MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2025-12-04 12:41:58+00:00
> Are they unprofitable because they don't profit on inference, or because they reinvest all of the profit into scaling up?

They are scaling up using VC money, not revenue. As far as profit on inference goes, it's hard to separate it out from training: they cannot, at any given time, simply stop training because that would kill any advantage they have 6 months down the line.

For all practical purposes, you can't look at their inference costs independent of the training cost; they need to keep spending on both if they want to continue doing inference.

> Remember how long Amazon was unprofitable, by choice.

That was a very different scenario - AMZ was not spending their revenue on land-grabbing, they were spending their revenue on long-lived infra, while AI companies now are spending VC investment, not revenue, on land-grabbing.

The difference between spending your revenue on short-lived infra (training a new model, acquiring GPUs) and long-lived infra is that with long-lived infra, at any time, even after 10+ years, you can stop expanding your infra and keep the resulting revenue as profit.

With short-lived infra (models, GPUs), you can't simply stop infra spending and collect profit from the revenue, because the infra reached end-of-life and needs to be replaced anyway.
by TonyAlicea10 | 2025-12-04 12:42:41+00:00
One thing this (and any browser-embeddable data store) are fantastic for is vibe coding interactive prototypes for user research.

AI-generated code that doesn’t need to be production ready has been a real boon to usability and design work. Testing with users something that actually saves and displays data, and seeding the app with realistic-looking datasets in both shape and size, reveals usability issues that you just don’t discover in Figma prototypes.

If a product team isn’t performing user research with interactive prototypes as a core part of their dev and design lifecycle, they’re doing themselves a real disservice. It’s so easy now.
by raesene9 | 2025-12-04 12:42:46+00:00
I'd guess the tricky part there is proving intent. If I sign up to a VPN so I can watch sports or other geo-restricted content while on holiday, does that count?

In a fully authoritarian state of course you likely don't have to worry too much about proof, but I'd suggest the UK has a ways to go for that.

On the piracy front, well we've seen how successful they were in stopping piracy.... not at all.
by defcc | 2025-12-04 12:42:56+00:00
I might consider adding a backend server at some point, but I'd still want to keep the tool as simple and privacy-friendly as possible.

Right now everything works fully offline, and that's part of the appeal.

If I do add a backend, it would only be for optional things like syncing or sharing — and it would stay opt-in so the core experience remains local-only.

Still exploring the balance there, but thanks for the idea!
by squeefers | 2025-12-04 12:42:57+00:00
> For the same reason you wouldn't allow a child to go play in an open sewer, you cannot allow them access to the unrestricted Internet.

fair enough, but legislate this? why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet? Id argue youre overblowing it but you cant ever remove the emotional/hysterical aspect when dealing with a parent
by vrighter | 2025-12-04 12:43:08+00:00
if you have the source to those programs, and are willing to (sometimes significantly) rewrite parts of them and recompile (see: wayland, for example)

The amazing part is that you don't need to do this in windows whether you have the source or not. I am a linux user, but for all their faults, Microsoft got their backwards compatibility stuff right. Something that the oss world, on average, needs to be convinced it's a desirable thing.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-12-04 12:43:57+00:00
They released UT 3 in 2007 but I think around that time the company shifted more towards their engine, which by then was already the most used game engine for high profile games (don't quote me on that one, it's a gut feeling).

They started working on a new title, but it was meandering for a long time; it seemed that they would do some of the ground work but relied on the community a lot to design and build maps and weapons. Then the Fortnite team released a Battle Royale mode and made it free to play and it completely dominated the market. The UT team was transitioned to Fortnite in 2017, and Fortnite became their money printer earning them hundreds of millions per month.

While I love Unreal Tournament and would love for them or some other party to fill the gap of a no-nonsense arena shooter, the reality is that it wouldn't be as popular or lucrative as Fortnite. It'd be competing with FPS games like CoD and Battlefield, which have more going for them - including an uneven playing field, depending on players' progression and paid-for unlocks.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-04 12:44:37+00:00
> What you hate is human nature.

Such a defeatist take. Human nature is to come up with culture to check human nature. Human nature is to feel community expulsion as badly as physical pain, because human nature is to punish anti-social behavior. We are equally capable of love, empathy, anger and violence. What isn't human nature, is watching everything taken from you, while you tell yourself that's just the way things are. That's pathology.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-12-04 12:44:52+00:00
I like the idea overall. Looks like something that would be fun to combine with music programming languages (SuperCollider/Of etc).

Not so sure how human-friendly the fractional beats are? Is that something that people more into music than I am are comfortable with? I would have expected something like MIDIs "24 ticks per quarter note" instead. And a format like bar.beat.tick. Maybe just because that is what I am used to.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-04 12:44:52+00:00
>Do you have any actual evidence of this?

Apart from the exfiltration of data, the complete absence of any savings or efficiencies, and the fact that DOGE closed as soon as the exfiltration was over?

>Corporations and governments are made of actual people.

And we know how well that goes.

>"the state" doesn't have one grand agenda for enslavement.

The government doesn't. The people who own the government clearly do. If they didn't they'd be working hard to increase economic freedom, lower debt, invest in public health, make education better and more affordable, make it easier to start and run a small business, limit the power of corporations and big money, and clamp down on extractive wealth inequality.

They are very very clearly and obviously doing the opposite of all of these things.

And they have a history of links to the old slave states, and both a commercial and personal interest in neo-slavery - such as for-profit prisons, among other examples.

All of this gets sold as "freedom", but even Orwell had that one worked out.

Those who have been paying attention to how election fixers like SCL/Cambridge Analytica work(ed) know where the bodies are buried. The whole point of these operations is to use personalised, individual data profiling to influence voting political behaviour, by creating messaging that triggers individual responses that can be aggregated into a pattern of mass influence leveraged through social media.
by crote | 2025-12-04 12:44:59+00:00
Because companies can't be trusted to set up proper renewal procedures.

If a cert has to be renewed once every 3 years, plenty of companies will build an extremely complicated bureaucratic dance around the process.

In the past this has resulted in CAs saying "something went wrong, and we should revoke, but Bank X is in a Holiday Freeze and won't be able to rotate any time in the next two months, and they are Critical Infrastructure!". Similarly, companies have ended up trying to sue their CA to block an inconvenient revocation.

Most of those have luckily been due to small administrative errors, but it has painfully shown that the industry is institutionally incapable of setting up proper renewal processes.

The solution is automated renewal as you can't make that too complicated, and by shortening the cert validity they are trying to make manual renewal too painful to keep around. After all, you can't set up a two-months-long process if you need to renew every 30 days!
by BirAdam | 2025-12-04 12:45:29+00:00
He didn't just "work on Windows."

GabeN was the lead developer on Windows 1, Windows 2, and Windows 3. When Windows 95 launched, he was a bit upset that no one was making games for Windows. He did a rough port of Doom to prove the viability. Around the same time Alex St. John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom were building DirectX, GabeN saw the potential, left to create Valve, and proceeded to try and making Windows gaming a great thing.

I can only imagine that he was heartbroken to see Windows go the way it did with Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and now 11.
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-12-04 12:45:51+00:00
So you build an insecure version of nomad/kubernetes and co?

If you do anything professional, you better choose proven software like kubernetes or managed kubernetes or whatever else all the hyperscalers provide.

And the complexity you are solving now or have to solve, k8s solved. IaC for example, Cloud Provider Support for provisioning a LB out of the box, cert-manager, all the helm charts for observability, logging, a ecosystem to fall back to (operators), ArgoCD <3, storage provisioning, proper high availability, kind for e2e testing on cicd, etc.

I'm also aways lost why people think k8s is so hard to operate. Just take a managed k8s. There are so many options out there and they are all compatible with the whole k8s ecosystem.

Look if you don't get kubernetes, its use casees, advantages etc. fine absolutly fine but your solution is not an alternative to k8s. Its another container orchestrator like nomad and k8s and co. with it own advantages and disadvantages.
by psviderski | 2025-12-04 12:47:10+00:00
This is exactly how it works now. The Compose file is the declarative specification of your services you want to run.

When you run 'uc deploy' command:

- it reads the spec from your compose.yaml

- inspects the current state of the services in the cluster

- computes the diff and deployment plan to reconcile it

- executes the plan after the confirmation

Please see the docs and demo: https://uncloud.run/docs/guides/deployments/deploy-app

The main difference with Docker Swarm is that the reconciliation process is run on your local/CI machine as part of the 'uc deploy' CLI command execution, not on the control plane nodes in the cluster.

And it's not running in the loop automatically. If the command fails, you get an instant feedback with the errors you can address or rerun the command again.

It should be pretty straightforward to wrap the CLI logic in a Terraform or Pulumi provider. The design principals are very similar and it's written in Go.
by reeeli | 2025-12-04 12:47:16+00:00
it's the same in any industry with the exception of insurance and bureaucracy, I think (IMO and from the top of my head)

but I believe no other industry has a greater gap between "i can't believe the shit I (have to) do at work" and "hobby" except in the many cases of voyeurs, stalkers, laissez-faire criminal investigators and passionate MiniTrue partisans, all of which are variations of the "true" human nature of the bulk of the population left after the many wars, including a great many of the ones who came home unharmed but with stories to tell
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-04 12:47:22+00:00
The difference between Valve and the other app stores with an actual user base (i.e. not Microsoft's Windows Store) is that PC gaming isn't tied to a single app store.

To be fair, neither is Android, but Steam actually gets real competition from GOG. The Amazon App Store was never really popular and the Epic Store doesn't seem to contain anything interesting if you're not playing one or two popular Epic games. Small projects can use itch.io. Large companies build their own launchers.

With the Steam Deck and now the upcoming new Steam hardware, that may change, depending on how hard Valve makes it to integrate with Steam's UI. Right now, Heroic works fine, from desktop mode, but if a company like GOG would like to actually take part in SteamOS, they'd need some kind of integration capability.

So far, nobody but Valve seems to have even considered supporting Steam and Linux' market share is small enough that it barely affects the gaming market, but if their Steam Machine explodes in popularity and they make mistakes, they can end up on many people's bad side just as well.
by bhouston | 2025-12-04 12:48:45+00:00
Very neat.

Impressive performance: https://pglite.dev/benchmarks

Even has Drizzle ORM integration: https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/connect-pglite

I will explore this for use in my unit / integration tests. It looks pretty amazing.

I am confused why all my recent compiled tooling (tsgo, biomejs) are shipping native binaries (thus creating multiple binaries, one per supported platform) and not WASM tools that can run cross platform? Is it because of startup times, poor tooling, etc?
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-12-04 12:49:03+00:00
I doubt there are any trees near the volcano, full stop.

Do the basics: go to google maps, find the "Hayli Gubbi volcano", click for the satellite image. Not a forested area at all.

I can see some light greenery near Lake Bakili. But not much.

"The Afar Region as a whole is sparsely vegetated"

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afar_Region#Land_features
by mhitza | 2025-12-04 12:49:25+00:00
This reminds me of Quake with the DeFrag mode "sub-game", but also gameplay available in Quake Live in which you could have a Railgun only match, but they could also behave like Rocket Launchers for rocket jumps.

Also allowing players to change the configuration of their game through the dev console was cool. My favorite visual change was to configure the railgun trails to persist for multiple seconds.
by heliumtera | 2025-12-04 12:49:33+00:00
About absorbing compliments really well, there is the widely discussed idea that one in a position of power loses the privilege to the truth. There are a few articles focusing on this problem on corporate environment. The concept is that when your peers have the motivation to be flattery (let's say you're in a managerial position), and more importantly, they're are punished for coming to you with problems, the reward mechanism in this environment promotes a disconnect between leader expectations and reality. That matches my experience at least. And I was able to identify this correlates well, the more aware my leadership was of this phenomenon, and the more they valued true knowledge and incremental development, easier it was to make progress, and more we saw them as someone to rely on. Some of those the felt they were prestigious and had the obligation to assert dominance, being abusive etc, were seeing with no respect by basically no one.

Everyone will say they seek truth, knowledge, honesty, while wanting desperately to ascend to a position that will take all of those things from us!
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-04 12:50:24+00:00
I know just enough about Kubernetes to not sound like an idiot when I’m in the room and mostly I deploy Docker containers to various managed services on AWS - Lambda, ECS, etc.

But, as a lead for implementations, I just couldn’t in good conscience permit something that is not an industry standard and not supported by my cloud provider. First from a self interested standpoint, it looks a lot better on their resume to say “I did $x using K8s”.

From an onboarding standpoint, just telling a new employee “we use K8s -here you go” means nothing new to learn.

If you are part of the industry, just suck it up and learn Kubernetes. Your future self won’t regret it - coming from someone who in fact has not learn K8s.

This is a challenge any new framework is going to have.
by anf0 | 2025-12-04 12:50:36+00:00
When clicking on an external link in my Facebook feed, the link opens in an in-app browser with a Debug menu in the top left and an FPS indicator in the top right of the page. When I click on the Debug menu I see logs about MetaScreenshotCapture API, IABScreenshotJS module, and IABScreenshotCaptureJSController. When I Google these terms I don’t find anything.

Does anyone know what this is? Should I be concerned?

I am using the Facebook iOS app on an iPhone 14 Pro Max with iOS 26.0. The Facebook app version is “Version 1.0\n531.0.0.35.77 (792629356)”.
Show HN: Mdit – clean Markdown notes with local files
by hjinco | 2025-12-04 12:51:06+00:00
Hi everyone, I built a small desktop markdown note app called Mdit.

I wanted something as simple and minimal as Apple Notes.

I also wanted Notion style slash commands so you can write without knowing markdown syntax, while still keeping the freedom of plain local .md files like Obsidian.

I'd appreciate any feedback.

Website: https://mdit.app

GitHub: https://github.com/hjinco/mdit

Currently supports macOS only.
by celrod | 2025-12-04 12:51:39+00:00
I use niri and footclient -N, so builtin window and tab completion don't appeal to be.

Foot feels fast, but I've not actually measured the latency. It also seems to use less CPU than GPU accelerated terminals (which it isn't) from just glancing at btop. So I'm not sold on GPU-acceleration as a feature unless I see benchmarks demonstrating the value in improved latency and reduced CPU use compared to foot

I love that foot's scrollback search, selection expansive, and copy can be entirely keyboard driven. Huge QoL feature for me that often seems neglected to me in other terminals.
by input_sh | 2025-12-04 12:51:58+00:00
Do you understand what the term "context window" means? Have you ever tried using an LLM to program anything even remotely complex? Have you observed how the quality of the output drastically reduces the longer the coversation gets?

That's what makes it bad at security. It cannot comprehend more than a floppy drive worth of data before it reverts to absolute gibberish.
by analogears | 2025-12-04 12:52:21+00:00
Speaking of JavaScript's evolution - I've been building a music player (muz11.com) and it's remarkable how far we've come. The Web Audio API, MediaSession for lock screen controls, smooth animations via requestAnimationFrame... all running client-side with no framework, just vanilla JS. Thirty years ago this would have required a desktop app and probably a record label deal.

The irony is that 'freeing' JavaScript from Oracle's trademark might matter less than freeing ourselves from the framework churn. The platform itself is incredibly capable now.
by crote | 2025-12-04 12:52:22+00:00
Having Chrome/Firefox asynchronously check the CT log 0.1% of the time would probably be enough to solve that.

CT logging is mandatory, and even a single missing cert is probably going to be an existential threat to any CA.

The fact that someone is checking is already enough of a deterrent to prevent large-scale attacks. And if you're worried about spearphishing-via-MitM, you should probably stick to Tor.
by joshstrange | 2025-12-04 12:54:02+00:00
Small targeted use of LLMs is the sweet spot for me, that can include Claude Code usage but not “write me this huge feature kthxbai”, I use it with dangerous permissions but I normally ask it to do small tasks that I review/tweak right away. That plus Copilot (auto-complete, I don’t care for the agent mode) is what I’m using right now.

I do lean heavily on Claude Code or other LLMs for small scripts and one-off tests. It’s amazing for that, “here are some log lines, I want I extract X, Y, Z from each line and write that out to a new file” or even little tools to wrangle out ticketing system “write a script to read ticket ids from a file and update each ticket to fill out the deployed version field with the value I pass into this script”.

Lastly, not exactly “writing code” but I semi-recently started asking Claude Code things like “find me all the places we do X in the code base” or “how does Y feature work”, it’s FAR from perfect but it’s an amazing starting point. Claude code doesn’t need to write code to be useful, just being able to spider through my codebase and pull out insights is amazing.
by suslik | 2025-12-04 12:54:41+00:00
A couple of years ago, one rainy Saturday morning, I woke up with a devastating hangover and nothing else to do - so I decided to build myself a PC, like in good old days. Turned out it wasn't at all difficult to find a local store; only two-three hours later I was already driving home with all these sexy looking boxes filled with hardware. That was in Sweden.
by klaussilveira | 2025-12-04 12:54:57+00:00
I honestly can't understand why Epic Games refuses to open-source Unreal 1 and UT99. They insist on licensing individual developers, instead of opening up the source so community forks can thrive. Look at the id tech community, with all the Doom and Quake forks, and all the amazing projects that spawned off of them.

The topic of "middleware" often comes up, as an excuse for them not being able to open the source. Well, just remove any third-party libraries and middleware, even EA did it with their C&C open-source releases. The C&C release did not even compile, but that did not stop the community from porting to Linux and other platforms, as well as modernizing the source and creating replacement libraries.
by qdotme | 2025-12-04 12:55:08+00:00
True, for some definition of first and some definition of modern. I’d say it builds extremely heavily on the works inside XTX (and prior to that, XFactor etc) on general purpose linear algebra tooling, and still doesn’t change the fact that it remains shallow, even including JAX. Google TPUs change this equation a bit, as they are starting to come to fruition; but for them to reach the level of depth of NVDA, or even DEC to SUN, they’d have to actually own it from silicon to apps… and they eventually might. But the bulk of work at Google is narrow end-user projects, and they don’t have (at large) a deep engineering excellence focus.

Waymo is an acquihire from ‘05 DARPA challenges, and I’d say Tesla got there too (but with a much stricter hardware to user stack, which ought to bear fruits)

I’d say Kubernetes would be impressive compared to 1970s mainframes ;) Jokes aside, it’s a neat tool to use crappy PCs as server farms, which was sort of Google’s big insight in 2000s when everyone was buying Sun and dying with it, but that makes it not deep, at least not within Google itself.

But this may change. I think Brin recognizes this during the Code Red, and they start very heavily on building a technical moat since OpenAI was the first credible threat to the user behavior moat.
by NewsaHackO | 2025-12-04 12:55:30+00:00
Thanks for the link, however, this is not saying what you think it is saying. This is talking about expenses, not losses. Saying that Anthropic has expenses in the billions is as meaningless as saying that Google has expenses in the hundreds of billions. This exemplifies why I hate it when people use amateur blogs to try to show that AI companies are failing; they use amateurish interpretations that are usually wrong, and a lot of people latch on to them because it confirms their own ideals