MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by StefanBatory | 2025-05-22 19:12:44+00:00
A mod set in modern times for wargame Hearts of Iron, just a bit more crazy. And he's a possible leader there for Germany.

I asked only because I was browsing their subreddit today and spotted something related to him, then I opened HN and saw your post. It was just a random coincidence, but curiosity got me to ask anyway.
Tell HN: Mozilla is preparing to remove bookmark keywords
by RheingoldRiver | 2025-05-22 19:13:09+00:00
On Bugzilla there's an active ticket [0] tracking progress to remove bookmark keywords from Firefox, in order to consolidate them into Search. I think this is going to be disastrous for my workflow and I'm very worried about it, but I don't see much discussion of this anywhere, even though I do see a lot of discussion about bookmarklets. Since bookmarklets and keywords are so tightly related (bookmarklets are the code, and they keyword is how you run it from your URL bar), I want to spread the word that this feature might be going away.

I wrote a(nother) blog post about how cool bookmark keywords are and how I use them [1] and I'd love to hear other people's use cases for keywords

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650874

[1] https://river.me/blog/bookmark-keywords-again/
by eitally | 2025-05-22 19:15:00+00:00
I was going to make the same comment as the PP, but I disagree with your point about "note patterns". When you're sight reading real music (melodies, harmonies and chords), that's when you start grokking note patterns and can reach real mastery. Sufficiently good sight readers often don't even need to read every individual note to anticipate what will "happen next" because in many cases chord progressions, rhythms and harmonies are fairly predictable (especially, especially in pop/rock music, religious music and a lot of early classical.

I think the OP would have benefitted more from programming an interface to project Hanon's exercises[1] to practice than randomized notes.

[1] https://www.hanon-online.com/ <-- perhaps the most popular fingering practice for pianists. It's boring and tedious, but it 100% works!
by bee_rider | 2025-05-22 19:15:38+00:00
This might be a better cheat for… I dunno, maybe risk? Or monopoly?

In settlers, trade is always important… getting an early lead can get you ganged up on. At least in my experience, the best way to win is to look like you are in second place, line things up (get close to some crucial port for example) and then rocket past the Designated Villain only when doing so will get you a really solid lead.
by thatnerd | 2025-05-22 19:16:17+00:00
For a casino? In practice, yes, fair games are perfectly consistent with greedily skimming a game, and fair games draw gamblers.

That said, when organized crime gets involved, somebody always thinks "if I rig this, I'll do EVEN BETTER!" Maybe they're a corrupt employee skimming from the house, maybe they're a loyal employee skimming for the house, but unless you have something like the Nevada Gaming Control Board forcing fairness on them, you basically never get it. At least, from what I've read on the subject. Source: I've read some books on card counting & otherwise beating the odds in casinos, and this my vague memory.

And it's ironic that the house wants to rig games, because a biased game means a mathematically savvy individual can go in and calculate how results differ from "fair" games, and can then skim some profits for themselves if the bias is larger than the house advantage.
by mtalantikite | 2025-05-22 19:16:34+00:00
"I am still not quite sure how other people are learning this..."

We practice our scales through the circle of fifths. I don't really follow what they mean by "activates" at F#.

If this is getting the author to play and they're having fun, then that's great. But having a great teacher is invaluable, particularly when you're trying to lay down the fundamentals. It's going to be more difficult to unlearn bad habits in the future.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-05-22 19:16:46+00:00
probably: saves money vs a fleet of consistently running instances

> From a billing perspective, AWS does not charge for the EC2 instance itself when stopped, as there's no physical hardware being reserved; a stopped instance is just the configuration that will be used when the instance is started next. Note that you do pay for the root EBS volume though, as it's still consuming storage.

https://depot.dev/blog/faster-ec2-boot-time
by kokanee | 2025-05-22 19:17:21+00:00
> Everyone else either performs a charade of doing their job—leaders still leading, managers still managing—or relaxes and collects an incredibly luxurious universal basic income.

For me, this was the most difficult part to believe. I don't see any reason to think that the U.S. leadership (public and private) is incentivized to spend resources to placate the masses. They will invest in protecting themselves from the masses, and obstructing levers of power that threaten them, but the idea that economic disparities will shrink under explosive power consolidation is counterintuitive.

I also worry about the economics of UBI in general. If everyone in the economy has the exact same resources, doesn't the value of those resources instantly drop to the lowest common denominator; the minimum required to survive?
Show HN: Personalized video generation for sales and marketing
by octopus2023inc | 2025-05-22 19:17:51+00:00
ScaleRep creates a hyper-personalized copy for each client or lead based on any information and instructions you provide. It then clones your voice and image so you can deliver an individual video for everyone in minutes.

It supports bulk generation, so you can upload a lead/client list with thousands of entries and generate individual videos for each one simultaneously.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-22 19:18:17+00:00
I worked for one manager who was exceptionally bad and used 1:1 meetings as a weapon to gaslight people. Comparing notes it became clear he was telling one thing to one person and another thing to another person.

In more normal workplaces my attitude is: if I have some reason I need to talk to my manager I want to talk to them right away as opposed to wait one or two weeks for a scheduled meeting.
by mrandish | 2025-05-22 19:18:41+00:00
Interesting, thanks for doing this. Both summaries are serviceable and quite similar but I had a slight preference for Sonnet 4's summary which, at just ~20% of the cost of Claude 4 Opus, makes it quite the value leader.

This just highlights that, with compute requirements for meaningful traction against hard problems spiraling skyward for each additional increment, the top models on current hard problems will continue to cost significantly more. I wonder if we'll see something like an automatic "right-sizing" feature that uses a less expensive model for easier problems. Or maybe knowing whether a problem is hard or easy (with sufficient accuracy) is itself hard.
by ivape | 2025-05-22 19:18:43+00:00
No, it can't be anyone. Please don't do this. This is about the Palestinian situation. They tried to pressure the TikTok purchase so they change their algorithm to show less Gaza deaths. It is simply about that, and there is also a money trail of top donors that corroborate this. They also made a show of arresting the Columbia Palestinian organizer. They are not looking for illegal Mexicans in the Ivy League.
by kurikuri | 2025-05-22 19:19:04+00:00
> Your guy lost, learn from your mistakes and carry on. Or criticize both presidents equally.

So, your solution here is for people who think the current administration is particularly bad to either not complain or accept any whataboutisms you have?

Your ‘both administrations’ quip is a vacuous justification for the current administration’s actions. If this is the basis for your justification, then, regardless of the truth of your claim, you’d be inconsistent to then praise this specific administration for anything positive. Thus, outside of nihilist generalizations about the overall structure of the US, you can’t meaningfully contribute to this conversation. Without giving a positive justification for the administrations behavior, your contributions are ‘logical nonsense.’

I’d rather simply complain about the doublespeakers in office at the moment and say it is wrong to do so, and there is no ‘logical nonsense’ in that.
Show HN: Through the Geek's Lens
by m0rc | 2025-05-22 19:19:25+00:00
What do a crowded airport in Beijing, parenting, the risk-return frontier, and micromanaging bosses have in common? Everything—if you look at the world through the right lens.

In Through the Geek’s Lens, you’ll embark on a personal, humorous, and yet thought-provoking journey through some fundamental trade-offs and models from mathematics, psychology, economics, and engineering. Through the eyes of a textbook lover, Through the Geek’s Lens opens unexplored mental horizons and connects the dots between accumulated scientific knowledge and our private and professional lives.

The book introduces and explains complex subjects, their factual basis, and their limitations by contextualizing them within a specific time and place—a moment in the author's personal life. Each section offers a small dose of actionable insight. Among the many topics explored are the trade-off between freedom and security, the diminishing returns faced by particle accelerators and large machine-learning models, and the No Free Lunch Theorem, which explains why a self-confident explorer like the author can get lost in an unknown forest. It applies paraconsistent logic to interpret Eastern philosophies and uses unbiased statistical sampling to show how to see your loved ones. It discusses the Law of Small Numbers and why it’s just as important as the Law of Large Numbers, the determination of Service Level Agreements using basic probability inequalities, and the Shannon-Hartley Theorem to decide when to shout (or not) at your kids. And that’s just the beginning—there’s much more to discover when you look your day to day through a geek’s lens.

You can take a look to a sample at https://github.com/marcmagransdeabril/throughthegeekslens/bl... .

Feedback is welcome.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-22 19:19:29+00:00
I really appreciate Stephen's mixture of skepticism combined with genuine interest in experimenting with these tools. Most MCP posts I've read have been so much hype I've been left with no clue what MCP actually does. This is the first article I've read on the topic that earnestly makes me want to start messing around with MCP for fun (and makes it clear how to get started).

It's a bit unfortunate that the field is so dominated by extremes of hype and skepticism, both of which aren't particularly helpful to getting problems really solved.
by podgietaru | 2025-05-22 19:19:40+00:00
I actually don't necessarily think that's true - As someone that has a bit of a background with the codebase of Omnivore I think the thing that killed that wasn't necessarily the business model (let's be real, they didn't even offer a premium tier.)

I think it was the introduction of features that required an unnecessary amount of processing power. Namely, RSS feeds. Their RSS implementation parsed every new webpage - a large percentage of which would never actually be read.

They hosted on Google Cloud using things like Cloud Functions. A good proportion of articles were parsed using Puppeteer, when a cheaper shorter running HTTP Request would have sufficed. The PDF viewer they used cost an arm and a leg.

None of this is to shit on the legacy of Omnivore, because I think with the team they had they built an incredible product. But I think there was a lot that could have been done to reduce monthly costs, and that there could have been more effort to monetise.

I paid for Pocket (without using premium features), and I donated to Omnivore, but the thing is ... I happened across their community whilst doing / building something else. I wouldn't have known donating / subscribing were even an option if I didn't. I'm sure I'm not the only kind of person who subscribes purely based on the fact I get value from the software.

I'd like to believe there's a viable business model around these sort of things. And honestly, a much less ethical version of me says that there absolutely is when it comes to Data. I don't think it'll ever be mega profitable, but sustainable? Sure. The Omnivore team was like 2 devs and open source contributors. I believe you could get to a point where it'd be able to sustain that team.
by nprateem | 2025-05-22 19:19:58+00:00
I posted it earlier.

Anthropic: You're killing yourselves by not supporting structured responses. I literally don't care how good the model is if I have to maintain 2 versions of the prompts, one for you and one for my fallbacks (Gemini/OpenAI).

Get on and support proper pydantic schemas/JSON objects instead of XML.
by eitally | 2025-05-22 19:20:05+00:00
No, not at all (imho), because if you're starting from scratch and don't even know which notes make up common chords or progressions, how in the world will you figure out how to compose something that sounds good / makes sense?

It's important to know the notes on the keyboard, but it's far more important to know how they work together in harmonious patterns. Composing entirely by ear is an option, but you still need to transliterate what your mind is hearing into notes on a page (preferably more complex than just a single note melody).

I 100% get where you're coming from, but I think a grounding in theory helps a ton with composition (even if you don't know how to play a specific instrument).
by selkin | 2025-05-22 19:20:34+00:00
> Initially, I avoided Swift because of my previous experience with it […] without native async/await at that time, writing concurrent code compared to Go or JS/TS felt clunky and boilerplate-heavy.

I have to disagree. Async may makes concurrent code easier to write, but also less simple to reason about as it grows. In a complex async codebase, I find it harder to reason about code flow and concurrency.

If the goal is to reduce the cost of executing threaded code, we have a solution in green light weight threads.

If we aim to reduce the cost of maintaining threaded code, I expect async to end up costing more effort in the long run.
by deepfriedchokes | 2025-05-22 19:20:58+00:00
Altman is trying to do an end run around Google/Apple/Microsoft. They’ve got search, now they’re adding hardware, next they’ll extend their interface to replace the traditional OS with an AI agent. Altman probably has a social strategy as well.

I think they’ll fail because they’re discounting how much energy it takes for people to change ecosystems, but it’s a great idea that the big boys will copy.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-22 19:21:13+00:00
I think the big thing that people never mention is, where will these evil AIs escape to?

Another huge data center with squillions of GPUs and coolers and all the rest is the only option. It's not like it is going to be in our TV remotes or floating about in the air.

They need huge compute, so I think the risk of an escaping AI is basically very close to zero, and if we have a "rogue" AI we can literally pull the plug.

To me the more real risk is creeping integration and reliance in everyday life until things become "too big to fail" so we can't pull the plug even if we wanted to (and there are interesting thoughts about humanoid robots getting deployed widely and what happens with all that).

But I would imagine if it really became a genuine existential threat we'd have to just do it and suffer the consequences of reverting to circa 2020 life styles.

But hey I feel slightly better about my employment prospects now :)
by potholereseller | 2025-05-22 19:21:29+00:00
They claim that their new LLM, unfettered, is so good that they are concerned that it might be able to provide instructions to make things like nuclear weapons. A mediocre physicist could provide similar, or better, instructions, but nobody is trying to shut down physics departments at universities.

This is a sales pitch wrapped in over-compliance and presented as an alert. This is pathetic, but I am somewhat entertained by their desperation; I will be even more entertained when LLM companies start using sex-appeal to sell subscriptions ("women find our latest model weights to be irresistible, so sign up now for our $1000/month plan").
by omnee | 2025-05-22 19:22:11+00:00
Trump is acting in the manner of all previous authoritarians: What is good for him is what's good for the country and the laws that align with this are proper, and those that do not will be ignored or changed where possible. The rule of law is anathema to authoritarians, and hence why they detest it. As individuals we might even feel the same about some laws. But in totality, the rule of, law and not by law is the foundation of our society, because its benefits are immense and usually taken for granted.
by rglover | 2025-05-22 19:22:12+00:00
Initially I took MCP to be some crazy new thing, but once I dug into it, it's really just a soft-standard for connecting a database, API, or other data source (e.g., a list of functions that can be called) to a vector database and then returning a response in a standardized JSON format.

It's basically RAG with a bit of sugar on top. What spooks me is how few people hyping MCP seem to understand that.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-05-22 19:22:24+00:00
Ya, multiple failed predictions is an indicator of systemically bad predictors imo. That said, Scott Alexander usually does serious analysis instead of handwavey hype, so I tend to believe him more than many others in the space.

My somewhat native take is that we’re still close to peak hype, AI will under deliver on the inflated expectations, and we’ll head into another “winter”. This pattern has repeated multiple times, so I think it’s fairly likely based on that alone. Real progress is made during each cycle, i think humans are just bad at containing excitement
by dakna | 2025-05-22 19:22:36+00:00
Google demoed an automated version upgrade for Android libraries during I/O 2025. The agent does multiple rounds and checks error messages during each build until all dependencies work together.

Agentic Experiences: Version Upgrade Agent

https://youtu.be/ubyPjBesW-8?si=VX0MhDoQ19Sc3oe-
by bbor | 2025-05-22 19:22:45+00:00
Turns out Opus 4 starts at their $40/mo ("Pro+") plan which is sad, and they serve o4-mini and Gemini as well so it's a bit less exclusive than this announcement implies. That said, I have a random question for any Anthropic-heads out there:

GitHub says "Claude Opus 4 is hosted by Anthropic PBC. Claude Sonnet 4 is hosted by Anthropic 1P."[1]. What's Anthropic 1P? Based on the only Kagi result being a deployment tutorial[2] and the fact that GitHub negotiated a "zero retention agreement" with the PBC but not whatever "1P" is, I'm assuming it's a spinoff cloud company that only serves Claude...? No mention on the Wikipedia or any business docs I could find, either.

Anyway, off to see if I can access it from inside SublimeText via LSP!

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/ai-m...

[2] https://github.com/anthropics/prompt-eng-interactive-tutoria...
by mrweasel | 2025-05-22 19:22:56+00:00
Pocket was pushed pretty heavily and basically shoved down the throat of Firefox users. Many obviously complained about this behaviour, either because they had no use for Pocket or already had a different solution. Mozilla was basically mimicking Microsoft behaviour of just forcing products/features onto it's users.

Shortly after the Pocket launch Mozilla stopped pushing Pocket and it became less visible in the Firefox UI. Now it's just a tiny grey button most don't click. So you're either use Pocket and like it, or you don't even think about it.

The main complaint, as I remember it, was mostly how Mozilla positioned Pocket. Some people picked up Pocket over the years, many liked it. These are not necessarily the same people who objected to have Pocket thrown in their face.
by alwa | 2025-05-22 19:23:10+00:00
> 70302. Restriction of funds No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.

Doesn't that just require that the party seeking the injunction or order has to post a bond as security?
by podgietaru | 2025-05-22 19:23:15+00:00
They should be able to change it with fairly minimal changes. I managed to modify some things to proxy articles from Omnivore to it, and the functionality remained largely the same across the two services.

They'd have to implement some kind of login, but they they should just be able to build some kind of converter between whatever format and the format that is expected by the Kobo device.
by mmaunder | 2025-05-22 19:23:20+00:00
Probably (and unfortunately) going to need someone from Anthropic to comment on what is becoming a bit of a debacle. Someone who claims to be working on alignment at Anthropic tweeted:

“If it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above.”

The tweet was posted to /r/localllama where it got some traction.

The poster on X deleted the tweet and posted:

“I deleted the earlier tweet on whistleblowing as it was being pulled out of context. TBC: This isn't a new Claude feature and it's not possible in normal usage. It shows up in testing environments where we give it unusually free access to tools and very unusual instructions.”

Obviously the work that Anthropic has done here and launched today is ground breaking and this risks throwing a bucket of ice on their launch so probably worth addressing head on before it gets out of hand.

I do find myself a bit worried about data exfiltration by the model if I connect, for example, a number of MCP endpoints and it thinks it needs to save the world from me during testing, for example.

https://x.com/sleepinyourhat/status/1925626079043104830?s=46

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/qiNtVasT4B
by jokethrowaway | 2025-05-22 19:23:24+00:00
MCP doesn't help but filtering is not always a good solution - sometimes you just need the agent to process a lot of data.

In that scenario running code on the data with minimum evaluation of the data (eg. a schema with explanation) is a much better approach and it will scale up to use cases of a certain complexity.

Even this system is not perfect: once your data definition and orchestration grow to big you'll face the same problems.

This should allow you to scale to pretty complex problems though, while the naive approach of just embedding API responses in the chat fails soon (I run into this issue frequently, maintaining a relatively simple systems with a few tool calls).

The only proper solution is reproducing the level of granularity of human decisions in code and call this "decisional system" from an LLM (which would be then reduced to a mere language interface between human language and the internal system). Easier said than done, though.
by purplejacket | 2025-05-22 19:23:40+00:00
A read-it-later app. Pocket, you had one job. Just one job. And for a while that was my killer app on mobile. But, as we see, the enshitification of the web continues.

"What began as a read-it-later app evolved into something much bigger. After Mozilla acquired Pocket in 2017, we invested in building our content curation and recommendation capabilities so people everywhere can discover and access high quality web content. While Pocket is shutting down, we will continue to invest in this promise—through the New Tab experience, our email newsletter, and more."