MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Apocryphon | 2025-12-14 08:03:13+00:00
AAA companies might pump out a lot of FPS- though it's arguable that they also grind out all sorts of other reliable and less-than-groundbreaking genres, from flavor of the decade trends (MMORPGs/MOBAs/live service battle royales/extraction shooters) to annual sports titles to Assassin's Creed sequels. The Call of Duty machine aside, I'm not sure if FPS is as much of a cash cow as it used to be.

And if you look at this best-selling video games list, there's only a single FPS in the top ten (PUBG, which is technically also third-person):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
by d--b | 2025-12-14 08:04:38+00:00
Ah, this is fun.

The article is about how people shouldn’t build CMSs because they’re building things that are too simple, missing tons features and not realizing the scope of what they get into.

But one thing that CMSs may want to have is “proper version control”. So what do they do? They are faced with 2 options: using a complete version control system like git, which allows them to do branches and merges and PR reviews and so on. Or they build something simpler internally, with only draft/publish, like they usually do.

But what if 2 marketers are making changes to the same file at the same time? one because the name of a product changed, and one because there is a new christmas sale. Does the version system handle merging? Maybe… maybe not…

The point I am making is that we always make the tradeoffs of buying off-the-shelf complex stuff vs internally built, incomplete buggy but tailor-made solutions.

And CMS is very much a space where customability matters.

BTW, Github Pages is a git-backed “CMS” used by millions of people. It works fine.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-14 08:05:41+00:00
As I read it I was just thinking "whoa, someone really just decided to pawn their site design off to AI, then complain it doesn't get CMS, then build CMS purely so they can yell their requests at the AI, and so the company making the CMS pawned off to AI writing article why using AI isn't a great way to click at their CMS"

could be summed up as "and not a single bit of productivity was had that day"
by valleyer | 2025-12-14 08:05:43+00:00
Basically, I bought a physical Apple gift card via the Apple online store, and it was never delivered. UPS tracking (on Apple's own site) showed it never left the origin. I called to get it re-shipped, and they (in so many words) accused me of fraud, because apparently the gift card had been redeemed and drained.

Obviously someone either at Apple's gift card printing contractor or at UPS snatched it.

Apple's suggested "solution" was for me to issue a chargeback on my credit card -- yes, the vendor suggesting a chargeback. I refused, because the credit card in question was my Apple Card, and I have read elsewhere that doing something like this can lead to your Apple account getting locked.

The exec escalation was the only way I got it resolved. It was Kafkaesque.

I think one major lesson to take from this (and other physical gift card vulnerabilities, like people that go and peek at the numbers on unredeemed cards in stores and then wait for them to be loaded) is: don't use physical gift cards anymore.
by famouswaffles | 2025-12-14 08:06:12+00:00
'A Markov chain is a mathematical structure where the probabilities of going to the next state only depend on the current state and not the previous path taken.'

My point, which seems so hard to grasp for whatever reason is that In a Markov chain, state is a well defined thing. It's not a variable you can assign any property to.

LLMs do depend on the previous path taken. That's the entire reason they're so useful! And the only reason you say they don't is because you've redefined 'state' to include that previous path! It's nonsense. Can you not see the circular argument?

The state is required to be a fixed, well-defined element of a structured state space. Redefining the state as an arbitrarily large, continuously valued encoding of the entire history is a redefinition that trivializes the Markov property, which a Markov chain should satisfy. Under your definition, any sequential system can be called Markov, which means the term no longer distinguishes anything.
by srean | 2025-12-14 08:07:05+00:00
In the discussion thread there seems to be a somewhat contentious argument about what is a Markov Model, whether LLMs are one, RNNs are one and so on.

Markov Models are anything that has state and emit tokens based only on its current state and undergoes a state transition. The token emission and state transitions are usually probabilistic -- a statistical/probabilistic analogue of a state machine. The deterministic state machine is a special case where the transition probabilities are degenerate (concentrated at an unique point).

For a Markov Model to be non-vacuous, non-vapid discussion point, however, one needs to specify very precisely the relationships allowed between state and tokens/observations, whether it's hidden or visible, discrete or continuous, fixed context length or variable context length, causal or non causal ...

The simplest such model is one where the state is a specified, computable function of the last k observations. One such simple function is the identity function -- the state then is the last k tokens. This is called a k order Markov Chain and is a restriction of the bigger class -- Markov Models.

One can make the state a specified, computable function of (k) previous states and k most recent tokens/observations. (Equivalently RNNs)

The functions may be specified only upto a class of computable functions, finite or infinite in size. They may be stochastic in the sense they define only the state transition probabilities.

You can make the context length a computable function of the k most recent observations (therefore they can be of varying length), but you have to ensure that the contexts are always full for this model to be well defined.

Context length can be a computable function of both the (el) most recent states and k most recent observations.

Crazy ones emit more than one token based on current state.

On and on.

Not all Markov Models are learnable.
by timokr | 2025-12-14 08:07:14+00:00
The combination `GWLP_USERDATA` to pass state and `GWLP_WNDPROC` to update the actual wnd procedure is what I used in my [rust wrapper](https://github.com/timokroeger/winmsg-executor/blob/main/src...).

This two step approach is the only way I found to use rust closures for wndproc without double allocation and additional indirection.
by microtonal | 2025-12-14 08:07:20+00:00
Markov models usually only predict the next token given the two preceding tokens (trigram model) because the data gets so exceptionally sparse beyond that, that it becomes impossible to make probability estimations (despite back-off, smoothing, etc.).

I recommend you to read Bengio et al.’s 2003 paper which describes this issue in more detail and introduces distributional representations (embeddings) in an RNN to avoid this sparsity.

While we are using transformers and sentence pieces now, this paper aptly describes the motivation underpinning modern models.

https://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume3/bengio03a/bengio03a.pdf
by lucketone | 2025-12-14 08:07:35+00:00
> there must have been perceived downsides at the time.

I also don’t know, but I seriously doubt there was cost benefit analysis.

My two bets would be:

- church/priests had power and they condemned most things, except for preying.

- it became widely known that opium is really obviously bad for you, after a bit of mental juggling that became “drugs are bad”, and then wholesale bans followed.
by pdpi | 2025-12-14 08:07:43+00:00
Not surprised.

The imagery and the aggression involved in the music can make it seem daunting and somehow damaging, but the metal community is surprisingly chill and friendly, and, sometimes, just so damned silly.

E.g. here's Slipknot's singer live in concert singing the SpongeBob Squarepants theme song, because the audience really wanted him to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5OLtoY70AI

Or, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Devin Townsend signing this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z1isK2MYWI is not the same Devin singing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsd4ZkFVOHY
by t0mas88 | 2025-12-14 08:08:51+00:00
When they wrote that 3 providers were honest about all locations I have to admit my first thought was "Mullvad, and who would the other two be?"

With their reputation and trackrecord they really can't do any shady tricks. Imagine if they weren't among the 3 honest providers? That would be HN frontpage news.
by BoorishBears | 2025-12-14 08:09:08+00:00
Sure doesn't seem like it. https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/1999317065237512224

And forget scripting languages, take a C program that writes a string to disk and reads it back.

How many times longer does it get the moment we have to ensure the string was actually committed to non-volatile NAND and actually read back? 5x? 10x?

Is it even doable if we have to support arbitrary consumer hardware?
by Nevermark | 2025-12-14 08:09:22+00:00
> But, at least with Google you can use hardware without the binding software requirement.

For now, but they are tightening things up.

And at least with Apple they provide convenient end-to-end cloud syncing. Google doesn't.

(And this back and forth can go on for a long time...)

You are just picking what is important to you and then ignoring other issues. That isn't how to craft advice that helps people you don't personally know, with needs you are completely unaware of, in a complex domain.
by avereveard | 2025-12-14 08:10:36+00:00
> how to cajole and plead

When a new person join the team you need to tell them the local coding standard. I don't see why people expect llm to work out of the box instead. The difference is you have to do it at every exchange as llm are stateless.

But yeah I mostly agree with the rest llm work best at very low lewel method by method where you can watch like an hawk they don't introduce silent failure condutions and super high level as system design as reasoning engine, and they still do not so good job at implementing components whole.
by AstroNutt | 2025-12-14 08:11:06+00:00
Which lead me to this by: Carbon Based Lifeforms Erratic Patrerns. https://youtu.be/empLZMVWIP8b?

Erratic Patterns Lyrics:

Look at the pattern Can you see what's wrong? It's supposed to be perfect (But really it's not) But really it's not

Can you find the flaws Hidden in structured code Hiding in the pattern In between the rows? Only illogics can find Hidden flaws in a straight logic line Only erratics recognize Errors in patterns of a perfect design Only illogics can find Hidden flaws in a straight logic line Only erratics recognize Errors in patterns of a perfect design

Now that you know That something's not right Look at it carefully In pale logic light

Don't be sorry If you can't recognize The errors and faults In such a perfect disguise

Only illogics can find Hidden flaws in a straight logic line Only erratics recognize Errors in patterns of a perfect design

Only illogics can find Hidden flaws in a straight logic line Only erratics recognize Errors in patterns of a perfect design
by rusk | 2025-12-14 08:13:34+00:00
World War 1 and 2 were drug fueled. Americans saw the carnage after WW1 and instituted prohibition and then entered WW2 as the only sober participants.

The Chinese 100 years of humiliation at the hands of the Brits, was down to Opium

The fall of the medieval European dynasties was all down to Luandanum

Time and again, the unhealthy, and unregulated use of drugs has toppled empires and led to social upheaval.

Makes perfect sense if you ran a country you would be scared of it.
by aspenmayer | 2025-12-14 08:13:38+00:00
It seems to be blogspam from the Spain-based Actualidad Blog network.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/actualidad-blog

IA has a capture of the site[0]; the first and only photo in the archived version of TFA appears to be a cropped version of one sourced to AP ([1] photo 2 in the carousel), and it is entirely uncredited in TFA.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20251214073005/https://en.jardin...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/brazil-rio-talipot-palm-flamengo-...

Other reporting I dug up reference the AP and also Reuters as sources for the story.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/once-in-a-lifet...
by gregates | 2025-12-14 08:14:13+00:00
It seems like the argument is roughly: we used to use CMS because we had comms & marketing people who don't know git. But we plan to replace them all with ChatGPT or Claude, which does. So now we don't need CMS.

(I didn't click through to the original post because it seems like another boring "will AI replace humans?" debate, but that's the sense I got from the repeated mention of "agents".)
by adamscybot | 2025-12-14 08:15:16+00:00
The point about CMSs having value in possibly being a more real-time collaborative UI layer to interact with that's less-scary for the average Joe is a valid driver; and is a critical factor for many use cases. But the the other stuff is clearly reasoning with a solution already in mind...

"All blog posts mentioning feature Y published after September...[more examples]...The three most recent case studies in the finance category...[etc]"

Fairly simple queries. If you're willing to build an MCP server (as they did for their solution), you could just as well build one that reads structured front matter.

"You can't. You'd need to parse frontmatter, understand your date format, resolve the category references, handle the sorting, limit the results. At which point you've built a query engine."

Well that's a scoped problem. Looks like it already exists (e.g., https://markdowndb.com/) and doesn't require moving away from Markdown files in GIT if you want.

Or use something like content collection in astro (https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/). Hell, looks like that lets you have the MD files somewhere else instead of git if you please.

The AI-generated points aren't as compelling as the prompter thinks. A new common problem.

Yes, you don't need flatfile-committed raw text for AI tools to work properly, in part because of things like MCP servers. Yes, semantically linked content with proper metadata enables additional use cases.

The next point to make would be "if you use our thing, you don't need to think about this", but instead goes into a highly debatable rant about markdown in git not being able to fulfil those additional use cases on a practical level.

This distracts from the what I imagine is the real intent: "git and markdown files don't come automagically with a snazzy collaborative UI. And yes you can still use AI, and use it well out of the box. If someone tells you you need markdown in git to do x,y,z with AI they are wrong."

Personally, I can get over the "AI writing style", but only if the content still nails the salient point...
by spoiler | 2025-12-14 08:16:27+00:00
As someone who was raised by aggressive alcoholics, and I have myself struggled with weed addiction in the past (and seen weed addiction in others), it's really difficult to compare the substances. Yes, weed dependence is bad and people need to be aware of it, but alcohol (and I'd even say nicotine, but that's a different subject) are far more insidious than weed
by okushigue | 2025-12-14 08:16:44+00:00
Transient Node Integration (TNI) allows launch vehicles and Starships to temporarily integrate with the Starlink laser network to achieve navigation <30 mm / <1 mm/s in real time, eliminating almost all orbital insertion correction budget (8–73 m/s savings per mission). TNI-R extends the concept to autonomous orbital rendezvous and refueling with docking accuracy <3 cm and a 40–63% reduction in total Δv. Implementable today with just a software update on the existing constellation + laser terminal.
by 1123581321 | 2025-12-14 08:17:26+00:00
I don’t like them as much, but Jonah at least feels like a legitimate third human on the satellite after Joel and Mike. Starcrash is one from that Kickstarter season to check out.

At this point it sees the fans are split into people who follow whatever MST3K and Rifftrax do, “keep sharing the tapes,” and people who liked MST3K because it was funnier and scrappier than other shows and tapered off when it lost that. I lean toward the latter, but I’m friends with the former and we make it work.
by ack_complete | 2025-12-14 08:17:37+00:00
The stdcall calling convention used APIs and API callbacks on Windows x86 doesn't use registers at all, all parameters are passed on the stack. MSVC does support thiscall/fastcall/vectorcall conventions that pass some values in registers, but the system APIs and COM interfaces all use stdcall.

Windows x64 and ARM64 do use register passing, with 4 registers for x64 (rcx/rdx/r8/r9) and 8 registers for ARM64 (x0-x7). Passing an additional parameter on the stack would be cheap compared to the workarounds that everyone has to do now.
by Insanity | 2025-12-14 08:18:39+00:00
If you want some more humorous metal, check out the band “NanoWar of Steel”. It’s great.

All their songs are humorous, but for example they have a song with Joachim from Sabaton called Pasadena 1994. It fits the “war metal” style of Sabaton, but instead the song is about football. (https://open.spotify.com/track/65i7HQAWy3ZlSTEyWWFoPN?si=kUm...)
by larusso | 2025-12-14 08:19:54+00:00
This story reminds me of a similar issue people love to solve with the same idea. Software builds. The can’t we have a simple make file or worse just a shell script to build.

And just like described in the post it starts the same. Simple script wrapper. No tasks no tasks dependencies. Then over time you need to built now a library which contains the core part of the software to share between different other projects. You need to publish to different platforms. Shell scripts become harder to use on windows all of a sudden. You need to built for different architectures and have to integrate platform specific libraries. You can built your simple make / shell file around all that. But it ain’t so simple anymore.
by procaryote | 2025-12-14 08:19:57+00:00
You usually can't simultaneously deploy two services. You can try, but in a non trivial environment there are multiple machines and you'll want a rolling upgrade, which causes an old client to talk to a new service or vice versa. Putting the code into a monorepo does nothing to fix this.

This is much less of a problem than it seems.

You can use a serialisation format that allows easy backward compatible additions. The new service that has a new feature adds a field for it. The old client, responsibly coded, gracefully ignores the field it doesn't understand.

You can version the API to allow for breaking changes, and serve old clients old responses, and new clients newer responses. This is a bit of work to start and sometimes overkill, given the first point

If you only need very rare breaking changes, you can deploy new-version-tolerant clients first, then when that's fully done, deploy the new-version service. It's a bit of faff, but if it's very rare and internal, it's often easier than implementing full versioning.
by MandieD | 2025-12-14 08:21:48+00:00
What if Anthropic offered a platform for such sharing while you were still around, with a percentage of the collected API fees going to you?

“License your chat history” - most of us wouldn’t have any takers, but someone like you might.

(And I say this as someone who is really not a fan of how LLMs are being presented to the world at large)
by NotLing | 2025-12-14 08:24:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a 17yo student from Taiwan. I was having a hard time with my multi-agent project, so I was like, what about we make LLM do whatever it wants instead? Maybe even self-evolve?

So I built Atlas – an attempt to engineer a "digital organism" using Control Theory and Cognitive Science principles.

The Core Architecture (How it works):

1. Adaptive Homeostasis (The Endocrine System) Instead of infinite loops, Atlas is driven by internal variables: Fatigue, Curiosity, Anxiety, and Satisfaction.

Implementation: I implemented a feedback loop where parameters self-adjust based on history.

Mechanism: High Fatigue actively inhibits Curiosity rewards (diminishing returns). If the agent repeats the same action (e.g., read_file), the reward decays logarithmically, forcing it to seek novelty.

Code ref: cognition/homeostasis.py in the repo.

2. Dreaming & Memory Consolidation (The Hippocampus) To solve the context window limit without losing "self", I implemented a sleep cycle.

Trigger: When Fatigue > 0.85, the main loop pauses (Dreaming state).

Process: It retrieves recent high-importance vectors from ChromaDB (Episodic Memory), uses the LLM to synthesize them into abstract rules/insights, and stores them into a JSON-based Semantic Memory.

This effectively compresses "what happened" into "what I learned".

3. The Body (Visual Browser) BTW, I also wrote a Playwright-based visual browser using Set-of-Mark (SoM) prompting. I decoupled this as a standalone MCP (Model Context Protocol) server so anyone can plug it into Claude/other agents.

Repo for the browser tool: atlas-browser-mcp on PyPI/GitHub.

Why I built this: I want to move away from "Chain of Thought" towards "Chain of Being". The goal is an agent that exists and evolves even when no user is prompting it.

The code is fully async (Python asyncio) and currently uses Gemini 2.0 Flash for vision/speed, though the architecture is model-agnostic.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Homeostasis implementation – specifically how to prevent parameter drift over long uptimes.

If you want to get a better understanding about Atlas, check: "https://deepwiki.com/LingTravel/Atlas". While some information might be wrong, it's a quicker way to get a comprehensive understanding about Atlas' structure.
by madaxe_again | 2025-12-14 08:26:09+00:00
That was my first conclusion, too - the absence of something in the fossil record does not mean that it was not there, just that it did not fossilise.

For one, predators in general often have more gracile build, high power to weight ratio - and don’t fossilise well. They’re also much rarer than herbivores, of course. This means the signal in the fossil record is much weaker and any deviation seems much greater, as you have to turn up the gain to get meaningful data.

Perhaps cats during that period were predominantly dry desert hunters - it is a common niche for felidae - and that environment produces checks wristwatch few fossils.

Perhaps there was another critter extant during that period that just found the crunch of cat bones irresistible, and they all got scavenged.

Perhaps they developed culture and cremated their dead.

Dunno. All that said the E-O was a big transition and it likely did result in gigadeaths, and predators would have been harder hit, ultimately and proportionally.
by camillomiller | 2025-12-14 08:26:23+00:00
This is a great testament to why 75% of the web runs on WordPress. Most of the problem mentioned have been solved by wordpress for ages, but there’s an entire industry set on reinventing the wheel in ways that really baffle me. If your actual goal is to publish on the web in a sane and understandable way, wordpress solves the problem for the largest number of cases. Scalability is solved. Usability by non tech editors is solved. Draft and approval flow is solved. Caching and speed is solved. You want headless? Oh, turns out wordpress is actually GREAT for that too.

It’s not sexy I guess? But if the goal is “work done” instead of “tech wank to impress investors with complexity”, that’s a solution that works very well.