MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-04-10 15:23:15+00:00
fedora/toolbox and distrobox create containers that can access the X socket and /dev/dri/ to run GUI apps from containers.

Flatpaks share (GNOME,KDE,NVIDIA,podman,) runtimes, by comparison.

Re: MSIX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23394302 :

> MSIX only enforces a sandbox if an application doesn’t elect to use the restricted capabilities that allow it to run without. File system and registry virtualization can be disabled quite easily with a few lines in the package manifest, as well as a host of other isolation features.

Flatseal and KDE and Gnome can modify per-flatpak permissions. IDK if there's a way to do per-flatpak-instance permissions, like containers.

MOUNT --type=cache
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-10 15:23:39+00:00
Right, and I think that's a combination of a few factors— first of all, there's the basic momentum that CMake is widely known and has a huge ecosystem of find modules, so it's a very safe choice— no one got fired for choosing https://boringtechnology.club

But bigger than that is just that a lot of these build system and infrastructure choices are made when a project is small and builds fast anyway. Who cares about incremental builds and aggressive caching when the whole thing is over in two seconds, right? Once a project is big enough that this starts to be a pain point, the build system (especially if it's one like CMake that allows a lot of undisciplined usage) is deeply entrenched and the cost of switching is higher.

Choosing technologies like Nix or Bazel can be seen as excessive upfront complexity or premature optimization, particularly if some or all of the team members would have to actually learn the things— from a manager's point of view, there's the very real risk that your star engineer spends weeks watching tech talks and yak shaving the perfect build setup instead of actually building core parts of the product.

Ultimately, this kind of thing comes back to the importance of competent technical leadership. Infrastructure like build system choice is important enough to be a CTO call, and that person needs to be able to understand the benefits, to weigh activation costs against the 5-10 plan for the product and team, and be able to say "yes, we plan for this thing to be big enough that investing in learning and using good tools right now is worth it" or "no, this is a throwaway prototype to get us to our seed money, avoid any unnecessary scaffolding."
by renewiltord | 2025-04-10 15:24:16+00:00
It is an interesting time for LLMs to burst on the scene. Most online forums have already turned people into text replicators. Most HN commenters can be prompted into “write a comment about slop violating copyright” / “write a comment about Google violating privacy” / “write a comment about managers not understanding remote work”. All you have to do is state the opposite.

A perfect time for LLMs to show up and do the same. The subreddit simulators were hilarious because of the unusual ways they would perform but a modern LLM is a near perfect approximation of the average HN commenter.

I would have assumed that making LLMs indistinguishable from these humans would make those kinds of comments less interesting to interact with but there’s a base level of conversation that hooks people.

On Twitter, LLM-equipped Indians cosplay as right wing white supremacists and amass large followings (also bots, perhaps?) revealed only when they have to participate in synchronous conversation.

And yet, they are still popular. Even the “Texas has warm water ports” Texan is still around and has a following (many of whom seem non-bot though who can tell?).

Even though we have a literal drone, humans still engage in drone behaviour and other humans still engage them. Fascinating. I wonder whether the truth is that the inherent past-replication of low-temperature LLMs is likely to fix us to our present state than to raise us to a new equilibrium.

Experiments in Musical Intelligence is now over 40 years old and I thought it was going to revolutionize things: unknown melodies discovered by machine married to mind. Maybe LLMs aren’t going to move us forward only because this point is already a strong attractor. I’m optimistic in the power of boredom, though!
by latexr | 2025-04-10 15:24:29+00:00
No offence meant, but this sounds like those doomsday prepper fantasies where they store chainsaws and crossbows in the garage because they think they’d thrive in a zombie apocalypse.

If your whole continent went without electricity for a year, something massively fucked up would be going on (like a gigantic war) and stocking up on beans and berries wouldn’t begin to address the issue.

Connecting phones peer-to-peer is a bad priority when civilisation and the government are collapsing around you. We already have cheap, reliable, sturdy walkie-talkies which run on replaceable batteries that can last for months and years, why would we waste precious energy resources charging expensive, fragile, unreliable phones that barely last one day?

Sounds like you don’t live in a city and are fantasising about being cut off from the rest of the world, but for most people collaboration would be key. Communities would need to form and be tighter to help everyone.
by pc86 | 2025-04-10 15:24:30+00:00
Derek writes a lot of great fashion threads but he is a dyed-in-the-wool partisan and it comes through any time he touches on things remotely political. This doesn't mean he's wrong and it isn't even necessarily a bad thing, but it's important to keep that in mind and just remember that when he says something political he likely arrived at that political opinion first and is picking examples/hypotheticals to support it, and not vice versa.
by justonceokay | 2025-04-10 15:24:56+00:00
If we are headed to a star-trek future of luxury communism, there will definitely be growing pains as the things we value become valueless within our current economic system. Even though the book itself is so-so IMO, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom provides a look at a future economy where there is an infinite supply of physical goods so the only economy is that of reputation. People compete for recognition instead of money.

This is all theoretical, I don’t know if I believe that we as humans can overcome our desire to hoard and fight over our possessions.
by pj_mukh | 2025-04-10 15:24:56+00:00
Super cool! Though cloud cover disabling your detection technique may make this infeasible for anything but low-altitude drones.

One small nit: Calling Ray-tracing "Not AI" is like calling Matrix Math "Not AI". It's definitely a core component of a lot Machine Perception (i.e. AI) tasks.

I'm guessing OP meant "Without using any costly CNN or Transformer inferencing", which is actually a clever achievement.
by ca98am79 | 2025-04-10 15:25:23+00:00
I don't know why the share button became that color. I actually made this years ago because I needed it for my company. But then file.io was acquired (which I was using for the backend), and so I had to recently switch to using aws as the backend. So I vibe-coded a new backend api for aws in the last couple of months. I also acquired the domain temp.pw - previously used temporary.pw (which still works).
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-10 15:25:24+00:00
Evolution is not about being better / winning but about adapting. People will adapt and co-exist. Some better than others.

AIs aren't really part of the whole evolutionary race for survival so far. We create them. And we allow them to run. And then we shut them down. Maybe there will be some AI enhanced people that start doing better. And maybe the people bit become optional at some point. At that point you might argue we've just morphed/evolved into whatever that is.
by lm28469 | 2025-04-10 15:25:30+00:00
You could have said the same thing when we invented the steam engine, mechanized looms, &c. As long as the driving force of the economy/technology is "make numbers bigger" there is no end in sight, there will never be enough, there is no goal to achieve.

We already live lives which are artificial in almost every way. People used to die of physical exhaustion and malnutrition, now they die of lack of exercise and gluttony, surely we could have stopped somewhere in the middle. It's not a ressource or technology problem at that point, it's societal/political
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-10 15:25:30+00:00
That's your opinion, not a "more accurate" conclusion.

I think the upper limit, really is consecutive hours before you need a good rest to be able to start over. If you can do that over 4 days, you can do it over 5. A standard 7-8 hours a day allows both for breaks during the day, and good rest overnight so I don't believe that it is "ridiculous" to think that it is sustainable over 5 days. (Happy to be proved wrong).

As an anecdote or personal experience, I think we've all been in offices (all/most offices?) where people were not exactly flat out all day long...
by IX-103 | 2025-04-10 15:25:45+00:00
Unions are a bad solution to the problem of companies not vaulting their employees. Unfortunately, without altruism by the corporations or governments action, they are also the only effective solution.

I'd prefer we look to other countries that have solved the problem in other ways, such as including representatives of the employees in the board.

Also, we need to remember that corporations exist at the mercy of the state, having received a special dispensation (corporate charter) to exist. Those companies that are not a net benefit to society have no right to exist and ought to be dissolved.
by cratermoon | 2025-04-10 15:25:50+00:00
> You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas

This is exactly what Dr. L. J. Hart-Smith wrote in "Out-Sourced Profits – The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting", a paper from 2001 https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2014130646...

See also How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/, where the author asks, "In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain?"

Once you've outsourced everything except the management work, the organization forgets how to do the thing they're supposed to be managing.
by slibhb | 2025-04-10 15:26:38+00:00
LLMs are statistical models trained on human-generated text. They aren't the perfectly logical "machine brains" that Asimov and others imagined.

The upshot of this is that LLMs are quite good at the stuff that he thinks only humans will be able to do. What they aren't so good at (yet) is really rigorous reasoning, exactly the opposite of what 20th century people assumed.
by duxup | 2025-04-10 15:26:44+00:00
A few times a year I end up in a TSA line where one TSA person is shouting instructions to everyone, and 20 feet away the next is countermanding those instructions and seems exasperated that everyone is doing the wrong thing.

It's such a bad joke.

A few years ago I went through an airport that had a dog checking everyone. The handler was struggling to get the dog to do his job, people were not being checked, dog / puppy just wanted to play.
by rambambram | 2025-04-10 15:26:53+00:00
You have way more advanced needs than I have for a calendar, but I've also been thinking of using a self-hosted solution. The realization for this came when I started noticing all kinds of appointments by email came with a notification attached to add the event to your calendar. I'm talking Gmail here, and I suppose my smartphone was going to add it to my standard Android calendar or something (I didn't try). Then I realized I didn't even like the UI/UX of my standard Android calendar.

I only need to manually add some appointments per week (not even every day, I'm a lucky guy) and realized I do not even need a grid layout for my calendar.

Having worked with times and dates in my favorite programming language already, I feel confident I can make something simple based on the standard default classes.

Even running something as simple and important as a calendar through third-party apps has started feeling very strange the last years.
by QueensGambit | 2025-04-10 15:27:09+00:00
Not yet. @promptrepo/score relies on token-level logprobs, which OpenAI exposes for their models. But, Anthropic’s Claude currently doesn’t expose token-level confidence (like logprobs) in their API. So, we can’t support Claude until they do. We’d love to add support if/when Claude exposes this capability.
by abuckenheimer | 2025-04-10 15:27:37+00:00
excellent explanation, to add to this since I was curious about the composition, '%c' is an integer presentation type that tells python to format numbers as their corresponding unicode characters[1] so

'%c' * (length_of_string_to_format) % (number, number, ..., length_of_string_to_format_numbers_later)

is the expression being evaluated here after you collapse all of the 1s + math formatting each number in the tuple as a unicode char for each '%c' escape in the string corresponding to its place in the tuple.

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#format-specifi...
by js8 | 2025-04-10 15:28:16+00:00
> By embracing that complementary relationship, we can advance as a society and be free to do the things that only humans can do.

This complementarity already exists in our brains. We have evolutionary older parts of brain that deal with our basic needs through emotions and evolutionary younger neocortex that deals with rational thought. They have complicated relationship, both can influence our actions, through mutual interaction. Morality is managed by both, neither of them is necessarily more "humane" than the other.

In my view, AI will be just another layer, an additional neocortex. Our biological neocortex is capable of tracking un/cooperative behavior of around 100 people of the tribe, and allows us to learn couple useful skills for life.

The "personal AI neocortex" will track behavior of 8 billion people on the planet, and will have mastery of all known skills. It is gonna change humans for the better, I have little doubt about it.
by lukev | 2025-04-10 15:28:34+00:00
As a follow-up, this is true not only at the level of individual experience but at the societal level.

"AI" is supposed to make our lives better. Proponents want it to replace soul-crushing, boring clerical work, to free us up for things more meaningful to us, which for many people is to create and consume art.

Why do tech people keep having the impulse to replace the best parts of being human?

Are you really telling me that the vast corpus of human-generated creative writing isn't enough for you, and you have an itch to read something that can only be written by an AI? That seems crazy to me.

...or are you just a publisher, and wish you could make more money without needing to pay those pesky human authors? And in that case, I won't try to argue with you -- just give you a heartfelt middle finger.
by ctrlp | 2025-04-10 15:29:11+00:00
If you ever find yourself driving West to East with some extra time, Route 70 from I10/125 junction at Las Crucas on up to Alamogordo and on up to Roswell is a phenomenally pretty drive. The long slope straight slope coming down from Dripping Springs into White Sands is uniquely strange. And the mountains around the Sierra Blanca are cool and refreshing after the dry desert valley. One of many wonderful American Scenic Byways. For anyone who loves to drive, I always go out of my way to take them. https://scenicbyways.info/
by archerx | 2025-04-10 15:29:13+00:00
Google’s A.I. is the least interesting and most useless in my experience. I use a lot of local models and the Gemma models have always been a waste of time, even the new ones.

Mistral, Llama, Deepseek, Qwen, Exaone and etc have been more useful.

I feel like Google has been spending a lot on PR lately because my experience does not match some of the weird praise I see them getting lately.
by sharpshadow | 2025-04-10 15:29:19+00:00
It’s awesome what our gut micro biome does for us. We literally don’t eat our meals but let them eat by microorganisms and absorb their poop. Best example is serotonin of which most gets produced from gut bacteria. An astonishing 90% of it. From tryptophan if I recall correctly. Depending how many of those serotonin producing MO you have the faster and more you can replenish.

Fecal transplants are a cool thing but there is a next step to this. Genetically modified microorganisms for our gut.
by damnesian | 2025-04-10 15:29:34+00:00
Unless they are brown recluses, I generally leave my household spiders be. Wolf spiders don't want to encounter me, either, and I am quite sure they are why the odd cricket that finds its way into our concrete slab dining room disappears quickly, that works for me. and there are others here and there that have set themselves up in discreet places near doors and windows. I'm not a germophobe or arachnophobe, we live in relative peace.
by sixothree | 2025-04-10 15:29:36+00:00
Agreed. Their timing was not right. But once Windows 95 hit, it was over. Also, the RAM requirements made it pretty much impossible for people to recommend to their friends and family.

I really had a special fondness for OS/2. But using it today, it really is a quirky thing. Maybe if it had won I wouldn't be thinking that way.
by Philpax | 2025-04-10 15:29:42+00:00
> Despite the flood of benchmark-tuned LLMs, we remain nowhere close to engineering a machine intelligence rivaling that of a cat or a dog, let alone within the next 5 to 10 years.

Depends on your definition of "intelligence." No, they can't reliably navigate the physical world or have long-term memories like cats or dogs do. Yes, they can outperform them on intellectual work in the written domain.

> Does their existence make you obsolete?

Imagine if for everything you tried to do, there was someone else who could do it better, no matter what domain, no matter where you were, and no matter how hard you tried. You are not an economically viable member of society. Some could deal with that level of demoralisation, but many won't.
by pmags | 2025-04-10 15:29:49+00:00
Job cuts at the US traffic safety regulator instigated by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency disproportionately hit staff assessing self-driving risks...

The NHTSA, which has been a thorn in Tesla’s side for years, has eight active investigations into the company after receiving—and publishing—more than 10,000 complaints from members of the public...

Oligarchy and self-dealing are what pass for public policy these days in Washington, DC.
by felipemesquita | 2025-04-10 15:29:55+00:00
It’s nice that the phone app is free and works without the device. I’m curious about how “Hardcore Mode (optional)” could work, which the page describes as “Locks apps for the entire focus session with no way to bypass it. The only way to unlock them is a full phone reset.”

I could not find this in the app, maybe it’s Android only, an upcoming feature, or requires the Busy Bar hardware device.
by taeric | 2025-04-10 15:30:14+00:00
This fits my observations, as well. I do think there is a set of hyper focused gym people that are looking to optimize their health choices. And in that crowd, I suspect they have largely dropped alcohol. Among the generally active, though, a large driver of that activity is social contact. And moderate drinking is still quite high in most social settings. (Well, at least here in the US.)

Now, again, I want to stress that I don't think my mental model has alcohol as healthy. Especially not to the level that I find I will drink, if given the chance. It is not the highest factor, though.
Show HN: FastAPI-MCP to expose FastAPI endpoints as MCP tools
by tadata | 2025-04-10 15:30:19+00:00
I built FastAPI-MCP as an open-source library, and recently had to completely refactor it, abandoning FastMCP wrappers in favor of the low-level MCP SDK. The new version gives more control over which endpoints are exposed, supports complex request bodies, and allows flexible routing options. I wrote about the technical journey and lessons learned here: https://medium.com/@miki_45906/advanced-mcps-in-python-how-t...

Looking for feedback and contributors who are interested in MCPs!
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-04-10 15:30:26+00:00
I think public health officials should be able to make content moderation recommendations to publishers. In fact, I think they have a responsibility to do so. If someone is knowingly publishing false information which could harm people, public health officials have a responsibility to at least offer counter-guidance to the publisher and make objections clear. They obviously don't have the right to silence them, but they don't do that already.

To me, we should be less concerned with how a platform is moderated and more concerned with the fact that the most successful, influential, and devious publishing empire in human history is essentially the personal property of one man.
by kelipso | 2025-04-10 15:30:32+00:00
It would be rewarding bad behavior though. Since there would then be no incentive to stop, voting for Harris would increase the likelihood of the Democrats continuing to skip primaries or promote candidates from within while ignoring their lack of popularity in the primaries.

I don’t believe in voting for the lesser of two evils. It’s a myopic viewpoint that doesn’t take into account long term consequences.

People can rationally look at the long term benefits vs short term risks and rationally vote for Trump. It is extremely hubristic to think that people who don’t agree with you politically are stupid or irrational.
by sightbroke | 2025-04-10 15:30:35+00:00
The spice melange

https://youtu.be/pEQREIDUJ88?si=VNjyge_0SMIY5Yjo

I did not expect South Park satire to be that accurate.

Gut health is looking like it'll be a major part of medicine for the 21st century like vaccines and antibiotics were for the 20th
by chneu | 2025-04-10 15:30:37+00:00
Oo fun idea.

I'd expand on that and say that we're forcing computers onto people who don't understand them in the first place, which aligns with what you're saying.

The same number of people are interested in tech/computers and want to have a deeper understanding, but because tech has become so required, we're seeing people who are only going to do the bare minimum.

Interesting idea.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-10 15:31:32+00:00
Believe me, I would have loved to have seen hands on wheels. It'd be great if people who cared about the Democratic party messing up would actually bother to show up to breathe some life into the party; party events are published, offices have addresses, local and state government positions go up for election far more often than Presidents do.

Instead, I saw Americans stay home, again, and Trump get elected, again. It would appear, sadly, Americans are getting the government they're willing to put in the effort to have. All the resources in the world to stop these circumstances and they didn't use them.

Ah, well. Pax Americana was a pretty good run. We got the Internet out of it. Hopefully, the reshuffling of global power into something that replaces it will be even better.