MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2025-12-10 21:45:12+00:00
Interesting Space Invaders Trivia:

The game speeding up as invaders are eliminated was an unintended consequence of the hardware running full speed to draw all 55 invaders. As invaders are eliminated the draw calls finish faster and the game speeds up. There is no code in the game to throttle the speed. The 2 Mhz 8080 is always drawing full speed. It's delightfully serendipitous this happens to ramp up the difficulty as you near the end of each level in such a compellingly perfect way. (https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/space-...)

I've watched some interviews with the game's programmer Tomohiro Nishikado and, although translated (so subject to garbling), he seems to confirm this was a 'happy accident'. He indicates he set the max number of invaders based on what the hardware could draw but there was no intent to have the speed ramp up. Of course, he noticed that it did this during play testing but decided to keep it that way. Arguably, it's one of the most compelling aspects of the game. Modern emulators have to add code game-specific code to limit the speed or the game plays too fast. Leaving no CPU cycles unused is the sign of an elegant design.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-10 21:45:21+00:00
Predictions are only valuable when they're actually made ahead of the knowledge becoming available. A man will walk on mars by 2030 is falsifiable, a man will walk on mars is not. A lot of these entries have very low to no predictive value or were already known at the time, but just related. Would be nice if future 'judges' put in more work to ensure quality judgments.

I would grade this article B-, but then again, nobody wrote it... ;)
by justapassenger | 2025-12-10 21:46:06+00:00
1. About 25% of their service revenue is from charging commissions in app store and other 25% of the revenue is Google paying them for search default. Other services include things like insurance (applecare) That's not exactly same type services that most of the people would be thinking about.

2. A lot of their services have less criticality (and it's not a ding at them - it's often very explicit design choice).

3. App store having hiccups or iCloud backups being delayed it's not something that will usually gather enough attention of media.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-12-10 21:47:16+00:00
As if immigrants fleeing Nazis in WWII 90 years ago or folk from less wealthy regions of the world today are a barometer for the state of the Netherlands?

The Netherlands is already doing well today, and don't have the grim outlooks of the current US. It's not perfect and the fall of the US would have enormous impacts, of course, but this seems like a total non sequitur.
by michaelt | 2025-12-10 21:47:39+00:00
> Why is it that CI tools don't make warnings visible?

A developer setting up CI decides to start an ubuntu 24.04 container and run 'apt-get install npm'

This produces 3,600 lines of logging (5.4 log lines per package, 668 packages) and 22 warnings (all warnings about man page creation being skipped)

Then they decide "Nobody's going to read all that, and the large volume might bury important information. I think I'll hide console output for processes that don't fail."

Now your CI doesn't show warnings.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-10 21:48:26+00:00
Exactly, that's the element that is missing. If there are 50 comments against and one pro and that pro has it in the longer term then that is worth noticing, not when there are 50 comments pro and you were one of the 'pros'.

Going against the grain and turning out right is far more valuable than being right consistently when the crowd is with you already.
by bigfudge | 2025-12-10 21:48:46+00:00
The attempt is to remove the market do exploiting the attention of children for profit. This doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth it.

What’s more, the idea that this puts children at the mercy of authoritarians is laughable. The US tech industry has shown us beyond doubt that they are perfectly ok with genuine authoritarians in charge, provided the dollars keep rolling. Fuck them, and good on ya Australia.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-12-10 21:49:01+00:00
And to your first point, the "good army" did become the "bad army" by the time of the sequel, Zeta Gundam. Once they're no longer on the back footing, the "good army" becomes a ruthless occupying force, operating almost entirely without oversight and under the direction of officers who are all too willing to cover up war crimes. But it still makes sense because you can see over the course of the show how such shift could happen in the inter-war period between the One Year War and the Gryps Conflict.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-12-10 21:49:02+00:00
I didn't even need to read the article to upvote, and doing so just confirmed my assumption that somebody finally wrote down their frustration with Gemini.

My fucking god, how has Google not flagged the failure of onboarding devs like Claude / Codex?

3 days ago I was literally thinking, I want to throw 20$ to try out Gemini alongside my Claude and Codex subs.

It took me a few minutes to realize its just not worth my time to figure out how.
by jpc0 | 2025-12-10 21:49:33+00:00
> Which is a huge risk factor for Rust, especially in today's context of the Linux kernel. If I have an object created/handled by external native code, how do I make sure that it respects Rust's lifetime/aliasing rules?

Can you expand on this point? Like are you worried about whether the external code is going to free the memory out from under you? That is part of a guarantee, the compiler cannot guarantee what happens at runtime no matter what the author of a language wants, the CPU will do what it's told, it couldn't care about Rusts guarantees even if you built your code entirely with rust.

When you are interacting with the real world and real things you need to work with different assumptions, if you don't trust that the data will remain unmodified then copy it.

No matter how many abstractions you put on top of it there is still lighting in a rock messing with 1s and 0s.
by h02 | 2025-12-10 21:49:48+00:00
Just wait until you find out that Tier 1 only gives you up to 250 requests a day, and if you want more than that you'll have had to have spent over $250 in Google Cloud spend, and your first payment has to be more than 30 days ago. I was going to build my side project using Gemini 3 Pro, but gave up after that.
by AuthAuth | 2025-12-10 21:50:20+00:00
The chain is about the statement "China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything" being disputed by the solar capacity being added. Whats being highlighted is that while solar is increasing its still a small % compared to the other types being added. If they add 800TWh of solar and 1000TWh of coal and 500TWh of other stuff they arent adding mostly solar like you keep claiming. We are not looking at % increases we are looking at actual increases relative to the total energy supply.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-10 21:50:25+00:00
People have done these sort of "optical computing" based demonstrations for decades, despite David Miller showing that fundamentally digital computing with optical photons will be immensely power hungry (I say digital here, because there are some applications where analog computing can make sense, but it almost never relies memory for bits).

Specifically this paper is based on simulations, and I've only skimmed the paper, but the power efficiency numbers sound great because they say 40 GHz read/write speeds, but these consume comparatively large powers even if not reading or writing (the lasers have to be running constantly). I also think they did not include the contributions of the modulation and the required drivers (typically you need quite large voltages)? Somebody already pointed out that the size of these is massive, and that's again fundamental.

As someone working in the broad field, I really wish people would stop these type of publications. While these numbers might sound impressive at a first glance, they really are completely unrealistic. There are lots of legitimate applications of optics and photonics, we don't need to resort to this sort of stuff.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-10 21:51:01+00:00
> A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?

But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.

> Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.

No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once. Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with "just enough to notice it's one of those so they can run the other way".

[EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an extremely reasonable middle ground for Internet targeted ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of liability for content they promote, which amount would surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I'm not gonna send my kids there—I'd rather see them gone, period. I will tell my kids what they are, and how and why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away. But I don't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of social media feeds is to avoid them entirely.
by MisterTea | 2025-12-10 21:51:04+00:00
> That said, it would be great if a simple, well-documented DIY standard (protocol + format) emerged that hobby plotters could implement and that common tools (Inkscape, CAD, etc.) could support out of the box.

I know just about every CAD program, inkscape and many others use the text based DXF. Might be a bit overkill in some cases so perhaps a simple plotting language such as the plot format: https://man.9front.org/6/plot
by jimbokun | 2025-12-10 21:51:06+00:00
Look at the current political environment.

In the US at least, there is a Congress incapable of taking action and a unilateral President fully on the side of tech CEOs with the heaviest investments in AI.

There is no evidence supporting short term optimism. Every indication the large corporations dictating public policy will treat us exactly like those horses when it comes to economic value.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-12-10 21:51:52+00:00
It's not that nobody told the director. It's that the director knew nobody cared what was actually in the show as long as the end product moved units on the shelves.

It's part of the reason the names are so wild. He was actively pushing the envelope with outrageous names during pitches to see how far he could go before producers would stop nodding along without paying attention.
by archagon | 2025-12-10 21:53:13+00:00
The idea that you can “steal” knowledge and ideas is farcical. One reason why China is so good at iterating rapidly on technology is that this notion of intellectual “property” doesn’t really exist there. Any cool new invention is immediately iterated on by a hundred different makers.

And the reason to release a standard is to make your own products better. TVs would be awful if every manufacturer brought their own proprietary video connector to the table, and those manufacturers who grouped together to create a standard would accordingly dominate the market.
by crabmusket | 2025-12-10 21:53:15+00:00
I think the government making stuff up is worth considering, but isn't it a kind of different threat model?

The hypothetical government isn't going to make stuff up about me, some nobody, on a flight to the US to be a tourist or something. They statistically don't care about me. However, the US morality police might decide to statistically care about everyone who watches porn.

But if I'm a somebody, say a former or potential whistleblower, or a local politician, etc. then a government might have a specific motive to do me dirty and not care about being honest.

I guess there's a wide and blurry line between being a "nobody" the government has no motivation to lie about and being a "somebody" that deserves special malicious treatment.
by hamdingers | 2025-12-10 21:53:27+00:00
You are incorrect. Fatalities in the US leveled out in the early 2010s and have been climbing since then. In all other developed nations they continued trending downwards.

This is not a statistical anomaly that can be handwaved by pointing out that things were worse 40 years ago. Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.
by anthk | 2025-12-10 21:53:45+00:00
Alphonse X "The Wise". A Castillian king basically sanctioned a book on board games, from chess to a few less known ones with dice. Enough said. There's tons of difference between the 6th century and the 12th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro_de_los_juegos

This would blow out lots of Anglo-Saxon minds with a very bad depiction of Middle Ages compared to the modern era from Newton. But, IRL, it was all about a gradual modernization of thinking.

People didn't just became modern with the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution. It happened tons of stuff in between.
by moomoo11 | 2025-12-10 21:54:25+00:00
Yes that’s why I said minimal AOE and also why I said in a war (keyword - we live in real world and war is a very real thing whether we like it or not) minimizing harm to innocents is key.

The alternative is 10s of thousands of civilians suffering because their leaders drag them into hell with them. We already see how bad that is..
by tim333 | 2025-12-10 21:54:30+00:00
If you use 300 million people, 2 years and the US suicide rate of 15/100k/yr you'd expect about 90,000 people who'd used LLMs to kill themselves anyway so it's hard to conclude much from the dozen or people listed in the Wikipedia article. 90k deaths seems a lot to me - maybe there are possibilities for good LLM assistance/therapy to improve things?
by hathawsh | 2025-12-10 21:55:12+00:00
I'll take a stab at this: LLMs currently seem to be rather good at details, but they seem to struggle greatly with the overall picture, in every subject.

- If I want Claude Code to write some specific code, it often handles the task admirably, but if I'm not sure what should be written, consulting Claude takes a lot of time and doesn't yield much insight, where as 2 minutes with a human is 100x more valuable.

- I asked ChatGPT about some political event. It mirrored the mainstream press. After I reminded it of some obvious facts that revealed a mainstream bias, it agreed with me that its initial answer was wrong.

These experiences and others serve to remind me that current LLMs are mostly just advanced search engines. They work especially well on code because there is a lot of reasonably good code (and tutorials) out there to train on. LLMs are a lot less effective on intellectual tasks that humans haven't already written and published about.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-10 21:55:19+00:00
Given the quality of the judgment I'm not worried, there is no value here.

To properly execute this idea rather than to just toss it off without putting in the work to make it valuable is exactly what irritates me about a lot of AI work. You can be 900 times as productive at producing mental popcorn, but if there was value to be had here we're not getting it, just a whiff of it. Sure, fun project. But I don't feel particularly judged here. The funniest bit is the judgment on things that clearly could not yet have come to pass (for instance because there is an exact date mentioned that we have not yet reached). QA could be better.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-10 21:55:41+00:00
I support this greatly. But I think instead of debating whether this makes sense or not, or speculating, let's consider that it is already in effect and consider it an experiment. Let's see how Australia is doing in 10 or 15 years, will those kids be resentful or regret the ban when they're 30?

Extremes are bad on either end. unrestricted internet access, even to those who can't defend themselves against harmful content is an extreme, some balance is long due. Since most other western countries chose to risk their kids in the name of liberty, let's wait and see whose trade off works out for the best instead of speculating what will or won't happen.

I wish more countries would experiment like this, and even more countries would learn.

You can't argue for UBI or drug decriminalization because some country experimented and succeeded and then oppose this sort of stuff. In the US, states are supposed to experiment with laws like this, but they don't have enough power to regulate interstate communication or commerce.
by ctime | 2025-12-10 21:55:41+00:00
You might be amazed to know how critical Services are to functioning Apple devices. While they mostly can run offline, there are dozens and dozens of services that Apple runs that modern ecosystems require (like certificate related stuff). Other oddball things related to iCloud, APNS and the private services like iCloud relay are all extremely critical to billions of devices. Thankfully the all mostly fail open (captive portal is particularly tricky). Not saying they are as critical or visible as, say, Google.com going down, but none the less would have a very very large and visible problem if they all did go down suddenly. Thankfully, due to Apple design philosophy, most are totally decentralized and teams are given almost complete autonomy on how services are ran, which makes them a huge confusing mess but also, kind of a feature as Apple generally expects them all to fail in odd ways and the software can generally handle it.
by eternityforest | 2025-12-10 21:55:49+00:00
There's always going to be some maintenance, at the very least the API changes for providers you mentioned, and then there's still the reviews and testing of the C.

A mempool seems very much like a DIY implementation of malloc, unless you have fixed size allocations or something else that would make things different, not sure why I'd want that in the general case.

For "non hacker style" production code it just seems like a lot of extra steps.
by justatdotin | 2025-12-10 21:55:50+00:00
I enjoy participating in wildly diverse online communities and I hate censorship.

I have seen the way heavy social media use changes some peoples personalities. it's scary. these platforms don't just home communities: they're engines, with tendencies. including numerous ways in which these platforms are implicated in youth suicide.

I am absolutely convinced that children should be discouraged from these engines just as they should be discouraged from alcohol.

I totally recognise that if that means these platforms demand proof of ID, that changes their privacy profile and some people will choose to stop participating.

perhaps this can offer some stimulus for other ways of online community forming. Thanks everyone here: I've participated in a few online conversations about the topic this week, and this is the only interesting one :)
by rcarmo | 2025-12-10 21:55:58+00:00
Hmmm. Cute. I use a Bluehand (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/08/08/1230), which is physical and has... half the keys, but that relies on chording. I might take a look at the idea of doing a 20-key physical keyboard that looks like this.
by ben_w | 2025-12-10 21:56:08+00:00
> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.

The USA seems to be doing the "if you ever criticize the government [there will be consequences]" part before the rest of them?

> It's amazing how coordinated it is.

It looks coordinated to you? Then why is the USA threatening tariffs etc. for the rest of us doing these things, even when they're going further?
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-10 21:56:22+00:00
> when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought

V-chip, movie ratings, music ratings, top shelf magazines, raising the age for smokes, the water shed, censorship of tv networks, chat rooms, computer in the living room, primitive walled gardens (AOL et al)

All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.

> Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.

The first example of something that you see is normally a big opinion former. If you see the local big city constantly portrayed at a lawless hell hole, its going to stick with you. As will the the race baiting, as will the utter bollocks herbal-remedy-cures-cancer 100% of the time shtick. Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.
by jolmg | 2025-12-10 21:56:22+00:00
A store that asks for ID before letting someone buy a porn mag will have an employee check with their own eyes and then return the ID. By the time the person is out the door, any record of who they were is basically gone. The record is just in the fading short-term memory of the employee. If they turned right around that instant and went back into the building, they're basically as anonymous as they were the first time. If they interrogated everyone affiliated with the store, including the owner, nobody would know the home address of the person even though it was on the ID. The anonymity is even larger if you let a few days pass. Nobody will ever remember you for having bought that magazine or for having ever entered that store for that matter. They'll likely be different employees.

With online services, the identity would be tied to your account forever. A government would have the ability to review every passing comment you've made in your entire lifetime and know exactly who you are, who your family is, where you live, where you work, what your bank accounts are, etc.
by BoppreH | 2025-12-10 21:57:31+00:00
That's a very good technical solution, but socially it can be foiled by an official-looking alert saying "failed to scan card, please do X instead".

And that's assuming the technical solution is deployed everywhere. I'm in the EU with one of those IDs, and I still had to upload photos of my passport and scan my face to open a bank account. The identification process even had its own app that I had to install.
by amiga386 | 2025-12-10 21:57:37+00:00
There is. You can easily find by googling "hector martin" "asahi lina" and you will soon find a pile of obsessively archived evidence.

My view, now that Hector has resigned from the LKML both as himself and as Lina, is there is no problem any more. If Hector wants to project a persona, or decide his identity is the persona, or maybe multiple personas, that is fine on social media. People do that. So long as he's not sockpuppeting Linux kernel maintenance, it's fine.
by samename | 2025-12-10 21:57:46+00:00
What about future governments in Australia? This is ripe for abuse and scope creep. It also ties a uniform ID to an account, simplifying tracking and surveillance by corporations and governments.

Plus, this is asking everyone in the country to give up their biometrics (face scanning is one implementation) or link your government issued ID to your social media account (look at the UK to see how this turned out - people are being arrested for simple tweets against the government). Sacrificing the freedom to be anonymous online to "protect the kids"
by staticassertion | 2025-12-10 21:58:03+00:00
> Logic errors always stems from lack of understanding and inattention

Really? Never from limitations of the ability to express your mental model in a way that's formally verifiable? What a strong claim to make.

> There are static tools available for C as well.

For checking the semantics of the code itself? And why discount the fact that a tool being native means it's easier to adopt?