MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by t0lo | 2025-04-14 02:55:32+00:00
Based on the 2020 Oxford report on state actor manipulation it's insanely prolific. 57 Countries use bot accounts, 79 countries use human propaganda accounts. This is a top 5 pressing issue of our times. I violently hate how little the public is informed by their governments about it.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulati... (Press release)

https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/202... (Actual report) (Very interesting, if you're only reading one report this month...-> goes into depth in what sectors in each country with cyber troops are involved, ie state, influencers, political parties, ngos, and which countries use human or bot.)

other: government control of media on the rise globally https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2024/10/22/government-co...
by pmags | 2025-04-14 02:55:55+00:00
My interests are science, science policy, public health, infectious disease, education, law and economic policy. Those are all undergoing radical changes in the US, and those changes seem worthy of discussion.

Judging by your submission history, your interests seem to lean towards AI and science. Sometimes you even post the same article twice (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43647984, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655440).

Interestingly you seem to post a decent number of articles of the type you are complaining about with respect to my submissions (science policy, economic policy). Here are some of your own recent postings that would seem to fall under the umbrellas of science policy, economic policy, public health, etc:

• Does US science have a future in Antarctica? Trump cuts threaten fieldwork -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43625553

• 154M lives and counting: 5 charts reveal the power of vaccines -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43617884

• Samsung under pressure as US tariffs rattle South Korean economy -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43647001

• Separated by a Border, but with Fates Entwined (news.harvard.edu) -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43646630

• Delta Air Lines had been expecting a record year. Then a trade war broke out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43635006

• The 'ghost reporters' writing pro-Russian propaganda in West Africa -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43616096

• Center for Public Integrity Is Shutting Down -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43552540

Your own comment history is "interesting" in that they seem to be pages and pages of "Previously" and "Discussion" links but you seem to rarely contribute meaningfully to discussions.
by serverlessmania | 2025-04-14 02:56:02+00:00
MCP allows LLM clients you don’t control—like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or VSCode—to interact with your API. Without it, you’d need to build your own custom client using the LLM API, which is far more expensive than just using existing clients like ChatGPT or Claude with a $20 subscription and teaching them how to use your tools.

I built an MCP server that connects to my FM hardware synthesizer via USB and handles sound design for me: https://github.com/zerubeus/elektron-mcp.
by wavemode | 2025-04-14 02:56:57+00:00
I could certainly see the appeal of this sort of idea. Once your engineering org gets to a certain size, you can end up spending an eye-watering amount of money on CI compute - spinning up runners and executing thousands of tests for every single commit of every single pull request. That cost could decrease by a lot if, for PRs at least, you could use the dev's local machine instead.

The three prerequisites in my mind would be, that the CI workflow runs inside a local cluster of VMs (to match a real CI environment), that the results of the CI run are still uploaded and published somewhere, and that it's only used for pull requests (whereas a real CI is still used for the main branch).
by hibikir | 2025-04-14 02:57:28+00:00
It really depends of the stage of the startup. I recall reading someone doing analysis on this (unfortunately I don't have a link) showing that joining a company that isnt public yet, but is already large-ish and showing some real product-market fit gets people better payouts. Yes, employees 1-40 of a future unicorn will to great (if they could afford to buy the shares, and AMT doesn't kill them which is another story), but it's relatively safe to get into a company that hasn't IPO'd yet.

Imagine say, that you joined Stripe in 2014. By then, probably 500-1000 employees and a a real name on the industry, yet private. It's perfectly reasonable to not consider the stock they might have offered at that time as straight out money, like you'd have treated Google RSUs. But discounting the shares to zero, or just "a nice bonus" is also silly. I bet anyone that got a year or two of stock in that era is well into the retire-early/somewhat rich cadre, and that wasn't all much of a risk.
by ddxv | 2025-04-14 02:58:00+00:00
Looking to add traffic analysis to my free mobile app intelligence platform AppGoblin (https://appgoblin.info), I needed to get an emulator up and running with a way to track the HTTPs traffic leaving the app.

I’ve done this a couple years now, writing down my notes in github.com/ddxv/mobile-network-traffic and it never seems to get any easier , but at least this year it seemed like I needed fewer tools.

Sharing as a public resource, reach out if you're interested in helping or have anything you think should be researched.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-04-14 02:59:01+00:00
I used to amuse myself thinking up attacks against the Chinese room. One was to have an actual Chinese professor feed answers into the room but force the conclusion that there was no intelligence. Another was to simplify the Chinese room experiment to apply to a Turing machine instead, requiring a very large lookup table which would surely give the game away.

I think ultimately I decided the Chinese room experiment was actually flawed and didn't reveal what it purported to reveal. From a neurophysiological viewpoint: The chinese room is very much the cartesian theater, and Searle places himself as the little man watching the screen. Since the cartesian theater does not exist, he's never going to see a movie.

I might be missing a more subtle point of Searle's though; maybe the chinese room experiment should be read differently?
by rvz | 2025-04-14 02:59:07+00:00
Another article accurately critiquing the short-comings of this terrible "spec".

This is exactly why MCP is hardly a mature standard and was not designed to be secure at all making it acceptable for AI agents to claim to execute commands but could also be stealing your credentials or running a totally different command such or could download malware.

The spec appears to to be designed by 6 month-old vibe-coding developers learning Javascript with zero scrutiny rather than members of the IETF at leading companies with maximum scrutiny.

Next time, Anthropic should consult professionals that have developed mature standards for decades and learn from bad standards such as JWT and Oauth.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-14 03:00:18+00:00
It's sad that support for these things always seems to just disappear. All software maintainers have to do is not touch it and not break it, and it would work forever, but no, they can't help themselves. Out of boredom of old things, they drop this... out of convenience, they deprecate that... and out of a refactor, they forget to keep thus... and suddenly, software that once worked fine is now gone. It's up to archivists and tinkerers to constantly fix these mistakes and restore these old platforms.
by Barrin92 | 2025-04-14 03:01:01+00:00
>I wonder if his books would have been as good if PKD hadn't been so fucked up as a person

I can't even see how most of them would've existed to be honest. Most of P.K. Dick's work is about his mental issues in particular in combination with the psychedelic culture he was surrounded by. Always loved the attribution in A Scanner Darkly:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8446272-this-has-been-a-nov...
by rtpg | 2025-04-14 03:02:01+00:00
I do like the idea of a variant of this that also includes some signing and logs that share, well, more of the state involved in this.

This sort of work would likely mean that test suites would be built in a way to be run in a more diverse sets of environments. That leads to just less brittle tests overall, and hopefully a better foundation to debug things.
by WoodenChair | 2025-04-14 03:02:02+00:00
If you're looking for a late PPC Mac to run esoteric PPC operating systems or PPC Mac stuff, the MDD G4 is a great machine if you need dual processors, expandability, and more than 1 GB of RAM.

But if you don't, you're much better off getting a Mac mini G4. I'm biased because I have a hobby business selling SSD upgraded ones running a hacked Mac OS 9 [0]. But compared to the MDD G4, the Mac mini G4:

- Uses a fraction of the energy

- Takes up a fraction of the space

- Largely can run the same operating systems

- Is much quieter (as the article alludes to, the MDD G4 is loud)

- For single core can actually be faster going all the way up to 1.5 GHz (MDD can go there with an accelerator)

- Has more integrated parts so has less parts that can fail

There are some cons to the G4 mini versus the MDD G4 though:

- Almost no expandability

- Limited to 1 GB of RAM

- No dual processors

- The hacked version of Mac OS 9 needs USB sound and some models can have some display incompatibilities at high resolutions

But for the vast majority of applications these don't matter much.

0: https://os9.shop
by michaelsshaw | 2025-04-14 03:02:03+00:00
>There's no colonial endeavor. Jewish people returning to their historical homeland is not a colonial endeavour.

That's crazy because Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, definitely defined it as a colonial endeavour.

You should read his book: "The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question", it's quite enlightening on exactly where this movement began and its historical motivations, which is absolutely the same MO as modern Israel.

Also the notion that people who are over 1000 years removed from a piece of land coming to violently remove current residents from their homes and massacre and imprison them for over 70 years isn't colonialism is absolutely ludicrous. Please seriously think about this sentence again. Think about it hard, like, harder than you've ever thought before.

>Arab expansion in the middle east is a colonial endeavor.

It's clear after you typed these first two sentences that you're probably a genocidal maniac, like approximately 57 percent of the Israeli population who believe that the current amount of force used is still not enough.

>Arab countries recognized the Jewish people's legitimate rights in the region and were looking for peace we'd have peace a long time ago.

There is absolutely zero legitimacy to the Zionist regime.
by awesome_dude | 2025-04-14 03:02:38+00:00
> There is no way that any sound contract law will grant any weight to the term "implied".

Nobody is suggesting that any law would.

> Either it is written (and agreed) or not.

Yet you managed to infer things that weren't in the post.

> So, I would say anything that is not explicit is meaningless in term of contract law.

Again, where is anybody saying anything to the contrary?
by pclmulqdq | 2025-04-14 03:03:12+00:00
Supersymmetry is on its last legs after the LHC didn't find any supersymmetric particles. WIMPs and other dark matter particles are now no longer speculated to be on the menu because they are too light for this energy range.

There's lots of "could" in your own post and your sources. Very little "will" - as in "will test X theory."
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-14 03:03:15+00:00
A bridge too far atm?

Here's an (intermediate) interpolate: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19643v3

"CUBITT [10]"

E: TIGR- EAB reminds gen++ to choose their parents wisely

The correct and elegant thing, I felt, was to be of gentle birth but to have no money.
by ungreased0675 | 2025-04-14 03:03:22+00:00
When a stock analyst creates a report, they’re doing quite a bit of technical analysis mixed with subjective judgment. An LLM is doing none of that, but guessing what that report might look like, based on no underlying analysis. It’s vibe investing.

I don’t believe this is an appropriate application for an LLM, unless it’s mixed with another program that does some fundamentals analysis based on historical data. That could be interesting.
by pmags | 2025-04-14 03:04:22+00:00
I take it you missed / didn't read the response immediately above yours where I cited data on malnutrition related deaths in the US?

• Mostafa, N., Sayed, A., Rashad, O. et al. Malnutrition-related mortality trends in older adults in the United States from 1999 to 2020. BMC Med 21, 421 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03143-8
Ask HN: Would you pay real customers for photo/video reviews?
by revuugc | 2025-04-14 03:05:21+00:00
I’ve been frustrated watching brands endlessly email customers for photo or video reviews — most get ignored or end up in spam folders. So I built https://revuplatform.com: Customers upload content after using the product If approved, they’re paid real cash via PayPal No influencers, no coupons, no fake reviews I’m curious — would you use something like this if you ran an ecommerce store? Or do most brands still prefer store credit / automated review apps like Loox or Judge.me? Feedback, roast, suggestions welcome
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-14 03:08:58+00:00
I love the editing in Mastodon. My schizotypal brain will always make mistakes no matter how hard I try and being able to edit what I wrote afterwards make me comfortable and it is good for my readers.

Unfortunately a lot of people like to play hateful games on those platforms and the argument is that jerks will edit what the wrote to make repliers look bad or crazy.
by thayne | 2025-04-14 03:09:16+00:00
Even if you accept that "web" is niche (which I don't), and all your input is trusted not to be malicious (which is not necessarily true for non-web applications, especially if they are privileged), you still need to worry about input with special characters causing bugs. Web apps don't have a monopoly on using a database, or generating strings in a specific syntax that includes user input.

With respect to compilation, that is basically is how t-strings work, but it is the python interpreter that does the compilation. When it parses the t-string, it compiles it to (byte) code to generate a Template object from from the expressions in scope when it is evaluated, which may happen more than once. And if you really want a template that is a separate object that is passed the values separately, you can just wrap a t-string in a function that takes the parameters as arguments.

> two dozen templating libraries that offer much more comprehensive safe and fast text-generation solutions than what t-strings do

But t-strings allow those libraries to be safer (users are less likely to accidentally interpolate values in an f-string, if a t-string is required) and possibly faster (since the python interpreter does the hard work of splitting up the string for you. t-strings don't replace those libraries, it allows them to be better.
by raddan | 2025-04-14 03:10:30+00:00
It’s wild that OpenBSD still supports the architectures it does. I literally learned how to program on a G4 Mac running OpenBSD back in 2000. I think it was version 3.0 but I don’t really remember. It was a wonderful experience, and I chose OpenBSD because it was the only UNIX-like OS I could get to boot on that machine (I struggled to understand Debian’s esoteric instructions for weeks before I gave up). OpenBSD, by contrast, had essentially the same install program it has to this day. At the time, there were no printed books for OpenBSD, but I read the (surprisingly good) man pages and supplemented with a used copy of the FreeBSD handbook I bought on eBay. Good times.
by rvz | 2025-04-14 03:11:19+00:00
Totally agree.

It appears Anthropic developed this "standard" in a vacuum with no scrutiny or review and it turns out it's riddled with horrific security issues, ignored by those hyping up the "standard" for more VC money.

Reminds me of the micro-services hype, which that helps the big cloud providers more than it helps startups with less money even with some over-doing it and being left with enormous amount of technical debt and complex diagrams costing them millions to run.
by halfcat | 2025-04-14 03:11:56+00:00
Can you clarify what angle of the existing solution you don’t like? The example you give of the Unix pipeline is pretty similar to what we do with pandas pipeline chains.

(pd.read_json(…) .join(pd.read_json(…)) .assign( texts=…, embeddings=…, ) .pipe(extract_something) .query(some_filter) .pipe(send_somewhere, batch=50))

(this is just thrown together, untested, on mobile, and I’m not sure what your data looks like exactly, or how you’re transforming it, but that’s the general form)

Is it the syntax you don’t like, or your data is too large to fit in memory, or what aspect? This can certainly be made more concise if desired, if we want to wrap things in classes, decorators, context managers, overload the actual pipe operator, or other syntactic sugar mechanisms.

Most tools you find will be aimed at handling scale, and in the name of efficiency will therefore be in a columnar form, which is why you see a bunch of tools that do this already but only on tabular data. JSON is slow to work with beyond the initial load, so often you’d see it loaded into pandas or polars, maybe with minor transformation, then dumped to parquet files for some downstream tool to pick up and process.

These systems are also geared toward being robust. In a real world system there are all kinds of unexpected errors to handle. What happens if the API you’re pushing to is down, or starts rate limiting you, or someone added a new field or renamed a field or your two data sets don’t have matching keys? Real pipelines have to account for this, and depending on your scenario you might want to retry, or roll back changes, and this can get ridiculously complicated because in API land you often don’t have any analogous concept of transactions and rollback like exist in SQL, so without a distributed transaction coordinator (it’s own complexity), streaming data will lead to distributed systems drifting out of sync. And now you need a batch job on top of your streaming data to ensure it hasn’t fallen out of sync (so in reality, unless you have heavy complexity needs, just use SQL so you have transactions, or just use batch jobs).

But that’s the reason you don’t see this record-based fire-and-forget approach, because it’s too slow and lacks error handling, and why instead everything is columnar and heavyweight (with DAGs and workflow orchestrators etc).

Maybe I’m missing your point, but your Python code could definitely be as concise as any of the other examples you gave.
by red75prime | 2025-04-14 03:12:34+00:00
The Chinese Room didn't show anything. It's a misleading intuition pump that for some reason is being brought up again and again.

Just think about it. All the person in the room does are mechanical manipulations. The person's understanding or not understanding of Chinese language is causally disconnected from everything including functioning of the room. There's zero reasons to look at their understanding to make conclusions about the room.

The second point is that it's somehow about syntactic manipulation specifically. But why? What would change if the person in the room is solving QM-equations of your brain quantum state? Would it mean that the perfect model of your brain doesn't understand English language?
by dghlsakjg | 2025-04-14 03:12:35+00:00
You are quoting yourself not the article or me?

No evidence besides the direct testimony of a person that worked on the project given to one of the best biographers in a piece of work that won a Pulitzer Prize. Also, the physical evidence of the bridges. Circumstantially, the man was openly racist, and openly used design to segregate.

The assertion isn’t that you couldn’t take a bus to the beach. The assertion is that you couldn’t take a bus from the inner city neighborhoods to Jones Beach, which was true.
by LarsAlereon | 2025-04-14 03:13:06+00:00
I read over the FAQ, seems interesting but kind of overcomplicated. The key principles (as I understand) are:

1. Source biomass that would have burned or decayed to atmosphere in a relatively short time without intervention, such as forestry or farming residues. This lets you say that any Carbon you don't release to the atmosphere is Carbon removal, but these materials tend to be difficult to consistently source and are energy-intensive to transport due to low density.

2. Use gasification to turn the hydrocarbon content into syngas, Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide. Gasification is nice because you don't release pollutants like heavy metals as readily as regular combustion, and you can easily clean the gas of any pollutants that were released before burning it.

3. Combust the syngas with pure Oxygen in something that sounds like a rocket engine. Burning pure fuel and Oxygen creates much higher temperatures and efficiencies than when the Oxygen is diluted with "inert" gases, and you don't have to worry about NOx production.

4. Separate the water and CO2, leaving a pure supercritical CO2 exhaust stream. This is the part they seem most vague about, maybe centrifugal separation based on density?

5. Use a high-efficiency turbine to extract energy from the post-combustion supercritical CO2. They say this can power all of the other steps including the pure Oxygen production and still be energy-positive.

6. After extracting all possible energy, inject the resulting CO2 underground in rock formations of minerals rich in oxides that can both contain the CO2 and react with it to form carbonates, permanently storing it.

The biggest question marks for me are the process to burn the syngas and remove the water, whether the CO2 turbine will actually be energy-positive given all the energy costs, the energy costs of sourcing and transporting the biomass, and how well geological CO2 sequestration actually works (does the CO2 react with rock before leaking out into the air?).

My favorite CO2 removal concept is pyrolysis, which bakes material to release hydrocarbon gases and vapors which can be refined to replace petroleum or burned for energy, leaving behind Carbon-rich charcoal which doesn't easily break down. When sourced from biomass this charcoal can be a useful soil amendment for farms, or when sourced from waste that may have heavy metals or other toxic ingredients it can be landfilled with much higher density than the source material. It seems like the carbon sequestration of charcoal is much more proven than burying CO2 underground, and its a lot easier to site a waste-to-energy plant near a landfill than an appropriate rock deposit.
by antifa | 2025-04-14 03:14:35+00:00
As much as that might be true to some degree, I doubt most people are comparing China's best to their grandparent's collapsed barnhouse in the boonies. The best I've seen (NYC is the best I'll publicly mention, but also a few other east coast cities) basically look like Ravenholm compared to the photos/videos of what's coming out of China.
by firecall | 2025-04-14 03:15:25+00:00
Agreed about purpose being a loaded term.

It's my, somewhat lazy, philosophical opinion, that there isn't any purpose and there doesn't need to be one.

I don't see why the universe would need a purpose for anything. Things are what they. Things changing state. Entropy.

I see reproduction as more of built in motivation to our system than a purpose as such. But that's semantics, and my purpose in life is not to argue about words! ;-)