MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-12-29 20:23:17+00:00
It's funny that 3 different Space Hulk games are here.

I actually thought Space Hulk (2013) was amazing but it's hard for a developer to keep up the yearly license payments on any Warhammer franchise. So it's not available for purchase anymore. It got ~75% on reviews on release but i like the board game and it was true to the board game so i personally loved it. Link on the steam store (the site should have these) https://store.steampowered.com/app/242570/Space_Hulk/

Fwiw if you have one of these games they are still in your Steam library. I still get to play the above game. I just can't easily play with others anymore nor can i suggest they purchase that game. I'm a little surprised it still runs fine given no updates but yay for backwards compatibility.

In general a theme for lists like these are licensing. If a developer has to pay a franchise licensing fee it's going to stop being worthwhile at some point. Take note if you're a developer. It's hard to get visibility without being tied to a franchise (Eg. Larian had to do it with Baldurs Gate 3) but it'll cut into profits massively. Even Larian are never doing it again.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-29 20:23:27+00:00
> the core aspect of software dev is architecture which you don’t have to lose when instructing an agent. Most of the time I already know how I want the code to look, I just farm out the actual work to an agent and then spend a bunch of time reviewing and asking follow up questions.

This right here in your very own comment is the crux. Unless you're rich or run your own business, your employer (and many other employers) are right now counting down the days till they can think of YOU as boilerplate they want to farm YOU out to an LLM. At the very least where they currently employee 10 they are salivating about reducing it to 2.

This means painful change for a great many people. Appeal by analogy to historical changes like motorised vehicles etc miss the QUALITATIVE change occurring this time.

Many HN users may point to Jevons paradox, I would like to point out that it may very well work up until the point that it doesn't. After all a chicken has always seen the farmer as benevolent provider of food, shelter and safety, that is until of course THAT day when he decides he doesn't.
by rambojohnson | 2025-12-29 20:23:34+00:00
What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore.

This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and harddrives, and responded by wrapping it in managers, sub-agents, memories, tools, permissions, workflows, and orchestration layers so we don’t have to look directly at the fact that it still doesn’t understand anything.

Now we’re expected to maintain a mental model not just of our system, but of a swarm of half-reliable interns talking to each other in a language that isn’t executable, reproducible, or stable.

Work now feels duller than dishwater, enough to have forced me to career pivot for 2026.
by mmooss | 2025-12-29 20:23:45+00:00
Thanks for the link! I'm not sure the incident you name is meaningful, but here is some evidence at last (from 2017):

> "the highest construction costs in the world"

> "The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world. The recently completed Second Avenue subway on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line to Hudson Yards also cost far above average, at $2.5 billion and $1.5 billion per mile, respectively."

> For years, The Times found, public officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits.

> Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.

> Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say.

> Public officials, mired in bureaucracy, have not acted to curb the costs. The M.T.A. has not adopted best practices nor worked to increase competition in contracting, and it almost never punishes vendors for spending too much or taking too long, according to inspector general reports.

etc. Also, this is based on extensive research:'

> The Times brought the list to more than 50 contractors, many of whom had worked in New York as well as in other cities. The Times also interviewed nearly 100 current and former M.T.A. employees, reviewed internal project records, consulted industry price indexes and built a database to compare spending on specific items. And The Times observed construction on site in Paris, which is building a project similar to the Second Avenue subway at one-sixth the cost.
by dnw | 2025-12-29 20:24:02+00:00
I have seen Claude disable its sandbox. Here is the most recent example from a couple of weeks ago while debugging Rust:
"The panic is due to sandbox restrictions, not code errors.
Let me try again with the sandbox disabled:"

I have since added a sandbox around my ~/dev/ folder using sandbox-exec in macOS. It is a pain to configure properly but at least I know where sandbox is controlled.
by Tarucho | 2025-12-29 20:24:16+00:00
I don´t understand. Most answers say they want to program but that they don´t want to type, compile, debug, add files to the project, refactor, etc. Well that´s programming.

Asking a prompt to do something is asking a prompt to do something.

In my case I fear the day comes where I can not program anymore and I have to give orders to a prompt.
by k310 | 2025-12-29 20:24:25+00:00
There is plenty on earth, and a very high quality of life if it weren't for the insane concentration of wealth and overconsumption (think mega data centers to spare us from thinking, among others) resulting in environmental ruin.

And if we got along instead of divisiveness, nationalism, and religious wars, incredible unlocking of value tied up in militaries and relieving consequent mass suffering.

It's a choice.

People have chosen poorly.
by Youden | 2025-12-29 20:24:49+00:00
For what it's worth, this is entirely a carrier problem and has little to do with the technology.

Various people and the article have outlined some bad experiences but to give a contrasting example: Digital Republic, a local MVNO here in Switzerland, allows you to replace your eSIM by simply logging into their web portal with TOTP-based 2FA and clicking a button. No SMS, no contact with support, no reidentification.

In theory, all carriers could do this.
by panstromek | 2025-12-29 20:25:00+00:00
I have bumped into this myself, too. It's really annoying. The biggest footgun isn't even discussed explicitly and it might be how the error got introduced - it's when the struct goes from POD to non-POD or vice-versa, the rules change, so completely innocent change, like adding a string field, can suddenly create undefined behaviour in unrelated code that was correct previously.
by redsymbol | 2025-12-29 20:25:21+00:00
I'm a software engineer who is also a media buyer, which is the term for someone who purchases and configures advertising campaigns. I have spent over $100k of my own funds on Meta ads the past several years, which makes me moderately experienced. I spend a lot of time in the "ad manager", i.e. the webapp that Meta has for configuring these ads, allocating budget, and so on.

I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can do to avoid that now.

Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time, but right now three specific examples come to mind:

1. Promo codes
2. Site links
3. Related media

I won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to disable them.

The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are silently re-enabled.

This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had activated ads with these accidentally active.

The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive.

It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their ad campaigns.

These three specific examples have been happening for many months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which has been wasted by many companies around the world.

That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not to happen.

Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am seeing.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-12-29 20:25:53+00:00
> But most colours can be associated with a primary wavelength… except purple. So by that definition, they don’t really exist.

And white, and black. Physically, you'll always have a measurable spectrum of intensities, and some such spectra are typically perceived as "purple". There's no need to pretend that light can only exist in "primary wavelengths".

Even if there's no empirical way to extract some 'absolute' mental notion of perceived color, we can get a pretty solid notion of perceived differences in color, from which we can map out models of consensus color perception.
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-12-29 20:26:43+00:00
Haters can be like bombs. You want to defuse them. Don't shake 'em. Don't drop 'em. Just render them safe. It's possible there's some gold in the ore; there might be, and if there is, accept it gratefully; but it's often hard to tell the constructive true-believer from the vindictive maniac. Your #1 job is to make it all inert, and to be able to walk away without an explosion destroying the business, social-media explosion or otherwise.
by eesmith | 2025-12-29 20:26:47+00:00
FWIW, I dropped my phone in the Chicago River. Crossing a drawbridge, I pulled out my phone to check the time. It slipped and fell - right into the gap in the middle. I peered through the gap to see if was there, and was able to see the splash it made.

Neither SIM nor eSIM would have helped.

In that case, I waited to get home (I didn't live in Illinois) and got a new SIM by mail.
by hnlmorg | 2025-12-29 20:26:53+00:00
Bullshit. You’ve taken my comment out of context and warped it into some anti-Semitic remark that clearly wasn’t even remotely related to the point I was making.

I talked about multiple different countries all having their own national and international crises and you single out literally the smallest paragraph in the entire post as if that was the core premise and then accuse me of exaggerating…completely missing the irony of your own attack.

So the issue here is you, not my comment. I’m not making silly rhetoric, you’re twisting my comment because of your own personal prejudices.

I’m sorry that you’ve had to deal with idiots online but don’t project that onto everyone.
by whiteros_e | 2025-12-29 20:26:57+00:00
it is indeed a great teacher but there are times where it hallucinates and sticks to the hallucinated content even after several iteration unless human in the loop breaks it. i've wasted hours believing what LLM hallucinated.

my learnings are a lot of microdoses of things that I usually don't work on in a day to day so i don't want to spend time reading about it but yes this sort of learning would be otherwise impossible so gotta thank LLM for that.
by evilduck | 2025-12-29 20:27:24+00:00
Possibly. Probably even.

High quality and consistent > Low quality and consistent > Variable quality and inconsistent. If you're going to be the cause of the regression into variable quality and inconsistent you'd better deliver on bringing it back up to high quality and consistent. That's a lot of work that most people aren't cut out for because it's usually not a technical change but a cultural change that's needed. How did a codebase get into the state of being below standards? How are you going to prevent that from happening again? You are unlikely to Pull Request your way out of that situation.
by sanskritical | 2025-12-29 20:27:25+00:00
I didn't misrepresent the situation it all. It is exactly as I described.

11 armed people is a functional equivalent of a SWAT team. My statement was hyperbolic. If you serve someone a court summons for a bullshit charge it is a threat of violence against their person. And the charge was bullshit. And the threat of violence was followed up with force.

I'm not lying. I'm also not Christian at all! Never claimed to be.
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-29 20:27:29+00:00
I'm not sure what help my "advice" is going to be so I'll start with a little context.

I'm near 50 and have basically zero friends. I have colleagues and acquaintances who I get along with. I'm also married with children. I always found it hard to make and keep friends.

I was badly bullied at school and felt worthless and didn't have the confidence at that time to make friends, though I couldn't see it, but I really wanted to, I just didn't know how. At the time I was lonely and depressed. I joined the military just before I was your age and had buddies until I left and it was the military that sorted me out.

With the benefit of age and lack of hormones I've come to accept that I have no friends for reasons. It doesn't bother me anymore. I've also realised I'm not a good friend, I make no effort, I'm not really interested in other people and find their problems annoying. I'm difficult and I don't really like people. And I like my own company.

Do I worry about loneliness? No, but I often wonder if I didn't have my family would I get lonely... I don't know. All I know is that at the moment I'm not and I don't think I will be. But change is constant.

All this is to say that you're young, it's likely not as bad as you think it is right now (I don't say this to lessen what you feel), and you will get passed this. Just be yourself, do what interests you and make the effort, even if it's not reciprocated. There's no shame in making unappreciated effort. Move on and don't over-think shit. Eventually it'll come.
by michaelt | 2025-12-29 20:27:36+00:00
> AI has taken it to the next level. Previously, with many exams you would still have to know how to identify the concepts and related keywords in a word problem to even know what words to look for in the index of the books on hand before you could get to the right page to start cheating.

Online exam cheating was easier than that.

20 years ago, for online quizzes cheaters given would simply get the three guys in their frat who took the class last year to sit nearby and act as human ChatGPT.

The solution was simple - limit easy-to-cheat means of assessment like online quizzes to 10% of the final grade, with 90% of the grade dictated by in-person exams and equally hard to cheat options.
by mtlynch | 2025-12-29 20:28:32+00:00
Dr. Hipp, I love SQLite but also had simonw's misapprehension that the project did not accept contributions. The SQLite copyright page says:

> Contributed Code

> In order to keep SQLite completely free and unencumbered by copyright, the project does not accept patches. If you would like to suggest a change and you include a patch as a proof-of-concept, that would be great. However, please do not be offended if we rewrite your patch from scratch.

I realize that in the section, "Open-Source, not Open-Contribution" it says that the project accepts contributions, but I'm having trouble understanding how that section and the "Contributed Code" section can both be accurate. Is there a distinction between accepting a "patch" vs. accepting a "contribution?"

If you're planning to update this page to reduce confusion of the contribution policy, I humbly suggest a rewrite of this sentence to eliminate the single and double negatives, which make it harder to understand:

> In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from people who have not submitted an affidavit dedicating their contribution into the public domain.

Could be rewritten as:

> In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and prevent contamination of the code from proprietary or licensed content, the project only accepts patches from people who have submitted an affidavit dedicating their contribution into the public domain.

[0] https://sqlite.org/copyright.html
by pfisch | 2025-12-29 20:28:35+00:00
You really can't though, not if the games have an online component or you want the game to be patched/updated as frequently as it would be on steam.

Almost all games these days are basically like a work in progress, so if you pirate them then the game doesn't stay up to date.

Pirating games is just really inconvenient compared to tv/movies/music.
by throwawaymobule | 2025-12-29 20:28:56+00:00
I assume so, there were rarely any other files on the disc in this case.

It varied between games, one of the battlefields (3 or bad company 2) was what I was thinking of. It generally improved with later releases.

The 4GB file size was significant, since it meant I couldn't run them from a backup on a fat32 usb drive. There are workarounds for many games nowadays.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-29 20:29:41+00:00
To answer your questions (I don't think it's what you wanted, but people will scratch their heads after reading them):

On reality, they are hiring because they have a lot of (investment) money. They need a lot of hardware, but they also need people to manage the hardware.

On an alternative reality where their products do what they claim, they would also hire, because people working there would be able to replace lots of people working in other jobs, and so their workers would be way more valuable than the average one, and everybody would want to buy what they create.

Journalists don't care about it because whatever they choose to believe or being paid to "believe", it's the natural way things happen.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-29 20:29:53+00:00
I'd say usually you learn those techniques when you join a company as a junior dev and come in contact with engineers with decades of experience and systems that have been in production for years, too.

I think it's when people consider that anything more than 5 years old is ancient and dismiss it that we lose established techniques and knowledge that we are then bound to rediscover again and again.
by Amezarak | 2025-12-29 20:30:35+00:00
What the Red Sea has shown is that drone and anti-ship missiles are massively overhyped. A 40 year old ship design has fended off hundreds of such attacks without losing a single ship. Without even taking a single hit.

> The Navy also needs the Constellation class frigate.

The Navy needs ships it can actually build, the Constellation is trapped in an unending design hell and is already years behind.
by cloudflare728 | 2025-12-29 20:31:01+00:00
Sometimes I have a similar file or related files. I copy their names and say use them as reference.
Code quality improves by 10 times if you do so. Even providing a a example from framework's getting started works great too for new project.

Yeah the pain of cleaning up small mess is great too. I had some tests failing and type failing issues, I thought I will fix it later by only using AI prompt. As the size was growing, failing Typescript issues was growing too. At some point it was 5000+ type issues and countless number of failing unit tests. Then more and more. I tried to fix with AI, since it was not possible fixing old way. Then I discarded the whole project when it was around 500k lines of code.
by tomwphillips | 2025-12-29 20:31:12+00:00
The article is about accountancy. Accountancy is not academia.

>In the end of the day academia in general should stop relying on exams based on memorization of random facts and start using real world examples of what kind of work student would be working with as an employee.

I have an undergraduate degree and PhD in chemistry and I don't really think "blind memorisation" had much to do with my success. It will only get you so far.

I think there is also substantial within academia about the purpose of academia. I think a lot of academics might disagree that it is about preparing people to be employees.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-12-29 20:31:25+00:00
"My conspiracy theory" is a set of facts that you and the source you cited (whose so-called "fact check" was mostly attempting to put into context) find really inconvenient. Fact 1: Starmer and his party are polling badly. Fact 2: Starmer and his party delayed several local elections, many of which were in constituencies where they currently hold power and won't afterward. This is not a good set of facts, regardless of how little those elections matter.
by eptcyka | 2025-12-29 20:31:31+00:00
We tried it CodeRabbit. They enable beta features without asking, so one day your GitHub issues get AI responses without anyone ever asking it to respond to it. I think the criticism was warranted. I think it is OK to let people be passionate about the tools they have to use. Ultimately, we decided to disable CodeRabbit. But there were definitely some people on our team that felt like they were forced into using it.
by eszed | 2025-12-29 20:31:51+00:00
Yeah, that's one argument - and is certainly true for later (medieval and early-modern) periods where urban disease rates were _much_ higher than rural.

The corollary hypothetical is that Roman cities had well-developed water and sewer infrastructure, whereas isolated forts were drinking out of wells and using latrines, with a higher probability of cross-contamination. They also might have had higher incidental population density (low-ranking troops sleeping in barracks; common meals) than at least some urban districts.

But... I don't know which case is actually true, and am curious what the evidence might show!
by mattm | 2025-12-29 20:32:19+00:00
Even the CEO's "apology" is pretty bad. He still finds a way to take shots at the original poster saying his original message was inflammatory (could also be read as how I'm justified in my response), that "he started it" and that the team was "spoken down to or treated dismissively" which they weren't. All the original feedback was about the project and was not directed at specific individuals.
by onesociety2022 | 2025-12-29 20:32:22+00:00
If what you say is true, why would Apple ever force a switch to eSIM? I’m now less likely to buy a new iPhone because I don’t want to deal with this eSIM fiasco. It’s to their detriment. If their goal is to sell more phones, they would want to eliminate all friction to switch to a new phone. So what you are saying doesn’t add up.