MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-12-30 16:53:15+00:00
The singular point of debate here has been whether the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ applies to cases where the ‘commons’ are owned, to the exclusion of some people, and nothing else. GitHub certainly is very different from a field, I don’t believe I have failed to acknowledge that. GitHub is even different from Wikipedia in many ways, like parent said. I am arguing those differences, no matter how large, do not matter in terms of whether you can call these a ‘commons’, and I’ve supported that opinion by showing evidence that other people call both GitHub and Wikipedia a ‘digital commons’. If any definition of commons can be used, including privately owned land that is made available to the public, then I think you and I agree completely.

There is a central authority on this topic: the paper by Hardin that coined the phrase. It’s worth a read. He defined ‘tragedy’ to be in the dramatic sense, e.g., a Greek or Shakespeare tragedy:

“We may well call it ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ using the word ‘tragedy’ as the philosopher Whitehead used it: ‘The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorse-less working of things.’”

Hardin did not define ‘commons’, but he used multiple examples of things that are owned to the exclusion of others, and he even pointed out that a bank robber thinks of a bank as a commons. He himself blurred the line of what a commons means, and his actual argument depends only on the idea that commons means something shared and nothing more. In fact, he was making a point about human behavior, and his argument is stronger when ‘commons’ refers to any shared resources that can be exhausted by overuse at all. Hardin would have had a good chuckle over this extremely silly debate.

The actual points behind the phrase ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ were that Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and libertarian thinking, are provably wrong, and that we should abolish the UN’s Universal declaration of human rights, as well as the right to breed freely, because he believes these things will certainly lead to overpopulation of the earth and thus increased human suffering. The only actual ‘commons’ he truly cared about in this paper is the earth’s space and food supply. The question of ownership is wholly irrelevant to phrase.

GitHub adding rules that curtails people does limit some people’s access (that’s the point). How many people it affects I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s especially relevant, but note that in this case one single GitHub user being limited might affect many many people - Homebrew was one of the examples. The tragedy never referred to the magnitude of the problem, as you and GP are assuming. Hardin’s “tragedy” refers to the human character flaw of thinking that shared spaces are preferable to limitations, because he argues that we end up with uncontrolled limitations anyway.
by mothballed | 2025-12-30 16:53:20+00:00
I am not at all a nervous wreck regarding my children but my toddler would definitely not ever let me have a shower in peace even if they were fully satisfied with attention and toys from another caregiver. It definitely depends on the child. Some are just hyper-social and at all times want to be in communication with absolutely everyone in the house, which was definitely not learned trait nor a response of something like no one paying attention to them.
by fiyec30375 | 2025-12-30 16:53:23+00:00
Typescript is ubiquitous in web, and there are some amazing new frameworks that reuse typescript types on the server and client (trpc, tanstack). It's faster (than python), has ergonomic types, and a massive community + npm ecosystem. Bun advances the state of the art for runtime performance (which anthropic just bought and use for Claude code).
by wolfejam | 2025-12-30 16:53:27+00:00
.FAF (Foundational AI-context Format) is a 40-line file that gives any AI instant project context.

This post documents a real build session with Grok where:
- Uploaded one .faf file
- Grok scored it 95/100 and locked in full context
- Built a complete GitHub PR code reviewer
- Zero re-explaining across the entire session
- I found 9 code issues, Grok fixed them, found 1 more, fixed that too

Full Grok conversation: https://x.com/i/grok/share/bWWQ7qHbCjHc2Wx3G9WZUq5ay

Format is open, MIT licensed, works with Claude, Grok, any AI.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-30 16:53:28+00:00
Someone smart said that AI should replace tasks, not jobs.

There are infinite analogies for this whole thing, but it mostly distills down to artisans and craftsmen in my mind.

Artisans build one chair to perfection, every joint is meticulously measured and uses traditional handcrafted Japanese joinery, not a single screw or nail is used unless it's absolutely necessary. It takes weeks to build one, each one is an unique work of art.

It also costs 2000€ for a chair.

Craftsmen optimise their process for output, instead of selling one 2000€ chair a month, they'd rather sell a hundred for 20€. They have templates for cutting every piece, jigs for quickly attaching different components, use screws and nails to speed up the process instead of meticulous handcrafted joinery.

It's all about where you get your joy in "software development". Is it solving problems efficiently or crafting a beautiful elegant expressive piece of code?

Neither way is bad, but pre-LLM both people could do the same tasks. I think that's coming to an end in the near future. The difference between craftsmen and artisans is becoming clearer.

There is a place for people who create that beautiful hyper-optimised code, but in many (most) cases just a craftsman with an agentic LLM tool will solve the customer's problem with acceptable performance and quality in a fraction of the time.
by eru | 2025-12-30 16:53:31+00:00
> Hi, I'm Non-Zero-Sum James, your companion on this exploration of win-win games [...]

That sounds hopelessly naive.

In a zero-sum game, you just min-max and that's it. No hard feelings.

Non-zero-sum games is where you pre-emptively nuke your neighbour.

See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tJQsxD34maYw2g5E4/thomas-c-s...
by kemyd | 2025-12-30 16:53:31+00:00
My guess is they had to sell to keep the lights on (similar to Windsurf).

They’re reportedly at ~$100M ARR, implying about $8.3–8.5M in monthly revenue (ARR = last month * 12).

At the same time, they claim to have processed 147T+ tokens. For context, pricing that volume on something like Sonnet 4.5 would come out to roughly $500M in API costs. They likely offset a chunk of that with open models, but for higher-quality outputs, they’re still paying meaningful amounts to Claude / OpenAI / Google.

Hard to make those numbers work without a lot of capital or an exit.
by dilly-dally | 2025-12-30 16:53:31+00:00
The more articles written like this only reflect the inevitable. This is not an era of slow progress which may have supported the authors opinion. This era is a rapid replacement of what was once dominated by masters of one who edged out others and arrogantly tried to hold onto their perceived positions of all knowing. There will always be those types unfortunately, but when the masters of one realize theyve wasted time stalling the inevitable, instead of accepting and guiding the path forward and opening the door to a broader audience, you will see a lot more articles like this which are a clear signal to many of us that theyre simply doing and saying too much trying to hold on to their perceived worth.
by collingreen | 2025-12-30 16:53:33+00:00
Hey yresting!

Look at all these comments chiming in with advice or similar stories. No way to tell how useful they are for you in particular but pretty neat how many people responded to your personal question outreach on a tech forum.

I don't have advice for you but I (and apparently lots of other folks here) feel for you and want good things for you just because you're a person and I think that's nice.

The holidays can be pretty depressing but we're almost through and I think you'll be ok.

I don't like to overpromise and I'm busy as hell but if you want another surface level friend (or at least some candid feedback) via email I'm game (hn @ <my username>.com). You mentioned this isn't really missing in your life so no worries but if you're feeling like the world is closing in maybe it can help.

Good luck out there. You've got this.
by kbolino | 2025-12-30 16:53:36+00:00
In what way does Python have more null safety than Go? Using None will cause exceptions in basically all the same places using nil will cause panics in Go, and Python similarly lacks the usual null-safe operators like traversal (?.), coalescing (??), etc.

You can abuse the falsity of None to do things like `var or ""`, but this ground gets real shaky when real bools get involved.
by stefanlindbohm | 2025-12-30 16:54:05+00:00
”The company” is not one company. The infrastructure manager (DB InfraGo in Germany) is managing tracks on behalf of the state. Operators (a regional operator in the case of this article) run as many trains as they want/are allowed, which in practice is more than the system can handle reliably. There are laws regulating how track access is awarded, so even when a DB group operator runs on tracks managed by DB InfraGo there is no single ”company” that makes a certain promise. The remedy is political either way, either change how track access is awarded to limit the number of trains allowed or increase funding for added capacity and maintenance.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-30 16:54:23+00:00
Labor shortages abound in the US military. It is slowly approaching paper tiger status, unless we're talking about delivering long range ordinance. The US can engage in a small handful of conflicts at the same time; it cannot take on the world. The Coast Guard didn't have enough staff to commandeer an oil tanker near Venezuela recently. Total global US military headcount is ~2.6M as of this comment, ~1.14M on US soil.

China can already detect and track stealth aircraft using a combination of ground based passive radar and StarLink signal, as well as satellite reconnaissance. Europe could have this capability whenever they're ready to spend and, in the case of a satellite, lift to orbit.

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/12/24/u-s-hunts-sanctioned-t...

https://www.stripes.com/branches/coast_guard/2024-03-06/coas...

https://www.gao.gov/military-readiness

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-...

https://usafacts.org/articles/is-military-enlistment-down/

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/06/6-facts-a...
by freehorse | 2025-12-30 16:54:34+00:00
Similar here. When I pirated I did not have the extra money to buy the games anyway, so I would not have bought them. I would also rent a bunch from a video game store, when this was actual a thing back then, which was much cheaper. And a couple that came with pc magazines. Not sure how that worked in the context of the video game industry, but anyway downloading a full game over these internet speeds was a pain.

Once I was more economically stable, I did not download pirated games anymore, and I even bought a bunch that I had played and really liked, even if I barely played them again.

I am not putting any moral stance on this, I was not entitled to play anything without money to pay, but my point is that for me a lack of option to pirate these games would not have implied me paying for them. Probably I would have done something else with my time.
Show HN: Botchat – a privacy-preserving, multi-bot AI chat tool
by leooodias | 2025-12-30 16:54:39+00:00
This started as a hobby project, curious if others find it useful. Feedback welcome!

botchat is a privacy-preserving, multi-bot chat tool that lets you interact with multiple AI models simultaneously.

Give bots personas, so they look at your question from multiple angles. Leverage the strengths of different models in the same chat. And most importantly, protect your data.

botchat never stores your conversations or attachments on any servers and, if you are using our keys (the default experience), your data is never retained by the AI provider for model training.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-30 16:55:33+00:00
It's not something that climatologists and meteorologists are unaware of. Even for longer-running weather stations you can get a heat island effect if they're in a city and it's built up over time. So while I can't say exactly why you got the result you did with this specific query and dataset it is something that is taken into account when analyzing this kind of data.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-30 16:56:00+00:00
> Career being the core of one's identity is so ingrained in society

In AMERICAN society. Over there "what do you do?" is in the first 3 questions people ask each other when they meet.

I've known people for 20 years and I don't have the slightest clue what they do for a living, it's never came up. We talk about other things - their profession isn't a part of their personality.
by bloppe | 2025-12-30 16:56:30+00:00
> The current Vibe coding systems can do the full pipeline.

For small and relatively simple projects, sure. In codebases that are either large, complex, or fairly novel, I've been consistantly disappointed by the hands-off approach.

There are plenty of small, relatively simple projects out there. Lots of websites and cookie cutter apps to make. But that's never been the stuff I wanted to work on anyway.

I use Claude code constantly, but it's not nearly as reliable as any of the colleagues I've worked with.
by eru | 2025-12-30 16:57:10+00:00
Your argument would at most prove that you can't have a positive sum. But it doesn't say anything about not having a negative sum.

We CAN needlessly increase entropy without that benefiting anyone. It's easy.

The sum doesn't have to be zero.

And, of course, once you agree that the sum can go negative. Then we can work on trying to avoid that. Game theory doesn't actually care all that much about any finite offset. Whether the maximum we can reach is 0 or ten quadrillion, it's all the same to the theory.
by cowpig | 2025-12-30 16:57:16+00:00
> energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain

Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system.

Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth?
by jerf | 2025-12-30 16:57:34+00:00
Yes, not having a length along with the string was a mistake. It dates from an era where every byte was precious and the thought of having two bytes instead of one for length was a significant loss.

I have long wondered how terrible it would have been to have some sort of "varint" at the beginning instead of a hard-coded number of bytes, but I don't have enough experience with that generation to have a good feel for it.
by xtracto | 2025-12-30 16:57:35+00:00
Sound (oss, alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire...), bluetooth, WiFi are eternal problematic Linux paper cuts.

As always It is Not Linux Fault, but it is Linux Problem.

It's one of the reasons why I moved to OSX + Linux virtual machine. I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the hardware quality of a 128GB unified RAM MacBookPro M4 Max is way beyond anything else in the market.
by asimovDev | 2025-12-30 16:57:38+00:00
I often catch myself in the same feeling and now I am wondering if other stuff I am doing pisses someone else off. Like having plastic strips on my monitor I bought a year ago or the fact that the motor cable of my standing desk is not managed in any way (the clips detached over half a year ago and I haven't bothered routing it again) and just dangles there
by merlinrabens | 2025-12-30 16:59:22+00:00
I built this because I was tired of context-switching between image generation APIs.

Different providers excel at different things:
- DALL-E 3 → text rendering
- BFL FLUX → photorealism, 4K
- Ideogram → typography, logos
- Leonardo → artistic/fantasy
- Recraft → vector output, #1 ELO ranked

The plugin lets Claude pick the best provider automatically based on the prompt. Ask for a "product photo" and it routes to FLUX. Ask for a "logo with text" and it routes to Ideogram.

It also has automatic fallbacks - if one provider hits rate limits or errors, it tries the next best option.

Install (in Claude Code):

/plugin marketplace add shipdeckai/claude-skills
/plugin install image-gen@shipdeckai/claude-skills

10 providers total: OpenAI, BFL, Stability AI, Ideogram, Google Gemini, FAL, Leonardo, Recraft, Replicate, ClipDrop.

MIT licensed. Happy to answer questions about the architecture or provider selection logic.
by xtracto | 2025-12-30 16:59:39+00:00
Lemmings Revolutions. Apparently to run in something else that is not Windows 95/98/Me requires some unofficial .EXE patch that you could download from some shady website. The file is now nowehre to be found.

It's a great game, unfortunately right now I am not able to play it anymore :( even though I have the original CD.

Unfortunately, Wine is of no help here :(

Also original Commandos games.
by rpastuszak | 2025-12-30 17:00:08+00:00
I'd say “wasteful” diversity move == woke in this context, not sure if that's milder. Just another distraction thrown at us to keep us at each other's throats. (+ keeping better alignment with the carrot man's branding)

Psychoanalysing politicians aside, serif fonts used to be considered more legible, but that doesn't hold any more that much (e.g. much of research shows that people tend to underestimate familiarity when assessing legibility).
by zeeb | 2025-12-30 17:00:32+00:00
Mandatory Neal Stephenson article in Wired on subsea cables [0], as previously discussed [1]. Also now available in the original magazine thanks to Archive.org [2].

[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30342302

[2] https://archive.org/details/wired-magazine-04.12-1996-decemb...
by ImPrajyoth | 2025-12-30 17:00:58+00:00
you are technically right (the best kind of right). i am running in userspace, so i cant replace the actual thread scheduling logic in Ring 0 without writing a driver and BSODing my machine.

think of this more as a High-Level Governor. The NTOS scheduler decides which thread runs next, but this LLM decides if that process deserves to exist at all.

basically; NTOS tries to be fair to every process. BrainKernel overrides that fairness with judgment. if i suspend a process, i have effectively vetoed the scheduler.
by mrkeen | 2025-12-30 17:01:29+00:00
It's not that shared-xor-mutate magically solves everything, it's that shared-and-mutate magically breaks everything.

Same thing with goto and pointers. Goto kills structured programming and pointers kill memory safety. We're doing fine without both.

Use transactions when you want to synchronise between threads. If your language doesn't have transactions, it probably can't because it already handed out shared mutation, and now it's too late to put the genie in the bottle.

> This, we realized, is just part and parcel of an optimistic TM system that does in-place writes.

[1] https://joeduffyblog.com/2010/01/03/a-brief-retrospective-on...
by hackandthink | 2025-12-30 17:01:57+00:00
"Poland, with the tacit backing of London and Paris, refused transit rights to Soviet forces even to defend Czechoslovakia"

Mr. Sachs could have elaborated:

"Other East European countries were Germany’s allies, and indeed Poland and Hungary gladly took part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia."

https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/javais-toujours-raison
by nickthegreek | 2025-12-30 17:01:58+00:00
In this case it does. I use that same spot next to eh lake to rest with my wife and watch the ducks and appreciate nature. But then you can into the public area, changed it and added furniture and even a fireplace! Treating it like private land owned by you and then you get upset when others use it. There is an inherent disrespect and narcissism in the example you provided.
by dkarl | 2025-12-30 17:02:05+00:00
I'd love to replace Python with something simple, expressive, and strongly typed that compiles to native code. I have a habit of building little CLI tools as conveniences for working with internal APIs, and you wouldn't think you could tell a performance difference between Go and Python for something like that, but you can. After a year or so of writing these tools in Go, I went back to Python because the LOC difference is stark, but every time I run one of them I wish it was written in Go.

(OCaml is probably what I'm looking for, but I'm having a hard time getting motivated to tackle it, because I dread dealing with the tooling and dependency management of a 20th century language from academia.)
by zahlman | 2025-12-30 17:02:12+00:00
> But the nice part is that both of those work, and you can pick whichever one you prefer.

Yep. And so does the pyenv approach (which I understand involves permanently adding a relative path to $PATH, wherein the system might place a stub executable that invokes the venv associated with the current working directory).

And so do hand-made subshell-based approaches, etc. etc.

In "development mode" I use my activation-script-based wrappers. When just hacking around I generally just give the path to the venv's python explicitly.
by pydry | 2025-12-30 17:02:27+00:00
The thing I find interesting is that there is trillions of dollars in valuations hinging upon this question and yet the appetite to spend a little bit of money to repeat this study and then release the results publicly is apparently very low.

It reminds me of global warming where on one side of the debate there some scientists with very little money running experiments and on the other side there were some ridiculously wealthy corporations publicly poking holes in those experiments but who secretly knew they were valid since the 1960s.
by keepamovin | 2025-12-30 17:02:29+00:00
Community, All the HN belong to you. When I made HN Made of Primes I realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and this is it. Have Hacker News on your device.

Go to this repo (https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's your hands. That's my Year End gift to you all. Thank you for a wonderful year, have happy and wonderful 2026. make something of it.
Show HN: Squirreling: a browser-native SQL engine
by platypii | 2025-12-30 17:03:33+00:00
I made a small (~9 KB), open source SQL engine in JavaScript built for interactive data exploration. Squirreling is unique in that it’s built entirely with modern async JavaScript in mind and enables new kinds of interactivity by prioritizing streaming, late materialization, and async user-defined functions. No other database engine can do this in the browser.

More technical details in the post. Feedback welcome.
by clrflfclrf | 2025-12-30 17:03:36+00:00
> For example, Christians turning a blind eye to certain negative character traits of God as he appears in the old testament.

If I were to extend your analogy, the problem in modern world has become aggresive. E.g. you have committed a crime or fraud. Everyone else has proved decisively and beyond doubt that you have committed fraud such that it has become common knowledge. yet the justice system isn't acting. In a sense, you are taunting and teasing me, "what you gonna do about it?" This is inviting violence. The guy killing insurance company CEO has exactly this line of thinking.