MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pathartl | 2025-11-10 17:06:34+00:00
The reality is Valve often does a better job at preservation than GoG. They know that a game released on Steam in 2009 that hasn't received any updates will never be updated to support things like modern controllers, which is why they wrote Steam Input.

Even then, there's so many other things that can go wrong with games. With DOS-era titles, DOSBox does a pretty fantastic job, as long as you use a fork with useful features like DOSBox-X. With Windows titles the possibilities to preserve games is almost endless thanks to hooking. I've spent the past few years compiling a personal archive of games to get them in a playable state. For me, this often involves support for modern controllers and _at least_ natively rendering at a higher resolution. Compatibility shims like dgVoodoo make it easy to bump up the rendering resolution of a game, while preserving aspect ratio for games that may only support 4:3.

Graphics are basically solved with projects like dgVoodoo, and there's numerous dinput -> xinput solutions out there, but that's rarely the whole picture. WinSock could really benefit from a wrapper that tunnels traffic over the internet (VPNs are really like using a steam roller to drive a nail). Registry API calls really could be redirected to read from config files instead of relying on the weird bastardization of WOW64 and the VirtualStore. Hell, even file access could be redirected so we can contain all of a game's files.

I'm actually working towards implementing the latter two as a way to preserve the functionality of installers and allow their reimplementation through something like PowerShell.
by zeld4 | 2025-11-10 17:06:49+00:00
azure seems quite shitty too. I only use it for having GPT models which is a corp requirement. For 1 hour total I spent on azure.com in past weeks, besides how slow it usually is, I ran into two issues:

- models sometimes got deployed to an unwanted instance, likely because some API is slow and front end state was not well maintained, so user clicking Next too soon will end up screw up the data being submitted

- one of the models (5-mini) deployment took very long and failed, it apparently ended up in a bad and invisible state, and future models can't be deployed any more on that instance. I retried today, same thing, gave up and created a new instance/

Azure AI is supposed to be an area MS making all the bets which I assume should have high quality, but apart from frequent update, it's same low quality as MS Teams.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-11-10 17:06:57+00:00
As mentioned elsewhere, like Agile… it’s not hard to take a good idea and twist it into something bad, in fact happens often. My first reply has examples.

I haven’t seen or heard of any professional rascism, sexism, etc directly with my own senses either—in my whole life. Does that mean they don’t exist? Of course not, but that’s what your statements above sound like. “I haven’t seen => doesn’t exist.”
by numbers | 2025-11-10 17:06:58+00:00
just noticed your CSS has an issue on wide screens that cuts off some of the words at the end of a line, here's the culprit:

``` @media screen and (min-width: 1200px) { .site-content .entry-content .wide-content, .alignwide, .alignfull { margin-right: -34.0740%; } } ```

that margin-right is causing some of the content to move too far to the right and gets hidden in `.entry-content`
by nradov | 2025-11-10 17:07:26+00:00
Even back during the Age of Sail when Britain was the dominant naval power with a worldwide empire, they had to import many of the inputs for their domestic shipbuilding industry. This included basic stuff like timber, tar, hemp, cotton, etc. If you have enough warships to secure your sea lines of communication then depending on imports is less of a concern. But the UK Royal Navy today is a shadow of its former self and can barely serve as a local defense force.
by dietr1ch | 2025-11-10 17:07:55+00:00
Same, if a wireless device needs more than 54Mbps (802.11g, what the ancient Linksys WRT54G already offered) then I feel I'm doing something wrong and I'd better off just plugging it to my USB-C dock to get ethernet and power.

It's enough to stream 4k video (though barely, and I'd be better off moving to a TV), has better wall penetration and is fast enough for browsing and updating software.

I don't have to deal with congestion though. I think I've only seen a neighbour's AP once and I doubt they started hiding their SSID. My guess is that congestion is an issue because transmission power isn't low enough and there's little you can do to fix someone else's AP other than be increasingly louder than them.
by giorgioz | 2025-11-10 17:07:56+00:00
I respect you for your knowledge of Beretta, La Marzocco, De Longhi and Carpiggiani. I was not aware of Carpiggiani. Ferrero is also Italian. Kinder Surprise is Italian (from German branch) and Ferrero Roché is Italian (from French branch). Italy has also a massive monopoly of glasses lenses in Luxotica.

I deeply admire the UK, the USA and anything great in any other country. Even when I disagree with their leaders I still admire their technical achievements and the great men that work hard for it. We should strive to admire, applaud and copy the best in each other. Pushing each other forward in a upgoing spiral of betterment.
by staticman2 | 2025-11-10 17:08:04+00:00
That makes sense.

I will day that I'm struggling to align these survey questions with human nature as I understand it.

I have a friend who "wants kids" and two different women, when they reached a certain age in their 30s, signaled they wanted to marry him and have kids.

But they both exhibited red flags that caused him to decline. One woman didn't act like she liked him, even though she was also saying she wanted to settle down together.

The other woman was unwilling to discuss how they'd raise the children given the fact they were from different religious backgrounds.

Given he's now in his 40s he'll likely never have kids.

I suppose if he was super passionate about kids he'd enter an unhappy marriage and make sure he got some kids out of it, before possibly ending up divorced.

So wanting children was more a conditional thing than a binary thing, and I don't know if these surveys can capture that.
by mandevil | 2025-11-10 17:08:10+00:00
This is what has crippled the Nuclear power plant building industry in most countries (ROK, China, Russia excepted). France built dozens of reactors in the 1970's and into the 1980's, then that slowed and then finally stopped for a decade after Chernobyl. When they tried to build the EPR it's been a huge fiasco of delays and cost overruns. Similarly for the US after 3 Mile Island, the AP1000 in Georgia are the first two power reactors built in the US in 40 years, and massively over-budget and behind schedule. Japan hasn't tried anything since Fukushmia Dai Ichi, but I expect that they will have the exact same problem. The ability to deliver on time and budget was just gone because they didn't have a workforce, and so are having to build that from scratch.

ROK found it easier to become world-class in building power reactors from zero than the US, UK, France and Germany has found it to re-build their capability after a decade (or more) of not constructing any power reactors. And that's true for a lot of these post-industrial industrial policy stuff. It is a lot harder to rebuild once lost than to build the first time.

Russia never stopped producing reactors after Chernobyl, because the USSR was a command economy and the Five Year Plan said that they needed to build a reactor here right now, and so the workers kept working even after the disaster, and now they are one of the few countries that can still deliver nuclear reactors. Note that this is NOT an endorsement of a command economy.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-10 17:08:15+00:00
These are primarily useful for developing CUDA targeted code on something that sits on your desk and has a lot of RAM.

They're not the best choice for anyone who wants to run LLMs as fast and cheap as possible at home. Think of it like a developer tool.

These boxes are confusing the internet because they've let the marketing teams run wild (or at least the marketing LLMs run wild) trying to make them out to be something everyone should want.
by JdeBP | 2025-11-10 17:08:23+00:00
Ever since the Verisign coup in 2003, the world has had the idea of "delegation-only" and suchlike filtering on responses from superdomain servers. More recently, query minimization was invented. Both of these can militate against the root content DNS servers doing that.

Better still, one can run one's own private root content DNS server. I've been doing that (in several ways) for a couple of decades. If ICANN decided to blackhole (say) www.microsoft.com. tomorrow, my DNS lookups wouldn't be affected.

To affect them, the aforementioned "court action" would have to target Verisign.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-11-10 17:08:28+00:00
> 2017-2021 wasn't a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance, it was the big wave of active discrimination

Right, I didn't make the point clearly enough, I meant that pushback and resistance to what you mentioned created more net sympathy and progress. My hypothesis is that the ugliness of the extremism turns off all but their base.
by andoando | 2025-11-10 17:08:31+00:00
The other big advantage is you can monitor and scale your services independently and decouple outages.

If one endpoint needs to scale to handle 10x more traffic, its wholefully inefficient to 10x your whole cluster.

Ideally you write the code as services/modules in a monolith imo. Then you can easily run those services as separate deployments later down the line if need be
by benoau | 2025-11-10 17:09:06+00:00
Allegedly it's deliberate, according to a pair of legal actions they face in the UK (hearing in 9 days) and US (hearing in August 2026).

> 13.1 a set of technical restrictions and practices that prevent users of iOS from storing certain key file types (known as “Restricted Files”) on any cloud storage service other than its own iCloud and thus ensuring that users have no choice but to use iCloud (a complete monopolist in respect of these Restricted Files) if they wish to meet all their cloud storage and/or back up needs, in particular in order to conduct a complete back-up of the device (“the Restricted File Conduct”); and/or

> 13.2 an unfair choice architecture, which individually and cumulatively steer iOS Users towards using and purchasing iCloud rather than other cloud storage services, and/or limit their effective choice, and/or exclude or disadvantage rivals or would- be rivals ( “the Choice Architecture Conduct ”). See further paragraphs 6 to 9 and 97 to 132 of the CPCF.

https://www.catribunal.org.uk/cases/16897724-consumers-assoc... (via summary of ruling of the chair)

> 30. By sequestering Restricted Files, and denying all other cloud providers access to them, Apple prevents rival cloud platforms from offering a full-service cloud solution that can compete effectively against iCloud. The cloud products that rivals can offer are, by virtue of Apple’s restraints, fundamentally diminished because they can only host Accessible Files. Users who want to back up all of their files—including the basic Restricted Files needed to restore their device at replacement—have but one option in the marketplace: iCloud.

> 31. There is no technological or security justification for Apple mandating the use of iCloud for Restricted Files. Apple draws this distinction only to curtail competition and advantage its iCloud product over rival cloud platforms.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68303306/felix-gamboa-v... (via document 1 the complaint)
Show HN: JavaScript&Drugs, a humor novel about devs
by robertBosiljak | 2025-11-10 17:09:10+00:00
Hey everyone!

I recently wrote a short humor novel about life as a dev. It’s called “JavaScript & Drugs: a Dev’s Quest for Ramen Profitability.”

It follows Cramer, a frontend engineer at an HR SaaS company, and his flatmates (also devs) as they go through soul-sucking corporate jobs, startup chaos, and questionable side projects.

You can read a free sample here: https://www.javascriptanddrugs.com/sample

I’m curious: do you think devs would find this kind of story entertaining? I wrote it in part as self-therapy, to let my work-related frustrations out, but also self-published it to see if I can sell some copies. So far, I've only sold 3, all of them to friends and family haha.

Also, do you know any good software-engineering humor books? I’ve read and enjoyed The Phoenix Project and its sequel (The Unicorn Projec)t, but don't know of any other fiction books about dev life.

Thank you all!

PS: yes, I used AI to help me write it, that's why there are so many en dashes haha
by hunter2_ | 2025-11-10 17:09:44+00:00
One solution is to have the senior ones (who have already been-there-done-that and lost interest in those possibly low quality outcomes or low velocities from a business perspective) handle architectural decisions and keep things on the rails by way of writing issue specs that the juniors (with those green personalities) will implement, reviewing their code, mentoring them, etc. -- carefully matching an ideal threshold of autonomy for each programmer which will relax over time.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-11-10 17:09:47+00:00
AI stuff aside I'm frankly happy to see workstation-class AArch64 hardware available to regular consumers.

Last few jobs I've had were for binaries compiled to target ARM AArch64 SBC devices, and cross compiling was sometimes annoying, and you couldn't truly eat your own dogfood on workstations as there's subtle things around atomics and memory consistency guarantees that differ between ISAs.

Mac M series machines are an option except that then you're not running Linux, except in VM, and then that's awkward too. Or Asahi which comes with its own constraints.

Having a beefy ARM machine at my desk natively running Linux would have pleased me greatly. Especially if my employer was paying for it.
by creature_x | 2025-11-10 17:09:54+00:00
What I am working on right now:

-https://salespark.app/apps/discount-spark: A Shopify app that allows merchants to create more powerful discount codes so they can create stronger offers for their customers.

What I recently built but didn't find a successful product market fit:

-https://wordazzle.com: A word game that's designed to expand your vocabulary with exceptional words.

-https://spicychess.com: Chess, meet boxing! Imagine playing chess BUT you can also smack your opponent. Now, if you smack em enough times to drain their health completely(yes, you have a health bar), you can steal their turn. It's fun, a little evil, but after thousands of $ spent on marketing, never found critical mass.
by Scubabear68 | 2025-11-10 17:10:03+00:00
I think the big problem no one speaks about is the name "microservices" was incredibly poorly named.

Your design goal should not be "create the smallest service you can to satisfy the 'micro' label". Your design goal should be to create right-sized services aligned to your domain and organization.

The deployment side is of course a red herring. People can and do deploy monoliths with multiple deployments and different endpoints. And I've seen numerous places do "microservices" which have extensive shared libraries where the bulk of the code actually lives. Technically not a monolith - except it really is, just packaged differently.
by jclay | 2025-11-10 17:11:50+00:00
Exciting work! I’ve often wondered if an LLM with the right harness could restore and optimize an aging C/C++ codebase. It would be quite compelling to get an old game engine running again on a modern system.

I would expect most of these systems come with very carefully guarded access controls. It also strikes me as a uniquely difficult challenge to track down the decision maker who is willing to take the risk on revamping these systems (AI or not). Curious to hear more about what you’ve learned here.

Also curious to hear how LLMs perform on a language like COBOL that likely doesn’t have many quality samples in the training data.
by palmotea | 2025-11-10 17:12:25+00:00
> I liked HP-UX having previously worked on IBM RT systems running AIX, as well as NCR towers with there more vanilla System V.

There's very little on the internet about those "NCR Towers."

> 1987: https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_marries_its_tower_un...: "Despite abandoning its effort to implement Unix on its NCR 32 chip set, NCR Corp did not abandon its ambition to bring Unix into the mainstream of its mainframe product offerings, and the company yesterday launched a facility whereby its top-end multiprocessor Series 9800 fault-tolerant mainframes can be used as servers to a network of 68020-based Tower Unix supermicros."

> 1988: https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/ncr_renews_its_tower_uni...: "When you sell as many machines as NCR does with the Tower, you can’t rush to incorporate a new chip as soon as it arrives because there simply aren’t enough chips to meet your needs. Accordingly the new Tower models use the 25MHz 68020 rather than the 68030."
by liotier | 2025-11-10 17:12:27+00:00
The European Union is an emerging country - it is my country. For now, many don't yet understand how common necessity binds us, and some remain under the illusion that they can make it alone against China and the USA, but ever closer union is real and whoever has been on Erasmus student exchange knows we are one people. On my French passport, "Union Européenne" is written above "République Française" - that is the hierarchy. A nation is people who will to live together, and the European Union is that... The rest is a couple treaties and a few decades away !
by netdevphoenix | 2025-11-10 17:12:27+00:00
> The problem with monoliths is when you have a million LoC Java application that is on Java 6, and will take months of work to get up to date, take 20 minutes to load on a dev machine, starts to fail because its getting too big for a dev machine to handle, can't bring in any new dependencies because of how old the Java version is, and has an old bespoke Ant + Maven + Jenkins + Bash + Perl build and deploy system that has been built up over the last 30 years.

- a million LoC Java application that is on Java 6 -> Congrats, now you have two half a million LoC Java application on two different Java versions. And if the set up is like most apps, you will likely need both running to debug most issues because most issues happen at the system to system interface

- take 20 minutes to load on a dev machine -> that is fair enough, I have only ever seen an app that takes that long on a modern machine once, most shops doing micro services don't have apps that big

- has an old bespoke Ant + Maven + Jenkins + Bash + Perl build and deploy system that has been built up over the last 30 years -> you can have the same problem on a micro service architecture, you can actually have that problem multiplied by 10 and now you can spend a whole sprint updating dependencies. Fun!

Breaking off pieces of the code into microservices that can run on a new Spring boot and can run on a newer nice IaC set up is an easy win -> You conveniently forget to mention the additional team to fix issues related to system to system communication
by paulhebert | 2025-11-10 17:12:33+00:00
Great question… marketing is not my strong suit.

I showcased at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game squad and that got me some players. I also shared it on my various personal social medias. The neighborhood board game store let me put up a poster!

I’m also hoping that organic sharing will drive growth.

This HN comment has been some of my most successful marketing so far. Around 2400 people from HN have visited since I posted!
by shagie | 2025-11-10 17:12:38+00:00
https://www.michiganseagrant.org/lessons/lessons/by-broad-co... and Reexamination of the 9–10 November 1975 “Edmund Fitzgerald” Storm Using Today’s Technology - https://www.michiganseagrant.org/lessons/wp-content/uploads/... (pdf from 2006)

The captain of the Arthur M. Anderson later indicated that as it moved into the area where the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost (Fig. 2) waves were between 5.5 and 7.5 m and winds gusted between 70 kt (35 m s–1) and 75 kt (37.5 m s–1). ... Wave heights of individual waves generally follow a Rayleigh distribution (Lonquet-Higgins 1952) so that the maximum wave height in 7-m seas, although rare and unlikely, could be as high as 14 m. It is particularly noteworthy that the most severe conditions in the simulations occurred between 0000 and 0100 UTC, coincident in time and location with the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
by giorgioz | 2025-11-10 17:12:44+00:00
> We can't win in the UK: if we cheer on our achievements and be positive, we're accused of being stuck in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy. If we get depressed about our economy, we're told we're not being positive enough and are 'talking down' the UK.

If you want others to cheer you on when you do great you should do the same to others (when they deserve it). Human behaviour is mostly imitation.
by j45 | 2025-11-10 17:13:14+00:00
You also have to determine how much traffic for monitoring is due to microservices itself - where the messaging and logging might happen in memory, it now has to be read, and written, in much more expensive exectuions.

There's not one silver bullet. It's not 100% monoliths, or 100% microservices for all.

Learning from the things we don't do, haven't done yet, in the ways you haven't yet thought of also helps expand one's skills.

This is because clever architecture, will always beat clever coding.
Show HN: Toktop – a LLM usage dashboard in your terminal
by hchtin | 2025-11-10 17:13:36+00:00
toktop is a TUI that tracks your openai and anthropic usage inside the terminal.

I spend a lot of time in terminal with claude code and codex, and I also build apps with openai and anthropic api keys. I found myself hopping on two different dashboards quite often to check my usage, so I built a TUI to monitor my daily/weekly/monthly cost, without leaving my workflow inside the terminal.

You can view the usage and cost for each of your api keys for the past 7 or 30 days, grouped by either model or api key.

For folks also using a lot of claude code/codex with api keys, or building ai apps, you might also find it useful without constantly hopping on openai and anthropic dashboard.

Github: https://github.com/htin1/toktop Quick installation: cargo install toktop
by gopalv | 2025-11-10 17:14:00+00:00
> would a fixed line in India typically be above that speed?

My family lives outside of a tier 2 city border, in what used to be farmland in the 90s.

They have Asianet FTTH at 1Gbps, but most of the video/streaming traffic ends at the CDN hosts in the same city.

That CDN push to the edge is why Hotstar is faster to load there - the latency on seeks isn't going around the planet.
by stevekemp | 2025-11-10 17:14:06+00:00
I think it's largely a matter of how regular these events are. Finnish winters are universally cold, with lots of snow. So car-owners switch to winter-tyres in advance of snow/ice, trams always work, and suchlike.

In the UK, either in Scotland where I lived as an adult, or Yorkshire where I grew up snow was something that lasted for a few hours most of the time, and so people weren't used to it. If it snowed enough that the roads were covered busses would be cancelled, trains wouldn't run, and schools would be closed.