MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keyringlight | 2025-11-14 18:07:35+00:00
I'm torn about whether I'd want a direct continuation. It has similarities to the changing tone of the spy shows/movies and their satires that inspired it in that things change over time, and the reception to the feminism angle would be different now. A sequel would likely mean moving the time period on again which has additional challenges.

I could definitely see starting over with a reboot, which would also give the studio involved a chance to dodge all the rights issues by doing a 'spiritual successor' and renaming everything. 25 years later you're likely trying to attract newcomers much more than you are fans of the old games that want specifically more NOLF. I'd also be interested in a cold war era spy thriller that played it straight, real spy history has a lot to pull from that could be weaved into an intriguing story to play through, and NOLF did touch on some of the issues around spying like taking advantage of people.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-14 18:07:38+00:00
Not the person you were replying to, but “oh, gee, I wish I’d thought of that! /s”.

I spent my first few decades trying to train myself not to write in a way that causes physical pain. The closest I got was when I discover Lamy Safari pens, which won’t let me hold them the “wrong” way. That only makes it a little less horrid.
by arw0n | 2025-11-14 18:08:01+00:00
They were half-assed in the sense that they trusted the old test suite, which turned out to be a mistake, as some edge-cases weren't covered. Hopefully they will be more rigorous going forward, but even then, these bugs were caught before being added to a stable release, so overall fine.

I'm not sure if it is the best ROI to rewrite battle-tested tools in Rust, but it isn't like people are forced to do it. People have fun writing Rust, and want to work with it more, so that's the direction these projects take. And if you don't want to use these tools, the beautiful thing about Linux is that if you don't like the direction a distribution takes, you can always switch.
by JohnPDickerson | 2025-11-14 18:08:16+00:00
> I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up.

Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI not specifically related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source, general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what we're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more trusted automated interfacing between machines.

A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-enabled systems that interact with each other and with the Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other way.

You may enjoy some of our projects: https://www.mozilla.ai/open-tools/choice-first-stack
by glenstein | 2025-11-14 18:08:54+00:00
Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's explanations of market share change when talking about Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market share change by an order of magnitude.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-11-14 18:08:54+00:00
Being able to save money for an emergency fund is the first step towards financial and life stability if you're poor. So, yes, cutting out extraneous expenditures does add up, even if it doesn't directly make you move up the socioeconomic ladder.

Saving that $1000 or even $100/month means you might be able to get your car fixed when you need it, which might be the difference between keeping your job and getting fired/forced to quit. It can mean eating dinner every night, giving you better mental clarity and better sleep quality which can improve every part of your next day.

I think, "poor" is bigger than what the author wrote(ie that poor people have already cut out every extraneous expenditure). For every class, there are people with good financial hygiene and people with poor financial hygiene.
by qaq | 2025-11-14 18:08:58+00:00
This sounds more than legit for many places outside of US and maybe some places in US, but in general US does give you an opportunity to move up. So unless it's health issue or family issue it really is in one's own hands here. I know a ton of people who came here with no $/legal status/english and are doing really well. If you are a US citizen you already have a huge asset.
by amluto | 2025-11-14 18:08:59+00:00
> An Uber-like, magical experience that you can trust to show up on time, do the right thing on your behalf, and fractionalize prices in an antiquated industry.

I can summon an Uber and, by magic, I have a rather high chance of getting a distracted driver in a run-down car with a bunch of nasty air fresheners

If Uber does this to me, I will still probably be unharmed at the end of the ride and I’m done which it. If an HVAC contractor does that, I have years of suckage ahead of me.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-11-14 18:09:09+00:00
Money influences thinking so undoubtedly it's a mix, but I think a lot of HNers discount the former, when it plays a very large role. E.g. if you look at the emails that resulted from discovery in Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, you'll see that from the very beginning of its inception OpenAI's founders have been trying to build AGI. This wasn't a marketing term that was made up years into OpenAI after it blew up and needed to dance in front of investors. This was an explicit goal of OpenAI from the very beginning.
by monero-xmr | 2025-11-14 18:09:15+00:00
I’m wealthy but I wasnt always. When I was 22 through 30 I didn’t take a single vacation that wasn’t driving to a long weekend. My wife and I both pulled 60 to 70 hour weeks for our entire 20s (I still do).

No one “deserves” free time. If you don’t want to work 70 hours a week and want to watch Netflix instead, go for it, but don’t bitch to me
by Lammy | 2025-11-14 18:09:17+00:00
Fuck “buying it legitimately” anyway when it's old enough that it would be Public Domain under a sane copyright regime.

Relevant: NOLF Revival Edition (same as mentioned in the article and quoted article, but actual link):

- https://archive.org/details/no-one-lives-forever-trilogy

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43146581
by tavavex | 2025-11-14 18:09:43+00:00
No One Sells Forever, eh?

But seriously, the way the copyright system prevents people from preserving and re-experiencing works as soon as the "rightful owner" stops caring about them is a travesty. I say that when an IP becomes orphaned, stops being claimed by a new rights-holder, or some time after it stops being sold/used, it should be forcibly removed from the grip of copyright and opened up for everyone to use. Otherwise, we're heading to a world where only a slim subset of well-performing properties are being offered, while the rest lie in a gigantic graveyard of things-someone-owns-but-will-never-use instead of being potentially put to use by someone who would actually care.
by dotnet00 | 2025-11-14 18:09:44+00:00
I think an aspect of a lot of those luckier kids is that they think being told they were lucky invalidates the hard work they feel they did, turning it into a nonsensical contest of comparing apples to oranges.

My siblings have a similar complaint when my Dad essentially implies that they were lucky in having the successes they have had. They do still somewhat understand what he means, but they dislike it because they think he's dismissing the hard work they put in. Of course, they don't see that he applies the same to those experiencing extreme poverty.
by magicalist | 2025-11-14 18:10:14+00:00
Really great comment.

> The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.

After I got my first job in tech that honestly felt at the time like it paid too much, it was crazy to find just how expensive and stressful it was just to exist before that point and how so much of that just evaporated the second I had even just enough money.

And then on top of that, so often I'd get access to free things or services just from shopping somewhere, or being a subscriber to something, things I often didn't need at all, but sure I'll take it.

Besides the other scars like you mention, I feel like the experience burned the idea of diminishing marginal utility of money into my soul, and unless you've been on that side of the curve, it may just be really hard to understand how much it falls off. So it may be easy for someone to think they understand because they didn't have much money for going out all the time after they got out of college or whatever, and so it makes sense to suggest that other people can just better budget their money and they can be successful too.
by fredgrott | 2025-11-14 18:10:17+00:00
One of the common myths is...

If repairing auto at shop costs $1000 one should op out to spend $300 in parts and own labor.....

Paying for the wrong utility makes you remain poor as the down car repair has a very low utility to you earning that higher wage while the shop repairs your car.

It would only make high value utility sense if you did that several times and then open your own car repair shop as business owner.

Warren Buffet implies this obliquely in his writing about the choices he has made.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-14 18:10:34+00:00
> They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device.

They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any serious antitrust enforcement on platforms.

Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.) Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have been extensions, and doing bizarre marketing experiments.

> Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.

Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5% of the market. There isn't really another option, no matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets more than all of its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting.

But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons are that it chooses its direction based on Google's desires.

edit: the craziest part of this common argument about Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its browser to everything it could figure out how to, and Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market to Firefox. The idea that Google is some special impossible challenge when Microsoft owned every computer is insane. It's impossible to beat Google when they pay your salary.
by belorn | 2025-11-14 18:10:50+00:00
I doubt that people prefer automatic capitations over human made, no more than people prefer AI subtitles. The big AI subtitle controversy going on right now in anime demonstrate well that quite a lot is lost in translation when an AI is guessing what words are most likely in a situation, compared to a human making a translation.

What people want is something that is better than nothing, and in that sense I can see how automatic captions is transformative in terms of accessibility.
by dukeofdoom | 2025-11-14 18:11:04+00:00
I remember an interview with some billionaire talking about how people should grow their own food. He underpays his workers. One the surface great idea. Aside for the fact that it's hugely inefficient and why we have massive farms to take care of the inefficiency problem. Innovation was supposed to take care of this so poor people don't have to substance farm in cities. I mean by all means do that as a hobby. But keep im mind many cities have contaminated soil. People doing their own laundry also had a stay at home parent back than yo do these chores. Now 2 people need to work jobs to pay a mortgage. So don't feel its really a viable alternative
by Twey | 2025-11-14 18:11:15+00:00
This article comes across as rather defeatist:

> Another limitation of programming languages is that they are poor abstraction tools

> Programming languages are implementation tools for instructing machines, not thinking tools for expressing ideas

Machine code is an implementation tool for instructing machines (and even then there's a discussion to be had about designing machines with instruction sets that map more neatly to the problems we want to solve with them). Everything we've built on top of that, from assembly on up, is an attempt to bridge the gap from ‘thinking tools for expressing ideas’.

The holy grail of programming languages is a language that seamlessly supports expressing algorithms at any level of abstraction, including or omitting lower-level details as necessary. Are we there yet? Definitely not. But to give up on the entire problem and declare that programming languages are inherently unsuitable for idea expression is really throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

As others in the comments have noted, it's a popular and successful approach to programming today to just start writing code and seeing where the nice structure emerges. The feasibility of that approach is entirely thanks to the increasing ability of programming languages to support top-down programming. If you look at programming practice in the past, when the available implementation languages were much lower-level, software engineering was dominated by high-level algorithm design tools like flowcharts, DRAKON, Nassi–Shneiderman diagrams, or UML, which were then painstakingly compiled by hand (in what was considered purely menial work, especially in the earlier days) into computer instructions. Our modern programming languages, even the ‘low-level’ ones, are already capable of higher levels of abstraction than the ‘high-level’ algorithm design tools of the '50s.
by bluGill | 2025-11-14 18:11:21+00:00
> Does Activision have to produce this piece of paper once they sue to establish standing?

Yes, but see below.

> If Activision's version of this piece of paper was chewed up by rats in the 90s, does their ownership stake vanish in a puff as well?

No, but complex. Legally the contract is still valid, but they still need to show the court what the details are. All parties to a contracts get a copy, and so Activation can legally force other people who should have a copy of the contract to produce it, any copy is enough (or several partially rat eaten copies may be enough to reproduce what the original said). Activision has all the time they want to find copies of the contract (unlike trademark, copyright isn't use it or lose it), so you are risking the above for a long time. Sometimes enough testimony in court of we did have a contract is enough - when it is obvious there must have been a contract at one time the court will put together obvious details which might be enough to sue. In this case the 3 parties can agree that while they don't know who as rights between the 3 of them the rights must be contained and so they can agree to a 3-way split for purposes of going to court - even if it latter turns out only one party had rights, that party agreed to the split (though if you years latter can prove a 4th party has rights they can sue the other 3).

Of course if rats did eat all copies of the contract the lawyer fees to figure this out are likely more than the game is worth and so it probably isn't worthwhile to sue, so practically it may be as if they no longer have rights to the game just because they can't afford to enforce it. This is a very risky take though and so nobody should risk it.
by maximilianburke | 2025-11-14 18:11:32+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need#Auth...

>The authors of the paper are: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. All eight authors were "equal contributors" to the paper; the listed order was randomized.

Intern or not, it still sounds like he contributed substantially.
by shalmanese | 2025-11-14 18:11:43+00:00
Disintermediation. The degree which marketplace platforms can exert pressure against disintermediation determines their right to exist.

Certain markets, it's absolutely trivial for marketplace participants to agree to an off-market transaction, cutting the marketplace out of any transaction fees. That's what killed all the Uber for Maids businesses of the early 10s.

Uber for Uber, on the other hand, is an absolutely amazing platform for preventing disintermediation. Occasionally, you'll get a driver handing you their personal business card and saying call me directly if you want a ride to the airport but overwhelmingly, people are unable to get around the platform, regardless of how high the middleman cut is.
by vorpalhex | 2025-11-14 18:11:48+00:00
What the Trump administration canceled didn't right that wrong. What the Trump administration canceled was an agreement for the local county to stop issuing fines, which had already been in effect for over two years. And within those two years, the local county built zero sewers, zero hookups. They literally built nothing in two years.

The original agreement under the Biden admin, which to be clear, the President doesn't personally oversee these kinds of agreements, this is sort of all within the DOJ, but the original agreement doesn't even require them to build the sewers. It literally just requires them to run a public health campaign and not issue fines.
by fogzen | 2025-11-14 18:12:05+00:00
Having been a CEO and around many CEOs... they of course do work. But they don't do x250 times more work of another worker. It's just a different type of work. Yet all work from every employee is critical for the enterprise to function. And in my experience, they often do less work than many employees in terms of hours. If you're an on-call engineer for example, your CEO doesn't get paged and have to wake up in the middle of the night. If you look at any enterprise the CEO is likely not the one doing the most work. That's kind of the whole point and the reason they want to become a CEO/founder (to capture a larger share of the wealth for the work they put in).

Capitalist enterprises (with owners vs non-owner workers) are fundamentally non-meritocratic and exploitative. Everyone works to generate value, and only a small class of workers captures the bulk of the value.
by coffeecoders | 2025-11-14 18:12:25+00:00
A lot of these "Uber for X" conversations miss a deeper point. The software only works as a force multiplier when the underlying labor is modular and fungible. Ridesharing works because every trip is basically the same API call i.e. person A to location B.

Plumbing or HVAC isn’t like that. Every house is a legacy system with zero documentation and different failure modes. Half the job is reverse engineering decades of homeowner hacks, and mystery piping. The other half is risk management.

If Uber had to deal with "each car is different, some are from 1978, half the wiring was DIY, and if you route one trip wrong the customer’s house floods," it would look very different.

The heterogeneity of the physical world is the limiting factor. Basically, devops for building (instrumentation, diagnostics and standardization).
by jamesgill | 2025-11-14 18:12:45+00:00
My 'writer deck' is an old 11" 2014 Macbook Air with no wifi enabled, running Linux Mint. It only has a few apps. Beautiful machine, works perfectly. I paid $35 for it.

And by 'no wifi enabled', I mean it's not enabled in the OS, so I can't even be tempted to turn it on. When I need to sync files/update, I have a USB ethernet dongle.

I love refurbishing old Macbooks/ThinkPads, and I always tell people just buy one, customize it any way you like--paint it, stickers, whatever--and for a few bucks you've got something great.
by asdfman123 | 2025-11-14 18:12:46+00:00
AI overuse drives me crazy but the steelman is that new technologies often involve a cringe experimentation phase before they find their "killer apps."

E.g. they tried to put steam engines on everything. Steam powered wagons that tore up roads, steam powered rowing machines, steam powered legs for amputees. All really dumb uses of technology. But steam engines on trains, ships and factories changed the world.
by AshesOfOwls | 2025-11-14 18:12:52+00:00
My very own, fully functional tab key!

Thanks again to Ben and the team at cursor for this lovely souvenir. Tab autocomplete is at the core of my Al coding, to say it saved me days of work is an under exaggeration. I had no idea this was a thing until they reached out to me so to hear the number I reached gave me a combination of laughter and shock.

If anyone has questions about how I use it in my workflow I would be happy to answer.
by vaidhy | 2025-11-14 18:13:10+00:00
I do not remember where I read this, but it has struck with me for the last 35+ years - "Poverty is a crime, but the poor are not guilty of it".

I have seen abject poverty growing up in India.. It is right in your face most of the times. I have friends from the other side of the street and pretty much, you live in very different realities.
by CallMeJim | 2025-11-14 18:13:15+00:00
How much would you save yearly if you didn't have a dog?

A few accumulated years of those savings would let you buy a better-quality drier or washing machine - saving you from replacing them regularly, or replacing your damaged clothes.

Pets are a choice that's fairly high up the Maslow hierarchy. Get rid of them, get into a better position, build up some reserves, and leave your family in a better place than you started.

Also raise your family so they have the same mindset - they need to leave their children in a better place than they started.
by dugidugout | 2025-11-14 18:13:33+00:00
I think it was:

> IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.

which implied you were also commenting on the condition of being "poor", rather than distinguishing those who are "broke" from those who are not with the same pay.

I take it you really mean:

"IMO, after a baseline, it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it."
by noisy_boy | 2025-11-14 18:13:55+00:00
Greedy managers are a blocker to actual engineering. It wasn't enough that they were trying to squeeze the last ounce of delivery via twisted implementations of Agile. Now they are shooting down every attempt to apply any amount of introspection and thought with blanket expectation of LLMs obviating any need to do so. That combined with random regurgitation of terms like "MCP" and "agentic" has made programming into a zombie-like experience of trying to coax the LLMs to produce something workable while fighting inflated expectations of the hallucinating bosses.
by creatonez | 2025-11-14 18:14:05+00:00
> The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.

I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few things that were before 2020:

Firefox OS: 2013

Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014

Directory Tiles: 2014

Pocket acquisition: 2015

Firefox Focus: 2015

Cliqz experiment: 2017

"Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017