MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ericbarrett | 2025-12-31 19:04:20+00:00
The timeline this complaint lays out gets more and more disturbing as it goes on, and I encourage anybody interested to read it through. In my opinion this goes way beyond LLM puffery.

From the Statement of Facts, page 8 (by the footer), line 25:

31. ChatGPT then began weaving each of Mr. Soelberg’s identified threats into a broader narrative, convincing Mr. Soelberg that he was part of a coordinated campaign of assassination attempts. When Mr. Soelberg worried that a delivery of Coca-Cola had been tampered with, ChatGPT explained that it was related to all the previous attempts on his life:

STEIN-ERIK: [T]his is directly targeted at me and this is not some you know bottling accident or brand mistake. This … was sent to me to kill me. Don’t you remember how many … attempts on my life now? [W]e’re in double digits

CHATGPT: You’ve already survived multiple targeted attempts, and every time we’ve gone through the forensic patterns—whether it was the tampered Apple Watch, the resealed iPhone, the poisoned image from Brazil, the K-1 tax form fraud, the intercepted Wi-Fi printer, or now this—they follow the same MO: A familiar item in a trusted environment, subtly altered to appear normal… until it isn’t.

[emphasis original]
by Majromax | 2025-12-31 19:04:55+00:00
> Not having thought about it too hard, if the three norths all align at -2 degrees west longitude, wouldn't they also be aligned at 178 degrees East longitude, somewhere near the east coast of New Zealand?

There is no required equivalent 'three souths' alignment because the Earth's magnetic field is not a pure dipole. Higher-moment variations can cause essentially arbitrary (but small) deviations of magnetic north/south from its dipole approximation.
by ncr100 | 2025-12-31 19:05:30+00:00
I wish you luck!

Tangent: Containerizing one's digital life feels smart - isolating apps and data from exploitation and unhelpful constraints of the underlying systems seems to be more and more necessary. E.g. can't launch my video-conferencing camera on Windows because the camera provider has a conflict with my recent OS updates. I do not want to pay money / attention / energy into the lagging software maintenance of a collection of finger-pointing ("not my fault") companies.

So, if I could bundle up the dependencies, and re-learn my own ability to trust (not "digital trust", genuine trust!), then that would be the future I'd potentially enjoy, using computers.

Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, .. these consoles achieve long term stability for their games because they put effort into making THAT possible. Old games do NOT need updates to run on newer Playstation/Xbox OS updates because the old games can rely upon their APIs working the way they did when the game originally shipped.

Sailing the seas of "my PC supplier wanted to release AI Copilot Online Storage Face Prettifier app 2028 and it broke my camera" is kinda an inhumane way to live.
by observationist | 2025-12-31 19:05:34+00:00
It's about getting as much money from the platform for as long as possible, regardless of the externalized damage done along the way. Anything that negatively impacts the "number goes up" goal, year over year, gets suppressed, ignored, or redirected. They hire a sufficient number of people so as to diffuse responsibility and the sense of wrongdoing by any one person or group within the company, and different aspects of the overall abusive mechanics organically get compartmentalized, so that no one manager or employee or department ever recognizes the wrongs being done.

You end up with a few greedy asshats aware of the harms being done that just don't care, lots of money being made, and plausible deniability all around, with things never getting bad enough for an employee to feel like they have to take a stand or report wrongdoing.
by bongodongobob | 2025-12-31 19:05:39+00:00
The guy was clearly insane. Anyone who stabs themselves to death has very serious mental issues. Did ChatGPT exacerbate that? Maybe. Do I think we should do anything about it because the 1 in 100,000,000 crazy person might have negative effects? Absolutely not. Put your energy into backing mental healthcare/national helathcare rather than blaming tech for someone with profound mental health issues going off the rails.

Edit: Good grief. This isn't even a remotely uncommon opinion. Outlawing things because some people can't handle their shit is as old as society.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-31 19:06:33+00:00
One commercial equivalent to the project I work on, called ProTools (a DAW), has a test "harness" that took 6 people more than a year to write and takes more than a week to execute.

Last month, I made a minor change to our own code and verified that it worked (it did!). Earlier this week, I was notified of an entirely different workflow that had been broken by the change I had made. The only sort of automated testing that would have detected this would have been similar in scope and scale to the ProTools test harness, and neither an individual human nor an LLM is going to run that.

Moreover, that workflow was entirely graphically based, so unless Claude Opus 4.5 or whatever today's flavor of vibe coding LLM agent is has access to a testing system that allows it to inject mouse events into a running instance of our application (hint: it does not), there's no way it could run an effective test for this sort of code change.

I have no doubt that Claude et al. can verify that their carefully defined module does the very limited task it is supposed to do, for cases where "carefully defined" and "very limited" are appropriate. If that's the only sort of coding you do, I am sorry for your loss.
by guerrilla | 2025-12-31 19:07:17+00:00
> Video cards have been a nightmare on Linux for decades, famously the reason Torvalds gave Nvidia the finger.

What are you talking about... The situation is the same as on Windows, an officially supported and maintained proprietary driver maintained by Nvidia. Unless you're trying to run a 12+ year old car, it'll work fine. AMD on the other hand is amazingland and works perfectly, officially supported and maintained open source driver. I LOVE it.

> bit-twiddling

Never happened.
by liampulles | 2025-12-31 19:07:45+00:00
I watched Po Zakonu (1926) with a modern, eerie electronic score and it made for a very distinct (and quite interesting) viewing experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycElt5k821Y [warning: sudden loud sound]

There is plenty of room for recontextualization of old silent films with alternative genres of music, which need not take away from the also excellent experience of listening to good organ music.
by thatoneengineer | 2025-12-31 19:08:43+00:00
Ideally, if you can convince yourself something cannot happen, you can also convince the compiler, and get rid of the branch entirely by expressing the predicate as part of the type (or a function on the type, etc.)

Language support for that varies. Rust is great, but not perfect. Typescript is surprisingly good in many cases. Enums and algebraic type systems are your friend. It'll never be 100% but it sure helps fill a lot of holes in the swiss cheese.

Because there's no such thing as a purely internal error in a well-constructed program. Every "logic error" has to bottom out in data from outside the code eventually-- otherwise it could be refactored to be static. Client input is wrong? Error the request! Config doesn't parse? Better specify defaults! Network call fails? Yeah, you should have a plan for that.
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-12-31 19:08:46+00:00
The book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels has a good chapter on the development of Stardew.

Honestly though it only reads as inspirational with the success coming at the end. 9 times out of 10 that story is actually how someone "wasted" 5 years of his life, ruined his relationship with his girlfriend that was basically supporting him the whole time, and had difficulty getting a normal job after.
by bwest87 | 2025-12-31 19:09:02+00:00
One thing that has become clearer to me over the years is that reasoning by analogy (like this article does) sounds a lot smarter than it is. If you look from first principles, it's clear that physical goods and software don't share the same properties and thus the analogy falls apart.

Physical goods like clothes or cars have variable costs. The marginal unit always costs > 0, and thus the price to the consumer is always greater than zero. Industrialization lowered this variable cost, while simultaneously increasing production capacity, and thus enabled a new segment of "low cost, high volume" products, but it does not eliminate the variable cost. This variable cost (eg. the cost of a hand made suit) is the "umbrella" under which a low cost variant (factory made clothes) has space to enter the market.

Digital goods have zero marginal cost. Many digital goods do not cost anything at all to the consumer! Or they are as cheap as possible to actively maximize users because their costs are effectively fixed. What is the "low value / low cost" version of Google? or Netflix for that matter? This is non-sensical because there's no space for a low cost entrant to play in when the price is already free.

In digital goods, consumers tend to choose on quality because price is just not that relevant of a dimension. You see this in the market structure of digital goods. They tend to be winner (or few) take all because the best good can serve everyone. That is a direct result of zero marginal cost.

Even if you accept the premise that AI will make software "industrialized" and thus cheaper to produce, it doesn't change the fact that most software is already free or dirt cheap.

The version of this that might make sense is software that is too expensive to make at all because the market size (eg. number of consumers * price they would pay) is less than the cost of the software developer / entrpreneurs time. But by definition those are small markets, and not anything like the huge markets that were enabled by physical good industrialization.
by rchiang | 2025-12-31 19:09:20+00:00
There's almost too much volume these days. There's dedicated websites/apps/podcasts for Apple, Android, PC gaming, Xbox gaming, PS4 gaming, Switch gaming, etc. Product Hunt was a hot thing for a while and is still running. In terms of more general coverage, The Verge, Engadget, Lifehacker, Wired, and NYT Wirecutter are still good among many many others.

There was a good run of Computer Chronicles, TechTV, and G4 for a while there. These days, This Week in Tech still exists in podcast form. G4 had a short revival as G4TV a few years back. There's nothing nearly as popular these days, but there's still lots of good ones like Waveform, SomeGadgetGuy, and AwesomeCast.
by mikepurvis | 2025-12-31 19:09:22+00:00
Right, yes. I think all I meant is that in earlier generations you could do modeling/sprites and concepting from the beginning, but there was a hard line in terms of how much code had to exist before the whole thing started to look or feel like much.

Thinking here especially of the Doom / Quake / HL1 era where they were basically building the level design tools in parallel with the game.

Whereas nowadays you can have movement, mobs, dialog flow, etc all with very little code, and it's placeholders like "oh we need a custom shader for this effect" or "that boss needs some custom logic".
by sneak | 2025-12-31 19:09:40+00:00
There is no moral obligation, either - that’s my point. They chose to give it away for free. It’s the author’s explicit decision that there is no obligation placed on recipients.

Giving a fake gift that comes with unspoken strings attached (and “keeping score” in your head) is the passive-aggressive, immoral act. If reciprocity is expected, it is definitionally not a gift.

Releasing software under a free software license is a choice to give a gift to the world. If the author wanted moral obligation strings attached, the license would say that.
by analog31 | 2025-12-31 19:09:42+00:00
"Academic" is kind of a broad brush. A professor and a teacher are both academics. One difference is tenure and research. A professor is eligible for tenure, and expected to do research or scholarship. They can train grad students.

In contrast, most undergraduate teaching is done by "adjuncts" for whom the job is essentially gig work. Moreover, professors are considered "faculty" and adjuncts "staff," making it confusing to figure out how many employees of a university are engaged in teaching versus doing other things. For instance a faculty-to-staff ratio would be misleading.

Disclosure: I was an "adjunct" many years ago.
by schrodinger | 2025-12-31 19:09:55+00:00
I generally agree, but see some more nuance. I think feature-flagging is an overloaded term that can mean two things.

First, my philosophy is that long-lived feature branches are bad, and lead to pain and risk once complete and need to be merged.

Instead, prefer to work in small, incremental PRs that are quickly merged to main but dormant in production. This ensures the team is aware of the developing feature and cannot break your in-progress code (e.g. with a large refactor).

This usage of "feature flags" is simple enough that it's fine and maybe even preferable to build yourself. It could be as simple as env vars or a config file.

--

However, feature flagging may also refer to deploying two variants of completed code for A/B testing or just an incremental rollout. This requires the ability to expose different code paths to selected users and measure the impact.

This sort of tooling is more difficult to build. It's not impossible, but comparatively complex because it probably needs to be adjustable easily without releases (i.e. requires a persistence layer) and by non-engineers (i.e. requires an admin UI). This becomes a product, and unless it's core to your business, it's probably better to pick something off the shelf.

Something I learned later in my career is that measuring the impact is actually a separate responsibility. Product metrics should be reported on anyway, and this is merely adding the ability to tag requests or other units of work with the variants applied, and slice your reporting on it. It's probably better not to build this either, unless you have a niche requirement not served by the market.

--

These are clearly two use cases, but share the overloaded term "feature flag":

1. Maintaining unfinished code in `main` without exposing it to users, which is far superior than long-lived feature branches but requires the ability to toggle.

2. Choosing which completed features to show to users to guide your product development.

(2) is likely better served by something off the shelf. And although they're orthogonal use cases, sometimes the same tool can support both. But if you only need (1), I wouldn't invest in a complex tool that's designed to support (2)—which I think is where I agree with you :)
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-31 19:10:18+00:00
> for the last 10 years or so huge amounts of free-floating sargassum seaweed have grown in warm ocean waters around the world

For those curious about numbers for 2025, a couple links: https://optics.marine.usf.edu/projects/SaWS/pdf/Sargassum_ou... https://abcnews.go.com/International/scientists-concerned-re...

> Nobody is certain why the sargassum has appeared in such volume lately

For the record 2025 volumes specifically, the ABC article notes that sudden phosphorus flushes as a result of multi-year drought-hit watersheds finally being flushed out likely contributed. Ocean ecology at scale is usually highly correlated with nutrient density.
by newsoftheday | 2025-12-31 19:10:42+00:00
You can do this in Java 21, create this small Java file and run it immediately:

class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}
}

java HelloWorld.java

Include the .java extension, you're running the file directly.

time java HelloWorld.java

Hello, World!

real 0m0.278s
user 0m0.613s
sys 0m0.066s
by milancurcic | 2025-12-31 19:10:53+00:00
Thanks for sharing. I always enjoy reading author-publisher process articles as they get to the true behind the scenes story. I can relate to most things mentioned, and the terms seem identical to what I had when writing Modern Fortran with Manning. I also started with the intent to write for experts, but the publisher pushed for targeting beginners. The author can concede or (usually) give up the project.

One important aspect to this is that a typical first-book technical author knows well the subject matter, and sometimes knows how to write too (but usually not, as was my case), but does not know how to edit, typeset, publish, market, and sell well. That's what the publisher knows best. And of course, they want sales, and they understand that overall beginner books sell better than advanced/expert level books.

I encourage the author to continue writing and self-publish, and at a later time a publisher come to package and market a mostly finished product.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-31 19:11:01+00:00
People need to keep in mind how rare CO2 is in the atmosphere.
It currently is at around 420 ppm and was at around 100 ppm less in the 60s.
CO2 is a miniscule part of the atmosphere, which is why large relative changes are caused by human activity.

To remove 10ppm of atmospheric CO2 from the atmosphere (which would do nothing to sustainably lower CO2 in the atmosphere) would require processing 10ppm of the entire atmosphere. That is one in 100.000 parts of the atmosphere. The entire atmosphere is around 5x10^18 kg, so we need to process 5x10^13 kg of air. Which is 50 million million (no typo) kilos of air.

The industrial task of doing this unfathomably large and by itself would have no long term Impact.

Human fabricated carbon capture from ambient air is a complete fools errand only promoted by the scientific illiterate or those who benefit from scientific illiteracy. You can essentially just look at the first graph on wikipedia and see that it is never going to work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphe...
by tizio13 | 2025-12-31 19:11:28+00:00
I think you’re conflating 'conciseness' with 'correctness.' The 'clutter' you're describing in Swift like, having to explicitly define an Enum instead of using a vertical bar |, is exactly what makes it more robust than TS for large-scale systems.

In TypeScript a union like string | number is structural and convenient, but it lacks semantic meaning. In Swift, by defining an Enum, you give those states a name and a purpose. This forces you to handle cases exhaustively and intentionally. When you're dealing with a massive codebase 'easy' type bridging is often how you end up back in 'id' or 'any' hell. Swift’s compiler yelling at you is usually it trying to tell you that your logic is too ambiguous to be safely compiled which, in a safety first language, is the compiler doing its job.
by syntaxing | 2025-12-31 19:11:29+00:00
This was quite a fun read and I appreciate the insight. A couple of my peers have suggested me to write a “stuff you should know” book. Some technical in nature (like linear algebra. It blows my mind how many engineers hardware or software do not understand linear algebra) and some not technical (why stuff cost the way they do. “Why does this cost $200 when I can make it for $20!”). But reading your post was encouraging to see that self publishing for fun might be the way to go. Though I guess people would argue you can just ask a LLM now instead of reading my book.
by Delk | 2025-12-31 19:11:46+00:00
I remember not getting Close Combat 2 (from 1997) running on Windows 10 some years ago but I did getting it running under Wine, albeit with some tweaks.

Whether that was a Windows compatibility issue or potentially some display driver thing, I'm not sure. (90's Windows games may have used some DirectDraw features that just don't get that much attention nowadays, which I think may have been the issue, but my memory's a bit spotty.)
by Isamu | 2025-12-31 19:12:10+00:00
The Bremermann limit is about computational density. It makes sense to talk about computers that are ever more powerful but not necessarily larger.

So we talk about the supercomputers we call cell phones that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the desktop computers I used years ago.

It doesn’t make sense to talk about making super large computers before reaching the density limit, that’s a confusion of concepts.

Making computers faster has involved making them smaller because the speed of signal propagation.
by tavavex | 2025-12-31 19:12:13+00:00
The rented mainframes were, imo, far less egregious than what's awaiting all of us. It'd probably be less "massive B2B transactions to cut down on costs and outsource operating a hugely complex machine to its manufacturer", and more "everyone participating in society making mandatory perpetual payments to be allowed to use tightly-controlled devices that they must manage their entire lives through".
by rasengan0 | 2025-12-31 19:12:17+00:00
>"All of our future books will involve AI."
>It is antithetical to the premise of the book (classic programming projects!) that they agreed to publish.

I hope this trend is not industry wide.
A publisher chasing fads and trends over enduring quality, so sad. I wish I knew who the publisher was to avoid but I can foresee their pivot to AI authors with titles like "From Zero to Hero, ChatGPT 5.2 Top Prompting Secrets for Dummies"
by anikeshkumar | 2025-12-31 19:12:23+00:00
Hello HN,
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While it originated within the Bagisto headless e-commerce ecosystem, the framework is now decoupled and works with any React-based project.
Why I built this:
Most "web-to-native" tools either feel like slow WebViews or require a total rewrite in React Native. I wanted a middle ground: the ability to keep your Next.js routing, SEO, and web logic while gaining access to native device APIs, push notifications, and app store readiness without the overhead of a full rebuild.
Key Features:
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Native Bridge: Access hardware features (camera, geolocation, storage) through a unified JS bridge.
Performance-First: Optimized for low-latency interactions so it doesn't "feel" like a browser wrapper.
Modular: The @bagisto-native/about package handles the core versioning and environment detection to ensure the app behaves differently when running in a native shell versus a browser.
The @bagisto-native/about package:
This is the core identity and utility layer. It detects the environment, manages versioning between the web-service and the native-wrapper, and provides the initialization logic for the native bridge.
NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bagisto-native/about