MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by torginus | 2025-12-29 09:02:28+00:00
Unity somehow manages to break the API of their own features so bad every year or so that their own tutorials don't work. You have a solid baseline API that has existed since forever (with known limitations), with stuff like the legacy render pipeline. Every attempt to reform it has only introduced confusion, complexity, and is at some point between experimental and no longer supported.

I don't agree with you on the Asset Store, for the same reasons - the rate of breakage means that things that are not constantly updated no longer work - and multple versions need to be maintained for parallel engine versions. That combined with the dubious economics of Asset Store (I don't think it makes financial sense to even make these things, let alone maintain them), they mostly end up as abandonware.

And on the Asset Store if you make something indispensable (which is more often than not something the engine should'have OOTB, like competent text rendering), one of the following things will happen:

- Unity will buy you out, and plop your asset in the engine, without doing any integration work, and will stick out like a sore thumb (TextMeshPro). Good for you, bad for consumers, and sucks if you were making a competitor

- They build an in-house solution, that you obviously can't compete with, and will have a huge leg up on you because they have engine access (sucks to be you)

- The engine will never have that feature, because 'you can just buy it', meaning you have to either spends hundreds of dollars/euros on dubious quality assets or hunt for open-source versions with generally even more varying usability. UE4/5 has a lot of these built in, and AAA quality.
by piva00 | 2025-12-29 09:03:18+00:00
Most people are not the ones initiating a hangout with others who they aren't yet friends with, they usually join in when invited if it fits their schedule/they are bored, etc. I'd recommend trying to brush off a bit the feeling of rejection since you don't have these connections yet. It sucks a bit but knowing it's completely normal might help you not feel it's something personal against you.

My recommendation is to keep trying with the ones you felt you could potentially click, I also have ADHD but never had much of an issue to make friends, and never made it a "goal", I just kept getting interested in people and would try to meet them again, most times it fizzles out even though you can have a nice time together but eventually some people stick around and become friends over time :)

Also try to have a well defined event, and be genuine, do things you like and try to invite people you met with these shared interests, in a casual and friendly way, people are more prone to join in when they don't feel there's pressure to do it.

I think the 3 first points of this comment [0] touch very much on the core of it, if you can strengthen against the feeling of rejection, and learn to be open and vulnerable (while balancing it to not become oversharing) it can go a long way to make people see and connect with you. Almost everyone is "in the closet" somehow, putting up a mask, when people meet someone that shows less of a mask and more themselves they usually will find those interesting.

What are some social activities you like to do?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46417195
Alternative Crypto Lending: Personal Experience and Observations
by Oleksandrslapko | 2025-12-29 09:03:22+00:00
Traditional bank loans are increasingly no longer the only option to quickly secure funds for a specific need. Rigid requirements, long approval processes, and bureaucratic hurdles drive both individual users and businesses to explore alternative solutions based on digital assets.

I personally tested one service in this niche — CapitalBit https://capitalbit.vip/en — and in my experience the process was straightforward: the conditions were transparent, the application steps were simple, and the support team provided clear responses. It was useful to see how the platform structures the loan application and defines terms upfront, which made the process predictable and easy to follow.

At the same time, I explored other platforms in this segment and encountered common issues: in some cases the terms changed late in the process, in others the application took too long to process, and support often lacked detailed answers. This reinforced for me the importance of evaluating not only the promises but also the transparency of conditions, the predictability of the process, and the quality of communication when considering alternative lending solutions. These aspects become most evident in real-world use and are key to a positive experience.
by axiolite | 2025-12-29 09:04:18+00:00
> developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible

Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.

Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.

Why don't YOU commercialize your fork of their service, and use the proceeds to hire developers to maintain the code? That would be infinitely more useful than armchair criticism of others.
by tripple6 | 2025-12-29 09:04:31+00:00
Jumping ahead to the comments below: obviously, I mentioned `java.sql.ResultSet` only as an example of an extremely massive interface. But if someone starts building theories based on what is left unsaid in the example for those from outside the Java world, one could, for instance, assume that such brittle tests are simply poorly written, or that they fail to mitigate Mockito's default behavior.

In my view, one of the biggest mistakes when working with Mockito is relying on answers that return default values even when a method call has not been explicitly described, treating this as some kind of "default implementation". Instead, I prefer to explicitly forbid such behavior by throwing an `AssertionError` from the default answer. Then, if we really take "one method" literally, I explicitly state that `next()` must return `false`, clearly declaring my intent that I have implemented tests based on exactly this described behavior, which in practice most often boils down to a fluent-style list of explicitly expected interactions. Recording interactions is also critically important.

How many methods does `ResultSet` have today? 150? 200? As a Mockito user, I don't care.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-29 09:05:06+00:00
Kind of agree, which is why we are discussing Apple was always about appliances, starting with Lisa and Mac models.

As someone that started using PCs on MS-DOS 3.3, having BASIC and DEBUG around wasn't much help without having the required books, and they were not that easy to get.

There was still a divide between user and having the means to become a developer.
by delaminator | 2025-12-29 09:05:06+00:00
> But I cannot stress this enough: none of this is new.
> The algorithms have been around for half a century.

Aside from that being false, novelty is not what I'm buying.

Word2vec was created, patented, and published in 2013 - by Googlers

which begat

Attention Is All You Need was published in 2017 - by Googlers

which begat

GPT-1 - 2018

GPT-2 was pre-trained on a dataset of 8 million web pages - 2019

None of it is more than 20 years old. Let alone half a century. It is all new.

And even if it was a 100 years old you still need the infrastructure and data to implement it on a computer. You can make it on a paper tape if you want, how many tokens per second do you think that will produce?

In this case we aren't paying for the algorithm, the Pure Mathematics. We are paying for the results of running the algorithm to real things - Applied Mathematics.

Now some of what some people in the industry might be doing is a scam. Overselling it and getting massive investment and bankrupting Oracle! I won't comment any further on that.
by aisutariVI | 2025-12-29 09:05:56+00:00
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by kgeist | 2025-12-29 09:06:33+00:00
>It completely breaks the censor's standard playbook of IP enumeration. You can't just block a specific subnet without risking blocking future legitimate allocations

At least in Russia, they don't really care about collateral damage. Currently, without a VPN, I can't open like 30-50% links on Hacker News (mostly collateral damage after they banned large portions of IPs)
by acyou | 2025-12-29 09:07:12+00:00
From the 1600s to immediately after WW2, Battleship meant roughly the same thing, not "fast armored ship with big guns", but literally "Ship fit to stand in the line of battle". So yeah it's not a WW2 fast heavily armed and armored Iowa class, but those are obsolete, so we should be happy.

If the guided missile cruiser is now the biggest meanest surface unit, I'm fine with calling it a battleship.

Also, if gun caliber and armor plate thickness and speed, etc are less than the Iowa class battleship, the above still stands. It just means that the state of the art in what the biggest baddest ship is has moved on.

The aircraft carrier in many ways already became the new battleship in 1942, and existing battleships became effectively second rate in the sense that a fleet aircraft carrier smokes a battleship, it still does.

Another way to think about it is that guided missile cruisers are kind of another evolution of the aircraft carrier, they launch large numbers of missiles at much less cost.

Of course, the reality is much more complicated. It's unclear how useful guided missile classes and nuclear powered aircraft carriers will be in a standup full blown major power fight, aircraft carriers have sure been nice for asymmetric warfare in relative peacetime.
by card_zero | 2025-12-29 09:08:00+00:00
I don't know, removing the turd from that picture reminds me of when Stalin had the head of the NKVD (deceased) removed from photos after the purge. It sounds like the turd was probably the focus of all your dog's attention and interest at the time, and editing it out has created a misleading situation in a way that would be outrageous if I was a dog and capable of outrage.
by ajb | 2025-12-29 09:08:08+00:00
The previous law used to control racial hatred was the law of criminal libel; it was successfully used to prosecute antisemitism etc. As a species of libel, it had an absolute defence of of speaking the truth. Now, clearly you can be clever enough to spread hatred by only the use of true statements. But we have reached the point where those speaking the truth about atrocities committed by a foreign government are imprisoned for hate speech, and vastly more self censor. Your implied claim that those criticising the law just want to be free to be racist is not defensible - and indeed, you're not bold enough to defend it, merely "find it interesting".
by strken | 2025-12-29 09:08:41+00:00
I think you're misunderstanding me: the proposal of a carbon tax is fine, but if you're the person who spearheads it then it's most effective to already be individual acting. That way, you can't be accused of hypocrisy.

You can't support the tax as effectively unless you prove by your actions that you believe in the cause. While individual action won't directly solve the problem, failing to take individual action might jeopardise your ability to support collective action.
by gorgolo | 2025-12-29 09:09:36+00:00
I noticed this a lot when taking pictures in the mountains.

I used to have a high resolution phone camera from a cheaper phone and then later switched to an iPhone. The latter produced much nicer pictures, my old phone just produces very flat-looking pictures.

People say that the iPhone camera automatically edits the images to look better. And in a way I notice that too. But that’s the wrong way of looking at it; the more-edited picture from the iPhone actually corrresponds more to my perception when I’m actually looking at the scene. The white of the snow and glaciers and the deep blue sky really does look amazing in real life, and when my old phone captured it into a flat and disappointing looking photo with less postprocessing than an iPhone, it genuinely failed to capture what I can see with my eyes. And the more vibrant post processed colours of an iPhone really do look more like what I think I’m looking at.
by ReflectedImage | 2025-12-29 09:09:52+00:00
Yep, the software development slows down to crawl. Yes, you can still code at the same speed as you were coding in a language like Java or C# but that is considerably slower then what's possible in languages like Ruby and Python.

To give you a roughly idea, you should always expect a 3x slow down when using static typing.

An recent example is Turborepo that went from basic types in Go to proper static typing in Rust. Just adding in the proper typing caused the codebase to grow from 20,000 lines to 80,000 lines and from 3 developer months to 14 developer months.

The stronger your typing system, the slower you will develop code. Whether you realise it or not.
by fru654 | 2025-12-29 09:12:42+00:00
Can anybody eli5 this law please?

If I read it right, I’d need to pay €3 on each item when Aliexpress bundles 20 1€ items together - €60 in tax for €20 worth of items, or effectively a 300% tax. That’s what the language implies with “applied to each different item, …, contained in a consignment.”

That’s not just a tax on revenue, or an incentive to buy locally - it’s prohibitory. Do they want to obliterate the "direct-to-consumer" cheap goods for good with this?

But who this law protects anyway? Most of “local” sellers that offer Aliexpress-kind of items (where else can I find my “stainless steel meat shredder claws” but there!?) basically drop ship from Taobao and the like in bulk. And this law now forces me to use them. What’s the point of this? A tiny revenue stream from handling fees? But even these drop shippers don’t offer much in terms of variety. Nor do or possibly can the supposedly big warehouses of Aliexpress-like platforms located within EU - it’s just not feasible. So this law implies that unregulated variety is a luxury now?
by ordu | 2025-12-29 09:14:55+00:00
> the city's foreign born population has been stable for at least 15 years

This statement doesn't contradict the one about international immigrants keeping the city from shrinking. It is easy to imagine how immigrants come to NY, give birth to natural born Americans, who then move out of the city. This process can come to some kind of a dynamic equilibrium with a stable population of foreign born people.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-12-29 09:15:04+00:00
My position is that we are nothing but our circumstances(I'm assuming that we're in agreement that genetics, pre-birth nutrition etc, are part of these circumstances and not of the 'soul' you're after?), or to put it more directly: We are our circumstances. Our Soul Is That. There is nothing that is "already inside".

The tree does not exist in isolation, separate from the patterns of rain and sunshine that shape its growth. "The separation is an illusion".

I have indeed been on the same path as you of trying to shed delusions and applying the scientific method, and have up to this point found no indication of any "causeless cause" to steer me besides the fundamental is-ness of the universe.

Put bluntly, I believe that if you hadn't started with the assumption of a soul, you would be entirely unable to arrive at the conclusion of a soul by rational methods. And starting by assuming the unproven instead of emptyness is epistemological cheating.
by goku12 | 2025-12-29 09:16:16+00:00
Self-hosted FOSS apps are probably the best push towards computing freedom and privacy today. But I wish that the self-hosting community moved towards a true distributed architecture, instead of trying to mimic the paradigms of corporate centralized software. This is not meant as a criticism against the current self-hosted architecture or the apps. But I wish the community focused on a different set of features that suite the home computing conditions more closely:

1. Peer-to-peer model of decentralization like bittorrent, instead of the client-server model. Local web UIs (like Transmission's web UI) may be served locally (either host-only or LAN-only) as frontend for these apps. Consider this as the 'last-mile connectivity' if you will.

2. Applications are resistant to outages. Obviously, home servers can't be expected to be always online. It may even be running on you regular desktops. But you shouldn't lose the utility of the service just because it goes offline. A great example of this is the email service. They can wait for up to 2 days for the destination server to show up before declaring a delivery failure. Even rejections are handled with retries minutes later.

3. The applications should be able to deal with dynamic IPs and NATs. We will probably need a cryptographic identity mechanism and a way to translate that into a connection to the correct end node. But most of these technologies exist today.

4. E2E encrypted and redundant storage and distribution servers for data that must absolutely be online all the time. Nostr relays seem like a good example.

The Solid and Nostr projects embody many of these ideas already. It just needs a bit more polish to feel natural and intuitive. One way to do it is to have a local daemon that acts as a gateway, cache and web-ui to external data.
by gf000 | 2025-12-29 09:17:02+00:00
Sure there are pain points in Java, but I definitely wouldn't want the language to introduce 15 new features each having only a tiny benefit.

Based on your other comment you prefer "fat" languages like kotlin and C# - and that's fair. I find languages with less, but more powerful features far more elegant and while Java has its fair share of historic warts, modern additions are made in a very smart way.

E.g. switch expressions seamlessly support sum and product types, meanwhile kotlin's `when` really is just syntactic sugar.

All in all, with too many features you have to support and understand the complete matrix of their interactions as well, and that gets complicated quickly. And Kotlin is growing towards that.
by elcritch | 2025-12-29 09:17:46+00:00
Personally I'm all for breaking up the media conglomerates. Especially the news. There is a tremendous amount of group-think from professional elites who all goto the same universities and then go work in the same newsrooms. When combined with endless M&A it creates insular monoculture with low tolerance for opposing views in most of these news outlets.

> At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism

That sounds great in theory, but given the recent scandals at the BBC and uncovering of systematic bias there we can see how fragile such institutions can be. Even without M&A driving it the BBC has become a primarily leftist monoculture.

> Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little

Sounds great, but also prone to systemic bias. Universities in general have become echo chambers in liberal arts departments.

Perhaps combine that with options for doing national service of some sort that would balance out education. Afterall, classroom learning only gives one aspect of life and experience. Often just exposing people to new places and environments broadens their outlooks.
by dangus | 2025-12-29 09:18:03+00:00
You can just turn off the AI feature in Brave search so it’s sort of extra pointless.

It’s possibly worth pointing out that the about page doesn’t offer any indicator that this is an actual nonprofit entity from a legal standpoint, so at this point I have to assume it’s just a sole proprietorship that is pinky promising to become a non-profit.

In that sense I’m quite happy “donating” to Kagi to provide a stable and supported product from a company with employees.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-29 09:19:18+00:00
My personal pet-peeve everytime a "you don't need JS" post comes up on HN, is the disconnect between the interface designers and the developers. In my dayjob as a (mostly react) freelance contractor doing B2B and LoB apps, there are always UX designers coming up with the screen- and interface designs. I don't think any project I ever were, could have matched a screen design I was passed without JS. Whether it being business requirements (has to work in IE, or nowadays has to work in Edge), or simply hard visual design choices.

My favorite example is that of a date, date-time or date-range picker. Yes, there are HTML native elements. But they look absolutely ugly, styling only goes so far, and good luck with requirements such as "oh, but in the popup on the date-range picker, add a topbar with 3 buttons that trigger preselection and a dropdown". Now you can argue and communicate back that we save a lot of technical complexity in the stack if we stick to the HTML native solutions. But all those discussions basically end up managers and UX designers having no clue about the actual complexity and savings (time and money wise for future maintenance) and simply don't care.

And if I am the one telling them "Look, in the HTML native date-time picker, you can't add custom elements, you can't fully customize every bit and piece of behaviour so change the screen designs" they will just fire up random corporate website XYZ and show a similar version of what they have in mind (and it is always JS-based) and suddenly it looks like me being unable or unskilled to achieve something, that is clearly doable as others have done it.

Now not all is nice and shiny in the JS/React world. We use MaterialUI in a current project, and the commercial MUI-X DatePickers. They also come with their limitations, but it is just they are far more powerfull and customizable to actually meet the requirements and demands of UX and management, compared to the HTML versions.
by laserb0y | 2025-12-29 09:20:52+00:00
I've seen several bigger Meshtastic networks in Europe that suffer from a dramatic unreliability.

Everything beyond 1 Hop is often unusable. The public chat room only sees fragments of discussions. This causes big frustration within the community.

MT clients are just too chatty. That most Roles can act as a (delayed) Router was IMHO a bad design decision.

Also that they blocked the term "Meshcore" on their Reddit Sub leaves a bad taste. Both projects share similar problems - they should cooperate instead of fight each other.
by phkx | 2025-12-29 09:21:12+00:00
Maybe [the UK is not on the list] because this article focuses on technical aspects of overcoming blocking of the global internet in those countries that benefit from improvements to the TOR infrastructure. Maybe there are no problems circumventing DNS-level blocking with TOR in the countries which you mentioned. Maybe those people arrested (source?) were actually able to technically access the platforms on which they raised whatever they had to say. So maybe, the post is simply about a completely different topic.