MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Brybry | 2025-05-18 10:56:09+00:00
Barges (and other watercraft) collide with stationary objects (which includes bridges) monthly, it's just not usually in the national news and doesn't usually cause a lot of damage.

For example, from 2001 to 2017 there were 1020 medium/high severity recorded "allision" incidents by just towing vessels/barges. That's over 5 times a month. [1]

10%+ of recreational watercraft accidents are with fixed objects. [2][3]

There were 18 bridge collapses (in the US) due to vessel collisions over 53 years (1960 to 2013), so averaging roughly one bridge collapse every 3 years. [4]

[1] https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Portals/9/DCO%20Documents/5p/CG-5PC... [page 9, chart 9]

[2] https://www.tuscaloosa.com/__aws/media/6553702_bridge-strike...

[3] https://www.uscgboating.org/library/accident-statistics/Recr... [page 7]

[4] https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/eesc/bridge/WBES/2013/Session9/9C_3...

[5] https://www.scribd.com/document/550271478/SHIP-AND-BARGE-COL...
by latexr | 2025-05-18 10:57:59+00:00
I disagree with the positive characterisation. Those videos have a funny schtick of exaggerating anime tropes for a couple of minutes and that’s the extent of it. The animation is all over the place, reactions, expressions, mouth movements often fail, style changes from frame to frame. It maybe kind of works precisely because it’s a short exaggerated parody and we have a high tolerance for flaws in comedy, but even then the seams are showing. Anything even remotely more substantive would no longer have worked.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-18 11:00:09+00:00
I agree that we will probably move to first-party remote MCP servers in the near future which puts a lot of registries/etc in limbo.

That said, I think there might be a market for MCP servers that do more than the first-party client, it will really depend on what first-party support looks like. Did they implement all of their existing API in MCP or just a few parts?

However, my experience with MCP servers so far (and it’s super early days, I know), has taught me that in a lot of cases it’s better/easier to write your own MCP server/tools. A lot of MCP servers out there are sloppy and/or hard to run/debug. Since most tools are a thin layer over existing API/SDK calls it’s not hard to write (or LLM generate) the needed code which has the added bonus of giving you full control.

Even when an MCP server works 100% and is easy to run, it doesn’t always map 1:1 with the API and so I’ve run into “Yes, you can retrieve data object X but you can’t filter by Y because they didn’t implement that filter in the tool call”.
by ryao | 2025-05-18 11:00:19+00:00
There are an incredible number of companies designing their own RISC-V cores right now. Some of them are even are making some of their designs entirely open source so that they are royalty free. The highest end designs are not, but it is hard to imagine their creators not undercutting ARM’s license fees since that is money that they would not have otherwise.

As for Qualcomm, they won the lawsuit ARM filed against them. Changing from ARM to RISC-V would delay their ambition to take marketshare from Intel and AMD, so they are likely content to continue paying ARM royalties because they have their eyes on a much bigger prize. It also came out during the lawsuit that Qualcomm considers their in-house design team to be saving them billions of dollars in ARM royalty fees, since they only need to pay royalties for the ISA and nothing else when they use their own in-house designs.
by rubitxxx4 | 2025-05-18 11:02:16+00:00
Whether it’s nonsense or not, this quote in the critical assessment is concerning:

> If I were a science journalist writing an article about a supposedly shocking development like this, I would email some experts and check to see if it’s for real.

An attitude like that would have us all believing the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth. After all, experts of the time believed both wrongly.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-18 11:05:40+00:00
100% this.

Next steps are auto-generate or auto-mashup tools (a couple of projects are doing this) and small, reusable agents that only have access to the handful of tools they need.

“Auto-mashup” refers to (I just made it up) a concept of chaining existing tools with a bit of logic so that instead of having to round trip to the LLM for common cases you can call “Get the load, and the last N log lines, and procstat the top 10 procs, …” all into a “check_server_status”. Similar to some systems that let the LLM write and reuse tools, this would be the same thing, just leveraging other/existing MCP tools. Maybe “auto-composition” is a better name.
by faresahmed | 2025-05-18 11:06:56+00:00
It has been kind of made into a movie! The Heptapods [0] in Arrival (2016) written script is a circular shape with each subsection of the shape conveying a different meaning ultimately representing a concept or thought. A quote from the movie:

> Like their ship or their bodies, their written language has no forward or backward direction. Linguists call this "nonlinear orthography", which raises the question: Is this how they think?

While the movie explores philosophical questions other than "Arrival" and does a quiet beautiful job at that, actual linguistic experts have helped making it and it has been praised for its accuracy. I suggest you give it a go.

[0]: https://aliens.fandom.com/wiki/Heptapod
Ask HN: How big of a deal is getting the .foobar challenge from Google?
by rblion | 2025-05-18 11:07:05+00:00
My browser split open when I was just starting out in 2016 and I got this coding challenge from Google that could've led to a job interview.

One problem, I got it on a flight to Maui and when I landed I had to choose between the coding challenge or exploring Maui. I picked Maui, right decision at the time.

But, I applied to YC and I've been working 10-12 hours a day on my MVP. I've been having VERY DEEP conversations with chatGPT Plus and moving mountains with Cursor Pro. So I started to realize that Google must've sensed I have the mind of a software engineer even though I see myself as a 'creative developer' (a designer able to write code when needed).

Anyways, I need to go to sleep but had to ask this before I forgot.
by card_zero | 2025-05-18 11:07:19+00:00
I tried to source who said this, presumably in the 80s, but struggled. The phrase "rumors regarding players having difficulty separating fantasy from reality" appears on Wikipedia, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons#Moral_pan... but the sources aren't good (the page from theGamer is unrelated, maybe spam). https://web.archive.org/web/20200626110749/http://www.ptgptb... has a good history of the topic, but without mention of the fantasy/reality claim. The panic made it out to be a satanic cult that induces suicide and murder. This psychiatrist was involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Radecki ... however, I can't find the claim about the blurring of fantasy and reality, so maybe nobody made it, although it's kind of the theme of Mazes and Monsters.
by 5555624 | 2025-05-18 11:08:08+00:00
It happens all the time, just not as high profile as this incident or Baltimore. "An analysis of U.S. Coast Guard records of maritime incidents shows a vessel has run into part of a bridge in America at least 650 times since 2019." (https://www.scrippsnews.com/investigations/us-bridges-are-fr...)
by omeid2 | 2025-05-18 11:08:30+00:00
> There are very few laws that are not giant ambiguities. Where is the line between murder, self-defense and accident? There are no lines in reality.

These things are very well and precisely defined in just about every jurisdiction. The "ambiguities" arise from ascertaining facts of the matter, and whatever some facts fits within a specific set of set rules.

> Something must change regarding copyright and AI model training.

Yes, but this problem is not specific to AI, it is the question of what constitutes a derivative, and that is a rather subjective matter in the light of the good ol' axiom of "nothing is new under the sun".
by ubercow13 | 2025-05-18 11:09:29+00:00
The article you linked says precisely that Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates are not singular at the event horizon. The event horizon is completely regular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity#Curv...

You can choose stupid coordinates that introduce a singularity wherever you like, in GM or in classical mechanics just the same. The coordinates have no meaning.
by abxyz | 2025-05-18 11:11:04+00:00
I read this article yesterday and I am still confused by it.

"...carried a pre-sale estimate of over $70 million..."

"...the artwork came to the market without a minimum price guarantee from the auction house..."

"Oliver Barker, the evening’s auctioneer, began the bidding for the bust at $59 million. But his bids stalled at $64.25 million. Three minutes passed as he hunched low over the rostrum, hunting for bidders, Nosferatu-like, until announcing that the lot was a pass."

Can someone explain how these things relate? If the pre-sale estimate was $70m, there was no minimum price guarantee (a reserve?) and a bid of $64.25 million (90% of the estimate) why didn't it sell?

The article goes on to say:

"“No one who is an informed buyer who is serious in this market — billionaire or not — is going to pay what essentially amounts to a 50 percent premium on something that sold in recent memory,” said Todd Levin, an adviser in New York."

Someone was willing to pay $64.25 million, a 30% premium on the last sale, $70 million is only 40%. Where does 50% come from? Why is $64.25 million bad but $70 million is good.
by thrance | 2025-05-18 11:11:11+00:00
Note that you could use your objection to defend nazism too. You can't "moral relativism" everything.

Republicans are currently the ones undermining the foundations or our republic, stripping rights from minorites (Texas just passed a bill that made it illegal to be trans), deporting people with no due process, arresting dissenting politicians and academics.

They're the ones plunging this country into economical ruin, destroying medicare and medicaid to transfer the savings to the 1% through massive tax cuts while letting everyone that depended on these programs die.

Everyone in support of these ideas is intolerant in my book, and I don't see why I should show empathy to a people that would rather see me in a camp.
Ask HN: Why do they make you login again?
by ttoinou | 2025-05-18 11:11:14+00:00
If I visit service.com/fdoit?session=hashBase64 then I am connected to the service to f do it, but if I visit service.com I need to connect again (with a form on a 2nd page) and waste time. I know I should use bookmarks (for when the hashBase64 doesn't change) but why do we have this common behavior in 2025 ?
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-18 11:12:12+00:00
I think what they're saying, is that, for there to be logical consistency within the concept of states' rights, that it should be both, or neither, in the context of the original statement:

> that states should be allowed to regulate AI, but should not be allowed to regulate health?

To rephrase this:

States should be allowed to regulate both AI and health, or neither.

This is not my argument, but I do intend it to be a good faith interpretation of what I think OP had in mind.

Either/or is a somewhat confusing phrasing due the way it causes sentences to become hard to follow, and because it can refer to two different concepts. I think most of the time and in this case, either/or refers to exclusive or, but it can also refer to logical disjunction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Either%2For

However, it's possible that they meant logical disjunction, in the sense that the GOP doesn't think that states' rights to regulate AI and health should be an either/or distinction simply in order to not be hypocritical, because the GOP sees no problem with legislation and lawfare to achieve the goals of the GOP; the GOP will use arguments that may be lacking ideological justification or consistency out of pragmatism.

The ends don't justify the means in this GOP reading, but rather, the means are the ends: states' rights as a concept can be a means to a particular end legally or legislatively, and an end unto itself as a way to preserve bastion states of GOP rule and jurisprudence during periods of non-GOP federal power.

So when you said "I think a lot of other people are hypocritical in the opposite direction" did you mean that Democrats focus too much on ideological justification and consistency instead of being pragmatic, or that their ideological focus on justification and consistency leads them to "play by the rules" against a pragmatic GOP opponent that isn't themselves bound by such notions?
by energy123 | 2025-05-18 11:13:10+00:00
I don't know if that's a big blocker now we have abundant synthetic data from a RL training loop where language-specific things like syntax can be learned without any human examples. Human code may still be relevant for learning best practices, but even then it's not clear that can't happen via transfer learning from other languages, or it might even emerge naturally if the synthetic problems and rewards are designed well enough. It's still very early days (7-8 months since o1 preview) so to draw conclusions from current difficulties over a 2-year time frame would be questionable.

Consider a language designed only FOR an LLM, and a corresponding LLM designed only FOR that language. You'd imagine there'd be dedicated single tokens for common things like "class" or "def" or "import", which allows more efficient representation. There's a lot to think about ...
by throw0101d | 2025-05-18 11:13:44+00:00
> That's because no one can make that conclusion definitively yet.

There's a problem here though: if things do eventually deteriorate (which, admittedly, there is a change will not happen), it may be too late to fix things.

If things get broken they are broken, and in this case you have risk of people's lives. And the people who did the jobs that were fired have probably moved on because they have bills to pay. If you can realize your mistake quickly enough, you can fix it quickly. This is what happened when the Very Stable Geniuses fired the folks who maintained US nuclear weapons:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130613

Perhaps instead of l33t h4ck3rz in DOGE they should hire carpenters or woodworkers: people who, instead of a mantra of "move fast and break things", live more by "measure twice and cut once". Some measure of where the (alleged) waste is could be useful before cutting.
by ath3nd | 2025-05-18 11:15:50+00:00
That's much less divided than, say, the US, with its two party system.

Any party is much less likely to have a dominance, and they'd have to play along with the others to form a coalition.

I'd argue that this is much more what a democracy should be like and much more representative of the wide range of people and voices that our countries (Norway, Netherlands, etc) have compared to the "divide-in-the-middle" politics that are common to the US.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-05-18 11:17:33+00:00
> The only thing missing from Grigar's collection is a PC that reads five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, she says. Despite their ubiquity, the machines are surprisingly hard to find. "I look on eBay, Craigslist, I have friends out looking for me, nothing. I've been looking for six years," she says. If you have one of these old computers lying around, and it still works, Grigar would love to hear from you.

I work at an ewaste recycling place. Even for us, DOS era systems are rare. I sit next to the retro guy. I'll try to remember to ask him about 5" floppy drives tomorrow.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-18 11:18:03+00:00
I agree. A change of environment (to a more positive one) can save your life. I have experienced it first-hand. I have psychiatric co-morbidities (which is exacerbated by MS) but a change of environment can do wonders. The people there do not even have to be your friends (in the beginning), it can still have such a positive impact on one's mental and even physical health.
by MYEUHD | 2025-05-18 11:18:58+00:00
> Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.

Protonmail is not standards compilant. You can't login to your protonmail account from Thunderbird or k9 mail. Yes, they have an IMAP bridge, but it's proprietary / requires a paid account. Thus you're locked in to the official protonmail clients
by jemmyw | 2025-05-18 11:19:43+00:00
Clear responsibilities between the teams can help. Then you don't need to blame, the blame is in the process. "I'll be blocked on X until Y is implemented, but I can work on Z" rather than "They didn't implement Y so I can't work on X" it's pretty subtle but that's people for you. Wording (a) feels more condusive to the follow up of "or I can help with Y"
by andyferris | 2025-05-18 11:19:59+00:00
It is a guide for developers using postgres as a client, who need to write systems that don't deadlock, are performant and are correct. These are the (rather sharp) tools that postgres provides for doing so (or else you can use e.g. serializable isolation and optimistic concurrency, but in my experience that has too many false positives and bail out rather eagerly, whereas these tools let you be very precise and granular).
by raydenvm | 2025-05-18 11:20:54+00:00
When people want a heavyweight stuff around forms including all the integrations with Zapier, Google docs, Notion, Airtable, etc, they go Tally or Typeform for $25 per/month. I see Forms.md as a an overpriced and less capable solution. For that kind of value, even with everything you enumerated, I can't expect users paying $99 for each form website. When I consult startups, I repeat guys: fast-growing AI code generators and editors will push you out of the market if you don't come strong differentiated value with free and very low-priced tagged packages (< $10).
by Jgrubb | 2025-05-18 11:21:26+00:00
At a beach rental house this week and they have some sort of internet television and no cable with a guide of channels playing whatever right now. I can stream anything I want at any time but I can't just watch the hockey game that's on right now without signing into something. It shouldn't be this hard.

We keep a Sirius subscription even though it occurred to me 10 years ago that Apple Music has largely everything I need. I want, however, to hear stuff I don't like that forces me to change the channel to another station or to be exposed to something new that's not like the last thing the algorithm already knows I like.

Infinite choice is horrible.
Ask HN: What's the best way to deploy container-based apps for a small project?
by pxheller | 2025-05-18 11:23:13+00:00
Hi HN,

For the last couple of months I've been working on a side project I'd now finally like to publish.

I developed and packaged everything into a few small docker containers (2 python apps, 1 postgres db, and 1 db cleanup script in another container. I'll likely also add some reverse proxy like Nginx or Caddy) and run it locally using docker-compose, with all secrets in a .env file (although I could use docker secrets)

I thought about either using a managed Kubernetes service from a provider like DigitalOcean, or setting up a vServer from scratch with the help of some online guides and ChatGPT/Claude (as I don't have a lot of infrastructure experience).

What is your guys go-to-stack? Any recommendations that are relatively simple (or well-documented) to setup while still being cost-efficient and easy to scale? What are your experiences with services like dokku or dokploy?

Re scaling: I also considered using an external Postgres provider, allowing me to scale the "worker" services horizontally when needed.

Asked here because I'm sure it might be relevant for others, too. Thanks in advance!
by ffaser5gxlsll | 2025-05-18 11:23:32+00:00
Using VR glasses instead of screens is a wet dream of mine, but VR tech has been one of the worst vendor-locked tech I have ever seen.

I haven't keep up lately, but as a linux-only dev, is there any hw combo which would give me full native hardware support and the ability to develop for the platform?

(I don't count linux-on-[android|win] as a solution)
by Oreb | 2025-05-18 11:25:37+00:00
To me it’s one of my best tech purchases ever. As someone who travels a lot, having a large external monitor for my MacBook that I can bring with me anywhere does wonders for my productivity. I also appreciate being able to filter out visual noise by enabling one of the virtual environments; it’s like noise-canceling headphones for the eyes. I routinely experience a level of focus and flow that I was very rarely able to achieve before. It’s my favorite Apple product since the original Macintosh, and I’m excited to see how the product category will develop in the years to come.
by jasoneckert | 2025-05-18 11:26:45+00:00
After watching the Qualcomm-ARM lawsuit in December, I have very little respect for ARM's relentless pursuit of profit for profit's sake:

https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-1...

https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-2...

https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-3...
by johnisgood | 2025-05-18 11:30:52+00:00
> ... complex numerator ... ... complex denominator ... /

Yes, this is why you are supposed to have short words. You should factor out the complex parts into short, self-contained, and descriptively named words, which is going to make your code much easier to read, test, and maintain.

For example:

Instead of:

a b + c d + * e f + g h + * /

You should probably have:

: compute-numerator a b + c d + * ; : compute-denominator e f + g h + * ; : compute-ratio compute-numerator compute-denominator / ;

Most (if not all) Forth books mention this as well.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-18 11:31:17+00:00
Disagree. A lot of experience comes from a long career of changing projects and domains. You keep on encountering the same issues and problems in different contexts. I've been doing that for thirty years or so. Getting productive in new projects quickly is a good skill to have. It requires being efficient and mastering new things.

This is also the number one skill you will learn by getting a good education. Education can come in many forms. Some people never go to university for this and are self taught. It's easier than ever to teach yourself whatever you want to learn. In the end it's not about the stuff you learn but about learning to learn stuff. And having learned a lot of stuff, makes learning a new thing relatively straightforward. It's more of the same.
by jshprentz | 2025-05-18 11:32:52+00:00
The New York Times reported [1] that at least three other tall ships have struck the Brooklyn Bridge.

In 1921, the steel mainmast on the six-masted schooner Edward J. Lawrence was bent as the vessel was being towed under the bridge at high tide. [2]

In 1935, the first three of four steel masts were bent as the Hamburg-American freighter Tirpitz passed northward under the bridge during an "abnormally high tide." [3]

In 1986, a radar was knocked out of commission when the South Korean freighter Hai Soo scraped the bridge while heading south. [4]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/nyregion/brooklyn-bridge-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1921/02/04/archives/ship-bends-mast-...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1935/10/03/archives/masts-of-freight...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/11/nyregion/new-york-day-by-...
by simonw | 2025-05-18 11:33:08+00:00
That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right?

I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that, no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration.

My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth was incompatible with how human beings actually work. This kidnapping thing appears to be getting a whole lot more media coverage than that.