apps look similar its because they copied it. This is like calling Citizen Kane boring.
by samrus | 2025-11-08 15:26:39+00:00
You cant be this naive. You have to read between the lines. Altman has laready shown hes willing to boil us frogs with his attempts IPO a non profit. Hes slimy, he doesnt just say things and stand by them, he tests the waters and lies about ever wanting to swim if its too cold.

He called for general bailouts, which would benefit OAI far far more than others since its spending the most, and then he got backlash, he lied and said that OAI doesnt want bailouts at all.

You cant be so literalist to just take the man at his exact word and not try to determine his motivations. Especially this guy, whos made a career out of dancing around silicon valley's "no assholes" policy
by bjackman | 2025-11-08 15:27:17+00:00
For what it's worth, I work on platforms infra at a hyperscaler and benchmarks are a complete fucking joke in my field too lol.

Ultimately we are measuring extremely measurable things that have an objective ground truth. And yet:

- we completely fail at statistics (the MAJORITY of analysis is literally just "here's the delta in the mean of these two samples". If I ever do see people gesturing at actual proper analysis, if prompted they'll always admit "yeah, well, we do come up with a p-value or a confidence interval, but we're pretty sure the way we calculate it is bullshit")

- the benchmarks are almost never predictive of the performance of real world workloads anyway

- we can obviously always just experiment in prod but then the noise levels are so high that you can entirely miss million-dollar losses. And by the time you get prod data you've already invested at best several engineer-weeks of effort.

AND this is a field where the economic incentives for accurate predictions are enormous.

In AI, you are measuring weird and fuzzy stuff, and you kinda have an incentive to just measure some noise that looks good for your stock price anyway. AND then there's contamination.

Looking at it this way, it would be very surprising if the world of LLM benchmarks was anything but a complete and utter shitshow!
by j45 | 2025-11-08 15:27:35+00:00
It's rarely better to write the business UI 3 times for each platform.

At the time such decisions are made, maybe the platforms couldn't do what was needed, but those platforms do tend to evolve, but not remain tracked.

Flutter to me has been one of the platforms that can quietly ship to multiple platforms as long as the parameters of what you're after can be accomplished in Dart, and if needed a bit of custom code for any particular platform.
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-11-08 15:27:49+00:00
Not the person you replied to, but I'm a programmer and up until ~3 weeks ago I really only used AI for auto-complete, looking up API information, and constructing arcane CLI commands.

I decided to take a leap and use AI as much as possible to complete a ticket at work. Now, 3 weeks later AI is writing 90% of my code.

Granted, I'm not sitting back sipping on a latte while AI does my job. It's a very interactive process, I spend more time reviewing code and going back and forth with the AI to get the result I want. But it's become surprisingly good.

I wouldn't say I'm anywhere close to 10x more productive, but perhaps 50%.
by bubblelicious | 2025-11-08 15:27:54+00:00
Are you talking about just preferences or A/B tests on like retention and engagement? The latter I think is pretty reliable and powerful though I have never personally done them. Preferences are just as big a mess: WHO the annotators are matters, and if you are using preferences as a proxy for like correctness, you’re not really measuring correctness you’re measuring e.g. persuasion. A lot of construct validity challenges (which themselves are hard to even measure in domain).
by sigwinch | 2025-11-08 15:28:06+00:00
We adopted. So many things today are in opposition to Christ’s teachings. The politicization of helping the poor. The individual reaction to problems by wanting so much wealth that those problems don’t apply to me.

Adoption is costly but for now there’s a tax credit. And I suspect every company would like to have the kind of employee who adopts. Some will pay large proportions of the cost, but not the median employer.
by bombcar | 2025-11-08 15:28:14+00:00
Flight following has always been available (to me) as I believe they'd rather be talking to you than having you wandering around (completely legally) in VFR without communications. They've vectored me for other traffic, and done the same for me.

The others do directly increase workload and regularly get denied at busy airports (some outright "ban" training activity or charge so much as to make it impractical).
by sheepscreek | 2025-11-08 15:28:20+00:00
I looked at the source code (as an amateur application developer) and boy, is it over-engineered and complex! Then I remember having built a complex Cordova app more than a decade ago, where I had to make C++, JNI and Javascript interop all play nice and this project feels a lot like that. Lots of moving parts. I suppose this is just the way things are when you are targetting such different ecosystems as Android and iOS _natively_, at the lowest level.

As a solo-dev, I realize well that this project isn't for me. This could be a great tool for experienced folks who know what they are doing. I will stick to Tauri and React Native, it does 80% of what I care about with 20% of the effort. Or until someone builds a nice wrapper around this to make it easy to use (and also add targets for x86_64/aarch64 builds).
by ninkendo | 2025-11-08 15:28:23+00:00
> First, sometimes they are mandated by the game story writers and backed up by artists wanting to show off

How is that possibly an excuse? It reads like you’re agreeing with me. I could give a shit less about the feelings of some artist that wants to “show off” to me when they’re getting in the way of me enjoying the maybe 20 minutes of time I have to try and play a game between other obligations.

Games like those seem to be designed for teenagers who have hours or even days on end to sink into a game. I’m a 40+ year old dad with negative time on my hands. The gaming industry has basically left me behind.
Show HN: I built an HTTP client that perfectly mimics Chrome 142
by armanified | 2025-11-08 15:28:24+00:00
BoringSSL and nghttp2. Matches JA3N, JA4, and JA4_R fingerprints. Supports HTTP/2, async/await, and works with Cloudflare-protected sites. Not trying to compete with curl_cffi - just a learning project that turned into something functional.
by fch42 | 2025-11-08 15:28:40+00:00
on the m68k, the "cisc-y-ness" is in the many many addressing modes, whereas x86 in that particular aspect of the architecture has always been rather "risc-y" (read: rather limited compared to other CISC architectures, including m68k).

The core instruction set of the m68k, as far as ALU/FPU is concerned, is simple enough. But converting the addressing modes to "risc building blocks" (μops or whatever term you like to use) is harder.
by happytoexplain | 2025-11-08 15:29:40+00:00
Who cares whether somebody says "I hate LED headlights" or "I hate the lack of regulation and/or enforcement around LED headlight brightness/angle characteristics in my state"? It's a pointless distinction colloquially. We all understand the problem. Nobody is confused. And it is a huge problem. Sometimes I have to pull over because the oncoming car has completely drowned out all other sights. It's reckless and dangerous, and that's all that matters until it's fixed. Then we can talk about the useful feature of LED headlights.
by eviks | 2025-11-08 15:29:55+00:00
> Also, standardize the points of rewards programs so we have an idea if we need 104 or 97,000 points to redeem them for the pocket lint prize.

This already exists, called money, and obviously won't be used because it's easier to realize how low the number is, but also harder to cancel/inflate away.

Broader than that - is there any big generational divide about subscriptions (or, for that matter, many other points on the list)?
by dgacmu | 2025-11-08 15:30:40+00:00
I'm not sure I understand Q1 - that's exactly the point: If you withdraw _from your account_ and customer B withdraws from _their_ account, then the two events are unrelated and can be executed in either order (and, in fact, replicas would still have the same state even if some executed AB and some BA).

The replay is part of what the authors fixed in the original protocol. I believe but need to read their protocol in more detail on Monday that the intuition for this is that when there's an outage and you bring a new node online, the system commits a Nop operation that conflicts with everything. This effectively creates a synchronization barrier that that forces re-reading all of the previous commits.

But I'm confused about the phrasing of your question because the actor isn't clear here when you say "I re-read events 1-100" -- which actor is "I"? Remember that a client of the system doesn't read "events", it performs operations, such as "read the value of variable X". In other words, clients perform operations that observe _state_, and the goal of the algorithm is to ensure that the state at the nodes is consistent according to a specific definition of consistency.

So if a client is performing operations that involve a replacement node, the client contacts the node to read the state, and the node is responsible for synchronizing with the state as defined by the graph of operations conflicting with the part of the state requested by the client, which will include _all_ operations prior to the replacement of the node due to the no-op.
by paganel | 2025-11-08 15:30:48+00:00
It will be probably be painted as a strategic move of "we need to do this in order to remain in front of the Chinese!", so Google trying to litigate all this will, first, put it in the same boat as China's supporters, a very bad position to be right now if you're a big company in the US, and second, put the US Government's sight on its (Alphabet's) own business, that's also a very bad place to be if you're a near-monopoly as Alphabet now is.
by tamnd | 2025-11-08 15:30:48+00:00
I started learning C again for one simple reason: to understand the Linux kernel. You cannot do that without knowing C, and soon you end up learning about GCC, linkers, and how programs really run.

Once I spent time with it, I saw how many smart ideas from the kernel could be used anywhere. the initcall system that runs modules in order, the way structs with function pointers create flexible drivers, the use of macros to build type-safe lists and so on.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/07/14/intr...

For real work, though, life is short. I use Go.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-08 15:31:02+00:00
I agree that the problem with headlights is misalignment, not brightness, but there are some vehicles that come misaligned from the factory. cough F150 cough.

The F150 lights are so high that they're blinding even when properly pointed down. We need proper regulations for maximum height too. And while you're at it, regulations for maximum hood height so that they stop killing so many pedestrians.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-08 15:31:02+00:00
He did mention them.

> The three leagues with even an argument for being not total failures are the NWSL, League of Legends Esports (LoL Esports), and LIV Golf. All have unique advantages over their counterparts, and yet none of them are profitable today or even on a very convincing path toward profitability.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-08 15:31:26+00:00
What if we already have AGI. What if it is ChatGPT 5. What then?

https://aimagazine.com/articles/openai-ceo-chatgpt-would-hav...

Edit: this was serious, if I read the Wikipedia definition of AGI, ChatGPT meets the historical definition at least. Why have we moved the goal posts?
by lioeters | 2025-11-08 15:31:40+00:00
Sounds like the difference between code as a craft versus artifact and product. Actually not even product, it's the inner guts of a product that most people don't need to care about, and increasingly just machine generated so it's not even meant to be read by humans. Write-only code of the post-programming era.

Professional software has always aspired to be an industrial process, like OOP and Agile, as a collective endeavor to produce code of decent quality that works reliably, to achieve business goals. Any aesthetic satisfaction or philosophical insights are a byproduct, nice to have, but not the main point.

Code as a craft is a niche for experts and researchers, for hobbyists and amateurs. The miniscule performance improvement gained from choosing an array or hashmap is insignificant in most situations, other than maybe resource-constrained contexts like embedded programming, retro computers, games, competitions.

But, thinking over it, code as a craft still has a healthy subculture of people across older and younger generations. Perhaps it's up to the older ones who remember the good ol' days of respectable craftsmanship ("craftspersonship") to promote and encourage others to carry on the tradition.

Or is that not even worth doing anymore with language models pumping out vibe-coded slop? Will programmers be relegated to reviewing and fixing such mass-produced code? Yes, probably. But no, of course it's worth preserving and evolving the culture of computer science and software development, maybe it's more important than ever to keep the flame of human spirit and imagination alive, supported by machine intelligence rather than replaced.
by tptacek | 2025-11-08 15:31:45+00:00
The Minnesota study was done in the phlogiston era of behavioral genetics, long before any operational understanding of epigenetics, let alone the molecular genetics tools used today to attempt to confirm the phenotype/genotype correlations twin studies generate (see: "the missing heritability problem"). All this is on top of the small sample size and lack of controls.

The authors of the study itself say that it "provide[s] little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement."
by dinobones | 2025-11-08 15:32:18+00:00
Here’s another idea:

We’ve had GPT2 since 2019, almost 6 years now. Even then, OpenAI was claiming it was too dangerous to release or whatever.

It’s been 6 years since the path started. We’ve gone from hundreds of thousands -> millions -> billions -> tens of billions -> now possibly trillions in infrastructure cost.

But the value created from it has not been proportional along the way. It’s lagging behind by a few orders of magnitude.

The biggest value add of AI is that it can now help software engineers write some greenfield code +40% faster, and help people save 30 seconds on a Google search -> reading a website.

This is valuable, but it’s not transformational.

The value returned has to be a lot higher than that to justify these astronomical infrastructure costs, and I think people are realizing that they’re not materializing and don’t see a path to them materializing.
by eloisant | 2025-11-08 15:32:32+00:00
Yeah, unfortunately that's what the word "boomer" has become. Also everyone talks about boomers, millenials, gen z, apparently people forgot there was a generation between boomers and millenials.

Anyway: it doesn't really matter because this "generations" split is bullshit. The cut-off dates are arbitrary, and there are all kind of people in all generations.
by skybrian | 2025-11-08 15:34:20+00:00
I doubt there’s an asset to write off yet.

Assuming normal accounting applies, OpenAI doesn’t owe them the money until they use the compute power. Then it becomes income, and accounts receivable goes up until they pay for it.

The stock market can anticipate income that hasn’t arrived yet, but that just affects the stock price.

(ChatGPT tells me that accounting rules are different for leases of an identifiable physical asset, though.)
by gametorch | 2025-11-08 15:34:22+00:00
Why do you care?

Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-08 15:34:29+00:00
The surprisingly emotional debate of "is it a sport or is it a game" has been around from the moment we invented the category of "sports". I don't think it will ever be definitively settled, because the difference is cultural, not technical, and cultural attitudes change with time and location.

Personally, the technical-ish definition that makes the most sense to me is "if it's a competition and people are gathering to watch it without participating, then it's a sport".
by egypturnash | 2025-11-08 15:34:39+00:00
I used to be able to buy a piece of software for $30, and I owned it until that computer became an antique. All your turning Photoshop into a monthly subscription did — was make me download the free version, GIMP.

Dude. Photoshop was like $700 back in 2008. You weren’t buying that anyway, you were pirating it or using an old unregistered copy of Paint Shop Pro.

I’m not gonna argue that every single app being either a subscription or an in-app purchase funnel now doesn’t suck, but you were not buying that for $30 unless it was from Bob’s Totally Legit House Of Burnt CDs.
by IgorPartola | 2025-11-08 15:34:41+00:00
But it works with one command and one (Docker)file. That’s what I mean by Docker being a kludgy solution: this is way less than ideal. But for developer experience this is very nice. And that same Dockerfile runs on everything from AWS, to GCP, to k8s, to Dokku, etc.

I dislike the implementation but I cannot deny that the UX is good enough to be very popular.
by lapcat | 2025-11-08 15:34:41+00:00
This headline is wildly inaccurate. $1 trillion in tech stocks were not "sold off." Rather, the collective market caps of some tech stocks dropped by $1 trillion.

Market cap is mostly a useless number. It's the current stock price multiplied by the number of outstanding shares. But only a small % of shares are bought and sold in a given day, so the current stock price is mostly irrelevant to the shares that aren't moving.

If you hold some stock, and the current stock price goes down, but you don't sell your stock, then you haven't lost any actual money. The so-called "value" of your stock may have dropped, but that's just a theoretical value. Unless you're desperate to sell now, you can wait out the downturn in price.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-11-08 15:35:33+00:00
The MTBF for OEM LEDs is in the decades timescale. Projector assembly isn't called LED bulb for a reason. It's time to nuke this misconception from orbit. If your 17 year LED headlight has failed, you need the part that represents just the LED bulb, and not the entire headlight assembly. See price difference between part 1 and part 9 below:

https://vw.oempartsonline.com/v-2024-volkswagen-gti--autobah...