MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-04-09 15:56:05+00:00
I'm working with rpm-ostree distros on workstations. The Universal Blue (Fedora Atomic (CoreOS)) project has OCI images that install as immutable host images.

We were able to install programs as admin on Windows in our university computer lab because of DeepFreeze, almost 20 years ago

"Is DeepFreeze worth it?" https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/18zn3jn/is_deepfr...

TIL Windows has UWF built-in:

"Unified Write Filter (UWF) feature" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/unif...

Re: ~immutable NixOS and SELinux and Flatpaks' chroot filesystems not having SELinux labels like WSL2 either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43617363
by rhdunn | 2025-04-09 15:56:49+00:00
Some complexities:

- handling shy hyphens/hyphenation when splitting long words -- working out where to hyphenate so it is readable, then how that affects the available space takes time to compute to ensure that justified text doesn't result in large blocks of whitespace esp. for long words;

- handing text effects like making the first letter large, or the first word(s) larger, like is done in various books;

- reflow due to any changes resulting from text rendering/formatting (e.g. if applying kerning or hyphenation results in/does not result in text wrapping);

- impact of things like kerning and digraphs (e.g. ffi) on text width -- including determining if a word can be split in the middle of one of these or not;

- combining characters, emoji (with zero-width non-joiners), flag Unicode character pairs (including determining valid pairs to determine if/where to split on), etc.;

- mixed direction text (left to right and right to left) handling and positioning;

- the mentioned Ruby text (e.g. https://www.w3.org/International/articles/ruby/styling.en.ht...) -- dealing with both the main text wrapping and the above/below text wrapping, both of which could happen;

- for Chinese/Japanese/Korean ensuring that characters within a word don't have extra space, as those languages don't use spacing to delimit words;

- other things affecting line height such as sub/super script text (mathematical equations, chemical symbols, references, etc.).
by jandrese | 2025-04-09 15:57:23+00:00
Basic Ubuntu 24.04 install:

man --html man man: can't resolve man7/groff_man.7 man: command exited with status 3: (cd /tmp/hman6rTowJ && /usr/libexec/man-db/zsoelim) | (cd /tmp/hman6rTowJ && /usr/libexec/man-db/manconv -f UTF-8:ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8//IGNORE) | (cd /tmp/hman6rTowJ && preconv -e UTF-8) | (cd /tmp/hman6rTowJ && tbl) | (cd /tmp/hman6rTowJ && groff -mandoc -Thtml)

The error seems to be about the groff manpage that I didn't even ask for? Very confusing.
by delusional | 2025-04-09 15:57:41+00:00
At some level everything has to go in a single band. I don't have separate network connections to my house, I don't send separate TCP SYN packets for each "band". I don't have separate storage devices for each file on my harddrive. We multiplex the data somewhere. Yhe trick to it is that the multiplexer has to be a component, and not a distributed set of ad-hoc regexes.
by cloutiertyler | 2025-04-09 15:57:46+00:00
Just to copy in my response from there too:

I'm Tyler (guy in the video). In BitCraft we currently implement client-side prediction outside of SpacetimeDB.

However, we DO plan to add automatic client-side prediction as a feature for SpacetimeDB in the near-ish future! Because all your server-side logic is in Wasm modules, we plan to run an embedded version of SpacetimeDB to execute the server logic on the client. As long as the server and client agree on the changes to the data we can reconcile the transactions, otherwise we'll rollback. Notably, we can do this with only partial state on the client!

We can also do deterministic simulation if you have total knowledge of the game state with this solution as well.
by intended | 2025-04-09 15:57:55+00:00
It’s even better, I was introduced to the term “narrative shopping” today.

> The second order effects are a much more fertile territory for narrative creation. That’s because, as with any other policy, the second order effects of tariffs don’t lend themselves to the same kind of certainty as first order effects. They involve people and how they will respond and act. Any argument in favor of tariffs can only live in the world of second order effects.

https://www.epsilontheory.com/narrative-shopping/

There is no logic here, seeing depth in a shallow pond, is the same as staring at the emperor’s new clothes.

PS> I have seen young voters happy to see Wall Street, elites and older generations feel pain.
by Kwpolska | 2025-04-09 15:58:24+00:00
> The production fix is don't include 3 versions of the same dependency in the image build (use "bcprov-jdk18on" and don't use any other "bcprov")

I doubt anyone is doing that manually, that’s probably done by mvn/gradle/sbt/whatever the cool Java kids use these days. Do the build tools not know about this problem and just make a mess?
by nonethewiser | 2025-04-09 15:58:28+00:00
How is including dogs random? Its fun. You said you wanted to see women included because it would be fun.

> The context in this case is pretty clearly geared towards connecting people across age generations.

Well no. Its clearly connecting older Japanse men with kids. Which is why your comment about including women isnt non-sensical.

You said you wanted to include women because it would be fun and said your original comment shouldnt be interpreted to imply sexism. That avoids actually saying its not sexist so I could use some clarification now that it seems like its not just all about whats fun.

Do you think there is an element of sexism in excluding women on the trading cards?
by skyyler | 2025-04-09 15:58:40+00:00
>Feels like hand wavy nod to a human soul

I have no idea what you're talking about. I've tried to understand where you're coming from with this and the only logical conclusion I can make is that you spend a lot of time engaging in debate about creativity and art as it relates to new AI technology, and you are simply re-igniting previous debates instead of engaging with me.

>It’s a really lame circular routine and lived experience being around my peers these days; oh I hate my job but this new thing is an abomination and affront to my chosen job.

It sounds like you're arguing with your peers, and not me, because I don't hate my job and I don't think AI is going to replace it any time soon.

>Are we that creative copy-pasting and git pull deps someone else maintains? IT is librarian work these days. Little in the day to day is novel creativity.

This isn't what I do at my day job, and if that's what you do... I think I have a good idea of why you interact with the internet like this.
by acyou | 2025-04-09 15:59:07+00:00
Interesting article. This is the key takeaway for me:

"U.S. firms are at a further disadvantage in that their foreign competitors benefit from sustained government incentives to invest in advanced industrial equipment."

True then, and true now. If you want to buy a machine, you are basically on your own, and machine financing isn't favorable, it's on the contrary somewhat predatory.

But this article was written prior to Haas really taking off in the 90s and 2000s, and I think Haas has been somewhat successful in selling into North America, if only for relatively cheap, low-quality, general-purpose machines.

And, if you extend the axis of that graph back past 1980, I think Germany, Japan and the UK were dominating advanced machine tool manufacture since their industrial revolutions. I am not convinced that USA was EVER a real leader in advanced machine tool manufacture, I think it was always traditionally imported. Correct me if I am wrong. Sure, the Americans made crappy low tech Bridgeport mills and engine lathes by the millions, then relied onto that technology for 100+ years (and are still trying to make it work). The Haas vertical mill is the new Bridgeport mill, it is 30 years behind state of the art, and American industry is still buying that en masse.

I think that the computer industry was successful enough in the 1990s, American policy makers were essentially OK with losing ground in the machine tool industry. Then the computer industry also got offshored.

But remember! The equipment and production lines were originally shipped offshore wholesale, the production lines can get shipped back, but American land, energy costs, wages, taxes and other input costs are too high to make it work (without protective tariffs).
by CyberDildonics | 2025-04-09 15:59:16+00:00
You keep saying "stack allocator" but you haven't been specific and said if you mean allocating on the stack or allocating on the heap and freeing memory based on the stack.

I'm not dismissing the trailing body macro approach, I just don't see what advantage it has over destructors which is a well worn solution. It seems like some of the design decisions are based off of 'don't do something that C++ does'
by westurner | 2025-04-09 15:59:16+00:00
Universal Blue immutable OCI images;

ublue-os/main: https://github.com/ublue-os/main :

> OCI base images of Fedora with batteries included

ublue-os/image-template: https://github.com/ublue-os/image-template :

> Build your own custom Universal Blue Image!

Microsoft took Torvalds, who also devs on Fedora FWIU.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-09 15:59:23+00:00
That's a great attitude if you can afford it.

But try telling it to the single low-income parent trying to raise their kids who just needs to make ends meet at the end of the month.

Unless you have a massive wealth redistribution plan in place, with massive, extremely progressive local taxes so everyone can afford the massively higher prices you'll be forcing on everyone?
by Flux159 | 2025-04-09 15:59:32+00:00
Some very quick initial thoughts - the json spec has some similarities to mcp: https://google.github.io/A2A/#/documentation?id=agent-card - there's an agent card that describes capabilities that google wants websites to host at https://DOMAIN/.well-known/agent.json according to https://google.github.io/A2A/#/topics/agent_discovery so crawlers can scrape to discover agents.

The jsonrpc calls look similar-ish to mcp tool calls except the inputs and outputs look closer to the inputs/outputs from calling an LLM (ie messages, artifacts, etc.).

The JS server example that they give is interesting https://github.com/google/A2A/tree/main/samples/js/src/serve... - they're using a generator to send sse events back to the caller - a little weird to expose as the API instead of just doing what express allows you to do after setting up an sse connection (res.send / flush multiple times).
by wegfawefgawefg | 2025-04-09 15:59:41+00:00
no not that one. the first icm paper:

https://pathak22.github.io/noreward-rl/

and the followup which address the noise impredictability problem.

there are more after that which i believe fail the black pill and miss the point of ml, asicifying the architecture with human priors. But the broader point is to show that rl is not just discovering solutions by chance in random actions. Nature starts with priors, and curiosity is one of the universal policy bootstrapping techniques. (others might be imitation, next state prediction, total nearby replication count)

There is also a paper that deployed ICM on a physical robot and it just played with a ball because it was the only source of novel stimuli, and inadvertantly learned how to operate its arms. There was no other reward in the environment except for curiosity. It is amazing, and slightly creepy. I think the ICM will be rediscovered later in ML tech.
by noodletheworld | 2025-04-09 16:00:18+00:00
yes.

This has been discussed before, but the short version is: there is no solution currently, other than only use trusted sources.

Unless there is a way beyond a flat text file to distinguish different parts of the “prompt data” so they cannot interfere with each other (and currently there is not), this idea of arbitrary content going into your prompt (which is literally what MCP does) can’t be safe.

It’s flat out impossible.

The goal of “arbitrary 3rd party content in prompt” is fundamentally incompatible with “agents able to perform privileged operations” (securely and safely, that is).
by adrian_b | 2025-04-09 16:00:32+00:00
Plants are happy with nitrate as the only nitrogen source.

Ammonium nitrate is preferred because it provides more nitrogen per weight, i.e. at similar transportation costs with the alternatives, and also because introducing a too great amount of metal cations together with the nitrate, e.g. potassium or calcium, can be detrimental for the soil and can make it too alkaline after the nitrate is consumed.
Show HN: MetaMCP uses MCP to manage MCP
by jczhang141 | 2025-04-09 16:01:28+00:00
You can connect all your MCPs through MetaMCP: a unified middleware MCP to manage all your MCP connections.

Hi all I am James glad to share some more progress on the project.

Features include:

- GUI app to manage multiple MCP server integrations all together.

- Support ANY MCP clients because MetaMCP is a MCP server.

- Support multi-workspace: e.g., activate a workspace of DB1 or switch to DB2 in another workspace, preventing polluting context of DB1 to your MCP Client.

- Tool level toggle on/off

- Trace tool execution logs for developers

And more potential to build this "OS" around MCP through MCP!
by Clubber | 2025-04-09 16:01:29+00:00
Imagine if China decided to invade Taiwan like they've been threatening to do for a while. They would instantly cut off all exports to the US, because that's the smart thing to do. They would probably blockade Japan and other countries as well to keep them from exporting to the US, because that's the smart thing to do. Now since our supply chains were greatly disrupted (remember COVID?) we can only go to war with the equipment we have and will struggle to produce any more equipment in a short period of time. No more uniforms, no more tanks, no more drones, no more missiles, no more artillery shells, no more medicine, etc, because all the materials for those things are largely sourced from Asia, which would now under a blockade.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-09 16:01:45+00:00
> SpacetimeDB wasn't built in a vacuum. It's the system powers our own large-scale MMORPG BitCraft. We designed it specifically for the performance requirements of games. That means extremely low latency (~100 us/Tx) and extremely high throughput (~1,000,000 Tx/s).

If you are trying to build a new MMO that scales to the moon, you might want to take a look at how the existing market goes about things.

Take World of Warcraft for example. You could probably put a $20 MySQL VPS behind a realm and have it reliably persist state with how authoritative and infrequently updated the clients are.

Being clever with what you can trust the client with and how the server reconciles events is where I think you will find most of the scaling hacks.
by cowpig | 2025-04-09 16:01:48+00:00
I don't totally understand why we need an additional layer of abstraction over MCP at this point. Why can't an agent just be an MCP server? What is the fundamental difference between an MCP server "tool" and an agent "capability"?

This kind of feels to me like someone at google saw how successful MCP was becoming and said "we need something like that". I feel the same way about OpenAI's Agent SDK.

I think the word "Agent" appearing in any engineering project is a tell that it's driven by marketing rather than engineers' needs.
by beng-nl | 2025-04-09 16:02:18+00:00
I don’t agree - working remotely is (in most respects) beneficial to the employee, and requires a lot of trust from the employer. So I think employees should do their part and honor that trust by being at least as productive as they would be at an office.

(I work remotely for a big corp and this is how I feel and act as well.)
by 16bytes | 2025-04-09 16:03:25+00:00
> The problem is that it talks about a fraction of what we want to convey.

That's ok! Hint at it and let people discover it instead of trying to force them from the get-go. Utilize progressive complexity; start simple, from first principles, and add complexity in bite-sized chunks. Show, don't tell.

No one wants to have to learn an entire philosophy before they can start using a tool.

For inspiration perhaps review how other very deep programs represent themselves for example orgmode.org. One caution there is that orgmode itself is famously obtuse for beginners.

Lastly, it is a bold statement to say something like "we have discovered a new development methodology, and have designed this toolkit around that philosophy".

Such a statement requires a ton of evidence that such a methodology is useful, and currently there simply is not enough.
by ajross | 2025-04-09 16:03:38+00:00
> Doesn't something have to happen eventually, before the problem gets worse?

The linked article is LITERALLY pointing out that the "something" you want to "happen" is in fact making exactly the problem you're talking about WORSE.

I don't get it, I just don't get it. We're all getting poorer, very rapidly, on every imaginable axis: higher domestic prices, lower international demand, higher interest rates (the linked article), lower asset valuation in US dollars, loser US dollar value globally. Literally everything is worse. And you're still digging for some kind of coin that might have some shine on the other side that you missed.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-09 16:04:34+00:00
Never heard of any of those marketplaces, not surprised at all you got no response.

Marketing is hard. It takes about 100x the effort that you think.

There are a lot of things that can work. For one thing you could count on spending more promoting your service than you spent developing it. That takes elbow grease to know you're not wasting your money.

If you want to put in effort but not money there are a large number of things that work such as, say, prospecting people on LinkedIn who are likely candidates and "cold outreach" them, but a good "cold outreach" is pretty warm because you have them well qualified. Running a blog that has really interesting content is another option. There also is the possibility of doing something really crazy like

https://themarketingmillennials.com/articles/2024-10-01/a-wi...

Myself I think "free" plans are for the birds, they cost a lot in terms of developer, marketing, sales and support headspace but don't convert well. Usually when I sign up for a "free" plan I never put much effort into evaluating the product because I have to multiply that effort by the expectation that the odds are 1/4 that I will want it, 1/4 that my employer will pay for it and such.
by normanthreep | 2025-04-09 16:04:43+00:00
yess we know! just this morning i said to my wife "darling i've been thinking about dropzap world again," and she said "the falling block game with lasers that amichail has been working on for many years? me too!"

i said "he thinks he has something that works now" and she responded "i know, it's amazing"

of course we know amichail. it's all we're talking about these days
by chris_va | 2025-04-09 16:05:04+00:00
Quite the chilling story.

The irony of the current administration making this argument: "The administration has acknowledged in court that not all the men have criminal records, but say it’s only further evidence of the threat they pose."

Here is a dumb question, even if these people were violent felons, what is the legal basis for sending them to a prison in another country? Does that not violate 8th amendment and/or habeas corpus regardless of the Alien Enemies Act (I cannot seeing the "right" to deport overriding the rest of the protections in the constitution)?
by viccis | 2025-04-09 16:05:06+00:00
Just anecdotally, I recognize and dread working with AI code nowadays. In the past when I see something stupid being done, my thought was "I wonder if there's a good reason they did it this way" but now it's increasingly "I wonder what other AI written problems are in this module".

Being forced to use AI would be a nightmare, as it means I would have to turn that same distrust onto my own code. It's one thing to use AI to basically just customize a scaffold like people do when using it to bootstrap some Next.js website or something. It's a completely different matter to have it writing code in huge and data driven existing codebases.
by Nav_Panel | 2025-04-09 16:05:45+00:00
This is insanely cynical. The optimistic version is that many teams were already home-rolling protocols like A2A for "swarm" logic. For example, aggregation of financial data across many different streams, where a single "executive" agent would interface with many "worker" high-context agents that know a single stream.

I had been working on some personal projects over the last few months that would've benefitted enormously from having this kind of standard A2A protocol available. My colleagues and I identified it months ago as a major need, but one that would require a lot of effort to get buy-in across the industry, and I'm happy to see that Google hopped in to do it.
by boredemployee | 2025-04-09 16:05:56+00:00
I think I understand what you're trying to say.

We certainly improve productivity, but that is not necessarily good for humanity. Could be even worse.

i.e.: my company already expect less time for some tasks given that they _know_ I'll probably use some AI to do tasks. Which means I can humanly handle more context in a given week if the metric is "labour", but you end up with your brain completely melted.
by j-krieger | 2025-04-09 16:06:18+00:00
> monomorphization bloat

Especially because the fix is so easy, it could just be fixed by the compiler on the fly.

If you have a function

fn a(arg: Into<C>) { expensive/extensive operations here }

and call it two times

a(&"test"); a(10);

The compiler will generate two functions

fn a_str(arg: &str) { /// expensive/extensive operations } fn a_u16(arg: u16) { /// expensive/extensive operations }

This can be fixed by just proxying the duplicated call like this

fn expensive_ops(arg: C) { // ... } fn a_str(arg: &str) { let _arg: C = arg.into(); expensive_ops(_arg); }
by bitmasher9 | 2025-04-09 16:06:19+00:00
Saying China wants Taiwan “just because” over simplifies the situation.

During the Chinese Communist Revolution the previous government of China retreated to Taiwan. The official name of the Taiwanese government is “Republic of China”, demonstrating that their legitimacy stretches back to this time period.

While Chinese settlers in Taiwan dates back further, China claimed the island in the 17th century. The island was under Japanese rule for about 50 years, before being returned to China in the post WW2 treaties.

The history is deep, and Taiwanese independence is a relatively new thing.
by elif | 2025-04-09 16:06:29+00:00
US customs on mail parcels cannot 1) compel you to unlock your device 2) threaten you with deportation for non-compliance

not to mention that there are rooms and people trained in every airport to scan your phone as a routine component of their daily function WHEREAS customs on mail are 90% concerned about duties and 10% concerned about smuggling. 0% on what kinda sms you send to your buddies
by torginus | 2025-04-09 16:06:55+00:00
I don't see how else they could've done that - if they decide not to tariff some countries, countries that did get tariffed could trivially reroute their goods to go through said exempt country - I'm not even sure goods would need to move physically to said country or they could get away with cargo ships registered under them and/or ports handed over to be the territory of said country.
by justonceokay | 2025-04-09 16:07:08+00:00
It’s about the “We can’t allow a mineshaft gap!” mentality displayed at the end of Dr Strangelove. If we aren’t using AI then how will we get developers interested in the cutting edge? When we are hiring new recruits they will know we are behind the times. We can’t allow other companies to outpace us in this space. Without an AI-first mindset we will be losing mindshare before our project has even left the planning stage!

The arms race is just as much about keeping up with the Jones’ as it is about company security.