MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hx8 | 2025-04-07 17:50:39+00:00
A simple DNA test should tell us. Roman soldiers were recruited from a diverse gene pool and fought far from their birthplace in mixed groups. A simple test to determine the average variance of genetics will let us know if they were a single ethnicity. Further cross references to compare similarity to other known genomes can tell us which region an individual was from.

Whole genetic sequencing cost about $500. So <$75,000 for the sequencing of the entire 150, plus scientist time to gather samples and process results. Answering the question through genetics probably costs more than $250,000 even with cheap grad student labor, so it's probably just not worth it, especially when the moral high ground is to let the dead rest.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-07 17:50:47+00:00
I took these numbers for 2023 and subtracted the US, Canada, Europe, India and Japan. Maybe I did the calculation wrong but I came up with 4,780,248 vehicles sold in the rest of the world, out of a total of 10,307,395. So nearly half of the company’s global sales (by unit) are in markets that are not the major ones you mentioned. Obviously these numbers are going to be smaller by dollar value, but a lot of them are growing markets as well.

Can most global car companies stand to risk up to half their global sales? I genuinely don’t know. https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2023-full-year-glob...
by beechwood | 2025-04-07 17:50:48+00:00
This is not a fancy web app. I simply made it because I'm a single parent and while I'm trying to make dinner my 9 year old is down some YouTube rabbit hole. I figured I would share because I can't be the only parent that has this issue.

So I made a web app where I could add channels that I approve. There is no algo recommendations in the side bar, just the video.

Please share feedback if you have any.
by ashoeafoot | 2025-04-07 17:51:16+00:00
If Russia fakes it and cannot make it, nobody can. Ignore the stark difference in behaviour before trump and after trump, because if trump is pure real politics then the before had to be idealistic and well meaning.

You are monsters and the world knows. The thing from the swamp, that is your civilization . A gross, locust like beast, glueing stolen gold and shiny things to its great conquests. Needing war, because western advanced tech saved you from china and the others taking all back. Delenda Moscovia!
by kazinator | 2025-04-07 17:52:06+00:00
The properties of air that you care about are basically immutable, so why not pre-compute a bunch of compressed air instead of compressing it on the fly, and then having to carry the equipment to do that.

There is an energy cost to supercharging. While you get an overall horsepower boost, it's less than what it would be if the compression cost nothing.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-07 17:52:53+00:00
This article gets the concept slightly wrong.The compressed air becomes very cold air when it expands rapidly in the intake.

Colder air is more dense and therefore carries more oxygen. More oxygen allows more fuel, which allows more power.

Here's a better explanation in a single paragraph on the company's website:

> The end result of these expansion processes is that the charge air temperature entering an engine is dramatically lower than can be achieved with conventional MAP increasing technologies (supercharging and/or turbocharging with after-cooling). Hence very high charge densities can be attained at relatively low MAP levels.

The goal is to increase the amount of air going into the engine by making it very cold and dense, not by pressurizing it like a supercharger. Low MAP means low manifold absolute pressure. In other words, it's not boost like a turbo or supercharger.

EDIT: It looks like the website is also unclear. There is some mention of a secondary valve shutting off the intake valve to prevent air leaking out from the air filter.

Their website is strangely unclear. This isn't mentioned in the "Theory of Operation" section but does get mentioned later as an "isolation valve"

See here: https://casupercharging.com/tech/#system-overview
by nabla9 | 2025-04-07 17:53:24+00:00
Surprisingly he makes a valid (completely theoretical) point. There is a way to Post hoc rationalize what Trump is doing.

The catch is in the end. There is no change in hell it works in practice. Neither politically nor strategically. Nobody trusts Trump to make anything than in-the-moment deals and the US can't inflict enough pain to the rest of the world to comply.

US Tariffs hurt the US most. Other countries can trade with each other without high tariffs.
Show HN: nix-mcp-servers – MCP server Nix package repo
by cameronfyfe | 2025-04-07 17:53:59+00:00
Started a collection of nix packages for some MCP servers I use. Makes installation into a NixOS-based system easy; also allows for running binaries straight from the flake on any Linux/macOS systems with nix installed. This can be convenient for MCP servers like `github-mcp-server` written in Go that aren't runnable using `uvx` or `npx`.
by pvg | 2025-04-07 17:54:32+00:00
I imagine some of them do since it's seen as a 'convenience' for the reader who might upvote the comment (and the article itself, if it's something they're interested in). And yes I think it does have some kind of social element - people do it in other places and it drifts back into HN. There's a whole bunch of such folklore some of which gets naturally misapplied to HN, 'don't downvote for disagreement' probably being the most famous-while-inaccurate.
by ycombinator_acc | 2025-04-07 17:55:04+00:00
No you can't.

Even if you could (which you can't, at least on my, modern, phone), it would be a workaround, not a solution.

A solution would be allowing free selection like in the browser or, better yet, ditching "native" apps for web apps, as the person above suggested. As a bonus, this "exodus" will force browser makers to iron out any UX issues very quickly.
by orbifold | 2025-04-07 17:55:12+00:00
Personally I am almost certain that the current framing of RL and its relationship to animal behavior is deeply misguided. It proves close to impossible to train animals using this paradigm (not for a lack of trying), i.e. animals such as mice only make any progress when water deprived and under conditions that exploit their natural instincts. Nevertheless they are capable of far more complex natural behaviors. There is a non-zero chance that RL as an explanation of animal behavior is just plain wrong or not applicable.
by jorvi | 2025-04-07 17:55:15+00:00
> because car guys are absolute nerds.

Are they? At least in Europe they are usually blue collar guys that pick a neighborhood at random to hold a car meet, terrorizing that neighborhood until deep into the night, including street races. And if they aren't accommodated they'll aggressively clash with the police.

They're easy to spot too, pumped up douches with tribal tattoos and gemstone earrings that behave like they're prone to pick a bar fight with you.
by namuorg | 2025-04-07 17:55:32+00:00
Browser MCP uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to automate the browser so it currently only works for Chromium-based browsers.

Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't expose WebDriver BiDi (the standardized version of CDP) to browser extensions AFAIK (someone please correct me if I'm mistaken!), so I don't think I can support it even if I tried.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-04-07 17:55:43+00:00
> why should we romanticize and pine for an era that has been passed by? Why shouldn't we have a vision for a new era and double down on the things we are best at?

Because if something bad happens, be it a war, trade war with tarrifs or a pandemic, or just a stuck ship somewhere blocking transport, you're left without everything that you were once able to make, but can't make anymore.
by behnamoh | 2025-04-07 17:55:50+00:00
What I don't like about LLMs is that people keep re-inventing the wheel over and over. For example, we've been able to control browsers using GPT for about 2 years now:

- https://github.com/mayt/BrowserGPT

- https://github.com/TaxyAI/browser-extension

- https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use

- https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern

- https://github.com/m1guelpf/browser-agent

- https://github.com/richardyc/Chrome-GPT

- https://github.com/handrew/browserpilot

- https://github.com/ishan0102/vimGPT

- https://github.com/Jiayi-Pan/GPT-V-on-Web
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-07 17:56:16+00:00
Services, in my mind, is a broader thing than just market exports (which I agree are largely tech). Consider the pejorative term "nanny state." The government bureaucrat testing your water for lead is part of this system. Bessent is very explicitly saying that the administration is deliberately shredding jobs in the federal bureaucracy and expects those people to go work in the factories they hope will be created based on these policies.

While there's definitely an "ugh, not everything has to be about gender studies" reaction to some of these ideas I personally can't stop seeing it over and over and over in the new administration and social reaction to it. Zuckerburg saying that we need more "masculine energy" in tech and rebranding his image. Mel Gibson saying that Trump is "daddy" returning home and taking off his belt to beat us back into shape. Vance and Musk's obsessions with childless women.
by mikestew | 2025-04-07 17:57:46+00:00
Drag racing has none of that.

What is it the kids say? "Tell me you know nothing about drag racing without saying you know nothing about drag racing"? Drag racing has all of that, squeezed into 1/4 of a mile. That's why top fuelers get an engine rebuild after every trip down the track.

It's like saying, "I get ultramarathons, but 400m foot races involved little skill or training." Look, if you don't get it, fine. Probably best to just leave it at that.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-04-07 17:57:53+00:00
Sorry but I think your saying is wrong.

> This amount of revenue/profit will cause a company of 500 or 1000 to go bankrupt

Or more likely it would make them fire 995 out of 1000 and the remaining 5 could be almost as rich as you 10, and they have advantage of spending for few years on marketing and better development.
by fsckboy | 2025-04-07 17:57:59+00:00
tinfoil hat question: who wants computers to turn on overnight or every day? I can imagine Five Eyes type players (or equivalents) find it helpful to track people, and potentially advertisers, is it just that? or is there some other reason like "decrease load on Apple/Microsoft's servers during the day"? I'm trying to understand the relentless pushing of this feature into the deepest levels of the firmware/hardware.
by d0mine | 2025-04-07 17:58:56+00:00
Isn’t it exactly what alphazero did?

“AlphaZero was trained solely via self-play using 5,000 first-generation TPUs to generate the games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks, all in parallel, with no access to opening books or endgame tables. After four hours of training, DeepMind estimated AlphaZero was playing chess at a higher Elo rating than Stockfish 8; after nine hours of training, the algorithm defeated Stockfish 8 in a time-controlled 100-game tournament (28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws).” [emphasis added] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero
by icelancer | 2025-04-07 17:59:16+00:00
I just run into a bunch of errors on my Windows machine + Chrome when connected over remote-ssh. Extension installed, tab enabled, npx updated/installed, etc.

2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [info] rmcp: Starting new stdio process with command: npx @browsermcp/mcp@latest

2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [error] rmcp: Client error for command spawn npx ENOENT

2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [error] rmcp: Error in MCP: spawn npx ENOENT

2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [info] rmcp: Client closed for command

2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [error] rmcp: Error in MCP: Client closed

2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [info] rmcp: Handling ListOfferings action

2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [error] rmcp: No server info found

---

EDIT: Ended up fixing it by patching index.js. killProcessOnPort() was the problem. Can hit me up if you have questions, I cannot figure out how to put readable code in HN after all these years with the fake markdown syntax they use.
by spmurrayzzz | 2025-04-07 17:59:38+00:00
I just view it as a relative minor convenience, but it's not some game-changer IMO.

The tool use / function calling thing far predates Anthropic releasing the MCP specification and it really wasn't that onerous to do before either. You could provide a json schema spec and tell the model to generate compliant json to pass to the API in question. MCP doesn't inherently solve any of the problems that come up in that sort of workflow, but it does provide an idiomatic approach for it (so there's a non-zero value there, but not much).
by min1m | 2025-04-07 18:00:05+00:00
I've been working at this for a while- its insanely difficult and I even found out an earlier archive of the site using waybackmachine and tried to use the contact us feature(which obv didn't work)

I love this so far- feels very much like a more silent Cicada3301! Someone on reddit solved the the QR code one midway of most of learning about Masking Patterns, but we have no clue how to proceed from here and what to make of the google maps area in Japan

Some of us have been trying to run a script for the typewriter one, but it hasn't worked yet, 2 of us found the 'secret' linked video in that one as well

None of us, absolutely ZERO, have figured out the first one

Cheers to you guys, You should post to reddit for more traction!
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-07 18:00:42+00:00
> unions are the best way

They are when labor is fungible, and when you're not paid by the public. Lots of crazy effects happen when the second condition is not met, for example prison guards unions advocating for harsher laws so that prisons stay full.

> That doesn't mean printing money

In principle, it does not. In practice you can count the countries that don't deficit finance on one hand.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-07 18:00:48+00:00
It _could_ be that, too, but as it turns out, in this particular case, it was the scary scary transes (see their response elsewhere in the thread).

With people who go on about 'luxury beliefs', the belief that they're referring to is nearly always 'trans people are people', I assume because it's such a new coinage (it's only a few years old) and that was what the far-right were mostly scared of at the time.
by Eridrus | 2025-04-07 18:00:50+00:00
I am mostly imagining the "happy middle" scenario where you raise $1m and sell for $10m in cash, but modified to assume you raised $10m and spent $2m of it, and then got the $10m in cash from the acquirer, and still have $8m in the bank account, you would give back $10m to your investors per the liquidation preferences and then split the remaining $8m.

You are in a worse boat than if you had only raised the $1m and then sold for $10m, but the founders probably still walk away with ~5-7m pre-tax (depending on how much equity the $10m cost you over 1-2 rounds), and you're in a better position than if you had run through the $1m and hadn't quite gotten to a thing worth $10m.
by ignoramous | 2025-04-07 18:00:56+00:00
> prefer their hospitals as sterile

Ah well, except for the sinks, which are breeding ground for superbugs: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10469867/

In a hospital setting, superbug x-contamination is often fatal: https://apnews.com/article/mexico-contaminated-hospital-supp...
by munchbunny | 2025-04-07 18:01:22+00:00
Reminds me of this piece of motorsports history: https://fordauthority.com/2017/12/how-ford-cheated-the-rules...

Take, for instance, Ford’s car from the 2003 FIA World Rally Championship. Through a knowledgeable automotive tuner and journalist named Stav from the UK (Facebook page), we learned that the 2003 Ford Focus RS WRC used an ingenious, mostly-hidden system to store excess pressurized air from the turbocharger in a titanium tank until it could be advantageously crammed into the engine on straight portions of the course, elevating power beyond what would otherwise have been possible.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-07 18:01:24+00:00
It's worth noting that most of what is said about the federal budget in layman circles (and some Congressional circles) is basically lies. Well, no, that's uncharitable. "Grossly mischaracterizes the mechanisms and consequences of the operation of a fiat currency that is used by the world as the IMF denomination for sovereign loans" is more accurate.

The only thing that stops the federal government from printing money is its own laws. In that sense, when Congress argues about "the budget," what they're really arguing about is "We'd like to do this via honoring the current laws instead of changing them." In practice, we change them constantly; every vote to increase the debt ceiling is a vote to print more money with no (immediate (1)) consequence. In that sense, the pockets are "infinitely deep" in that they're only constrained by Congress via rules that Congress made up and can change. And firing individual bureaucrats, or even closing entire departments, is rarely worth the cost savings because bureaucrat labor is just so, so much cheaper than most things the government is spending on (like the military budget, which in the modern era is basically "A big storehouse of extremely expensive fireworks that are brutally powerful one-shot policy-changers;" maintaining that storehouse is pouring money into an arbitrarily deep hole because there's always room for one more missile in the old arsenal of freedom).

(1) This, of course, grossly oversimplifies. There are definitely consequences for putting more liquid currency into the ecosystem than taxes take out (2). The relative value of dollars in-circulation falls; it can be thought of as a "stealth tax on hoarding assets." This is, it is worth noting, a tax the government can choose to levy to encourage not hoarding assets because moving money tends to make everything better for everyone much of the time, with some extremely notable exceptions.

(2) That's, incidentally, a much better way to think of how the system actually works than "we tax people to pay for government services." Imagine the government took all the federal tax money, put it in a big pile on the Washington Mall, set it on fire, and then told the Mint to print, 1-for-1, one dollar for every dollar destroyed. Beyond the ridiculous carbon cost, this would have no impact on the US economy because, functionally, that's how the loop works: the government taxes to make money go away and prints money to make money exist. And, most importantly, the outputs and inputs are in different places to satisfy federal economic policy; broadly speaking, we take money from people who have a lot of it (to discourage resource hoarding a bit, which slows down the economy) and give it to people who have use for it and not enough of it to act on their intent (because the economy tends to be healthier when there are more, and more diverse, participants in it). The US, in particular, has special leverage to do this in the global marketplace because of its ties to the IMF, but that's a much bigger can of worms than one HN post.
by alaxhn | 2025-04-07 18:01:45+00:00
I'll continue playing devils advocate here.

> To improve rust belt manufacturing, you would target competitors of industries in that area, not the whole global economy.

If you accept as a premise that the goal is to prevent offshoring our manufacturing base THEN you may also want to develop new industry and not just protect industries in that area. Moreover the goal is presumably not restricted to just that area it is an example of a specific region which was hard hit.

> We imposed a 32% tariff on Taiwan. Simultaneously, we are making it more expensive to manufacture here in the states. We have 1/4 China's pop - why would we try to compete on raw output by ourselves, instead of strengthening ties w/ the world?

I don't immediately see how each of these statements relate to each other. I'll just reply to "We have 1/4 China's pop - why would we try to compete on raw output by ourselves" by stating that we may want to compete with China on manufacturing output because of national security implications.

> For many countries, there is nothing to negotiate since we already have free trade agreements with them. We may import a lot of goods, but we export a lot of services, like many developed nations do.

The Tariff calculations have a differential rate for each country so it appears to have taken into account to some degree that we need more negotiation with certain relationships. I won't state that this was necessarily done well...

> With regard to raising revenue, think of the tradeoffs. If demand is elastic (given our trade deficit, it has to be!), this will be a tax on many, many American businesses and consumers. Its just moving the taxes from income tax to a consumption tax. That's a worse deal for poorer/middle-class Americans.

A consumption tax is a worse deal for poorer/middle-class Americans. I agree with you. It may be the case that this functions as a consumption tax on foreign labor which could increase the negotiating power of poorer/middle-class Americans.

---

I really do not mean to defend the specific actions of the sudden global Tariffs. I am attempting to explain how I believe some on the right may see things in case people find this interesting. The furthest I will go is to state that I think the fears about a new great depression may be somewhat overblown.
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-07 18:02:40+00:00
>I merely suggest these things, not because I have the math to understand how it would affect GR or QED, or even what experiments would be needed to verify them, but merely to plant the seeds of how things work to stimulate those who can do those things to think about what their ramifications might be.

You think physicists don't smoke weed and dream up random ideas? Or formally study eastern religions?

The fact that they are trained physicist is why they don't conceive of the universe (and dark energy specifically) the way you do, and probably never will.

>And, really, y'all are out of ideas as to what or where dark matter or energy are anyway, so there is nothing for anyone to lose.

This is an example of your condescension. There are so many assumptions implicit in your statements that it's offensive to the audience. Its like the difference between a person raving in the street that everyone is free to ignore. Versus that same person deliberately entering a physics conference shouting the same things, then claiming they're only there to help.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-07 18:03:01+00:00
I know what the article says, but the author seems to misunderstand how the system works.

The systems has regulators that step the air pressure down from thousands of PSI in the tank to a much smaller, regulated number at the nozzle that gets sprayed into the intake.

From the source company that sells the system:

> The very low temperature medium pressure air stream is then throttle one more time in the Electronic Pressure Regulator before being discharged into the engine air intake tract. The throttling effect that occurs here is small compared to that which occurs at the Mechanical Pressure regulator but, similar in nature.

The tuner can adjust the pressure that is being discharged into the intake tract, but that's not equivalent to the pressure in the manifold.

The system works by having the air expand rapidly in the intake, causing a rapid cooling effect.

The company describes it better on their own site: https://casupercharging.com/tech/#system-overview

EDIT: There is some mention of an "isolation valve" but not within the "Theory of Operation" section of the company's own description: https://casupercharging.com/tech/#system-overview

So there might be some scenario where the system shuts off the intake valve, too, but it's weirdly unclear from their own system description.