MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zeroq | 2026-02-02 00:13:05+00:00
It is absolutely infuriating that Flash, ActionScript and ES4 draft were completely erased from history.

I was there since '00.

It all started with Macromedia and their animation tool. They had an idea to add simple scripting so you add commands like "stop" or "gotoAndPlay(n)" on your animation timeline. For whatever reason they chose to use EcmaScript (aka JS).

Soon after it turned out that people were doing actual programming and shortly after in 2003 they came up with updated version called ActionScript 2.0 that added all OOP features from Java. This became the EcmaScript 4 draft.

If you ever wondered why JS has reserved keywords like "abstract", "protected" or "interface" this is why.

What's funny is that by that time the underlying engine was still working on the old ES3 so when you compiled your app your code was transpiled in exact same way TS is transpiled into JS today.

We had MXML, which was XML for laying out your controllers and classes like we do today with React and web components.

We had Alchemy that allowed you to compile C directly into Flash bytecode - exactly what emscripten is doing. And there was even a way to write assembler directly if you were brave enough.

Around 2008 there was even a thing called RedTamarin which was... command line runtime for ActionScript, just like NodeJS.

And then Apple came, Flash was gone, and with it all these things.

All of these things were erased from memory, and for the next 10 years community was slowly reinventing the wheel.
by disillusioned | 2026-02-02 00:13:38+00:00
Tons of chatter on Twitter making it sound like you'll get permabanned for doing this but... 1) how would they know if my requests are originating from Claude Code vs. OpenClaw? 2) how are we violating... anything? I'm working within my usage limits...

$70 or whatever to check if there's milk... just use your Claude Max subscription.
by brettgriffin | 2026-02-02 00:13:54+00:00
Something I've come to accept and try to remember: people will complain about literally anything you give them to opportunity to complain about.

The world is better today in every conceivable way for more people, than it was at any point in history. But it isn't good enough for enough people, and the people who remind you of that are usually doing the least to improve anything, for anybody.

I don't really understand why. It seems fall under this larger victimization umbrella. The best answers I've seen for it are that it is either some cathartic response to just how good things have gotten, or that the complaint itself represents some marginal effort, enough to elicit a dopamine response.

I was born in the 80s and have vivid memories of the 90s. I absolutely loved everything as it was at that point in time. But to look at the world around us today and to think anything before was the peak is just incomprehensible to me.
by insuranceguru | 2026-02-02 00:14:17+00:00
wow, the home accountant is basically the great-grandfather of everything we do in modern financial and actuarial modeling. dmitry's breakdown is like digital archeology.

it’s wild to think about the hardware risk people used to accept putting your entire household's financial history on a system that bricks itself the second a 40-year-old plastic dongle fails. really great read.
by ndriscoll | 2026-02-02 00:14:24+00:00
The sycophancy is an artifact of how they RLHF train the popular chat models to appeal to normies, not fundamental to the tool. I can't remember encountering it at all since I've started using codex, and in fact it regularly fills in gaps in my knowledge/corrects areas that I misunderstand. The professional tool has a vastly more professional demeanor. None of the "that's the key insight!" crap.
by silisili | 2026-02-02 00:14:40+00:00
I'm conflicted on that myself. On paper their life is certainly so much easier and more comfortable.

On the other hand, I feel like there's some intangibles missing. Not having instant access to everything made for patience and appreciation. Not having laptops and cellphones meant having to converse and interact with those around you. It's hard to describe why any of that is better than today, but it just feels like it was to my old brain.
by narrator | 2026-02-02 00:14:58+00:00
As an old-timer, the biggest difference between now and the 80s and 90s is that in the 80s and 90s entertainment was relatively scarce. An album cost $20, which was a lot in those days. You could get movies, but you had to go to the video store and remember to return them, and the selection was often limited. If you liked some weird band, most record stores didn't have it. In the 80s TV was very limited and you had to get home in time.

So today entertainment is unlimited and everywhere, personalized and you can have more free entertainment than you could ever watch in a million years. This means other forms of entertainment like hanging out with friends, going to the symphony, the opera, or out to the movies, or just hanging out in public are much less valuable than they used to be.

One example: As a teenager, I used to go to a special screening of a Warren Miller film about extreme skiing that they would do once a year. This was a big annual event where we would watch daredevils ski and do tricks with old Warren narrating and pay $12 to get in. They wouldn't have anything like that on regular TV. Now, there is an unlimited amount of that stuff on almost every single video platform on the internet.

Also, one other huge notable difference was pornography was very hard to get a hold of, and now it's available in unlimited amounts for free. This warps society in all kinds of weird ways. For instance, women were mysterious, incredibly alluring, and much more irresistable in those days. Just seeing cleavage was a big deal! Now all that mystery is totally gone for men who don't abstain from pornography, and young men seem hugely demotivated to date.
by Tade0 | 2026-02-02 00:15:00+00:00
There's a guy in my neighborhood driving a 20yo BMW with a modified exhaust. He also has a motorcycle. If I tried to move to a more expensive area, I would have a guy driving a 5yo BMW with a modified exhaust - the building two blocks away is literally that - 40% more expensive, asshole in an M3 flooring it every time he drives out.

A friend of mine had a prolonged conflict with a neighbour who lived off of his dad's money and who would pound his Porsche at any time he would feel like it.
by gjadi | 2026-02-02 00:15:12+00:00
IMHO, the real problem is that they create an even greater dissonance between online life and IRL.

Think about dating apps, pictures could be fake, and now words exchanged can be fake too.

You thought you were arguing with a gentle and smart colleague by chat and mails, too bad, when you meet then at a conference or at a restaurant you find them very unpleasant.
by singingbard | 2026-02-02 00:15:29+00:00
The Internet is to blame!

But you could say we peaked before electricity too:

- It broke our natural circadian rhythm

- It enabled the 24-hr grind

- With radios and televisions, people were now staying home for leisure instead of going to parks and public spaces (TV dinners!)

- It led to immense pollution

Technology really is a double edged sword.
by simianwords | 2026-02-02 00:15:33+00:00
I don't buy too much into your framing of pitting classes against each other.

But I think we both can at least agree on this - AI can actually replace some labour or augment it enough to require some shuffling.

My argument is that if AI brings efficiencies, products become cheaper and cost of living reduces. It's how it always worked - agricultural revolution, industrial revolution and information revolution. Cost of living reduced constantly because efficiency increased.

> upper class giving up it's power over the masses voluntarily

The upper class needs labour to consume their products. So it is in both interests that both labour has more money to spend. What then happens is, people are richer but the upper class gets even more wealth. Everyone benefits.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-02-02 00:15:50+00:00
I severely doubt your thesis around iPhones being Veblen goods.

You are claiming that if the price of the iPhone went down, apple would sell fewer phones?

Correspondingly, you are arguing that if they increased prices they could increase sales?

You are claiming that 100s of millions of people have all made the decision that the price of an iPhone is more than it is worth to them as a device, but is made up for by being seen with one in your hand?

Not all goods that signify status are Veblen goods.
by misssandwich | 2026-02-02 00:15:58+00:00
Author here. The mods were kind enough to give this a second chance after the spam filter ate it.
I'm a 3rd year physics student at Leeds, not an AI. I know this is a bit more 'philosophical' than the usual engineering post, but I've been obsessed with how technical concepts like 'collision detection' and 'rendering' map onto the social stagnation I see on campus.
I wrote this as a genuine attempt to bridge Mark Fisher with systems theory. If it reads like a manifesto, that's just because I've been reading too much Nietzsche between lab sessions. Would love to hear if the 'systems' metaphor holds up for actual engineers.
by _heimdall | 2026-02-02 00:16:38+00:00
Are you claiming that the party alignment hasn't switched over time?

I expect that everyone would agree Alabama is a very conservative state. It was voted solid Democrat until the late 80s, at which point the state went republican along with any elected politicians that stayed in office.

If I'm not mistaken, Richard Shelby was elected as a democrat in the early or mid 80s before being the last elected official to switch to the republican party. He stayed in office for decades and had state university buildings named after him.

The voting opinions largely didn't change over that time, only the party name they were voting for.
by scapp | 2026-02-02 00:16:42+00:00
This is the easiest of the paradoxes mentioned in this thread to explain. I want to emphasize that this proof uses the technique of "Assume P, derive contradiction, therefore not P". This kind of proof relies on knowing what the running assumptions are at the time that the contradiction is derived, so I'm going to try to make that explicit.

Here's our first assumption: suppose that there's a set X with the property that for any set Y, Y is a member of X if and only if Y doesn't contain itself as a member. In other words, suppose that the collection of sets that don't contain themselves is a set and call it X.

Here's another assumption: Suppose X contains itself. Then by the premise, X doesn't contain itself, which is contradictory. Since the innermost assumption is that X contains itself, this proves that X doesn't contain itself (under the other assumption).

But if X doesn't contain itself, then by the premise again, X is in X, which is again contradictory. Now the only remaining assumption is that X exists, and so this proves that there cannot be a set with the stated property. In other words, the collection of all sets that don't contain themselves is not a set.
by fxtentacle | 2026-02-02 00:16:53+00:00
For colours to look natural you need your white light to contain lots of different wave lengths. It’s usually measured as Ra. Artificially looking LEDs are easily 10x cheaper than photography grade LEDs. Also, this guy is probably paying taxes and handling stuff the proper legal way. If you order from Alibaba, chances are you’ll not be paying taxes. Plus if they offer a 5 year warranty, they probably need to keep some money around for repairs.
by matt-attack | 2026-02-02 00:17:28+00:00
> Things came out slowly. Albums. Games. Software. That slowness gave them weight. You lived with them for a while instead of replacing them next week.

This is very true (and should include films as well). When big movies came out they were a big thing. Waiting in long lines for a ticket to a movie was a normal thing. People talked about them weeks and weeks. They were sort of big cultural events.
by zmmmmm | 2026-02-02 00:17:50+00:00
> brains that looked nearly a year younger

Seems like a pretty small effect - if I'm 58 and I have the brain of a 57 year old, and to achieve that I did an entire year of exercise (as was done in this study) ... you'd have to evaluate it against many other things to decide if that was really the easiest way to achieve that result.

I'm always suspicious of small effect sizes even when they are statistically significant. It just seems like so many confounders could bring about the effect. Here I'd wonder if just the mental challenge of achieving that sustained exercise over a whole year was responsible, since generally speaking, any mental challenge you undertake on a regular bases improves overall cognition.

They try to argue their way around this:

> "Even though the difference is less than a year, prior studies suggest that each additional 'year' of brain age is associated with meaningful differences in later-life health,"

But it just begs the question, if you think that then go measure those things with your study.

Of course I'm not in any way arguing against exercise. Adding at least a baseline level of exercise into your lifestyle is the most impactful health intervention anybody can do after age 40 I believe.
by dredmorbius | 2026-02-02 00:18:01+00:00
"Value" one of those horribly conflated terms of economics. For starters there are the relatively well-known conflicts between production cost value, use value, and exchange (market) value. The discussion here adds another element: the distinction of notional currency value vs. commodity value of underlying specie or substrate.

The absolute nature of carlosjobim's claim makes it fairly trivially falsifiable, however. Since nominal value is a value, if the face value of a coin is lower than its specie value, its use as currency meets his absurdity condition, "Of course a coin can never be worth less than the metal it contains...", but that remains its legal tender face value. As money, that is, an exchange token socially recognised as having a universal value, the coin is exchanged below its commodity value.

As a commodity, that is, metal (or other material) specie, the same item may have a different and higher value, but in this case it's not one which is universally accepted within a given market, but rather is dependent on the specific local market supply and demand of that specie. The coin-as-commodity is also subject to differential valuation based on characteristics --- assayed purity, weight, etc. --- which must be assessed on an individual basis for each coin.

In practice, where specie coin was used it virtually always traded at a premium above the commodity value, known by the term seiniorage, which I interpret as the trust value imbued by the currency issuer. My (unorthodox) view is that seigniorage exists in all monies, and is efectively the total basis for value of fiat systems such as paper or credit-based financial systems. The value of such currencies is a market vote on the trust in the issuing entity (and/or the lack of viable or accessible alternatives).

But again, coin-as-money has a value equal to its notional face value. That the face value may differ from its commodity value can of course occur. My argument is that this makes the exchange one of commodity trade rather than financial trade, and that ascribing commodity value to coin or face value is a misdirection.

Some years back looking into what money is, I realised that the names for virtually all currencies can be traced to either weight (pound, peso, dinar, penny, shekel, kopek, livre, baht, etc.) or division (dime, quarter, cent); or quality (dollar, crown, royal, franc, renminbi), sometimes appears as a signifier of value, e.g., the florin, yuan, or yen. I'd classify toponymic names (e.g., afghani) as referencing quality. There are the odd exception, notably Bolivar, the Venezuelan currency named for Simón Bolívar, though that's arguably a quality signifier.
by throwyawayyyy | 2026-02-02 00:18:49+00:00
If you want to sum up the 90s in the UK for people like me who became adults then, it would be the song, "Things can only get better". A little embarrassing, yes? Naive? and yet there really was an optimism then. If things weren't great (and objectively it was a poorer country), they were getting better, and they could get better, and they would. Happiness is more about cake tomorrow than cake today, and in the 90s you really could believe it. Do we have that belief now? Managed decline, it feels like, is the best the UK can offer.

To make this a bit more pithy: in the 1990s we were excited about the coming 21st century. In 2025, do we think the 2030s are going to be better, really? Or are we looking down the barrels of one maturing catastrophe over another?
by jimminyx | 2026-02-02 00:19:13+00:00
OP here. Appreciate your perspective but I don't really accept the framing, which feels like it's implying that I've been caught out for writing and coding with AI.

I don't make any attempt to hide it. Nearly every commit message says "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5". You correctly pointed out that there were some AI smells in the writing, so I removed them, just like I correct typos, and the writing is now better.

I don't care deeply about this code. It's not a masterpiece. It's functional code that is very useful to me. I'm sharing it because I think it can be useful to other people. Not as production code but as a reference or starting point they can use to build (collaboratively with claude code) functional custom software for themselves.

I spent a weekend giving instructions to coding agents to build this. I put time and effort into the architecture, especially in relation to security. I chose to post while it's still rough because I need to close out my work on it for now - can't keep going down this rabbit hole the whole week :) I hope it will be useful to others.

BTW, I know the readme irked you but if you read it I promise it will make a lot more sense where this project is coming from ;)
by Sharlin | 2026-02-02 00:19:31+00:00
Tracker music was always a hobbyist thing, with a few exceptions. Not really relevant in the greater music scene.

But digitally produced music was of course a huge thing in the 90s. Countless genres of electronic music – techno, trance, house, whatever have you, all of that made on computers. And of course pop was almost all synth – digital synth – just like today.
by oconnor663 | 2026-02-02 00:19:37+00:00
Infant mortality was also 1.5x higher in the US than it is today. (Depending on who we mean by "we", this difference can be much larger.) Cystic fibrosis was a death sentence. "Late 90's" barely includes the development of effective AIDS treatment, though certainly not the rollout. (Maybe part of what you were getting at above, besides gay marriage.) Etc etc.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-02 00:20:02+00:00
Yup that's the thing: it's not only people who lived that era who do wish they could live in it today.

I never wanted to live in the post-WW II late 40s/50s: maybe the sixties though. For honestly the late 40s and 50s looked incredibly dull. Just dull: movies were dull, acting was dumb, music was mostly pathetic save for a few exceptions.

The boomers really lived the absolute dullest, naive, era and nobody fantasizes on it.

There's never been a teenager from the 80s or 90s saying: "Oh wow, I so wish I lived in the 50s". That's not a thing.

And yet I see many young persons asking me, today, about the 80s and 90s. They like some of the music (sure, some were cheesy but it wasn't the uber dull pathetic stuff from the 50s: not to mention the incredible poor recordings unless you were as successful as Elvis Presley) and they definitely enjoy some of the epic movies. And the cars: many twenty-agers do love cars from the 80s and 90s.

They understand it was pretty much today's world, but less soul-sucking.
by nntwozz | 2026-02-02 00:20:31+00:00
I actually had that too, but they don't stop sounds from inside the building like constant bathroom renovations etc.

The problem is also that the moment you walk outside you're bombarded with all the sounds of the city. ANC headphones exist but so do air-pollution masks, I don't think that's the way forward or at least that's not how I want to live my life.
by wpm | 2026-02-02 00:20:35+00:00
Lithium ion batteries existed in the 90s and were being explored for BEV use by Nissan in 1996. They were already fairly ubiquitous in consumer electronics, at least high end ones, at the time the EV-1 was killed.

GM just tapped out too early because despite the cars being incredibly popular, they didn't want the short-term hit to the books that a niche product full of brand new technology represents.
by river_otter | 2026-02-02 00:21:57+00:00
It’s Sunday night/Monday morning, I just got back from a great day at FOSDEM 2026, and since I’m on the east coast time schedule, might as well tackle some outstanding issues on agent-of-empires.

Step 1, backlog prioritization.
Step 2, realize that truly the most important thing the tool is mising is AoE sound effects.
Step 3, add configurable sound effects.

Now you can optionally enjoy being told “wololo” when Claude needs to you to confirm your plan before executing the implementation. Enjoy.

https://www.agent-of-empires.com

Go to docs to see how to install the open source sounds (the internet can show you how to grab the real aoe ii sounds, because of copyright concerns I didn’t bake it into the codebase).
by 999900000999 | 2026-02-02 00:22:11+00:00
For me I need at least 2TB of storage, so a MacBook would end up being 2500$ to 3k, vs buying a 500$ Windows computer and adding a 100$ SSD.

I enjoy the struggle of Linux, even though I'm stuck with Windows for a lot of things.

Linux provides a better developer experience imo. But it's like owning a project car. You're better off buying a Corolla, but where's the fun?
by antonvs | 2026-02-02 00:22:39+00:00
> Many a crack back in the day was even more simple still, we'd just find and alter the right JE or JNE into a JMP and we're off to the races.

I did that with dBASE III, which used ProLok "laser protection" from Vault Corporation - a signature burned onto the diskette with a laser. Back then, I found it amazing that Ashton-Tate actually spent money to contract with a copy protection company for something that could be so easily defeated by a teenager reading assembler.

They could have easily just written the same kind of code themselves. An example of the power of marketing over substance.

I was able to replicate that protection mechanism just by scratching a diskette with a pin. The "laser" was a meaninglessly advanced-sounding solution that added no value compared to any other means of damaging a diskette.
by refurb | 2026-02-02 00:23:04+00:00
Quality of life has a lot to do with how you choose to spend your time.

I know lots of people that have no idea what Reddit is. They’ve never had a Facebook account.

Those aren’t happenstances - they are the result of the choice on what they spend their time doing.

I’m not surprised people who spend most of their time exposed to the rage bait that fills social media think the world is falling apart. Especially if you’re not aware that it’s not an accurate or balanced view of reality.
by Perenti | 2026-02-02 00:23:22+00:00
I first saw an Apple I at a Maths Camp in late 1976. It was from the first batch to arrive in Australia. We were all enthralled. We were slightly less enthralled waiting for the floating point libraries to load from cassette tape.

Earlier that year I'd been on a school excursion to Lismore "to see the computer". Richmond River High had got themselves a computer. It was a WANG the size of a washing machine, with a separate mark-sense card reader and a separate RF adapter which connected to a big black and white TV. It was new by the way.

The rate of advance from the WANG to the Apple I was incredible. I'm still intoxicated by it.