MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sebastianromero | 2025-12-18 16:41:38+00:00
Last night I wrote this thread: https://x.com/bipsa/status/2001519045334700378

I've been thinking a lot about what's coming next for AI + VR, and whether 2026 could be a real inflection point rather than just more hype. Here's the core idea, summarized:

A global catalyst: the 2026 World Cup. ~1 billion viewers, likely the last World Cup for Messi and Ronaldo. These kinds of once-in-a-generation life events are exactly where immersive experiences can actually add value (not just novelty).

Big tech is already positioned.

AI needs bigger stages than chatbots nor development tools.

The "invisible" enablers are finally maturing.

Connectivity: Satellite internet + Wi-Fi 7 reaching broader adoption.

Cloud & streaming: Netflix, PlayStation, Nvidia, Microsoft refining high-quality cloud delivery.

The network can finally support high-fidelity, real-time VR at scale.

Curious to hear thoughts: Do you see 2026 as a real investment/opportunity window for VR?
by Aurornis | 2025-12-18 16:41:40+00:00
This mirrors my experience with the texting while driving problem: The debate started as angry complaints about how all the kids are texting while driving. Yet it’s a common problem for people of all ages. The worst offender I knew for years was in her 50s, but even she would get angry about the youths texting while driving.

Pretending it’s just the kids and young people doing the bad thing makes the outrage easier to sell to adults.
by matltc | 2025-12-18 16:41:44+00:00
I am a drummer. One of the most important lessons I learned and passed onto my students is one I learned from Joe Morello (GOAT imo): tension should never be present in your playing. Counterintuitive because if you're playing a fast or difficult part, the natural inclination is to try harder. The correct way to try harder is to practice with intention, not push your body past its limits. The ability will follow.
by jackling | 2025-12-18 16:41:46+00:00
Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie.

Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good.

So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-18 16:41:54+00:00
> For now, the achievement is striking: a single robot, a thousand tasks, one day, one demonstration per task—a glimpse of a future where robots learn almost as fast as humans.

Reminds me of that medical school "See one, Do one, Teach one". I'm not sure whether to be excited, or to panic, or both.
by Macha | 2025-12-18 16:41:54+00:00
I think for these big companies as well, they should have to have a more targeted punishment. Since having access to an Apple or Google device is increasingly mandatory in many countries (often as a result of government legislation!), getting that cut off is more impactful than other services.

So like, if you get caught, red handed, absolutely 100% you, performing gift card fraud, the maximum punishment from Apple should still be getting banned from the gift card system (buying or redeeming). And if they want more consequences for you because they think you’re running a fraud ring, they should have to sue you like a physical store would. But not lock you out of the rest of the ecosystem. Otherwise you get the false positives getting the digital death sentence Apple tried to hand out here
by stevenwoo | 2025-12-18 16:42:25+00:00
The USA has several regions that appear to be headed in the same direction because of some ancient laws about water rights; bureaucracies motivated by have budget/must use for only development of water resources; developers who benefit from government projects exploiting water resources (most egregiously the farming land and urban development in deserts in Southern California, and Arizona) - all under the guise of democracy documented in Cadillac Desert.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 16:42:31+00:00
> Barcelona is not a large city

By what measure? Granted, I now live outside of Barcelona after moving here from an island with ~700 people on it, so for me pretty much any city is big, but I'm fairly sure Barcelona is within top 100 worldwide in terms of population living in it, so I'm guessing you're saying "not a large city" by some other metric?
by SR2Z | 2025-12-18 16:42:43+00:00
> It sounds like it isn't optional everywhere, the pay is beyond inhuman, they don't always get any benefits at all, no training, don't safety and are overworked.

Most of these are true, but I would push back on the pay angle. If a person is in jail, they are a ward of the state and have no expenses at all. There is no sense in paying them a "living wage" because they don't have to live off it. In any case, most stereotypical prison jobs would not cover the cost of incarcerating the employee.

A common way this works these days in more progressive states is that prisoners who can hold down a remote job are allowed to keep their income, minus paying a tithe for their incarceration:

https://www.mainepublic.org/2025-08-29/in-maine-prisoners-ar...

> Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.

Only about 10% of prisoners are in private prisons. The vast majority of them are in some kind of government prison. The US definitely puts too many people in prison, but that's for cultural reasons and not because of some nefarious plan to get cheap labor.
by elashri | 2025-12-18 16:42:44+00:00
Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money (part of grant money goes to that). That's because as another commenter says now authors pays high fees (thousands of dollars) in advance, while at the same time peer reviewers and sometimes even editors are not paid. And of course in neither case (open or closed access) authors get a dime.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-18 16:42:48+00:00
Actually it's more specific than that. A company pays you not just to "write code", not just to "write code that works", but to write code that works in the real world. Not on your laptop. Not in CI tests. Not on some staging environment. But in the real world. It may work fine in a theoretical environment, but deflate like a popped balloon in production. This code has no value to the business; they don't pay you to ship popped balloons.

Therefore you must verify it works as intended in the real world. This means not shipping code and hoping for the best, but checking that it actually does the right thing in production. And on top of that, you have to verify that it hasn't caused a regression in something else in production.

You could try to do that with tests, but tests aren't always feasible. Therefore it's important to design fail-safes into your code that ALERT YOU to unexpected or erroneous conditions. It needs to do more than just log an error to some logging system you never check - you must actually be notified of it, and you should consider it a flaw in your work, like a defective pair of Nikes on an assembly line. Some kind of plumbing must exist to take these error logs (or metrics, traces, whatever) and send it to you. Otherwise you end up producing a defective product, but never know it, because there's nothing in place to tell you its flaws.

Every single day I run into somebody's broken webapp or mobile app. Not only do the authors have no idea (either because they aren't notified of the errors, or don't care about them), there is no way for me to even e-mail the devs to tell them. I try to go through customer support, a chat agent, anything, and even they don't have a way to send in bug reports. They've insulated themselves from the knowledge of their own failures.
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-18 16:43:06+00:00
Too, in regions with winter weather (snow, or worse, sleet and ice), what few sidewalks or walking/biking trails which might exist are often further limited due to accumulated snow, if not slick with ice.

This can be found even within town/village centres, let alone the stroads and strip-malls on their peripheries. Walking and cycling become far more perilous.

Not impossible, but challenging, and a clear danger for the very young, elderly, or disabled.

Local ordinances to maintain clear sidewalks are quite often observed in the breach.

Then there's the shortened daylight hours, mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
by rglover | 2025-12-18 16:43:09+00:00
"Slow the f*ck down." - Oliver Reichenstein [1]

This only happens because the software industry has fallen into the Religion of Speed. I see it constantly: justified corner-cutting, rushing shit out the door, and always loading up another feature/project/whatever with absolutely zero self-awareness. AI is just an amplifier for bad behavior that was already causing chaos.

What's not being said here but should be: discipline matters. It's part of being a professional and always precedes someone who can ship code that "just works."

[1] https://ia.net/*
by ricardo81 | 2025-12-18 16:43:24+00:00
>Interestingly, the typo space on major sites is actually very sparsely registered (2% at edit distance 1), meaning that typosquatting may actually be underexploited.

Anecdotally, the autosuggestions and improved browsing history recommendations may mean this is way less lucrative than it used to be.

Also, anyone doing search like behaviour in their address bar is far more likely to see a knowledge panel style reply for prominent websites vs the 10 blue link format of historical search engine results, which may have included the nefarious domains.

I'd leap to say that because of this, users find their intended domain by using natural language far more than they used to.
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-18 16:43:25+00:00
I have a strong desire not to self host the “live” copy of anything. If my server goes down, I don’t want to have to drop everything and fix it (e.x. if I’m on vacation, I don’t want to have to take a laptop incase I need to fix any server troubles - I go on vacation not to be on call!).

That said, keeping a backup of everything, decoupled from any account I don’t control, gives me huge peace of mind.
by glenstein | 2025-12-18 16:44:02+00:00
>that this is actually Steam Machine 2.0. Valve already tried this a decade ago, and it flopped.

I find this framing to be beyond maddening. Sure, it wasn't an iPod, and if you measure it against that kind of expectation, of course it's a flop, because it wasn't an overnight success.

But I think it's more appropriately understood as a soft launch of an ecosystem, to strategically rebalance Valve away from the potential risk of being locked into Windows. It was also a thoughtful partnering with hardware vendors, so they weren't shipping hundreds of thousands of units to Walmart shelves was just sat there and lost them tens of millions of dollars, which is also what I think of when something's considered a flop.

But it was a thoughtful, intelligent long-term commitment to an ecosystem that bore fruit in large part due to the credible long-term commitment as the library of steamos compatible games grew and set up the Steam Deck for success. And now it looks like the wind is at their back with the new line of hardware, but I think it's best understood as a return on investment that begun those many years ago.

I think it reflects a kind of intelligence and long-term thinking that Google is pathologically incapable of, by contrast.
Show HN: Paper2Any – Open tool to generate editable PPTs from research papers
by Mey0320 | 2025-12-18 16:44:11+00:00
Hi HN, We are the OpenDCAI group from Peking University. We built Paper2Any, an open-source tool designed to automate the "Paper to Slides" workflow based on our DataFlow-Agent framework. The Problem: Writing papers is hard, but creating professional architecture diagrams and slides (PPTs) is often more tedious. Most AI tools just generate static images (PNGs) that are impossible to tweak for final publication. The Solution: Paper2Any takes a PDF, text, or sketch as input, understands the research logic, and generates fully editable PPTX (PowerPoint) files and SVGs. We prioritize flexibility and fidelity—allowing you to specify page ranges, switch visual styles, and preserve original assets. How it works: 1. Multimodal Reading: Extracts text and visual elements from the paper. You can now specify page ranges (e.g., Method section only) to focus the context and reduce token usage. 2. Content Understanding: Identifies core contributions and structural logic. 3. PPT Generation: Instead of generating one flat image, it generates independent elements (blocks, arrows, text) with selectable visual styles and organizes them into a slide layout. Links: - Demo: http://dcai-paper2any.cpolar.top/ - Code (DataFlow-Agent): https://github.com/OpenDCAI/DataFlow-Agent We'd love to hear your feedback on the generation quality and the agent workflow!
by bargainbin | 2025-12-18 16:44:17+00:00
> That's HTMX. I didn't write JavaScript to make those work. I wrote HTML attributes.

Well you didn’t write standard HTML attributes, you wrote custom attributes that are picked up by a JS framework, so potentially the worst of both worlds depending on your problem space.

Having tried HTMX a few times, the problem is firmly in creating a backend that feeds it properly. It’s a disjointed experience for anything more complicated than updating content.
by hnthrow0287345 | 2025-12-18 16:44:25+00:00
>It's even worse than that: non-junior devs are doing it as well.

This might be unpopular, but that is seeming more like an opportunity if we want to continue allowing AI to generate code.

One of the annoying things engineers have to deal with is stopping whatever they're doing and doing a review. Obviously this gets worse if more total code is being produced.

We could eliminate that interruption by having someone doing more thorough code reviews, full-time. Someone who is not being bound by sprint deadlines and tempted to gloss over reviews to get back to their own work. Someone who has time to pull down the branch and actually run the code and lightly test things from an engineer's perspective so QA doesn't hit super obvious issues. They can also be the gatekeeper for code quality and PR quality.
by dymk | 2025-12-18 16:44:30+00:00
Still then, it's a stretch to say that Jai influenced other languages. How could it when only a handful of game-centered applications have been built by a handfull of devs?

Rust and Zig developed features by cutting their teeth on large amounts of real software, not by following one guy's personal project that has no source, no library, no spec available.
by rcbdev | 2025-12-18 16:44:43+00:00
This sounds like the exact kind of profound pseudo-enlightenment that one gets from psychedelics. Of course, it's all electrons in the end.

Trying to create a secure, reliable and scalable system that enables many people to work on one code base, share their code around with others and at the end of the day coordinate this dance of electrons across multiple computers, that's where all of these 'useless' layers of abstraction become absolutely necessary.
by PeterHolzwarth | 2025-12-18 16:44:53+00:00
It will be interesting to see if they can answer a question better now than with the original Steam Machines ten years ago: what problem do consumers have that Steam Machines solve?

Their original answer was a resounding "nothing" - Steam Machines solved a problem for Valve (fear of an impending "Windows Store" being added by Microsoft that would steal the battlefield from Valve), but very little for the customer.

I guess that same question needs to be asked again here: are there sufficient problems that the average game-player at home has that are better answered by a Steam Machine than a Windows 11 box? Are those real problems experienced by the broader market of people, or are those just tangential issues cared about by a more vocal few?
by jackling | 2025-12-18 16:45:00+00:00
More like, shipped 2 hit games, which were both technological and artistic feats for their time. And developed a blazingly fast compiler. Casey also was a developer in RAD game tools developing animation tools. Their output is probably better than most industry developers. I understand if you don't like their attitudes and the way they attempt to teach/preach to other engineers, but IMO their work speaks for itself. I take their advice and try to apply it to my own work, because it seems to have work for them.
by zero0529 | 2025-12-18 16:45:34+00:00
What I don’t like with HTMX and the like is that you basically don’t get any help in the backend. It also introduces implicit coupling between the frontend and backend which is very much the worst kind of coupling you can have. While this is fine for small to medium projects it is terrible in the long run.

To be honest this might be a skill issue or something I haven’t understood properly with these frameworks.
by lowkeyokay | 2025-12-18 16:45:39+00:00
In the company I’m at this is beginning to happen. PM’s want to “prototype” new features and expect the engineers to finish up the work. With the expectation that it ‘just needs some polishing’. What would be your recommendation on how to handle this constructively? Flat out rejecting LLM as a prototyping tool is not an option.
by echelon | 2025-12-18 16:45:40+00:00
Valve's products are 100% designed to punch a hole through Windows Store monopolization. It encourages developers to write for Linux.

Microsoft has been trying to corner Valve. Valve is finding clever ways out by getting developers to finally make their games Linux compatible.

If Valve's consoles become broadly successful, that's an added bonus. The real win is to outflank Microsoft.

One of Microsoft's biggest mistakes was to give up on Windows Phone. One of Meta's biggest mistakes was to give up on their phone (they gave in early due to technical choices, not just lack of user demand).

Owning a "pane of glass" lets you tax and control everything. Apple and Google have unprecedented leverage in two of the biggest markets in the world. Microsoft wants that for gaming, and since most gaming is on Windows, they have a shot at it.

Valve is doing everything they can to make sure developers start targeting other platforms so PC games remain multi-platform. It's healthy for the entire ecosystem.

If we had strong antitrust enforcement (which we haven't had in over 25 years), Apple and Google wouldn't have a stranglehold on mobile, and Microsoft would get real scrutiny for all of their stunts they've pulled with gaming, studio acquisitions, etc.

Antitrust enforcement is good for capitalism. It ensures that stupid at-scale hacks don't let the largest players become gluttons and take over the entire ecosystem. It keeps capitalism fiercely competitive and makes all players nimble.

The government's antitrust actions against Microsoft in the 1990s-2000s was what paved the way for Apple to become what it is today. If we had more of it, one wonders what other magnificent companies and products we might have.
by smurda | 2025-12-18 16:45:51+00:00
I love writing with a dash—it packs a punch! On Writing Well by William Zinsser, who taught writing at Yale and Columbia, says this about the dash:

Somehow this invaluable tool is widely regarded as not quite proper—a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English. But it has full membership and will get you out of many tight corners. The dash is used in two ways. One is to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part. "We decided to keep going—it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner." By its very shape the dash pushes the sentence ahead and explains why they decided to keep going. The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence. "She told me to get in the car—she had been after me all summer to have a haircut—and we drove silently into town." An explanatory detail that might otherwise have required a separate sentence is dispatched along the way.

https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/OnWritingWell/on-wri...
by Jensson | 2025-12-18 16:45:53+00:00
> I sincerely doubt the slaves would agree with you. Just because one group was economically and societally OK with it, doesn’t make it morally OK.

That is wrong, slaves were happy to be alive instead of killed in most societies. It wasn't "slavery or freedom" it was "slavery or death" in most cases. America is an exception there, but in most areas with slavery it was done to criminals that otherwise would have gotten the death penalty.

Christianity forbade enslaving Christians, so we just killed our criminals for the past thousand years, but before Christianity we practiced slavery as punishment of crime everywhere as people thought that was better than killing them.
by trevor-e | 2025-12-18 16:45:54+00:00
> Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.

Strong disagree here, your job is to deliver solutions that help the business solve a problem. In _most_ cases that means delivering code that you should be able to confidently prove satisfies the requirements like the OP mentioned, but I think this is an important nitpick distinction I didn't understand until later on in my career.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-18 16:46:03+00:00
They’d need to improve desktop Linux a lot to threaten Apple. It’s far more tolerable on their relatively tightly-controlled and stable hardware platforms than it is elsewhere, but it’s still a features-weak jankfest compared to macOS. I mean user facing features relevant to any desktop user, not “docker is native on it” or other developer-only stuff—and for the record Linux was my main desktop OS for about a decade, so I’m far from unfamiliar with it, and I do own a Steam Deck and have used it extensively in desktop mode (and in console-alike mode).

I’d love someone to actually compete with Apple at the specific kind of thing they do, but I don’t see it in the cards for Valve. Too much distance, with things they don’t have to solve to hit other (apparent) targets of theirs.

As for Microsoft, what is Valve threatening? Home no-business-use-case (mostly gaming and maybe light web browsing) PC owners, and I suppose x-box? The former has got to be negligible at this point, and the latter… I guess maybe, yeah, they could threaten that.

[edit] to soften this somewhat, I do love what Valve is doing and their micro-PC thing they’re releasing next year is likely going to be an instant purchase for me, provided supply issues don’t drive the price insanely high or otherwise mess with the release. I happen to be in the exact niche of people who are thrilled to have a good low-tinkering option that lets me ditch my last Windows machine, so this stuff’s my jam.