MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Hilift | 2025-05-27 09:53:28+00:00
Those were great books, but it doesn't age well when you fawn over Walgreens and a few years later the books have an aged like milk patina.

I worked for GE for a couple of years. They are a conglomerate. They acquired other companies. I worked for a company where GE was the largest customer, and GE acquired it. If a company started to perform poorly, it wouldn't be long before it would either be sold or split apart. The company I was working at probably would have failed anyway due to rapid competition, but since GE used a lot of its products it was sort of a no brainer until an alternative was found.

Acquiring and sunsetting companies is not uncommon now, but back then it wasn't received well and backlash accumulated over time. They had/have a huge part of the jet engine market. Due to their size and executive connections, they were capable of landing large contracts, such as defense and aerospace.

They aren't successful if compared to Meta for example, that nets $70 billion per year.

GE acquired the power grid component of Alstom, a French company in 2014. That company was previously fined by the US DOJ for $772 million for FCPA violations (bribes). (This was back in the US World Police days).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations
by lynx97 | 2025-05-27 09:54:22+00:00
Regarding the "worse is better" discussion: At least its definitely better accessibility-wise. HN is about the last well-known site that allows interacting with it, including writing comments, with plain old Lynx. I am well aware that most web devs do not care anymore these days, and they have their reasons for sure. However, its still nice to see sites that refuse to go for SPA. It makes them so much more useable for people like me (blind). A big THANK YOU to the site maintainers, its one of the last corners of the net where interesting stuff happens which is still accessible.
by hengheng | 2025-05-27 09:55:18+00:00
Old laptop cells are going to need a lot more babysitting than a new LiFePO4 rackmount battery. Those generally do pretty well with the internal monitoring that they bring. Semiconductor fuse as overcurrent protection, passive balancing and monitoring of individual cell voltages seems to get you pretty far. Get your 48V or 51.2V battery in 5 kWh, 10 kWh or 15 kWh cell size from one of the Chinese outlets in dubious quality, or from real brand names like Pylontech. RS485 is usually present and there are kludgy home-assistant gateways, but they're not required for safety.

External monitoring is made by Victron, who initially did electrical solutions for boats. Their inverters are also very popular and pretty great.

Also, brick walls are kinda nice I have to admit, along with an exhaust for any fumes.
by rvz | 2025-05-27 09:56:30+00:00
To know what the "end game" is, you first need to define "AGI".

However, there is no agreed upon definition of what "AGI" actually is and it can mean anything. So the closest true definition is what are the big AI labs "doing"?

Most of the work and what they are doing is building AI agents and chatbots that "replace" or "streamline' operations; i.e more layoffs in favour of AI.

So assuming that progress will continue, the logical end-game is a 10% increase in global unemployment as the start and then you get to the conclusion that what "AGI" actually means is mass job displacement of knowledge workers with them being automated by AI - creating a state resembling Mad Max / Fallout scenario were humans are totally dependent (slaves) on robots.

QED.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-05-27 09:56:48+00:00
2022-2025: They're sandboxed text/pixel-prediction machines with interesting emergent properties. They provide output in response to natural language instruction, which they are able to comprehend. There's no question of what they "want" -- they're Searle's Chinese Room IRL and their memory is too short for them to have any real understanding of what they do.

2025: They're increasingly agentic rather than sandboxed -- given tasks to autonomously perform in the real world. They're not markedly smarter than they were, but they have far larger context windows, so they can remember prior output and perform more complex or multi-step jobs adequately. (i.e. generating reports from 150 web searches, or making videos by stringing along image generation.) They don't appear to have inherent drives or motivations, but it's possible that they're getting there.

Future: Nobody knows. It's not clear that they can have wants, or ever become markedly smarter than the humans who build and train them. (I mean, they're already much smarter in some respects -- faster and vastly more erudite -- but they appear to lack that certain inventive spark that characterizes the best human geniuses.)
by ath_ray | 2025-05-27 09:57:53+00:00
author of the article here.

You can use OpenAPI as well. With MCP however, there's an aspect of AI-nativity that MCP offers that reifies patterns that show up in building integrations that helps building and adoption (Tools, Prompts, Resources etc). It's a different layer of abstraction. There's some things like Sampling that I cannot find an OpenAPI equivalent of easily.

I definitely barely scratched the surface with my example, but it's true that most MCP Servers I have seen and used are basic REST endpoints exposed as tool calls.

That said, the MCP server layer has some design considerations as well, since it's a different layer of abstraction from a REST API. You may not want to expose all the API endpoints, or you may want to encode specific actions in a way that is better understood by an LLM rather than an application that parses OpenAPI.
by jsheard | 2025-05-27 09:58:53+00:00
Just a word of warning, the Tetris Company is pretty aggressive about protecting their trademarks. I'd at least pick a different name, but sometimes they even go after Tetris clones which don't use the name (e.g. Apotris).

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/adcac3eddac2e5555d87942d...
by obayesshelton | 2025-05-27 09:58:56+00:00
I am struggling too.

There is quite the security risk it seems. From giving your credentials to access to your filesystem and other OS related stuff.

Would you go to an website and willingly give your credentials or filesystem access?

You don't really know what is happening in the middle.

Finally if you are building an AI wrapper, you are just adding more "wrappers" on top
by maxbond | 2025-05-27 09:59:02+00:00
It's not a replacement for a math exam, it's a replacement for an essay. You get some sources and a topic and have an hour or two to write an essay, by hand in the exam room. The alternative being to have the proper time to think and research and then submit your essay in Canvas or whatever.

"Worst nightmare" is hyperbole but they were certainly my least favorite exams.
by thresher | 2025-05-27 10:00:53+00:00
I teach computer science / programming, and I know what a good AI policy is: No AI.

(Dramatic. AI is fine for upper-division courses, maybe. Absolutely no use for it in introductory courses.)

Our school converted a computer lab to a programming lab. Computers in the lab have editors/compilers/interpreters, and whitelist documentation, plus an internal server for grading and submission. No internet access otherwise. We've used it for one course so far with good results, and and extending it to more courses in the fall.

An upside: our exams are now auto-graded (professors are happy) and students get to compile/run/test code on exams (students are happy).

>Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible.

This is the real demon to vanquish. We're approaching course design differently now (a work in progress) to tie coding exams in the lab to the homework, so that solving the homework (worth a pittance of the grade) is direct preparation for the exam (the lion's share of the grade).
by diggan | 2025-05-27 10:02:31+00:00
> REPL requires a lot of discipline from the developer to keep track of its state

More discipline than what is required when trying to keep track of all of that in your head? Personally I use a REPL because I'm lazy and dumb, and the REPL helps me keep track and makes sure I don't do stupid mistakes. If I wanna know what value a thing has, I just ask the REPL, instead of trying to retrace some logic by reading the code again.
by sigwinch | 2025-05-27 10:04:11+00:00
I see that as path-dependent still. I wonder: how would AI achieve an ability to dictate the terms of big systems?

Right now, its mode is gathering info about the world. The most important questions end with, “… to generate passive income for me” which after a turning point will become “… to generate passive income for my benefactor”; and finally “… to dominate access to resources”. AI will help you individually, because it’s important for both of you to acquire capital for your benefactor.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-27 10:04:40+00:00
Why should it belong to people who are good at botting? That's a much less fair way to allocate resources than wealth. In a free society wealth is used to buy things, that's the point of earning it. If you don't generate more wealth and you trade it away then eventually you end up poor again. If you're generating wealth continuously, then the things you can buy with it are the reward for doing so. It's much better for everyone that desirable apartments go to people who earned them rather than those who randomly managed to shave some milliseconds off a TCP connection.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-27 10:05:00+00:00
Writing an essay by hand in the exam room is also the norm for a final exam.† The term used at my high school was "in-class essay", and they weren't rare. At no point did anyone feel the need to use paper that was bound. Paper is paper.

(I can't really speak to college; I didn't take classes that required essays.)

I always loved in-class essays as an alternative to take-home essays, since the demand on your time is zero instead of "lots".

† A final paper, in contrast, would be written in advance. Usual practice would be to have the paper and the exam. Is the article really saying "schools have started giving exams again"?
by topspin | 2025-05-27 10:06:56+00:00
> Aren't they also claiming this is more reliable?

Indeed they do. I overlooked that.

I know little about microLED arrays and their reliability, so I won't guess about how credible this is: LED reliability has a lot of factors. The cables involved will probably be less reliable than conventional laser fiber optics due to the much larger number of fibers that have to be precision assembled. Likely to be more fragile as well.

On-site fabricating or repairing such cables likely isn't feasible.
by tiborsaas | 2025-05-27 10:09:40+00:00
Out of all the things, you brought up Comic Sans, which is really hard to defend other than ironic use cases and no, there's no proof either it helps dyslexia. Even if it does, there are also better alternatives in the accessibility space.

How many designer friends do you have? Do you know what they do daily? We know your preconception that regardless of company size and product they are just counting beans.
by throwaway290 | 2025-05-27 10:10:01+00:00
Nah. In reality they would just automate the stuff mentioned like reprompting and context. Make it generate an outline then call it again to generate every section. Call again with yet another prompt to validate quality and check references.

No magic, all dumb for loops and string formatting and a bunch of calls to LLM. Just a single prompt from the manager. Writers can now go do a roofing job to put food on the table while the retirement age always grows proving them how AI is finally freeing humanity from having to work.
by pbiggar | 2025-05-27 10:10:24+00:00
I run a non-profit called Tech for Palestine that is pushing for digital and real-world freedom. The efforts to weaponize the tech industry to control our speech are very frequently aligned to Israel as part of a movement to suppress Palestinian liberation.

We support over 60 projects in areas such as media bias, algorithmic/AI bias, protest tech, and boycotting, which are pushing back against these initiatives. Donations are very much appreciated

https://techforpalestine.org/donate/
by scowby | 2025-05-27 10:10:31+00:00
There is Australian research into virtual fencing https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/it/Virtual... that has been commercialised. There’s a lot of expense in fencing and being able to herd cattle remotely is one of the benefits, you can also define areas to avoid, like rivers and dams without putting a fence in place.
by eesmith | 2025-05-27 10:10:34+00:00
Exactly!

Colbert gave a commencement speech. (He even wondered if he was the one invited, or his eponymous character was the one invited.)

Since others normally write his lines, do you grouse that you don't know who wrote Colbert's commencement speech?

If you think he wrote it, do you wonder why he wrote his own speech instead of his writers?

Which is why your question "Does Matt Vogel normally write Kermit's lines?" makes it sound like you just want an argument.
by srean | 2025-05-27 10:11:09+00:00
I once ended up participating in rock, paper scissors strategy competition on a whim.

At that time I was quite tired of polishing and repolishing a paper draft at my university. (I write very poorly). And there it was, an announcement of this fun competition. The deadline was just an hour away.

I had no time to implement any respectable algorithm myself.

So, all my submission did was take the history of plays of my opponent, up to the present point in the ongoing joust, and extend it by three possible completions. I would compress each of the three resulting strings. Whichever completion gave the shortest compressed final string, I assumed that to be my opponent's predicted play. I played whatever beat that predicted play.

This did not win the competition, but survived the knockout for many rounds, beyond my expectation. If I remember correctly, I had used plain old zip. A compressor that converges faster would have been better.

In essence my strategy was similar to a Markov chain predictor. It would have been exact match had I used a Markov model based compressor.

The number of rounds of play against one's opponent was not long. Had it been so, Lempel-Ziv being an universal compressor, would have been hard to beat.

Of course we know from game theoretic analysis what the Nash strategy is for this game, but where is the fun in playing that ?

One might think that a transformer based player would be an excellent strategy, not necessarily. One needs to learn potentially non-stationary strategies of the opponent from very few examples - (near) zero-shot online learning is required.

If I had more time, I would have tried context-weighted trees - universal learners for stochastic strings. The failure mode would be non-ergodic plays by the opponent, assuming that, it too is another stochastic parrot.
by jll29 | 2025-05-27 10:12:45+00:00
I was also wondering that - is the poster the author?

In any case Markov chains are a simple and elegant mechanism for making predictions, easy enough to understand so that even school kids at grade eleven (which is where probability theory got introduced when I underwent it) can follow the popular "weather forecasting" tutorial using MCs.

Onwards, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) add to MCs a layer of hidden states and associated emission probabilities. To learn these, check out Lawrence Rabiner's beautiful tutorial: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/18626

Apart from their simplicity and mathematical elegance it is remarkable how little data and electricity these models require to do a good job.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-27 10:15:06+00:00
> A basic water based fire suppressor would not extinguish a battery fire but it will cool it and the room, limiting spread.

That's the thing: it will not, quite the contrary - unless it's many tons of water at once that quench the fire, the burning lithium will just go and create hydrogen gas that in turn recombines and leads to an even larger fire.
by donatj | 2025-05-27 10:15:33+00:00
With the only real tangible thing I know about rust being that the "Rust by Example" introduced a macro in the very first example, it took me waaay too long before it clicked that this might be a joke.

The WASM related annotations had me rolling my eyes a bit, yet I'd seriously read to around line 200 before I started thinking "are you kidding me"

Good on you, you got me!
by neepi | 2025-05-27 10:15:53+00:00
Supposed to be the same thing in the UK but no one cares. In fact most of our students (undergrad mathematics) appear to have HP Prime now which has a full CAS built in. The questions are designed to break the CAS sometimes. Try expanding (a-2b)^1000 on a calculator to get a coefficient out. It gets stuck and hoses the whole calculator.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-27 10:16:54+00:00
I was listening to a (100x wiser than me person) saying on an interview that (I'm paraphrasing) "the disconnect between thinking and writing (brain+hand+fingers+pen+paper) is the thing that will lower intelligence and stupidify people". The guy was far gentler than how I wrote the previous sentence, but he went on to analyze how humanity's ability to 'grow' has exploded in comparison with the invention of writing (Harari's "Nexus" also speaks of this), and how "writing 10 words and getting 1000 back, and not even reading that" will make the (perhaps 'academic') part of people's brains 'poorer'/weaker.

Now we think the 'prompt' and the writing magically happens. No finger motion, not thinking each word and writing it down, no re-reading 3-4 times (as we check if our handwriting is readable), and so on.

When I heard that the image (Wall-e) of the fat people on board the spaceship, sitting, and consuming 24/7 (food, drinks, 'content' on their VR headsets). Full tech everywhere, everything they ever desired - they got, but fat, clumsy, unable to walk, in the mercy of even the tiniest of adverse circumstance.
by jorvi | 2025-05-27 10:17:31+00:00
> The University is a student-factory

In The Netherlands, we have a three-tier tertiary system: MBO (practical job education / trades), HBO (college job education / applied college) and WO (scientific education / university).

A lot of the fancy jobs require WO. But in my opinion, WO is much too broad a program, because it tries to both create future high tier workers as well as researchers. The former would be served much better by a reduced, focused programme, which would leave more bandwidth for future researchers to get the 'true' university education they need.
by infecto | 2025-05-27 10:19:09+00:00
Not knowing which model you’re using is doing it wrong, unfortunately, that matters with current-gen tools. The differences are significant. And while LLMs do hit limits fast on deep complex work, dismissing them outright misses the real utility: they’re great at the tedious stuff. No fanboyism but more middle of the road it works great for some things, ok for others and terrible for the rest.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-27 10:22:18+00:00
I think the ffmpeg / libav controversy definitely showed that codec implementation is an area which doesn't attract only well adjusted people. Emulators have the same issue. It seems to be common about this very technical, very low level projects.

You sometimes get contributors which are very attached to their work and have strong feelings about how things should be done with the deadly combo of low / still developing social skills.
Built a directory of useful AI tools (in Spanish)
by kraayen_jon | 2025-05-27 10:22:50+00:00
I launched a product last year. Spent $300+. Nobody saw it.

Google never indexed it. Zero clicks.

I learned something the hard way: building isn’t enough if nobody finds it.

I never shared it publicly. I was frustrated. But now, I want to do things differently.

So today, I’m launching: ¿Qué IA es?

A curated directory of AI tools in Spanish.

It’s where I organize the apps I actually use, the ones I recommend, and the ones others are building.

Why I built it:

→ I love discovering new tools and people often ask which ones I use. → I want to share useful resources, not just my own products. → Shipping is good, but distribution is everything. → I felt there was a gap: a space in Spanish, made by someone who uses these tools daily.

Also: it’s open to the community.

If you’re building something with AI and want to reach Spanish-speaking users, you can list it for free.

I’ll review and approve it myself.

Would love your thoughts. Any feedback is more than welcome.
by frabcus | 2025-05-27 10:23:51+00:00
It's a fundamental user experience flaw with the MCP server. It does indeed need fixing - e.g. it could have a permissions system itself, so even if the GitHub token has permissions, different projects have their tool calls filtered to reduce access to different repos. Or it could have a clearer UX and instructions and help making multiple tokens for the different use cases. The MCP server could check the token permissions and refuse to run until they're granular.
by croes | 2025-05-27 10:25:05+00:00
As long as you can vote and the vote is recognized you are a democracy, there is a reason why liberal democracy and democracy aren’t just synonyms.

Foundational freedoms sounds like a fixed definition of freedoms but history showed it’s highly subjective and selective by culture and country.

Not all cultures value individual freedoms like western culture does, and few cultures grant all their freedoms to people outside their culture or country.

Societies always have to balance between what’s good for all, most, some and one.
by maxbond | 2025-05-27 10:27:00+00:00
My biggest problem with them was that they were painful, my hand would start cramping and such.

I think the benefit of it being bound is a.) they don't want you to use your own paper because it might give you an opportunity to cheat and b.) if 100 students turn in loose leaf essays you're liable to lose a few pages. But that's just my speculation.
by jansan | 2025-05-27 10:27:21+00:00
> The Me262 was the first operational jet fighter, again with Ohain's engine.

I think "Ohain's engine concept" would be more correct.

Ohain worked at Heinkel and developed the HeS 011 engine. However, the Me 262 was equipped with the Junkers Jumo 004, which was based on Ohain's design, but developed without him. The first test flights were actually done in 1942 with two BMW Typ P 3302 turbines (later called BMW 003).
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-27 10:27:21+00:00
> Even if rav1d closes the gap, who will ship rav1d over dav1d? More than 85% of dav1d is hand written assembly that rav1d takes as-is and calls via unsafe blocks. Is this really memory safety?

> The dav1d improvements must continuously be backported to rav1d, see the 82 closed PR's here [3]. Who is going to pay for this maintenance in perpetuity?

No one?

Isn't the point of rav1d to show that it's possible to write a performant encoder in semi-idiomatic Rust and that it doesn't have to be very different from one written in C?

It seemed pretty clear to me that rav1d was supposed to be a fun "research" side-project from its author shared with everyone and with an unclear future which will depends of what the community wants to actually do with it but I might be completely wrong.
by neepi | 2025-05-27 10:28:00+00:00
This reminds me of something that happened to us recently. So one of the internal things we have is a giant turd that sits on top of some Oracle/SAP mess. The user interface is circa 2001 and hasn’t changed really. Looks like a cross between Motif and GTK1 it’s that bad. The icons are off the shelf ones from some clip art collection.

So they need to rewrite it and got a consultancy to do it. The whole UI got rewritten using react and used an off the shelf flat design. A week after launch they sent out a user survey and nearly every respondent complained about the flat UI. So they made it look like the old one again very quickly.

So now we have a shiny new React app that looks like something from 2001.

I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just user studies are broken.