MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by catapart | 2025-11-20 14:46:30+00:00
Since you broached the topic, I've got an open curiosity about projects like that: if I manufactured entirely new assets, completely independently from the source game (possibly not even matching the source; like a different "skin" or "theme"), and then used those assets in a "clone" (in all but assets) of the source game, would that run afoul of IP law? I'm aware that anything can be litigated, but is there some quirk of IP protection for that kind of thing, or would I be able to use the cloned source with completely new assets without really infringing on anything? Does the cloned (re-coded? recomposed? clean-roomed?) source cause issues or create some kind of legal link from the original assets to the unrelated ones?

Again, just idle curiosity. No actual intentions here, so just wondering if anyone has some deeper knowledge on the subject.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-20 14:47:41+00:00
The biggest hurdle Europe has to face is the cultural shift away from the post-soviet era of "Don't take work too seriously, enjoy life".

There is now a full generation of Europeans who grew up in with this mentality, looking down on Americans for their ridiculous work ethic and comparatively meager benefits.

But it's not sustainable, and the strain is already becoming obvious. Young Europeans will have to work longer and harder for less if they want to move Europe away from being totally dependent on American tech, American defense, and Chinese wares.
by plorg | 2025-11-20 14:47:53+00:00
I think it reads as too cute by a half. The wire was just the one of dozens of problems that happened last. It's natural to attribute cause in that way, but it's not really helpful in communicating the purpose of these investigations.

If this represents a change in style and/or substance of these kinds of press releases, my hunch would be that the position was previously hired for technical writers but was most recently filled by PR.
by asveikau | 2025-11-20 14:48:01+00:00
> an European

European starts with a vowel in spelling, but actually phonerically begins with a consonant, /j/, so it doesn't trigger the "an" thing.

Similarly some spellings start with a consonant but have vowels (like acronyms, "an SSRI", the name of the letter S, "ess", begins with a vowel)

More to the point I agree with what you're saying. This seems like lazy attribution of cause that is so common in American business and politics. "Of course deregulation will boost growth!" Why? Because of religious beliefs about deregulation boosting growth.
by krisoft | 2025-11-20 14:48:05+00:00
> People need to learn manners, nobody should be using video calling without headphones.

OK? it still sucks even with headphones. Imagine the following scenario: You are in a meeting using your headphones as you suggest. A coworker a few seats away from you are in the same meeting using their own headsphones. When they talk you hear their real voice reach your ears first (this happens with even the best noise canceling headphones to some extent) and then you hear their voice with some delay from the meeting.

This is not about manners or headphones.

Better meeting software identifies when this is happening and they suppress the streamed voice of your coworker just for you.
by kittikitti | 2025-11-20 14:48:17+00:00
Unpopular opinion, but I dislike how universities embraced vocational programs. These students were not there for academics, they were there for job and career training. The irony is that they complain about the high costs of tuition when they're just there to get more money. These professors have much better things to work on. I apologize if my opinion upsets you.
by j45 | 2025-11-20 14:48:23+00:00
MooCs are just glorified long videos of classrooms from 20 years ago.

I wouldn't trust a Jordan Peterson type to have impartial position on a sudden EdTech psychosis when:

- he appears to have a relatively new online academy

- selling courses

- in a way that is relatively new to him

- don't seem welcome to teach in academic institutions

- uses psychology on their audience for the above

If MooCs weren't a thing, and courses on LaserDisc were, I think we'd know what we'd be hearing about a LaserDisc Academy by mail service.
by evanjrowley | 2025-11-20 14:49:08+00:00
1. The source code for Red Alert 2 is rumored to be lost a very long time ago[0], so the fact that the Chrono Divide team was able to achieve this is quite amazing.

2. The Mental Omega mod project[1] is going strong, so RA2 is still worth playing today. Hopefully it will work in this browser-based version.

[0] https://forums.revora.net/topic/107344-red-alert-2-engine-so...

[1] https://mentalomega.com/
by dboreham | 2025-11-20 14:49:24+00:00
I came up on the cusp of the calculator take-over, so although slide rules were around, and we were taught how to use them in school, I never really used them for any practical purpose. However, since they were the buggy whips of that day, you could pick up nice fancy ones for cheap in stationary stores (also now gone). So somewhere I have a good collection of them.
by chuckadams | 2025-11-20 14:49:30+00:00
Nix is just one installer (I steer devs toward Determinate's installer) so technically not super-different from needing Docker. Lots of files in /nix but actually less disk use since the store has much more fine-grained de-duping than container images. Nix is still a big bite though, and for most projects I wouldn't make nix a requirement, but the project in question is itself a build system with reproducibility requirements in its design, so I'm not losing too much sleep over this one. The final artifacts don't depend on Nix anyway.
by thmsths | 2025-11-20 14:49:49+00:00
I think you know the answer to your question: nothing until it becomes a major issue. This is like global warming, it's a slow moving catastrophe, you can see it coming from a mile away but it's expensive to fix so it's hard to convince people to do something about it and there is just enough ambiguity that the detractors can effectively block your efforts.
by afavour | 2025-11-20 14:50:36+00:00
IIRC if you make entirely new assets you're good to go. OpenTTD (Open source version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe) has its own custom made assets, but can also be used with the original if you own them.

https://www.openttd.org

Not sure it's ever been proven definitively in court, though. And if you "made" custom assets that were exactly like the original ones only with a 1px color difference or something I'm sure you'd fall foul of it. What counts as different "enough" is always debatable.
by darkamaul | 2025-11-20 14:50:52+00:00
This is a meaningful step! For years, XDG Base Directory compliance has been spotty across major applications. Firefox's adoption matters because it's widely used and its implementation may encourage others to follow suit.

The Arch Wiki documentation will likely need updates [1], but sadly the list of non-compliant software is far too long.

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory
by robertlagrant | 2025-11-20 14:51:13+00:00
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.

My kids are similar. Years ago I actually just unplugged the TV and put it behind some furniture for 3 months because I was so fed up. It calmed them down a lot (this was after Covid lockdowns, when we'd just given them too much TV) but still - it flares up.

I do think a lot of kids tv is either straight addictive (e.g. Cocomelon) or depicts how kids would like to behave, e.g. in how they talk to adults rudely (e.g. how they talk to the dad in Peppa Pig), or they're always right and the adults are wrong (too may examples to name). Bluey is the saving grace there, as it depicts healthy and respectful relationships, but it's very unusual.
by neilv | 2025-11-20 14:51:17+00:00
It would be too perfect if "adversarial" here also referred to a kind of confrontational poetry jam style.

In a cyberpunk heist, traditional hackers in hoodies (or duster jackets, katanas, and utilikilts) are only the first wave, taking out the easy defenses. Until they hit the AI black ice.

That's when your portable PA system and stage lights snap on, for the angry revolutionary urban poetry major.

Several-minute barrage of freestyle prose. AI blows up. Mic drop.
by amiga386 | 2025-11-20 14:51:22+00:00
At last! Mozilla fixing longstanding bugs! (I jest)

The devil is in the details though: https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/diff/8a6d6c...

Looking briefly at this,

* there doesn't appear to be any migration from old directory to new directory. Does the code just use ~/.mozilla if it still exists, ~/.config/mozilla otherwise.. or does it _require_ MOZ_LEGACY_HOME=1 to be set to keep using your existing config, and just lose all config if you don't set that?

* there doesn't appear to be a proper split between ~/.cache (always-removable cached data) ~/.config (configuration) and ~/.local/share (application data that is not user-editable configuration and is not just cached data either), they just moved the entire set of profile stuff to ~/.config

Is that about right, or do I need to read the code more carefully?
by mortarion | 2025-11-20 14:51:30+00:00
Europe has a shitload of homegrown competitors. The problem is that users here in Europe either goes for a national service or for an US service. They don't look up what their EU neighbor has to offer. In fact, most don't bother translating their services to appeal to the entire EU market.

If you live in country X, you will only ever learn about services from country X or from the US. No one here knows what goes on in neighboring countries.

It's easy to think the EU is like the USA, but it's not, it is still separate sovereign countries with their own language and culture.
by buu700 | 2025-11-20 14:52:10+00:00
It makes development faster, but not infinitely fast. Faithfully reproducing complex 42-year-old software in one weekend is a stretch no matter how you slice it. Also, AI is cheap, but not free.

I could see it being doable by forking LibreOffice or Calligra Suite as a starting point, although even with AI assistance I'd imagine that it might take anyone not intimately familiar with both LibreOffice (or Calligra) and MS Office longer than a weekend to determine the full scope of the delta between them, much less implement that delta.

But you'd still need someone with sufficient skill (not a novice), maybe several hundred or thousand dollars to burn, and nothing better to do for some amount of time that's probably longer than a weekend. And then that person would need some sort of motivation or incentive to go through with the project. It's plausible, but not a given that this will happen just because useful agentic coding tools exist.
by palmotea | 2025-11-20 14:52:25+00:00
> But after a term of AI-generated slides being read, at times, by an AI voiceover, James said he had lost faith in the programme and the people running it, worrying he had “used up two years” of his life on a course that had been done “in the cheapest way possible”.

This is the future guys, get used to it.

The upside is Sam Altman will get really, really rich.
by superkuh | 2025-11-20 14:52:41+00:00
This basically means that Matrix will stop working for my parents and other family: the only people I use matrix for. We started during the pandemic for the video chat element. But Riot.im/Element.io changes to the homeserver over these many years have made it so none of our accounts properly verify. I can't even get my account to properly verify and I'm a huge nerd. We put up with it because of inertia and chat still working fine. But this? I guess it's the end.

Riot.im/Element.io really knows how to shoot themselves in the foot.
by benmorris | 2025-11-20 14:53:28+00:00
On Aug 27th 2025, Braintree (owned by PayPal) introduced a policy that forces merchants to accept pre-arbitrations for disputes under $1,000:

https://developer.paypal.com/braintree/articles/risk-and-sec...

I’ve been a PayPal/Braintree merchant for over 10 years, and this feels like a pretty big shift in risk.

For anyone not deep into disputes:

- A customer files a chargeback. - The merchant can submit evidence and may win that first round. - The customer can then file a second dispute, which goes into pre-arbitration. The merchant can again submit evidence and, historically, sometimes win.

If either side pushes further, it goes to arbitration, where there’s usually a few-hundred-dollar fee for the losing side.

Under this new policy, for transactions under $1,000, Braintree will automatically accept the pre-arbitration in favor of the customer. There’s no second chance to present your side as the merchant; the dispute is simply closed and refunded to the cardholder.

Practically, this means:

- A customer can lose the first dispute, - Immediately escalate, - And automatically win the pre-arbitration if the transaction is under $1,000.

I’ve already had multiple cases where bad-faith customers was awarded the full amount at pre-arbitration solely because of this rule. At that point, the only remaining recourse is to pursue the customer directly (legal action, collections, etc.), which is usually not realistic for sub-$1k orders.

For anyone running ecommerce on Braintree, this effectively creates a “free second shot” at a dispute for customers under $1k, with the merchant guaranteed to lose the second round by policy.

Has anyone else run into this yet?
by MangoToupe | 2025-11-20 14:53:30+00:00
None of this is really true, though (except the paper straw thing which... obviously)

> Unfortunately, in non-0 interest rate reality, governments can't keep deficit spending to prop up a broken socialist economic model.

Governments have deficit spending because we subsidize private inefficiency at a social level and refuse to run them efficiently. It's insisting on letting private entities run things that is clearly not working.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-11-20 14:54:02+00:00
I understand what you're saying. But people who use the expression "manufactured consent" know that it comes from Chomsky and use it in the same sense as Chomsky did. It refers to the idea that the only debate that the media allows is that which doesn't challenge any actual power. Furthermore that expression also refers to the fact that this is achieved without anyone having to explicitly coerse the media. The individuals in it self-select to support with the agenda. You're allowed to be a revolutionary, but no one in the media will give you a job because they're all benefiting from the status quo and don't want to rock and boat.

For example, the left media hypes the democrats and the right media hypes the republicans. You're encouraged to debate which is better, because it doesn't actually change anything. But if there's a candidate that says "corporations have too much power and are using to exploit labour", both sides of the media will attack them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
by Aurornis | 2025-11-20 14:54:15+00:00
> Whether they're directly doing business with data brokers or not is not the point.

That was literally the point I responded to.

> They're indirectly profiting from the profiles they build by selling access to them via their advertising platform

That’s very different than the “selling your data” line that keeps getting repeated.

There’s a motte and bailey game that gets played every time this topic comes up. The argument starts with claims they’re selling your data, then when that’s revealed as a false claim the argument pivots to something else with strained arguments that it’s equally bad.
by sureglymop | 2025-11-20 14:54:26+00:00
I think that's not true. What I gain from university are three things:

1. Experts who compile/write the theoretical materials necessary (usually long form text, scripts).

2. The necessary pressure to actually read and understand these in order to pass the exams.

3. Social connections and the ability to work on interesting projects supervised by lecturers with experience and connections (clout if you will).

It's not that much deeper. The actual classroom is a nice "sugar" but that's not where the real learning and understanding happens in my experience. Videos are okay in order to learn but imo text is always much better. Sure you could compile this all yourself but the university provides a good path and everything around it for you to succeed.
by cogman10 | 2025-11-20 14:54:37+00:00
But you aren't a student paying for a university education presumably taught by someone that has experience in the field.

Perhaps the insights are good or bad and that's fine if you can correct later with a conversation with your doctor. But would you want a doctor trained by the same AI?

Importantly, you have no idea what part or what percentage of the conversation was accurate. How much of it was a hallucination from a chi manipulator? How much of it was based on dated research? How much of it came from a random blog post by a crazy person?
by techblueberry | 2025-11-20 14:55:06+00:00
AI food photography is the perfect example of the like paradox of AI. On the one hand it’s perfect. It’s probably a thing that’s relatively hard to get right, and expensive for small restaurants, especially if your menu changes a bunch.

And maybe there are two purposes to food photography. One is. I’m not from your culture or never had your cuisine before and I want to vaguely understand better what this is. What do you mean by stew?(sometimes it’s more soup, sometimes it’s more heavily and thickly sauced meat/veggies) Let me see a picture.

But very specifically what is selling me is, I want to know what your version of this dish looks like. Is it a generic rendition of said dish, or did you put your own spin on it? Like it or not, AI food photography immediately sends me a quality signal that you don’t care enough about your food to think about presentation.
by FiBe | 2025-11-20 14:55:14+00:00
Shopify doesn’t actually provide a real line sheet, most brands end up exporting CSVs or hacking together PDFs in Canva or Google Sheets. It works, but it’s slow and hard to keep updated. I built ShowcaseHQ because I kept seeing brands remake the same spreadsheet over and over every season. Mine pulls the product data directly from Shopify and formats it automatically, so you don’t have to redesign or re-export anything each time your inventory or pricing changes.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-20 14:55:20+00:00
I think this closer to the crux of a major problem. Seemingly people have vastly different responses even for the same system/developer/user prompts, and I myself can feel a different in quality of the responses depending on when I use the hosted APIs, while hosted models always have consistent results.

For example, after 19:00 sometime (GMT+1), the response quality of both OpenAI and Anthropic (their hosted UIs) seems to drop off a cliff. If I try literally the same prompt the around 10:00 next morning, I get a lot better results.

I'm guessing there is so much personalization and other things going on, that two users will almost never have the same experience even with the same tools, models, endpoints and so on.
by flybird | 2025-11-20 14:55:28+00:00
For transparency: we also launched GoodSMS on Product Hunt this week as part of our public release. If you are curious about the screenshots, launch notes, or early user feedback, the PH page is here: https://www.producthunt.com/products/goodsms

No obligation at all — I mainly want feedback from HN on the technical side, but some people asked for the PH link so adding it here.
by jordanb | 2025-11-20 14:55:49+00:00
The US government used to provide differential subsidies for cargos shipped on US flagged ships. This ensured that US shipping was competitive with the bottom dollar global shippers, at least for some cargos.

This ended under Reagan.

At first lots of people didn't care because Reagan was also doing his 600 ship navy so everyone was busy doing navy work, but after that ended the MM and american shipbuilding entered a death spiral.

Now the only work US flagged vessels can get is supporting the navy, and a tiny sliver of jones act trade. This means there are no economies of scale. If a ship is built, one is built to that class not 10. Orders are highly intermittent and there is no ability to build up a skilled workforce in efficient serial production. On the seagoing side, ships either get run ragged on aggressive schedules (ex: El Faro) or they sit in layup for long stretches rusting away.

If the US wants to fix its merchant marine it needs to provide incentive for increased cargos and increased shipbuilding. As Sal points out, the US is the second-biggest shipowning country in the world. US business like owning ships, they just don't want to fly the American flag because their incentives are towards offshoring.
by chuckadams | 2025-11-20 14:56:28+00:00
If the nix ecosystem moved entirely to flakes, you could just point at the flake in python's repo, pin it to the proper commit hash, and job's done. Might result in a lot of extra near-duplicate dependencies in the store, but that's unlikely to affect you at the level of Python. Otherwise yeah, you're stuck with whatever combinations were blessed by nixpkgs at the time, or with writing your own derivation.

And the error messages are ... well, yeah. I don't find the nix language as awful as some do, but it's still a functional language by and for functional programmers, and being lazy, a lot of errors surface in very non-obvious places. Ultimately Nix could use a declarative config format on top of everything, but I'd rather they ironed out the other issues first. Guix seems to be a bit further along there, but its platform options are more limited.
by graynk | 2025-11-20 14:56:46+00:00
> You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc.

That's not necessarily true. I mean, you will be fine, but gaming is one of the areas where you can benefit from having everything on bleeding edge. And Cachy is surprisingly stable (and the "one day things will stop working" can realistically be said about any Linux distro, really).
by bluedino | 2025-11-20 14:56:48+00:00
Mousetrails, anyone?

I was talking with someone about a post we saw on social media, a $4999 laptop from 1992 or whatever, and it had something like an 8" screen.

"How did people even use those laptops!?"

Then you remember everyone didn't have a laptop for surfing Facebook and Amazon. You probably only had one of those if you were an executive or traveling salesperson.
by malfist | 2025-11-20 14:57:48+00:00
I have one device in my house on Alexa called "under cabinet lights", I asked Alexa to "turn on the cabinet lights" she said "several things share the name cabinet lights, which one do you mean?" (As if there's enough information there to answer the question) I told her "all of them" thinking maybe the lights got duplicated or something.

She turned on every smart home light in the house.

.

That isn't your ideal world?