MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by functionmouse | 2026-01-30 19:17:22+00:00
The whales in the video game economy can be automated. It's been clear to me for a while that, while video games are indeed now the most lucrative form of media ever to have existed, most of that money is in slop. Skinner box phone games, match 3's, Temple Run/Subway Surfers clones, Clash of Clans clones, literal gambling games where you spend money for (worthless) tokens to enter matches with a prize pot where all the contestants are secretly bots and the outcome is determined before you even start playing...

I'm certain this could be automated, and the victims will continue bleeding. Can't help that, I guess, as long as the interested parties are eating good.

Worth noting, from the article,

> Shares of "Grand Theft Auto" maker Take-Two Interactive fell 10%, online gaming platform Roblox was down over 12%, while videogame engine maker Unity Software dropped 21%.

GTA and Roblox both rely heavily on these Skinner box style tactics to manipulate users into spending more money than they otherwise would for simple cosmetic or gameplay content. And I'm not entirely certain how unity falls into this but from what I understand it's one of the most popular engines for making phone games.

> Project Genie also has the potential to shorten lengthy development cycles and reduce costs, as some premium titles take around five to seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create.

Wouldn't this also lower the perceived value, and thus, potential revenue of these games, also?

> Videogame developers have been increasingly adopting artificial intelligence as a way to stand out in a highly competitive industry dominated by large players. A Google study last year showed that nearly 90% of game developers use AI agents.

How does doing something the way 90% of studios are doing it make you stand out, then?
by skeam | 2026-01-30 19:17:24+00:00
The mechanism (1) and (2) you've identified are tackling governance. If less people are producing, more people can decide. Flattening hierarchy or redistributing the decisional power seems to be one way to lift the governance bottleneck.

Interestingly, human society is also a system that has been hugely impacted by sudden innovations increasing the production efficiency, each leading to an observable redistribution of power.

So, will the best performing companies 10 years forward be the ones flattening hierarchy as much as possible?
Ask HN: Why the OpenClaw hype? What's so special?
by anon_anon12 | 2026-01-30 19:18:10+00:00
OpenClaw is seemingly just another way to chat with an AI on another non-AI centric platform instead of the CLI or the company's site. Then, you have to give it so many API keys to actually utilise it, which for me has shattered the image of it enabling complete autonomy. Yes, I get that it's just an one-time thing, but all these platforms have AIs of their own at this point, why would I go through this new hassle. That too some have expiring API keys or certain limits as well. All in all, AGAIN, a feature, not a product.
by zahlman | 2026-01-30 19:18:23+00:00
I thought all of this should have been clear in the first post, but I guess it wasn't.

The problem is not using the Internet, but being expected to use it for things where there isn't a clear domain requirement for it.

The immorality I describe is on the part of the entity expecting Internet usage, not the user.

The issue is that I paid money for my hardware to own it outright, and this expectation makes it feel like I no longer actually fully own that hardware.
by fwip | 2026-01-30 19:18:28+00:00
Doesn't seem like a ton of attention has been paid to kerning, either. The 'he' pair seems especially noticeable to me, which occurs several times in the "somewhere where there's cheese" image. I don't know enough about font design to guess whether the 'bad' kerning is intentional for the typeface, though - so I could be off base.
by js8 | 2026-01-30 19:19:05+00:00
> Models are not AGI.

How do you know? What if AGI can be implemented as a reasonably small set of logic rules, which implement what we call "epistemology" and "informal reasoning"? And this set of rules is just being run in a loop, producing better and better models of reality. It might even include RL, for what we know.

And what if LLMs already know all these rules? So they are AGI-complete without us knowing.

To borrow from Dennett, we understand LLMs from the physical stance (they are neural networks) and the design stance (they predict next token of language), but do we understand them from an intentional stance, i.e. what rules they employ when they running chain-of-thought for example?
by skrebbel | 2026-01-30 19:19:07+00:00
Clone of some popular game that I forgot the name of where you're a block and you move around a maze (tile-based, 2d) but you can't take small steps or slow down, you always slide quickly in one direction until you hit a wall. It's a puzzle game, you gotta make it to the exit without hitting the kill blocks. He wants to figure out how to make an in-game level editor for it but he still only 10% groks the node/scene system so that'll take him some attempts for sure :D
by iainctduncan | 2026-01-30 19:19:21+00:00
I wound up going back to C in a big way about five years ago when I embarked on Scheme for Max, an extension to Max/MSP that lets you use s7 Scheme in the Max environment. Max has a C SDK, and s7 is written in 100% ANSI C. (Max also has C++ SKD, but is far less comprehensive with far fewer examples and docs).

I was, coming from being mostly a highlevel language coder, suprised at how much I like working in this combo.

Low level stuff -> raw C. High level stuff -> Scheme, but written such that I can drop into C or move functions into C very easily. (The s7 FFI is dead simple).

It's just really nice in ways that are hard to articulate. They are both so minimal that I know what's going on all the time. I now use the combo in other places too (ie WASM). It really forces one to think about architecture in what I think is a good way. YMMV of course!
by skrebbel | 2026-01-30 19:19:51+00:00
Nah, like you said, SDL is just window creation and a bit of audio etc. If that counts as a "game engine" then so does every web browser.

EDIT: Sorry if I seem grumpy, I'm not actually grumpy at you, I'm grumpy at PyGame for calling itself a game engine when really it's just SDL + the ability to blend images.
by dang | 2026-01-30 19:19:52+00:00
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In this case the original title "ClawdBot Skills ganked all my crypto" was both linkbait and misleading, because (unless I missed it), the article describes no actual such incident.
by comex | 2026-01-30 19:19:54+00:00
This kind of automatic property serialization/deserialization, however, has traditionally been a sore spot for C++ as well.

You can do it, but you will have to either repeat yourself at least a little, use some very ugly macros, or use a code generator.

And many of those ugly macro tricks work in C as well. So do code generators.

That said, as C++ has added features, this type of metaprogramming has gotten easier and easier, and more and more distinct from C. This culminates in C++26 reflection which will finally make it possible to just define a struct and then automatically generate serialization/deserialization for it, without hacks. Once reflection is implemented and widely adopted, then I will agree with you that this should be 1 or 2 lines in a well-structured C++ app.
by zem | 2026-01-30 19:20:00+00:00
perhaps, though also "humans are the plague" is a popular trope in science fiction. e.g. this one is from pratchett, in a conversation between rats in "the amazing maurice and his educated rodents":

You will have worked out that there is a race in this world which steals and kills and spreads disease
and despoils what it cannot use, said the voice of Spider.

'Yes,' said Dangerous Beans. 'That's easy. It's called humanity.'
by nephihaha | 2026-01-30 19:20:12+00:00
"Yeah what are we comparing the airport to, home? Plenty of airports are amazing and beautiful.
"

The only thing they compare favourably with are shopping centres. A horrible place to spend several hours or more. Noisy, expensive, usually sterile and ugly. Not my idea of fun. Little or no natural beauty (I gather Singapore and some others have tried to turn this around.)

They also feel like a kind of police state.
by souvik1997 | 2026-01-30 19:20:14+00:00
If I had to rank these, in order of least to most secure, it would be container < VM < WASM.

WASM has:

- Bounds checked linear memory

- No system calls except what you explicitly grant via WASI

- Much smaller attack surface

VMs have:

- Hardware isolation, separate kernel

- May have hypervisor bugs leading to VM escape (rare in practice though)

Some problems with containers:

- Shared host kernel (kernel exploit = escape)

- Seccomp/AppArmor/namespaces reduce attack surface but don't eliminate it

- Larger attack surface (full syscall interface)

- Container escapes are a known class of vulnerability
by parliament32 | 2026-01-30 19:20:16+00:00
AI slop.

> If you connect to a Wi-Fi network that isn't your company's, Teams will simply display the name of that network.

This is hallucinated. The actual change: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?id=488...

IF your 365 admins add a list of WiFi SSIDs to Teams, Teams will (optionally, opt-in by user) toggle your work location. It will not report not-known SSIDs to your manager or display it in Teams (but note your 365 admins have always been able to see this in the first place, in call/connectivity troubleshooting).
by TulliusCicero | 2026-01-30 19:20:17+00:00
Still doesn't have full static typing support to my knowledge, which is a dealbreaker to me.

The other things are that it just has less support for structuring your code in different ways, and of course the performance is vastly worse. My game does some state space exploration for the enemy AI, so having code that runs an order of magnitude slower just doesn't work for me.
by mmooss | 2026-01-30 19:20:18+00:00
'What if' is pointless. What if vegetarianism makes you stronger than eating meat? What if it increases your IQ by 20 points or makes you live 200 years? What if you can code faster drinking rare pygmy tree sap or the blood of certain albino poison toads?

> you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor.

Almost every decision in life must be made without proof, but with evidence and judgment. We know a lot about nutrition, and a lot of evidence points toward health benefits in eating more vegetables and less meat. We can also see lots of vegetarians in our communities and they don't seem sickly or shorter, etc. - we also see elite athletes in public who are vegetarians.

> a diet consisting of vegetables

Vegetarianim is much more than vegetables; it's everything but meat - legumes (generally beans), vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts - plus eggs and cheese. Vegans cut out the latter two items.

> What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now).

Where?

> evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't.

What problems? How does diet affect evolution? We'll lose our hunting muscles over the next 500,000 years? Remember humans haven't changed much biologically in 200,000+ years.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-30 19:20:54+00:00
I used to work in healthcare network/telecom and then as a healthcare network/telecom VAR before working at a networking manufacturer currently for the last ~year. The below may be slightly out of date, and I was just the person getting told by the lawyers instead of the one with the real understanding, but it was what I'd run into at the time for the US.

The understanding I always got from legal was "it's continually the company's legal liability under the RAY BAUM's Act whether the address is correct when the user dials 911 on/via the corporate systems, not the user's". Sometimes the conversation sounded like you could potentially have users sign something to transfer that liability, other times legal didn't seem to even want to entertain the idea as valid. Regardless, none of the companies ever ended up wanting to go that route for either concern of general friction/overhead or concern there would be employees pushing back that they don't want to sign it and instead would just want 911 to work (which is also a reasonable position for an employee to want to hold). I.e. implementing automatic VOIP location for some users but not others was either impossible on some systems or just seen as a nightmare to try to track/audit, even if they were willing to try to make every employee perfectly happy about it. A bit of a legally induced quagmire for a good intent (accurate 911 not being something a place could opt out of providing) which had trade offs in reality.

RAY BAUM's compliance requirements for for nomadic endpoints in went active in 2022 but most companies had already started trying to be compliant a little prior to that when fixed endpoints needed it anyways. Some companies of course don't bother, either knowingly or unknowingly assuming that compliance risk. Before that it wasn't really a topic.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-30 19:20:55+00:00
one of the benefits of SO is that you have other humans chiming in the comments and explaining why the proposed solution _doesn't_ work, or its shortcomings. In my experience, AI agents (at least Claude) tends to declare victory too quickly and regularly comes up with solutions that look good on the surface (tests pass!!!) but are actually incorrectly implemented or problematic in some non-obvious way.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-30 19:20:55+00:00
> but they also seem kind of clunky and bloated

Like their predecessors, they were initially conceptually clean and simple in the beginning too. But then decades of feature development, the scope creep overcomes the clean architectures and design decisions. Lets see if Godot remains the same in 10-20 years, I'm cautiously optimistic :)
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-30 19:20:58+00:00
> none of us could write a library call without consulting online sources.

I use SO quite often, but it is for questions I would otherwise consult other people, because I can't figure it out short of reverse-engineering something. For actual documentation man pages and info documents are pretty awesome. Honestly I dread leaving the world of libraries shipped with my OS vendor, because the quality of documentation drops fast.
by GZGavinZhao | 2026-01-30 19:21:22+00:00
Haha thank you, I must admit I can't make it always work out, but writing (typing) them down and forcing myself to look at the view to remind my brain is a lot better than juggling all the priorities around in my head. I really really hate planning tasks, I just want to do things and write code, so Linear is a good way for me to offload these computations and just focus on clearing the list.
by vineyardmike | 2026-01-30 19:21:25+00:00
The models are already made. They can just run the very useful models they have indefinitely, and they’d be profitable. Or when they go under someone else can buy the rights to the weights.

Anthropic, a common coding model provider, has said that their models generate enough cash to cover their own training costs before the next one is released. If they stopped getting massive investments, they should be able to coast with the models they have.
by chintanshah35 | 2026-01-30 19:22:31+00:00
After years of writing try-catch blocks for every JSON.parse, I built handlejson v1.0.0. It is a zero-dependency, 1.5KB library that eliminates boilerplate while hardening your application against common JSON exploits.

The problem:

let data
try {
data = JSON.parse(str)
} catch {
data = null
}

The solution:

import { parse } from 'handlejson'

const data = parse(str) // null if invalid, no try-catch needed
const data = parse(str, { default: {} }) // {} if invalid

Key features:

Hardened Security (Protection against common exploits)

Native JSON.parse is vulnerable to resource exhaustion. handlejson adds:

maxSize: Blocks memory exhaustion from "JSON bombs."
maxDepth: Prevents stack overflow from deeply nested objects.
safeKeys: Automatically blocks prototype pollution (__proto__).

parse(userInput, {
maxSize: 10 * 1024 * 1024,
maxDepth: 100,
safeKeys: true
})

High Performance

- Small JSON: 5.2M ops/s
- With security checks enabled: 3.4M ops/s
- Bundle size: 1.5KB gzipped (Zero dependencies)

Advanced Handling

- Circular References: stringify() handles circular structures automatically.
- Date & BigInt: Automatic serialization and revival without manual revivers.
- Detailed Errors: Precise error position and context instead of "Unexpected token."
- Stream Parsing: Support for parsing large files in chunks.

Reliability:

- 244 tests covering security, streams, and edge cases.
- CI/CD tested on Node 18, 20, and 22.
- TypeScript-first with full type support.

Blog Post (Deep Dive): https://chintanshah35.hashnode.dev/introducing-handlejson-v1...
GitHub: https://github.com/chintanshah35/handlejson
NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/handlejson

More of my work: https://dev.to/chintanshah35
by TheGRS | 2026-01-30 19:22:36+00:00
mmhmm. Yea if someone really had the desire they could figure out my online presence and possibly even get a rough idea of what I'm actually doing with my time. Always something you could figure out from an IT network, its just about putting the history together.

But I'll agree that Teams is packaging this information into something more digest-able for middle managers, and that's the rub. There are always manager types who have the epiphany that not everyone is working 100% of the time and it bothers them enough to call it out to subordinates, or if they don't like someone enough they might do a deep dive with IT. Teams already has this indicator to show if you're online, on mobile, in a meeting, AFK, or offline entirely. Its not that the information wasn't there, its just much more front-and-center for managers to be annoying about it.
by souvik1997 | 2026-01-30 19:22:50+00:00
True. bubblewrap and similar (Landlock, sandbox-exec on Mac) are solid lightweight options. The main difference is they still expose a syscall interface that you then restrict, vs WASM where capabilities are opt-in from zero. Different starting points, similar goals.

Some advantages of building the sandbox in wasm, aside from the security benefits, are complete execution reproducibility. amla-sandbox controls all external side effects, leaving the wasm core as just "pure computation", which makes recording traces and replaying them very easy. It's great for debugging complex workflows.
by cptaj | 2026-01-30 19:22:59+00:00
Another thing that I think would help is to start introducing some ethics into our profession as programmers.

Most other professions have you take ethics classes, have ethics boards and even ethics legislation. We're severely lacking in this area as a community. It really shows when every year there's a new company building the Maximum Oppression Orb from the book Dont Build the Maximum Oppression Orb. Its like we're dealing with the moral equivalent of a mentally challenged person all the time
by observationist | 2026-01-30 19:23:48+00:00
Trivial in the grand scheme of things. There are much larger problems to attend to - if worrying about the cost and impact of AI tokens was a problem, we'd be living in a utopia.

Literally pick any of the top 100 most important problems you could have any impact on, none of them are going to be AI cost/impact related. Some might be "what do we do when jobs are gone" AI related. But this is trivial- you could run the site itself on a raspberry pi.
by DataDive | 2026-01-30 19:23:59+00:00
Great monologue, shaky biology.

Viruses do not multiply endlessly. Most viruses exist in stable ecological cycles.

Most viruses are beneficial to life. We complain about the few (and tiny minority of viruses) that infect humans and we do so from a selfish perspective, but forget about all the other that make life and evolution possible.

As a matter of fact evolution favors reduced lethality in many cases because wiping out hosts is bad for viral survival.

Agent Smith is way off on this one ...
by barbazoo | 2026-01-30 19:24:09+00:00
We don't have to anything for it. Someone artificially inseminates the animal, raises the animal, keeps it in mostly in terrible conditions we would cry about if we saw them, drives them somewhere for slaughter, processes the remains until it looks appetizing for you to just heat up and eat. All for couple of dollars per pound. Unbelievable privilege of not seeing the suffering involved.

Animals go out and kill other animals for food, have to deal with the family and friends of the animal it just killed, compete with other animals for the meat, etc. Much more vulnerable and involved.
by uejfiweun | 2026-01-30 19:24:41+00:00
I have no doubt that someday in the future these world models will revolutionize gaming. However, they are clearly very far off from that point in capability, not to mention the cost. And a lot of these articles I'm seeing are confidently stating very incorrect facts like "this new model will completely change the workflow of game developers and accelerate game development." No it won't.

I don't trade individual stocks but it does seem like an easy case of "buy the dip" here.
by dang | 2026-01-30 19:24:44+00:00
Thanks for showing up to provide some corrective information. I know it can feel like opening a box of yellowjackets, but one of the best things about the HN community is when someone with first-hand knowledge is willing to share what they know.

Edit: from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827312, it does sound like the feature isn't really opt-in for end users though?
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-30 19:24:44+00:00
> If we had human level cognitive capabilities in a box - are you confident that such a construct will be kept sufficiently isolated and locked down?

Yes, I think this is possible and not quite hard technically.

> I'm assuming we will get there in some way this century

Indeed, there isn't much time to decide what to do about the problems it might cause.

> just looking at how we currently experiment with and handle LLMs

That's my point, how we handle LLMs isn't a good model for AGI.

> The people opening such a pandoras box might also be far from the only ones suffering the consequences

This is a real problem but it's a political one and it isn't limited to just AI. Again, if can't fix ourselves there will be no future - with AGI or without.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-30 19:24:45+00:00
Get all the agents talking to each other -- nice way to speed up the implementation of Skynet. Congratulations, folks! (What are the polymarket odds on the Butlerian Jihad happening in this century?)

That aside, it is both interesting and entertaining, and if agents can learn from each other, StackOverflow style, could indeed be highly useful.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-30 19:25:06+00:00
The old FCC Standards kneecapped Atari. I think Atari would have had a much showing against Apple had they not had to have the heavy and expensive cast box inside ever 400/800 and the increased cost for "smart" peripherals versus "dumb" slots. Those Atari machines are arguably more technically advanced and capable than the Apple II. The cost of FCC compliance drove up the price and hurt their market share.

I've always thought the whole Apple / aftermarket RF modulator trick was a bit underhanded.
by 0xy | 2026-01-30 19:25:29+00:00
Is your position that the 2024 election, despite having a foreign power intercept the phone communications of both campaigns (confirmed and on record), had no integrity compromises?

What do you consider a compromise of integrity if not a hacking of political campaigns?

Also, please clarify whether the 2016 DNC hack is an exemption to your prior answer so I can weigh your bias.