MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mywittyname | 2025-12-31 17:19:00+00:00
> What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is?

For whom? The manufacture? It's closer to 10-30% for the manufacture (lower for white label goods, higher for "premium" brands). And it's higher for products that enjoy monopoly status.

For retailers, it's 2-3%, but retailers also get products on loan and negotiate various agreements that help cover the costs of displays, shipping, marketing, and wastage. So even that small percentage margin is skewed a bit.

There's a reason that retailers and food manufactures ("canned goods") were some of the largest American companies prior to technology taking off. It's a highly profitable industry.
by badc0ffee | 2025-12-31 17:19:47+00:00
I'm not 100% sure I understand your question, but in order to display a DVD correctly, you need to either display the pixels stored in the video stream wider than they are tall (for widescreen), or narrower than they are tall (for 4:3). Displaying those pixels 1:1 on a display with square pixels would never be correct for DVD video.
by thijsr | 2025-12-31 17:20:02+00:00
We've only verified EC2 during our research, but you do make a good point here. Nitro wasn't vulnerable. Firecracker might have been, considering that it is also built on top of KVM. Firecracker was not specifically designed to also defend against hardware vulnerabilities [1], so I don't see an immediate reason why it wouldn't have worked.

We had to limit the scope of the project somewhere unfortunately, but it would have been nice to check Firecracker and Lambda as well.

[1] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...
by zerotrickpony | 2025-12-31 17:20:29+00:00
Ahh sorry about that! This feedback helped me notice that the hints for the that objective were underbaked. If you reload the page and click "a small hint", I have put in a set of more detailed hints. If you're still stuck email me your game export and I will try to give more help? My email address is on the game's about page.
by mapt | 2025-12-31 17:20:32+00:00
We're not just in Puerto Rico. Over the past few months we've got assets mobilized all over the southern Caribbean islands with appreciable ports. These mostly have pretty small populations and economies, so it is immediately noticeable to locals, who post about all their spare housing and warehouse space filling up.

We also have a appreciable fraction of our blue water Navy sitting down there now.
by lb1lf | 2025-12-31 17:20:37+00:00
Happy new year indeed!

Still some five hours to go here in Norway, but it has been dark outside for a few hours already.

Dinner is just about ready, friends pouring in the doors as we speak and as for fireworks, seeing as we live quite rurally, a couple of kilos of dynamite is at the ready.

Professionally, 2025 has been kind to me. Got to visit Japan and Libya for the first time and am going back to Japan next week for a scientific cruise down to the Mariana trench or thereabouts; when back, I will start working on the next generation control system for our products, having spent the past few months trying to learn enough about control system architecture to hopefully avoid the most obvious pitfalls.

Oh, and I have learned from painful experience a few of the things NOT to do evaluating the current design...
by Majromax | 2025-12-31 17:20:50+00:00
> A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the studios were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped?

I think the problem comes from marketing budgets. For any given game a marketing budget can push some amount of sales, but applying a marketing budget to each game makes it much harder for the winners to make up losses on the rest.

Small releases also need to be 'lean' releases; management overhead is another cost that's hard to make up in scale.

Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.

Hearthstone (Blizzard) is another rare exception of an indie-scale, in-house game that was a breakout hit that could not have come from the outside (because of the IP involved), but even that existed because it started as a "closet-scale" project with senior developers who insulated themselves from management pressures.
by sigseg1v | 2025-12-31 17:20:52+00:00
Every time I try to have this conversation with anyone I become very aware that most developers have never spent a single microsecond on thinking about licenses or rights when it comes to software.

To me when it's very obviously infuriating that a creator can release something awesome for free, with just a small requirement of copying the license attribution to the output, and then the consumers of it cannot even follow that small request. It should be simple: if you can't follow that then don't use it and don't ingest it and output derivatives of it.

Yet having this discussion with nearly anyone I'm usually met with "what? license? it's OSS. What do you mean I need to do things in order to use it, are you sure?". Tons of people using MIT and distributing binaries but have never copied the license to the output as required. They are simply and blissfully unaware that there is this largely-unenforced requirement that authors care deeply about and LLMs violate en masse. Without understanding this, they think the authors are deranged.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-12-31 17:20:55+00:00
I don't think this way at all. RSU (for public companies) is real, tangible money. Sure, there is some amount of risk involved with it, but it is WAY more tangible than options than can just be diluted if the person with the cap table is feeling ornery that day. The key that makes RSU's real money is their immediate liquidity on award, so you can literally just treat them as cash compensation in this regard if you decide not to hold them.

When you work at BigCorp for an extended period of time, your salary often ends up being majority by RSU as the vest rolls start to stack up
by tsujamin | 2025-12-31 17:21:18+00:00
There’s also API Sets: where DLLs like api-win-blah-1.dll acts as a proxy for another DLL both literally, with forwarder exports, and figuratively, with a system-wide in-memory hashmap between api set and actual DLL.

Iirc this is both for versioning, but also so some software can target windows and Xbox OS’s whilst “importing” the same api-set DLL? Caused me a lot of grief writing a PE dynamic linker once.

https://bookkity.com/article/api-sets
by kridsdale1 | 2025-12-31 17:21:40+00:00
I really like modern Swift. It makes a lot of what this author is complaining about, impossible.

The worst file I ever inherited to work on was the ObjC class for
Instagram’s User Profile page. It looked like it’d been written by a JavaScript fan. There were no types in the whole file, everything was an ‘id’ (aka void*) and there were ‘isKindOfClass’ and null checks all over the place. I wanted to quit when I saw it. (I soon did).
by copirate | 2025-12-31 17:21:49+00:00
But to get 10 blocks ahead you have to withhold blocks before knowing you'll be ahead. If you don't get ahead, you'll likely lose the reward of the blocks you withheld.

So, you have to risk a lot of rewards, and for what potential gain? If you win you get to discard some blocks of others. You don't get more rewards, you just make others earn less (and you push the difficulty down a bit).

I can see how you get a chance to double spend, though. If you want to double spend a transaction with N confirmations, you've to be N+1 blocks ahead in your hidden chain, publish your first transaction, wait for N confirmations on the public chain, and you publish your chain that's still 1 block ahead (and includes your double spend transaction).

Indeed, it's not "51% expensive", but it's still very expensive because of the rewards lost during the failed attempts before you get ahead enough. Actually, it might even be more expensive, because with 51% you're guaranteed to get ahead enough at some point, so you don't really risk your rewards (if you can maintain 51%).
by xg15 | 2025-12-31 17:22:06+00:00
I was thinking about the revenue shift as described in articles like this one: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/nvidia-g...

Arguably, Nvidia has a point, probably more than the other companies, because they really are at the heart of the current buildout gold rush. So it's more actual economics for them than the FOMO it feels like for the other companies.
by dfxm12 | 2025-12-31 17:22:33+00:00
Consolidation of all kinds of media (social, print, TV, radio, etc.) is a big ingredient in this. Another ingredient is the enshitification of the net, along with the value of unfettered collection of user data.

The problem isn't that people are consuming (social) media, it's that everything is owned by so few people. We shouldn't be punished for this by having to submit to even more surveillance.
Show HN: Overlay – Invisible AI Assistant
by ckkampy | 2025-12-31 17:22:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I have built Overlay, a MacOS provides a hidden HUD for AI assistance that only you can see. It is:

-100% hidden from Zoom/Google Meet/Teams by Stealth mode

- Get complex answers and code snippets in a heartbeat by AskAI anywhere on screen by trigger a shortcut

- Can do Screen OCR to feed context if cannot select text

- Instant AI feedback based on what's being said in the meeting by Live Audio, then answer the questions for that instantly.

Hope it helps,
Thank you and have a great 2026!
by yakattak | 2025-12-31 17:22:51+00:00
Windows has been eroding my trust for a decade or so, and I really didn’t like having to make a Microsoft account to setup Windows. However there was that voice in my head whispering “Well, it’s not like you can play games on Linux.” or “See all those tools like Substance Painter and Unreal Engine you like using? Pfff can’t do that on Linux”.

Then the Steam Deck came out, and I was skeptical. I was wrong. Gaming on Linux could happen, it was happening. Proton and the strides made in Wine in the past decade or so have been amazing.

A month ago I installed a few different distros to “try out gaming on Linux”. I was shocked when Cyberpunk with mods worked with a little tinkering. Not only that, but it performed extremely well.

So if you’re on the fence, try it. Also all my tools still work ;).

p.s. Don’t let lack of NVIDIA support stop you if you’ve got an NVIDIA GPU, the latest driver works really well.
by n8cpdx | 2025-12-31 17:23:11+00:00
> Too many bugs. Too many changes. Too little control. Windows 11's reputation might be at its lowest it's ever been as 2025 comes to a close.

That, sadly, also applies almost perfectly to macOS. And yet, as bad as macOS has become, it is still a distant third in the race to become the worst desktop OS.

Very difficult spot to be in when the entire industry is racing to make desktops awful.

Linux starts to look very interesting, but is held back by the lack of good efficient high quality mobile hardware - the only such devices, Macs and snapdragon x elite devices, have poor Linux support.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-31 17:23:21+00:00
It's also in the Handmade crowd, and for a lot of people that's intimately connected to video games. I actually think Handmade's approach is helpful for games in a way it isn't for a lot of other software.

Games are art. The key thing is that you have to actually make it. Handmade encourages people who might make some art to actually make something rather than being daunted by the skill needed for a very sophisticated technology. Handmade is like telling a would-be photographer "You already have a camera on your phone. Point it at things and take pictures of them" rather than "Choose your subject, then you will need to purchase either an SLR or maybe a larger camera, and suitable lenses and a subscription for Photoshop and then take a college course in photo composition"

I don't want to use a text editor made by someone who has no idea what they're doing and learned about rope types last week. A dozen handmade text editors, most not as good as pico, are of no value to anybody.

But I do want to play video games by people who have no idea what they're doing. That's what Blue Prince is, for example. A dozen handmade video games means a dozen chances for an entirely unprecedented new game. It'll be rough around the edges, but novelty is worth a lot.
by ranger_danger | 2025-12-31 17:23:27+00:00
If you share it in such a matter-of-fact, black-and-white manner, I do think it's an attempt to force it as the only way to see a particular issue, which is what I take issue with. There are so many confidently-wrong people in the world, I don't know why people got so used to acting like there can never be any other valid perspectives.

> Nothing happens if someone doesn't like you

Hard disagree, people have been killed just because they were disliked or offended, even if they appear to be a "stranger with zero influence on your reality."

> The fact there are generations of people who equate the feeling of being offended with physical harm is one of the great delusions of modern society.

I think it's because it does actually happen. I was almost punched yesterday just because I parked next to a guy. He was upset I didn't park "literally anywhere else" and was clearly embarrassing his wife and kids by hurling slurs at someone for absolutely no good reason at all.
by mock-possum | 2025-12-31 17:23:29+00:00
Hello baader meinhoff my old friend - while I’m familiar with the convention, I was just introduced formally to the phrase “functional core, imperative shell” the other day, and now here it is again.

“Learn to stop worrying and love the bomb” was definitely a process I had to go through moving from JavaScript to Typescript, but I do mostly agree with the author here wrt convention. Some things, like using type names as additional levels of context - UserUUID and ItemUUID each alias UUID, which in turn is just an alias for String - have occurred to me naturally, even.
by awesan | 2025-12-31 17:23:29+00:00
I installed Linux (an arch-based distro) last month. There have been some minor issues but nothing worse than what I experienced regularly on Windows recently.
My computer feels fast again and when things randomly break I can at least get to the root cause and fix it myself.

I used to quite like Windows, but it has gotten worse every patch day for years now. The pain of learning a new system is not so bad and at least I own my computer now.
by why-o-why | 2025-12-31 17:23:40+00:00
>> I don't think the hospital expects to actually ever get paid what they bill out

OH YES THEY ABSOLUTELY DO!

When I was in-between jobs I had a medical emergency and I was on the ACA around the first year it was offered. I was billed above medicare rates so I was on the hook for ~40k after out of pocket max. They told me this limit is what insurance has to cover but hospitals can still bill above it. First they told me they could work on the prices and asked for my last 5 years tax returns. When they saw that I had dividend payments they said they couldn't help me and I owed them the $40k. I think that was the problem because even though I wasn't working in their mind if I had investments then technically I was not in need so they set up four-year payment plan and paid every penny with no cost reduction.

I probably did something wrong but to this day I didn't know what I would have done differently. The only people I could talk to were the hospital and they only cared about the hospital.
by vvern | 2025-12-31 17:23:46+00:00
About time for the 6th Edition, eh? What would folks include in it?

- Vector databases and hybrid search?

- Object storage for all the things? Lake houses. Parquet and beyond.

- Continuously materialized views? I'm not sure this one has made the splash but I think about Naiad (Materialize) and Noria (Readyset)

- NewSQL went mostly mainstream (Spanner wasn't included in the last one, but there's been more here with things like CockroachDB, TiDB, etc)
by ericmay | 2025-12-31 17:24:42+00:00
Well, there is that. But there is also the fact that they charge you or your insurance company to smooth out other costs like $2,000,000.00 cancer treatment or for people who show up to the hospital, don’t have insurance, and the hospital has to treat them.

I’m reaching the point where I don’t really care if it’s private or public, but what we are doing today is the worst of both worlds. It either needs to be fully private, maybe with mandatory insurance purchase, or it needs to be fully public, though that has its own baggage.
by cryptonector | 2025-12-31 17:24:58+00:00
The reason you're getting downvoted is that what you're saying implies a shit-ton of work for the distros -- that's expensive work that someone has to pay for (but nobody wants to, and think of the cost of opportunity).

But you're not entirely wrong -- as long as you have API compatibility then it's just a rebuild, right? Well, no, because something always breaks and requires attention. The fact is that in the world of open source the devs/maintainers can't be as disciplined about API compat as you want them to be, and sometimes they have to break backwards compatibility for reasons (security, or just too much tech debt and maint load for obsolete APIs). Because every upstream evolves at a different rate, keeping a distro updated is just hard.

I'm not saying that statically linking things and continuing to run the binaries for decades is a good answer though. I'm merely explaining why I think your comment got downvoted.
by gunnarmorling | 2025-12-31 17:25:07+00:00
Assuming JVM installation is not required (to which I agree, it shouldn't be), why would you care which language a CLI tool is written in? I mean, do you even know whether a given binary is implemented in Go, Rust, etc.? I don't see how it makes any meaningful difference from a user perspective.

> Pkl, which is at least built using Graal Native Image, but (IMO) would _still_ have better adoption if it was written in something else.

Why do you think is this?
by carbonguy | 2025-12-31 17:25:48+00:00
To put it further into numbers -

1). Wikipedia does have a citation [1] saying 2,450 gigatonnes of CO2 have been emitted by human activity, of which 42% stayed in the atmosphere and 34% dissolved in the oceans, with the rest already sequestered by plant growth and land use. As we start to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, it will begin to be emitted from the oceans as well; therefore, let's assume we have to recapture all excess atmospheric and oceanic CO2:

:: 2450x10^9 tonnes CO2 x .66 fraction to sequester ~= 1.6x10^12 tonnes CO2.

2) Let's convert the CO2 to something more stable for long-term storage: HDPE.

- Convert mass of CO2 to mass of carbon:

:: 1.6x10^12 tonnes CO2 x 12/44 mass fraction of C in CO2 ~= 4.4x10^11 tonnes C

- Convert mass C to mass HDPE; assume HDPE is effectively (CH2)n. Then:

:: 4.4x10^11 tonnes C x 14/12 mass fraction CH2 to C ~= 5.2x10^11 tonnes HDPE

3) That's a lot of plastic! How much volume? Wikipedia says HDPE is ~930-970 kg/m3; let's be conservative again and take the low figure:

:: 5.2x10^11 tonnes HDPE x 1.0/0.930 m3 per tonne HDPE ~= 5.5x10^11 m3 HDPE

4) Those are cubic meters; how about cubic kilometers?

:: 5.5x10^11 m3 x 1.0/1.0x10^9 km3 per m3 ~= 5.5x10^2 km3

In other words, if you turned all the [excess potentially climate-change impacting] CO2 that humanity has emitted since 1850 into plastic (a process that would certainly emit a large additional CO2 fraction given the industrial buildout required) then we'd end up with about 550 cubic kilometers of the stuff. Coincidentally, that's about the volume of Mount Everest according to an intermediate calculation in [2].

So, a mountain of carbon: more than a pile but less than a mountain range.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphe...

[2] https://www.quora.com/What-would-the-estimated-weight-of-Mou...
by Aloha | 2025-12-31 17:25:59+00:00
I think a valid part of the question of who invented something is "who built the first working device" - describing something in theory and building working device are not the same thing.

AG Bell wasn't the first one to conceptually invent the telephone, he was among the first (along with Elisha Gray) in making practical working telephone and later a practical working telephone system.
by smeeagain2 | 2025-12-31 17:26:32+00:00
You'll learn. One way or another, you'll learn.

My description of the red herring that is Rust stands as written.

I also wasn't a fan of Python or Javascript back in the day, for very sound reasons that your type will always just brush away as meaningless, yet in time these languages have proven to be just as flawed as I always knew they were. And yes, C++ is garbage too, as I've also understood, but you don't want to hear me when I tell you Rust is NOT any kind of solution.

In fact it's a great big joke that is obvious with the least bit of actual analysis. Question: Rust is built on top of LLVM, which is written in which language? ___. Fill in the blank. Hint: it's the language that is supposedly going to be replaced by Rust. lol.

Rust, the language that is so obviously great the only way to put it everywhere is to force it on people; force it into the kernel against big objections from smart engineers, force it into the browser with the power of Google, force it into the heart of Mesa through writing a critical component in it, etc.

Sort of like systemd, right? So obviously great that people have to be forced to use it, until the old guard has died off or been silenced and all that's left is the brainwashed youth who never knew anything different. Same old tactics the liars and crooks always used to force their garbage down on people and make them think it was their own idea.

Always the herd marches in the direction its owners desire, while each individual creature thinks "his" ideas are truly his own and he himself decided which direction he is to travel in.

I've long had the experience of people "suddenly beginning to discover" things I clearly understood on day one, decades ago. I've also long had the experience of never being given any credit for my actual understanding, instead constantly being told I'm wrong, stupid, have no idea what I'm talking about, blah blah. This is exactly why I don't spend much time hanging out with the hoi polloi anymore. (You Are Here.)
by LeFantome | 2025-12-31 17:26:51+00:00
Many corporations are free-riding on the Open Source they use. As most of us are honestly.

But I think people cynically underestimate the value of the contributions corporations do make and fail to understand just how much of the software we enjoy is only possible due to corporate funding.

Igalia may be a good example as most of have are not even familiar with them. But the Linux distro that I use comes from their, the Servo browser is being driven by them, and many other projects benefit from their contributions.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-12-31 17:27:01+00:00
He used this open source engine, it is free. He is almost certainly getting between 60-70% of revenue after distribution fees. His only other expenses are taxes and the other devs he employs and he was solo until the game made like $100 million. Most of the copies sold for $15 so it seems fair to me to say his companies lifetime revenue is close to $10*number of units sold which is close to half a billion dollars. And since the companies expenses are effectively zero profit is the same. If he’s smart with taxes he’s paid 15% corporate tax rate then 15% capital gains rate which comes out to just under 28% so his own lifetime earnings is probably around $360 million.