MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by knowriju | 2025-05-11 09:13:08+00:00
What's funny about this comment is that YouTube is absolutely usable if you pay for YouTube Premium, but most won't. Goes to show, while everyone whines about how bad an ad based business model is, noone has any alternate strategy that works at scale, - especially one that's not exclusionary to people from the developing world who can't afford to pay for every single thing on the internet.
by PeterStuer | 2025-05-11 09:13:21+00:00
As someone who has designed and implemented automated descision systems for the financial sector:

Many of these systems are rule based, not black box NN. The reasons are many. The first descision such a sytem makes is wether the case is suitable for automated descision. If not, the case manager wants all the data and the exact reason why the case needs manual attention.

Rules regarding descisions change constantly, mostly in line with (aggregate) risk positions and the financial business climate. Specifics are tuned on types of cases, exposure to certain asset classes in the portfolio etc., not just on the basis of a global parameter.

Risk rules and models vary significantly between different regions and countries. So does the availability of data. This wouls significantly fragment the training data.

Rules can deal easily with niche cases incorporating specific explicit world knowledge. E.g. dentists require significant credit at the start of their carreer for building out their practice and the assets are harder to market in case of loan default. Would the (fragmented) training dataset have enough nuance to cover all such niche rules? What if they change?

My personal feeling is some of the recent regulation should be more focussed on systems and outcomes, and try less to tie that to specific technology.

Suppose I take a room of 50 low paid employees. I project a past finance case onto the screen, and they get to vote yes or no. The result is then showm so they know what the right answer eas. They earn a bonus in line with how many they get right. Once sufficiently trained, they move to production and real case descisions are based on a simple majority of their votes.

No AI system to be found here. Just human 'experts' making joint descisions, right? The AI act does not apply.
by James_K | 2025-05-11 09:13:36+00:00
> No, they’re not.

Interesting that you are critiquing a woman for making observations without evidence, then you yourself make an observation without evidence. It couldn't be a double standard, could it?

> it is unscientific to claim this bias without evidence

We have ample evidence that almost everyone is sexist. Assuming that this doesn't apply to people on Hacker News is rather odd.
by behnamazimi | 2025-05-11 09:13:53+00:00
I built PlayMime, a simple, free web app for playing charades in person—no downloads, no signups, just launch and play.

You can pass the device around or let one person act while others guess. It includes:

• Quick Play Mode • One Word Per Turn Play Mode • Heads-Up Mode • Random Word Generator

It works well on both desktop and mobile, and was designed to be fast, clean, and distraction-free.

I made it for parties and family gatherings, but I’d love feedback or ideas for new modes. Happy to open-source parts of it if there’s interest.

Link: https://playmime.com
by Wololooo | 2025-05-11 09:15:19+00:00
To add some context here, at the time you had Jeff Gerstmann which is a dinosaur in the game journalism sphere and had insights and insider information from many different sources.

He has also an encyclopedic knowledge of weird esoteric games.

Add to this a series of people he had great chemistry with and people that were not familiar with some franchises and introduced by other members lead to funny moments.

Their coverage of E3 was legendary.

It depends how deep people are within subcultures but giant bomb did offer a lot of entertainment (even for free I never paid for the premium stuff) and honest game reviews. I can't speak for the current state because I was watching before the core team left and stopped watching after.
by uoaei | 2025-05-11 09:15:22+00:00
Anyone who has had to learn social skills/cues as an adult, with analytical faculties in place of a more intuitive understanding, can attest to these seemingly universal patterns. People are ultimately more predictable than they believe themselves to be, and there are clear signs of a rich (evolutionary?) history of habit formation over many generations that in a real sense define "the human condition". One should consider themselves privileged not to have been forced to spend their cognitive efforts on understanding these patterns rather than merely be socialized into them.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-05-11 09:15:49+00:00
Thermostats were invented by the Dutch genius Cornelis Drebbel (aka de rebel) around 1600, based on alchemical principles.

This cybernetic alchemist also invented functional air conditioning, a perpetual motion machine (wound a clock powered by daily changes in barometric pressure), solar powered fountains and the first functional submarine (along with torpedos).

I have a full sized replica of his wooden submarine in Amsterdam. He also invented a mechanism for generating oxygen — necessary for the rowers, of course.

His thermostat was used to incubate eggs. It appeared in Chinese literature, with illustrations, within 50 years.

https://drebbel.net/2013%20Drebbels%20Athanor.pdf

This is pre steampunk — alchemy-punk?

Both Shakespeare and Ben Johnson wrote plays with characters based on Drebbel.

He also invented magic lanterns (projection devices) and camera obscures for painters.

He was widely discussed by members of the Royal Society, but had been generally forgotten. Largely because a few early Dutch scientists thought he was a charlatan.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-11 09:19:11+00:00
386SX was slower than a 286 at the same clock only for the legacy 16-bit programs and only for the 16-bit programs that did not use a floating-point coprocessor, as the 80387 coprocessors available for 386SX were much faster at the same clock frequency than the 80287 available for 286.

Moreover there was only a small time interval when 286 and 386SX overlapped in clock frequency. In later years 286 could be found only at 12 MHz or 16 MHz, while 386SX was available at 25 MHz or 33 MHz, so 386SX was noticeably faster at running any program.

Rewriting or recompiling a program as a 32-bit executable could gain a lot of performance, but it is true that in the early years of 386DX and 386SX most users were still using 16-bit MS-DOS applications.
by rich_sasha | 2025-05-11 09:20:42+00:00
Well done! Keep going :)

I'd say the hardest bit about running a business is not running the business. It's everything else - admin, figuring out what you actually want to do, reaching customers, retaining customers etc.

But also that's the bit you have lots of time to figure out. Focus on the bits you enjoy and try to learn as much as you can (unless you are really desperate for cash out of this, in which case focus on all that!). You can figure out the boring bits later.
by Retric | 2025-05-11 09:22:06+00:00
That’s more a modern interpretation coloring history. “Applied mathematics” has always disagreed with reality. It’s only recently that we’ve gotten so good at understanding the world that the differences seem less pronounced.

Ancient Egyptians didn’t know why the height of a pile of grain doesn’t grow linearly with the amount of grain in a column etc, instead mathematics was seen as a useful shortcut. Which has always been what applied mathematics ends up as.

> You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy"

There’s a far longer list of famous people including philosophers, scientists, etc who disagree with that idea than agree with it. Fundamentally they operate in different directions with philosophy attacking from the top down and science and mathematics from the bottom up.

Plato specifically disagreed with the notion that observation alone can lead to truth.
by imiric | 2025-05-11 09:22:30+00:00
You're talking like there are no alternatives to all of these products. There are, and not just from Apple. The reason Google's products are popular is because they're advertised as being "free", and Google has enough resources to run them as loss leaders, while also exerting pressure as a giant corporation and monopoly.

If they happen to disappear tomorrow it would cause a minor disruption in the markets, but the world would quickly adjust, and smaller companies would have a chance at competing. Until a new monopoly pops up, and governments are "forced" to break them up again. The circle of capitalism.
by xscott | 2025-05-11 09:22:56+00:00
They tried this with Itanium and got beaten up constantly about how legacy performance was bad. Personally, I agree with you, but the market isn't rational. This paved the way for AMD to eat some of their lunch by making a "compatible" 64 bit ISA. Itanium could've been great for the kinds of workloads I was interested in at the time.
by tsimionescu | 2025-05-11 09:23:18+00:00
Propaganda, which is what advertising is, is generally a way to trick people into doing things that they wouldn't otherwise have done, typically by making them believe things that are not true.

In the case of advertising, those untrue things are usually "X is a much bigger problem than I thought" and "Y will solve problem X and make my life a lot easier". That you can convince people of these things doesn't make them true in all cases. Washing machines are extremely useful; egg cookers, very much unnecessary. Yet commercials will often look the same for both kinds of products (not for washing machines today, obviously, as the case for why they are useful to have has long since become obvious, and commercials are mostly about which brand is better).

This is an often overlooked thing in discussions about advertising. A major part of the propaganda effort is not "which brand of X should I buy", it's "I need to own an X". That's where they lie to people the most, and convince them to waste money, not on an inferior product, but one that shouldn't have existed at all.
by globular-toast | 2025-05-11 09:23:48+00:00
It's not technically currently dead, but running a film movie camera pointing at your laptop during a Teams call is a bit out of reach of most. Even movies costing millions of credits are not shot on analogue any more.

Can you manufacture film yourself? Know anyone who does?

It could start with quietly making the essential chemicals in film production and development "controlled". Then you might need a licence to do analogue photography. Eventually even the last few analogue photographers either die or switch to digital due to the increasing impracticality of analogue. Then the film companies stop making it, then you make it illegal for them to start making it again. You've now killed the analogue hole.

Maybe you're hoping it would be futile like the war on drugs, except there's actually demand for drugs. I can't imagine dealers suddenly stocking up on illegal film for all the people wanting to capture stuff from their Teams calls.
by qldp | 2025-05-11 09:24:03+00:00
first off, very well done. this article captures exactly the uneasiness i've felt as an mcp implementer.

doing seemingly in-the-box, mundane things like asking the server to dynamically register a new resource after a tool call yields new local files is met with surprising errors like "resources cannot be registered after transport connection."

i reached for the official kotlin sdk, found it did not work (mcp clients refused stdio comms), looked at the source and saw that the transport layer had recently been converted to a proprietary implementation, leaving commented-out code in-place that showed the previous transport details. reimplementing the former, assumedly-functional interface yielded the same broken stdio behavior, and everything being package-private meant i couldn't easily modify sdk components to fiddle with a solution without rewriting the entire transport mechanism. i wasn't willing to do this on a lark and hope the rest of the sdk behaved as promised, so my team is now stuck with a typescript mcp server that no one is comfortable maintaining.

what's really concerning is that openai threw in the towel on a competing standard, so we're now being corraled into accepting mcp as the only reliable tool interface, because every llm (frontier, and derivatives trained on these models) will end up conforming to mcp whether they intend to or not.

i haven't yet mentioned that there's an implicit hierarchy in the three capabilities exposed to mcp clients/servers -- tools above resources and resources above prompts, the latter of which is flat-out ignored by clients. the instructions aspect of server initialization was the only reliable way to bootstrap context with actionable exemplars, and that's just a big, inlined markdown document.

all of that said, the mcp contract is not pretty, but it works. in ~200 lines of code, i can spin up a wrapper over existing APIs (web and/or local binaries) and provide a workable plugin that adds real value to my team's day-to-day activities. mcp hasn't really promised more than that, and what it's promised, it's delivered.
by kragen | 2025-05-11 09:25:04+00:00
Nonsense. You seem to want to redefine "philosophy" to mean "philosophy that doesn't work", which admittedly is a widespread definition today among the common people. But if we stipulate that definition, it has the practical problem that we cannot tell whether what Chalmers is up to here is "philosophy" or not until we find out whether it was a productive line of inquiry or not, perhaps in two or three hundred years.

Whether Plato believed that you could figure out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter from pure logic, or whether that required empirical observation, is irrelevant to the fact that he considered figuring out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter to be properly part of philosophy. This is an assertion that it would never have occurred to anyone to challenge until very recently, with the advent of the useless popular definition of "philosophy" you seem to be championing for some random reason.
by the_othernet | 2025-05-11 09:25:04+00:00
Using only 32bit fast_loop and mix (for 64bits of state) passes PractRand with 64bit output up to 256GB with only one unusual. That's about a 100 bit LCG equivalent? I did have to alter the output to be "(GR * mix) + fast_loop" and change the rotation constants to be 12 and 5.
by graemep | 2025-05-11 09:26:27+00:00
> Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism

This is incorrect. The church was initially fine with heliocentrism - they were fine with Copernicus. He was encouraged by the Church and his living was provided by the Church so he was in effect funded by the church.

Galileo made a specific claim that it has been proven that the sun was the centre of the universe, and annoyed a lot of powerful people (e.g. mocking the Pope).

> (man wasn't at the center of the universe)

That is imposing modern perceptions on a different age. It would convey their perception better to say the earth was seen as the bottom of the universe, the one corrupt blot on an otherwise perfect creation.

Also, they did not place man at the centre of the universe, that would be the centre of the earth, and what did some people (e.g. Dante) place at the centre of the earth?

We perceive being at the centre a good thing, they regarded it as a bad thing.

> and anti-evolution

Also incorrect. The church never had an objection to evolution. Many influential people in the church (such as cardinal Newman) welcomed it. https://inters.org/Newman-Scarborough-Darwin-Evolution
by rich_sasha | 2025-05-11 09:26:58+00:00
Political failures compared to what other large bureaucracy? It is miles ahead, IMHO, US federal government or UN. Hard to compare to China.

Crimea is complex, but I can't really see what the EU could have done to prevent Brexit, while keeping itself whole. UK was so desperate to leave, they ended up crashing out.

I personally think the EU gets the blame for a whole load of things that are not really in their remit, while not getting the credit for other things it does well. Like hate speech laws, or the other things I listed.
by xPkcUCBpILu | 2025-05-11 09:27:03+00:00
Hey HN! I built AreYouFree, a scheduling tool that makes coordinating meetings across timezones much easier. It's similar to when2meet.com but with a modern tech stack and better UX.

Key features: - Drag-and-select calendar interface - Automatic timezone conversion - Multi-language support - Password protection for private events - Dark mode - Built with React, TypeScript, and FastAPI

What sets it apart from when2meet: - You can edit events after creation (a major pain point with when2meet) - Modern, responsive UI - Better timezone handling - Open source and actively maintained
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-11 09:27:07+00:00
No one owes anyone a job. Systems like that have been tried and they don’t work.

This is going to be a bumpy transition but at the other end the jobs that survive will be creative and fulfilling - for example, people automating work, every day, so (barring corner cases) no one has to do that task again.

Putting AI in and letting it do a bad job is a great way for AI to be in there eventually doing a good job. Humans may not be needed to do the work but they will be needed to tend to the systems and automations driving the AI - and/or to the agents driving the AI. They’ll be needed to improve what the AI is doing, handle corner cases, and add new use cases. And they’ll fill in the gaps - until those can be automated too.

Once everyone’s doing that, it’ll be an automation race. The more humans a company has the more capability it will have to automate more work. Then we’ll be back to full steam hiring, but the skill sets will be very different. At places like Duolingo, job titles like “AI automation specialist” will replace “translator”.

It’s going to be okay, we will get through this!
by int_19h | 2025-05-11 09:27:20+00:00
`Result` is clearer given that in Pascal, a function name by itself in any other context is a function invocation (with no arguments). That is, you then have this kind of stuff:

type PInteger = ^Integer; var X: Integer; function Foo: PInteger; begin Foo := @X; Foo^ := 123; end;

The first assignment here is assigning to the magic result variable, while the second one recursively invokes the function and dereferences the returned pointer to assign through it. This is technically not ambiguous (since you can never have a naked function call on the left side of the assignment, unlike say C++), but it's a subtle enough distinction for human readers. No such problem with `Result`, obviously, which is presumably why it was one of the things that Delphi added since day 1.
by thih9 | 2025-05-11 09:27:36+00:00
Confirming, the image linked by grandparent is tagged as 3d illustration on shutterstock[1]. A similar illustration with lowercase “de” spelling exists too[2]. Actual road signs in Chile have lowercase “de”[3].

[1]: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/santiago-chi...

[2]: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/santiago-de-...

[3]: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CARRETERA_COSTERA_...
by starfezzy | 2025-05-11 09:27:41+00:00
> People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived

You know what will be short lived? The disruption itself. We're not talking about the death of Sol.

The most significant fact in all of this is that everything will stabilize and we'll all be fine (except the monopoly, which is the point). And when it's all said and done, we'll come out the other side better for it.
by 52-6F-62 | 2025-05-11 09:28:35+00:00
And the tech bros pushing magic chatbots that they nor anyone else has any insight into but from which the same tech bros derive an even higher salary and more opulent livelihood and collect additional rent from certainly do have your interests at heart?

Fuck me. Maybe that guy on the street corner selling salvation or “cuckane” really was dealing in the real thing, too, eh?
by jampekka | 2025-05-11 09:28:44+00:00
I don't think this is it. There is definitely a lot of philosophy that tries (and consistently fails) to construct formal definitions of some "true ontologies". But this is more about trying to figure out reasonable definitions that people could agree about.

The problem in many branches of philosophy is becoming the opposite: people debating without shared definitions and thus not even talking about the same thing.

Chalmers has been central in trying to find reasonable shared definitions for (some of) the many different phenomena that are all too often referred to as "consciousness".
by PeterStuer | 2025-05-11 09:29:31+00:00
The author draws overall conclusions based on observations at wedding parties.

I've know very many (techies) that are extremely introvert and yes, bored, in such an environment, yet when you would observe them at evening drinks at a tech conference, they would be engaged, open, interested, welcoming and kind.

I fear the author overextrapolates from a specific context to people across contexts.