MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rbanffy | 2025-04-27 14:46:52+00:00
> 1500 nuclear bombs is an effective deterrent

Not if ABM programs such as Golden Shield (I’m inclined to call it Phantom Menace, because it’s a crappy sequel to Star Wars) succeed. If you launch all your 1500 warheads and only 15 reach their targets, you’ll need a lot more warheads.
Show HN: Mirror AI – LLM agent that takes action, not just chat
by sat13 | 2025-04-27 14:47:49+00:00
Hi HN,

TL;DR Mirror AI is a cross-platform desktop action oriented LLM. Instead of just replying with text, it can run terminal commands, move files, hit APIs, send email/messages, schedule calendar events, query databases etc. - and chain those steps in one request.

Why I built it Chatbots are great for answers but stop at the “OK, now go do it” moment. I was copy-pasting between ChatGPT and my shell/IDE/Gmail far too often, so on red-eye flights I hacked a bridge that lets an LLM execute tasks under a permission layer. Friends asked for it, feature-creep happened, and here we are.

What it can do today - Files & Shell – read/write/rename/compress/execute files, run shell commands - Productivity – draft + send Gmail, create Google Calendar events, read/write Notion, post to Slack/Discord/WhatsApp (via Beeper) - Dev/Ops – query Postgres/Mongo, interact with GitHub, call AWS, curl any REST endpoint - Search/GenAI – web search (Perplexity), summarise PDFs, generate images/video, keep long-term memory - Extensible via MCP (Modular Command Protocol) to add your own skills - And a lot more

Example prompt after you have added a few integrations (copy-paste):

Search Reddit for discussion on LangChain streaming, summarise it, email me the summary, and block 30 min in Calendar tomorrow. OR Investigate my AWS account and tell me how to easily save money. Also check my MongoDB and make some proposition to optimize it.

How it works - Desktop app (macOS, Windows, Linux) written in TS - No SaaS backend: everything runs locally; outbound calls only hit the model provider you configure (OpenAI, Claude, local Ollama, etc.) - Safety: every risky actions require approval from the user

Status & roadmap - Free alpha download: https://themirrorai.com (bring your own API keys) - Planning to open-source core in the coming months after tidying up if there is enough interest - Up next: improved working memory, event-driven triggers for autonomous responses, and expanded integrations.

Ask Kick the tires, try weird edge-cases, look for security holes, and tell me what hurts or what you wish it did. I will be in the thread checking the comments.

Thanks! Sat
by viraptor | 2025-04-27 14:48:02+00:00
That's a seriously weird paper. They're showing different sentiment around left/right leaning people and claim lack of neutrality without even mentioning the possibility that maybe the criticised people were actually assholes.

Think about the results this way: if you inserted enough praise for Hitler into Wikipedia, their result would show Wikipedia as being more neutral. What does that say about their chosen method?
by ben_w | 2025-04-27 14:48:23+00:00
For a lot of things, yes; but — genuine Q because I'm not economically trained — on the question of dollar dominance in international trade… is PPP genuinely more relevant than nominal? I mean, this does seem to be a question about the currency itself?

Or should the question draw the boundary differently, and be asking about the size of the dollar economy rather than the US economy, with e.g. all international trade that is denominated in USD being counted?
by petercooper | 2025-04-27 14:48:50+00:00
I bet someone like Cloudflare could pull the dataset each day and serve up a plain text/Markdown version of Wikipedia for rounding error levels of spend. I just loaded a random Wikipedia page and it had a weight of 1.5MB in all for what I worked out would be about 30KB of Markdown (i.e. 50x less bandwidth).

Of course, the problem then is getting all these scrapers and bots to actually use the alternative, but Wikimedia could potentially redirect suspected clients in that direction..
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-04-27 14:48:58+00:00
So then we have proof by example that money is not a necessary incentive for people to create, no? And even if the FOSS projects eventually evolved into foundations that solicit some form of funding, they’re still mostly non-profits that are collecting just enough money to sustain their continued operations and aren’t really chasing profits and growth like regular companies do.
by throw0101b | 2025-04-27 14:52:19+00:00
> Among native peoples, sharing seems to be the default.

Greed applies to more than just 'wealth'. Honour, fame/glory, and power are all things people that people strive for and are envious about:

* https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2002.htm

Even collectivist communities have a finite supply, or a hierarchy, of those things. Le Guin explored this in The Dispossessed:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
by easygenes | 2025-04-27 14:52:26+00:00
For about a year Hono has had mature RPC. So bhvr has a type-safe RPC story without tRPC: export your AppType, import it in the browser, and hono/client gives you fully-inferred calls plus Zod-backed validation — in a ~3 kB helper instead of tRPC’s heavier client and adapters.

You still won’t get auto-generated hooks or WebSocket subscriptions, but for plain REST/JSON the old “hand-rolled fetch” drawback is gone, leaving only edge cases like hooks, real-time, and IDE scalability as the remaining trade-offs.
by eesmith | 2025-04-27 14:53:43+00:00
I assume Dr Jenny Wagner is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Wagner .

I'm a bit confused about her affiliations as that doesn't mention the Sinica Institute, but it could be out of date.

Her most recent preprint at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04135 lists three:

1. Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan. I think this is their staff page: https://www.tiara.sinica.edu.tw/people.php . It doesn't list her.

2. Helsinki Institute of Physics. https://www.hip.fi/people/ says she's an Adj. Scientist

3. Bahamas Advanced Study Institute and Conferences, which I can find little about. (See https://en.everybodywiki.com/BASIC_(institute) , but the original Wikipedia article doesn't exist.) She's been affiliated with it for a couple of years. In 2023 https://phys.org/news/2023-10-theory-abell-hazy-askew-gravit... reports she co-authored a paper "proposing a new theory to explain the unique lensing seen with Abell 3827".

Arxiv.org has 35 papers from BASIC, and 6 of them have Wagner as an author.

This all suggests to me someone who is naturally aligned to heterodox theories.

Of which there are oodles in physics.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-04-27 14:54:02+00:00
It's buried pretty deeply, but the product page does say:

> Monitor and Control your BBQ Smoker from your phone, anywhere!

> Smartfire regulates the BBQ temperature on your behalf by automatically controlling the smoker airflow supply so you aren't up all night adjusting vents.

It does feel like the kind of product where everyone involved in the company and most of their potential customers know what it is, why they want it, and how it works.

The ad copy focuses on making it attractive to people who arrive by searching for "BBQ Controller" and aren't sure which one they want. There's no real reason to try to make it approachable to people who don't even own a smoker, it's not like someone's going to impulse buy a $400 gadget to improve their experience with an activity they've never done.
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-27 14:54:43+00:00
>All that said, I assume the truth is somewhere closer to this being a collective action problem. Individual server might think that they can beat the curve (perhaps correctly, my numbers are averaged) which causes them to advocate for tips instead of more consistent wages

Precisely. Notice that I said "vast majority", certainly not all. Some people see serving as a labor to perform. Others (rightfully) see it as hospitality, and act acccordingly. It's no surprise who earns more, and who feels resentful of that. At the end of the day you are shucking and jiving to make more money than your physical labor is worth, and some people just don't get that. But the ones who do would never want to give up tips because it is an outsized form of income that a wage could never touch. Your festival example is a bit nontypical as they generally rely more on regulars at a fixed location, which is why servers will usually negotiate a higher hourly rate for things like that.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-04-27 14:55:02+00:00
Think of organizations as a kind of AI. A prosecutorial organization can take on a so-called "paperclip maximizing" dysfunction just like a standard AI. Converts the whole world to paperclips.

The solution actually is to gate the specialist AI's through a generalist process. That's what court is supposed to be, but court is less effective in the modern world.
by hyperbrainer | 2025-04-27 14:55:57+00:00
It's hard to pinpoint the problem, because I love and adore Rust. So, thank you for all the work you have put in -- it's a great language.

I feel like my biggest struggle is simply how hard (tedious?) it is to properly work with generics and some more complex applications of traits. Any time I am working with (especially writing, somehow reading is easier) these, I always take an ungodly amount of time to do anything productive.

I am almost certainly sure this is a skill issue -- I am simply not "Rusting" like I am supposed to. Maybe I overuse generics, maybe I rely on traits too much, maybe I am trying to abstract stuff away too much. But this is one of the reasons I want to also explore other languages in the space, especially ones which make it impossible for me to make this so complex.

Don't get me wrong -- all of this complexity is a joy to work with when I can use my brain. But sometimes, it's just too much effort to do stuff, and it feels like I could be getting away with less. Curiously, I never had a problem with the borrow checker, even though people often complaining about how much it forces them to "stop and think".

Another thing is that C, for some weird reason, always feels "lower level" than Rust, and seeing it gives me some sort of weird satisfaction that Rust does not. Maybe it's just a greener grass syndrome, but wanted to mention it nonetheless.

All this said, I want to just emphasise, that despite this shortcoming (if it even is one), if I were forced to choose a language to spend the rest of my life with, I would not be the least bit sad to only ever use Rust again. I absolutely love it.
by martin-t | 2025-04-27 14:56:28+00:00
"A bad plan now is better than a good plan later."

People have evolved to unify behind a strong (and aggressive) leader because historically the biggest threat to one's tribe (and therefore genes) were other tribes. You might not be in the right but it doesn't matter to evolution, what matters is that you kill the people trying to kill you, regardless of who started is.

This primitive drive is why every time the going gets tough, people elect charismatic and abusive leaders - because their lizard brain wants to fight an external enemy and abusers are good at giving people that enemy (Jews for Hitler, immigrants and gays and anybody who is slightly different for Trump, ...).

---

The issue is that for most of our evolution, such a leader could units hundreds, maybe thousands of people and if a tribe behaved aggressively and unjustly towards its neighbors, those neighbors would units against it and "keep it in check" (which is a euphemism for fighting and killing them).

But these days you have 3 superpowers, 2 of which are dictatorships and the 3rd is on track to become one. There is nobody to keep them in check.

Oh and the abusers have nukes now.
by toast0 | 2025-04-27 14:57:03+00:00
People, especially those on the Internet, say a lot of things.

Some of the things they say aren't credible, even if they're said often.

You don't need an enormous amount of ram to run zfs unless you have dedupe enabled. A lot of people thought they wanted dedupe enabled though. (2024's fast dedupe may help, but probably the right answer for most people is not to use dedupe)

It's the same thing with the "need" for ECC. If your ram is bad, you're going to end up with bad data in your filesystem. With ZFS, you're likely to find out your filesystem is corrupt (although, if the data is corrupted before the checksum is calculated, then the checksum doesn't help); with a non-checksumming filesystem, you may get lucky and not have meta data get corrupted and the OS keeps going, just some of your files are wrong. Having ECC would be better, but there's tradeoffs so it never made sense for me to use it at home; zfs still works and is protecting me from disk contents changing, even if what was written could be wrong.
by flessner | 2025-04-27 14:57:55+00:00
Furthermore, the menu is missing a close button, the components look like shadcn or AI generated, and overall it's not well optimized for mobile.

Also listing Coca Cola in the team section, without indication of a partnership or investment - likely as a joke - is not a smart move.

It looks like - and probably is - a random assortment of projects from a single person, the "branding" is simply not reflecting this.
by egypturnash | 2025-04-27 14:58:52+00:00
There are a lot of artists out there who are doing work with a similar vibe by stacking up multiple layers of laser-cut matte board. Usually these have gallery-ready prices.

You can buy kits of thin sheets of metal that are intricately die-cut, and assemble into little sculptures of trains and buildings and bugs and whatnot.

But who can afford to buy anything any more?
by wduquette | 2025-04-27 14:59:43+00:00
My buddy and I added a room to the entrance of the Little Twisty Maze of Passages All The Same. If you said “out” having just entered the maze, you went to a room that said, “You are out. There is nothing in all directions.” “In” would return you to the maze.

Our plan was to let you say, “get nothing”, and then carry “nothing” to the Majestic View and drop it on the lava flow so that you could cross to a new area; but we only had 28k of memory and and had to abandon the idea,
by martin-t | 2025-04-27 14:59:44+00:00
Lying by omission is still lying.

What I've noticed is that for a lot of people, if you do something wrong through a sufficient number of steps, they feel like the severity is lower.

The opposite is in fact true - causing harm through multiple steps shows intent and the severity is in fact higher.

If a journalist doesn't understand statistical significance, he is either incompetent or malicious. Either way he needs to be removed from his little position of power and if the incompetence is sufficient or the malice proven, he needs to be punished.
by tpetry | 2025-04-27 14:59:57+00:00
But SSDs (to my knowledge) only implement checksum for the data transfer. Its a requirement of the protocol. So you can be sure that the Stuff in memory and checksum computed by the CPU arrives exactly like that in the SSD driver. In the past this was a common error source with hardware raid which was faulty.

But there is ABSOLUTELY NO checksum for the bits stored on a SSD. So bit rot at the cells of the SSDs are undetected.
by thyristan | 2025-04-27 15:00:07+00:00
Lots of ZFS users are enthusiasts who heard about that one magic thing that does it all in one tidy box. Whereas usually you would have to known all the minutiae of LVM/mdadm/cryptsetup/nbd and mkfs.whatever to get to the same point. So while ZFS is the nicer-dicer of volume management and filesystems, the latter is your whole chef's knife set. And while you can dice with both, the user groups are not the same. And enthusiasts with the right usecases are very few.

And for the thin-provisioned snapshotted subvolume usecase, btrfs is currently eating ZFS's lunch due to far better Linux integration. Think snapshots at every update, and having a/b boot to get back to a known-working config after an update. So widespread adoption through the distro route is out of the question.
by klodolph | 2025-04-27 15:00:30+00:00
> Chibi was an indirect reference to what western cultures refer to as CSAM (in not-as-uncommon-as-outsiders assume cases). Too subtle eh?

Sure, subtle, or maybe downright cryptographic. I would describe it as cryptographic.

> Do you want me to get more specific?

I think your general point is unclear. Maybe you could explain your overall point in general terms first, before going into specifics. Or maybe you could start with specifics to motivate the broader point you’re making. I think the bottom line here is that when you say Japan is going in a “similar direction”, I have no idea what direction you think that is.

> It’s not like Akiba and several other nearby distracts are actually about just maid cafes (actual-what-they-purport-to-be ones anyway) and cheap electronics, eh?

Neighborhoods aren’t “about” something, so when you say that Akiba isn’t “actually about just maid cafes”… obviously, because Akiba isn’t about anything. If you are winking at the camera and trying to insinuate that I know what Akiba is “about”, it’s not going to communicate anything about Akiba. This has all the hallmarks of how people communicate crackpot theories, and the antidote is to explain things in plain terms with direct language.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-27 15:00:51+00:00
That's called marketing. Give it a snazzy name, like say "TimeMachine" and users will jump on it.

Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add.

Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does the same as timemachine on mac, a feature that users love. Albeit stored on the same drive (but with syncoid or just manually rolled zfs send/recv scripts you can do that on another location too).
by hsuduebc2 | 2025-04-27 15:01:02+00:00
True. Musk for example is publicly attacking it for spreading "left-wing lies" because in his wiki page there are statements like "He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation and promoting conspiracy theories, and affirming antisemitic, racist, and transphobic comments." which are just pure facts.

It would be nice to have something like this more decentralized.
by SloopJon | 2025-04-27 15:02:03+00:00
Personally, I don't know what you mean about Rust being too massive. One thing I am wary of is using a truly massive language like C++ on a multi-programmer project without consensus on which features to use and how to use them. Maybe you have in mind something like that?

If you want the simplicity of C with more safety, maybe tooling like Frama-C, a MISRA C conformance checker, or just aggressive use of static and dynamic analysis tools like ASAN and UBSAN. You can also disable certain optimizations (e.g., strict aliasing) to steer away from some of the major pitfalls of UB.
by twodave | 2025-04-27 15:02:37+00:00
I don’t think anyone who understands geopolitics can agree with this take.

China has been able to (for a time) sustain this kind of rapid industrialization because of globalization, a model of hyper-inflation and by taking advantage of wage inequality (i.e. paying their workers less) in order to dump goods into other countries’ markets. Take away globalization and China starves in the dark, because the part of their population that is largest, most productive and knows how to even feed itself (China is a heavy net importer of food, especially pork) is also very old. And when those people are too old to work, China is going to rely on the rest of the world to sustain its (rapidly declining) population.

There are a lot of other Asian countries in a similar situation, but China is unique in how bleak the future could be for hundreds of millions of people.

A year ago I would have said “who knows when the scale will tip?” With what’s going on lately it seems that it may have already happened. Whether you agree with the economic policy of this administration or not, the ramifications are astounding. The US is positioned to come out of this the best, at the expense of the rest of the world. This is why China is all of a sudden calling the US bullies. They would never admit weakness, but they are suddenly feeling the heat. If the US took it a step further and decided to stop securing the seas in that part of the world, all hell would break loose.

For instance, do you think Japan and China would just “play nice” with no incentive to? I’m not so sure, and China has no access to the ocean without going through Japan.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-27 15:02:54+00:00
To be clear, BTRFS also supports in-place upgrade. It's not a uniquely Apple feature; any copy-on-write filesystem with flexibility as to where data is located can be made to fit inside of the free blocks of another filesystem. Once you can do that, then you can do test runs[0] of the filesystem upgrade before committing to wiping the superblock.

I don't know for certain if they could have done it with ZFS; but I can imagine it would at least been doable with some Apple extensions that would only have to exist during test / upgrade time.

[0] Part of why the APFS upgrade was so flawless was that Apple had done a test upgrade in a prior iOS update. They'd run the updater, log any errors, and then revert the upgrade and ship the error log back to Apple for analysis.
by stevedsimkins | 2025-04-27 15:03:21+00:00
Thanks!!

Vite is specifically used for bundling the frontend and chosen due to the vast ecosystem of plugins that people use for it. Tailwindcss is a great example, others here: https://vite.dev/plugins/

Bun does quite a bit more. In this context it’s used as a runtime and a package manager, and automatically handles the workspaces aspect for shared types. While you might be able to achieve all of bhvr with just Bun I chose to stick with Vite due to the number plugins, tutorials, setups, etc. that all use it. Just keeps things simple and easy!
by Modified3019 | 2025-04-27 15:03:47+00:00
ZFS detects corruption.

A very long ago someone named cyberjock was a prolific and opinionated proponent of ZFS, who wrote many things about ZFS during a time when the hobbyist community was tiny and not very familiar with how to use it and how it worked. Unfortunately, some of their most misguided and/or outdated thoughts still haunt modern consciousness like an egregore.

What you are probably thinking of is the proposed doomsday scenario where bad ram could theoretically kill a ZFS pool during a scrub.

This article does a good job of explaining how that might happen, and why being concerned about it is tilting at windmills: https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...

I have never once heard of this happening in real life.

Hell, I’ve never even had bad ram. I have had bad sata/sas cables, and a bad disk though. ZFS faithfully informed me there was a problem, which no other file system would have done. I’ve seen other people that start getting corruption when sata/sas controllers go bad or overheat, which again is detected by ZFS.

What actually destroys pools is user error, followed very distantly by plain old fashioned ZFS bugs that someone with an unlucky edge case ran into.
by hyperjeff | 2025-04-27 15:04:40+00:00
Ambition, with respect to wealth, can be a double-edged sword. One can imagine being both ambitious and allowing everyone to share in the benefits, and the act of participating in some advance as its own reward. Those that do gain some advantage often are hiding the tremendous work of others, gaining a grotesque share of the fortune for their being in the right place and time. To paraphrase a scene from Life of Brian, it is the (so-called) ambitious, often, who are the problem.