MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kadonoishi | 2025-05-11 06:57:25+00:00
I once read a small book for an anthropology class, and got more and more puzzled, and rather incensed. It was covering its subject well but with this bizarre hodgepodge of different anthropological framings, some of them quite anachronistic, some current, jumping around with jarring inconsistency.

I got to the end (it was a small book, only maybe 110pp) wondering what in the heck this thing was, and flipped to look at the author at the back. And it was a missionary! Instantly my attitude flipped; I was in awe that a missionary could do such good anthropology, and the inconsistencies in framing made perfect sense.

This author has good psychological insights, but her theoretical framings are somewhat mis-specified, inconsistent, sometimes out-of-date by psychological standards, to my eye. But it's very good stuff.

artist : psychologist :: missionary : anthropologist
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-11 06:59:19+00:00
I am not convinced that's true. Rome colonized vast swathes of the world long before the industrial revolution, without an incredible technological gap between them and the regions they conquered. It is not hard to imagine that a similar thing could have occurred with the European nations which colonized other parts of the world later on. Having a massive technology edge certainly helped a great deal, but I think that it was not necessarily required.
by Uptrenda | 2025-05-11 07:00:22+00:00
Yep, an over-sized, parasitic worm with control over most of the worlds communications, search, navigation, web browsing, and a size chunk of mobile software. That is definitely good for the Internet, security, privacy, and society at a whole. We can trust Google to always do what's right for the individual and to put profits second. Google makes money through donations and doesn't depend on the personal information of users it extracts to manipulate them into product purchases.
by nitely | 2025-05-11 07:00:22+00:00
Yes, and the client may do multiple requests, and if all take long to be processed you may end up with a lot of open connections at the same time (at least on http1), so there is a point to fast HTTP requests+SSE, instead of slow requests (and no SSE). Granted, if the server is HTTP2 the requests can share the same connection, but then it'd be similar to just using WS for this usage. Also, this allows to queue the work, and processed it either sequentially or concurrently.

By async I meant a process that may take longer than you are willing to do within the request/response cycle, not necessarily async IO.
by franga2000 | 2025-05-11 07:00:33+00:00
A lot of Google's products could be completely sustainable businesses on their own, but of course they couldn't offer them for free for personal use as they do now. Plenty of companies pay for Google Workspace, so that surely wouldn't die. Android could be spun out and returned to a more open development model, with phone manufacturers contributing money and developer time to the project instead of mostly freeloading from Gooogle. Google Cloud is supposedly profitable, (although I don't get why anyone would want to pay for that...).

Really the only things that I'd worry about are Google Search, Maps and Gmail, as they don't seem like they would work if they weren't free to use and I don't see a way to monetize them. It might be interesting to also put Google Maps under the same umbrella as Android, so it could be jointly owned by the phone manufacturers who ultimately benefit from its existence. Gmail could surely survive for quite a few years by optimizing their costs like crazy and burning Workspace profits.

The rest of the things you listed have existing competition, so it could probably survive and if not, alternatives exist.
by weatherlite | 2025-05-11 07:01:01+00:00
Why would it happen though? If A.I is not good enough or won't be good enough it would fail and the company providing the service would go under. If it is good enough, it will succeed. Or is your issue not with the A.I responses themselves but with the fact it is not conscious like a human is?

Personally I use Gemini sometimes to talk about my mood, didn't get a bad experience yet.
by xparadigm | 2025-05-11 07:03:47+00:00
In my experience, it comes down to matching patterns.

Here's what I think likely happened: your friend talked to other people who went through tragedy. He noticed something common in their behavior. It can be something so subtle that it's invisible to most people, but your friend notices these kind of things. Then when he talked to the current person, he found the similar pattern.
by Create | 2025-05-11 07:04:34+00:00
- OpenStreetMap, MapLibre - GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota - Nextcloud, Seafile - Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad - Discourse, Flarum - LimeSurvey Framaforms - Nextcloud, OpenStack, Hetzner, OVHcloud, Wix - Keycloak, Gluu, eduID, SAML2, OAUTH - Qwant, DuckDuckGo - Matomo, Plausible Analytics - Firefox, Brave - LineageOS, /e/ OS - OpenAuto, AGL (Automotive Grade Linux) - Open Health, Gadgetbridge - Fairphone, Various MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) - Community Fiber Networks, Local ISPs (various) - Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, Amadeus - LibreTranslate, Apertium, Mistral - CB, Swish, Klarna, SumUp, Revolut (UK) - EasyMile, Navya, Aurora, Apriv, BMW, Daimler, Renault, Volvo, VW, Oxbotica, Zenuity
by mdaniel | 2025-05-11 07:07:28+00:00
> To return a value from a function, assign something to the magic Result variable. You can read and set the Result freely, just like a local variable.

I'm torn about which is clearer, that magic variable style or assigning to the function name as one does in VBScript. I guess the magic variable makes refactoring dirty fewer lines

I also have mixed feelings about golang's `func Doit() (result int, err error)` syntax. To quote another platform, "there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it"
by throwanem | 2025-05-11 07:09:12+00:00
What does casting biochem in the metaphor of CS abstractions, in this example, clarify? What does it elucidate? What further predictions does it allow us to make about either subject of the metaphor? Can those predictions be tested? Do they make sense enough for that to be a meaningful question?

Show me how this isn't a more confusing than useful explanation, even for the bright ten-year-old or so at whose level it appears to be pitched, and I'll grant it may have some value.
by netcan | 2025-05-11 07:09:48+00:00
> These are not scientific observations in any sense.

This is... IMO, a misguided criticism. It implies every study of anything should be scientific. This is the road to bad science, pseudoscience and whatnot. In fact, it's the road we already have taken.

Psychology is full of dubious scientific pretense... often because art, anthropology, philosophy and such are derided and rejected as unscientific.

Give me great art or philosophy over bad science any day.
by szszrk | 2025-05-11 07:09:55+00:00
I think that exist. There are also some public dns providers that partially offer that for free.

Check apps: blokada, dnsnet (fdroid), Adguard (the paid one, there are discounts for lifetime for as low as ~$10), I think even DDG browser used to have that.

Often they work by providing a fake vpn that is hosted from localhost and filters ads. So it can work for any app and you can cherry pick them.
by raydiak | 2025-05-11 07:11:19+00:00
You still haven't addressed the consequences of NOT doing something.

Perhaps you've never heard the expression about "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." It's an aphorism, absolutely not literal. [1] Additionally, even if it were intended literally, which it clearly was not, saying it should have been done 20 years ago is not the same as fantasizing. It also obviously concludes that it should be done now, which is not fantasy.

I didn't say you were dismissive. If you have valid points, you should be able to make them without rewording everything into something else that you can tear down. That's called a straw man argument. "... the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction" [2]

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/603725 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
by nopelynopington | 2025-05-11 07:11:20+00:00
I've been an atheist since I was old enough to form any thoughts about existence. I don't believe in man's uniqueness, or the concept of a soul. But it irks me when people talk about what we currently call AI as something that thinks or has an intellect.

LLMs do not think. Our poor human brains are just fooled by the accuracy in which they predict words. Maybe one day we'll invent an AI that does think, but LLMs are not it.
by thinkingemote | 2025-05-11 07:12:57+00:00
There appears to be a pattern of posts where "I'm 16 / 17 etc" as a prefix gets the hits. And rightly so!

It's very good that young people are engaged. It's encouraging for us grey beards interested in the future of technology and a healthy action for us old people to encourage younger people.

As my beard gets greyer so my pattern recognition library of samples gets bigger and it has recognised a "I'm 16" prefix to popular HN submissions!

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=i%27m+16 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=i%27m+17
by brabel | 2025-05-11 07:16:50+00:00
You joke, but with the right prompt, I am almost certain that an LLM would've written a better spec than MCP. Like others said, there are many protocols that can be used as inspiration for what MCP tries to achieve, so LLMs should "know" how it should be done... which is definitely NOT by using SSE and a freaking separate "write" endpoint.
by ab5tract | 2025-05-11 07:17:05+00:00
People think of “alcoholism” as a binary. It’s not, and the new language reflects this. We absolutely should educate “problematic” drinkers that they are on a sliding slope to an ungroovy dependency.

It also highlights that just because you were classifiable as AUD, you won’t necessarily be so classifiable for the rest of your life.

The language of alcoholism often mirrors sermons of eternal damnation. Not a particularly inspiring starting point for treatment and a big reason why most people who succeed in getting past AUD don’t do it in groups that preach this eternal damnation angle.
by ewoodrich | 2025-05-11 07:18:51+00:00
I basically only see them referenced mockingly these days but man I loved the netbook era. A 200 dollar computer dual booting Ubuntu and Windows XP (just to play Counter Strike 1.6 and Age of Expires) was a dream come true for high school me.

I got the original iPad as a graduation present and as futuristic as it was ended quickly lost its lustre for me thanks to Apple's walled garden.

Took a few more years until I was rocking Debian via Crostini on the first Samsung ARM Chromebook to scratch that low cost Linux ultraportable itch again (with about triple the battery life and a third as thick as a bonus).
by lionkor | 2025-05-11 07:18:51+00:00
I think it's not elitist at all to say that people with no CS education (whether academic, self taught, or acquired over time) should probably not be considered when writing documentation or release notes.

If you generate AI slop web dev code (and the chances are incredibly high if you haven't heard of Lisp or Delphi) you probably won't need Lazarus or care that native apps even exist.

I'm all for teaching and explaining, and I know a small percentage of new CS people are curious and interested, but... release notes aren't the place for helping them.

That said, an explanation of what Lazarus is is genuinely needed, because people who have written Delphi for years might not have heard it (thanks, Embarcadero). So your have a point beyond your main point there.
by kragen | 2025-05-11 07:20:00+00:00
My uninformed opinion based on no experience is that this will creep so you should use a Kibble balance instead. (See sibling comment by s0rce.) Or maybe use a lever arm to amplify milligrams into tens of milligrams of force. Or just a regular pan balance. How big a weight do you want milligram precision on?

If you have some way to cut a precise shape out of some kind of metal sheet of well-controlled thickness, could you cut out a milligram precision bismar balance or steelyard?
by romaniitedomum | 2025-05-11 07:22:45+00:00
From the article, about mid-way through:

> But some detractors consider the project misleading. University of Maryland vertebrate paleontologist Thomas Holtz, Jr. pointed out to Live Science, a science news site, how the lab-created skin won't be authentic because there's no actual T. rex skin or DNA to serve as a basis. "What this company is doing seems to be fantasy," he said.
by dreghgh | 2025-05-11 07:22:46+00:00
Yes, and Gmail hasn't improved for decades. Why not? Because Google is a monopoly actor and does not need to compete.

Example: you can't create a new email label in the Android client. You have to log on to email in a browser and do it there. This was true when smartphones were a niche way of connecting to email, and it's still true today.
by kragen | 2025-05-11 07:22:52+00:00
Not every scale with milligram repeatability has milligram accuracy, and not every scale with milligram resolution readouts has milligram repeatability. You probably know that, but not everyone reading this does.

(This one might be fine? It does claim to have a 50.000g calibration weight, which is a good sign, but it doesn't say anything about metrological traceability, which is a bad sign.)
by monkeyelite | 2025-05-11 07:24:09+00:00
> Linux in particular has invested heavily in this, from select, to poll, to epoll, and now unto io_uring.

Correction. People who wanted to do async IO went and added additional support for it. The primary driver is node.js.

> And they have simply not been optimized with this kind of scale in mind,

yes, processes do not sacrifice security and reliability. That’s the difference.

The fallacy here is assuming that a process is just worse for hand wavy reasons and that your language feature has fa secret sauce.

If it’s not context switching then that means you have other scheduling problems because you cannot be pre-empted.

> There's a reason typical ulimit configurations are limited to around 1000 threads/processes per system

STILL waiting to hear about your experience of maxing out Linux processes on a web server - and then fixing it with green threads.

I suspect it hasn’t happened.
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-11 07:24:27+00:00
"That's why we need anti-trust in the first place."

Moreover, it seems to me these laws ought to strengthened to make executives/decision makers even more accountable.

The people who made Google a monopoly aren't stupid and knew full well what they were doing. They should not be able to hide behind Google's corporate structure and also should be penalized for their bad behavior.
by ksec | 2025-05-11 07:24:43+00:00
This is an Cloudflare Worker issue right now. Although I have no idea what the site is and why does it not work.

Most site, on simple page like CMS or wiki should be static. And serving it from cache even a $5 VPS could do a few hundred page view per second, or 1000+ Request per second. I dont believe HN generate these amount of traffic. From previous note on other HN front page page it is actually much smaller than most expected. Something like IIRC 30K to 50K Page views - over the course of 24 hours.
by dodomodo | 2025-05-11 07:25:32+00:00
Nice artical! However the supposed rationale for having ACPI WMI is wrong, the real reason is that it allows firmware to (almost) directly expose higher level WMI objects, which is in my opinion clearer and easier to use than the sysfs style used in linux. The problem is that it stopes making any sense when all the supporting infrastructure is not available.
by rtpg | 2025-05-11 07:25:51+00:00
It's not the same flavor of logic language but I've been trying to find some interesting things to do in Curry. The functional dependency component it introduces makes some problems a lot easier to deal with in Curry than in Prolog (or at least that's what someone told me one day....)

The project as a whole exists and everything, but even things like just having an easy-to-install implementation on Homebrew hasn't happened yet, so if you're up for some sweat and tears and low hanging fruit, it feels right to me!
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-11 07:27:36+00:00
It's a classic Worse is Better situation.

Most users don't care about the implementation. They care about the way that MCP makes it easier to Do Cool Stuff by gluing little boxes of code together with minimal effort.

So this will run ahead because it catches developer imagination and lowers cost of entry.

The implementation could certainly be improved. I'm not convinced websockets are a better option because they're notorious for firewall issues, which can be showstoppers for this kind of work.

If the docs are improved there's no reason a custom implementation in Go or Arm assembler or whatever else takes your fancy shouldn't be possible.

Don't forget you can ask an LLM to do this for you. God only knows what you'll get with the current state of the art, but we are getting to the point where this kind of information can be explored interactively with questions and AI codegen, instead of being kept in a fixed document that has to be updated manually (and usually isn't anyway) and hand coded.
by verisimi | 2025-05-11 07:29:17+00:00
> He attributes this to rising atmospheric CO₂ levels. "All plants grow faster with more CO₂, but lianas benefit even more

And yet this extra growth all around because of co2 means that the will be more co2? This seems incoherent.

Pet peeve - if the article hooks you with a line like 'visible from space' they should provide the imagery so I can see for myself. But there's no picture.
by dur-randir | 2025-05-11 07:29:59+00:00
For anyone wondering, have fun reading responses to those:

- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/20286

- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/18814

- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/16791

- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/17950
by dreghgh | 2025-05-11 07:31:46+00:00
But if Google weren't a monopoly, phone manufacturers could choose to bundle different collections of apps made by different people on to their hardware, rather than having to get it all from Google. This would also mean that phone users could be given a genuine choice about their privacy, rather than have dark patterns to force them to give up most of it, because it's the Android business model.
by tdullien | 2025-05-11 07:32:21+00:00
As a trained mathematician with 20+ years shipping software products, I object to this.

A lot of AI work is done by people that "dash-shaped" -- broad, but with no depth anywhere.

Then there's a few I-shaped people that drive research progress, and a few T-shaped people that work on the infrastructure that allows the training runs to go through.

But something like a protocol will certainly be designed by a dash, not an I or a T, because those are needed to keep the matrices multiplying.
by ETH_start | 2025-05-11 07:33:43+00:00
This kind of technology has been technologically viable for decades. The fact that we’re only now seeing prototypes, not mass adoption, is an indictment of the legal framework around medical devices.

The FDA classifies these devices as high-risk because they might give a false result but completely ignores the guaranteed harm of not having them at all. It’s a system that punishes action and rewards delay.
by jpc0 | 2025-05-11 07:34:14+00:00
I agree with many of your points, including coroutines being a good abstraction.

The reality is though that you are directly fighting or reimplementing the OS scheduler.

I haven’t found an abstraction that does exactly what I want but unfortunately any sort of structured concurrency tends to end up with coloured functions.

Something like C++ stdexec seems interesting but there are still elements of function colouring in there if you need to deal with async. The advantage is that you can compose coroutines and synchronous code.

For me I want a solution where I don’t need to care whether a function is running on the async event loop, a separate thread, a coprocessor or even a different computer and the actor/CSP model tends to model that the best way. Coroutines are an implementation detail and shouldn’t be exposed in an API but that is a strong opinion.
by bcraven | 2025-05-11 07:36:28+00:00
The previous paragraph explains it:

>Lianas are rapidly expanding their territory in tropical forests, sometimes suppressing tree growth entirely in certain locations. In such areas, forest regeneration halts, and carbon storage can decline by as much as 95%. "That's almost equivalent to deforestation," Visser says.

There's more more CO₂ in the atmosphere; so more lianas grow; they choke out the main tree body; so less CO₂ is absorbed; so there's more CO₂ in the atmosphere, _e.t.c._
by kragen | 2025-05-11 07:36:51+00:00
I hadn't thought about the hygroscopic and expansion questions; I think FR4 is, like wood, almost immune to longitudinal variation with temperature and humidity due to its anisotropy. (But I haven't tried to measure that.) And strain gauges are low enough impedance that I'd expect the capacitive effects to matter.

The temperature coefficient of resistance of the strain element seems like a concern, though, and so do thermal EMFs. My kitchen scale zeroes when I turn it on, a procedure that should be able to cancel one of these two but not both. Maybe you could have a diode thermal sensor, as an MCXO does, to measure the temperature so you can cancel both?

This project seems to do the first-order temperature correction thing:

> The included sample firmware will wait until a serial console is opened, perform a 5 second offset calibration, then sample continuously at the lowest gain setting. The graph.py script can be used to display the output.

> For high sensitivity measurements, it's important to let the board reach a stable operating temperature for at least 5 minutes before calibrating.

The thing I intuitively worry about here is creep. Does FR4 creep enough to worry about? Normally you make strain gauge bodies out of steel because it doesn't.
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-11 07:37:23+00:00
The problem is that you don't actually know how valuable it is without knowing how it's being used. If your ad-view statistics are used to charge you personally a higher price for a product than someone else who didn't click on the same ads, is that still okay? If they're used to raise your mortgage interest rate, is that still okay? If they're used to sell scam products to old ladies, is that still okay? If they're used to peddle political misinformation to support the election of a fascist, is that still okay? You don't know what tradeoff you're actually making. Maybe you'd think it was okay, maybe not.

Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.
by kadonoishi | 2025-05-11 07:37:53+00:00
Gah, that would be hard to dig out. It was over 30 years ago.

edit: Ok that wasn't too hard, it was in a box. It's

"Fields on the Hoof: Nexus of Tibetan Nomadic Pastoralism" by Robert B. Ekvall, 1968, 1983.

Thanks for making me go find that, the notebook for the class is interesting to look at again.