MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I remade my website in the Sith Lord Theme and I hope it's fun
by cookiengineer | 2025-12-30 18:08:37+00:00
I used the time over Christmas and in between the years to redesign my website.

This time I decided to make it in the theme of an evil Sith Lord that commands the Galactic Cookie Empire, because I found my previous cookie consent game a bit boring after a while.

Here's the website's welcome page and the cookie consent game: https://cookie.engineer/index.html

(the cookie consent game isn't started on any other page of my website, only on the welcome page)

I also made a "making of" weblog article series, in case you're interested in the development process and how I implemented it and what kind of troubles I went through already:

- Making of the Game: https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/making-of-my-website...

- Making of the Avatar: https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/making-of-my-website...

- Debuggers to toy around with: https://cookie.engineer/design/consent/index.html

It "should" work on modern browsers. I tested it on Firefox on Linuxes, Chrome/Chromium on Linuxes, and Safari on Macbook. Don't have an iPhone so I can't test that, but my two old Android phones were also working fine with the meta viewport hack (I can't believe this is still the "modern" way to do things after 15 years. Wtf).

Best experience is of course with a bigger display. On smaller screen sizes, the game will use a camera to zoom around the game world and follow the player's spaceship. Minimum window width is 1280 pixels for no camera, and I think 800 pixels to be playable (otherwise the avatar gets in the way too much in the boss fights).

Oh, there's also a secret boss fight that you can unlock when you toy around with the Dev Tools :)

What's left to do on the avatar animation side:

- I have to backport CMUdict to JavaScript / ECMAScript. That's what I'm working on right now, as I'm not yet satisfied with the timings of the phonemes. Existing tools and pipelines that do this in python aren't realtime, which leads to my next point.

- I want to switch to using the "waveform energy detection" and a zero cross rate detector to time phonemes more correctly. I believe that changes in waveforms and their structures can detect differences in phonemes, but it's a gut feeling and not a scientific fact. Existing phoneme animation papers were kind of shit and broken (see my making of article 2). The phoneme boundary detector is highly experimental though and is gonna need a couple weeks more time until it's finished.

That's it for now, hope you gonna enjoy your stay on my website and I hope you gonna have fun playing the Cookie Consent Game :)

Oh, also, because it might not be obvious: No LLMs were used in the making of this website. Pretty much everything is hand-coded, and unbundled and unminified on purpose so visitors can learn from the code if they want to.

~Cookie
by beeboop0 | 2025-12-30 18:08:41+00:00
there's a huge flaw in the logic here but I can't pinpoint it

we've never had machines that can reason. today, they reason badly. tomorrow, they'll reason better. not all ai research white papers will pan out, but some will. the ai research community is acutely aware of the limitations in reasoning; it's their whole mission right now. 100% chance someone will make progress. Analogous to the chip industry or self driving, in that regard

incremental improvements in reasoning will broaden the dead zone for human developers

what difference does it make if in 20 years NASA still needs a few human developers but the rest of us are unemployed? ai agents still can't get you to the moon with one shot coding session in 2045? who cares?

the "still can't" we really need to be worried about is "politicians still can't consider UBI"
by BeetleB | 2025-12-30 18:08:42+00:00
> Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics.

I wish I could find the source, but the vast majority of universities don't have a fixed admissions quota. They are criteria based (if you meet the criteria, you get in). In principle, AA admissions did not prevent others from getting a seat.

Of course, it's possible the general admissions criteria is raised slightly to compensate, but again - for most universities, AA admissions wasn't a significant number, and however much the bar raised, it was likely minuscule.

I'll be blunt. Everyone I've personally known who didn't get admissions in a particular university and blamed AA for it was trying to get into a top school, and likely didn't earn his spot.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-30 18:08:57+00:00
Your friends can afford the type of gaming PC necessary to play those $60 titles, but they can’t afford to buy any games for said PC?

And they can’t even wait for them to go on sale? They need to buy them right at launch, at their full $60 price?

> Or reach out and take the thing which is free?

It’s not free. It has a price.
by protimewaster | 2025-12-30 18:09:50+00:00
The thing that jumped out to me was the mention of the engineer jumping ship to DFI. Despite DFI still existing, they stopped making consumer stuff back in 2012, and it seems like they somehow disappeared from the consumer mindset even more than Abit did.

I recall that there was a while during the Athlon 64 era that DFI was the gaming board to get. But I feel like I hear references to Abit more often than DFI.

I think my old Opteron machine with a DFI board is kicking around somewhere still.
We investigated why chatbots often feel "robotic"
by helain | 2025-12-30 18:10:48+00:00
We investigated why chatbots often feel "robotic" and found the root causes were missing context and weak instruction, not model size. Three practical interventions improved helpfulness in measurable ways:

1) Ground with retrieval: convert docs into semantic chunks, retrieve top-k, and pass explicit context to the LLM. When the system couldn't find an answer, the bot asked a clarifying question instead of hedging or hallucinating.

2) Prompt templates and response shaping: enforce tone, brevity, and banned phrases in the prompt. A strict template removed lead-ins like "As an AI" and capped answers to ~120 words.

3) Context management and guardrails: retrieve broadly, rerank with a cross-encoder, then truncate to stay within token limits. Add a similarity threshold that triggers escalation to a human or a clarifying question.

Results: on the flows we optimized we observed a significant drop in follow-up clarification rate (≈30%) and improved helpfulness ratings. Trade-offs included ~200–350ms additional latency for reranking and slightly higher infra cost for vector DBs and cross-encoder runs.

Limitations: multi-hop reasoning across multiple documents remains hard; tables and scanned PDFs require special parsing; quality depends on chunking strategy and retrieval coverage.

If you're instrumenting a bot, start with one high-traffic flow (billing, returns, or account management), implement retrieval + a strict prompt, and measure: follow-up clarifications, escalation rate, and user helpfulness. Curious if others have a simple heuristic they use for choosing max_k and reranker budget.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-12-30 18:10:51+00:00
Japan having the most insane, high effort culture in the world is exactly why they are continuing to slowly die by lack of fertility. Same with South Korea.

Japan will either lose its traditional culture including this long term aversion to "cheating", or they will lose their nation. It's existential and their refusal to embrace globalism will destroy them.

Zero sum game, and yes they (ZSGs) do actually exist nearly everywhere in real life and are the norm. I can't physically be in the same place as another person. Time spent on one action is time not spent on everything else. Every bit of food I eat is food denied from every other person.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-30 18:10:54+00:00
Agreed... I'm kind of a fan of AppImage/Flatpak/Snap (less Snap, but still)... even then, I don't use a lot of apps, and most of my variety is usually via Docker.

It's much more bloated than it should be, but the best way to reliably run old/new software in any given Linux.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-12-30 18:10:56+00:00
I don't see this as an either/or. It's great to be able to remote SSH into a personal server and do whatever you need to do to tweak and deploy software via the CLI alone. And I do believe those are skills every developer should cultivate.

But for day-to-day dev tasks, having VSCode/code-server/Zed/Neovim/whatever floats your boat, with all the lovely extensions and fonts and syntax highlighting and type hints and whatever you like to use, that's awesome and nothing to shrink back from.
by lunias | 2025-12-30 18:11:00+00:00
In my experience an "architect" is someone that used to write code (maybe 10-20 years ago - maybe only for a few years to begin with) but followed incentives away from the practice. Now they read blogs written by other architects about technologies that none of them have used. They champion the iterative process, but have 20 hard requirements up front that "make sure we can scale" (there are 5 users of this intranet app). They have 30 minutes free per day to produce any deliverables, all other time is spent in meetings. The deliverables produced are diagrams which have a few boxes and arrows pointing between them. Engineers are quick to ask, "Aren't those arrows backwards? We pull data from that service, right?". To which the architect replies without thought, "Ah, yeah, you're right. This is more of a work in progress, something to work off of." The next slide in their presentation is about database normalization and shows some data model that they hallucinated without looking at the data. The engineers chime in again, "Do we care more about the size of the data on disk or read times here?". The architect doesn't understand why you would challenge "best practices". You don't understand why the person presumably leading the initiative is unaware that computer science is fundamentally about trade offs.

It's not always like this, but the bigger the company, the more statistically probable it is.
by josephg | 2025-12-30 18:11:08+00:00
Typescript also has significantly better performance. This is largely thanks to the browser wars funnelling an insane amount of engineering effort toward JavaScript engines over the last couple decades. Nodejs runs v8, which is the JavaScript engine used by chrome. And Bun uses JSC, written by the safari team for safari.

For IO bound tasks, it also helps that JavaScript has a much simpler threading model. And it ships an event based IO system out of the box.
by ggreer | 2025-12-30 18:11:33+00:00
My point was about cylindrical cells with higher energy chemistries like NMC and NCA. Rivian uses cylindrical cells for their non-LFP batteries. Lucid uses 2170 cells. As far as I can tell, those three (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid) are the only US car manufacturers who have not had battery recalls due to fire risk.

GM, Hyundai, and Nissan all used pouch cells with higher energy density chemistries, and had recalls due to battery fire risks. Ford also recalled tens of thousands of their plug in hybrids due to battery fire risks, though they haven't found a solution yet beyond limiting the max charge of the battery. These batteries are also NMC pouch cells.

I'm sure it's physically possible to make safe, reliable pouch or prismatic cells using higher energy chemistries, but so far it has been risky for those who have tried.
by wjgilmore | 2025-12-30 18:11:41+00:00
I’ve built and launched numerous SaaS products (which have paying customers) which were almost entirely built usibg AI agents including https://securitybot.dev and https://dependencydesk.com.

My experience so far has been if you possess both deep domain-specific experience and significant coding experience then these coding LLMs, and most notably Opus 4.5, are the greatest productivity booster in the world.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-12-30 18:12:07+00:00
>"Later this year, Point2 will begin manufacturing the chips behind a 1.6-terabit-per-second cable consisting of eight slender polymer waveguides, each capable of carrying 448 gigabits per second using two frequencies, 90 gigahertz and 225 GHz. At each end of the waveguide are plug-in modules that turn electronic bits into modulated radio waves and back again. AttoTude is planning essentially the same thing, but at terahertz frequencies and with a different kind of svelte, flexible cable.

Both companies say their technologies can easily outdo copper in reach—spanning 10 to 20 meters without significant loss"

This is absolutely fascinating! For the longest time, I thought that optical fibers were the future, but waveguides (of whatever material appropriate) at whatever frequenc(y|ies) appropriate could give optical fibers a run (get it, a "run"? :-) ) for the money!

If we think about it, both fiber and copper cables are both very specific cases of a more broader

waveguide (first) principle...

That is, in theory you could make something that looks like a wire or cable out of any material(s) -- and if the material(s) and apertures and frequencies are correct, then you've created a transmission of path for data from point A to point B...

So, kudos to Point2, AttoTude (and other future companies!) that go down this technological tract! You're increasing both human knowledge (and data rates!) -- which could never be a bad thing!
by alwillis | 2025-12-30 18:12:36+00:00
> LLMs MAY be a version of office hours or asking the TA

In my experience, most TA's are not great at explaining things to students. They were often the best student in their class, and they can't relate to students who don't grasp things as easily as they do--"this organic chemistry problem set is so easy; I don't know why you're not getting it."

But an LLM has infinite patience and can explain concepts in a variety of ways, in different languages and at different levels. Bilingual students that speak English just fine, but they often think and reason in their native language in their mind. Not a problem for an LLM.

A teacher in an urban school system with 30 students, 20 of which need customized lesson plans due to neurological divergence can use LLMs to create these lesson plans.

Sometimes you need things explained to you like you're five years old and sometimes you need things explained to you as an expert.

On deeper topics, LLMs give their references, so a student can and should confirm what the LLM is telling them.
by jacobrussell | 2025-12-30 18:13:04+00:00
If by production you mean “done” and used by someone (i.e. by me) then I made https://skidmarks.club to replace my peloton subscription. You can browse and ride at https://app.skidmarks.club.

I’ve done ~10 rides with it so far. Hoping I can convince my wife to use it and save myself $50 a month. That would be my most successful side project by a wide margin.

There are probably a lot of examples like this. Vibe coded software people made for themselves, and other people could use it if they wanted.

All of the code was reviewed by myself, and I’m a programmer, so not sure if that fits the description. I didn’t go through it with a fine-toothed comb, however, and 90% of the review was on my phone. I also did some non-vibed setup for hosting, db, email, etcetera.

To me vibe coding is not looking at any of the code at all, but the definition reads a little loose to me these days, especially on HN, as: did an LLM “type” most of the code or did you? Either way I don’t think the term or definition is a big deal and probably not worth splitting hairs over.
by khedoros1 | 2025-12-30 18:13:15+00:00
Since friction in creating a new account is so low, the only real signal about the controller of the account is their behavior on the platform. Bots trying to sell things are rampant. Advertising (including self-promotion) is seen as a kind of spam by most of Reddit.

That being said, anyone can start a subreddit. You start your own and post whatever you want, or you spend some time in the individual communities, learn their norms, learn what each one considers acceptable to post. Something completely normal in one subreddit will be completely unacceptable in another.
by aurelien | 2025-12-30 18:13:22+00:00
There something that people should consider in the way they enter in your hile and explain like in October Factuon to your children how to suck a dick from a male to another male from high school friend.
So that mean that if I follow this phylosophy any adult can go explain the same in front all school … I think that could not be well considerate as well as the sexual netflix method.
by ifethereal | 2025-12-30 18:13:23+00:00
I'm replying without having read the entirety of the text you've referred to by Proudhon, but it looks interesting—thanks.

Some raw thoughts of mine if I may (feel free to add seasoning):

You mention that capitalism is definitionally zero-sum, and you seem to be facing quite a bit of resistance. I've had similar thoughts (perhaps still premature) that capitalism is zero-sum, but only (?) under a strong definition of "zero". I've not fleshed out my thoughts completely, but I suspect there are intangible/abstract dimensions along which we maintain some kind of equilibrium, regardless of what we do. "Do" here is quite abstract, but as a first approximation in the realm of economics, it might refer to any act of investment, compensation, or labour. (I may be abusing some technical terms in economics here—not my home turf.) A separate question could then emerge as to how significant these intangible/abstract dimensions are.

Actually, I'm not even sure that this is specific to the context of capitalism. However, whether something is a zero-sum game would seem relevant to systems obsessed with objective quantification, and where that quantification is heavily involved in steering moral views (or decision making), and I view capitalism as one of them.
by sandblast2 | 2025-12-30 18:13:33+00:00
> So, what is the solution?

1. Clearly explain the massive harm LLMs cause society and the environment to everyone. (Mass media should do this instead of parroting every nonsense the promptfondlers feed them.)

2. Ban them all. Don't tell me it's impossible just because it's widespread. Asbesthos was everywhere.
by raducu | 2025-12-30 18:13:37+00:00
> Reputation management is what it will take to bring trust back to all forms of media.

Does that really work, though? I think it doesn't -- think all the anti-vaccine type influencers -- their identities are known and they're ok with it.

> It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.

Surely this won't be used for nefarious reasons or to silence individuals like it's done in the UK or in the cancel culture actions. /s
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-12-30 18:13:46+00:00
> Even the government themselves went full digital...

Not really. There is the ‘mijn berichten’ (my messages) app. You can indicate which government services should send messages through the app instead of by physical mail. I have checked everything, including the tax service. So now I get anything related to taxes through the messages app. And then they send a physical letter anyway which arrives 2 days after the digital one. Every. Single. Time. As far as I can tell it’s only the tax service that does this.

They claim the app is meant to save on paper waste, but if they keep sending things by mail anyway then what is the point.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-30 18:15:05+00:00
> The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option?

I don’t think this is as much of a question outside of social media attempts to justify piracy. If only 10% of the pirates would buy the game, that’s still lost sales.

The social media justifications for piracy always assume that the only reason anyone pirates a game or video is because they either couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t buy it anyway. The same arguments were made when Netflix clamped down on account sharing: Everywhere you would find predictions that Netflix would suffer as a result, people would start cancelling their accounts, and they’d regret the decision. Yet the opposite happened and they had more users sign up.

> There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.

I agree with this statement, but in the opposite direction. The misunderstanding is the mental gymnastics that go into painting all pirates as all poor individuals who have no money and therefore no choice but to pirate games. The reality is that piracy is just a choice of convenience and taking something for free because they can. People from all tax brackets do it.
by jimlawruk | 2025-12-30 18:15:56+00:00
Here is an web app that tracks the grocery prices of my shopping at Aldi. It is meant to track grocery price inflation over time. It is obviously limited and incomplete since it is just based on my haphazard Aldi shopping. It includes a "basket of goods" total for each quarter, graphs, product pages, etc. It is coded by an LLM (except for maybe the initial commit). I don't write or edit the code, but I do sometimes "look" at the code, and ask for changes based on what code I see, so purists might question it as being 100% vibe coded.

https://aldi-prices.lawruk.com/ https://github.com/jimlawruk/aldi-prices
by furyofantares | 2025-12-30 18:16:15+00:00
Really neat. Part of speech is quite easily the hardest dimension, kind of interesting to have a SET game with such a difference in the dimensions.

I'm curious about the decision to do it showing 2 words and you find the 3rd. It's trivial to identify which length and text decoration you're looking for, usually leaving only a couple options and you have to work out which one is the right part of speech. I guess that's why you're meant to level up your pacing.

But I'm surprised it's not more like the original set, where you're searching around the board for a group of 3 rather than presented with 2 that have a known 3rd that you're meant to find.

The share result is really clever. I guess maybe that answers my questions actually, it's designed around a playtime that's more like a daily puzzle game.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-30 18:16:26+00:00
2025 wasn't really a good reading year for me. I was out foraging at the Arts & Architecture library the other day and brought back Great Planning Disasters by Peter Hall

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppx64

which I should have finished by the end of the year.

I must admit that Arknights has ate into my reading time, but I have a big project I'm working on that I call "foxwork" which involves animal behavior and physiology, character acting, shamanism, coaching, martial arts, physical culture, Eastern religion, meditation, Ericksonian hypnosis, etc.

The reading queue for that project is long but I've mostly been doing rather than reading. Next in queue is Tracking and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Signs because we often have fresh snow on the ground this time of year and it's a good time to see things like the tracks of a rabbit being followed by a fox.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-12-30 18:16:32+00:00
Re: Plato/Socrates

"Therefore Socrates said that it wasn’t enough to use the intellect in all things, but it was important to know for which cause one was exerting it. We would now say: One must serve the “good cause.” But to serve the good cause is—to be moral. Thus, Socrates is the founder of ethics.

"Socrates opened this war, and its peaceful end does not occur until the dying day of the old world."

Plato/Socrates are the original ghost story tellers. I spit on their grave. Republic is easily one of the worst books written in human history in terms of its impact. Right up there with Das Kapital.