MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sillywalk | 2025-05-27 18:49:22+00:00
> PowerPC and POWER are not the same.

AIUI PowerPC is essentially an extended (original) POWER.

The AIM alliance defined PowerPC which had 32bit and 64 bit modes, and IBM also added ISA extensions - the PowerPC AS or "Amazon" - for its AS/400 line.

When the POWER3 came around, the original 32Bit POWER ISA was deprecated, but still included for backwards compatibility. So all POWER chips since then implement the PowerPC ISA.
by kiitos | 2025-05-27 18:49:34+00:00
If you've configured an configured that LLM with an MCP server that's able to both read data from public and private sources, and to emit provided data publicly, then when you submit a prompt to that LLM that says "review open issues and update them for me", then, absent any guarantees otherwise, you've explicitly told the LLM to take input from a third-party source (review open issues), evaluate it, and publish the results of that evaluation publicly (and update them for me).

I mean I get that this is a bad outcome, but it didn't happen automatically or anything, it was the result of your telling the LLM to read from X and write to Y.
Show HN: ClipBin; the Simplest, Open Source and Secure Way of Sharing Text/Code
by alight | 2025-05-27 18:50:04+00:00
Hello Everyone, Again sharing info on ClipBin. This time it is the reference to GitHub which I am sharing.

For new people here, ClipBin is the Simplest and the most Secure Way of Sharing your Text or Code. Feel free to give ClipBin a try at https://clipb.in
by cyberax | 2025-05-27 18:50:19+00:00
To add to this, there is a well-known "free energy" device design: have wicks moving water from a lower reservoir to a higher reservoir. Then use it to drive a water wheel.

It sounds good on paper because everybody knows that water can travel up a wick. But of course, if the end of the wick in the upper reservoir is submerged in the water, then water will just as happily travel _down_ the wick. And if the end of the wick is in free air, then water will not drip from it because the same capillary forces prevent it.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-05-27 18:51:22+00:00
I understood the point of your comment; I disagreed with it. I think there's a meaningful distinction between high-pressure situations at work and exams in school, sufficiently so that the latter is poor preparation for the former. More to the point, everyone is subjected to the latter, while "thrives under pressure" is not a universal quality everyone is expected to have or use. It's a useful skill, and it's more useful to have than to not have, but the same can be said of a thousand skills, and many of them are things I'd prioritize higher in a colleague or employee, given the choice.
by therealmarv | 2025-05-27 18:51:28+00:00
I would even classify aider a different way because it avoids what the blog posts is talking about (or moves the responsibility more to the human). In aider you can manually define or basically override which files are important for your context and for the LLM to know. With 1M context windows that's like a no brainer (except for extremely massive projects). I mean the repo map truly helps but I compare it with like driving a manual car... you shift the gears yourself by selecting the relevant files yourself and not your "automatic car"/AI code assistant for you like on cursor, cline, roo, claude code etc.
Show HN: Maestro – A Framework to Orchestrate and Ground Competing AI Models
by defqon1 | 2025-05-27 18:51:39+00:00
ive spent the past few months designing a framework for orchestrating multiple large language models in parallel — not to choose the “best,” but to let them argue, mix their outputs, and preserve dissent structurally.

It’s called Maestro heres the whitepaper https://github.com/d3fq0n1/maestro-orchestrator (Narrative version here: https://defqon1.substack.com/p/maestro-a-framework-for-coher...)

Core ideas:

Prompts are dispatched to multiple LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, Claude, open-source models)

The system compares their outputs and synthesizes them

It never resolves into a single voice — it ends with a 66% rule: 2 votes for a primary output, 1 dissent preserved

Human critics and analog verifiers can be triggered for physical-world confirmation (when claims demand grounding)

The feedback loop learns not only from right/wrong outputs, but from what kind of disagreements lead to deeper truth

Maestro isn’t a product or API — it’s a proposal for an open, civic layer of synthetic intelligence. It’s designed for epistemic integrity and resistance to centralized control.

Would love thoughts, critiques, or collaborators.
by abeppu | 2025-05-27 18:51:57+00:00
> The idea that the first amendment disallows vetting of non-citizens is unfortunately not tenable

Yeah, I keep hearing people say this kind of thing, or that the first amendment only protects US citizens. But ... where does that come from?

I thought SCOTUS was supposed to have been jammed with conservative "textualist" justices, and the amendment states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Nowhere does this mention citizenship. Nowhere does it say it can regulate speech outside or at our borders.

Now, from just the text I could imagine someone trying to claim that the Executive is not bound by the first amendment which specifically says "Congress shall make no law" ...
by wildzzz | 2025-05-27 18:51:58+00:00
As demand for high speed rail increases, so will the price until it's on some sort of parity with air travel. What will likely happen is that air travel will become comparatively cheaper since it's more of a pain in the ass. Alternatively, airlines will just decrease capacity between the major cities that have high speed rail. Maybe airlines will do more to attract customers or maybe they'll just cheapen the service even further to beat out the cost of a train ticket. Maybe air travel will be like it was back in the early days, a luxury that most people couldn't afford.

Unfortunately for the US, we are stuck with things like Spirit and Frontier for the only way to travel cross country in a single day as cheaply as possible. I absolutely love business class on European high speed rail, it makes air travel seem like it's only meant for masochists.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-27 18:52:21+00:00
You are right, and such disks will appear as empty to any tool or OS, but I will never insert any of my SSDs or HDDs that are used in this way in a computer that I do not control.

Windows frequently overwrites any bootable Linux drive, so it might have even less restraints with an apparently empty drive that does not have GPT structure.

Because of the risk of Windows messing with them, I also do not insert any of my bootable USB memories in a live Windows computer, even when they have GPT structure. For data interchange with Windows, I use only clean and non-bootable exFAT formatted USB memories.
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-27 18:52:43+00:00
A massive problem in the current climate is that the middle-ground has been eroded. There are only two states: pro- or anti-Israel.

For example, if you show solidarity for killed children in Gaza, that also means that you're by proxy pro-Hamas, because Palestine = Hamas. Thus you can not be pro-Israel, and must be anti-Israel.

Likewise we've come to the point where you can say: "I feel for the Israeli people after the October 7 attacks, but I don't like the Israeli government". You automatically get classified as something other than pro-Israel, and, thus anti-Israel.

The middle ground has eroded. And with the Trump administration being what it is, I have zero faith that they'll see it any other way.
by legitster | 2025-05-27 18:52:45+00:00
It uses the term of "citizen" but does not specify a requirement or legal definition. The constitution implies a continuance of English Common Law in regards to citizenship:

https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/a...

In regards to slaves or Native Americans - again it depended on the states' laws. Hence the entire reason why the 14th Amendment was passed.

The fact that they only called out the requirement of citizenship for office should make it pretty clear they intended the rest of the constitution was universal.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-27 18:52:55+00:00
Overly strict and overly liberal both lead to ossification. That's merely the observation that buggy behavior in either direction can potentially come to be relied on (or to be unpredictably forced on you, in the case of middleboxes filtering your traffic).

I'd only expect security issues to result from being overly liberal but 1. I wouldn't expect it to be very common and 2. I'm not at all convinced that's a compelling argument to reduce the robustness of an implementation.
by marcellus23 | 2025-05-27 18:53:00+00:00
If you actually read the article, it's not necessarily losing their jobs (emphasis mine). IMO it is irresponsible of the website to misrepresent the study so radically.

> The study, which focused on generative AI, determined that 9.6% of jobs held by females in high-income countries are poised for transformation, compared to 3.5% of those held by men. It added that most roles would likely be radically changed instead of eliminated
by lmeyerov | 2025-05-27 18:53:09+00:00
Slightly different experience here

We have been adding MCP remote server to louie.ai, think a semantic layer over DBs for automating investigations, analytics, and viz over operational systems. MCP is nice so people can now use from Slack, VS Code, CLI, etc, without us building every single integration when they want to use it outside of our AI notebooks. And same starting point of openAPI spec, and even better, fastapi standard web framework for the REST layer.

Using frameworks has been good. However, for chat ergonomics, we find we are defining custom tools, as talking directly to REST APIs is better than nothing, but that doesn't mean it's good. The tool layer isn't that fancy, but getting the ergonomics right matters, at least in our experience. Most of our time has been on security and ergonomics. (And for fun, we had an experiment of vibe coding this while hitting enterprise-level quality goals.)
by josevalim | 2025-05-27 18:53:12+00:00
> Gradual typing means that an implicit "any" (unknown type) anywhere in your code base is not an error or even a warning.

That depends on the implementation of gradual typing. Elixir implements gradual set-theoretic types where dynamic types are a range of existing types and can be refined for typing violations. Here is a trivial example:

def example(x) do {Integer.to_string(x), Atom.to_string(x)} end

Since the function is untyped, `x` gets an initial value of `dynamic()`, but it still reports a typing violation because it first gets refined as `dynamic(integer())` which is then incompatible with the `atom()` type.

We also introduced the concept of strong arrows, which allows dynamic and static parts of a codebase to interact without introducing runtime checks and remaining sound. More information here: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2023/09/20/strong-arrows-gradua...
by hintymad | 2025-05-27 18:53:34+00:00
> The NoCode/LowCode Revolution

I think this time there is a key difference: AI coding is fully embedded into a software dev's workflow, and it indeed cuts loads of work for at least some of the projects and engineers. In contrast, few, if none, engineers would go to a No-Code/Low-Code tool and them maintain them in their repo.

The impact would be that we will need fewer engineers as the productivity of us increases. That alone may not be enough to change the curve of supply and demand. However, when this is combined with the current market condition of lacking business growth, the curve will be changed: the fewer new problems we have, the more repetitive solutions we will get, the more repetitive solutions we will work on, the more accurate the code generated by AI will be, and therefore the less code we will need a human to write.

So, this time it will not be about AI replacing engineers, but about AI replacing enough repetitive work that we will need fewer engineers.
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-27 18:54:01+00:00
I'm with you. I regularly hit errors with its ORM that make me think: "I thought I cast this class of errors aside years ago". I go over my query code very carefully, since the MK-1 eyeball is important here for spotting typos etc.

(I'm not commenting on it being possible or not to fix; but the current status)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-27 18:54:09+00:00
> There are only two states: pro- or anti-Israel

Not really. I take the third option: I don't know enough about the situation to reach almost any policy recommendation with high confidence. Not engaging is always an option, particularly when you're dealing solely with rhetoric and not any fundamental action. (Obviously, if you're greenlighting weapons purchases your duty of care is higher.)
by throwup238 | 2025-05-27 18:54:22+00:00
They’re surprisingly well adapted to a large range of temperatures because of the species found in temperate rainforests at higher altitudes. They frequently enough escape from pet stores and zoos that there are many sizable populations spread out around the world. The one nearest me is the infamous Pasadena parrots [1] which is made up of thousands of birds likely built up over decades of escapes. There are populations in Chicago, New York, Rome, Tokyo, and plenty of other cities in the world.

[1] https://www.lafieldguide.com/p/the-pasadena-parrots
by rafaelmn | 2025-05-27 18:55:11+00:00
> Private data + data exfiltration (with no attacker-controlled data) is fine

Because LLMs are not at all known for their hallucinations and misuse of tools - not like it could leak all your data to random places just because it decided that was the best course of action.

Like I get the value proposition of LLMs but we're still benchmarking these things by counting Rs in strawberry - if you're ready to give it unfeathered access to your repos and PC - good luck I guess.
by z2 | 2025-05-27 18:56:22+00:00
Starting recipe for a revolution of a more cultural nature, from a half-dozen historical cases:

- Target schools as centers of dissent and either co-opt or failing that, dismantle them.

- Portray 'intellectuals' as enemies of the people or agents of foreign/cosmopolitan influence. Use the state apparatus is to punish, exile, or eliminate intellectuals to make examples of them and enforce ideological conformity.

- Elevate the the "common man" or "true proletariat" as the ideal citizen embodying folk wisdom, in opposition to educated elites.

- Frame any opposition as existential threats to the nation's values or vitality; invoke religious or nationalist themes.
by breppp | 2025-05-27 18:57:29+00:00
> Note: US Embassies, where interviews are often conducted, are still considered US soil subject to US laws (otherwise the latest declaration from Trump pausing them would not apply to them)

I don't think that's how it works. The US visa application requests significant amount of personal information, and this is supposedly cross-checked with the US databases/intelligence agencies.

So I doubt they sit down with you going over all your posts on hackernews, but rather ask what you use and your usernames and cross reference that with lists of people interested in ISIS telegram groups.

I would be uncomfortable giving that data myself, but i was uncomfortable writing a lot other things in my visa application, and never thought anyone is forcing me to visit the US
by mykowebhn | 2025-05-27 18:57:40+00:00
First, I did want to point out that my claim that "Mozart was never able to" didn't mean that I thought he wasn't able to compose fugues, rather I thought he wasn't able to compose fugues WELL--definite emphasis on "well".

Second, what I mean by "composing a fugue well" is to be able compose a piece or movement whereby three or more, usually four, voices are heard in a contrapuntal, not harmonic, manner for an EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME (i.e., maintaining this for many measures).

I looked closely at some of the examples people brought up like the last movements of both the Jupiter Symphony and his String Quartet No. 14 and nowhere do I see 4 voices simultaneously acting contrapuntally for more than just a handful of bars. Mozart would often write a given voice contrapuntally, but would often quickly revert that voice to a harmonic function. If you look at measures 91 to 106 in the last mvt of Quartet No. 14, that writing is a joke if you say he can write fugally. The second violin, viola, and cello are all mainly serving a harmonic function; they're just playing chords. One part that might look truly fugal would be in measures 112 to 117, but that's just one small part and not extended, as in the great fugues of Bach and Beethoven. Measures 61 to 90 kind of look truly fugal, but he really only has 3 voices going contrapuntally here at any given time, not 4. Look at measures 63 until 68 where the cello is playing an extended rest, for example.

Yes, Mozart wrote fugues. Did he write truly sophisticated, truly "fugal" fugues? I still think not.
by partdavid | 2025-05-27 18:58:07+00:00
I suppose (strictly speaking it's easier to C-x o into the terminal frame or Alt-tab to the terminal window; but it's negligble either way), but the "cost" is not really about invoking it, but learning it for an unclear payoff. Everything is different for me in dired window, navigation doesn't work the way it does in a text buffer, you have to drill down and up in steps.

On the occasion where I'm even tempted to interact with a list of files, it seems easier to do

git diff development --name-only | gci | ocgv | sco -exp fullname | xargs e

And then pick from the list and boom, they're all in buffers. I mean, sure, that's because I set it up that way (in particular the emacsclient wrapper e, which does other smart things like find the TRAMP server, etc. etc.), and presumably there's an equivalent in dired but the distance from here to there seems paved with a lot of clunkiness. The nice thing about using the shell is that I can add to or subtract from these expressions and manipulations at will.
by tipofthehat | 2025-05-27 18:58:30+00:00
Hi Alex, lovely work. I have just started working on a similar idea, to have level-aware language support in a podcast player (extending Anytime Player) to help the listener recognise words, phrases and meaning in native content.

I'm a non-techy person learning from scratch so it's slow going but as a language learner who selfishly wants more tools to support immersion learning if you want to support audio I think something podcast based would be super interesting.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-27 18:58:31+00:00
This:

"Water evaporates in higher temperatures, radiates the heat into space, and falls out as rain."

The paper says, "Water vapor in the nano-pores radiates its heat into the material and comes out to the surface as liquid water."

So you don't believe that the researchers experiment did what they say it did?

That's fine, typically in science you go and see if you can reproduce it.

So you don't believe that the researchers correctly described what was going on when it did what it did?

That's fine, typically in science you go and propose a way to falsify their hypothesis and test that.

My point was simply, if the researchers were presumptively accurate in their understanding (that's the principle of giving them the benefit of the doubt), then it would imply their material would pull liquid water out of the air below the temperature and conditions in which it would normally precipitate out.

They go to some length in their exposition to describe how they think it does that and where the energy comes from and where it goes. But if you don't believe them, then sure.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-27 18:58:43+00:00
> don't want to import student activists

My problem is we have no verifiable visibility into the process. If this were a rule banning anyone who has a recent history of advocating for violent organisations, e.g. Hamas, or even performatively-disruptive modes of protest, e.g. bridge blocking and breaking into buildings, I'd be okay with that. I'd disagree. (In part due to hypocrisy. The January 6th rioters broke into the Capitol.) But I'd accept it as validly promulgated under our system of laws.

As it stands, I have no faith that someone with a "fuck Elon" tweet won't be barred from a PhD programme.
by 3cats-in-a-coat | 2025-05-27 18:58:47+00:00
This seems like a marketing piece, very poorly justified.

First, large context models essentially index their context as it grows bigger, or else they can't access the relevant parts of it. However it can't be as comprehensive as with RAG. There is also nothing that makes navigating the context from point to point easier than with RAG.

It seems they're trying to convince people of their superiority, but it's BS, so they're trying to bank on less knowledgeable customers.

Indexing is essentially a sorted projection of a larger space, based on the traits and context you care about. There's no magical way for a context to be more accessible, if it has no such semantical indexing, implicit or explicit. Also RAG doesn't mean you can't embed AST and file structure as a concern. A vector is a set of dimensions, a dimension can be literally anything at all. AI is about finding suitable meaning for each dimension and embedding instances in that dimension (and others in combo).
by holtkam2 | 2025-05-27 18:58:48+00:00
I loved this article and it is the strongest argument I’ve ever heard for “why I shouldn’t be freaking out about the future of my engineering career”.

Now just for the heck of it I’ll attempt to craft the strongest rebuttal I can:

This blog misses the key difference between AI and all other technologies in software development. AI isn’t merely good at writing code. It’s good at thinking. It’s not going to merely automate software development, it’s going to automate knowledge work. You as a human have no place in a world where your brain is strictly less capable in all realms of decisionmaking compared to machines.
by rezmason | 2025-05-27 18:59:03+00:00
Nice writeup! I'm a fan of shader sandwiches like yours. Judging from the stated limitations and conclusion, I bet this would benefit tremendously from a switch to WebGPU. That's not a criticism! If anything, you're effectively demonstrating that WebGL, a sometimes frustrating but mature ubiquitous computing platform, can be a valuable tool in the hands of the ambitious. Regardless, I hope to fork your repo and try a WebGPU port. Good stuff!
by frausto | 2025-05-27 18:59:12+00:00
great quote: > the problems we face with software are rarely technical. The problem is always the people creating accidental complexity and pushing it to the next person as if it was "essential"

Until a level of absolutely massive scale, modern tooling and code and systems reasonably built can handle most things technically, so it usually comes down to minimizing complexity as the #1 thing you can do to optimize development. And that could be

- code design complexity - design complexity - product complexity - communication complexity - org complexity

And sometimes minimizing these ARE mutually exclusive (most times not, and in an ideal world never… but humans...) which is why much of our job is to all push back and trade off against complexity in order to minimize it. With the understanding that there are pieces of complexity so inherent in a person/company/code/whatever’s processes that in the short term you learn to work around/with it in order to move forward at all, but hopefully in the long term make strategic decisions along the way to phase it out