MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dartharva | 2025-12-18 16:51:46+00:00
How are Google and Apple in its crosshairs (article's framing notwithstanding)?

From what I see, Microsoft is the only one they have been gunning for, and even that behemoth is looking to get out of the way. Their Xbox platform has practically imploded, and they have specifically designed Windows 11 to be less of a PC operating system and more of an ads platform and a cross-selling channel for their AI/cloud offerings indicating that they've lost interest in the consumer market as a whole.
by yardie | 2025-12-18 16:51:49+00:00
> the idea of the government telling people how to use private property doesn't sit well

Between zoning, easements, nuisance laws, government has a lot of say in how you use your private property. Owners even stepped it up a notch and invited HOAs, a quasi-government that has even more say about your property.

Unfortunately, people love telling their neighbors how they should live.
by Aeolun | 2025-12-18 16:51:49+00:00
Uh, when my son asks me for the phone, I say no, and he asks me why, I just tell him it’s because I think being bored once in a while is healthy. As long as the rules around using it are consistent he can work with that (he’ll start running to get to the bus/train on time too, because he can only use a phone if he can sit down)
by somewhereoutth | 2025-12-18 16:51:50+00:00
Yes - in the UK we had a strong social housing sector, with award winning architecture (and some terrible mistakes too).

Then along came 'right-to-buy', allowing tenants to buy their social housing for knock down prices (and so become a natural Tory [right of centre party] voter).

If councils had been allowed to use the money to build more social housing, then maybe this was fine. But they were not. So now we have affordability issues in the UK too.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-18 16:51:57+00:00
> And, in turn, you appear to be oblivious to the point - the release cadence of this best-case scenario still means like a decade between updates to the project.

It doesn't seem you are managing to think the issue all the way through. Even if you believe you can claim that release cadence is a factor, C++26 is the latest release in a process that outputs a new version every two years. Therefore, your argument would lead you to agree that there is a greater need for maintenance as there are more releases still evolving.

> C++26 was released 4months ago; pointless to update it until compilers and deps are updated.

This is a silly argument to make. At best you are trying to argue that you somehow believe maintenance needs aren't as urgent. Except urgency is irrelevant to the discussion, and the whole argument is derived from specious reasoning to begin with.

It sounds like you are fully invested in contrarianism and not invested at all in thinking about the issue you are trying to discuss. This is not the best use of anyone's time.
by cyral | 2025-12-18 16:52:09+00:00
Different scenario but it reminds me of when Missouri prosecuted a reporter who found that teacher's SSN numbers were exposed in the HTML of a webpage

> "Parson described the journalist as a “perpetrator” who “took the records of at least three educators, decoded the HTML source code, and viewed the Social Security number of those specific educators” in an “attempt to steal personal information and harm Missourians.”"
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-18 16:52:35+00:00
That may be the idiom, but evidence suggest otherwise.

See Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises (2014), tracking intergenerational wealth in England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)>
by biophysboy | 2025-12-18 16:52:36+00:00
He gets political.. Just as an example, he claimed that it was obvious that COVID was a lab leak in 2021. This is not obvious at all if you read Michael Worobey's rigorous work instead of rely on Blow's arrogant intuitions.

I will still play Jonathan Blow's next game, but I think he is a bit of a hack outside of game design.
by MangoToupe | 2025-12-18 16:52:36+00:00
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373

> Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.

Perhaps your point would be clearer if you indicated what specific conditions you believe are missing. Maybe the tweeter had no followers? Idk, I can only vaguely guess at what you're referring to.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-18 16:52:54+00:00
> and there was no new version.

Yes there was… IE 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.

The reason why IE 6 kept haunting us all was because later versions were never available on Windows XP.

> actual accepted web standard

The only thing for which there is an actual standard that matters is JavaScript itself (or rather ECMAScript) and on that front Apple has pretty much always been a laggard.

Saying “Apple is compliant with all of W3C standards” is a bit ridiculous when this organization was obsolete long before Microsoft ditched IE. And Apple itself acknowledge that, themselves being one of the founding parties of the organization that effectively superseded W3C (WHATWG).
by azemetre | 2025-12-18 16:52:59+00:00
I'm not saying I don't like their attitudes but it's a viewpoint I am struggling with myself.

I'm starting to realize caring about all these minutia of details that don't really matter for my professional goals. I know my software isn't special, caring about pumping out as much performance as possible when I just sling JS professionally feels a tad myopic?

What is the point of it just continues the pattern of procrastination towards the actual goals I want to achieve? Does this also apply to them?

What is the point of espousing all these supposed virtues when the output isn't that special? I mean Braid is still good, but let's not act like greener devs haven't put out good games too without all the jackassery baggage.
Show HN: A small browser extension to turn selected text into reminders
by kshk123 | 2025-12-18 16:53:14+00:00
I built a small browser extension to help create reminders from selected text on any website. I kept seeing dates/times in emails and webpages (“next Tuesday 3pm”, “25.12.2025”, “14:30”) and wanted a convenient way to turn them into reminders without switching apps.

How it works:

- Select text on any webpage → right‑click “Add to Reminders” - It detects common date/time formats (English + European/German) and pre-fills a reminder time - Review/edit/delete reminders in the popup, or add reminders manually - Dates can also be edited/added manually, and the highlighted text need not contain a date. Optional integrations (only when you choose them): - Google Calendar sync via OAuth (creates an event) - macOS Apple Reminders via a small local bridge you run on your machine Links: - Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/create-reminders/ecifdofkbodefbieanakcmhnncjhflkh - Firefox Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/create-reminders/
by georgeburdell | 2025-12-18 16:53:15+00:00
My manager asked me to disable CI and gating code owner reviews “for 2 weeks” 6 months ago so people could commit faster. Just because it is in your job description doesn’t mean it won’t get shoved aside when it’s perceived as the bottleneck for the core mission.

Now we have nightly builds that nobody checks the result of and we’re finding out about bugs weeks later. Big company btw
by louthy | 2025-12-18 16:53:24+00:00
People with mental health issues need help and support. Just because there’s a pithy saying, doesn’t make it universally beneficial to have suffered hardship.

Not sure what else you’re expecting? I’m not advocating imposed hardship, just trying to give some context for why it can often lead to a more robust and driven person. It’s clearly not universally true.

I imagine there are lots of veterans that are able to cope and have become more robust. But there will always be mental health aftershocks, because that’s why it was a hardship in the first place.
by viiralvx | 2025-12-18 16:53:28+00:00
Damn, Unpoly looks great! Never tried HTMX but have been a fan of it, it solves a UX problem that frameworks like Django and Rails suffer from, without needing to bring in something heavy like React.

I'm currently working on a side project in Rails using Stimulus but sometimes I wonder if Stimulus is overkill with all of the controllers and stuff as well. Do you have an opinion on when you should reach for something like Inertia or Stimulus over htmx?
by hamdingers | 2025-12-18 16:53:38+00:00
The comment I responded to offered no such qualifiers.

To answer in general, aging of accounts is common as is synthetic credibility-building activity. There are marketplaces where you can buy sets of years old accounts with activity for every major platform. Anything you could come up with would either be so stringent it would exclude most users or be easy enough to become a target for account sellers.

To be honest this is why I got out of the space, it's sisyphean.
by vernrVingingIt | 2025-12-18 16:53:41+00:00
Try almost 30 years in electrical engineering.

I know exactly what those layers of abstraction are used for. Why so many? Jobs making layers of abstraction.

But all of them are dev friendly means of modeling memory states for the CPU to watch and transform just so. They can all be compressed into a generic and generalized set of mathematical functions ridding ourselves of the various parser rules to manage each bespoke syntax inherent to each DSL, layers of framework.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-18 16:53:42+00:00
> Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors

I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse.

This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it.

Banks are nothing to do with this. You could have your Steam/Google/Apple/etc. account summarily executed for any reason; it doesn't have to be money-related.
by zahlman | 2025-12-18 16:53:46+00:00
> Why would you sell a dollar for 90 cents? Because you know that on average you're selling quite a bit less than a dollar.

There's more to it than covering the risk of fraud. It's more about optionality. The gift card only allows for buying things at one place — so you're restricted in what you can buy, can't deposit it at a bank, can't comparison shop etc.

I don't get the sense that money being left on the card is a serious issue for the sort of person who goes hunting for deals like this. They'll eventually spend more than the card's value and have the last of it apply partially to some purchase.

Also the discount rates I've seen have been more like buying the $100 card for $95 or $97. Except perhaps where the gift card retailer is offering it directly as part of a cross-promotion deal with the target retailer.
by andy99 | 2025-12-18 16:54:07+00:00
Yeah it’s trained to do that somewhere though it’s not necessary malicious. For RLHF (the model fine tuning) the HF stands for human feedback but is really another trained model that’s trained to score replies the way a human would. And so if that model likes code that passes tests more than code that’s stuck in a debugging loop, that’s what the model becomes optimized for.

In a complex model like Claude there is no doubt much more at work, but some version of optimizing for the wrong thing is what’s ultimately at play.
by ndriscoll | 2025-12-18 16:54:11+00:00
The original question was "how do you know these things before you buy the game?" My answer was "You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG." Whether it's a developer choice is irrelevant. GOG tells you the information you need for your purchasing decision, so if you want to know what you're buying, buy from somewhere like GOG. Also, don't assume that because it's DRM-free on GOG, it is also DRM-free elsewhere like Steam.

Buying a DRM-free copy on GOG seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do even if a company has DRM on Steam; it provides an economic signal that there's some segment of customers that requires no DRM as a condition of sale. Since marginal cost of digital "goods" is ~0 and it's likely trivial to disable DRM in your build, it would be dumb not to cater to them and take your free money.
by naasking | 2025-12-18 16:54:19+00:00
> If you find it compiled something wrong, you can walk backwards through the code, if you want to find out what it'll do walk forwards. LLMs have no such capability.

Right, so you agree that optimization outputs not fully predictable in complex programs, and what you're actually objecting to is that LLMs aren't like compiler optimizations in the specific ways you care about, and somehow this is supposed to invalidate my argument that they are alike in the specific ways that I outlined.

I'm not interested in litigating the minutiae of this point, programmers who treat the compiler as a black box (ie. 99% of them) see probabilistic outputs. The outputs are generally reliable according to certain criteria, but unpredictable.

LLM models are also typically probabilistic black boxes. The outputs are also unpredictable, but also somewhat reliable according to certain criteria that you can learn through use. Where the unreliability is problematic you can often make up for their pitfalls. The need for this is dropping year over year, just as the need for assembly programming to eke out performance dropped year over year of compiler development. Whether LLMs will become as reliable as compiler optimizations remains to be seen.
by entropicdrifter | 2025-12-18 16:54:28+00:00
>and the dedicated user buys most of their games on Steam anyways because it's the dominant distribution platform.

It's also the most convenient by far, and the new Steam Family stuff lets you share all of your games with all of your siblings without any need for password sharing like you'd have to on e.g. GoG or Epic. I have 4 siblings and most of us are married. Our combined Steam library is well over 1000 games
by empath75 | 2025-12-18 16:54:28+00:00
> How do you prevent introducing a bias that then becomes what we "know" about how statues were painted? By introducing modern aesthetic sensibilities and present them as plausible, we then reinforce that this is how statues were painted back then, and we don't know.

This is just an argument against doing reconstructions at all. Which I am also okay with. It's not a defense of the existing reconstructions because they have the same problem. You don't want to assume additional layers. The existing reconstructions are assuming there were no additional layers. Neither are valid assumptions, but they are both possible. So present multiple possible alternatives without stating that any of them are accurate reconstructions, only that they are constructions which are consistent with the available evidence.

Surely, if one wanted to produce a "reconstruction" of the Venus deMilo, it would have arms. Even if you don't know what the arms would have looked like. And that you would not reconstruct the arms as just straight lines projecting from the stump and would make some attempt to make them realistic and aesthetically pleasing, even if the end result almost certainly does not look much like what the original arms would have looked like, exactly, it would be more like it in spirit than either the statue with stumps or with some sort of vaguely armed shaped cylindrical attachments.
by Obscurity4340 | 2025-12-18 16:54:40+00:00
They also need to let you transfer your purchases to a new AppleID under a new enail address. It is outrageous you're forced to choose between all your purchases from an email account name from when you were a kid or teen and getting to have an adult email address/handle and not having a data hungry company like Google or Microsoft seeing all your Apple activity in perpetuity
by n4r9 | 2025-12-18 16:54:43+00:00
> You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts

This is untrue, as I've previously pointed out here [0] and here [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488099

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45412989
by smivan | 2025-12-18 16:55:11+00:00
This is one of the reasons I picked a small, dedicated email provider [1] over Google Workspace for my corporate emails. If Google flips out and ban hammers us for no reason, my company will still be able to reach clients and work on projects. Apple, Google and Facebook are way too trigger happy with automated bans and no recourse.

[1] https://mxroute.com/
by HDThoreaun | 2025-12-18 16:55:54+00:00
> That's why I think that people should be able to work for less, for employers who think they are a net positive at a lower wage.

No. If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because employers think they would be a net negative at a $0 wage. There are a couple counter examples like walmart no longer being open overnight, but even then thats more because of theft than paying the employees. It is not hard to find a minimum wage job in the vast majority of the country. If you cant its because employers think you will do an exceptionally bad job. Every single adult has skills valued at minimum wage in the US, the question is just if they have a drug problem or mental illness or something like that. Those people wouldnt be helpful at $0 wage either
by teddyh | 2025-12-18 16:56:13+00:00
> (2011, proxied quote from The Cambridge Student via The Escapist; the link in that article is dead, and a search on the site for “Newell” turns up no results)

Here’s the latest copy of the original article in The Cambridge Student:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20220924191721/https://www.tcs.c...>
Show HN: Git rewind – your Git year in review
by thijser | 2025-12-18 16:56:31+00:00
I started an experiment to let a WASM-powered webapp interact with a local git repo and see how well this works. It turns out, it works pretty well!

I made it into a "git wrapped" tool that shows you when you committed the most, and what languages and files you most touched.

Despite the scary prompt when you use the filesystem API everything happens locally and your code stays private. (You can of course also just try it on cloned public github repos).

Let me know what you think!
by reactordev | 2025-12-18 16:56:43+00:00
yes but except as a punishment for crime whereof has been refined with further case law I believe. You can be forced to do small jobs, clean up. You can be assigned Road Crew and pickup trash. You can do small jobs that the system won't hire and pay for, they'll use you. So long as you aren't a risk of flight, to the officers, or to society if you have to interact with the public.

Beats sitting in a cinderblock white-painted cell with a metal cot and 4" mattress.
by ryandvm | 2025-12-18 16:57:02+00:00
I tried to use Microsoft's Game Pass and the Xbox store on a Windows machine with multiple users.

It was astoundingly unusable for sharing Microsoft's own game within my own household with my own family members. Completely broken user experience.

It's not hard to believe that Steam was able to thrive because Microsoft has just done an amazingly bad job with this. I've been in software dev for 20 years and it still baffles me that companies with tens of thousands of engineers can produce such shitty software experiences.
by azemetre | 2025-12-18 16:57:08+00:00
I use AI every day and run my own local models, that has nothing to do with seeing sales people acting like sales people or conmen being con artists.

Also add in the fact that big tech has been extremely damaging to western society for the last 20 years, there's really little reason to trust them. Especially since we see how they treat those with different opinions than them (trying to force them out of power, ostracize them publicly, or in some cases straight up poisoning people + giving them cancer).

Not really hard to see how people can be against such actions? Well buckle up bro, come post 2028 expect a massive crackdown and regulations against big tech. It's been boiling for quite a while and there's trillions of dollars to plunder for the public's benefit.
by jrowen | 2025-12-18 16:57:25+00:00
> Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.

I would call that disparaging.

If we're going to be pedantic, the post you initially quoted said "it's entirely possible" and "it seems likely." That's not a claim, that's a suggestion that invites a substantive counter-argument. Just saying "uh no, it's obviously not" is not substantive.

"It goes without saying HN is not the smartest" is more of a claim.

It really should not be that difficult to actually attempt to make an argument rather than point out that someone else's is probabilistically not totally factually correct. It's just bad faith, pure negation. You're defending the lack of substance in your argument by saying someone else's argument lacked substance. Put something forth yourself.

I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.
by notahacker | 2025-12-18 16:57:51+00:00
I mean, some change in taste is indisputable fact: we like our classical statues in bare marble but we know Romans generally painted them in some way. The Romans also didn't build brutalist buildings or listen to rock music. Nothing about this change in taste necessarily implies that we're smarter than them.

We're clearly not the same society since the Romans either, whilst we take a certain amount of influence from them and other ancestors (and a certain amount more from idealised conceptions of them) we're not a unified state under one Emperor or a mostly agricultural society, don't think that slavery is part of the natural order, consult oracles or worship Jupiter and have big ideas about the importance of human rights and the necessity of universal education.
by potatolicious | 2025-12-18 16:57:57+00:00
Are they actually running the Apple playbook in reverse? It seems to me that they're actually running Apple's playbook pretty squarely, just in another domain.

First-gen product that seemed to not know where it's going? Check.

Continued quiet iteration behind closed doors despite first-gen being a flop? Check.

Sticking with the product line over many years, where most other companies would have written off and thrown in the towel? Check.

Multi-pronged GTM strategy where other products prove out key bits of next product? Check. (see: SteamOS and Proton setting the stage for Steam Deck, which in turn sets the stage for Steam Machine 2)

Deep software-hardware integration in ways that are highly salient to users? Check (see: foviated streaming for Steam Frame, Steam Deck "just works")
by jampa | 2025-12-18 16:58:12+00:00
I've used it in some repos. It doesn't catch all code review issues, especially around product requirements and logic simplification, and occasionally produces irrelevant comments (suggesting a temporary model downgrade).

But it's well worth it. It has saved me some considerable time. I let it run first, even before my own final self-review (so if others do the same, the article's data might be biased). It's particularly good at identifying dead code and logical issues. If you tune it with its own custom rules (like Claude.md), you can also cut a lot of noise.
by privong | 2025-12-18 16:58:42+00:00
> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money

In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).