MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KallDrexx | 2025-04-14 03:47:02+00:00
Feel free to write up any issues in the repo if you encounter them. It's likely to encounter MSIL opcodes that my transpiler is missing support for.

Also the pvsneslib docs will probably be crucial for working with the SNES in general.

The Maven 2 SNES emulator was pretty useful for debugging. If you are on windows there's also a no$sns emulator that pvsnseslib has console message support for debugging.

I'm not going to promise it's a super polished effort in its current state :)
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-04-14 03:47:14+00:00
If one must toil for 25 years, then such a person is still in the working class. A few years of high inflation, terribly high medical costs, damage to a house that insurance won't cover, etc, etc, can ruin even a "wealthy" person in the working class. The oligarchs, however, are living in another plane of existence than the rest of us.
by lotyrin | 2025-04-14 03:47:39+00:00
Plenty of instruments are more accessible to noobs than others. Some instruments require incredibly precise dexterity, ability to perceive pitch, and knowledge of accidental complexity inherited from musical history, while others attempt to avoid this and some of those succeed to differing degrees.

Plenty of UIs are objectively deficient in their accessibility, especially to those with poor working memory or cognitive abilities. Many UIs require rote repetition of arcane rituals or inobvious language, exploration through a space of modes, actions, states which aren't immediately clear or discoverable. Some of this can be made up for through effort, but it's not always inherent complexity being reflected, much of it is accidental.
by za3faran | 2025-04-14 03:47:46+00:00
We know Jews that lived in Syria - their houses are still intact and held for their owners. I already referred to a youtube interview with one you can easily find. He speaks positively of the Syrians.

Islam is very well known to protect the rights of minorities under it, especially the People of the Book: the Jews and the Christians.

By the way, what does the word "Hebrew" mean? Those that crossed the river ;) So someone lived there before the Jews - the Caananites, i.e. the Palestinians. The same people who became Jews and Christians, then Muslims.

Arabs and Muslims did not force anyone off their land. Ottomans did not kick out anyone under the ruling of Islam. The Ottoman Caliphate was an Islamic rule at its peak, not an ethno-rule as some like to falsely claim. Muslims preserve the local culture - this is why Islam spread. And that is why you will see Kung Fu styles adapted by Muslim rituals like Wudu'. Islam does not erradicate the local culture, people accepted it because of the positive interactions they had with Muslims. This is why most Muslims are not Arabs.

When pan-turkism and pan-arabism did arise (due to several reasons, but also instigated by the west, the story of Lawrence of Arabia is well known), that was a big reason to the decline of the Ottoman Caliphate, of course other factors played a role, but it was against the teachings of Islam.

There was no "Saudi Arabia" back in the day lol.

Yes, we reject all of the european colonialist projects and fake borders in the ME. Post WWI european colonization has caused nothing but destruction everywhere it touched, including India - that's why they sought liberation. Divide and conquer is the name of the game. The established view in Islam is that all Muslims are one people, and no borders between us, from Indoesia all the way to Mauritania. Bilad Al-Sham are one, not the sykes-picot borders that they carved out.

Edit: why are they allowed to do this: https://x.com/trackingisrael/status/1911148565692362904
by polygot | 2025-04-14 03:47:50+00:00
I could _maybe, maybe_ see self-hosted GitHub runners inside of VMs running on developer machines. The VMs would have to be re-created after every request however.

I don't think this is a great idea, however, as now CI is dependent on my flaky laptop's wifi/internet connection/IP address, has the potential to be contaminated by something running on my machine, build logs can be modified, environment shape/architectures are all different and can't be easily controlled, I now have access to all of the CI secrets and can impersonate the CI, etc.
by EigenLord | 2025-04-14 03:48:19+00:00
The author makes good general points but seems to be overloading MCP's responsibilities imo. My understanding of MCP is that it just provides a ready-made "doorway" for LLMs to enter and interact with externally managed resources. It's a bridge or gateway. So is it really MCP's fault that it:

>makes it easier to accidentally expose sensitive data.

So does the "forward" button on emails. Maybe be more careful about how your system handles sensitive data. How about:

>MCP allows for more powerful prompt injections.

This just touches on wider topic of only working with trusted service providers that developers should abide by generally. As for:

>MCP has no concept or controls for costs.

Rate limit and monitor your own usage. You should anyway. It's not the road's job to make you follow the speed limit.

Finally, many of the other issues seem to be more about coming to terms with delegating to AI agents generally. In any case it's the developer's responsibility to manage all these problems within the boundaries they control. No API should have that many responsibilities.
by chongli | 2025-04-14 03:48:35+00:00
The Chinese Room argument is silent on the question of the necessary and sufficient conditions for intelligence, thinking, and understanding. It’s an argument against philosophical functionalism in the theory of mind which states that it is sufficient to compare inputs and outputs of a system to infer intelligence.

The Chinese Room is also an argument that mere symbolic manipulation is insufficient to model a human mind.

As for the QM-equations, the many-body problem in QM is your enemy. You would need a computer far larger than the entire universe to simulate the quantum states of a single neuron, never mind a human brain.
by cmsparks | 2025-04-14 03:49:17+00:00
MCP isn't static. It explicitly includes support for dynamically modifying tools, resources, etc via it's client notifications[0]. Sure, context is usually opaque to the server itself (unless you use the sampling feature[1]), but there's nothing preventing MCP clients/hosts from adjusting or filtering tools on their own.

[0] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/ser...

[1] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/cli...
by Aaron2222 | 2025-04-14 03:49:36+00:00
> Can you see the small text of individual items of the Word ribbon?

I tried with my Xreal Air on Windows and macOS, and yes, it's quite legible.

Do bear in mind that although the screen is quite close to your eyes, the optics makes the apparent distance quite far. So if you're short-sighted, you will need prescription inserts. I also have some issues with some corners of the screen being slightly cut off, probably a combination of the inserts which I ordered locally as well as the fixed IPD of the older Xreal glasses (the newer Xreal One should be better here with its software IPD adjustment, the Xreal One Pro also comes in two different sizes for different IPD ranges). I also noticed some of the text on the right side of the Word ribbon was a bit blurry, which might be due to the inserts. But in general, I find the display quality great for video, and perfectly good for web browsing (not as good as a Hi-DPI display, but perfectly usable).
by koakuma-chan | 2025-04-14 03:49:40+00:00
> I genuinely cannot see how Rust would be able to scale to something usable for all system applications the way it is now. Is every graphical application supposed to duplicate and statically link the entire set of GNOME/GTK or KDE/Qt libraries it needs? The system would become ginormous.

You don't have to statically link C libraries.
by xwolfi | 2025-04-14 03:50:11+00:00
Oh thanks, as a French, it's my feeling also that this is a "white people" thing in the US, to infantilize black people. I come from a country where we try to be color blind, it's very rude to tell someone his skin color (last time I checked, we were now saying "ke-bla" if we really wanted to tell that some guy was black, a verlan reversal of the English word black because it's hard to even say it in French, like Japanese have trouble to say penis lol) and we force ourselves not to "overly help them" but to "overly ignore they're different".

So it always blew my mind Americans split themselves in random colors (especially the hispanics, like, why) and enrages me the self-described "whites" are so dismissive of the ability of "black people" to be, like, completely normal and boring and able to get whatever form is needed to vote...
by cultofmetatron | 2025-04-14 03:50:14+00:00
as someone who's been using mathacademy for a few months now, I'm pretty happy with what it provides. Yes it focuses on "procedural fluency" and thats not a bad thing.

if learning mathematics was like body building, traditional classes would be the equivalent of going to a traditional classroom where you get a lecture on the various pathways to build muscle strength. its on you to spend your off ours going into the gym and doing the work. Progress might be slow becase your feedback on your "problem sets" comes back a few days later.

Mathacademy on the other hand is like having a trainer at the gym. every day they take a look at you and tell you what exercises to do and to set the difficulty. You might not know exactly how all the pieces fit together but thats ok. you're getting stronger. you are seeing progress in your ability to just power through problems.

I personally have found my algebra skills to have improved substantially. I remember factoring to be a struggle for me when I was in high school. after a few weeks of mathacademy its pretty easy now. Does it mean I have a great conceptual framework for solving real world problems? probably not but I'm in a much better position to learn that skill as a result of mathacademy.

BTW math academy guys, if you're reading this. Id LOVE a class on circuit analysis!
by d42muna | 2025-04-14 03:50:34+00:00
There are lots of examples of comedy comparable to Monty Python over the years, but with so many media outlets you kind of have to seek it out or stumble across it. Here are a few random ones that immediately spring to mind:

Green Wing [1], Channel 4 television series (UK)

Aunty Donna, Australian comedy troupe that has a lot of surrealist humour. A good introduction is this sketch [2] and their Netflix show "Aunty Donna's Big Ol' House of Fun".

The Frantics, a Canadian sketch comedy troupe. They are most known for their sketch "Boot to the Head", but their CBC radio series which ran from 1981-84 was (to me) very reminiscent of Python.

I'd imagine fans of The Mighty Boosh and Python intersect quite a bit.

The Mischief Theatre Company - the ones behind the "Goes Wrong" theatre shows, e.g. "The Play That Goes Wrong", the "The Goes Wrong Show" on BBC, etc.

Bleak Expectations by Mark Evans, BBC Radio 4 pastiche on Dickens (2007-2012) - one of my favourite pieces of comedy in any medium. Here's the first episode [3] on YouTube.

I've seen a lot of live comedy that reminded me of Python at places like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Wing>

[2] <https://youtu.be/a5FGOaz__W0>

[3] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdyYQeLR1kA>
by red75prime | 2025-04-14 03:51:10+00:00
Everything can be represented as a lookup table. Well, at least everything we can rigorously reason about. Because set theory can serve as a foundation of mathematics. And relations there are sets of pairs (essentially lookup tables).

I guess it means that we can throw away the notion that "it can be represented as a lookup table" has some profound meaning. Without further clarifications, at least. Finite/infinite lookup table, can/can't be constructed in time polynomial in the number of entries. Things like that.
by boxed | 2025-04-14 03:51:12+00:00
Humans are easily confused though. I've been 100% sure I've run the tests and haven't many times. It's quite easy to do: make a change, run the tests, fix it, run again, everything works. Make some trivial refactor that "shouldn't change anything". Your brain says "it's fine, I ran the tests, remember?" and you push. But you didn't run the tests.

"First you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest to fool"
Show HN: Resurrecting Infocom's Unix Z-Machine with Cosmopolitan
by ChristopherDrum | 2025-04-14 03:51:55+00:00
I recently brought Infocom's original UNIX z-machine source code back to life on modern systems. The modified source code, instructions on usage, a build of the z-machine, and examples of embedded game executables are available.

There is also a detailed write-up about the state of the original source code, the porting process, and the invaluable role Justine Tunney's Cosmpolitan project played in bringing the Zork trilogy (and more) to Windows/Mac/Linux/bsd for arm/x86 machines over the course of a lazy Sunday.
by wruza | 2025-04-14 03:52:20+00:00
It always bothered me that people go "ew, wikipedia" when you simply refer them to it rather than literally rewording the article (which they would accept, or at least reply with "source? source? s-s-source? so-source?" to which you could successfully post any source from the wiki article). Reference is not a proof, it's information that you have to check yourself if you want the latter. I guess same will happen with LLMs. Any link to a chat will be met by some with "ew, llm" regardless of the fact whether it's checked and informative and saves effort to formulate, or is just-generated crap. With all the issues with llms, it's us who don't understand the basics when it comes to handling the info. This is by semi-natural social design, I believe.
by dragonsky67 | 2025-04-14 03:52:26+00:00
This raises so many questions.

I'd be interested in how many people in the study from each group die off during the study... is there a larger number of people in the unmarried group dying off, thereby increasing the chance that the married group would age to the point where dementia is more likely?

The question about married people being more likely to be able to afford health care (via insurance) would seem to be a uniquely US issue... I'd be interested to see the health impact of marriage on different countries, different cultural groups etc.

Culture would seem to impact greatly on what marriage entails... many groups appear to have a strong link between marriage and cultural activities, others it allows the couple to be a self contained social group, removing the link to external socialisation.

The 50% figure seems to be pretty strong, but at least from the article it is hard to draw too many conclusions without knowing how wide the sample set of participants are.
by ezyang | 2025-04-14 03:52:35+00:00
I mean, obviously you want to run the local CI in some isolated way. But it's not such a bad idea for many projects.

At PyTorch, we have the reverse problem, it's basically infeasible to run the CI locally, you really do need the cloud setup to cover all of the operating system / hardware configurations, and the parallelization in cloud also saves you loads of time.
by robocat | 2025-04-14 03:52:40+00:00
I would add that Delphi also had a culture of component libraries and sharing code.

There were free intro libraries (no code), shareware component libraries, and usually a developer version available that came with source code. Plus a culture of open source libraries.

This community was a key strength of Delphi compared to some other choices. I suspect if Borland had really leaned into a combination of open source, plus better support for commercial proprietary solutions, that would have kept the ecosystem alive.

Also of note is that Delphi came with some source code for library components (often useful when understanding usage or debugging or extending).
by willy_k | 2025-04-14 03:53:16+00:00
> it used to be so easy to get multiple experts on anything to answer your questions.

It’s still possible to get useful answers on niche topics, but you will also get flooded with questionable sub-specific dogma, and god forbid your question is the tiniest bit obvious/unnecessary (according to the “experts” of course, never mind that it clearly wasn’t obvious to the asker)
by getnormality | 2025-04-14 03:54:05+00:00
"Stochastic parrot" is a deepity, an ambiguous phrase that blends a defensible but trivial meaning with a more profound but false meaning.

It's true, and trivial, that all next word predictors are stochastic and are designed to generate output based on information from their training data.

The claim that this generation merely "parrots" the training data is more significant, but obviously false if you interact with these models at all.
by AngryData | 2025-04-14 03:54:07+00:00
I overall agree with you, but not about these. Drones have no way to recover from any sort of mechanical or power delivery failure. They can't glide or auto-rotate and have zero control or maneuverability on any failures, they just fall straight out of the sky. In open clear areas an emergency parachute might be fine, but drone style flight is not efficient at all so not suited for longer distances and you only really need taxis in more urban areas where deploying a chute will likely just smack you into the side of a building and you fall anyways.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-04-14 03:54:08+00:00
Stafford Beers, "The Purpose of a System is What it Does (POSIWID)", very hot right now..

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
by panny | 2025-04-14 03:54:24+00:00
>It's crazy to spend 28+ hours on a train when a plane ticket is around the same cost and 2 hours.

That's like saying it's crazy not to fill your salad bowl entirely with cheese :)

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/salad

Besides, we both know it's 2 hours in line just for the TSA check sometimes. I'm very familiar with flying. I've probably logged enough air milage to circle the globe 10 times or more. I despise it. It's nothing like traveling by train. I can board a train in under 5 minutes. I don't even have to have a ticket, I can just decide to go and pay the conductor once I'm on board. Try that on a plane.
by red75prime | 2025-04-14 03:55:52+00:00
Again. It's not an argument. It's a misleading intuition pump. Or a failure of philosophy to filter away bullshit, if you will.

Please, read again what I wrote.

Regarding "larger than Universe": "the argument" places no restrictions on runtime or space complexity of the algorithm. It's just another intuitive notion: syntactic processing is manageable by a single person, other kinds of processing aren't.

I'm sorry for the confrontational tone, but I really dismayed that this thing keeps floating and keeps being regarded as a foundational result.
by ReaLNero | 2025-04-14 03:57:47+00:00
Yeah, I would say the y-axis range on charts should be set at "3-sigma likelihood of observation" thresholds. Not everything that's charted can be framed as sampling from a distribution, but the principle of manually setting chart ranges would nonetheless still apply.

For instance, if we're charting someone's body temperature, we would likely fix our y-axis to 80-110.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-14 03:58:43+00:00
If you're preserving accurate brightness, then yes obviously 99% white needs 1 black pixel out of 100 on average. Accounting for gamma. There's no line to draw. That's already part of the definition. (You can increase contrast for artistic effect, but that's a different conversation.)

And it doesn't matter if you have patterns or not. What matters is that when you look at different dithering algorithms, it's incredibly clear that some (like truly random noise) make detail very difficult to see, while others (like error diffusion) make it much easier to see.

Just look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Algorithms and observe the difference between "Random", "Ordered (void-and-cluster)", and "Floyd-Steinberg". The level of resolvable detail is obviously increasing. It's not subjective, it's literally the level of signal vs noise. How do you quantify that as a metric?

E.g. one way would be to calculate the standard deviation of the brightness in the dithered image from the original in every 4x4 set of pixels, to minimize their sum, or the sum of their squares, or something. But 4x4 is totally arbitrary, so I'm looking for something more elegant and generalizable. The point is, it shouldn't be dependent on human perception. Detail is detail. Signal is signal. So how do you prove which algorithm preserves the most detail, or prove that an algorithm preserves maximum possible detail?
by justanotherjoe | 2025-04-14 03:59:30+00:00
What I find compelling is how it works at low and high levels. Low level because we dissipate energy just by being a living creature. And the high level because as you said, we as a civilization can't seem to escape it, and want to use pockets of low entropy like mineral veins and fuels. Until all is spent i guess. You don't mention how unsympathetic that purpose is, though. At that point any purpose you make for yourself is better than that one even if it's true.
by rsanheim | 2025-04-14 04:00:23+00:00
It isn't a matter of trust, its a matter of developers are humans. Humans make mistakes, and continuous integration helps catch mistakes.

I've been coding for 25+ years, and I sometimes I forget to remove debug output, or I forget to update an explicit exception I threw somewhere, or I forget to make sure dependencies build across all the platforms we need.

Running your build a second machine helps to catch a lot of those mistakes. It also helps enforce automation and good configuration practices and lint/formatting standards and all that, but fundamentally its helps us because humans make mistakes.

CI doesn't have to mean setting up a 12 step pipeline in GH actions with 3k lines of yaml and crazy triggers and workflows. It can just be an old dev machine (https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2006/continuous-integrati...) that pulls the latest code, runs `script/build`, and POSTs results somewhere.

Maybe local signoff works for 37signals, if so, thats great. But it isn't continuous integration.
by Spivak | 2025-04-14 04:04:37+00:00
I think the author's point is that the architecture of MCP is fundamentally extremely high trust between not only your agent software and the integrations, but the (n choose 2) relationships between all of them. We're doing the LLM equivalent of loading code directly into our address space and executing it. This isn't a bad thing, dlopen is incredibly powerful with this power, but the problem being solved with MCP just isn't that level of trust.

The real level of trust is on the order OAuth flows where the data provider has a gun sighted on every integration. Unless something about this protocol and it's implementations change I expect every MCP server to start doing side-channel verification like getting an email "hey your LLM is asking to do thing, click the link to approve." Where in this future it severely inhibits the usefulness of agents in the same vein as Apple's "click the notification to run this automation."
by IAmGraydon | 2025-04-14 04:06:39+00:00
>Instead of being seen as a safe haven, U.S. debt itself started to look shaky. Maybe it was the deficit outlook, maybe the global response to tariffs — but whatever it was, yields started climbing. Fast.

Seems pretty simple to me - bond yields moved up sharply because they follow inflation expectations. Bond holders take on inflation risk, so when future inflation is expected to increase, yields go up to compensate. Out of control tariffs equals out of control inflation, which equals rocketing bond yields. The fact that Trump's team didn't realize this would happen is both hilarious and frightening. This is Econ 101 stuff.