MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raufakdemir | 2025-05-12 17:11:43+00:00
Co-founder here. The platform provides MCP or REST endpoints on top of searchable information. The tool is specifically geared towards agents that want to perform actions on external systems (through an MCP server, for example) but get confused about which objects to interact with. Airweave provides a robust interface for this.

You can compare it to how coding agents like Cursor work. This is the usual pattern you see: - The first step is reading your prompt - Then it goes through all the attached files and searches your codebase - The last step is to make code file edits.

Non-coding agents that use "regular" MCP servers completely miss the second part. It's very hard to go from natural language instruction, to a chain of API calls that actually work and don't end up in hallucination
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-12 17:12:15+00:00
Yes, this. Sometimes they cancel because they claim they have a malfunction. Sometimes they cancel because fuck you, that's why. Almost cost me an appointment with the doctor when our small kid got sick and a driver strung us for 15 minutes of extra wait time while he circled a grocery store, then claimed his car broke down.

I don't trust those companies with important stuff anymore, I either go straight for public transport, or in some cases (airport) I pre-book an early enough departure to still be able to catch a bus to airport if the driver doesn't show.
by bombcar | 2025-05-12 17:12:17+00:00
This is way more an issue than some realize. A repairman I used to know would always have great deals on amazing kitchen gear. It was always 5-10 years out of date but barely used (Viking oven where the burners had been used a bit, but the oven still had all the plastic bags and manuals in it).

Super valuable houses where nobody ever cooked. He said the only thing he’d ever be called to service was the microwave and the fridge.

But 10 years in, gotta refresh the house!
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 17:12:30+00:00
You don't need a "resource DLL"; the compiled .rc file gets linked directly into the binary, and any Win32 C toolchain is capable of doing that, including MinGW.

As API goes, I don't see what's wrong with it (anymore so than Win32 in general). And you do get quite a lot for free, as GP mentioned. Hi-DPI, for example - .rc files use "dialog units" to measure all widgets, which, unlike raw pixel values you pass to CreateWindow, are DPI-independent.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-12 17:13:06+00:00
> "So, you have a lot of people commenting here that this is obvious common sense"

You have this about everything, everywhere. It's a pet peeve how much stuff people will attribute to "common sense" so they can do the internet "I'm superior" thing.

"Wear sunscreen, it's just common sense". No it isn't. We evolved on Earth under the sun, we feel good when going out in the sun, it's bright and beautiful. Rubbing petrochemical distillate or industrially processed plant extract on your skin so the invisible light discovered in 1801 doesn't denature the invisible DNA discovered in 1869 is not common sense it's learned behaviour. Nothing much about Science is common sense, it took thousands of years from the dawn of Civilization until the Enlightenment era and still people can go through years of education and then choose to believe what we want to believe instead of what the evidence shows.

'Common Sense' is that the world is simple, designed for a purpose by a human-like mind one or two levels up from us on the power scale, and inhabited by life-like energies and spirits, some of them malevolent. Common Sense is that things which didn't happen today or yesterday will probably never happen. Common Sense is that things which happen together cause each other; if the relative comes to town and the crop fails then they are bad luck, if the relative comes to town and the baby is born healthy then they are good luck.

Why would it be any kind of 'common sense' - 'sound judgement not based on any specialised knowledge' - that glucose (1747) response differs for the same meal if you need a continuous glucose monitor (FDA approved in 1999) to find that out?!
by a4isms | 2025-05-12 17:13:43+00:00
True!

Of course, Shrink-wrap 2020-2025 is not exactly the same as Shrink-wrap 1995-2000. You mentioned digital distribution. Speaking from my lived experience... We shipped software on golden masters that were used to manufacture DVDs at scale.

At that time, the entire software industry worked on long release cycles because of the friction of shipping software on manufactured media. And in those days, people read physical dead tree computer magazines, which had long lead times for articles. This affected software development, because months before we were scheduled to "ship," we were sharing screen shots with journalists, doing interviews, and placing stories in magazines timed to drop when we released.

I remember a death march to get a product ready so that we'd have DVDs to give away at JavaOne in the Moscone Center, where our CTO was scheduled to give a talk. The way software was distributed in those days all strongly influenced the way companies attempted to manage software development.
by taylodl | 2025-05-12 17:14:15+00:00
The creator of Cuid, Eric Elliot, claims to have run into collisions with UUIDs. I'm extremely skeptical of that claim. It's far more likely that the site he was working on had an implementation issue. Anyway, here's the article where he explains his motivation for Cuid.

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/identity-crisis-how-mode...
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-12 17:14:21+00:00
A company has no duty to report to you about just because you kindly notified them of a vulnerability in their software.

> During our conversation, the Cerca team acknowledged the seriousness of these issues, expressed gratitude for the responsible disclosure, and assured me they would promptly address the vulnerabilities and inform affected users.

Well that was the decent thing to do and they did it. Beyond that it is their internal problem and, especially they did fix the issue according to the article.

Engineers can be a little too open and naive. Perhaps his first contacts was with the technical team but then managament and the legal team got hold of the issue and shut it off.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-12 17:14:25+00:00
Which is hilarious because the only thing gatekeeping the homeowner from doing their own HVAC is an EPA 608 cert you can do in like 2 nights in your underwear (cost me like $50 and saved me like $10k), after which you can order 200 lbs of whatever toxic refrigerant you want straight to your home.

It used to be getting the actual HVAC systems was a problem but with internet you can get everything you need and bypass that whole racket, especially if you use mini splits you don't even have to know how to run ducts.
by camcil | 2025-05-12 17:14:37+00:00
In a data conscious world, the complete and utter disregard for PII and lack of competency in design and implementation would result in catastrophic business failure.

They may have "patched" the ability to exploit it in this way, but the plaintext data is still there in that same fragile architecture and still being handled by the same org that made all of these same fundamental mistakes in the first place. Yikes.
by nick238 | 2025-05-12 17:14:39+00:00
One of the anti-consumer behaviors that banks figured out was reordering transactions to increase overdraft fees [0]. For instance, say you made 5 purchases in a given day for ~$20 each, and your account had $500 in it. Then, you need to make an emergency $600 payment because something on your car broke.

Banks used to have (maybe have again, as the CFPB is now a husk) broad latitude to resequence transactions posted to your account, so instead of you thinking you'd have one overdraft in the example, $500 down to $400, then once into the negative, -$200, and one overdraft fee, the bank could post them so it was $500 to -$100, an overdraft, then all 5 small transactions were also overdrafts, allowing them to charge 6 overdraft fees.

In December 2024, the CFPB announced a proposed rule to cap overdraft fees for banks with over $10B in assets at $5 (OR treat the fee like a loan) and add additional regulations to avoid resequencing. On May 9th, last Friday, the president signed the resolution [1] to overturn the pending CFPB regulations, saving us from "unlawful government price caps" (ABA President Rob Nichols) and "harmed the very consumers the CFPB is supposed to protect" (Sen. Tim Scott, R, Banking Committee Chair).

Comparing it to a loan, e.g. a credit card, usual effective overdraft fees are something like 16,000% APY [2] ($35 charged to the average $26 overdraft, repaid in a few days). Those with poor finances often might use a debit card instead of a credit card, which they might not have access to. It's a cruel joke that those with a bit more financial privilege can pay for things via CC without having the money for ~30+ days (statement close + payment due date) for 0%, or if they let the debt ride, "only" 40% APY. Not 16,000% APY.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/your-money/customers-can-...

[1]: https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2025/05/with-trump-signing-re...

[2]: https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_overdraft...
by bravoetch | 2025-05-12 17:14:42+00:00
I think most companies have a weak playbook for this kind of interaction. I once bought a product (and I'm going to be deliberately vague) from a company whose customers are mostly very famous people around the globe. The URL for my order included the order number, and that page showed everything about my order and my PII. Naturally I tried changing the order number, and wowzers I was able to see emails, phones, addresses, contacts for the PA/agent and sometimes direct contact info for the ordering party.

When I contacted the company about this, they didn't thank me or really acknowledge the problem. They fixed it about a month later by requiring login to view order URLs. I feel like they should have let their customers know all their PII data was exposed - I know they didn't, I never got such a notification.
by archarios | 2025-05-12 17:14:50+00:00
I think a big advantage of a framework is that the team(s) don't end up arguing over architecture as much because the framework made those decisions for us. Also the framework has a proven history of this architecture working well for xyz problems. Also it makes finding compatible talent much easier. If you're using a framework, finding someone who has worked with that same framework for years makes it a safer bet that they will start being useful quickly. If you have your own bespoke system, it could be years until a new hire feels comfortable with the existing system's quirks and nuances and stops breaking things as much.
by imglorp | 2025-05-12 17:15:57+00:00
About a third of those 42,000 dead are due to DUIs. US has historically been lenient here, resulting in many repeat offenders on the road causing preventable tragedies. Distracted driving is around 3,000/yr, while drowsy drivers around 6,000.

If self driving cars do nothing better than on par with alert and sober human drivers, that might cut half of those deaths by itself.
by umvi | 2025-05-12 17:15:58+00:00
Think of America more like 50 countries. Now take your school shooting example. A lot of states have made changes to their gun laws in response to this. Making federal (i.e. applies to all states) gun law changes is more challenging because you have to get 75% of the states on board with any constitutional changes. Without a constitutional amendment, any gun legislation ultimately must respect the existing 2nd Amendment so it's not possible to have Japan-esque policies without a constitutional amendment. Also USA takes up an entire continent so different regions of the us have different cultures and sentiment towards guns. People living in highly rural areas like Montana probably have favorable gun ownership sentiment. People living in highly urban areas like NYC usually have negative gun sentiment.
by 9283409232 | 2025-05-12 17:16:23+00:00
There's no penalty for failing at privacy and security so companies would rather play the odds that they will be fine than invest in proper practices. Alex says Cerca is being misleading when it comes to encryption but it seems to me they are outright lying and will likely face no consequences for it. In a more just world, this would trigger so many regulatory and compliance audits.
by winwang | 2025-05-12 17:16:28+00:00
Large scale shuffles: Absolutely. One of the larger queries we ran saw a 450TB shuffle -- this may require more than just deploying the spark-rapids plugin, however (depends on the query itself and specific VMs used). Shuffling was the majority of the time and saw 100% (...99%?) GPU utilization. I presume this is partially due to compressing shuffle partitions. Network/disk I/O is definitely not the bottleneck here.

It's difficult to say what "workloads" are significant, and easier to talk about what doesn't really work AFAIK. Large-scale shuffles might see 4x efficiency, assuming you can somehow offload the hash shuffle memory, have scalable fast storage, etc... which we do. Note this is even on GCP, where there isn't any "great" networking infra available.

Things that don't get accelerated include multi-column UDFs and some incompatible operations. These aren't physical/logical limitations, it's just where the software is right now: https://github.com/NVIDIA/spark-rapids/issues

Multi-column UDF support would likely require some compiler-esque work in Scala (which I happen to have experience in).

A few things I expect to be "very" good: joins, string aggregations (empirically), sorting (clustering). Operations which stress memory bandwidth will likely be "surprisingly" good (surprising to most people).

Otherwise, Nvidia has published a bunch of really-good-looking public data, along with some other public companies.

Outside of Spark, I think many people underestimate how "low-latency" GPUs can be. 100 microseconds and above is highly likely to be a good fit for GPU acceleration in general, though that could be as low as 10 microseconds (today).
by noahjk | 2025-05-12 17:16:43+00:00
For this reason, maybe a handyman / jack-of-all-trades will have less wear and tear on their body? Diversity in tasks could mean a week of concrete followed by a week of cabinets, then a day or two of building a staircase, three hours of adding a new receptacle, and then two days of painting? Although in some ways, a handyman's job might be harder - they should be a quick learner, have good support / contacts in specific trades, and it might require better/more marketing to get customers.
by kotaKat | 2025-05-12 17:16:52+00:00
DOCSIS modems require a configuration file from the cable modem termination system. This dictates the whole configuration from RF map and channel plan to things like QoS and management. Even with a customer-supplied modem, the CMTS will still supply a configuration file the modem must obey (and the CMTS will enforce).

For many modems on the customer market this also can mean that the ISP can push their own version of the firmware for a modem if you buy identical - such as pushing SURFboard updates.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-05-12 17:16:52+00:00
> linked by a common thread of inaction towards things that should in principle be solved.

Yes, but this is hardly unique to the US. Various European countries and the EU as a whole often suffer similarly.

It's not like the EU took one look at the Draghi report and immediately started to fix things; often the cultural and policy issues causing the problem also make it harder to implement new fixes to the problem.
by silisili | 2025-05-12 17:17:05+00:00
I have to assume a huge amount of it is national and local regulations, which seem to change every freakin year. I read relevant sections a decade ago re: outlets with no ground(has to be on gfci breaker) and wiring a bathroom(has to be on separate circuit). Now you're apparently not allowed to put outlets on the side of or back of kitchen islands? Just random things like this.

I couldn't imagine having to keep up with all of it. I'd guess many don't...
by qwery | 2025-05-12 17:17:18+00:00
Your entire line of questioning is disconnected from reality. How could you possibly think that the machine can do that? I'm sorry that that sounds so severe, but it's the best way I could describe it.

Creation doesn't work that way. Music(ian) doesn't work that way. Your innocent AI lifeform doesn't exist. The technology does not experience in any way, let alone like a human does.

When you read the bitstream of an mp3 does it sound like the song you hear if you play it in Winamp?
by evolve2k | 2025-05-12 17:17:21+00:00
Mastodon runs on Rails and currently utilises and relies on Redis and Sidekiq. I’ve heard redis/sidekiq adds some additional complication and workload to setting up and maintaining a mastodon instance especially for those less familiar with the stack.

I’d love some opinions from those with any insight. Would it benefit the Mastodon project to switch across to Solid Queue generally or as a default? Or is mastodon one of those use cases where the current Redis/Sidekiq setup really is more suitable?

Please explain your reasoning :)
by johnklos | 2025-05-12 17:17:43+00:00
The solution is simple: go back in time and get legislation passed to mandate the release of source code for devices that the original manufacturer no longer intends to support.

That might be imposssible right now, and not just because of the time travel thing. While it's a good idea, and while people are working to get legislation passed that would prevent the forced obsolescence of products by companies requiring, then no longer supporting, public servers, for instance, companies would fight to the death any requirement to make their source available.

But the problem isn't only theirs - open source projects that are steered by corporations often lack the willingness to expend some work now in order to save work decades from now.

For instance, NetBSD moved to 64 bit time on all platforms using clever versioning to maintain compatibility with 32 bit timestamps. They did this on 32 bit architectures, too, back in 2012. [0], [1]

Linux, on the other hand, has no shortage of people who either want to drop 32 bit support entirely or who think that the work to modernize 32 bit support isn't worthwhile (because, in part, they've forgotten that embedded Linux is a thing, and they also don't care about people who can't afford modern hardware). The 64 bit time transition for 32 bit platforms has taken ages, but is thankfully finally underway. [2]

There's practically no hope for corporations. If they aren't given stuff that's already fixed (that is, if the fix isn't already baked in to the Linux they choose to use), they're certainly not going to "invest" resources in fixing things from the past. Heck - it took Google more than a week to fix issues with Chromecasts that came from bad planning. [3]

What can we do? Most people aren't going to decide on a purchase based on whether their product might stop working in 2038 unless we make it very easy for them. We should test more things and point out when products will fail. Of course, nobody is going to care if their wifi device bought in 2025 won't run in 2038, but if someone told you that a $50,000 car's infotainment system will stop working, they might care.

[0]: https://wiki.netbsd.org/symbol_versions/

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200122035908/https://twitter.c...

[2]: https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time

[3]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/google_chromecast_fix...
by Ericson2314 | 2025-05-12 17:18:00+00:00
One thing that I think is underappreciated as a distinguishing factor of brutalism is how three-dimensional it is.

Whether its the Barbican, or "Grad Center" at Brown University, there are all sorts of elevated walkways that you can see from other levels, defying "every floor is like every other floor" expectations.

I think I have vague memories of when being a small child, being filled with wonder at various municipal buildings that did this. Though my memory hazy and I cannot remember the specific buildings.
by raufakdemir | 2025-05-12 17:18:08+00:00
Co-founder here. The Airweave interface doesn't discriminate which downstream use case it's applied in. Most current developers don't build it for a chat interface at all actually. Instead they fold it into their agents to give them access to user data. At first sight enterprise search looks quite similar, but instead this is a building block for developers to set up integrations for their internal agent / agent product.
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 17:18:23+00:00
C++ actually makes a lot of sense specifically for Win32 API because RAII takes care of releasing all the numerous handles at the right time in the right manner. Also, things like string operations are a pain in pure C (indeed, this app uses stuff like strcpy which is a recipe for buffer overruns etc).

WTL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Template_Library) is the oldschool way to do low-level Win32 coding in C++.
by moralestapia | 2025-05-12 17:19:02+00:00
Because it's a machine that reproduces other people's work, who are copyrighted. Copyright protects the essence of original work even after its present in or turned into derivative work.

Some try to make the argument of "but that's what humans do and it's allowed", but that's not a real argument as it has not been proven, nor it is easy to prove, that machine learning equates human reasoning. In the absence of evidence, the law assumes NO.
by zipy124 | 2025-05-12 17:19:14+00:00
Just to clairfy I'm not assuming you are criticing the commentor, nor am I intending to critisice you, merely that I don't agree the viewpoints are actually that similar at all between the commentor and the article.

The article doesn't state they target uneducated people, it states that they use it more which are subtle but key differences. Furthermore "poor people who don’t understand credit" is not the same category as "lower incomes, lower education, and worse credit (redundancies here)". Even if we assume they are the same group of people (by making an equivalence between understanding of credit and general education/income/credit which we know is not a great assumption) the statements are different anyway.

The article is talking about an observed statistic, BNPL seems to be more prevalent in lower income, lower education and worse credit populations (we actually have really poor data on private credit so this should be taken with a grain of salt). The commenter however is making the claim that this is because they have a bad understanding of credit, and also implicitily that BNPL is bad and a bad use of credit.

These are therefore different as we can easily see for instance that a probable cause could for example be that people with no savings are more likely to borrow to cover spending in-between paychecks for example, or when emergency expenses change their cash-flow. This would not however fit with the commenters viewpoint, and is actually a good use of credit.