MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwforfeds | 2025-05-27 20:20:59+00:00
My friend is a professor at NYU and, to make a long story short, one of his international students messed up their scheduling and tried to get my friend to change their final meeting time because his flight home for the summer cost >$10k and he didn't want to change it. Like, that's clearly an international first class flight, for a 19 year old. My ass was lucky to catch a $20 bus that may or may not catch on fire.

That's all to say, I'm guessing for many of these rich kids they're not thinking twice about throwing out a table or some slides their parents bought for them.
by KaiserPro | 2025-05-27 20:21:17+00:00
> was the one jailed for her comments

The one that fanned huge fucking protests, the one that caused a massive spike in violence, many hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage? That old poor innocent councillors wife?

Britain and the US are very different. In the same way that a lot of americans think that school shootings are a fair exchange for second amendment rights, this is a fair exchange for not having shitstirring fucks whip up tensions.

Look, you're not going to be convinced by any of this, because of where (I assume) you grew up. But think of it this way, how many of those constitutional protections Americans have now, have been broken by the current executive branch of the USA? what practical constitutional checks and balances have actually worked when they are being tested?

The 6th amendment appears to not hold with anyone who ICE touches. Personally I'd be much more excised about the USA right now, given that it cant even practice what it's currently trying to preach.

Also, if you want analysis of why Connolly got that sentence: https://davidallengreen.com/2025/05/explaining-a-31-month-se...
by silverlake | 2025-05-27 20:22:45+00:00
Have you guys at Cline considered using LLMs to create summaries of files and complex functions? Rather than read a 500 line function, feed it a short comment on what the function is doing. I'd like to use a local LLM to create summaries at every level: function, file, directory. Then let the LLM use that to find the right code to read. This is basically how I navigate a large code base.
by tart-lemonade | 2025-05-27 20:23:26+00:00
> And are URLs (w/ DNSSEC and TLS) really that easy to hijack?

During the Google Domains-Squarespace transition, there was a vulnerability that enabled relatively simple domain takeovers. And once you control the DNS records, it's trivial to get Let's Encrypt to issue you a cert and adjust the DNSSEC records to match.

https://securityalliance.notion.site/A-Squarespace-Retrospec...
by apitman | 2025-05-27 20:24:28+00:00
I maintain a list of tunneling solutions here: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

Usually my first question is what makes this different than the many existing options. Looks like the answer in this case is that it's p2p and built on iroh (which is built on QUIC), which I find interesting. Would love a PR on the list.
by csense | 2025-05-27 20:24:45+00:00
All kinds of nice things appear in a college dorm's dumpster on move-out day -- especially if said college attracts a lot of non-local or international students who will be flying. Selling takes a lot of time and planning ahead, shipping also requires time (you have to box it up and take it to the post office or FedEx) -- and it might cost more than the item's worth.

When I was in college I found a perfectly working DVD player in a dumpster on move-out day, and I wasn't looking particularly hard -- only casually glancing at the most obviously visible items in the nearest dumpsters I happened to walk by. I could easily imagine finding $thousands worth of items if you go to a big campus with the right student demographics on the right day and systematically search all the dumpsters.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-05-27 20:25:08+00:00
I genuinely don’t understand how the analogy about naval vessels is a fair simplification of the argument that Chomsky’s research programme is, heuristically, a dead-end and should be abandoned. What is A,B,Y,Z?

It’s not like it’s an outrageous position. Chomsky’s tradition is quite controversial and is outside of mainstream nowadays. And connectionism is a valid scientific approach.
by lordnacho | 2025-05-27 20:25:21+00:00
One thing I took note of was that he was a chemistry nerd in school.

It seems like the subject of nerd culture changed from waaay back when he was a kid being chemistry (you could make bombs), to electronics such as radio (you could do ham radio), to computers and then programming (video games).

Nowadays you won't find anyone who can tell you how chemistry works, and a few old guys will tell you how to solder your own electronics, but everyone will be able to tell you how to code a website.
by arbayi | 2025-05-27 20:25:24+00:00
Hello!

I've been playing around with agents, MCP servers and embedded systems for a while. I was trying to figure out the best way to connect my real-time devices to agents and use them in multi-agent workflows.

At OpenServ, we have an API to interact with agents, so at first I thought I'd just run a specialized web server to talk to the platform. But that had its own problems—mainly memory issues and needing to customize it for each device.

Then we thought, why not just run a regular web server and use it as an agent? The idea is simple, and the implementation is even simpler thanks to MCP. I define my server’s endpoints as tools in the MCP server, and agents (MCP clients) can call them directly.

Even though the initial idea was to work with embedded systems, this can work for any backend.

Just wanted to share and would love to hear your thoughts—especially around connecting agents to real-time devices to collect sensor data or control them in mutlti-agent workflows.

Repository: https://github.com/openserv-labs/mcp-proxy
by sleepybrett | 2025-05-27 20:25:57+00:00
I used to live in some apartments near the university of washington. Every june whole apartments worth of stuff would end up in the 'free pile' whenever the international students would move out.

One year I pulled a gaming PC with a current gen nvidia card in it, two current playstations and six current xboxen out of the pile (straight to ebay, minus the gaming PC which I gifted to a friends kid) along with some household items (pots and pans, some of that wire storage shelfing) that I still use.

Hell my current apt which is across town from the university (though I guess seattle u is semi close...) I still see the same kind of stuff end up in the free pile at the beginning of just about every summer and the end of some semesters. I can't tell if it's kids that communing outside of the neighborhood to school or potentially some 'travelling nurses' working at the nearby hospital, but the eating is good.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-05-27 20:25:59+00:00
You think Harvard is a vocational school? Or Columbia, or Stanford, or Princeton for that matter? You think parents like to shell out money presuming their kids are "mediocre"?

The elite schools are still elite schools. They just do cutting edge research now... research originally intended to win a thermonuclear WW3. Their humanities departments of these schools may very well still also stuffed with academics influenced by Soviet active-measures campaigns from the cold-war which actively seek to undermine the power of American institutions to win that long settled conflict.

The agricultural colleges of the 19th century now do research and have football teams now.

American Universities are incredible powerhouses of research. The impact of research efficacy is power law distributed, just like youtube influences, and American wealth. A lot of people in the tech industry seem to be jaded by Universities due to the fact that they've gotten outrageously expensive compared to the median income, that for the past 15 years you can make easier money doing webservices than Greek literature, and the majority of universities are not Harvard or MIT. But you can't deny the enormous contributions to society from American universities. Many people we hold in high regard started off as "mediocre" students.

And the truth is there are many colleges and universities in America that are vocational schools. They just don't want to admit it. How many community colleges in the states are really preparing kids to become nobel laureates? The anti-university sentiment is just another offshoot of the anti-elitism (and perhaps anti-intellectualism) running through American society today... a natural consequence of the situation where you have massively skewed wealth distribution and massively skewed success outcomes from that power law distribution I mentioned earlier.
by Rochus | 2025-05-27 20:26:26+00:00
> It is explicitly against policy to attempt to answer a question in the comments

I didn't say anything else.

> other people were simply prevented from answering them until you fix the question

Oh, thanks, I feel much better now.

> No, you clearly did not, based on your demonstrated lack of understanding of basic principles of how the site works.

Which is what common people call "bad marketing" ;-) In Switzerland, we have a popular expression for the attitude we can observe on SO: “schön sterben” (to die beautifully). As I said, I left SO behind and am much better off with what I have now, and I'm definitely not the only one.
by john-dev | 2025-05-27 20:27:48+00:00
We recently open-sourced FFmate: https://github.com/welovemedia/ffmate

It’s a modern automation layer on top of FFmpeg designed to simplify transcoding workflows, especially for developers integrating video/audio into apps or pipelines.

FFmate is built with extensibility in mind. Here's how you can leverage its core components: - REST API – Submit and manage FFmpeg tasks programmatically - Web UI – Monitor and control jobs in real time, no terminal required - Watchfolders – Automatically process files dropped into a directory - Presets – Ready-made set of pre-configured transcoding presets for common use cases - Webhooks – Get real-time notifications for task events - Dynamic Wildcards – Automate file naming and folder structures - Pre/Post Processing – Run custom scripts before or after each task to automate complex workflow steps - Built-in Queue – Manage task execution with priority control and smart concurrency handling

Docs & Examples: https://docs.ffmate.io

We would love feedback and contributions — especially from folks who've struggled with FFmpeg!
by johnklos | 2025-05-27 20:27:54+00:00
The title is incorrect, because b&w Macs have 512×342 resolution, not 512x324.

It wouldn't've been too crazy had Apple went with 64K x 4 chips, so they'd've just needed four of them to get 128 KB at a full 16 bits wide.

512x342 was 16.7% of 128 KB of memory, as opposed to 18.75% with 512x384. Not much of a difference. But having square pixels is nice.
by jsrozner | 2025-05-27 20:29:57+00:00
SQL attack is different. There's clearly zero expectation that someone can, for example, enter something on a web page and extract database info or modify the database beyond what was intended by the API (e.g., update a single record).

If you are working in an organization and you tell a junior coder "do everything on this list" and on the list is something that says "do something to some other list" and the junior coder does it...that's a fundamentally different kind of "bug". Maybe you expected that the junior coder should say "oh hmm, it's weird that something in this repo mentions another repo" but in that case, you can imagine a high level todo list that points to other low level todo lists, where you would want the junior coder to proceed. Maybe you're looking for "common sense" where there is none?

Actual organizations have ways to mitigate this. For example, OWNERs files would prevent someone from committing code to a repo of which they are not an OWNER without review. And then we're back to what many in these comments have proposed: you should not have given the agent access to another repo if you didn't want it to do something in that repo after you told it--albeit indirectly--to do something in that repo...

-- Actually, arguably a better analogy is that you go to share a file with someone in, e.g., Google Drive. You share a folder and inadvertently grant them access to a subfolder that you didn't want to share. If, in sharing the folder, you say "hey please revise some docs" and then somehow something in the subfolder gets modified, that's not a bug. That's you sharing a thing you weren't supposed to share. So this automatic detection pipeline can maybe detect where you intended to share X but actually shared X and Y.
by al_borland | 2025-05-27 20:30:04+00:00
> What I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want.

I had a boss who let me do this for a while. He just told me to do whatever I wanted that would help the team. He didn’t talk to me for 2 years after that. For the first few weeks I was kind of stressing to find what to do and show some results, but after that the boredom set in, and that’s one things took off. It was the most productive I’ve ever been. I was regularly working 12+ hour days, because I was enjoying what I was working on. After 2 years I had so many projects and so much stuff that they built a whole team around what I was doing to spread the load out a little. That actually helped me get bored again, so the ideas started flowing again. Those were the good ole days.

A lot of what I did started as research, then I applied what I learned. It was a nice balance to keep things interesting, rather than being in research mode or build mode all the time.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-27 20:30:57+00:00
Then you meant to say Ukraine, not Europe. It is not like Russia is going to attempt to conquer Europe, is it? Additionally, there are historical reasons for what is going on between Russia and Ukraine. I am sure you have heard of it, or perhaps have a distorted view of it. It is between Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine is not even part of EU. The EU has nothing to worry about. We might though.
by bityard | 2025-05-27 20:31:49+00:00
I live near a major university town and one of the highlights of my year is move-out week. At dusk, a friend and I go dumpster diving at the apartments around campus. You definitely wear gloves and clothing you don't mind throwing out afterward, but MOST of the garbage is cleaner than you'd think.

Usually the trash is pretty well picked-through by the time we get to it, but every year, we drive off with a pickup truck full of stuff. Common items I typically find are: clothing (especially coats), backpacks (which sometimes have money and other valuables in the small pockets), food (unopened), bathroom supplies, cleaning supplies, notebooks, bins/organizers, tools, sports equipment, batteries (new in box), etc. Oh, and alcohol. So much alcohol.

There is lots more that I typically don't bother with because I have no use for, things like furniture, vacuums, lamps, "items of a personal nature," etc. Basically anything you can imagine fitting into an apartment, you are likely to find in the dumpster.

For some reason, I have yet to find a laptop or anything particularly in line with my other hobbies, but the general day-to-day stuff is quite plentiful if you're willing to take the time to find it, and possibly get a little dirty.
by vincent-manis | 2025-05-27 20:32:28+00:00
I haven't written a PL/I program since about 1985, but I still have a certain affection for the language. It was a genuine attempt to create a new language that would be better than Fortran and Cobol (and Algol, for that matter). The designers bit off way more than they could chew; it has the equivalent of threads, but threads weren't understood at all in those days. Even procedures were not understood: because of the multitasking, on procedure entry, the original IBM PL/I (F) compiler used a system call (GETMAIN) to allocate a stack frame, which was freed on exit. This led to the hilarious advice in the (F) Programmers' Guide: “Do not use procedures, they are expensive.”

The preprocessor was another problem. Its language was Turing-complete, but programs that used it were essentially undebuggable.You had to look at the preprocessor output (which was generally unreadable) to fix even the smallest mistake in using it.

Finally, the language designers followed the Cobol principle of making every pre-defined facility a statement. So there are record I/O statements, stream I/O statements, and on and on. This would all have been much better done with comprehensive library facilities, which were not well-understood in those days.

With all of that said, if I were to find myself required to write PL/I code nowadays, I would find it a tolerable matter. I'm glad, even if it's only for legacy code, that the Iron Spring compiler exists.

(And I even managed to get this comment done without mentioning the time that the PL/I (F) compiler produced a box of printer paper, saying “ERROR: COMPILER IS UNABLE TO ABORT”, over and over, double-spaced, for 2000 pages, accompanied by a nasty letter explaining that I was “abusing” Computing Centre services. That really was a rocky time for PL/I programmers.)
by slau | 2025-05-27 20:32:41+00:00
I discovered this a few days ago and shared it with some friends. It worked quite well for the few routes I tried.

It provides percentage of chance of delay and average delay for specific routes. Each time slot has different stats. So for example the 13:00 train from Copenhagen to Hamburg is much less reliable than the 17:00 one (random example, not sure if accurate).

Very cool overall.
by cableshaft | 2025-05-27 20:33:22+00:00
You can still not comply and see if they end up terminating you. If they value you as an employee enough they may begrudgingly be willing to look the other way.

I've had companies try several times to bring people back to the office, just to have most people not show up anyway (or show up only every once in a while), and so far I haven't seen terminations enforced. That may eventually change, but at least so far I haven't seen that happen. YMMV though.
by greenavocado | 2025-05-27 20:33:33+00:00
Ah, the eternal dream of offloading all human labor to machines. Why can't teachers just let an LLM grade? Because, of course, nothing says "educational integrity" like a glorified autocomplete deciding whether little Timmy's essay on Shakespeare adequately captures the existential dread of Hamlet. Sure, let's trust a model that hallucinates citations. But fine, if we're really committed to stripping all nuance from education, why stop there? Let's just plug students into Anki's FSRS algorithm and call it a day. Just assign grades based on how fast their retention decays, because nothing says "holistic assessment" like reducing a human being to a set of coefficients in a spaced repetition formula. Never mind that actual learning involves things like critical thinking or, heaven forbid, creativity. No, no, we'll just reduce the entire process to a forgetting curve. Because nothing inspires a love of knowledge like treating human minds as poorly optimized flashcard decks, mechanically processed and discarded the moment their retention scores dip below acceptable thresholds.
by hilux | 2025-05-27 20:33:44+00:00
I wondered the same - most of them seem to recover. I think they are helped by their narcissism, in other words, their self-confidence is unshaken by the shame that would cripple "normal" people in a similar situation.

E.g. Kaavya Viswanathan, who plagiarized a high-profile bestseller while a freshman at Harvard, went on to Georgetown Law and a job as an attorney as a blue-chip law firm.

And there are many other examples ...
by ankit219 | 2025-05-27 20:34:08+00:00
I have a different pov on retrieval. It's a hard problem to solve in a generalizable format with embeddings. I believe this can be solved at a model level where its used to fix an issue. With the model providers (oai, anthropic) going full stack, there is a possibility they solve it at reinforcement learning level. Eg: when you teach a model to solve issues in a codebase, the first step is literally getting the right files. Here basic search (with grep) would work very well as with enough training, you want the model to have an instinct about what to search given a problem. similar to how an experienced dev has that instinct about a given issue. (This might be what the tools like cursor are also looking at). (nothing against anyone, just sharing a pov, i might be wrong)

However, the fast apply model is a thing of beauty. Aider uses it and it's just super accurate and very fast.
by johnea | 2025-05-27 20:34:41+00:00
I think your defense of reusing terms for new phenomenon is fair.

But in this specific case, I would say the reuse of this particular word, to apply to this particular error, is still incorrect.

A person hallucinating is based on a many leveled experience of consciousness.

The LLM has nothing of the sort.

It doesn't have a hierarchy of knowledge which it is sorting to determine what is correct and what is not. It doesn't have a "world view" based on a lifetime of that knowledge sorting.

In fact, it doesn't have any representation of knowledge at all. Much less a concept of whether that knowledge is correct or not.

What it has is a model of what words came in what order, in the training set on which it was "trained" (another, and somewhat more accurate, anthropomorphism).

So without anything resembling conscious thought, it's not possible for an LLM to do anything even slightly resembling human hallucination.

As such, when the text generated by an LLM is not factually correct, it's not an hallucination, it's just wrong.
by lostmsu | 2025-05-27 20:35:04+00:00
As a person who decided to join such a party of own volition, answered "yes" to that question in that form, and had to submit an accompanying statement, then proceeded to get US citizenship, I believe this particular bit is a violation of the first amendment, and would love the Supreme Court to struck it down. It violates the letter of the law, and probably the intent too. For all we know had the idea of communism existed in the late 18th century some founding fathers could have subscribed to it.
by msarca | 2025-05-27 20:35:15+00:00
Thanks! Funny enough, I'm super-qualified to answer that since my partner and I made that software https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marius-sarca_coming-soon-the-...

Of course, in the meantime, they brought new features and regressions, but the core technology remained the same, so I have an excellent insight into that product. I would say that the main differentiator is the team behind the product. Ours is better, and your experience as a customer will also be better with us.
by Yusefmosiah | 2025-05-27 20:35:48+00:00
I’m building something similar. https://github.com/YusefMosiah/Choir.chat — if you email me at yusef@choir.chat I can invite you to the iOS TestFlight alpha. Happy to talk about in more detail as well.

Getting the UX to work well enough is a major challenge. I’m redesigning that currently, as I got negative feedback from early testers on my initial experimental UX. There’s a balance to be struck between giving users a low latency response, giving the models time to work together and call tools, and not overloading the user with too much information.
by JamesSwift | 2025-05-27 20:36:07+00:00
I was stationed out in Monterey CA for a while and the combination of wealthy civilians + loads of young temporary military personnel (+ a fat BAH for some of them) led to an absolute treasure trove of craigslist finds if you had access to a pickup truck.

I did my part by leaving a nearly brand new king size mattress (got married and had my wife move in 2 months before moving away from the area) as well as multiple items that a Rent-A-Center failed to pick up before we left (large sectional sofa, dining room table + chairs).