MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-28 05:20:26+00:00
Being a professional also involves reading about the technology like how there are studies saying that prompt engineering has hit a limit which is why people are talking about reasoning, agentic systems, this vendor vs that vendor vs offline, etc... Part of being a professional is also wanting to understand why and how something works and not disclosing my secrets to a third party vendor or otherwise wish casting over a black box that I cannot audit. Part of being a professional includes a history of natural language processing experience and knowing the limits of the digital representation of information, and having played with the early incarnations of OpenAI products and seeing them fail in the same way ever since, in the well documented ways that transformers are known to fail. There's also a real problem in the overloading of terms where the lay people are hearing "we have to cross our fingers and hear rumors and the magic box will make things correct for us" vs. machine learning experts saying "you have to limit the context to precisely the problem at hand and then their accuracy will improve" except... in machine learning terms the second is actually about as good as the first and they are both bad ways of working. There is very exciting ongoing research operating on these things in parallel to just absolute mysticism and here on HN that line is pretty much eroded away, and a lot of that is due to thought-terminating responses that blame the users.
by wodenokoto | 2025-05-28 05:23:08+00:00
I don't think that is a "soft period" as parent is saying is the use of semicolons. I think it is - as the name implies - a semi colon. Or a soft colon, if you will.

It could sooner be replaced by a colon than a full stop. And I agree with your usage.

> Semicolons are used by people who find highly nested code to be natural and necessary: They add another level to the outline.
by D13Fd | 2025-05-28 05:24:22+00:00
With proof-of-work, we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels on a warming planet just to ensure people don’t cheat at various distributed spreadsheets. Even if you don’t participate in crypto, those who do are polluting your environment, increasing your electricity costs, and generally making the planet worse all to run their distributed spreadsheets

With proof-of-stake, all of the annoying crypto folk are basically harmless. They generate near zero economic value (moving money from place to place, which can be accomplished without crypto) but they don’t hurt anybody except for other crypto folk.
Show HN: MCP² (Mcpsq) – A MCP Server to Discover and Install Other MCP Servers
by xinbenlv | 2025-05-28 05:24:26+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently built something called MCP² (mcpsq) – a "MCP of MCPs", or a meta-MCP server.

What is it? It’s a management layer for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem. By installing mcpsq in an MCP-compatible client (like Cursor), you can directly chat with your AI agent to help you find, install, and manage other MCP servers — using natural language.

Site: https://mcpsq.xyz GitHub: https://github.com/xinbenlv/mcpsq

If you're an MCP server developer We're opening up early-stage server registration. You can submit your server by sending a Pull Request — it's the easiest way to be discovered by others in the ecosystem.

If you're an MCP user This project aims to provide the most MCP-native way to install MCP servers — directly via AI chat, without needing to fiddle with configs manually.

Currently supports Cursor, with Claude and ChatGPT support coming soon.

Would love your feedback or contributions — and a on GitHub would be awesome!

Thanks! Victor (github.com/xinbenlv)
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-28 05:26:32+00:00
Given that people love to try and talk as if they can replace developers right now, I wll disagree with any such assertions. Speculating on the future is worthless in this context.

But if we want to do it anyway: the current stalls and approaches to iterating on LLM's do not give much short term promise. This approach seems to already be plateauing.
by esseph | 2025-05-28 05:26:40+00:00
In my understanding, it depends on the device and the cable installation. Let's say it's a 59W device so it doesn't fall under NEC regulations as of 2017 for PoE devices over 60W.

The device needs a certain amount of power to keep itself alive. Depending on how the device is designed and if actually adhering to standards, the device should simply not have enough power to start at say 80m, or let's say they pushed the install from the get-go (happens all the time) and it's actually 110m on poor / underspec'd cable.

And let's say the device has enough power to start, but you're using indoor cat5 and it's been outdoor for 7 years, and you don't know this but it's CCA. If it's in a bundle with other similar devices drawing high power and there is enough heat concentrated at a bend, then yes, the cable could catch fire without the device having a problem. As long as the device has enough power it's going to keep doing its thing until the cable has degraded enough to cause signal drop and assuming it's using one of the more modern 4pair PoE standards, would just shut off. But that could be after the drapes or that amazon box in the corner of the room caught fire.

We're just lucky in the residential space that PoE hasn't been as "mass market" as an iphone, and we've been slowly working into higher power delivery as demands have increased.

IMO? It's all silly though. We should just go optical and direct-DC whenever possible ;)
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-28 05:26:52+00:00
Oh I mean for sure, but the point I was trying to make is that OP did those things, and I would argue the LLMs mostly just give him the permission to do it rather than actually producing something that he actually fully let the system do. I mean, he even says this too. I understand hacking is how things are done, but the thing that managers don't understand is that hacking is not their personal army, and you can't rub AI on things and make them better without losing determinism.
by emmelaich | 2025-05-28 05:27:24+00:00
Alongside the "excessive discussion of “super space electronic hangman life-war pong” were hardware hackers hooking up an S100 bus to AppleIIs or running CP/M on some weird machine via a z80 add-on card.

The other classic, risible, software discussion were hackers suggesting writing a recipe database program. Typically to keep their (typically female) partner from condemning their hobby as a waste of time.
by mintsuki | 2025-05-28 05:27:34+00:00
I know every word of what I said in the message you're replying to. While what you said is mostly accurate, as in MBR != BIOS and GPT != UEFI, never in my original message have I stated that that is the case. And the rest of what you said is incorrect, as per my original message.

I invite you to read what I said again.
by baq | 2025-05-28 05:28:06+00:00
They’re on the right path but still have a lot to learn in the testing department.

Source: my job’s monorepo is running nx, but I’m not in developer productivity; used to work with a large codebase with an accompanying test suite of thousands of hours of a single box and it’s kinda like watching people rediscovering the roundness required to make the wheel.
by Pawka | 2025-05-28 05:28:35+00:00
It's worth noting that most monorepos won't reach the same size as repositories from Google, Uber, or other tech giants. Some companies introduce new services every day, but for some, the number of services remains steady.

If a company has up to 100 services, there won't be VCS scale problems, LSP will be able to fit the tags of the entire codebase in a laptop's memory, and it is probably _almost_ fine to run all tests on CI.

TL;DR not every company will/should/plan to be the size of Google.
by echelon | 2025-05-28 05:29:31+00:00
As a former IC at a large monorepo company, I preferred monorepos over polyrepos.

It was the "THE" monorepo, and it made understanding the company's service graph, call graph, ownership graph, etc etc. incredibly clear. Crystal clear. Vividly so.

Polyrepos are tribal knowledge. You don't know where anything lives and you can't look or discover it. Every team does their own thing. Inheriting new code is a curse. Code archeology feels like an adventure in root cause analysis in a library of hidden and cryptic tomes.

Polyrepos are like messages and knowledge locked away inside Discord or Slack channels with bad retention policies. Everything atrophies in the dark corners.

If monorepos cost millions, I'd say polyrepos do just the same in a different way.

Monorepos are are a continent of giant megafauna. Large resources, monotrophic.

Polyrepos are a thousand species living and dying, some thriving, some never to be known, most completely in the dark.
by palmfacehn | 2025-05-28 05:29:38+00:00
I'm disillusioned by these headlines. Without citing the concentrations of valuable minerals the 19M statistic is meaningless. Perhaps other experts will chime in here. As I understand, minerals other than the primary target can add to the overall profitability of the enterprise. Another factor would be the ability for would be mining concerns to concentrate and extract the lithium. The US has relatively higher regulations and environmental protections than other jurisdictions.

>The oceans contain only trace amounts of gold at ten parts per quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000), but the seas are vast and have a volume of 1.335 billion kilometers. Some experts estimate up to 15,000 tons of gold in the world’s oceans.

https://learn.apmex.com/answers/how-much-gold-is-in-the-worl...
by csomar | 2025-05-28 05:30:54+00:00
You can't legally hire someone else not currently in the US or at least has a US-work permit and thus can be legally hired in the US and made a resident in some state. It used to be that the law turned a blind eye about this but now that's not the case.

You can Deel these employees but you can only transfer money abroad long enough till you realize that the only way to do it fully legally is to create a foreign entity in the foreign country and hire the employee through it. Might work for a particular and unique talent but it doesn't scale.

The US system is now hostile for "globally" distributed teams.
by akouzoukos | 2025-05-28 05:31:19+00:00
The name is the most important part, as it gives them a way to look for games that have their name but aren't theirs. But you're mostly right that they actually go after any game that has the same gameplay and is relatively popular, but only when they can easily issue a DMCA takedown. It's not like they ever said that this was their policy but you can see it bear out time and again.

TETR.IO and Jstris are insanely popular games that have been up for years with no action against them since they aren't hosted on another platform/marketplace.

This is also why Apotris got 2 DMCA takedowns on both Github and itch.io 3 months apart from each other, but after hosting the game on my own site, they haven't taken any further action in the past 2 years while it has continued to grow in popularity.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-28 05:32:47+00:00
I like this architecture because I like event sourcing. But you have to be careful with event sourcing. There are schemas where the views you want to materialize are slow to materialize, and anyways as the data grows the materialization gets slower. What to do? Well, the developer just has to write triggers (or equivalent) to update the materialization in-transaction, and you have to do this when doing replication / synchronization. And you need to think carefully about collision resolution -- basically you need to read up on CRDT a fair bit then think about it.

It would be really nice to have a SQLite3-like database with PG language functionality so that one could do local-first and remote-first as just a configuration setting.
by walterbell | 2025-05-28 05:33:10+00:00
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/nvidia-and-m...

Digitimes says that both companies are well into production ramp-up, however, states "insiders believe meaningful shipment volumes won't emerge until the second half of 2026".. early N1X benchmarks hint at performance that lags behind some Arm-based PC chips, noting "the results have raised industry concerns".. there are "unresolved integration issues with endpoint devices."
by wahern | 2025-05-28 05:33:32+00:00
See https://lwn.net/Articles/1009548/ and references therein.

Large folio support is a capability required for a Linux filesystem to fully support large block sizes--block sizes larger than the usual page size, which for ext4 on x86 is 4KB. So now ext4 can support block sizes of, e.g., 64KB--a common maximum block size supported by NVME drives--without having to issue more than a single read/write operation.

Background: recently the Linux memory management architecture completed the transition to so-called "folios", which provide a way to (mostly) atomically manage blocks of memory larger than the normal page size. It's like large pages, but more of a software abstraction than an interface over large page support in hardware. But to leverage the full potential of folios, various components, like the ext4 filesystem implementation, need to be further refactored beyond what was required for the initial transition to the folio API. See https://lwn.net/Articles/1015320/ for a recent overview of folios.
by account-5 | 2025-05-28 05:33:33+00:00
I agree but my point was not that my point was you can find tit for tat examples all over the place. It doesn't move the original conversation on. Point in fact, this morning in the news, a MET employee was reinstated after getting sacked for gross misconduct over comments apparently made whilst dealing with calls to the police. This time they're critised for the opposite of doing what they've been critised in the OP article for. Lose, lose for the police.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c14ke41yg18o
by mmooss | 2025-05-28 05:34:13+00:00
> It could sooner be replaced by a colon than a full stop.

Use it as you like, of course, but by the rules of grammar that is quite misleading. A semicolon must separate (or connect) two independent clauses, just like a period; a colon has many uses. Here is the Chicago Manual of Style:

"A colon introduces an element or a series of elements illustrating or amplifying what has preceded the colon. Between inde­pendent clauses it functions much like a semicolon (see 6.56), and in some cases either mark may work as well as the other; use a colon spar­ingly, however, and only to emphasize that the second clause illustrates or amplifies the first. (The colon usually conveys or reinforces the sense of "as follows"; see also 6.64.) The colon may sometimes be used instead of a period to introduce a series of related sentences (as in the third ex­ample below)."
by tomcam | 2025-05-28 05:34:15+00:00
By the way, I have a sincere question about land acknowledgments. How far do they go back? For example, should the Comanche do land acknowledgments for the Apaches? Are the descendants of Vikings responsible for land acknowledgments to the British whom they conquered?

Should modern Mexicans start their speeches with land acknowledgments to the Maya, Inca, and other Mestizo Indians? Indians and Mayans committed genocide at a big scale. Should their descendants be responsible for land acknowledgments?
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-28 05:34:23+00:00
I guess I respect that you're stating it honestly, but this is a statement of belief or faith. I think it is something that you should disclose perhaps more often because it doesn't stem from other first principles and is I guess actually just tautological. I guess this is also getting more precise with our fundamental disagreement, I guess I just wouldn't blog about things that are beliefs as if they are the technology itself?
by kingstnap | 2025-05-28 05:34:54+00:00
Proof of Work provides scarcity that makes crypto work. Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work.

I think proof of storage or something would be more interesting as a (partial) solution to the crypto folk wasting electricity.

Ideally as proof of RAM though. We don't want them abusing cloud storage plans.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-28 05:35:42+00:00
One thing I don't usually see discussed in monorepo vs multi repo discussions is there's an inverse Conway's law that happens: choosing one or the other will affect the structure of your organization and the way it solves problems. Monorepos tend to invite individual heroics among common infrastructure teams, for example. Because there are so many changes going in at once, anything touching a common area has a huge number of potential breakages, so effort to deliver even a single "feature" skyrockets. Doing the same thing in a multi-repo may require coordinating several PRs over a couple of weeks and some internal politics, but that might also be split among different developers who aren't even on a dedicated build team.
by proxynoproxy | 2025-05-28 05:37:40+00:00
Because it’s not external referencing. It’s all on chain, and any external price of tokens is all in humans minds. Of course, true of Bitcoin too. However, energy is the external thing that links time and computation to the chain data. Really, Bitcoin PoW is an amazing discovery. Proof of Stake is self serving self referencial database.

Bitcoin through Proof of Work is a global computational one-way valve for a ledger, which enables a fuzzy decentralized time, by which we can enforce digital scarcity! The ledger record becomes the digital commodity. What an age!

Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc. it’s not really different than 26 banks doing the same. And really you have to ask yourself about the purpose of any of this if you are trading 26 banks for 26 dudes in a discord.
by mikewarot | 2025-05-28 05:38:37+00:00
I'm learning what "vibe-coding" really is, and using GitHub CoPilot to build a variant of BASIC with a permanent equals (aka declarative programming) in node/typescript (of which I know nothing, I'm an old Turbo Pascal programmer)

Long ago, I came across Metamine here on HN, and thought it was magic... but there's a LOT of stuff in that code I don't understand.... maybe I'll do a Turbo Pascal version later? I do have code to do cooperative tasking under MS-DOS from the 1980s I wrote. ;-)

https://github.com/mikewarot/PermEq
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-05-28 05:38:57+00:00
Sshhht corporate hasn't understood yet that designers are in a collective loop because otherwise they would do nothing most of the time.

Changing icons, making some buttons bigger and smaller again, introducing and removing some gradients, that's what keeps us busy because at most companies the products already have a design system when we started.
by TFYS | 2025-05-28 05:40:06+00:00
You're probably right, though U.S healthcare costs per capita are much higher than they need to be, and would be much lower in a "proper" single payer system like in Europe. In any case, a wealth tax would still help a lot with being able to fund these programs. Yes, the working class does have to pay as well, but it'd be much less if there were a reasonable wealth tax.

But yes, global co-operation to enable a large enough tax on wealth is not going to happen any time soon. A more likely scenario is that as automation develops and as the share of income that capital gets grows, the working class will end up in a position bad enough that capitalism will collapse and be replaced with something else. Hopefully with something better, but could also be worse.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-28 05:40:47+00:00
Well, not always; one prominent use of semicolons is as the delimiter of an outer list of inner, comma-delimited lists. They're also used in a similar-but-not-quite-identical way to delimit lists in which the items are extremely long.

To qualify for [some involved definition], the situation must satisfy: (1) Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah; AND (2) Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah; AND (3) either (a) Blah blah blah blah; OR (b) Blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah.

This is essentially the same idea as defining an ASCII "record separator": you have data that is difficult to distinguish from ordinary delimiters, so you hope that by using a rare, exotic delimiter, the problem will go away.
by potholereseller | 2025-05-28 05:42:13+00:00
The relevant chemicals are Triptolide [2] and VCD [3], which are the principle ingredients of ContraPest, produced by SenesTech [4]. Contrapest requires regular doses to be effective, so this may prove to be a very lucrative contract for SenesTech. Any city councillors (or their friends/family) invested in SenesTech will surely profit as well.

> "We know these pellets are going to be attractive to rats because they're sweet. There's a compound in it called triptolide that targets ovarian function in female rats and sperm production in male rats," he said. Animal welfare organizations including PETA have shared support for the program's mission to keep poison out of the mouths of pets and wildlife.

If rats find the pellets sweet, then why shouldn't other mammals be attracted to it? Triptolide is toxic to mammals in general.

Did the city government take into account run-off? Triptolide is somewhat water soluble (0.017 mg/mL); NYC has a habit of getting flooded.

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptolide> [3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-vinylcyclohexene_diepoxide> [4] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SenesTech>
by RuslanBay | 2025-05-28 05:42:39+00:00
I'm excited to announce the first public developer preview of VETO, a powerful web extension that lets you take control of your online privacy and security! With VETO, you can block requests based on GeoIP, ASN, domain names, URLs, IPs, and more.

Your Feedback Matters. I'm looking for your input and contributions. Please try out VETO, provide feedback, and feel free to submit pull requests. Get the signed developer preview version here: https://github.com/veto-firewall/veto?tab=readme-ov-file#met...

I'm open to new opportunities - let’s connect!
by jjav | 2025-05-28 05:45:03+00:00
I am also a Radio Shack Color Computer alumni, owe my career to it. I started using OS-9 as soon as I could afford to upgrade to 64K RAM, to which I thank feeling right at home with SunOS after I got access to that in the university.

To anyone unfamiliar, which is probably most people, OS-9 was a multi-user multi-tasking operating system which ran on 6809 CPUs. While not a UNIX, it was similar enough that the transition to SunOS was smooth.

To this day, I still alias "ls -la" to "dire", which comes from my muscle memory of typing "dir -e" in OS-9!
by natmaka | 2025-05-28 05:45:10+00:00
> I tend to set up a small, but completely separate block device (usually on enterprise SAN storage or cloud block store) just for WAL/redo logs

I'm not sure about this, as this separate device may handle more of the total (aggregated) work by being a member of an unique pool (RAID made of all available non-spare devices) used by the PostgreSQL server.

It seems to me that in most cases the most efficient setup, even when trying hard to reduce the maximal latency (and therefore to sacrifice some throughput), is an unique pool AND an adequate I/O scheduling enforcing a "max latency" parameter.

If, during peaks of activity, your WAL-dedicated device isn't permanently at 100% usage while the data pool is, then dedicating it may (overall) bump up the max latency and reduce throughput.

Tweaking some parameters (bgwriter, full_page_writes, wal_compression, wal_writer_delay, max_wal_senders, wal_level, wal_buffers, wal_init_zero...) with respect to the usage profile (max tolerated latency, OLTP, OLAP, proportion of SELECTs and INSERTs/UPDATEs, I/O subsystem characteristics and performance, kernel parameters...) is key.