MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnBooty | 2025-12-03 16:30:53+00:00
I expect it's a story that'll never get told in enough detail to satisfy curiosity, but it certainly seems strange from the outside for this optimisation to be both possible and acceptable.

From a technical perspective, the key thing to know is that the console install size for HD2 was always that small -- their build process assumed SSD on console so it didn't duplicate stuff.

154GB was the product of massive asset duplication, as opposed 23GB being the product of an optimization miracle. :)

How did it get so bad on PC?

Well, it wasn't always so crazy. I remember it being reasonable closer to launch (almost 2 years ago) and more like ~40-60GB. Since then, the devs have been busy. There has been a LOT of reworking and a lot of new content, and the PC install size grew gradually rather than suddenly.

This was probably impacted to some extent by the discontinued game engine they're using. Bitsquid/Stingray was discontinued partway through HD2 development and they continued on with it rather than restarting production entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquid
by ecshafer | 2025-12-03 16:30:54+00:00
If there is 1 job at a university. And there are 10 researchers applying. And 1 took this improvement in research speed to do more research, and 9 took the change to play more piano and take more walks, then most likely that one will get the job. This competitive nature is what has driven society forward and not kept us at just above subsistence agriculture.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-12-03 16:30:57+00:00
Sure you could just use in-program comments and/or external annotation files. There were a handful of standards for doing exactly that... NumPy, Google, RST/Sphinx, Epydoc, Zope, ...probably a few others I'm forgetting. And there were external "stub" definition files like `.pyi`. Not exactly code, but closely-linked metadata. Ruby seems to be trying something like that with its `.rbs` files.

IME not until there was a sufficiently clean, direct, and common way to add typing (PEP 484 and its follow-ons) did the community actually coalesce, standardize, and practically start to use type information on a broad basis. We needed there to be one default way of sufficient attractiveness, not 14 competing, often incompatible, and rather inconvenient options.

You may look at built-in typing as a way to communicate with interpreters, compilers, type-checking and linting tools, and/or editor language support engines. Certainly the old purely static typing languages looked at them this way, out of necessity. The compiler, linker, loader, ABI chain has to know the bit-width of your objects, and pronto, because they're going right on the stack!

But in a highly dynamic language that doesn't strictly need types to run the code, typing works as much a signal to future me and my colleagues and collaborators as it is to any mechanism or tool. It signals structure and intent that we'd otherwise have to intuit or decipher. That some tools can use it too, just as they do in fully static languages, is great and useful but not the whole enchilada.
by ivell | 2025-12-03 16:31:05+00:00
The friction already existed long before supreme court orders. No two departments agreed upon what ID they would need for doing the work. It could be rationcard, PAN, passport, driving license etc. Some organizations asked for more than one ID just in case. India just has too many IDs and it is asked for too many use cases.

Aadhar made it easier than before. It is really a quality of life improvement.

The main issue is government requiring IDs even when it is not usually needed in other countries. Mostly in the name of security. This is the root cause. Aadhar is just the symptom.

However Aadhar does enable deeper breaches into privacy due to its unified nature and the way it is validated through government owned infrastructure. There is full tracking possible on all the services that the residents used.

If Aadhar was a self sovereign ID, then having a single ID is definitely a good thing. It keeps privacy intact while usable where needed.
by EmiDub | 2025-12-03 16:31:09+00:00
Right, but unlike with social products (where the network of users is essential) or transportation/food delivery (where providers will follow the user volume) I just don’t see any stickiness benefit for OpenAI. A user’s conversation history is the only potentially valuable bit, but I think most users treat their ChatGPT history like their Google search history; disposable.
by nyrikki | 2025-12-03 16:31:18+00:00
I am running a container on an old 7700k with a 1080ti that gives me vscode completions with rag with similar latency and enough accuracy to be useful for boilerplate etc…

That is something I would possibly pay for but as the failures on complex tasks are so expensive, this seems to be a major use case and will just be a commodity.

Creating the scaffolding for a jwt token or other similar tasks will be a race to the bottom IMHO although valuable and tractable.

IMHO they are going to have to find ways to build a mote, and what these tools are really bad at is the problem domains that make your code valuable.

Basically anything that can be vibe coded can be trivially duplicated and the big companies will just kill off the small guys who are required to pay the bills.

Something like surveillance capitalism will need to be found to generate revenue needed for the scale of Microsoft etc…
by jimt1234 | 2025-12-03 16:31:27+00:00
If we're gonna stick with private insurance in the US, we should detach it from employment. The current system has created a society of indentured servants, not for money, but for "health insurance". The current system is expensive for employers that are often mandated to provide health insurance plans. And it forces people to work for something they have little or no control over.

When you work for money, you can do whatever you want with the money once you've earned it. But being compensated with "health insurance", you've got almost no control over it; you get what the company gives you - and btw, you can't purchase the same thing on your own, with your own money (way too expensive for most middle-class folks).

Detach health insurance from employment. Open "health insurance plans" to the free market, just like auto insurance. Free employers from all the administrative overhead of managing health insurance for employees (the stock market will love it!) And let health insurance companies work for their actual customers (health care patients!)

Or, just open Medicare to all.
by wipaveeknecht | 2025-12-03 16:31:31+00:00
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A ChainSecurity Auditor will review the most complex blockchain projects to find vulnerabilities which no-one else can. By using state of the art tools, expert knowledge and a deep understanding of the fundamentals, we secure projects handling billions, often forming the foundation in the new paradigm of an open financial system.

Your Responsibilities:

* Work directly with the developers of the most successful teams in the blockchain industry to audit their code and secure their products

* Contribute to our security tools and create new ones in collaboration with our internal research team

* Conduct security research and publish your findings

Requirements:

* Strong background in software engineering, focused on security relevant areas and most importantly being able to reason about complex code

* Experience with penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, threat modeling or similar is a plus

* Good knowledge of cryptography

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* Fluent in OOP programming language

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Join us here: https://www.chainsecurity.com/jobs/blockchain-security-engin...

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by dangus | 2025-12-03 16:32:16+00:00
I think that's highly significant. Keep in mind that that's only one provider in the system. You've also got to pay the executive salaries of your hospital system, your pharmacy chain, your drug company, medical equipment company, etc.

If we figure that every company involved in your $15k/year healthcare cost is paying 0.1-0.5% of their revenue to executive compensation (Cleveland Clinic as a random example pays 0.4% of revenue to the executives, $30 million) then we are talking about a small streaming video subscription worth of cost just which is allocated not on paying a productive group of administrators to keep the lights on, but instead paying excess incentives to an extremely small group of people.

In reality, if CEO compensation was capped to something reasonable like $500,000/year or 10x the pay of the lowest paid employee, there would still be CEOs and the quality of CEOs would not decline because it would still be the highest paid job on the market. Everyone involved in our economy would be just that much richer if the wealth wasn't getting unnecessarily concentrated.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-03 16:32:21+00:00
The thing is that bribery is technically illegal. Of course it's completely ubiquitous, but it's generally (FFS Menendez) done in a nuanced and practiced way. Newcomers are not always going to be willing to accept bribes, and actually trying to offer them one would require much more overtness, which enters rapidly into the domain of clear criminality, to say nothing of when your bribe attempt is rejected. And these are the issues with just one guy - with hundreds of politicians regularly cycling in and out, this scale of bribery is just not realistic.

The bigger risk with sortition is that power isn't granted through a title, but through people agreeing to respect that title. If the authority of that title ends up being undermined, then it's entirely possible for power to shift from our representatives to other, probably more entrenched, groups. One could argue that on many issues this is already the case. For instance Congress ostensibly has oversight over the intelligence agencies but the power relationship there is completely reversed. For those that don't know, Congressmen don't have classified access by default. Millions of people in the US have classified clearance, but the people representing the country at the highest level - nah, why would they need such a thing?
Show HN: Aim-Style Instant Messaging in VSCode
by milowata | 2025-12-03 16:32:23+00:00
As an old, I miss the AIM days of getting home from school and turning on the computer, waiting for friends to come online, and chatting with them live (and basically only saying "hey, sup, nm u, jc")

We don't get that with messaging now because everyone is on mobile. Folks with Bloomberg Terminals can have this IM experience, because they are sitting with it open all day. Slack is like this too...but only for people within your company.

And as a developer, me and the rest of us are sitting with our IDEs open all day; why can't we have IM back? Thus, devchat: an extension in VSCode that brings back the IM experience of yore.

It's all live, and messages are only shepherded between clients but never stored/viewed on a server. It's got themes for you to feel like you're back using AIM, or a Bloomberg Terminal, or for those who like iMessage.

Find devchat IM in VSCode extensions, tell your friends to join you, and enjoy chatting while you work! Any and all feedback is welcome, thanks!
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-03 16:32:34+00:00
"I've been consistently saying this online - "app stores" and "developer programs" are all about control ..."

Good

When I choose "DIY" I am not making the choice for "security", "privacy", speed, resource conservation (e.g., program size, memory usage, etc.), convenience, "features" or cost.^1 I am interested in control. Specifically, control over the operation of the computer hardware I purchased

I am willing to make sacrifices to get as much control as I can

But every user is different; some might not care about control. Clearly "Big Tech" cares; perhaps there are advantages to having control

1. Although it's possible the choice may affect these concerns, either positively or negatively. Arguably these concerns are ultimately addressed with finality by whomever has control, whether that's the computer owner or some trillion dollar company
by antiloper | 2025-12-03 16:32:34+00:00
Index investors aren't exposed to IPOs, since the common indexes (SPX etc) don't include IPOs (and if you invest in a YOLO index that does, that's on you).

Also:

> The US led a sharp rebound, driven by a surge in IPO filings and strong post-listing returns following the Federal Reserve’s rate cut.

https://www.ey.com/en_us/insights/ipo/trends
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-03 16:33:22+00:00
There are at least a few CMS editors for static sites intended for non-technical/less-technical users. They often still require someone technical to setup (config files and OAuth connections to GitHub, for example) but then provide an experience somewhat like what one would expect from the WordPress Admin Page.

Two examples I've briefly worked with:

Decap CMS (formerly Netlify CMS): https://decapcms.org/

Lume CMS: https://lume.land/cms/
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-03 16:33:52+00:00
I bought 4x (1TB->4TB the storage for half the price after my SSD died after 5 years (thanks samsung), what you mean they 'stopped being bigger'?

Sure, there is some limitation in format, can only shove so many chips on M.2, but you can get U.2 ones that are bigger than biggest HDD (tho price is pretty eye-watering)
by silverquiet | 2025-12-03 16:34:00+00:00
> Hence, the "on average". For any 10 couples, they should have 21 children. If some have fewer, the rest have to have more.

This would seem to agree with "not everyone has to have children" - mathematically speaking you can quite simply put a couple zeros into the equation and still arrive at 2.1

> Sounds like a "you" problem.

I have no problem with the situation at all as I have never in my life had an interest in having children. I'm not sure I even see the changes in birthrate as a problem; people can adapt to demographic changes. But if it is a problem, then it must be some sort of systemic one and I doubt the answer is to try and apply pressure to individuals to have children by telling them to think of the economy or that it is some sort of societal obligation.
by senfiaj | 2025-12-03 16:34:06+00:00
The compiler didn't recognize that x % 2 == 0 && x % 3 == 0 is exactly the same as x % 6 == 0 for all C/C++ int values. In theory a compiler could detect that and generate identical code for both functions, but it isn't done because this case is "niche" despite being trivial. My point is not to over rely on optimizer for math expressions and algorithms.
by crest | 2025-12-03 16:34:41+00:00
Which describes both the PS2, PS3, PS4, Dreamcast, GameCube, Wii, and Xbox 360. The PS4 had a 2.5" SATA slot but the idiots didn't hook it up to the chipsets existing SATA port, but added a slow USB2.0<->SATA chip. So since the sunset of the N64 all stationary gaming consoles have been held back by slow (optical) storage with even worse seek times.

Some many game design crimes have a storage limitation at their core e.g. levels that are just a few rooms connected by tunnels or elevators.
by immibis | 2025-12-03 16:35:14+00:00
I think they recently banned people from creating their own API keys, which is a thing that people were doing to enter into their third party apps to bypass the ban - every copy of the app was registered as a single-user app. Now if you want to make any app or bot, you either screen-scrape, steal an API key, or get the approval of Reddit management.
by MarkusQ | 2025-12-03 16:35:17+00:00
The dash cam, backup camera, or autonomy system of an adjacent car stopped in traffic would be roughly the same distance from the lidar as a person taking a closeup picture. Since these are lasers the attenuation with distance will be far less than with, say, a headlight (that's why they use them). You can't just assume, as the article does, that the inverse square law will protect you.

In any case, the problem is acting as if it is the camera owner's responsibility to avoid damage. How would you feel if they mounted a high pressure water cannon on each car and advised people to keep their distance or wear a raincoat if they didn't want to get wet?
by pdimitar | 2025-12-03 16:35:28+00:00
Here's mine from my most recent consulting engagement:

"We understand and recognize that this feature we asked of you absolutely cannot be done without the database denormalization you warned us is necessary several weeks ago, but we are still unhappy with you that you couldn't make it work without it and so we are ending our cooperation."

Consider yourself privileged.

I do all sorts of root-cause analyses and I don't sit to code until I am reasonably sure I'll make a positive impact. Long gone are the days when I started coding enthusiastically after hearing just two sentences.

It was still not enough.

I'll not start a flame war -- too tired for it -- but let us just say that some stereotypes exist for a reason.
by stagas | 2025-12-03 16:35:37+00:00
Thanks! For anyone trying this, it's being HN crushed right now and hitting rate-limits, you should try again in a bit if you see an error.

Also, there is an AI DJ mode[0] where you set the mood/genre and the AI generates and plays music for you infinitely.

[0]: https://loopmaster.xyz/editor?aidj
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-03 16:35:38+00:00
>One of the great powers of federalism is not having to duplicate efforts for every state. It also reduces cost by allowing 'one-size-fits-all' and economies of scale, rather than each state having its own bespoke whatever.

One of the great failings caused by federalism and those who simp for it is that when a bad solution is arrived upon or a solution becomes outdated immeasurable suffering is caused and prolonged by not letting those states who want to try and improve do so.

There were a dozen states who were on the precipice of having this solved before the feds stuck their dick in it. Remember Romneycare?
by wat10000 | 2025-12-03 16:36:08+00:00
As I remember it (I was just starting college at the time), Google search was an absolute revelation. You could type in a search term and the first hit would usually be what you wanted. AltaVista required a lot of looking through results to find the right thing and messing around with boolean operators. People switched over and never looked back. Google went from zero to a substantial majority market share in only about one year.
by gortok | 2025-12-03 16:36:25+00:00
The "They" here are the folks who are currently investing in 'selling' AI solutions to other companies. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google's Gemini, and a slew of AI-backed startups are good examples.

They don't need AI to turn a profit.

They need AI to be seen as widely adopted and "a part of life".

They need certain categories of folks (CEOs, CIOs, Boards of Directors) to see AI as valuable enough to invest in.

They need to keep up the veneer of success long enough to make their investments attractive to acquisition by Private Equity or to an IPO.

They need to juice the short-term stock price.

Their goal isn't to produce a long-term business, their goal is to raise short-term returns to the point that the investors get a nice return on their investment, and then it becomes someone else's problem.
by KnowledgeWeaver | 2025-12-03 16:36:25+00:00
I initiated the directory download, because we had a huge trove of data about the entire internet that could until now only be accessed by thousands of manual clicks.

Now, the global community behind the Curlie.org internet directory offers the entire directory for download (open source, CC-BY).

The directory contains editorial descriptions of 2.9 million hand-picked websites, sorted into categories.

Vying to start your own search engine or LLM, but lacking the resources to find the quality training data? Just use the directory data, and crawl the included websites.

In fact, our scientific partner OpenWebIndex.eu already integrated the directory data into its open search index, so even the crawling part is already accomplished for you.

This is the contribution of the Curlie community to a knowledge infrastructure that is distributed, open source and under the users' control!

(Nitty gritty technical details in the download itself, or ask here.)
by Dachande663 | 2025-12-03 16:36:45+00:00
Does anyone have any recommendations for a simple S3-wrapper to a standard dir? I've got a few apps/services that can send data to S3 (or S3 compatible services) that I want to point to a local server I have, but they don't support SFTP or any of the more "primitive" solutions. I did use a python local-s3 thing, but it was... not good.
by smokedetector1 | 2025-12-03 16:37:15+00:00
You cannot measure everything with numbers. Many things in life cannot even be ordered[0]. Lives are different. Yes, some are just worse/more challenging than others, but in general people and their experiences are wayyyyyyy too complex and multivaried to be projected onto the real line. Only by narrowing your understanding and experience of life to measurable phenomena like bank account balance can you actually do the comparison you're looking for. And then you've all but ruined your life.

To address your point, GDP per capita is not a good metric capturing happiness, for several reasons. Most trivially, because it does nothing to reflect the distribution of wealth. A country could (purely hypothetically ;) ) have massive GDP per capita but the benefits flow mainly to the top.

Even putting that aside, a culture with massive GDP but where the citizens don't have the time, peace, values, and social structures to enjoy life is not a happy society.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_order
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-03 16:37:27+00:00
Honestly looking over time I think that phrase did more bad than good.

Yes, of course you shouldn't optimize before you get your critical path stable and benchmark which parts take too much.

But many, many times it is used as excuse to delay optimisation so far that it is now hard to do because it would require to rewriting parts that "work just fine", or it is skipped because the slowness is just at tolerable level.

I have a feeling just spending 10-20% more time on a piece of code to give it a glance whether it couldn't be more optimal would pay for itself very quickly compared to bigger rewrite months after code was written.
by jasomill | 2025-12-03 16:37:51+00:00
For gaming, this doesn't bother me much, given that, even at today's prices, the cost of maintaining a midrange gaming PC with ample storage and "recommended" specs for new releases is probably no more than $200-$300/year.

The ever-increasing system requirements of productivity software, however, never ceases to amaze me:

Acrobat Exchange 1.0 for Windows (1993) required 4 MB RAM and 6 MB free disk space.

Rough feature parity with the most-used features of modern Acrobat also required Acrobat Distiller, which required 8 MB RAM and another 10 MB or so of disk space.

Acrobat for Windows (2025) requires 2,000 MB RAM and 4,500 MB free disk space.