MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taurath | 2025-12-10 08:31:21+00:00
It was really proof that gameplay often takes a back seat to visual identity, ESPECIALLY if the gameplay is extremely derivative, which this was. They had a massive amount of goodwill from fans of the genre, but when they started sharing screenshots it deflated fast - its not a 2025 game, its a 2010 clone of a popular 2005 game. Its nigh impossible to make a spiritual successor to genre defining games in WC3 and SC2 - too many things need to go perfect.

It had a better chance if it could find its own voice, but it ended up feeling like a direct to home video sequel to a popular movie
by IshKebab | 2025-12-10 08:32:33+00:00
I never claimed to be doing a formal proof. If someone said "traffic was bad this morning" would you say "have you done a scientific study on the average journey times across the year and for different locations to know that it was actually bad"?

> LLMs produce worse results in than humans

We aren't talking about whether LLMs are better than humans.

Also we're obviously talking about Rust code that compiles. Code that doesn't compile is 100% secure!
by danlitt | 2025-12-10 08:32:40+00:00
Giving the users source code and no rights to do anything with it really doesn't give them very much. Software freedom advocates are not just nerds who really enjoy reading source code. The point is that if you have the source code and the right to change it then you take control of the activity the software is doing, or helping you to do. If you don't have control, being able to read the source code is not very useful.
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-10 08:33:42+00:00
> Breakpoints just work. Debugging just works. Everything… works.

...and you're actually debugging the WASM executable which runs in a browser and not a native version of the application?

Not that it matters most of the time, I also do 99% of my debugging session on the native target. But for debugging problems that only happen in the WASM version actually debugging the WASM version makes a lot of sense, and that was anything but trivial not too long ago (if QtCreator can actually pull off a remote debugging session where the debuggee runs in Chrome then kudos to QtCreator).
by bvrmn | 2025-12-10 08:33:56+00:00
It's funny. One can't simply write a correct C code. Even after years of practice.

void strclone(const char* str, char** outCpy) { size_t len = strlen(s) + 1; *outCpy = malloc(len); memcpy(outCpy, str, len); // wrong dest address }

I don't like double pointer parameters because of it.
by rickdeckard | 2025-12-10 08:34:14+00:00
Vertical integration matters for sure, but people often underestimate the scale in which this market is already skewed.

- Apple owns more than 50% of this market-segment, the annual sales of iPhones is roughly 200 Million units. In comparison, Samsung Galaxy S-series sits at roughly 20-25 Millions.

- Apple's is alone in the iOS ecosystem, while Samsung, Xiaomi and Oppo have to compete within the Android space every year. iOS is extremely sticky, which makes a certain volume of iPhones almost guaranteed to sell every year, at a lofty profit margin.

In comparison, Samsung always has to consider that the next BAD Galaxy-S might only sell a fraction of the previous one, because users might move horizontally to another Android brand (even to Pixel, a first-party product of their ecosystem provider). So Samsung cannot even make bets based on the sale of 20 million units, they are already at risk to make bets on the initial shipment-volume (~5 millions) because if the device doesn't sell they will have to PAY money to the carriers to get them into the market.

Apple has a much lower risk here. If the next iPhone is not catching on, Apple will likely still sell 200mn iPhones in that year, because the ecosystem lock-in is so strong that there is little risk of losing customers to anything else than ANOTHER (then more-profitable) iPhone.

So even when assuming a MASSIVE annual drop of 25% in Sales, Apple can still make development bets based on a production forecast of 150 MILLION units.

For their supply-chain that's still an average production output of ~400k units per DAY for each component. With that volume you can get entire factories to only produce for you.

That's why I can't think of any company in a comparable position. Apple can add hardware to their device and sell the resulting product to the consumer for profit before delivering any actual value with it.

If any competitor in the Android space attempts that, just the component costs alone will risk the device to be dead-on-arrival just because "some other Android device" delivers the same experience at lower cost.
by hgs3 | 2025-12-10 08:34:27+00:00
I'm not a kernel developer myself, but I’m aware of the Tanenbaum/Torvalds debates in the early 90’s. My understanding is the primary reason Linus gave Tanenbaum for the monolithic design was performance, but I would think in 2025 this isn’t so relevant anymore.

And thanks for attempting to answer my question without snark or down voting. Usually HN is much better for discussion than this.
by goosers | 2025-12-10 08:36:23+00:00
I’m experimenting with this, but using the CPU not the GPU. I’m finishing up writing the series now, but focused more on understanding the architecture than trying to build a useful model. Mine requires talking in the language of Shakespeare, and getting replies in the same, a proof of concept more than a useful tool. https://www.tag1.com/white-paper/part1-tokenization-building...

I was interested in focusing on repeatability and using text sources anyone can legally obtain. It’s been fascinating, but after much experimentation it’s clear that working with more text and more diverse text would be extremely helpful.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-10 08:36:31+00:00
Those numbers would be more realistic, amounting to around a thousand dollars spent per each EU citizen per year; this seems a little high if replacement rates are hovering around 3 years on average, but not impossible like the other figure.

What I don’t understand is why it would be written “USD 448.87 million.” This convention is common in accounting and finance as well, but they usually make an indication of it in a column header.
by conradev | 2025-12-10 08:37:29+00:00
It is thought up to 35 turbines were present on the site of xAI’s existing data center, generating 422MW of power.

That is a few square miles of solar panels, which I don't think is quicker to install than the 35 turbines.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/xai-removes-some-...
by luc4sdreyer | 2025-12-10 08:37:58+00:00
> Time doesn’t exist. Do the people writing this garbage live in a vacuum? Is it AI slop?

Maybe don't dismiss an idea as garbage before trying to understand it.

One of the ideas here is that time is an emergent phenomenon, like how temperature and gas pressure seem real at a macroscopic level, but disappear once you look closer. They simply describe the average kinetic energy of all the molecules in the area.

The _hypothesis_ is that time could be similar.
by GBeastMode | 2025-12-10 08:38:28+00:00
It’s true that 'the house always wins' in the long run because of game mathematics. Yet a casino that runs on secure, certified software and focuses on player retention doesn’t profit from a single big loss - it builds income through long-term relationships with its players. Here’s an article explaining how casinos generate revenue: https://www.rosloto.net/en/what-online-casino-revenues-depen...
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-12-10 08:39:17+00:00
Service reminder: Peertube is mainly developed by academics (at least half of whom are French) to host educational content. Competing with YouTube is not their priority. Their priority is to be able to present a history course on the Second World War without having to contort themselves to avoid saying ‘Nazi’ and pass under the radar of automatic moderation.

It's a great project, but it's not a replacement for YouTube, and that's fine.
Ask HN: New swe engineer at a scale-up, low quality of projects
by elnatro | 2025-12-10 08:39:17+00:00
I’ve been hired by a company, and the code quality is atrocious (no tests, no docs, outdated runtimes and libraries BY YEARs). Hundreds of projects suffering bugs that I’m assigned to fix without any idea about them.

I need some positive experiences to know that this is not normal. Or if it is, how can you navigate it? Do you just ignore the status and do cowboy-coding? You first try to add tests? You leverage LLMs for this?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-10 08:40:05+00:00
Thank you for your response!

So I thought that having an open source project in DPGA would be really great but it seems that everything that glitters isn't gold like how you mention support requests etc.

I have a question tho, What are the best foundations or labels (like DGPA) that an open source software can qualify for which might give it more exposure and funding

Personally I am starting to believe it might be NLNET (https://nlnet.nl/) but what are your thoughts on it?
by simonask | 2025-12-10 08:41:06+00:00
What they mean is that the Linux kernel has a long-standing policy to keep the whole kernel compilable on every commit, so any commit that changes an internal API must also fix up _all_ the places where that internal API is used.

While Rust in the kernel was experimental, this rule was relaxed somewhat to avoid introducing a barrier for programmers who didn't know Rust, so their work could proceed unimpeded while the experiment ran. In other words, the Rust code was allowed to be temporarily broken while the Rust maintainers fixed up uses of APIs that were changed in C code.
by lawrencejgd | 2025-12-10 08:41:20+00:00
It doesn't matter that AVIF uses the same container for AV1 or AV2 based encoding, if the browsers don't have the right decoder for it then they can't decode it.

An example of this is MP4: Browsers can decode videos encoded with H264 in MP4 containers, but not H265 even if it uses the same container, because one thing is the container and another thing is the codec, they're related but they aren't the same.
by bloppe | 2025-12-10 08:41:23+00:00
Most source-available licenses that I've encountered have no paid license requirements for users. They only require a paid license if you want to sell the product commercially. Normally, you're still allowed to use the software as a piece of a larger commercial product, as long as it does not compete with the original author, or "substantially reproduce the functionality" of the source-available bits, depending on the exact language.
by A1kmm | 2025-12-10 08:42:31+00:00
If the intent is to stop it being used for a business, that's inherently at odds with part of the OSI's definition: "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research".

Now technically maybe it could meet the OSD if it required a royalty for hosting the software as a SaaS product, instead of banning that - since it allows "free redistribution", and passes on the same right to anyone receiving it (it is defined in terms of prohibitions on what the licence can restrict, and there is no restriction on charging a set amount for use unless that requires executing a separate licence agreement).

Now arguably this is a deficiency in the OSD. But I imagine if you tried to exploit that, they might just update the definition and/or decline to list your licence.
by eudoxus | 2025-12-10 08:42:53+00:00
I'm going to respond here assuming you are being genuine and not facetious or sarcastic (even though I am hoping you were).

"Source available" doesn't in any way mean "you can sue anyone that uses your code for any reason...". The irony of highlighting the trickery of these terms then you yourself perpetuating wrong definitions is... amusing.

"Source available" is by definition ill-defined, in the sense that "open source" is defined. There is no trademark, stewarding body, or legal entity behind "Source available". It only exists in relation to OSI defined "open source".

Which is to say, it is defined as code that does not fit the "Open Source Definition (OSD)" yet its source code is viewable. Maybe its modifiable, maybe its free to use, but maybe its neither. Thats all anyone can factually attribute to the definition of "Source available". Nothing about "suing ... for any reason".

Again, hoping you were making your comment in good fun, otherwise it doesn't look too good for you.
by brucehoult | 2025-12-10 08:43:01+00:00
Quote, because unlike on Reddit I couldn't figure out how to do multi para > quotes with code here.

------

Compressed pointers reduce the need for memory by storing pointers as 32-bit unsigned offsets relative to a base register. Decompressing the pointers just consists of adding the offset and register together. As simple as this sounds, it comes with a small complication on our RISC-V 64-bit port. By construction, 32-bit values are always loaded into the 64-bit registers as signed values. This means that we need to zero-extend the 32-bit offset first. Until recently this was done by bit-anding the register with 0xFFFF_FFFF:

li t3,1 slli t3, t3, 32 addi t3, t3, -1 and a0, a0, t3

Now, this code uses the `zext.w` instruction from the Zba extension:

zext.w a0, a0

-----

This is so strange. Does no one at Google know RISC-V? This has *never* needed more than...

slli a0, a0, 32 srli a0, a0, 32

And if they're going to use `Zba`, and zero-extend it and then add it to another register, then why use a separate `zext.w` instruction and `add` instead of ...

add.uw decompressed, compressed, base

... to zero extend and add in one instruction??

After all, `zext.w` is just an alias for `add.uw` with the `zero` register as the last argument...

They also could have always simply stored the 32 bit offset as signed and pointed the base register 2GB into the memory area instead of using x86/Arm-centric design.
by mathstuf | 2025-12-10 08:43:32+00:00
If you have projects that fit within an app, sure. I do not. The only "apps" seen on my machines are terminal windows hosting tmux processes and Firefox. Everything else is ephemeral (mpv, dialogs, rofi, dunst). App-centric behavior is just the wrong axis for this setup.

I'm saying that given what details are there, I think the author is closer to "my" end of the spectrum than one where the question makes sense at all.
by mickeyp | 2025-12-10 08:43:33+00:00
Battle.net's simple system of just downloading maps you didn't have helped a lot.

I remember playing a "Use Map Settings" map where you started out as a lone marine and then had to 'upgrade' your character over time. It felt like a very early prototype of later hero-style games that came to exist in Warcraft 3 and beyond.

Fun times.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-12-10 08:43:43+00:00
I remember at my first job, the internet stopped working at my workstation. I got on the phone with IT, and the guy said "looks like you don't have our new certificates." I asked why I would need my employer's certificates. He said "because we MITM every connection." I asked if that was even legal, and he said yes it's legal.

At another job I was handling a support ticket where a customer was asking, in so many words, "can I get HTTP headers of requests flowing through my Envoy TLS reverse proxy?" I said that they could terminate TLS at the proxy and redo things that way, but then that wouldn't be a TLS proxy it'd be a MITM or a gateway. They could log the downstream/upstream and duration of connections, but that wouldn't help.
by dwattttt | 2025-12-10 08:44:09+00:00
There is, I understand, an expectation that if you do make breaking changes to kernel APIs, you fix the callers of such APIs. Which has been a point of contention, that if a maintainer doesn't know Rust, how would they fix Rust users of an API?

The Rust for Linux folks have offered that they would fix up such changes, at least during the experimental period. I guess what this arrangement looks like long term will be discussed ~now.
by NiloCK | 2025-12-10 08:44:57+00:00
Again and forever:

These fights stem from usage of a proprietary definition of Open Source (the OSI's). Obviously the definition doesn't resonate with DHH, and he uses the words 'open' and 'source' colloquially. Open, as in a book or a window, source, as in the thing that gets compiled into bits and bobs that run on computers. You wouldn't jump on someone's "open letter" to city hall because of a lack of freedom to fork it.

This could stop if people capitalized their reference to Open Source, which is standard English treatment of proper nouns. Unlikely to happen though, because insisting that "my definitions are your definitions" seems to be a primal tribal instinct for humans.
by zwnow | 2025-12-10 08:45:02+00:00
The process of breaking a complex problem down into the right primitives requires great understanding of the original problem in the first place.

Whats blocking me during programming usually are edge cases I had no idea about. Its still hard to find good material on compilers if you are not into reading dry ass books. Thats a me problem though, I simply cant force myself to read boring factual only content (one of the reasons as to why I love beejs guides).
by pjmlp | 2025-12-10 08:45:23+00:00
This was only the case when the machine code generated from C compilers was almost 1:1 to PDP-11, or similar 16 bit home computers.

Since optmizing compilers became a thing in the C world, and the WG14 never considered modern CPU architectures on what hardware features C should expose, this idea lost meaning.

However many people hold on to old beliefs that C is still the same kind of C that they learnt with the first edition of K&R C book.

This ACM article might be interesting to you, https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479

Before dismissing it as the author having no idea what he is talking about, David Chisnall used to be a GCC contributor, one of the main GNUStep contributors back in the original days, and one of the key researchers behind the CHERI project.
by corndoge | 2025-12-10 08:45:55+00:00
> Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware?

I think the user experience would be quite poor, enough that nobody would use the instance. As an example a 4k video will transcoded at least 2 times, to 1080p and 720p, and depending on server config often several more times. Each transcode job takes a long time, even with substantial hwaccel on a desktop.

Very high bitrate video is quite common now since most phones, action cameras etc are capable of 4k30 and often 4k60.

> Do you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous.

If I had to guess, I would expect it be a poor experience. Say I take a 5 minute video, that's probably around 3-5gb. I upload it, then need to wait - in the foreground - for this video to be transcoded and then uploaded to object storage 3 times on a phone chip. People won't do it.

I do like the idea of offloading transcode to users. I wonder if it might be suited for something like https://rendernetwork.com/ where users exchange idle compute to a transcode pool for upload & storage rights, and still get to fire-and-forget uploads?
by oblio | 2025-12-10 08:45:59+00:00
Even Perl... It's not in POSIX (I'm fairly sure) and I can't imagine there is some critical utility written in Perl that can't be rewritten in Python or something else (and probably already has been).

As much as I like Java, Java is also not critical for OS utilities. Bash shouldn't be, per se, but a lot of scripts are actually Bash scripts, not POSIX shell scripts and there usually isn't much appetite for rewriting them.
Tell HN: GitHub listened and removed the AI summary feature
by muragekibicho | 2025-12-10 08:45:59+00:00
I don't know if it's the same for you guys. I stopped submitting code to GitHub last month because I absolutely hated the forced AI summaries while making commits.

Today I needed to make a commit for my customers and I wasn't fed that LLM garbage while submitting a commit.

I'm actually quite impressed that they listened to us and removed that AI nonsense.

However, I'm also aware I might be part of some bizarre A/B test so I'm not super sure if you guys are seeing the LLM summary garbage.
How to scale after first paying customer?
by machopanko | 2025-12-10 08:46:28+00:00
Hey guys,

Super excited to have experienced my first taste of success with my first paying customer after two weeks of launching.

Built this while finishing my thesis and working contract gigs. Saved 18k, spent six months shipping features and fixing bugs, and honestly wasn’t sure anyone would use it. So seeing that first customer felt unreal.

Now what? I'm extremely happy about this but at the same time i would like a reality check and I would like to learn how to scale my product. and not got trapped by this founders high that I'm feeling. So my question is, how do i expand from here?

Feel free to give some feedback, thoughts, comments.

Landing Page (explanation) -> https://haxiom.io

Product Page (Application) -> https://app.haxiom.io

Tech Stack:

Backend: ElysiaJS + Axum

Frontend: SolidJS + Rust WASM markdown renderer

Database: PostgreSQL + PgVector

Analytics database: Turso CDN: Cloudflare

LLM/embeddings: Gemini

Infra: DigitalOcean
by Arainach | 2025-12-10 08:46:39+00:00
By leaving out the following paragraph you're doing an injustice, framing a humorous anecdote as an attack:

>Then I remembered that I'd heard it before. A homeless guy had been saying this exact same thing down by the beach, although I had to admit the message benefited from the wireless microphone, the giant festival stage, and the thousands of screaming fans.

It's a poignant observation about how similarly inane arguments are perceived as evidence of mental illness or deep insights based on the social perception of the speaker.

The author of this article is a solid storyteller who brings in a number of human elements that make it compelling. Meandering storytelling is intentional - this isn't an article for a scientific journal.
by koolala | 2025-12-10 08:46:55+00:00
I edited it to be more specific while you were typing that.

The entire point of copyright is a legal mechanism to sue people. "Source-available" at a minimum is someone sharing their code under their own copyright and terms of use.

Yes the term is designed to trick outsiders. Most people don't even know that code is copyrighted by default when it is posted publicly and freely on the internet without a © symbol.
by bullfightonmars | 2025-12-10 08:47:23+00:00
In the case of Fizzy, the app that 37signals has made “source available”, the real motivation for publishing is form of advertising for Ruby on Rails.

DHH is on a mission to show that you can write great software with way less bullshit than is in vogue.

This code base is sparkling in its design. No build frontend, server side rendered templates, minimal js used primarily to drive interactivity, extremely simple models, jobs, and controllers.

It has < 3000 lines of js with incredibly rich interaction design, when was the last time you saw that?