MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivewonyoung | 2025-04-16 22:02:05+00:00
I just gave a couple of examples in the other comment in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710568

Zero ad hominem or anything else.

And I see this all the time. Not to mention only one "side" is subject to this suppression so it's no surprise that they prefer to(or are forced by the site mechanics to) disengage from commenting.

If sourced verifiable facts stated in a neutral way are punished, what chance do opinions or personal takes have? It's a textbook example of an echo chamber.
by simpaticoder | 2025-04-16 22:02:51+00:00
I agree that "speaking truth to power" can, and has been, abused. Treated as an end unto itself it becomes mere contrarianism, and loses the "truth" part of the phrase. I mean it in its original sense: speaking up when it is dangerous for you to speak, particularly when you have evidence of misdeeds by the powerful (the lack of evidence is another pervasive issue with most online speech - mere allegation against those you don't like is enough, it seems, for most people). When the government can disappear its critics and optionally suppress news of the disappearance, then critics deserve praise and honor.
by quails8mydog | 2025-04-16 22:02:55+00:00
I agree that it's an interesting question, that's why I spent so much of my free time reading it.

I'd also agree that using AI for sentiment analysis could be a good approach, I'm not an expert in the area, but I believe this is one of the things AI is best at. But it needs an extra step to translate that into bias. Establishing a sympathy baseline is my initial idea, but I haven't tested it and maybe there's something better.

Whether something is biased is less about how any given individual(s) feel about what's been said and more about if the different viewpoints are presented honestly. Though it can get really difficult to identify except in the most extreme cases. As you say, it's not just what's said where the bias occurs, but also in the choice of what not to say.
by danenania | 2025-04-16 22:03:48+00:00
Thanks! I'd love to hear your feedback.

> I want Cursor-like functionality, where it’s aware of my codebase and able to make changes iteratively. It sounds like this is what I need?

Yes, Plandex uses a tree-sitter project map to identify relevant context, then makes a detailed plan, then implements each step in the plan.

> Btw one of the videos is private.

Oops, which video did you mean? Just checked them all on the README and website in incognito mode and they all seem to be working for me.
by aceazzameen | 2025-04-16 22:04:01+00:00
Why don't you help brainstorm ideas instead of being dismissive? There is no right answer right now. Clearly in order for society to move forward in a healthy way, single individuals cannot amass wealth/power that is a millennia ahead of everyone else. The goal isn't to say you can't be wealthy. The goal is wealth/power cannot be obscenely beyond everyone else. These few individuals have more power than governments. This is a complex issue that requires a complex solution. There is no easy answer.

What's the threshold for obscene? That's an easy one, but still requires discussion.

Should a % of assets be frozen and redistributed after that threshold is reached?

Should we Logan's Run the top 10 richest and let the market adjust around that?

There's going to be some preposterous ideas! The answer won't be as simple as raise taxes. Regardless, these discussions need to take place so a good solution for the world can coalesce.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-04-16 22:04:25+00:00
> Want to make an application that never phones home at all? Go nuts. Want to run a service that never collects any sensitive data? Sure thing! Want to run a service that needs sensitive data to function? Names, addresses, credit card info? Yeah, you're going to need a PE to sign off of that.

Agreed, but I do think a tool like curl makes this a little complicated. To my knowledge, curl itself does not phone home or collect user data, but it's obviously security critical.

...or maybe it's not, now that I think about it. Curl is not end-user software. Maybe when other software uses curl, that software gets a PE sign off. But now this is starting to feel to me like another dumb compliance checkbox system. Is it?
by eddythompson80 | 2025-04-16 22:04:34+00:00
The same way you'd write a third party client to any software/API.

The MCP uses some kind of identity to talk to booking.com or GitHub. That's your security boundary. You assume that anything the MCP has access to (including that identity), the user has access to. If you add a `list_available_hotels()` tool to your booking.com MCP, that tool needs to run with the same identity as the person talking to the LLM. It doesn't have any more permissions or access to your system than the booking.com react app does.

Think of the MCP server as a natural language interface to your application. Like a CLI or a WebApp. Instead of writing specific commands to a cli, or following a series of clicks in a GUI app, you "chat" with it.
by dhorthy | 2025-04-16 22:05:03+00:00
exactly - we keep trying to figure out the right interfaces, but we jump to assume that we know what they are.

If we had the right interface, we would set up the black box, and then put holes/knobs on the box to allow anyone to change the things they should actually need to change.

if we have the wrong interface, then the knobs aren't interesting, and instead we keep end up opening the box, or reaching into the holes at weird angles to do things that nobody knew we'd want to, but that are obviously the right things to do to maximize performance

someday we'll have the right interface, but for now, better to skip the box and do the extra cycles. You're an engineer, you can write a for loop and a switch statement. don't outsource your prompts and give up control flow to save a few hundred lines that will eventually become pretty customized anyway
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-04-16 22:05:09+00:00
I understand you as saying "I don't want to use a product because in future it'll turn to shit".

Spotify has not turned to shit. It might happen in future but isn't happening right now and they're showing no signs of letting it happen.

If and when Spotify does turn to shit I'll move on: I'll download my playlists and fetch every track via yt-dlp, deemix, et al., manage tags and cover art with musicbrainz et al, use AI to create tools that generate playlists that I can sync to my devices. I'll carry it with me on all my devices. I anticipate the library being around 30-60gb, not that much these days. But man is all that a ton of work.

My world-view is: I use great stuff while it's great, and hedge against it turning to shit by having an escape plan. But to sit around not using something great because there's a chance it might turn to shit in the future, is missing out on how good the thing is right now.
by mattskr | 2025-04-16 22:06:09+00:00
To be fair, a car isn't accessible to 8 billion+ people at any given second. That's the scary part about the internet now. You can't just have a fun little garden and only have to protect the veggies from rabbits. Them gnawing on your lettuce is your biggest issue. Now, you have to protect your veggies from essentially professional armed raiders who either burn your garden to the ground for lolz or a cryptocoin ransom.

In this day and age, like... is anything secure at this point? You say hastily... but even the biggest "walls" get breached, constantly. Just claiming hastily to feel better about your own glass walls is just as bad.
by fzeroracer | 2025-04-16 22:07:25+00:00
> Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that.

And...why are people immediately quitting to work somewhere else? Your idea of addressing the problem is by saddling employees with debt and forcing them into literal wage slavery rather than fixing the problem of companies not paying people enough to stay.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-16 22:07:31+00:00
>These models cannot even make legal chess moves. That’s incredibly basic logic, and it shows how LLMs are still completely incapable of reasoning or understanding.

Yeah they can. There's a link I shared to prove it which you've conveniently ignored.

LLMs learn by predicting, failing and getting a little better, rinse and repeat. Pre-training is not like reading a book. LLMs trained on chess games play chess just fine. They don't make the silly mistakes you're talking about and they very rarely make illegal moves.

There's gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct which i already shared and plays at around 1800 ELO. Then there's this grandmaster level chess transformer - https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04494. They're also a couple of models that were trained in the Eleuther AI discord that reached about 1100-1300 Elo.

I don't know what the peak of LLM Chess playing looks like but this is clearly less of a 'LLMs can't do this' problem and more 'Open AI/Anthropic/Google etc don't care if their models can play Chess or not' problem.

So are they capable of reasoning now or would you like to shift the posts ?
by photon_rancher | 2025-04-16 22:07:39+00:00
You could have some moving element with limit switches and an encoder, that’s pretty common. There’s probably others…

Normally the limit switch would be reliable but it will degrade over time, could be damaged in use, be assembled wrong etc… and the encoder might not be very accurate from the get go.

So if you want a safe/reliable system under as many conditions as possible you might get a problem space like this
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-16 22:08:20+00:00
> what if you start writing a new source file that you don't want to compile and link until it's ready and needed?

What makes using a different top-level directory (which is something that would work with nearly all build systems) inconvenient? But if you really want these not-to-be-compiled-yet files nearby in the directory tree, customise the rule to, e.g., not compile anything having a filename beginning with IGNORE, or in a subdirectory called IGNORE, or (if you want to get fancy) listed in a .compileignore file (a la .gitignore). If the number of exceptions is small, then explicitly marking them in any of these ways is DRYer (= requires less maintenance) than explicitly recording the larger number of "business as usual" cases a second time.

> An IDE can use actual file lists and its internal project configurations

If you rely on an IDE to this extent, it's effectively part of your build system. (Which is absolutely fine, and has some benefits, though also some downsides.)

Provided that the IDE is "doing the work for you" (e.g., by adding each new .cpp file you create to the list of files to compile, until you uncheck a box somewhere that removes it), you're good. The only questions then are (1) whether this IDE configuration info is handled sanely by the VCS, and (2) whether it's readily understandable and usable to someone without the IDE (e.g., a CI build server). If the IDE stores this info in an externally defined plain-text build script like a Makefile or Maven pom.xml, then the answer to both questions is probably "yes" -- but, depending on how expressive the build script language is, it might be difficult or error-prone for the IDE to be able to update it reliably if the user makes their own changes to it as well.
by steeleduncan | 2025-04-16 22:08:57+00:00
I don't know what the licence is, or the legality of using it, but the download urls for the fonts on the linked site are

- https://kermit-font.com/_css/KermitRoman-VF.otf

- https://kermit-font.com/_css/KermitItalic-VF.otf
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-04-16 22:09:01+00:00
"a lot of attempts" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here.

If your password was a set of random letters (both upper and lower case) and numbers and 20 characters long, then even if you could attempt 1,000 logins/second (a very high number for an online attack), it would take a whopping 2,232,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

If you could do 1,000,000 logins/second, an absolutely absurd number for an online attack, that only takes 3 zeros off that number.
by freeone3000 | 2025-04-16 22:09:27+00:00
It is “just” that, but: How are numbers assigned? How can others find details? Who determines when these details are public? (note: full CVE details can be used to exploit critical software) If they’re not always public, who gets to see them? And who handles that dissemination? Who takes care of duplicates?

Lots of work does go into this, even if it’s “just” an identifier.
by dlinder | 2025-04-16 22:10:10+00:00
Around 1995, our high school "Pascal I" and "Pascal II" classes were taught in a forgotten Apple //e lab in the Math wing of the school. The PC and Mac labs were occupied by typing, word processing, and desktop publishing classes. I think every other kid in class groaned, but to a hamfest scrounger of PDPs, Vaxen, and weird UNIX workstations, UCSD p-System Pascal on Apple hardware was weirdly intriguing, the cherry on top being that the whole lab was served by a Corvus hard disk shared over, I think, an "Omninet" network. We'd all come in, turn on the lights, turn on the computers, and then have the lecture portion of class while this poor early NAS would serve Pascal to 20-odd machines simultaneously. I think we saved our work on floppy disks, though maybe that was a backup, as I think I recall turning in our work by saving to the Corvus? Even at the time, it all had a very "you are living the early experimental days" feeling to it.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-16 22:10:26+00:00
Surely "antisemitism" isn't a fig-leaf for the internationally-held stance that Israel does not legally administrate the Golan Heights, West Bank or Gaza Strip, right? Because that's common knowledge, a universal consensus shared by nearly every sovereign government on the face of the planet. Only Israel's weapon suppliers disagree.

Most educated Americans would likely agree that such an action is a gross misappropriation of semitic justice and a blatant cover-up for supporting genocide. Sadly, these educated Americans know the same thing happened when Nixon sold Pakistan a fuckload of weapons under the guise of "regional stability" and only changed his tune after the Bangladesh Genocide reached the international news.
by umbra07 | 2025-04-16 22:10:33+00:00
> Under the contract terms, Mauch will provide 100Mbps symmetrical Internet with unlimited data for $55 a month and 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month. Mauch said his installation fees are typically $199. Unlike many larger ISPs, Mauch provides simple bills that contain a single line item for Internet service and no extra fees.

For one, Starlink won't get anywhere close to 1gbps
by margalabargala | 2025-04-16 22:11:37+00:00
> We are effectively talking about the entire world wide web generating multiple highly secure cryptograph key pairs every 47 days. That is a lot of CPU cycles.

We aren't cracking highly secure key pairs. We're making them.

On my computer, to create a new 4096-bit key takes about a second, in a single thread. For something I now have to do fewer than 8 times per year. On a 16-core CPU with a TDP of 65 watts, we can estimate that this took 0.0011 watt-hours.

Yes, there are a lot of websites, close to a billion of them. No, this still is not some onerous use of electricity. For the whole world, this is an additional usage of a bit over 9000 kWh annually. Toss up a few solar panels and you've offset the whole planet.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-04-16 22:12:54+00:00
Yeah it is a proxy. I feel that in general we always use the term proxy as short for transparent proxy, while "server" is a bit more general purpose.

If you squint hard enough you can call almost any server a proxy. An FTP server is a proxy for data on disk. Github.com is a proxy for a git repo.

But yeah, saying "MCP is a proxy to your application" might be more insightful than "MCP is a client to your application"
by nick238 | 2025-04-16 22:13:00+00:00
If I'm in a city neighborhood, could I just run fiber on the telephone poles just like Comcast does cable? I could probably run point-to-point connections from my garage to 16 single family homes and 2 multi-unit buildings with 3000' (extremely generous) of fiber.

If it was $50/mo, and 20 customers, that's only $1k/mo, which I'm not sure would cover a fiber backhaul...
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-04-16 22:14:01+00:00
There's a few issues with the Horspool implementation.

To obtain non case sensitive searching, you set the shift in the bad char table for both the upper and lower case variants. That's fine. But when you come to do the search, you ignore this and only look up the lower case version if it's non case sensitive. This is unnecessary - the valid shifts for both cases are already in the table, since you put them there. So you can avoid doing a lookup on the lower table.

I think you also only ever shift by one if you get a full match, but this is also unnecessary. You can shift by whatever the last char bad char shift is and you won't miss any patterns, even if they can overlap.

Finally, you have a test to see if the shift is zero, and to set it to one if it is. You should never get a shift of zero from the bad char table (you don't process the last char of the pattern when creating the bad char table, so there is never a distance of zero from the end).
by AIPedant | 2025-04-16 22:14:11+00:00
I think it is AGI, seriously. Try asking it lots of questions, and then ask yourself: just how much smarter was I expecting AGI to be?

That's his whole argument!!!! This is so frustrating coming from a public intellectual. "You don't need rigorous reasoning to answer these questions, baybeee, just go with your vibes." Complete and total disregard for scientific thinking, in favor of confirmation bias and ideology.
by primitivesuave | 2025-04-16 22:16:54+00:00
This ISP was actually part of a detailed study in my college class on networking. The founder created a singular example of an "open-source ISP" [1], and I am pretty sure you can find his guidance online somewhere if you were inclined to build your own.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg
by dcre | 2025-04-16 22:17:12+00:00
You don't pay monthly fee to use OpenAI models through the API. You pay per token. https://openai.com/api/pricing/

There are other CLI coding agents like Aider (https://aider.chat/) that will let you point at any model. The problem is that local models are dramatically worse than these big hosted models — I have not seen anyone claim they are good enough for these kind of tools. See https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
by mattmaroon | 2025-04-16 22:17:47+00:00
Your question is rhetorical so I won’t answer it directly, but I am sure even you agree that like half the country has drawn different conclusions. So it is at least least possible, right?

If a lot of people have drawn a vastly different conclusion from the same set of facts as you, and you can’t fathom what that may be, that’s the strongest possible sign that you may be a toddler in this particular instance.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-04-16 22:17:50+00:00
The MIT license is basically the license of choice for growth hacking these days. Many VC backed companies follow this strategy - it serves to grow your userbase, a free-tier for developers using your ecosystem and last but not least, a chance for volunteers to do free work for you.

This is perhaps too cynical for this specific instance, but it's not overly cynical more broadly. Considering users of the site have to evaluate many of these offerings frequently, I don't blame them for having a negative gut reaction.
by mst | 2025-04-16 22:19:01+00:00
Having cut my teeth on early Archimedes machines, I have a deep fondness for arm2's 16 instructions and the (lost during a house move, I suspect) assembly book I had that gave me enough of a description of the internals of the chip that I could desk check my assembly in my head with reasonable confidence that I was mentally emulating what the chip was actually doing rather than just what outputs I'd get for a given set of inputs.

Having to remember where I'd put the relevant chunk of assembler any time I needed a division routine was, admittedly, less fun, but the memories remain fond nevertheless :)
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-16 22:19:03+00:00
> Your question is pretty much the same as...

I respectfully don't agree with your opinion here -- the question multiple people asked you, is what it is. There's no point relating it to a totally different question when we could simply discuss it directly.

It reminds me of the current situation we're discussing -- the administration, when pressed by a judge to answer what they've tried so far towards returning their victim, refused to do so, giving some pretext about fairness or whatever. The judge essentially responded, okay, thanks for the opinion, but just because you have an opinion about the question doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't answer it.

Same goes here: a personally-held opinion that a question is unfair, or biased, or mean, or like this or like that, doesn't mean one can't or shouldn't answer it. What kind of meaningful discussion can be had when everyone avoids answering questions that they don't like, or whose answers make them uncomfortable, and they justify it by claiming that they personally hold the opinion that the question is "unfair"? Bor-ing!

> Capture a guard, change clothes with them, and escape

See? That said, is this really your proposed recourse for someone (US citizen or otherwise) deported to the gulag in question by the current administration (mistakenly or otherwise)? Seriously?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-16 22:20:29+00:00
> What was asked for is a reasonable ask.

No it isn't. You don't get any copyright protection on a volume of data produced by rules, such as "every possible 8x8 bitmap". Furthermore, you also don't get copyright protection against "copies" that were developed without reference to your work, as would always be the case for this idea. So there is no theoretical benefit from attempting it.

What's the reasonable part?
by nunez | 2025-04-16 22:22:32+00:00
So I'm watching one of the really old sales training videos [^0] and am wondering: for anyone here who shopped for stuff in the 60s/70s, were retail employees friendlier and more assistive than retail employees today? Do you think the brick-and-mortal retail experience is any better or worse than then?

[^0]: https://archive.org/details/S.S.KresgeTraining-TheABCsOfFrie.... It's also really trippy that the tips being given here STILL apply today at a basic level, even in complex technical sales!
by discardedrefuse | 2025-04-16 22:23:30+00:00
My LG had an update last week that made me re-do all the user agreements. I don't know if that has anything to do with this. As always, I opted out of most of the agreements, but (as always) there are 2 agreements I cannot opt out of and still use any apps.

So...what set-top boxes are available for privacy minded people?
by lurk2 | 2025-04-16 22:23:56+00:00
> Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.

This line might exist, but I have yet to see it. I have seen users on this forum advocate for eugenics and murdering CEOs, and not obliquely.

> But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.

It was around the time they banned /r/TheDonald. There was still a ton of good discussion going on there until that point. The new app also brought in a ton of casual users who didn’t fit with the site’s historical demographic of cerebral young men.

> Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other.

That’s the problem I haven’t figured out. In theory you could have a branching moderation authority that could be forked if the moderator starts abusing their power, but the issue is that most users won’t notice anything is wrong until years after the problem arises.

> No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.

Would you not consider a shift back to personal networking a technical solution to the problem?