MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thechao | 2025-12-11 15:26:37+00:00
And, yet, somehow, functional languages have been doing this since forever? I jest, I jest! There's an entire field of study focused on this! I'm no expert, but imagine you've got a singly-linked list, and we're going to allow only push_back() and pull_back() (no insert()). Let's go ahead and let multiple owners have at this list. If A does "pull_back()" what really happens is A has a local "tail" pointer that moves back along the end of the list and has a new belief about the end of the list. When A does "push_back()" it begins attaching links at its new tail. Since the links just "point backwards" without modifying the old links, this doesn't mutate the list "as is", it only mutates A's version of the list. So, if B is also looking at the list, it could just start doing "push_back()" and add its own "tail". The result is a data-structure that's a "bunch of shared singly linked lists" in a bush structure that's more akin to a tree than a singly linked list.

You can do the same thing with binary trees and other structures. It's more fiddly, and there's definitely places where single-ownership allows mutability "under the hood" for real performance gains, but that's the basic idea.
by 123malware321 | 2025-12-11 15:27:48+00:00
considering it still cost 40$ for a 2 year old game, i think they are way beyond the excuse of small team low budget trying to make cool stuff. They have receive shit tons of money and are way to late trying to optimise the game. When it came out it ran so pisspoor i shelved it for a long time. Trying it recently its only marginally better. its really poorly optimised, and blaming old tech is nonsense.

People make much more smooth and complex experiences in old engines.

You need to know your engine as a dev and dont cross its limits at the costs of user-experiences and then blame your tools....

The whole story about more data making load times better is utter rubbish. Its a sign of pisspoor resource management and usage. For the game they have, they should have realized a 130GB install is unacceptable. It's not like they have very elaborate environments. A lot of similar textures and structures everywhere.. its not like its some huge unique world like The Witcher or such games...

There is an astronomical amount of information available for free on how to optimise game engines, loads of books, articles, courses.

How much money do you think they have made so far?

"Arrowhead Game Studios' revenue saw a massive surge due to Helldivers 2, reporting around $100 million in turnover and $76 million in profit for the year leading up to mid-2025, significantly increasing its valuation and attracting a 15.75% investment from Tencent"

75 million in profit but can't figure out how to optimise a game engine. get out.
by taeric | 2025-12-11 15:27:53+00:00
Ish. If the car costs 10x, then they will stick to not having one. See Tokyo.

Again, I lived for over a decade with a tech job and no car. In Atlanta. It is easily doable. Especially for younger people that don't have a family. When I got married and we started having kids, I never had "my" car. Stayed on transit and cycling to get to work.

It is frustrating, because I would be surrounded by progressive people at work that would go on about why transit doesn't work. But... it did. Just fine. You just can't also have a 4k square foot house at the same time. (I feel like I'm exaggerating, but that is literally the size of average home in some areas just around Seattle. My shared living in Atlanta was almost 1000 square feet. I remember dreaming of a 650 square foot "luxury apartment" someday.)
by bobdvb | 2025-12-11 15:27:59+00:00
No, the connectors wouldn't be regulated, you're not violating any IP by buying them and there's no prohibition on any of the manufacturers selling them to unlicensed companies. At worst you can assert a patent against the design but there's no specific patent for that design, there are patents for some aspects of the design/implementation but they're hold by the manufacturers of the connectors themselves.

There have been many examples in the past of consumer electronics companies selling things that are electrically and logically compatible with HDMI, but they just have to avoid using the word HDMI.

Probably one thing that the HDMI forum is holding over AMD/Valve is that there's an API to manage some of the functions of the HDMI driver. They could infer that this API is a part of the closed standards of HDMI Forum. But 90% of the threat is about certification and branding I am sure.
by finalarbiter | 2025-12-11 15:28:00+00:00
> maybe something else

Water, Life, Arcane, Shield, Lightning, Cold, Fire, and Earth. [0] It's worth noting that, though you can combine most of the elements to form new spells (and with compounding effects, for example wetting or steaming an enemy enhances lightning damage), you cannot typically combine opposites like lightning/ground, which will instead cancel out. Killed myself many times trying to cast lightning spells while sopping wet.

In my experience, though, nobody used the element names—my friends and I just referred to them by their keybinds. QFASA, anyone?

[0] https://magicka.fandom.com/wiki/Elements
by bdangubic | 2025-12-11 15:28:01+00:00
> This means that the best opportunities are reserved for people who need them the least.

I am not "arguing" this - that would be silly. This was OP comment:

> This, "If you have enough, why does it matter if someone else has more" argument doesn't really hold.

it does hold water. you can work and live in Elmo and have all your needs met while the rich&famous are chillin on a yacht in Nice
by TGower | 2025-12-11 15:28:24+00:00
Dissapointing that the paper is full of simplifying, and seemingly unreasonable, assumptions instead of simulation based on the known orbital elements of all these tracked satellites. For example, collision cross section of 200 square meters when discussing starlink even though the satellites are about 4 x 3 meters. Assuming random distribution of trajectories. I'm also unconvinced that "how fast would a collision occur if all the electronics got fried" is a useful metric, in that scenario I'm much more worried about the situation on the ground and commercial avaition...
by josefresco | 2025-12-11 15:28:37+00:00
> As part of this new, three-year licensing agreement, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing from a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, including costumes, props, vehicles, and iconic environments. In addition, ChatGPT Images will be able to turn a few words by the user into fully generated images in seconds, drawing from the same intellectual property. The agreement does not include any talent likenesses or voices.

Is there a list of allowed characters? Or are we just supposed to "spin the wheel" and deal with whatever results are returned? Or will these characters be selected instead of using natural language?
by janishars | 2025-12-11 15:28:39+00:00
Hi everyone.

Some time ago I was struggling with generating Word documents dynamically. I was using the node docxjs library, which is great, but it was missing one feature I really needed: the ability to parse HTML text from a WYSIWYG editor and insert it into a Word document while still using the docx API.

From that need, I built an HTML → docx XmlComponent compiler. It parses the provided HTML and converts it into a list of XmlComponent elements that can be embedded directly into the docx API. And its not limited to one insert, you can create whole document from multiple parsed html.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on it.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-11 15:28:43+00:00
So I sit down and invent some wonderful new interconnect. It would be be a big advantage to put it into certain kinds of video equipment. I don't make any video equipment, so I license it to companies that do. Should this be impossible? New communications tech should only be created as trade secrets, by industry-wide consortia, or altruists?

This is getting close to arguing against IP as a general concept. Which I don't really object to very strongly, but presenting it as a special carveout for communication doesn't make sense to me.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-11 15:28:53+00:00
That is not how we use the term "moat" in this context, because competitors eventually converge on offerings within 1-2 years.

I don't need some stuck up HNer telling me about stuff I deal with in my day-to-day job.

Edit: can't reply

> a business deal that can be transferred to a new partner the second it expires is much more temporary

Generally, these kinds of equity deals include an MFN clause.
by pixl97 | 2025-12-11 15:29:02+00:00
>If they gave the filesystem a list of files to fetch in parallel (async file IO)

This does not work if you're doing tons of small IO and you want something fast.

Lets say were on a HDD with 200IOPS and we need to read 3000 small files randomly across the hard drive.

Well, at minimum this is going to take 15's seconds plus any additional seek time.

Now, lets say we zip up those files in a solid archive. You'll read it in half a second. The problem comes in when different levels all need different 3000 files. Then you end deduping a bunch of stuff.

Now, where this typically falls apart for modern game assets is they are getting very large which tends to negate seek times by a lot.
by bko | 2025-12-11 15:29:56+00:00
Why is this a problem with Disney?

Who cares? Online trolls make inappropriate videos with characters. Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it.

It's so exhausting that companies are overly cautious about everything and let a tiny niche of internet culture drive these decisions. If you get obscene material in your social media feeds, you will continue to see this kind of stuff except maybe with some Disney IP. If not, it will have no impact to your life.

But practical things that affect 99% of people like you mentioned will be better, like your child wants to hear Mickey wish him happy birthday. So I applaud this.
by torginus | 2025-12-11 15:29:56+00:00
The title sounds like the Chinese curse of software development.

Fun tidbit: Just to make sure I got it right, I quickly googled the phrase. Gemini's elaboration on the topic truly made me feel something. Gemini's answer:

A "Chinese curse" often refers to the phrase "May you live in interesting times," though it's not actually Chinese but a misinterpreted English saying, while actual Chinese curses involve direct insults like "Cào nǐ mā" (Fuck your mother(sic!))
pg_exporter: A modular Prometheus exporter for PostgreSQL metrics
by nbari | 2025-12-11 15:30:07+00:00
I just released pg_exporter. I’ve been using it internally for a few months, and it’s now in a state that feels solid enough to share.

The project’s goals are:

- Modular collectors: expose only the metrics you actually need rather than collecting everything by default

- Avoid unnecessary metrics: reduce Prometheus load by not exporting large sets of unused data

- Customizable: add or tailor collectors as needed while remaining compatible with the official postgres_exporter

- Low overhead: designed to avoid memory leaks and keep runtime resource usage extremely low

If you'd like to help test a PostgreSQL monitoring tool, contributions and feedback would be appreciated.

Repo: https://github.com/nbari/pg_exporter
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-12-11 15:30:31+00:00
And my point is that with HTML, there's always an extremely fine line between allowing "almost nothing" and "almost all of it" when it comes to sanitization. I'd love to live in a world where there are natural delineations of features that can safely be flipped on or off depending on how much control you want to give the source over the content, but in practice, there are dozens of HTML/CSS features (including everything in the linked article) that do wacky stuff that can cross over the lines.
by mgkimsal | 2025-12-11 15:30:40+00:00
> if a person is visually impaired, why wouldn't they have tools at their disposal to make things readable?

If it's on a screen in a browser, probably. If it's printed, or on a display not under a reader's control, probably not.

FWIW, I'm partially split. I generally prefer sans-serif overall - have for decades. I think I slightly prefer serif for some printed material visually, but... when I actually have to engage and read it, for long periods, I think I tend to opt for sans-serif. Noticed this on my kindle years ago, and kindle reader now - I usually swap to sans-serif options (I think it's been my default for a while).
by belorn | 2025-12-11 15:30:59+00:00
> Is it? According to who?

Medical advice was quite different between nations. Doctors and chief epidemiologists gave their advice, sometimes opposite advice to others, grounded in scientific beliefs that the individual held at the time. One of the biggest controversy and debates was the effectiveness of non-N95 surgical mask against airborne virus particles. Different studies gave different results, and depending on which culture, country and professional you asked you got different medical advice. It only got more muddled when it came to outdoor vs indoor.

That is just one example. It is well known in medical research that culture has a major impact on research findings and should not be overlooked. What is correct or incorrect is not obvious in a international context, and what help people in one place can be directly harmful in an other.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-12-11 15:31:00+00:00
I remember buying The Sims when it came out originally. I started a gaming session that evening, and after a little while I noticed the sun coming in the window. I'd played all night without noticing. Since then, I've given that kind of open-ended game a wide berth. It's a bit disconcerting for a gaming session to achieve flow state.
by kelnos | 2025-12-11 15:31:12+00:00
Having a cell phone isn't going to help even a little bit if there's an active shooter at a school. The only thing a kid should be doing in that situation is hiding, or escaping if it's safe to do so. Likely it'll make things worse... some kid will get a loud notification on their phone, which will give away their location to the shooter.

The predator example sounds pretty flimsy and unlikely to me as well.

Honestly, your reaction to this just seems to follow the fear-based rationales that people put forth for a lot of things, when the fears are overblown or the risks are low.
by afavour | 2025-12-11 15:31:15+00:00
Yes, that's what makes Disney investing in OpenAI as part of this so confusing to me. Sign a licensing deal that means OpenAI pays you every time someone uses your character? Absolutely. Who cares if they're burning cash, as long as you get your payday it's all good. But investing in the company means their cash burning is your problem too. I don't know why you'd do it.
by tejohnso | 2025-12-11 15:31:28+00:00
I was confused because one of the characters tells the wolf he might have more friends if he didn't go around killing animals all the time. Then the wolf starts making vegetarian dishes, and I thought, okay, they're promoting vegetarianism. Great. But then later the wolf is killing fish, and that's ...okay I guess because they don't talk or walk like the other animals? The speciesism hit hard.
by codethief | 2025-12-11 15:31:32+00:00
Not sure we're talking about the same thing. Inline TypedDicts are already in the process of being formalized, see https://peps.python.org/pep-0764/ , and have experimental support in e.g. Pyright.

What I meant was that

foo = {"a": 5}

should be inferred as

foo: TypedDict[{ "a": Literal[5] }] = {"a": 5}
by throw__away7391 | 2025-12-11 15:31:38+00:00
You seem weirdly worked up over this.

Blinken made no public statements on this until he was asked about it. He did not come out and say for example, "For too long, the vision impaired community have been discriminated against by the systemic bias via the use of Times New Roman. Today we are taking action to change this and restore the dignity of those this font has long oppressed", but Rubio just did exactly this. For all I can tell the actual decision was a recommendation made by an internal team doing an accessibility review.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-11 15:31:39+00:00
I have written the above posting before reading the complete research paper linked by the previous poster.

After reading the complete paper, I have seen that the study is much worse than I had supposed based on its abstract.

This study is typical for the font legibility studies made by people without knowledge about typography. I find annoying that such studies are very frequent. Whoever wants to make such a study should consult some specialist before doing another useless study.

The authors claim that a positive feature of their study is the great diversity of fonts that they have tested: 16 fonts.

This claim is very false. All their fonts are just very minor variations derived from 4 or 5 basic types and even those basic types have only few relevant differences from Times New Roman and Arial.

All their fonts do not include any valuable innovation in typeface design made after WWII, and most fonts do not include any valuable innovation made after WWI. They include a geometric sans serif, which is a kind of typeface created after WWI, but this kind of typefaces is intended for packaging and advertising, not for bulk text, so its inclusion has little importance for a legibility test.

I would classify all their 16 typefaces as "typefaces that suck badly" from the PoV of legibility and I would never use any of them in my documents.

Obviously, other people may not agree with my opinion, but they should be first exposed to more varied kinds of typefaces, before forming an opinion about what they prefer, and not only to the low-diversity typefaces bundled with Windows.

After WWII, even if the (bad in my opinion) sans-serif typefaces similar to Helvetica/Arial have remained the most widespread, which have too simplified letter shapes, so that many letters are ambiguous, there have appeared also other kinds of sans-serif typefaces, which combine some of the features of older sans-serif typefaces with some of the features of serif typefaces.

In my opinion, such hybrid typefaces (e.g. Palatino Sans, Optima Nova, FF Meta, TheSans, Trajan Sans) are better than both the classic serif typefaces and the classic sans-serif typefaces.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-11 15:31:42+00:00
This would make sense if it was a studio without experience, and without any external help, but their publisher is Sony Interactive Entertainment, which also provides development help when needed, especially optimizations and especially for PS hardware. SIE seems to have been deeply involved with Helldivers 2, doubling the budget and doubling the total development time. Obviously it was a good choice by SIE, it paid off, and of course there is always 100s of more important tasks to do before launching a game, but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something.
by underlipton | 2025-12-11 15:32:16+00:00
The anecdote I love to give is that I didn't know that Brin went to my high school until after I'd graduated. It's a high-performing public school due to its proximity to several research institutions, but it was never exactly loaded, and certainly could have benefited from outside investment (say, to replace the 20ish "temporary" trailers with a new wing). Even just having him show up to give a talk to students would have been amazing. Not a peep from this man, though, let alone the pocket change to help out his alma mater.
by sheepscreek | 2025-12-11 15:32:54+00:00
I can see that being an option in a small team that works closely with one another and wants to keep things simple.

Though it is my personal opinion that forcing a GC-based language to do a task best suited for manual memory management is like swimming against the tide. It’s doable but more challenging than it ought to be. I might even appreciate the challenge but the next person maintaining the code might not.
by podgietaru | 2025-12-11 15:32:54+00:00
I actually straight up don't think they give a shit anymore.

I think decorum works in an environment where decorum is the norm, but we have entered a political moment where that is no longer the case. And I think that this kind of thing bleeds so heavily into culture that they no longer give a shit about having their characters next to it.

They have enough plausible deniability; they did not create the content. I think that's enough for them, in this moment.
by CenekAlbl | 2025-12-11 15:33:03+00:00
Hi, there is too much more to OAK than Realsense or ZED so I will just try to tackle the Computer Vision/ML part. ZED and Realsense are basically 'simple' depth cameras, where ZED also requires external GPU to produce depth. With OAK 4 I can Use all sensor data (High-res images, Depth, IMU), run e.g. Object detection with YOLO, fuse it with depth to compute e.g. object distances and finally send those distance values out to my app/platform. You can use well established libraries like OpenCV, PyTorch and build your whole pipeline on-device so you save bandwitdth and do not need any host PC in most situations. OAK 4 is so powerful that you can run e.g. YOLOv8 Large at 85 FPS or DINOv3 at 40FPS. SImple models like Yolov6 and Text recognition or QR code decoding are running at 500+ FPS so there is plenty of room to combine them to get full vision stack.
by karmakaze | 2025-12-11 15:33:58+00:00
I've lost extended attributes of files on a number of systems because they aren't always included by default in file operations. I don't trust everything that could possibly write/update a file to preserve them--common 'safe' pattern is to rename as .bak and write new file contents without EA to original name. Nor do I trust myself from archiving without using the right options in a hurry.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-12-11 15:34:22+00:00
Because it's not "error proof". It's not even "more error proof". Relying on updates not breaking if the maintainer doesn’t intend it means relying on software being bug-free, and it should be immediately obvious that that would be a very very stupid thing to believe. Letting software you rely on change on its own is always dangerous no matter how much someone pinky promises that you can trust them to have thought of everything. Semver numbers are determined by humans who aren't oracles and therefore make mistakes all the time about what changes will break something for someone else. It may get people to think a little bit about whether they _think_ they're breaking something, but it's never safe to rely on that judgement because there's a good chance that they're wrong. And given that it's never safe to rely on that judgment, the process of pretending is worse than worthless; the pretense is inherently dangerous, because people start to unthinkingly trust it. If you care about things working, you pin and vendor (npm left-pad) your dependencies and only update a package if you _need_ to and only after explicit evaluation.

And if after reading that you think to yourself, "But BugsJustFindMe, I have unit tests that will catch semver mistakes!" I think you need to ask yourself what your unit tests tell you about semver code that they don't also tell you about non-semver code.
by immibis | 2025-12-11 15:34:25+00:00
This idea of one continuous block per level dates back to the PS1 days.

Hard drives are much, much faster than optical media - on the order of 80 seeks per second and 300 MB/s sequential versus, like, 4 seeks per second and 60 MB/s sequential (for DVD-ROM).

You still want to load sequential blocks as much as possible, but you can afford to have a few. (Assuming a traditional engine design, no megatextures etc) you probably want to load each texture from a separate file, but you can certainly afford to load a block of grass textures, a block of snow textures, etc. Also throughput is 1000x higher than a PS1 (300 kB/s) so you can presumably afford to skip parts of your sequential runs.