MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-09 06:49:32+00:00
Wow, what an amazing story. Fascinating from an engineering perspective. Quoting a few of my favorite bits:

>Mark began by taking a vertical slice of, say, Chartres and replicating it in a special kind of plastic. He’d then hang fishing weights from various points on the plastic replica, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, to simulate the actual external forces acting upon various parts of the cathedral. There was the direct load of the overhead stone, of course, but also the winds. (To estimate the winds in the 12th century, he found anemometer readings in rural France going back a century. Not perfect, but good enough.) He placed his fully loaded plastic model in an oven, where it was subjected not just to heat but also light. Warmed, the plastic model revealed its stresses, sort of like the way an MRI reveals damage to soft human tissue.

>“The very words ‘statistical analysis’ seem foreign to many in rock engineering. Engineers are trained to see the world in terms of load and deformation, where failure is simply a matter of stress exceeding strength. Statistics are generally given short shrift in engineering curriculums, and so the entire language of statistics is unfamiliar. Yet statistics are the tools that science has developed to deal with uncertainty and probability, which are both at the heart of mining ground control.”

>Real-life American workers were different from his mental model of them. “I had thought if they only knew what I thought, they’d see things how I do,” he said. That idea now struck him as so obviously nuts that he didn’t bother to let them know what he thought. His fellow coal miners were less concerned with his ideas about the economy and their rightful place in it than in simply making a living. Their morale, at that moment, was actually sky-high. “Coal was booming,” said Chris. “We were going to save the world. Thank god we have all this coal so we’re not reliant on Arab oil. People felt good about themselves.”

>“A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris. “It’s not a designed environment. Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown. With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are — what the loads are. You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem, but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.”

>Again, he found work done by others and repurposed it for his uses. Back in the 1940s, geologists working for the Agriculture Department in national forests created a crude method for work crews to determine if some rock would work as a road: whacking it with a ball-peen hammer. Oddly, it didn’t matter how hard you whacked it. There were just a handful of ways the rock might react, and its specific reaction revealed its strength. Chris started whacking mine roofs with ball-peen hammers. “It’s not precise,” he said, “but it does get you in the ballpark.”
by Scarblac | 2025-05-09 06:49:53+00:00
Splitting off a few larger parts because they are self contained, have their own Ops characteristics and might be usable by other projects on their own, vs creating a service for every single entity in your domain modal (or whatever), that's quite a difference.

We have an auth service, a database service for raster geo data, a generic task runner. Those are services. They all have their own pretty unique architecture and stand on their own, they are used by but are separate from the project that they were made for.

Different services for customers, for orders, for invoices, for items in the shop, for items on an order, for promotions, that's microservices. They all look very similar and belong to the application.

(in my opinion this morning)
by bvrmn | 2025-05-09 06:50:09+00:00
It's literally stated in the PEP: https://peps.python.org/pep-0681/

Also: https://github.com/python/mypy/blob/501a07b45af8e44eda665e53...

Also did you know mypy ignores typing of class decorators? You simply can't return a different type other than type[thisclass].
by aaravchen | 2025-05-09 06:51:22+00:00
Zed's only real differentiator I can see right now is that they're not VSCode, and not run by Microsoft. Their AI isn't really any better than major competitors', and AI integration is table stakes for most new IDEs now anyway. They're missing a LOT of basic features still, their extension system is very lacking, and the extension library us still small.

If the community goodwill can be maintained, and they can expand their extension system capabilities, the community will probably catch them up to the effective VSCode extension library size pretty quickly (at least for a 95% of user's needs cases). But I'm seeing a lot of indications they're headed toward enshitification before they even get fully off the ground. I'm just hoping they avoid the obvious pitfalls of prioritizing only profitable new features and flavors of the month when their only real path to success relies so much on tons of unpaid open source community contributions.
by bugglebeetle | 2025-05-09 06:51:24+00:00
Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at coding than Claude, it’s just not as good at acting agentically, nor does Google have good tooling to support this use case. Given how quickly they’ve come from far behind and their advantage on context size (Claude’s biggest weakness), this could change just as fast, although I’m skeptical they can deliver a good end user dev tool.
Show HN: I Built an MCP Server for Reddit
by Arindam1729 | 2025-05-09 06:52:36+00:00
Hey folks ,

I recently built something cool that I think many of you might find useful: an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for Reddit, and it’s fully open source!

If you’ve never heard of MCP before, it’s a protocol that lets MCP Clients (like Claude, Cursor, or even your custom agents) interact directly with external services.

Here’s what you can do with it: - Get detailed user profiles. - Fetch + analyze top posts from any subreddit - View subreddit health, growth, and trending metrics - Create strategic posts with optimal timing suggestions - Reply to posts/comments.

Repo link: https://github.com/Arindam200/reddit-mcp

I made a video walking through how to set it up and use it with Claude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY7Stp6peMI

The project is open source, so feel free to clone, use, or contribute!

Would love to have your feedback!
by Kholin | 2025-05-09 06:52:46+00:00
That's a great idea, but I tried the official website, and it seems everything is rendered using Canvas. This means you can't select or copy text, use the browser's text translation feature, open links with a middle-click, or use the Tab key to switch focus between page elements. These behaviors feel quite out of place in a browser. However, it might be a good idea for developing game interfaces, as games don't need to worry about such browser compatibility issues.
by frank20022 | 2025-05-09 06:53:07+00:00
Good idea, what a can of worms this seems.

Can model providers be trusted to not be paid by advertisers? Can brands effectively influence how models react to them and their competitors?

I deff imagine brands flooding the internet with llm.txt files linked to their home pages but hidden from human visitors just to boost themselves up... what is the antidote?

Can attempts to influence LLM's be detected and reported?
by Daviey | 2025-05-09 06:55:54+00:00
Doesn't per-call pricing reduce your usage? When I see the price of a session go to >$3, for a handful of interactions I self-limit my usage.

I'd love to have an all-you-can-eat, but $100 p/m isn't compelling enough compared to copy/paste for $20 p/m via chat.

That's not to say the value doesn't exceed $100, I just don't want to pay it.
by dmurray | 2025-05-09 06:56:07+00:00
Predicting things like that is exactly the job of insurers and reinsurers. They're very good at it and it actually becomes easier at scale.

How many houses will be made uninhabitable by subsidence in the US in the next 5 years? I predict more than 100 and fewer than one million. There, that's a prediction. A team of actuaries armed with historic data could massively improve it.

This is much easier than the same kind of prediction for earthquakes or hurricanes, which have tail risk of unlikely but devastating events. If insurers don't want to cover this kind of risk, it's either because it's too small to be worth spending time on, or so predictable that it's not worth spreading the risk (better to just condemn the handful of houses built on top of known mines and move on).
by hobofan | 2025-05-09 06:56:21+00:00
I think that puts it into an entirely different category. SOCKS proxies are great, as they don't require you to try and bend all domain names the correct way. In a typical intranet or proxied container cluster setup, you quickly end up hitting some application logic that e.g. returns back an absolute URL (breaking your manual usage of lvh.me), or uses non-default HTTP ports, or one of many other ways that break if you try to use a lvh.me-like setup or remapping DNS entries to localhost.
by kilimounjaro | 2025-05-09 06:56:47+00:00
Doesn’t seem to add much to just converting a 3d model into voxels and therefore bricks.

Using bricks other than 2x2 and 2x4 blocks creatively to make interesting things is really important, i’m not sure what type if algorithm would best auto generate beautiful MOCs however? Was thinking of doing a $50000 kaggle comp for this, what do others think?
by roenxi | 2025-05-09 06:57:08+00:00
The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else. Allowing dissent and maybe even adjusting to it generally leads to better results in the long term.

I was mulling on my commute today as I dodged several homeless people. I can't speak to the US experience, but in Australia if I'd offered those people jobs at the wages and conditions of Chinese workers in the 90s, with the expectation of achieving the same civilisation progress as China ... I would expect to be fined and told off. If I persisted in running a business that way, eventually I'd probably be arrested.

Quashing dissent is illegal in the West, but that isn't the thing that needs to be changed to get industrial results. We need to legalise the industry part. Pollution has to be acceptable, mistakes decriminalised and it needs to be easy to employ people productively. All these Western countries are going a good way to banning mining, restricting cheap energy, blocking industrial processes as environmentally unsound and over-regulating how business is done. All on purpose and largely due to consensus opinions that too much industrial progress is bad for people. The result is much to most of the capital investment for the last few decades seeming to have happened in Asia where they were happy to let the world improve around them. It has nothing to do with division. If anything we don't have enough division, the people who want progress are hamstrung because they are forced to conform to the whims of timid environmentalists.

(and I endorse bcrosby95's reading of my comment).
by imoverclocked | 2025-05-09 06:59:00+00:00
If you think that's wild, just wait until you learn about 6to4 [1] (not to be confused with 6over4 [2] ...)

TL;DR: Given a globally unique IPv4 address, you can create automatic tunneling IPv6 networks with the IPv4 address embedded into the IPv6 address space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6over4
by aaravchen | 2025-05-09 06:59:17+00:00
The AI integration with their "Zeta AI" (a Zed product), is incredibly half-baked, and it screwed up/with their existing third-party AI integration.

You have to command-pallet to "assistant: show configuration" to setup almost any API or integration except the Zed "Zeta AI", and that configuration directly conflicts with the authentication needed for the Zed login. So you currently can't use a third-party authenticated AI engine and the Zed Collaboration features at the same time.

Once you've setup the third party AI configuration, you then have to open the settings.json and copy the "features" section from the default settings into it manually. Ignore the blog posts and docs from Zed, they're all wrong now that they've completely changed/broken everything with the "Zeta AI" release. In the copied "features" section of your settings.json, you have to set the value for the predictions to the name of your third party AI engine. Good luck guessing what the right string value is, the values for each engine aren't documented anywhere I can find.
by haberman | 2025-05-09 06:59:43+00:00
> To improve the stability of the resulting designs, we employ an efficient validity check and physics-aware rollback during autoregressive inference, which prunes infeasible token predictions using physics laws and assembly constraints.

I'm far from an AI expert, but I've long felt that this is one of the most interesting ways to use AI: to generate and optimize possibilities within a set of domain-specific constraints that are programmed manually.

For example, imagine an AI that is designed to optimize traffic light patterns. You want a hard constraint that no intersection gives a combination of green lights that could cause collisions. But within that set of constraints, which you could manually specify, the AI could go wild trying whatever ideas it can come up with.

At that point, the interesting work is deciding how to design the problem space and the set of constraints. In this case it's a set of lego bricks and how they can be built (and be stable).
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-09 07:00:01+00:00
> Most customers do want it this way, but Apple still allows to exchange comfort for privacy […] more than an empty promise, or what other vendors provide.

That’s pretty much exactly what all the other vendors in the market provide: insecure and spying by default.

I don’t really understand why Apple should somehow get good points for their stance on privacy when they are actually doing pretty much the same thing than everyone else.
by reincoder | 2025-05-09 07:00:09+00:00
I work for IPinfo. Thank you for raising a great point.

Integrations and maintenance were major issues when it came to users using the IP database. Usage of our IP database in software and platforms where data download facilities, maintainability (updating the database at regular intervals), and using an MMDB reader library were issues that were stopping us from universal adoption. For example, search/SIEM/threat intel platforms, distributed systems, firewall applications etc.

So, we just decided to launch an API to complement our data downloads. It is easier to use, and the unlimited requests make it a strong candidate.

We are rebuilding our backend in Rust and also developing a bulk enrichment API endpoint. The intention of the API system is to replicate the performance and features you get from a local database, with ease of use and minimal friction. Of course, the API is competing against the local database and will never be perfect, but I have to admit that using the IP database, particularly the binary database, and maintaining it is not as easy as using an API service.
by bkor | 2025-05-09 07:02:14+00:00
> So, I find that it's highly unlikely that the ISP is officially required to support a user supplied modem, although I haven't consulted the EU laws on this.

Ziggo (called UPC in other EU countries) uses DOCSIS. The instructions on how to use your own DOCSIS modem are at the following link (in Dutch): https://www.ziggo.nl/klantenservice/apparaten/wifi-modems/ei...

Edit: it really is using your own modem. It's not about putting it in bridge mode.
by kyrylo | 2025-05-09 07:02:37+00:00
Thanks, I’m looking forward to hearing from your team!

I plan to document what it takes to build a ONCE-style product. It'll probably be a blog post (or a few). If you're curious, feel free to stay in touch - links are in my bio.

The app doesn’t phone home, for the exact reasons you mentioned. I also don’t want it to feel like you’re locked in a cage. I’m trying to build something I’d genuinely love to use, and ONCE gets a lot of that right.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-09 07:03:27+00:00
Those are already an issue. AI is a bigger threat to cognitive tasks than to physical ones.

Skynet isn't goanna attack you with Terminators wielding a "phased plasma rifle in the 40W range", but will be auto-rejecting your job application, your health insurance claims, your credit score and brain washing your relatives on social media.
by skissane | 2025-05-09 07:03:37+00:00
I wouldn’t assume that just because Trump appoints someone to a commission, they and Trump see eye-to-eye about whatever.

Bishop Barron is pretty middle-of-the-road as far as US Catholic bishops go - he’s not much of a progressive, but nor is he a traditionalist or hardline conservative. On most issues on which Pope Francis and President Trump disagreed, Barron’s views and instincts are closer to the late Pope (who made him a bishop and then gave him a diocese) than to Trump’s
by claudex | 2025-05-09 07:04:03+00:00
>DSL tech is far simpler and it's always a combo unit so I could see a case where you would be allowed to bring your own DSL modem.

Not really, when you want to increase the bandwith, e.g. with vectoring[1], you need to have all neighbor modems to participate, which prevent free modem choice for the users.

>But it just doesn't work like that for DOCSIS or GPON where the cable modems or "ONT" router combo units these days do much more than just media conversion - SIP, PPPoE, IGMP, etc.

In Belgium, the ONT is just media conversion these days, SIP is done on the provider box, so you can have your own GPON SFP.

>so it's just not possible for the ISP to guarantee support for any random modem or ONT.

The ISP doesn't have to guarantee support to let you use your own hardware. It just have to give you the specs to use it and let you plug the ISP box if you can't configure vlan of dhcpv6 client.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#VDSL2_vectoring
by ghiculescu | 2025-05-09 07:07:12+00:00
Author here. We don't have (or want) any investors. I encourage PMs to code because it's good for the business. Otherwise I wouldn't do it.

I wrote about this years before we started doing AI-backed-coding: https://ghiculescu.substack.com/p/opening-the-codebase-up-to..., so some of the details are no longer correct, but the philosophy is the same.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-05-09 07:07:33+00:00
I've also been using this for a while now and it works great. My only complaint is that tools for cleaning up metadata are a bit clunky if you have a very large collection. You can basically go through every item one-by-one, or you can run an automatic script to check the whole collection. It would be great if you could define certain rules to require manual review, and incrementally run the tool to improve the tags whenever you have a bit of free time to clean up your collection.

But the ideal solution would be to have some way of generating fingerprints for each audiobook, and then build up a database which matches that fingerprint to the correct metadata. That way the work of organizing and tagging large collections could be crowdsourced; this is what other communities have done.

Maybe we're not too far off from AI-assisted tools that can just figure out how to properly tag a bunch of items correctly just by looking at the filename and existing metadata. Maybe even picking up on additional contextual clues by listening to a little bit of a chapter, to check if the title of the work is mentioned at the start.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-05-09 07:08:17+00:00
>> In a serious organization, non technical people should not be shipping any sort of code

Just as you want developers building domain knowledge for all the benefits it brings, you want a role like product owner to be developing their understanding of delivering software.

Sometimes the highest leverage thing to be done is making teams of people work better together. One aspect of achieving that can be better understanding of what each role does.
by _1tem | 2025-05-09 07:08:27+00:00
Claude Code is the first AI coding tool that actually worked for me on a small established Laravel codebase in production. It builds full stack features for me requiring only minor tweaks and guidance (and starting all over with new prompts). However, after a while I switched to Cursor Agent just because the IDE integration makes the workflow a little more convenient (especially the ability to roll back to previous checkpoints).
by zuluonezero | 2025-05-09 07:08:54+00:00
Good article and interesting technical description. Stays on the side of "proud developer keen to share details others would find interesting" and away from the "I made a game and here is my blog to advertise it". I do like hearing about Playdate development and wish I had one. There is lots of other Doom-like games out there with decent descriptions of the ray casting algorithm but the additional tweaks you made for the platform are fascinating.
by aaravchen | 2025-05-09 07:09:09+00:00
Honestly, that's why I've been using it too.

But it's painful some of the basic features that are missing. Like manually switching indentation settings on a file. Not supported by Zed at all, you have to write an entire editorconfig file for your project instead, or change your global settings.

I do really love how simple some of the GUI config options are though. Just a single value to hide the useless Collaboration panel and button. And having a default settings and default keymap file you can open to look at and copy from when modifying your own is so helpful, and makes it much easier to customize a key binding here or there from the defaults instead of the GUI-fied VSCode mess that you can't eve see what's been manually modified easily.
by gambiting | 2025-05-09 07:09:16+00:00
Pope John Paul II was a crucial figure in the fall of communism in Poland, even though he never opposed the state directly - just the fact that he was Polish and that the state couldn't censor his speeches and visits and demonstrated to the deeply religious nation that there is a path outside of the the one dictated by the state that is credited with a significant contribution to the forces that eventually led to the events of 1989.
by colechristensen | 2025-05-09 07:10:21+00:00
Here's the question: who cares about accreditation?

I'm not trying to be flippant, this is an actual question.

Sure, getting a higher degree at another institution will have that requirement, as would a professional certification (medicine, law, professional engineering), but those are relatively narrow scopes.

Isn't it true that in most cases nobody is going to care or even know enough to check accreditation?
by gond | 2025-05-09 07:10:29+00:00
Disregarding the downvotes, I mean this as a serious question.

From the liked article: “We don’t know an “algorithm” for this, and we can’t even begin to guess the required parameter budget or the training data needed.”

Why not, at least the external ones? The computational resources and the size of the training dataset is quantifiable from an input point of view. What gets used is not, but the input size should.
by fweimer | 2025-05-09 07:10:59+00:00
That's how mmap and mprotect work today. Sizes get rounded up to the next multiple of the page size. Many applications using mmap do not need to know about the page size.

I think it's even part of POSIX: “The system performs mapping operations over whole pages. Thus, while the parameter len need not meet a size or alignment constraint, the system shall include, in any mapping operation, any partial page specified by the address range starting at pa and continuing for len bytes.”