MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Catch Tap Toy
by memalign | 2026-03-13 08:32:48+00:00
I built this game to satisfy my nostalgia for one of the first games I ever played on a computer, Walnuts (playable on archive.org[0]), which was apparently published in 1994.

We're at an interesting phase of AI capability. It's easier than ever to make simple games like this. Is it still worth bothering to make and share something like this?

I think so. I made this for myself and to share with my son. Since I showed him the game first working (I called it a "preview" of a new game I'm making), he has frequently asked to play the "preview" again. That is special.

Also, the choices I make matter. They give this project meaning to myself and maybe also others. I picked the music, the art, and the special twists. Even though the game is simple, there are enough choices to make and options for each choice that nobody else would arrive at the same end result. (I even chose to keep a behavior that could be considered a bug: try playing this game on a phone-sized screen in landscape orientation for an extra amusing challenge) This whole game has been molded and curated for the player's enjoyment.

So I hope you like it!

0: https://archive.org/details/WarpedForWindows-Walnuts
by teekert | 2026-03-13 08:32:52+00:00
"I edited SystemVersion.plist to make the “About this Mac” window say it was running Mac OS 69, which is the s*x number, which is very funny."

If I'd see that on my kids' computer it would fill me with pride.

I do miss the days that a (Linux) computer was like this for me. I say Linux because I had a similar obsession with FOSS and what it meant in a broad sense. But it doesn't matter, before that I de-compiled some program to make the text on the Windows START button different. Re-installed Win 2000 about every week, often after f-ing it up. Before that I changed some lines in DOS' autoexe.bat so it would ask for a password (which was just 2 input parameters readable in the autoexec.bat, but that is some mighty fine security (through obscurity) in a normie family).
by drawfloat | 2026-03-13 08:33:26+00:00
Your complaint is with Vite – famously incredibly simple and reliable to work with – using Rust, but you're bringing up webpack's complexity?

Node dependencies are fine, add an npmrc file to have it default to exact versioning and you solve 90% of common day to day problems. It's not ideal, but nor is cargo's mystery meat approach to importing optional features from packages.
by wongarsu | 2026-03-13 08:33:44+00:00
AI facial recognition is smarter than what they are capable of. That's not the issue. It is much faster than a human, and state-of-the-art models make fewer errors than a human (though the types of errors are not the same).

The issue is that facial recognition is just not very reliable. Not for humans and not for machines. If you look at millions of people, some of them just look incredibly similar. Yet police apparently thought that was all the evidence they will ever need. A case so watertight there's no point in even talking to the suspect
by jjav | 2026-03-13 08:33:58+00:00
> is well loved by everyone who participates (except management)

Most of management hates it too. I manage a team where everyone is remote, yet I have to go to the office few days a week to sit on zoom, why? And up a level, my manager has an even longer commute and probably hates it more than I do.

This stuff is pushed down by HR, most of management hates it.
by jorgegalindo | 2026-03-13 08:34:03+00:00
Hey HN,

We wrote about something we keep thinking about: the gap between code that runs and code that's provably correct.

The post walks through a simple Java banking app with three bugs that compilation won't catch, tests are unlikely to catch, and an LLM reviewing the code would almost certainly miss. The most interesting one is structural: LLMs reason within a context window, but the most dangerous bugs are global properties that cross component boundaries. The preservation of money in a transfer isn't a property of withdraw() or deposit() in isolation.

Curious whether others have run into this class of problem in production.
by aw1621107 | 2026-03-13 08:34:04+00:00
> I'm assuming the suns gravity simply cant move objects of such different mass, at the same rate, and thereby the orbit and position changes accordingly?

Kind of? An object moving in a circular motion at a constant speed must have an acceleration towards the center of the circle of (velocity^2)/(radius). This means that two objects in the same circular orbit moving at different speeds must be experiencing different accelerations towards the center of the circle.

In the simplified case of orbits around the Sun, that acceleration towards the center of the orbit is due to the Sun's gravity. However, gravity accelerates everything at a given distance at the same rate. As a result, you can't have two objects solely influenced by the Sun's gravity that orbit around the Sun with the same orbital shape but moving at different speeds. You'd need something in addition to the Sun's gravity to pull that off.

> The speed doesn't have to be much different - 366 days and earth will eventually hit asteroid - 364 days and it will eventually hit the earth.

Sure. When I said slightly-larger-than-Earth-sized orbit, I really meant it. Kepler's third law of planetary motion states (approximately) that (orbital period)^2 is proportional to (radius)^3. Assuming I did my math correctly, if your orbital period goes from 365 to 366 days your orbital radius gets ~0.18% larger, which is roughly 274000 km increase over the radius of Earth's orbit. That would fit inside the Moon's orbit (~385000 km from the Earth)!

> Ahh, Im still having a hard time figuring out why that would take more energy

At least the way I was thinking, the short answer is that one alteration to an orbit is likely to be cheaper than two, especially if you aren't particularly concerned in what manner the asteroid eventually collides with Earth.
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-13 08:35:16+00:00
If you want IPv6 without dynamic allocation you end up rewriting half the stack anyway so probably not what most embedded engineers are itching to spend budget on. The weird part is that a lot of edge gear will be stuck in legacy-v4 limbo just because nobody wants to own that porting slog which means "ubiquitous IPv6" will keep being a conference slide more than a reality.
by FuckButtons | 2026-03-13 08:35:18+00:00
I know accountants, most of the stuff they deal with is getting stuff to make sense when your dealing with an unreliable narrator dealing with push back from their employers and then attempting to synthesize a coherent narrative over a large corpus of heterogeneous internal documents, controls, spreadsheets and legal agreements. LLM’s as they exist now are yes men, they are not good at making coherent fact patterns, especially when someone pushes back on them or gives them a red herring or mis-represents something. There’s a long list of things that need to improve for them to gain traction in that industry.
by wiseowise | 2026-03-13 08:37:30+00:00
False. Have you even used google in the last 6 years or so? The results are so bad that I stopped using it altogether. It pops up sometimes when I mistype something in a search bar, but that’s it.

And don’t make me laugh about “good online resources”. SO went downhill and is just a graveyard at this point where everything is frozen in time. It has some good discussions (that LLMs ingested), but that’s it.

You can hate LLMs all you want, but they’re godsend for interactive discussion with the material.
by hnlmorg | 2026-03-13 08:37:53+00:00
Yet such security bugs exist in their multitude. Plenty of internal-only systems are not locked down securely and only thing preventing mass exploitation is browsers CORS settings. But if request is originating from inside the network (as it would from a terminal emulator), then all bets are off.

Granted, on its own, this should be safe. But attacks are usually composed from multiple bugs and/or weaknesses in design. Hence why security folk keep talking about “defence in depth” — ie not to rely on the security of any single facet but instead layering your security just in case any one particular layer does prove to be insufficient.

This is why in my own terminal emulator I implemented hyperlinks via user defined RegEx. The terminal user gets to decide what text becomes click-actionable rather than the attacker.

I actually voiced some concerns with this original hyperlink proposal several years back. In fact lots of developers and security researchers did. And the gist authors response was to delete the replies and turn off comments. Which adds additional concern about this proposal. It follows no process, no feedback, nothing. Just one persons mission to dictate how everyone else’s terminal, and security model, should operate.
by p2detar | 2026-03-13 08:38:07+00:00
Apple introduced User Enrollment from iOS 13 onwards, which is the preferred way to do BYOD enrollments. This enrollment type does not support the erase capability.

What you mean is the device enrollment on non-supervised devices, however and to my knowledge, enterprises do not use this, or if they do, it is very rare. (edit: And if they do, it's apparently a grave mistake.)
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-03-13 08:38:16+00:00
GP claims their family was lower middle class not properly middle class. My family mostly traveled like kelnos family did at the time. Also gas prices in the 80s-90s were so cheap that it rarely made sense to fly over driving. We flew as a family twice as a kid because we were an immigrant family and we saved up to visit the country of origin but it was ridiculously expensive to take the whole family, so dad stayed home one vacation, and we always stayed there with family.

We did have a computer but it was really a one time expense. At the time computers were improving quickly so I scavenged parts which wealthy areas that threw last Gen hardware away but were better than what we had (and I was a kid with a lot of time on my hands.) Giving a computer to a kid for Christmas in '83 is a very different value proposition than even a family vacation because a vacation is something the whole family does.
by paganel | 2026-03-13 08:39:06+00:00
I agree with the popular thing, but only up to a point, for a certain type of people, or from a certain age on (for me this latter case holds true), competing against other people just isn't a valid concern anymore, the societal "recognition" stops being a thing.

In my case, and I suppose this holds true for others, too, the "fiercest" competition is with one's inner-self or, at the very most, with past/dead/way-out-of-line-of-sight "competitors" that have nothing to do with current society and its recognition. I know that this "competing against one-self" sounds trite, but, again, this is how things are for some of us.
by tomhow | 2026-03-13 08:39:15+00:00
> I’m not usually one to complain about AI being used to generate content because I find this an especially interesting topic, but it really took me out of it.

This is an important point for writers to recognise. An important part of reading someone's writing is the feeling of being drawn into their experience of the world. You're interested in the topic, so you get on board and come along on the journey through their experience that you believed would be conveyed by their own words and sentences. Then suddenly, you're jolted out of that experience by the appearance of words and sentences that weren't written by that person and weren't even really written by a human. It's an unnerving feeling and it makes us feel somehow robbed, or at least disappointed.
by xp84 | 2026-03-13 08:40:07+00:00
You can't destroy a democratic system that isn't democratic and already doesn't serve the people. The Senate was never designed to be democratic in the first place. The House was, but its main problem is just campaign finance decadence that means to the extent those guys do any governing during their 2-year terms, it's a part-time gig in between fundraising. And together, the legislative branch has become a joke. They now just fart around, either rubber-stamping whatever the President says, or shutting down the government whenever the party out of power can't accept that the public has rejected their policies. So I hope I can be forgiven for being pessimistic about whether this "democratic system" even serves any purpose at this point.

But back to the Senate. Jon Tester was defeated in 2024. There is a peppering of Democrats in statewide office here and there -- Fetterman and Beshear, and the Virginia and Georgia Democrats, the latter of which got really lucky to both run in the election that was a referendum on Trump's COVID chaos, and the one getting to run against a proud child molester. They are also the exact kind of politicians that don't get support from the blue-state Democrats in primaries for national elections, because they are too moderate. If you don't check every box, the primaries will destroy you. To be fair, Republicans have the exact same problem. Blue-state moderates certainly could have been persuaded to support say, Jeb Bush, but the party only supports... well, since the phenomenon became locked in, they have only given their support to one man. Sorry to ramble, my point is that the practice of split-ticket voting is dying off faster than discounted DRAM.

There used to be a lot of these cross-party appeal people like Bill Clinton, Ann Richards, Jon Tester, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, and on the Republican side George Pataki, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie. But this is now massively the exception, and trending down.

BTW I'm all for getting rid of gerrymandering, but the Democrats have set that cause back by 100 years by selling out their supposed deeply held beliefs last year in California. Now we're just being honest that it's only about power.

I don't remember who's running for governor in California, but I am guessing there is only one Dem running it's because the California Democratic Party is powerful and disciplined in ways neither national party is, and has told everybody but the party's favorite to sit down and shut up. That's speculation - let me know if I'm wrong.
by simoncion | 2026-03-13 08:40:56+00:00
If your edge router supports IPv6, it almost certainly can make a DHCPv6-PD request and handle advertising the assigned prefix on its LAN side.

Because of Google's continued (deliberate?) misunderstanding of what DHCPv6 is for, Android clients don't do anything sane with it. That doesn't mean that DHCPv6 isn't simple.

Again, DHCPv6 is "Please give me an IP address, and maybe also what my directly-attached friends need to get IP addresses.". Simple, straightforward, and easy to understand. Even if it were relevant, Google's chronic rectocranial insertion doesn't change that.
by darkwater | 2026-03-13 08:41:16+00:00
It's pretty clear. If you have your bank account with 2 owners, and with X on it, X/2 are yours and X/2 belong to the other owner, at any point in time.
Case in point, if one of the owners deceases, you can withdraw X/2 at most. The other half is blocked until the inheritance paperwork is completed and that half has a new legal owner(s).
by gdorsi | 2026-03-13 08:41:17+00:00
I see this post as something motivational around public writing or public speaking.

It's true that the more you are afraid of expressing yourself, the worse your "performance" is going to be.

On general work level it's different.

There the trust needs to be balanced.

People should feel free to express themselves, but also that they need to meet some certain standards of quality at work.

Otherwise we may tend to relax too much and become sloppy in certain areas.
by themafia | 2026-03-13 08:41:53+00:00
Intelligence and ignorance are two different things. It is a sign of intelligence to be able to acknowledge your ignorance when it exists. Then you use your intelligence to correct that. Even with a mortgage this has never failed me. 20 years, 2 employers due to an ownership change, and several RIFs survived.

The power of saying, "I don't know, but I will find out" is underestimated.
by xigoi | 2026-03-13 08:41:59+00:00
> No. Floating number arithmetic is deterministic. You don't get different answers for the same operations on the same machine just because of limited precision. There are reasons why it can be difficult to make sure that floating point operations agree across machines, but that is more of a (very annoying and difficult to make consistent) configuration thing than determinism.

Float addition is not associative, so the result of x1 + x2 + x3 + x4 depends on which order you add them in. This matters when the sum is parallelized, as the structure of the individual add operations will depend on how many cores are available at any given time.
by aa-jv | 2026-03-13 08:42:39+00:00
This is exactly what I have wanted for a while, so thank you very much!

Disclaimer: I haven't dug into axe enough yet, just going on first impressions.

>No daemon, no GUI.

I love the world we developers live in right now. ;)

>What would you automate first?

In a sense, I have wanted to be able to just add AI to a repo, and treat it like the junior developer it is. Its okay if the junior developer will do literally any stupid thing I tell it to do, because I won't tell it to do stupid things.

So, exactly: refactor this code, implement a shim, produce docs for <blah>, construct a build harness, write unit tests, produce a build, diff these codebases, implement this API, do all this on your own branch, and build and test things so that I can review the PR over coffee.

Essentially, three word commands which will encourage the AI to produce better software. Through my repo, so I can just review through the repo.

Okay, that's how I hope things work, now off to actually dig in to axe and give it a try on a few things, thanks very much again ..
by BoppreH | 2026-03-13 08:43:13+00:00
It's not a value judgement, I'm no misanthrope. But it's a fact or life that we humans must specialize, while LLMs can afford to have "studied" a staggering variety of topics. It's no different than being slower than a car, or weaker than a hydraulic press.

On a different note, LLMs are still not very wise, as displayed by all the prompt attacks and occasional inane responses like walking to the car wash.
by jart | 2026-03-13 08:44:25+00:00
DB's fall has been glorious. I shorted them back in January when I learned they were delivering 1.3% of their market cap in gold to the COMEX. No bank gives up that much of a hard asset unless something is wrong. Things are also looking bleak for Scotia Capital, BofA, Barclays, and UBS. JPMorgan seems to be doing fine. However Citigroup appears to be making out like a bandit. https://www.cmegroup.com/delivery_reports/MetalsIssuesAndSto...
by jigglypuff-mab | 2026-03-13 08:44:27+00:00
This resonates. I've noticed my own relationship with coding shifting in ways I didn't expect.

The grief isn't really about losing the craft—it's about losing the context where that craft made sense. When I started, "good code" meant something specific: elegant abstractions, clever patterns, the kind of stuff you'd show off in a code review. Now? The best code might be the prompt that gets an agent to write 500 lines of solid boilerplate in 30 seconds.

What's weird is I'm not even sad about it. I'm more... untethered? Like the identity I built around "being a good programmer" is dissolving, and underneath there's just... someone who likes making things work.

Maybe that's the real split: people who tied their identity to how they worked vs. people who tied it to what they built.
by bob1029 | 2026-03-13 08:44:30+00:00
> The overwhelming majority of mutations end up being harmful or neutral. An exceedingly small fraction are beneficial.

Neutral drift is perhaps the most important part of evolution. It's how you preserve diversity over time and avoid getting stuck in holes in the fitness landscape.

If we only ever made steps that improved performance we'd inevitably see premature convergence. The neutral drift can overpower progress toward a global minimum, but it's a lot better to be going in circles than to not be moving at all. Diversity collapse is the worst thing that can happen to an evolutionary algorithm. You must reject superior solutions with some probability in order to make it to the next step. You can always change your selection pressure. You can't fix information that doesn't exist anymore.
Show HN: A small macOS app to send push notifications to the iOS Simulator
by opafan | 2026-03-13 08:45:18+00:00
Testing push notifications during iOS development is often cumbersome: you usually need to craft .apns payload files or run xcrun simctl push commands from the terminal. I built iOS Simulator Push Notifier, a small macOS utility that lets you send push notifications to a running iOS Simulator instantly through a simple UI.
by sehansen | 2026-03-13 08:46:49+00:00
The shareholders are responsible for the management of the company who are in turn responsible for their employees. By wiping out the shareholders in these companies hopefully other shareholders in other financial companies will demand more oversight. In the end people respond to incentives and the individual employees that sold the fraudulent loans were implicitly or explicitly incentivized to do so by management, who were in turn rewarded for this by shareholders. Going after the specific employees that sold the loans is of course morally satisfying, but if we want this to not happen again we need to make shareholders and executives keen to avoid a repeat. Looking at how popular Klarna, gambling companies and now private credit has been with investors, it doesn't seem to have worked, unfortunately.

But, yes, it is a travesty that more of the subprime loan salesmen weren't prosecuted. It has a lot of value for a society to actually convict people that have done actual wrong. We all want to live in a just world and seeing that people who have done wrong get what they deserve is part of that. Looking at the US from the outside I think a lot of the polarization we've seen in the US over the past 15 years could have been avoided if more prosecutions had happened in 2008-2012.

IMO this is also why big companies being allowed to do settlements without admissions of wrongdoing is so bad. They fail to fulfill the moral purpose of law enforcement. Ironically Goldman Sachs _did_ admit wrongdoing in their settlement with the SEC over their Abacus CDFs...
by int0x2e | 2026-03-13 08:47:25+00:00
The Iranian regime would absolutely use nukes as soon as they have two or more weapons ready. Just as they have launched countless attacks against civilian areas in many of their neighbor states in the past 2 weeks, including several nations that have prohibited any use of US military installations or their in their country or their airspace as part of this campaign.

If Iran's regime had nukes, I guarantee you'll see UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and several others go all in on their own nuclear programs immediately. They'd be fools not to.

Israel's nukes are troubling, but the weird "nuclear ambiguity" doctrine has already stood for so long and managed to avoid nuclear flare-ups so far. I'd still like them to not have nukes, but they won't be launching any nuclear first strikes for sure - since we've seen them not do that even while fighting many major wars and suffering losses without taking that step...
by ardeaver | 2026-03-13 08:48:32+00:00
The thing that actually killed Blockbuster was Carl Icahn. He bought up a bunch of shares and wanted to quickly turn a profit on the company. At the time, they were investing heavily into a Netflix-like service, which required a significant up front capital investment and, therefore, was losing money. Icahn, wanting to make a profit, decided to cut spending and basically not look forward at all. He got a quick, massive bump in stock price and jumped ship as it was crashing into the iceberg. Blockbuster was caught in the middle of a paradigm shift and found itself massively under prepared to deal with it.