MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dataflow | 2025-12-04 00:07:05+00:00
> There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?"

Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.

> Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.

I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the price you might sell your item for; the market is the one responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling -- I'm just saying it's not gambling, and so it makes sense that people react to it differently.

For items that you can't trade (like where the platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not gambling.
by spopejoy | 2025-12-04 00:07:37+00:00
> made a change that seemed right at first glance, maybe even passed code review, but fell apart completely when it came time to build on top of it

Maybe I'm not understanding you're point, but this is the kind of thing that happens in software teams all the time and is one of those "that's why they call it work" realities of the job.

If something "seems right/passed review/fell apart" then that's the reviewer's fault right? Which happens, all the time! Reviewers tend to fall back to tropes and "is there tests ok great" and whatever their hobbyhorses tend to be, ignoring others. It's ok because "at least it's getting reviewed" and the sausage gets made.

If AI slashed the amount of time to get a solution past review, it buys you time to retroactively fix too, and a good attitude when you tell it that PR 1234 is why we're in this mess.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-04 00:07:54+00:00
I also hoped it would crash and burn. The real value added usecases will remain. The overhyped crap won't.

But the shockwave will cause a huge recession and all those investors that put up trillions will not take their losses. Rich people never get poorer. One way or another us consumers will end up paying for their mistakes. Either by huge inflation, job losses, energy costs, service enshittification whatever. We're already seeing the memory crisis having huge knock on effects with next year's phones being much more expensive. That's one of the ways we are going to be paying for this circus.

I really see value in it too, sure. But the amount of investment that goes into it is insane. It's not that valuable by far. LLMs are not good for everything and the next big thing is still a big question mark. AI is dragged in by the hair into usecases where it doesn't belong. The same shit we saw with blockchains, but now on a world crashing scale. It's very scary seeing so much insanity.

But anyway whatever I think doesn't matter. Whatever happens will happen.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-04 00:08:05+00:00
> Who is Margolis, and are they happy that OP publicly announced accessing all their confidential files?

Google tells me they are a NY law firm specializing in Real Estate and Immigration law. There are other firms with Margolis in the name too. Kinda doesn't matter; see below.

I doubt that they are thrilled to have their name involved in this, but that is covered by the US constitution's protections on free press.
by bmacho | 2025-12-04 00:09:23+00:00
Here is an online renderer and the description: https://asciimath.org/

The rules are basically the same as LaTeX, with saner symbol names, support for fractions, \ is not needed before symbols and () can be used instead of {}.

> Supposing that the parentheses aren't necessary, as implied by your edit: how does AsciiMath determine that e^y isn't in the numerator in "e^y dy/dx"

It seems to me that dx,dy,dz,dt behave like numbers, single letter variables and symbols (probably they are symbols, but not listed for some reason). Just as LaTeX doesn't need {} parentheses for numbers, single letter variables and symbols, AsciiMath allows omitting them too.

So `/` captures a single number/symbol/variable left to it, and that is `dy`. But if there was `du` for example it would only capture u, and you would need to put du between parentheses.
by darkteflon | 2025-12-04 00:09:31+00:00
I don’t. My comment makes it clear that I consider editorial oversight to be the most likely culprit.

As for the “why”: as an in-context quote it’s fine; out of context - as an article heading - there’s a high chance that the reader will understand it literally and be shocked by it. As pointed out in the other comments. A heading that is misleadingly designed to shock is the definition of clickbait. If, as I said, it was intentional.
by jemmyw | 2025-12-04 00:09:52+00:00
> they need a Land Rover Defender

This is an English thing and I don't really get it, despite being English originally. Our English neighbour imported their Land Rover when they moved here from the UK, all the way to NZ. As far as I can tell their appeal is just for talking about it in-between trips to the mechanic, which is where they'll spend a lot of their time. Said neighbour's one is currently unroadworthy. They're ugly (subjective), inefficient, rattly, unreliable, not super fun to drive. I could understand if it was a nationalistic thing, but LR is owned by Tata motors.
by dralley | 2025-12-04 00:10:34+00:00
>Rust is a cool language and I hope it eventually settles down enough to be considered for "real" projects. I've done a little bit of Ada in the last year and I really, really want something better. But... reverse in-compatibility is a deal-breaker for some corners of the commercial world.

Critical loadbearing chunks of AWS, Cloudflare, Azure and Google are built on it. It's in both the Windows & Linux kernels, shipped on billions of devices, processing probably tens or hundreds of exabytes of data every day. It's running on satellites in space and in production cars. Respectfully, you don't know what you're talking about.
Show HN: Paarvai – Infrastructure context for LLM-based DevOps agents
by satheesh18 | 2025-12-04 00:11:00+00:00
I have been trying to get LLMs to handle real infra/DevOps tasks, and the biggest issue is that they don’t have reliable context. Infra is deeply interconnected, one misconfig can break a system.

So I built Paarvai. It connects to your cloud and IaC (read-only), builds a dependency graph, and gives LLMs the full picture of how everything is mapped and configured.

Unlike tools that make on-the-fly calls (like Amazon Q), Paarvai stores the whole state and all relationships upfront, so agents or tools like Cursor/Claude/GPT can do things like:

1. Understand dependencies (“What depends on this SQS queue?”) 2. Identify breakage (“Will disabling this Lambda break an API route?”) 3. Generate IaC with full context (“Write Terraform for this component using my current infra.”)

We just launched the MVP with AWS support.

I’m looking for early users, completely free. If you try it and want something added, I will personally integrate your feature requests.

Link: https://paarvai.app

Happy to share details or answer questions.
by joeg_usa | 2025-12-04 00:11:02+00:00
I built a search engine that runs on Node + SQLite + FTS5.

BM25 + 384-dim vector + FTS5 hybrid ranking Mesh network with RSA crypto identity (no central auth) Remote nodes contribute crawl data through P2P WebSocket 930 bytes per doc (2M docs = ~2GB) Currently indexing 52K+ domains Runs on 2 servers for $22/month Patent pending

Why: I wanted search infrastructure anyone could own and run. No Elasticsearch cluster. No cloud dependency. No vendor lock-in. Demo: https://www.qwikwit.com Stack: Node, JavaScript, SQLite, FTS5, WebSocket mesh Happy to answer questions about the architecture.
by k1tanaka | 2025-12-04 00:11:25+00:00
I can't answer all of this questions, but "why not offer 2 versions and allow the user to choose" was mentioned here [0].

Helldivers 2 is a multiplayer game, for the game 2 start, everyone in the lobby needs the game to be fully loaded. If one person would choose to have a slower version, it would make everyone wait longer. Which is definitely not a trade off you are willing to make as a game developer because makes the experience for other players worse.

There could be other options and better optimizations, such as lower textures that you mentioned, but I agree with the developers on having only a "fast version".

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/helldivers-2-dev-explai...
by qnleigh | 2025-12-04 00:11:28+00:00
There's an amazing way to derive Maxwell's equations, and the equations for 3 of the other fundamental forces of nature, directly from Lie group symmetry. You try to write down a theory that is symmetric under -local- symmetry transformations, meaning that the theory should give the same predictions even if you rotate (in some abstract space that you tack into the theory) by an angle that depends on position arbitrarily. At first this seems impossible, because any derivatives with respect to position will depend on the spatial variation of the rotation angle. But if you add an additional field that subtracts off the variation in the rotation angle, you find that this field is a dynamical object that coincides with the electromagnetic field! (Or to be more correct, it's the vector potential, which is directly related to electric and magnetic fields).

So there's some strange sense in which these laws of nature seem to arise from, or are at least deeply connected to geometry.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-04 00:11:40+00:00
The key word in that is "responsible".

The legal world has plenty of ways for determining if you are legally responsible for the outcome of an event. Right now the standard is civil punishments for provable negligence.

It sounds like GP is proposing a framework where we tighten up the definition of negligence, and add criminal penalties in addition to civil ones.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-04 00:11:50+00:00
The underlying technology already is commodified - there are many, many other models that are extremely competitive.

The problem is: suppose Google has an equivalent model (they do, but if you disagree, just pretend). Suppose they do. What then is OpenAI offering that makes its product more intriguing? Nothing. They have a chat interface. An intern can make a chat interface.

> ChatGPT is the fifth most visited website in the world!

To me, this is absolutely worthless information. That DOES NOT mean that ChatGPT is in the clear and nobody else will overtake them.

Your analogies really paint the picture here aptly. Salesforce is not just a database, it's a lot of stuff on top of it. AWS is not just a server, it's a lot of stuff on top of it. Uber is not just a GPS wrapper, it's a taxi service. That's a different thing.

ChatGPT... is just a model. What they add on top approaches zero. Because that's just how the technology works. It takes text and gives it to a model and then spits out the output. What more can you add onto that system, removing the model? Make it easier to input text? Make it easier to get output? Well that's truly trivial to do, and I would argue ChatGPT isn't even in the top 10 when it comes to that. Today.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-12-04 00:12:18+00:00
My father was born in mexico, came here with his parents who worked in agriculture. He worked his ass off to make it to a comfortable, modest, middle class neighborhood. I didn't go to college, but found my way into the tech industry because it's about as close to meritocratic as anywhere else has been in human history.

Is it perfect? no. Is it better than everything else because of Capitalism? Yup...
by stagas | 2025-12-04 00:12:38+00:00
When you learn to use it you can throw a lot of intention into it, knowing the output even before you hit play. Yes, you can go the other way and "subtract" your way out of a chaos, but you can also intentionally piece together the components and produce an output you imagined beforehand. The missing pieces here for this format, my instinct tells me, are layers of abstraction or additional UI elements that will help in composing a final piece, using code for the fundamental components plus something else that hasn't been invented yet or noone has thought of glueing it together.
by cjameskeller | 2025-12-04 00:13:01+00:00
American software engineer here, and I have only used LLM tools ~3 dozen times: tried at work a few times, and been unimpressed/actively frustrated; a few times to ask questions I would be normally survey blog posts about (social/lifestyle things); and the rest has been generating images with my kids.

But currently, aside from generating "creative media", I'd say I'm pretty much opposed to LLM tools. They have yet to demonstrate any value to me at work or with respect to the areas of research I am interested in, and given the kind of statistical mechanism that they are, I do not believe they are capable of doing so.
by usefulcat | 2025-12-04 00:13:09+00:00
The best argument I've yet heard against the effectiveness of AI tools for SW dev is the absence of an explosion of shovelware over the past 1-2 years.

https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

Basically, if the tools are even half as good as some proponents claim, wouldn't you expect at least a significant increase in simple games on Steam or apps in app stores over that time frame? But we're not seeing that.
by groby_b | 2025-12-04 00:13:22+00:00
The difference is that PE firms own firms as investment vehicles, while Valve is owned by people who see making games as their calling.

No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop, he wants to leave his mark on gaming.

Passion matters.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-04 00:14:06+00:00
Right, again, even if you take every advertiser in the world and shove them in a dungeon and then point a cannon at them and say "give me all the money you have", you won't even have 1/10th the money you need.

Everyone is vastly, vastly overestimating advertising. Advertising is a side hustle, because the product is the main hustle.
by _alternator_ | 2025-12-04 00:14:29+00:00
I would give the same review, without seeing any of this as a positive. NKS was bloviating, grandiose, repetitive, and shallow. The fact that Wolfram himself didn’t show that CA were Turing complete when most theoretical computer scientists would say “it’s obvious, and not that interesting” kinda disproves his whole point about him being an under appreciated genius. Shrug.
by disqard | 2025-12-04 00:15:13+00:00
The way you articulated it, connected with a thought I've had (for over a year now):

AI is like oil, in that it's "burning" a resource that took geological timescales to accrue. Its value derives from the energy-dense and instantaneous act of combusting a fossil fuel, and in this particular part of the "terrain", it will be a local maximum for A Long Time.

Just like how it's taken absurdly long (still very much WIP) for human societies to prioritize weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, I fear we are going to latch onto GenAI/LLMs pretty hard, and not let go.
by sackfield | 2025-12-04 00:15:18+00:00
Countries like Singapore figured out that high reward / high risk (e.g. punishment) is the essence of capitalism and thus retaining talent in the public sector.

EDIT: You will notice a lot of talk about high pay. It's important to note that this is not without major punishment for financial mismanagement. You can't have one without the other, it's not just a question of giving politicians a bigger trough to put their snout in.
by skmurphy | 2025-12-04 00:15:18+00:00
I think in the early stages, the intent is self-rescue: prevent yourself from going off half-cocked. I see it as a way to gather feedback from trusted peers who have knowledge of the problem area. If it proves out, then they can help you sell it, but my primary intent was to encourage a "measure twice, cut once" approach instead of running with an idea without adequate preparation. If you cannot find at least three things that might go wrong with your approach, you probably have not thought it through. The intermediate step between soliciting feedback and "pre-wiring" is a pre-mortem, where you actively solicit potential failure modes and stumbling blocks.
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-04 00:16:52+00:00
> “We can take the …cheapest form of electricity in places like Gladstone and Townsville, take the surplus solar, put it into the battery during the day … and we’ve got eight hours of cheap solar stored in those batteries, and then we can get to 16, 18 hours a day of supply.

All the fossil fuel company shills kept going on and on about how there's no sunshine at night, and that we will still need baseload plants. They were wrong. More accurately, they were outright lying to protect their vested interests, but the point is that grid-scale battery technology has advanced to the point that gigawatt-hours can be deployed without government subsidies.

I had the opportunity to talk to the project manager of the first 100 MWh battery that was deployed in South Australia, and I asked him directly if the nay-sayers were right or if the battery was actually any good.

His response was that it was, and I quote, "fucking awesome", and then elaborated that unlike every other source of power it can track the requirements perfectly, matching the supply to the demand instantly. In the past, they had to over-produce by keeping "peaking" gas plants running and then just dumping the excess into resistors. The electricity price from peaking plants is also charged at something like 7x the normal rate because they had to be spun up and spun down at least once a day, which puts massive wear and tear on the expensive turbines. Not to mention the wasted power.

So, yes, of course the owners of those peaking gas plants put out articles in the press through their buddies in the right-wing media pooh-poohing the battery technology that is actually vastly superior in capability and cost and environmental benefits. Once the batteries are deployed at scale, their investment in those peaking plants may as well be written off.

Green technology is now the cheapest and the best.

Anyone arguing against it is a paid shill or has a vested interest.
by moefh | 2025-12-04 00:18:00+00:00
> The fact that the correct type signature, a pointer to fixed-size array, exists and that you can create a struct containing a fixed-size array member and pass that in by value completely invalidates any possible argument for having special semantics for fixed-size array parameters.

That's not entirely accurate: "fixed-size" array parameters (unlike pointers to arrays or arrays in structs) actually say that the array must be at least that size, not exactly that size, which makes them way more flexible (e.g. you don't need a buffer of an exact size, it can be larger). The examples from the article are neat but fairly specific because cryptographic functions always work with pre-defined array sizes, unlike most algorithms.

Incidentally, that was one of the main complaints about Pascal back in the day (see section 2.1 of [1]): it originally had only fixed-size arrays and strings, with no way for a function to accept a "generic array" or a "generic string" with size unknown at compile time.

[1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas...
by londons_explore | 2025-12-04 00:18:24+00:00
The security@ inbox has so much junk these days with someone reporting that if you paste alert('hacked') into devtools then it makes the website hacked!

I reckon only 1% of reports are valid.

LLM's can now make a plausible looking exploit report ('there is a use after free bug in your server side implementation of X library which allows shell access to your server if you time these two API calls correctly'), but the LLM has made the whole thing up. That can easily waste hours of an experts time for a total falsehood.

I can completely see why some companies decide it'll be an office-hours-only task to go through all the reports every day.
by AngryData | 2025-12-04 00:18:28+00:00
And? Do they do 30x more work than other companies C-suite? Do they have multiple PhDs or some impossible to find skill that makes them better than other people doing the same job? If such small fractions of money are so inconsequential, why are they nickel and diming all their customers and the healthcare system?

It isn't even a secret that these positions are largely based on networking and inter-company politics, not their skills or productivity or often even any real merit. Maybe a couple bucks isn't much to you, but it is to other people. And we haven't even gotten into all the non-cash extras that are often a huge bonus on top of their actual salary. How many more doctors is 25 million dollars could that be providing? How many lives saved?
by jarjoura | 2025-12-04 00:19:09+00:00
meh, you're just conflating two different things.

Tech companies spent a decade (since 2010), driving towards some belief that the entire world was going to go online and stay there. They also ammassed an insane amount of wealth in that time. Wealth that is now structurally tied to the stability of the entire financial system.

For whatever reason, investors get bored and want to move money around and so the tech companies, that built healthy, stable businesses, needed to keep that dopamine hit coming with new mega annoucements. What else is there to build? "Efficiency" is the current corporate white collar trend, because that's what investors are woo'd with. AI is the other new-new thing, but instead of a that next reason to reverse hiring trends, AI itself is built and sold as an employee replacement.

Anyway, the fact that there is an entire class of people in the US who feel and believe, it can't get any worse, are geniunely suffering in ways many of here on this forum can't even imagine. Definitely think it's unfair to put these two concerns in the same bucket.
by sdqali | 2025-12-04 00:19:41+00:00
- It looks good. Or more correctly, it is easy to make it look good. If one spends a lot of time in the Terminal emulator, it looking good has some positives.

- It uses plain text configuration that is easy to modify and version control.

Edit: - At least on Linux, foot's support for windows and tabs is limited to starting an entirely new process.
by charles_f | 2025-12-04 00:20:07+00:00
> AI mandates, like RTO mandates, are just another way to "quiet fire" people

That's a recurring argument, and I don't believe it, especially in large tech companies. They have no problem doing multiple large non-quiet lay-offs, why would they need moustache-twirling level schemes to get people to quit.

I don't believe companies to be well intentioned, but the simplest explanation is often the best:

1. RTO are probably driven by people in power who either like to be in the office, believe being in the office is the most efficient way to work (be that it's true or not), or have financial stakes in having people occupy said offices.

2. "AI" mandate is probably driven by people in power who either do see value in AI, think it's the most efficient way to work (be that it's true or not), have FOMO on AI, or have financial stakes in having people use it.