MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-04-14 01:02:21+00:00
> It may not be as stupid as it sounds.

It is.

> However, in any probabilistic system, you can run a function k times and you’ll get an output distribution that is meaningful if k is high enough.

This is the underlying flaw in this approach. Attempting to use probabilistic algorithms to produce a singular verifiably correct result requires an external agent to select what is correct in the output of "k times" invocations. This is a person capable of making said determination.

> The thing with LLMs is they scale in a way that actually allows this to be possible, in a way that scaling with humans can’t.

For the "k times" generation of text part, sure. Not for the determination of which one within k, if any, are acceptable for the problem at hand.

EDIT: clarified "produce a verifiably correct result" to be "produce a singular verifiably correct result"
by dubyah | 2025-04-14 01:03:39+00:00
"By looking at property damage and police injuries, we also conclude that this pro-Palestine movement has not been violent. That is true of both the national protest wave in general and of the student encampments in spring 2024 in particular. The rhetorical core of this pro-Palestine movement has not been a call for violence against Jews, but rather a call for freedom for Palestinians and an end to violence being inflicted upon them. To substantiate this point, we considered two sources of evidence: 1) the banners, signs, and chants seen or heard at pro-Palestine events; 2) the demands issued by organizers of over 100 student encampments." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14742837.2024.2...
by TrapLord_Rhodo | 2025-04-14 01:04:37+00:00
in 2001, Eutelsat transitioned into a private company, Eutelsat S.A., and later became Eutelsat Communications S.A., headquartered in Paris, France. In 2023, Eutelsat merged with OneWeb, a company founded in 2012, to form the Eutelsat Group.

Essentially, just as old as SpaceX.

So, how does one ensure a company continues to make good decisions? Have a very flat structure, and have alot of smart people work insanely long hours. If you hire twice as much people to match the 80 hour weeks, you no longer have a flat structure and >> "the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization."

You are right, technology is not magic, you've just got to want it more than anyone else. SpaceX wants it, Europe would rather have their maximum of 48 hours a week. Which is actually halarious, i don't think i've worked under 48 hours a week in my entire adult life. 50 is usually expected, 60 if you want good performance reviews and 70 if you want a promotion.
by mneil | 2025-04-14 01:04:39+00:00
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is essentially a protocol for tool access. It defines a standard way for large language models to interact with various tools, data, and resources. Simply put, MCP enables AI to use various functionalities, much like how programmers call functions.

A2A (Agent-to-Agent Protocol) focuses on agent collaboration. It establishes ways for intelligent agents to discover, communicate, and cooperate with each other, allowing different AI systems to work together like human teams.

Taken straight from this article:

https://a2aprotocol.ai/blog/a2a-vs-mcp
by benatkin | 2025-04-14 01:04:43+00:00
Those meanings are connected. I think it was a reference to counting sheep but it describes yearning as far as connecting the title to the plot.

Also, upon further reflection I don't really agree with what the other commenter said: "There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream". If you try to and manage to think in a way that causes you to become less alert, it starts to be like daydreaming, so I think this sort of falling asleep thinking is under the umbrella of dreaming.
by Corrado | 2025-04-14 01:05:09+00:00
That makes me wonder ... what could you do with a cheap Cybertruck? Take all the panels off and remake them in something else? Maybe put a 3D printer to work and create something really unique. Sure, you'd still be stuck with a CT but a lot of the tech in that vehicle is pretty good. Could you turn it into a sand buggy? What about a flatbed truck? Maybe a repair truck with welders and other electrical equipment?
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-14 01:07:34+00:00
> the US is politically unstable with its two party democracy

How about Netherlands and Belgium? With the exception of PM Rutte (NL) in the last 8 years, normally Netherlands has a relatively unstable democracy, compared to Germany or France. Their gov'ts collapse relatively quickly, then call elections. (To be clear, [Semi-]Presidential systems like France, US, and Brazil don't have the concept of "calling elections", so they are perceived as more stable.) And don't even get me started about Belgium: Their political system is a mess. It is like 2.1 countries in one: The French speaking side, the Dutch/Flemish speaking side, and a tiny German speaking minority. At some point (2011?), the went more than 500 days (FIVE HUNDRED DAYS!) without an elected gov't, while they were negotiating to form a new one. And both NL and BE and facing serious challenges with newly powerful hard right parties (Hello Geert Wilders!). This "woke-vs-maga" story isn't only in the US. Many highly developed nations in Europe are struggling with similar divisions in their political systems.

Somewhat tangential: I see two serious flaws with the US democratic system: (1) The supreme court is too powerful. If you look at many other highly developed, democratic nations, their supreme court (or equivalent) is much less powerful, and they are no worse for it. I have seen that in both semi-presidential and parliamentary systems. (2) The US president is too powerful.
by brucehoult | 2025-04-14 01:07:41+00:00
Technically the correct name now is RVA22+V

RVA22 includes a long list of things in addition to the original 2019 RV64GC -- which is now called RVA20. V (Vector) is optional in RVA22, required in RVA23 but it will be a year or two before RVA23 hardware start appearing.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-04-14 01:09:18+00:00
> This isn't flat land. There are expansive mountain ranges that make it difficult to build and any flat land that is buildable is ALSO prime agricultural land that is worth millions.

Flat land is convenient of course, but I don't think mountains are a make-or-break factor. It looks like the Interstate 5 already takes a viable route through the Tejon Pass, and as the land will already be publicly-owned it is a candidate for cut-and-cover or an elevated railway. A 5-mile tunnel to bypass Gorman would eliminate the tightest curve along the route.

Alternatively, for a detour of an hour or so the railway can be routed eastward through Los Angeles and through the Cajon Pass instead, thence following the path of Route 58.

But all of this doesn't negate my original point - that regardless of the feasibility of a railway, a lack of intermediate stops is not necessarily a disadvantage.

> Yeah no. I don't want employees to come in unshowered, and they still need a place to keep their luggage. Furthermore, plenty of people like maintaining their daily routine or spending time with their SOs. Flying a couple hours, staying at a hotel overnight, getting work done, and immediately bugging out back home is the norm.

The on-board facilities are among the easiest challenges to address. There are plenty of examples of showers on long-distance trains, and it's not much cost to build a few at the terminus station. Luggage can be sent ahead and lockers can be provided at stations.

Spending time with family? Those 'couple of hours flying' can add up: that's time that could have been spent with family, too!
by kentonv | 2025-04-14 01:09:58+00:00
> The Chinese room argument showed that this does not extend to intelligence.

Searle's argument doesn't actually show anything. It just illustrates a complex system that appears intelligent. Searle then asserts, without any particular reasoning, that the system is not intelligent, simply because, well, how could it be, it's just a bunch of books and a mindless automaton following them?

It's a cyclic argument: A non-human system can't be intelligent because, uhh, it's not human.

This is wrong. The room as a whole is intelligent, and knows Chinese.

People have, of course, made this argument, since it is obivous. Searle responds by saying "OK, well now imagine that the man in the room memorizes all the books and does the entire computation in his head. Now where's the intelligence???" Ummm, ok, now the man is emulating a system in his head, and the system is intelligent and knows Chinese, even though the man emulating it does not -- just like how a NES emulator can execute NES CPU instructions even though the PC it runs on doesn't implement them.

Somehow Searle just doesn't comprehend this. I guess he's not a systems engineer.

As to whether a lookup table can be intelligent: I assert that a lookup table that responds intelligently to every possible query is, in fact, intelligent. Of course, such a lookup table would be infinite, and thus physically impossible to construct.
by missedthecue | 2025-04-14 01:11:16+00:00
In a world with a constantly shrinking population, what investment is expected to grow over time?

- Stocks are a melting ice cube selling to a perennially shrinking consumer base.

- Bonds offer low returns and suffer from credit risk due to the above. Do we really think Japan is good for their 2055 bonds, assuming no inflation or debasement?

- Property also faces challenges with a shrinking population. Rural Korea, Japan, Italy and other places are already full of housing and commercial buildings selling for $30k and they're all overpriced.

The truth is that there is no model of retirement -- not the state model, private investment model, or family model that works in a world where the population is shrinking 50-70% per generation.
by unethical_ban | 2025-04-14 01:11:18+00:00
Wow, a GameFAQs reference. I remember hanging on Z-Tack and some other Atari 2600 message board with silly fake ranks and weird harmless shenanigans I can't even clearly recall. Then there was Magician Type 0, DSL forums, and Outboards, and "Ace" something, and darkpage.net, all clones of the Gamefaqs message board design in variations of PHP and ASP.net. It's how I got into programming. And here we are.
by simonw | 2025-04-14 01:11:43+00:00
Langchain is one of many frameworks that implement the "tool calling" pattern, where LLM applications can request that a tool is run (eg "search the web for X" or "execute this Python code") and see the result of that.

MCP is a standard for describing and exposing tools to LLM applications.

So they're not the same category of thing. Langchain could implement aspects of the MCP specification, in fact it looks like they're doing that already: https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchain-mcp-adapters
by mixmastamyk | 2025-04-14 01:11:55+00:00
I'd like a mobile OS where I can reuse my existing knowledge. Write software for it with Rust, Python, pipewire, systemd, Wayland, etc. Login with ssh.

No interest in Android apps or Windows (hah). (Though maybe I'll try Waydroid one of these days.)

I don't know anything about your distro, not the graphics stack or what the package manager is or even if there is one? Meanwhile my starlite tablet is awesome because it works just like my desktop Fedora or Mint, though I installed Phosh on it.

Security is nice, but not before there is even a single feasible device on the market. Librem is just barely limping along, and I mean barely with a five year old handset that was obsolete when it debuted.

If your kernel is so advanced it really should be upstreamed, so these other distros could use it and support new Pixels. Y'all working together with other mobile projects would be so much better than the current surveillance dystopia we are currently living in. Maybe it's hard, but it is incredibly important. I can help though have limits.
by sshh12 | 2025-04-14 01:12:07+00:00
It's a common question!

Related: > Tool-Calling - If you’re like me, when you first saw MCP you were wondering “isn’t that just tool-calling?”...

Not everyone uses langchain nor does langchain cover some of the lower level aspects of actually connecting things up. MCP just helps standardize some of those details so any assistant/integration combo is compatible.

Edit: +1 simonw above
by behnamoh | 2025-04-14 01:12:13+00:00
How long until such "rules" also become standardized (like we saw with MCP)? It feels redundant to have rules.cursorrules and rules.aiderrules where the rules content is the same. I predict companies will not only publish coding guidelines for their programmers, they'll publish these tiny coding rules for LLMs used in the company as well, so all code follows the same standards/idioms.
by unethical_ban | 2025-04-14 01:14:10+00:00
The Texas subreddit recently got "taken back" by normal, older mods. It had been run by an account "annatrashpanda", who banned anyone critical of the Democrats, who let generic copy/paste national memes take over the board, and so on. I see they have now deleted their account. This all happened about two weeks ago.

I say this as a liberal, the artificially partisan takeovers of local subs is a real thing. It's one thing to ban trolls and consistent shit-talkers from a community. And frankly it's one thing to have some bias. But it was just so obviously hostile, and I was happy to see the sub get back some authenticity.
by martinbaun | 2025-04-14 01:14:17+00:00
I was thinking of building exactly this type of thing here. This is great and I love the simple/minimalistic styled pages.

Things I was also contemplating to implement you can freely steal:

1. Giving a list of potential interesting investments - these could also be behind paywall.

2. Summarize based on sectors to see where there's downturns coming - again maybe paywall this

3. Connect with news-sites or twitter etc.. to see what is happening and what is the sentiment. This is a lot harder as you'll need to either scrape or pay to get that info.

Best of luck
by chongli | 2025-04-14 01:14:36+00:00
This seems like it was inevitable. Most people do not understand the meaning of the word "stochastic" and so they're likely to simply ignore it in favour of reading the term as "_____ parrot."

What you have described, a probability distribution with carefully-tuned parameters, is perfectly captured by the word stochastic as it's commonly used by statisticians.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-14 01:15:19+00:00
> more with no single metric meeting all use cases

Is it, though?

Dithering to black-and-white is pretty simple. If the only thing you want to do is maximize detail while preserving accurate brightness, I don't really see a lot of leeway there.

Now sure, you can choose to artistically adjust some tradeoff of less detail for... something? But it feels like there ought to at least be an objectively correct starting point for a metric, no? I'm curious if that really doesn't exist.
by christophilus | 2025-04-14 01:16:25+00:00
I have found Cursor to be frustrating and exhausting to work with, even with my rules file. When it works, it’s like magic. But most of the time, it feels like working with a Jr. dev who has a bit of a concussion. Code review is wearying work, and using Cursor means you’re doing a lot of code review. I have never once gotten into a flow state with it.

That was a long preamble to this question: any senior devs out there (20+ years) who enjoy using Cursor? What’s the trick?
by kazinator | 2025-04-14 01:17:13+00:00
I think the other half of the law is more or less good, so I don't have any reason to bring it up. I don't exactly know what it means to be conservative, but it sounds safe, like staying away from generating inputs for other programs that exercise dark corner cases. I don't really have anything to discuss about that half of the law.

The world doesn't need principles that are half good.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-14 01:20:37+00:00
> So why do some learning resources designed for autodidacts—such as Math Academy, or the generally very good Execute Program—rely so heavily on dependency graphs?

I went to a university where the upper-division undergraduate math courses didn't have much in the way of prerequisites.

A foreseeable consequence of this approach is that the first several weeks of each ten-week class are spent covering material that's shared with other classes, because that material is relevant to both classes but isn't included in the lower-division prerequisites. This is very bad as a matter of curriculum design, but good if you're more interested in making sure students never have scheduling conflicts.

Another example of dependency graphs is that when my sister signed up for Portuguese classes, she took "Portuguese 1 for Spanish speakers" rather than "Portuguese 1". You can learn Portuguese from an English perspective, or you can learn it from a Spanish perspective, and those are both approaches that can work, but they're not approaches you'd want to combine. In this case, one of the approaches is clearly superior - if you can relate Portuguese to your knowledge of Spanish, that will work better than relating it to English - but even where no particular dependency structure is preferable to another, it remains true that the plan for going from A to B isn't the same as the plan for going from B to A, or the same as the plan for going from nothing to B. So the curriculum needs to rely on a dependency tree.
by sepositus | 2025-04-14 01:20:38+00:00
> So what changed or what makes this place different?

It's an interesting question. Primarily, I think it's because HN doesn't allow you to downvote instantly or even after a lengthy period of time. I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there. Regardless, that single change probably makes a big difference.

Compared to Reddit, I've had some comments go into the tens of negative karma points within five minutes of posting. It wasn't because it was low quality, but because it wasn't the "correct" view to have in whatever subreddit I was engaging in. The downvoting there is practically militant.

However, as someone who usually holds a minority view on HN, I don't think the system here is perfect either. Usually an echo chamber forms because the dissidents don't last long and leave. If you reward the ones that stay the longest with downvote capabilities, it would explain my general experience quite well. But again, it's nothing compared to Reddit.

Note: I recognize this is a conversation on karma, which has a rule associated with it, but I hope we can make an exception here given it's a good faith discussion between Reddit/HN :)
by venusgirdle | 2025-04-14 01:20:48+00:00
Haha, yeah I was kind of thinking that as well! Like with different error-diffusion patterns, one method may be more visually appealing than the other.

Although, with either approach, I definitely feel that the fact that sRGB is non-linear should be acknowledged, and that’s something I was completely unaware of. So, I’m happy I learned something new today :)
by ein0p | 2025-04-14 01:20:54+00:00
The point is, for this to work, your system has to be connected to the internet. And if that's the case, there's no material difference between hosting it on prem and hosting it on GCP (where Google can promise you that it won't exfiltrate data). That's if you trust Google. And if you don't (and you shouldn't - it's an ad / mass surveillance company first and foremost), your only option for sensitive data is to self host and air gap.
by unethical_ban | 2025-04-14 01:20:55+00:00
I wonder if you worked for a certain california-named company based in another california city... Your experience sounds a lot like mine.

They sell-to-cover when my stocks vest quarterly, which pisses me off because the stock constantly goes up and I wish I could keep them until the time my tax bill is due.

And, I have to manually report to the taxman all the money paid via those sell-to-covers, because even though eTrade sends me the transaction details each year, and they clearly tell the IRS how many stocks I got, they don't tell the IRS how much tax I already paid on it.
by krick | 2025-04-14 01:21:26+00:00
They imply it should be somehow optimized for apple silicon, but, yeah, I don't understand what this is. If docker can use GPU, well, it should be able to use GPU in any container that makes use of it properly. If (say) ollama as an app doesn't use it properly, but they figured a way to do it better, it would make more sense to fix ollama. I have no idea why this should be a different app than, well, the very docker daemon itself.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-14 01:21:29+00:00
> No other previous administrations have been so blatant about revoking visas simply for the "crime" of voicing one's opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

They don’t see it as a free speech issue. They are not imprisoning the person but “simply” sending them home.

> We're in uncharted waters here because previous administrations have generally followed constitutional norms when it came to making visa decisions.

Not really, they specifically ask about membership in various parties, namely the communist party. This is nothing new at all. Any student coming say in the 80s and starting to show up at pro Communist party protests would have been just as easily kicked out.

A visa like J-1 can be revoked for non-criminal reasons. They don’t see a student visa validity as a free speech issue. It has never been and won’t be until the law is changed.
by Marsymars | 2025-04-14 01:22:07+00:00
> I used it myself once or twice and it worked simply with antennas that were relatively cheap (<$50 iirc). Maybe there was a problem in Minneapolis?

I don’t know about Minneapolis is particular, but 40 miles is far enough that it gets tricky, and in my Canadian city, I’m close to the towers as the crow flies, but in the RF shadow of a huge hill - so I’d actually get better reception if I was further away from the broadcast towers.
by blindriver | 2025-04-14 01:22:09+00:00
This review reads very much like one written by someone who reluctantly is trying to find excuses to criticize it. Many of the things he says feel made up.

For example,

> Many of the questions I answered correctly were in areas that I don’t feel I understand well, but where I suppose I had drilled enough in the past for my procedural fluency to survive 20 years of atrophy.

The author is complaining that he felt like he should have done worse because emotionally he thought he knew it less than he actually did. This is an entirely fictional, made-up criticism. He obviously knew it better than he "felt" he did.

The entire review reads like this, trying to make up real-sounding criticisms that to me just don't make very much sense. The DAG criticism as well doesn't make sense. There is no "one way". The DAG approach probably works for many if not most students, but of course there are other students it won't work for. Exactly like how phonics works for many students but some need to be taught whole word reading. You can't criticize the DAG approach just because some students can't learn that way, but they have to pick one method. I would expect a teacher to have a better critcism than that.