MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pwdisswordfishy | 2025-12-29 01:03:20+00:00
The author (probably unknowingly) glosses over a lot in these sentences of the "How did we get here" section:

> Unity uses the Mono framework to run C# programs and back in 2006 it was one of the only viable multi-platform implementations of .NET. Mono is also open-source, allowing Unity to do some tweaks to better suit game development. [...] An interesting twist happened nearly 10 years later.

Not mentioned is that Mono itself of course improved a lot over the years, and even prior to MS's about-face on open source, it was well known that Unity was hindered by sticking with an old and out-of-date Mono, and they were very successful at deflecting the blame for this by throwing the Mono folks under the bus. Any time complaints about game developers' inability to use newer C# features came up, Mono/Xamarin would invariably receive the ire* because Unity couldn't come to an agreement with them about their license and consulting fees. (Mono was open source under LGPL instead of MIT licensed at the time, and Unity had initially bought a commercial license that allowed them exemptions from even the soft copyleft provisions in the LGPL, but the exemption was limited and not, for example, for any and all future versions, too, indefinitely.) Reportedly, they were trying to charge too much (whatever that means) for Unity's attempts to upgrade to the modern versions.

It's now 10+ years later, and now not only Mono (after being relicensed under MIT) but .NET CoreCLR are both available for Unity at no cost, but despite this it still took Unity years before they'd upgraded their C# language support and to a slightly more modern runtime.

Something else to note: Although, LGPL isn't inherently incompatible with commercial use or even use in closed source software, one sticking point was that some of the platforms Unity wished to be able to deploy have developer/publisher restrictions that are incompatible with the soft copyleft terms in the LGPL that require that users (or in this case game developers) be allowed to relink against other versions of the covered software (including, for example, newer releases). Perversely, it's because Unity sought and obtained exemptions to the LGPL that both end users and game developers were hamstrung and kept from being able to upgrade Mono themselves! (It wouldn't have helped on, say, locked down platforms like Nintendo's for example, but certainly would have been viable on platforms without the first-party restrictions, like PC gaming or Android.)

By now, Unity has gone on to pull a lot of other shenanigans with their own pricing that seems to have sufficiently pissed off the game development community, but it should still not be forgotten when they were willing to pass the blame to an open source project over the development/support that the company felt it was entitled to for a price lower than they were told it would cost, and that they themselves were slow to make progress on even when the price of the exemption literally became $0.

* you can find threads with these sorts of comments from during this period right here on HN, too, but it was everywhere
by epage | 2025-12-29 01:03:20+00:00
Take the example at https://docs.rs/thiserror/latest/thiserror/

- Struct variant fields are public, limiting how you evolve the fields and types

- Struct variants need non_exhaustive

- It shows using `from` on an error. What happens if you want to include more context? Or change your impl which can change the source error type

None of this is syntactically unique to errors. This becomes people's first thought of what to do and libraries like thiserror make it easy and showcase it in their docs.
by danpalmer | 2025-12-29 01:04:56+00:00
> incoherent in service of sounding as negative as possible

This is a great summary of it. Zitron has some good points on economics and shady deals in his criticism, but it's all buried beneath layers of bad faith descriptions that are almost religious in nature, totally closed off to any sort of debate.

It's a shame because I'd like to see another good and critical writer in this space. Simon Willison's writing for example is excellent, detailed, critical, but inquisitive and always speaks in good faith. There seems to be space for someone taking a less technical, more business/economics approach.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-12-29 01:05:32+00:00
But does applying the same transfer function to each pixel (of a given colour anyway) count as "processing"?

What bothers me as an old-school photographer is this. When you really pushed it with film (e.g. overprocess 400ISO B&W film to 1600 ISO and even then maybe underexpose at the enlargement step) you got nasty grain. But that was uniform "noise" all over the picture. Nowadays, noise reduction is impressive, but at the cost of sometimes changing the picture. For example, the IP cameras I have, sometimes when I come home on the bike, part of the wheel is missing, having been deleted by the algorithm as it struggled with the "grainy" asphalt driveway underneath.

Smartphone and dedicated digital still cameras aren't as drastic, but when zoomed in, or in low light, faces have a "painted" kind of look. I'd prefer honest noise, or better yet an adjustable denoising algorithm from "none" (grainy but honest) to what is now the default.
by mbesto | 2025-12-29 01:05:44+00:00
> If Elon can be CEO of three companies and the founder of a couple more while also finding time to tweet 50+ times a day, have a failed and embarrassing stint in trying to optimize the federal government, and get K-holed at parties then the demands of the job can't be that rigorous.

Except, Elon has been largely successful at being the "CEO" of these companies because he attracts talent to them. So...either:

(1) Businesses still will require human talent and if so, I don't see how an AI bot will replace a CEO who is necessary to attract human talent.

OR

(2) Businesses don't require any human talent beneath the CEO and thus a CEO is still necessary, or at least some type of "orchestrator" to direct the AI bots beneath them.
by ddtaylor | 2025-12-29 01:06:27+00:00
It could be because when you leave an SQL server exposed it often turns into much worse things. For example, without additional configuration, PostgreSQL will default into a configuration that can own the entire host machine. There is probably some obscure feature that allows system process management, uploading a shell script or something else that isn't disabled by default.

The end result is "everyone" kind of knows that if you put a PostgreSQL instance up publicly facing without a password or with a weak/default password, it will be popped in minutes and you'll find out about it because the attackers are lazy and just running crypto-mine malware, etc.
by RickJWagner | 2025-12-29 01:06:43+00:00
So much to disagree with here.

The path to gathering wealth is simple, and anyone has a good chance of success. See Bogleheads.org for details. ( Once the path is clearly understood, discipline is the primary factor. You have to live below your means, there is no exception. Also, a long compounding timeframe is useful. )

You can live YOLO like the rabbit or you can live like Warren Buffet the tortoise. You don’t get rich quickly, you get rich slowly with large gains at the end, after compounding has done its magic.

Financial literacy is easy to obtain, but watch your sources. Trust the Bogleheads!
by CodingJeebus | 2025-12-29 01:07:02+00:00
> This is the type of cynicism the post is talking about and it's just trivially untrue.

It's a fundamental truth of capitalism, deeply interwoven in the history of markets and modern capitalism. It began when the Dutch East India Company sailed to the Banda Islands and committed genocide in order to harvest nutmeg for trade. Money is and has always been the prime directive of capitalism.

To quote Tom Stoppard: War is capitalism with the gloves off.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-29 01:08:18+00:00
You're wrong again. What's your point?

Read the entire sentence, nitwit. You couldn't make it past the first word without making a totally humiliating elementary schoolboy mistake, then trying to blame it on me. Your incorrect correction "You are surprised and bewildered questions" doesn't even make grammatical or semantic sense.

Let me spell it out simply enough that the tokens all fit in your tiny cramped sliding context window and tired lonely little attention head, by omitting the parenthetical text offset between "--".

I wrote "Your surprised and bewildered questions [...] weren't addressed to me," which IS grammatically and factually correct: YOUR questions. The questions you asked. That belong to you. The surprised and bewildered ones. They were not addressed to me.

I am in no way obligated to even attempt answering them, so stop being so angry and frustrated about not getting enough personal attention to your confused and bewildered cries for help.

You still fail to comprehend that he was mocking you, as I already patiently explained to you. And he is not going to answer your surprised and bewildered questions, because you don't deserve answers, and that would spoil the joke on you anyway, so leaving them unanswered makes it supremely funnier.

But the fact that you didn't realize he was mocking you, and then asked your self-absorbed deeply revealing questions, makes it 100x more hilarious that you unwittingly beclowned yourself and amplified his mockery to another epic level entirely.

And then to outdo your own epic self-own, now you're continuing to spectacularly humiliate yourself by misreading and getting tripped up on elementary school grammar, totally blowing it up in your own face, and making even more mendacious hostile accusations, instead of answering a simple question anyone with a coherent point would gladly and easily be able to.

Yet again you're unwittingly proving my point that you're incapable of answering this simple question: what is your point? Instead of proving mine yet again, just state yours for the first time ever.

Please explain to the class all the racist shit you said so we can all understand what you mean and where you're coming from.

Ball's in your court again, Georgie.
by throwaway94275 | 2025-12-29 01:08:34+00:00
"Monopoly" means one seller, so you can't say multiple X makes a monopoly and make sense. You probably mean collusion.

If demand exceeds supply, either prices rise or supply falls, causing shortages. Directly controlling sellers (prices) or buyers (rationing) results in black markets unless enforcement has enough strength and integrity. The required strength and integrity seems to scale exponentially with the value of the good, so it's typically effectively impossible to prevent out-of-spec behavior for anything not cheap.

If everyone wants chips, semiconductor manufacturing supply should be increased. Governments should subsidize domestic semiconductor industries and the conditions for them to thrive (education, etc.) to meet both goals of domestic and economic security, and do it in a way that works.

The alternative is decreasing demand. Governments could hold bounty and incentive programs for building electronics that last a long time or are repairable or recyclable, but it's entirely possible the market will eventually do that.
by to11mtm | 2025-12-29 01:08:42+00:00
I mean it depends, does your Bayer-to-JPEG pipeline try to detect things like 'this is a zoomed in picture of the moon' and then do auto-fixup to put a perfect moon image there? That's why there's some need to differentiate between SOOC's now, because Samsung did that.

I know my Sony gear can't call out to AI because the WIFI sucks like every other Sony product and barely works inside my house, but also I know the first ILC manufacturer that tries to put AI right into RAW files is probably the first to leave part of the photography market.

That said I'm a purist to the point where I always offer RAWs for my work [0] and don't do any photoshop/etc. D/A, horizon, bright adjust/crop to taste.

Where phones can possibly do better is the smaller size and true MP structure of a cell phone camera sensor, makes it easier to handle things like motion blur. and rolling shutter.

But, I have yet to see anything that gets closer to an ILC for true quality than the decade+ old pureview cameras on Nokia cameras, probably partially because they often had sensors large enough.

There's only so much computation can do to simulate true physics.

[0] - I've found people -like- that. TBH, it helps that I tend to work cheap or for barter type jobs in that scene, however it winds up being something where I've gotten repeat work because they found me and a 'photoshop person' was cheaper than getting an AIO pro.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-29 01:08:46+00:00
> Most Americans earn a top 1% income.

1% of Americans earn a top 1% income. They weren't being asked "do you make more than an amputee kid in Gaza?"

> It's possible 19% of survey takers were in the top 1%…

There's a whole field of math devoted to preventing this. Polling works quite well, all things considered.
by alexwennerberg | 2025-12-29 01:08:51+00:00
Lol thanks for reading my blog post! (Alex here) Your statement of my position:

> We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, so they can goose the (largely fictional) stock price. Meanwhile, end-users are left holding the bag: paying more for worse software, being hassled by advertisements, and dealing with bugs that are unprofitable to fix. The only thing an ethical software engineer can do is to try and find some temporary niche where they can defy their bosses and do real, good engineering work, or to retire to a hobby farm and write elegant open-source software in their free time.

Let me re-state this in another way, which says functionally the same thing:

> Companies are hierarchical organizations where you sell your specialized labor for money. You should do what they expect of you in order to collect a paycheck, cultivate as enjoyable of a working environment as you can, then go home and enjoy the rest of your free time and your nice big tech salary.

Is this cynical? In some sense, sure, but I don't think it's inaccurate or even toxic, and I think it's probably how something like 90% of big tech employees operate. Sometimes your writing makes it seem like this is actually what you think. If your "objective description" of big tech companies were in service of this goal -- getting along better and not fighting the organization to preserve your own sanity and career -- I don't think people would take issue with it.

But you make the analogy of public service and seem in some sense to believe in values that are fundamentally at odds with these organizations. Is your position that, through successful maneuvering, and engineer can make a big tech organization serve the public in spite of internal political and economic pressures? This seems far more idealistic than what I believe. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
by mgraczyk | 2025-12-29 01:09:45+00:00
And? What algorithm was used for downsampling? What was the high frequency content of the downsampled imagine after doing a psuedo inverse with upsampling? How closely does it match the Samsung output?

My point is that there IS an experiment which would show that Samsung is doing some nonstandard processing likely involving replacement. The evidence provided is insufficient to show that
by text0404 | 2025-12-29 01:09:52+00:00
Why are there "good ol boys" tasks in the first place? Instead, automate the C-suite with AI, get rid of these backroom dealings and exclusive private networks, and participate in a purer free market based on data. Isn't this what all the tech libertarians who are pushing AI are aiming for anyways? Complete automation of their workforces, free markets, etc etc? Makes more sense to cut the fat from the top first, as it's orders of magnitude larger than the fat on the bottom.
by jmyeet | 2025-12-29 01:10:07+00:00
So the top 1% of income is currently ~$570k. The vast majority of people will never see that.

But more relevant is the top 1% of net worth is currently ~$11.6M [1], which is vastly more unattainable.

Also, the net worth of the bottom 99% is skewed by house prices. You might be sitting on a house worth $1M but when every other house also costs $1M and you have to live somewhere, you don't really have a net worth of $1M.

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/among-wealthiest-heres-net-wo...
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-29 01:10:17+00:00
What software had a good % of computer users using in the year 2000 that was client-server? What % of developers were doing client server?

What % were doing client server a decade latter?

To my view, it had largely been age of Personal Computing before the web happened. There were enterprise softwares some with client-server architectures doing important things sure, but very very very few people saw that in action, experienced the constraints of what client server meant. The web was the new thing changing the face of software for the world, and brought client-server to mainstream (consumers and devs).

I can't understand (and you have contributed nothing to clarify) your scathing shitty low grade unqualified hate. Are you at all serious? Why such a un hackerly comment that provokes no thought or raises no interesting ideas?
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-29 01:10:46+00:00
The shape of the curve doesn't matter at all. What matters is having a mismatch between the capture curve and the display curve.

If you kept it linear all the way to the output pixels, it would look fine. You only have to go nonlinear because the screen expects nonlinear data. The screen expects this because it saves a few bits, which is nice but far from necessary.

To put it another way, it appears so dark because it isn't being "displayed directly". It's going directly out to the monitor, and the chip inside the monitor is distorting it.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-12-29 01:11:37+00:00
That last step is nonsensical: WebGPU is a shim layer that Vulkan-like layer (in the sense that WebGL is GLES-like) that allows you to use the native GPGPU-era APIs of your OS.

On a "proper OS", your WebGPU is 1:1 translating all calls to Vulkan, and doing so pretty cheaply. On Windows, your browser will be doing this depending on GPU vendor: Nvidia continues to have not amazing Vulkan performance, even in cases where the performance should be identical to DX12; AMD does not suffer from this bug.

If you care about performance, you will call Vulkan directly and not pay for the overhead. If you care about portability and/or are compiling to a WASM target, you're pretty much restricted to WebGPU and you have to pay that penalty.

Side note: Nothing stops Windows drivers or Mesa on Linux from providing a WebGPU impl, thus browsers would not need their own shim impl on such drivers and there would be no inherent translation overhead. They just don't.
by LelouBil | 2025-12-29 01:11:40+00:00
Yeah, I started a project in Unity a while ago, and tried out Godot in the meantime.

Unity really feels like there should be a single correct way to do any specific thing you want, but actually it misses <thing> for your use case so you have to work around it, (and repeat this for every unity feature basically)

Godot on the other hand, really feels like you are being handed meaningful simple building blocks to make whatever you want.
by underlipton | 2025-12-29 01:11:48+00:00
Obviously it's not instantaneous, and you still have imports wanting to fill the vacuum, but a collapse of the US auto industry means 1) lower replacement rate in the near term as the remainders try to ramp up production, 2) difficulty servicing the legacy fleet, and 3) a massive blow in terms of sentiment and outlook. In this hypothetical, an American institution blew itself up and made a lot of people's lives more difficult. Do you think they earn that trust back easily? Or is it a post-bust clarity moment, where people finally have a moment to think about how much money is poured into their personal cars and auto infrastructure writ large?

Because, I mean, we did see something similar to that with the pandemic and a mass shift in perspectives on work culture, which corporations had to fight mightily to hobble. You also saw a similar shift during the Great Depression, and it took banks literal generations to rebuild their reputation with the public. In both cases, you saw massive ramifications for the way in which people lived.

I do think that no auto bailouts in 2008 ends America's love affair with the car as we knew it. So, yes, fewer cars. Or maybe, at least, different cars.
by jayd16 | 2025-12-29 01:13:12+00:00
I think the major problem with Unity is they're just rudderless. They just continue to buy plugins and slap in random features but it's really just in service of more stickers on the box and not a wholistic plan.

They've tried and failed to make their own games and they just can't do it. That means they don't have the internal drive to push a new design forward. They don't know what it takes to make a game. They just listen to what people ask for in a vacuum and ship that.

A lot of talented people and Unity but I don't expect a big change any time soon.
by viraptor | 2025-12-29 01:13:57+00:00
I don't get what you mean. There are people who are great at bridging the customer-engineering gap. (Although we don't know what Tom was really like with customers) There's skill to that kind of position. Bobs were the stereotypical consultants brought in to change things and cut costs without understanding the actual work. What does this have to do with defending CEOs?
by db48x | 2025-12-29 01:14:11+00:00
If your computer fails to sleep, or fails to wake up correctly after sleeping, when running Linux then the problem is almost always the hardware manufacturer’s fault. Many motherboards come with frankly broken ACPI tables that should never have made it out of QA. Remember this (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271484>) recent story? This is just the tip of the iceberg. For every well–researched story we have about ACPI problems there are a dozen more that are quietly fixed by Linux kernel developers (who instruct the kernel to simply ignore the broken ACPI tables and write a custom kernel driver to do the work instead) and an unknown but presumably large number that never come to the attention of a kernel developer.
by heikkilevanto | 2025-12-29 01:14:21+00:00
I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.

Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.
by yooogurt | 2025-12-29 01:15:11+00:00
I have seen similar critiques applied against digital tech in general.

Don't get me wrong, I continue to use plain Emacs to do dev, but this critique feels a bit rich...

Technological change changes lots of things.

The verdict is still out on LLMs, much as it was out for so much of today's technology during its infancy.
by nrp | 2025-12-29 01:15:19+00:00
We’ve been able to hold the same price we had at launch because we had buffered enough component inventory before prices reached their latest highs. We will need to increase pricing to cover supplier cost increases though, as we recently did on DDR5 modules.

Note that the memory is on the board for Ryzen AI Max, not on the package (as it is for Intel’s Lunar Lake and Apple’s M-series processors) or on die (which would be SRAM). As noted in another comment, whether the memory is on the board, on a module, or on the processor package, they are all still coming from the same extremely constrained three memory die suppliers, so costs are going up for all of them.