MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Covenant0028 | 2025-12-05 02:23:06+00:00
I'll quote what the person I responded to said:

> because most companies will make decisions based on time/effort/profitability, and because client-side anticheat is stupid simple and cheap, that's what they go with. Why waste their own server resources, when they can waste the user's?

And my comment was a response to that statement. In context of that statement, companies are indeed choosing to prioritise their commercial interests in a way that increases the risk to the computers of their customers.

> Not to mention these abstract "the company" positions completely ignore all the passionate people who actually make video games

Irrelevant. Companies and their employees are two different distinct entities and a statement made about one does not automatically implicate the other. Claiming, for example, that Ubisoft enables a consistent culture of sexual harassment does not mean random employees of that company are automatically labeled as harassers.

Coming to anti-cheat, go ahead and fight them all you want. That's not a problem. Demanding the right to introduce a security backdoor into your customer's machines in order to do that, is the problem.
by WalterBright | 2025-12-05 02:23:36+00:00
One physics exam question I remember was derive Maxwell's Equations from the starting point of presuming the existence of magnetic monopoles. This sounds like an intractable problem, but it turned out that if you really understood how they were derived, all you had to do was switch out the charge monopoles with the magnetic monopoles, and it was a piece of cake.

A similar exam problem in AMA95 was to derive the hyperbolic transforms. The trick there was to know how the Fourier transforms (based on sine/cosine) were derived, and just substitute in sinh/cosh.

If you were a formula plugger or just memorized facts, you'd be dead in the water.
by urban_strike | 2025-12-05 02:23:46+00:00
I've seen that in some cases the definition of mental health will explicitly score against things like "lacks close relationships" or "does not seek companionship". So it always seems to me a bit circular to just assert "being more social is more mentally healthy" when the definition of mental health bakes in "being very social".

If I were to define mental health to include "desires and enjoys spending lengths of time in solitude", then I could assert "Humans as a species crave solitude, mental health is shown to directly correlate with the drive and ability to be alone."
by saghm | 2025-12-05 02:24:33+00:00
When it comes to our ability to write bug-free code, I feel like humans are not actually not that good at writing bug-free code. We just don't have any better way of producing software than that, and software is useful. This doesn't mean we're particularly good at it though, just that it's hard to motivate people to spend effort up front to avoid bugs when the cost of them is easy to ignore in the short term when they're not obvious. I feel like the mindset that languages that try to make them more apparent up front (which I honestly would not include Go as one of) are somehow getting in the way of us is pretty much exactly the opposite of what's needed, especially in the systems programming space (which also does not really include Go in my mind).
by cjbgkagh | 2025-12-05 02:24:34+00:00
Thankfully minor injuries.

A thermoplastic in an engine cowling is insane. It’s crazy that this was being sold the supplier should have known better, as should the buyer. 3D printing can be used to make a fiberglass or carbon fiber mold which is already a lot of the work of making the part.

It would be interesting to know what filament was used, in theory some high temp filament could be suitable but I would be nervous putting those on a car let alone a plane.

Edit: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69297a4e345e3...

The actual report includes the important details, ABS-CF which they thought was safe because they underestimated the glass transition temperature of epoxy fiberglass.
by samarthr1 | 2025-12-05 02:24:58+00:00
This makes me feel that peak car was 2010 ish, when, when engines were powerful, cheap, and not too polluting, but also not overly complex.

Spare parts were small, cheap, and easily accessible too (atleast for my toyota)

I dread being forced to upgrade, not out of disdain for the environment, but the fact that I will spend more money, on a less reliable, less "mine" car, and more something big daddy government wants.
by dmix | 2025-12-05 02:25:24+00:00
> Prompt and voluntary cooperation with law enforcement on child safety issues, including UK law enforcement, is what really matters for children’s safety online. That work happens quietly and non-publicly with officials who are tasked with performing it, namely, the police. My client will not be working with you on that important work because your agency is a censorship agency, not a law enforcement agency. Ofcom lacks the competence and the jurisdiction to do the work that actually matters in this space.

Well said
by jfoster | 2025-12-05 02:25:39+00:00
I think it continues to be under-appreciated how much of a lead Tesla still has in EVs. Even BMW can't make something that is practical.

First people said "competition is coming" for about a decade. Now the competition has finally half arrived, but it's still so far behind. Perhaps the closest is BYD, but most BYD drivers would prefer to be driving a Tesla.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-05 02:25:45+00:00
> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts. I have no clue if there's any price fixing going on like there was a few decades ago—that's something conspiracy theorists can debate—but the problem is there's only a few companies producing all the world's memory supplies.

LE should investigate as this concerns us all. However, I really don't have faith this current administration would criminally investigate this. Maybe the next one will, if there's going to be one.
by bluGill | 2025-12-05 02:26:12+00:00
In the case of the oil pull tractor they needed to run the tractor much hotter than water boils - even if they had known modern antifreeze it still boils too hot. They also didn't know to make modern radiators - they usee very large radiators to make up for lack of surface area. (They also used exhaust to pull air through the radiator instead of a fan). All in all a very ingenious design - but there is good reason they don't make them like that anymore. (My 1939 is a lot more modern - and it lacks electric start)
by nu11ptr | 2025-12-05 02:26:26+00:00
I disagree. I've been writing heavy Rust for 5 years, and there are many tasks for which what you say is true. The problem is Rust is a low level language, so there is often ceremony you have to go through, even if it doesn't give you value. Simple lifetimes aren't too bad, but between that and trait bounds on some one else traits that have 6 or 7 associated types, it can get hairy FAST. Then consider a design that would normally have self referential structs, or uses heavy async with pinning, async cancellation, etc. etc.

I do agree that OFTEN you can get good velocity, but there IS a cost to any large scale program written in Rust. I think it is worth it (at least for me, on my personal time), but I can see where a business might find differently for many types of programs.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-05 02:27:12+00:00
> And for cases involving licenses make some of it people qualified to hold the license.

Cases involving licenses (rather than cases involving torts or crimes by licensed professionals, which are not the same thing) already do, generally; they aren't held in courts, they are held by licensing boards who are themselves composed of licensed professionals in the same profession.

> And the lawyers would hate that.

Legal malpractice being tried to a jury of lawyers? Lawyers would love that.
by lisbbb | 2025-12-05 02:27:58+00:00
How much are the expense ratios on those etfs you chose, though? I mean, Vanguard, Fidelity, Blackrock, and others have extremely low cost funds and etfs and it has been shown year after year and decade after decade that you can't beat their average returns over the long term. Indexing works for a reason. Beating something by 1%? It's not even worth it if your costs and taxes are higher than that.
by netcraft | 2025-12-05 02:28:17+00:00
couldn't have said it better myself.

Data should be data, queryable, relational. So often I have had to change enums into lookup tables - or worse, duplicate them into lookup tables - because now we need other information attached to the values. Labels, descriptions, colors, etc.

My biggest recommendation though is that if you have a lookup table like this, make the value you would have made an enum not just unique, but _the primary key_. Now all the places that you would be putting an ID have the value just like they would with an enum, and oftentimes you wont need to join. The FK makes sure its valid. The other information is a join away if you need it.

I do wish though that there were more ways to denote certain tables as configuration data vs domain data, besides naming conventions or schemas.

Edit to add: I will say there is one places where I have begrudgingly used enums and thats where we have used something like prisma to get typescript types from the schema. It is useful to have types generated for these values. Of course you can do your own generation of those values based on data, but there is a fundamental difference there between "schema" and "data".
by mrandish | 2025-12-05 02:29:11+00:00
Yes, there are several cheap Home Assistant-compatible devices to do dry contact closure and/or a 5v pulse. The Shelly 1 is a popular turn key Wifi-based option but there are wired and Zigbee options as well.

Many come with (or can be OTA flashed with) Tasmota or ESP Home open source firmware, ensuring you'll continue to control them forever locally and/or via your cloud API of choice - which I highly recommend doing. I built a new house with 75 ESP 8266-based in-wall WiFi dimmer switches ($19 ea) plus dozens of other wall plugs, power strips, sensors, etc - all running Tasmota. It's great because each Tasmota device powers up and works as expected as a 'dumb' device. The dimmers always dim and the wall plugs/power strips have physical on/off buttons that always work.

But they'll also connect with each other via Wifi in ad-hoc device groups (if I enable that option) and will follow whatever rules I set in their on-device config - like "you are Device #3 in Group #2 and you follow-the-leader of Device #5". And they do this even if there's no Wifi router active. If there IS a Wifi router available, then they'll log on to the local-only subnet I've limited them to and work under local and/or cloud Home Assistant control with infinite automation possibilities. So it's an open, flexible, secure system that can be maximally "Smart" but has layered fallbacks which guarantee as long as there's 110v power - the lights, plugs and other devices always fucking work.

IMHO, open source with layered dumb --> local --> any-cloud-API-you-like is the only sane home automation architecture. There's no way I'm ever permanently installing some for-profit company's opaque, remotely updatable system into my home's walls. Even if they don't turn evil like Chamberlain did, it would be crazy to leave the basic functionality of my house's lights, door locks, HVAC, sensors, etc at the mercy of some vendor bug, broadband outage or regional S3 'mis-configuration'.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-05 02:29:50+00:00
I wouldn't understate BYD, but Tesla did play a massive role in helping build China's domestic EV ecosystem because Tesla also worked on building a supplier ecosystem in China, which also helped incubate much of the Chinese ecosystem.

That said, BYD is outcompeting most other Chinese players as well, and it can be argued that this is due to the fact that BYD is also a private sector player unlike most of it's domestic competitors.

The only competitor in China that can compete against BYD is SAIC - an SOE owned by Shanghai's government.

That said, the EV glut has become a significant headache from a local government fiscal perspective - the majority of Chinese automotive companies are owned by state and local governments - a large number of whom ended up spending eye bleeding amounts of yuan on EVs despite no competitive advantage, and it's these state and local governments that are now increasingly holding the bag - which Chinese market regulators have increasingly raised red flags about [0] (and I myself foreshadowed on HN a couple times [1][2]).

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/terminal/T3V4AWMB2SJX

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275593

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275541
by saghm | 2025-12-05 02:30:10+00:00
Yeah, this is very confusing to me. I don't see how someone can conflate Go implicitly deciding whether to promote a pointer to the heap based on escape analysis without any way for the programmer to tell other than having to replicate the logic that's happening at runtime with needing to explicitly use one on the APIs that literally exist for the sole purpose of allocating on the heap without either fundamentally misunderstanding something or intentionally being misleading.
Ask HN: How do LLMs perform in the low-level space?
by kode-targz | 2025-12-05 02:31:17+00:00
Low-level coders, how do LLMs perform in your profession? How much have tools like copilot and claude impacted your job and workflow? Do you see them taking over more and more of the space in the near future? What are your thoughts on its use in the low-level space?

I'm a student in computer science. I'm passionate about all things low-level, especially anything that touches the OS, and embedded too. I love C, Rust, functional languages and lisps. However, everyone around me (webdevs, mostly) tells me all of the above is useless (they're right about the lisps at least, sadly), i should just stick to python and data science or ML, that no humans will be writing code in the future, and all this low-level stuff is from the stoneage and is useless in today's world. If I don't learn ML or data, then I should at least do something creative like frontend webdev. But I hate webdev.

I genuinely can't tell what's real anymore. In my head, the programming roles that will be taken over the fastest will be webdev, especially frontend work (except UX). To my inexperienced eyes, that looks like the easiest, most automatable area of programming (aside from just writing small utilities and scripts). Embedded, compilers, OSdev, etc. should be the last to go, if anything does actually go away (in its current state, i doubt AI can do much except make it harder for juniors to get a first job). Those are "real" programming in my eyes.

But I'm just a student. A first-year, no less. The professionals in my life, people who have worked in IT for decades (I haven't had my first job yet, not even an internship) tell me the complete opposite. Am I just biased? Should I really just give up on what I like? Doing something you love is cool but I'd like to also put food on the table. I want to invest my time in school towards something that won't be completely useless in the future.
by xpe | 2025-12-05 02:31:23+00:00
Self-aware people are mindful about what "future them" might do in various scenarios, and they plan ahead to tamp down their worse tendencies. I don't keep a raspberry cheesecake in my fridge, even though that would maximize a certain kind of freedom (the ability to eat cheesecake whenever I want). I much prefer the freedom that comes with not being tempted, as it leads to better outcomes on things I really care about.

In a sense, it is a powerful kind of freedom to choose a language that protects us from the statistically likely blunders. I prefer a higher-level kind of freedom -- one that provides peace of mind from various safety properties.

This comment is philosophical -- interpret and apply it as you see fit -- it is not intended be interpreted as saying my personal failure modes are the same as yours. (e.g. Maybe you don't mind null pointer exceptions in the grand scheme of things.)

Random anecdote: I still have a fond memory of a glorious realization in Haskell after a colleague told me "if you design your data types right, the program just falls into place".
by lowbloodsugar | 2025-12-05 02:31:41+00:00
So I've got a crate I built that has a type that uses unsafe. Couple of things I've learned. First, yes, my library uses unsafe, but anyone who uses it doesn't have to deal with that at all. It behaves like a normal implementation of its type, it just uses half the memory. Outside of developing this one crate, I've never used unsafe.

Second, unsafe means the author is responsible for making it safe. Safe in rust means that the same rules must apply as unsafe code. It does not mean that you don't have to follow the rules. If one instead used it to violate the rules, then the code will certainly cause crashes.

I can see that some programmers would just use unsafe to "get around a problem" caused by safe rust enforcing those rules, and doing so is almost guaranteed to cause crashes. If the compiler won't let you do something, and you use unsafe to do it anyway, there's going to be a crash.

If instead we use unsafe to follow the rules, then it won't crash. There are tools like Miri that allow us to test that we haven't broken the rules. The fact that Miri did find two issues in my crate shows that unsafe is difficult to get right. My crate does clever bit-tricks and has object graphs, so it has to use unsafe to do things like having back pointers. These are all internal, and you can use the crate in safe rust. If we use unsafe to implement things like doubly-linked lists, then things are fine. If we use unsafe to allow multiple threads to mutate the same pointers (Against The Rules), then things are going to crash.

The thing is, when you are programming in C or C++, it's the same as writing unsafe rust all the time. In C/C++, the "pocket of unsafe code" is the entire codebase. So sure, you can write safe C, like I can write safe "unsafe rust". But 99% of the code I write is safe rust. And there's no equivalent in C or C++.
by netsharc | 2025-12-05 02:32:16+00:00
A world full of humans being guided by computers would be... dystopian.

Although I imagine a version where AI drives humans who mindlessly trust them to be more vegetarian or take public transport, helping save the environment (an ironic wish since AI is burning the planet). Of course "AI" is being guided by their owners, so there'd be a camp who uses Grok who'll still drive SUVs, eat meat, and be racist idiots...
by mikeyouse | 2025-12-05 02:32:51+00:00
And the Trump administration has leapfrogged all of the 'asking' on 1st amendment issues -- they're actively suing news stations, entering shake-down agreements with colleges about what they're allowed to teach, deporting green card holders for their political opinions, cancelling already-awarded research grants based purely on the topic being studied ... anyone pretending like this is remotely comparable to anything that happened under Biden isn't a serious person.
by Eyoz | 2025-12-05 02:33:35+00:00
I built a life tracking app that turns your daily experiences into retro thermal printer-style receipts!

Features: • 13+ life scenario logs (mood, food, movies, fitness, etc.)

• Data visualization and quantification

• Retro thermal printer aesthetics with Fusion Pixel font

• One-click export to image

• Bilingual support (Chinese/English)

• Responsive design

Tech stack: React 19, Vite 6, Tailwind CSS 3

Live demo: https://life-logger.netlify.app

GitHub: https://github.com/Eyozy/life-loggernk]

Would love to hear your feedback!
by 0manrho | 2025-12-05 02:33:39+00:00
> To me, the big news here is that ~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware decoding

Where did it say that?

> AV1 powers approximately 30% of all Netflix viewing

Is admittedly a bit non-specific, it could be interpreted as 30% of users or 30% of hours-of-video-streamed, which are very different metrics. If 5% of your users are using AV1, but that 5% watches far above the average, you can have a minority userbase with an outsized representation in hours viewed.

I'm not saying that's the case, just giving an example of how it doesn't necessarily translate to 30% of devices using Netflix supporting AV1.

Also, the blog post identifies that there is an effective/efficient software decoder, which allows people without hardware acceleration to still view AV1 media in some cases (the case they defined was Android based phones). So that kinda complicates what "X% of devices support AV1 playback," as it doesn't necessarily mean they have hardware decoding.
by komali2 | 2025-12-05 02:33:54+00:00
I think it might be because I'm autistic but can you help me understand why it's in bad taste to ask it? I see YouTube videos of people talking about how they became really wealthy or showing off their houses or cars, and this person was talking about his bank account directly and has mentioned the 3 comma thing before, so I'm a bit confused why it's not ok to ask more about it.

You did mention something I didn't think of which is lifetimes, I guess if someone wanted to guarantee an ultra wealthy lifestyle for all generations of their kids and grandkids forever, that would be a reason to hoard wealth into the hundreds of millions.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-05 02:34:25+00:00
I think Nissan is a bit underrated here. I’m leasing an Ariya which has been great (including its charging curve, which is better than much of the competition) and feels more premium than you’d expect from the brand (to the point that the top trim is sometimes referred to as a “baby Infiniti”) with things like dual pane windows to cut down on road noise, as well as a proper heat pump where many still only have resistive heaters.

The 2026 Leaf takes many of the Ariya’s good qualities and one ups them at one of the lowest price points in the industry.

And both can be parked in spots that no model of Tesla will fit. The 3, Y, etc aren’t even a consideration for me since they won’t fit my garage. Tesla badly needs a proper small hatch option.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-12-05 02:35:15+00:00
Basic economics. If value is based on scarcity of a resource, and you lift the bottleneck that makes the resource scarce, the value is reduced.

In the case of software, the resource is time (you could build/host/operate that software yourself, but it takes a heck of lot more time than you're willing to spend so you trade money for the product instead), and you can't reduce the scarcity of time.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-05 02:35:33+00:00
I think people put way too much weight in the distinction between kids and adults. Sure pre-schoolers will be in a very limited place bilologically, but if we're talking 9~10yo and later, the core difference will be social experience and overall knowledge.

To put it in perspective, some people will still live their all life in an institution dictating their life rhythm, potentially setting how they dress and where they live, what they eat. That's how working in a factory line and getting a place in a company dormitory will be like. We basically modeled school according to that model, not by first looking at kids and thinking long and hard at their biological needs and how to best match their needs. School uniforms looking like adult cosplay version is in line with this as well.

> Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc.

We expect kids to get their work down, pass the scheduled tests, act according to the ~company~school rules.

I'd argue generic schools have always tried to just mold kids into what society wants as adults, and only a few places genuinely focus on sheer education. But even under the "mold the kids" premise, expecting kids to deal with smartphones, digital communication and SNS all at once at 18 is just a recipe for disaster. Understanding how to do what they're expected to, while having access and properly using all of those is probably the most basic life skill they absolutely need in this day and age.