MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Productivity apps won't disappear, just the need to open them will
by haniehz | 2025-05-30 19:28:54+00:00
There’s a quiet but profound shift happening in how we interact with software. Agent frameworks like mcp-agent, Superblocks, and Lovable are starting to erode the need for traditional UI-based productivity tools—not by replacing them, but by automating around them.

Instead of opening Notion, Figma, or Asana to perform a task, developers are chaining agent workflows that handle it directly:

• Need a sprint plan? The agent assembles it using past tasks and meeting notes. • Need a report? The agent pulls data from Airtable and emails a summary. • Need a brainstorm canvas? The agent generates one from context.

These aren’t generic assistants. They’re agents that call tools directly (via APIs or Model Context Protocol), apply org-specific logic, and return structured outputs. No GUI. No tabs. Just outcome.

The architecture shift looks like this:

• Apps → backends • Agents → interface layer • Human input → intent, not navigation

In this model, tools like Notion become data stores. Figma becomes a renderer. Jira becomes a structured event log. The real “productivity platform” is an orchestrated mesh of tool calls, policies, and workflows—interfaced through a single prompt.

We’ve been here before. CLI > GUI > SaaS > API-first tooling. Now: API + LLM = agents. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s real—and accelerating.

The exciting part isn’t speed or efficiency (though both are improving). It’s that the cognitive load of learning and navigating software disappears. You no longer need to know how to use 10 tools, you just need to know what you want.

Feels like the early days of cloud. Invisible infrastructure, powered by intent.

Would be curious how others are using agents in production or where this abstraction breaks down.

https://x.com/zahiremami/status/1928527937705226368
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-05-30 19:29:09+00:00
> using AVX512 instructions _at all_

This isn't correct. AVX512 provides both a bunch of extra instructions, zmm (512 bit) registers, and an extra 16 (for a total of 32) vector registers. The donwnclocking only happens if you use 512 bit registers (not just avx512 instructions). The difference here matters a bunch since there are a bunch of really useful instructions (e.g. 64 bit integer multiply) that are added by avx512 that are pure upside.

Also none of this is an issue on Zen4 or Zen5 since they use much more sensible downlclocking where it will only downclock if you've used enough instructions in a row for it to start spiking power/temp.
by RodgerTheGreat | 2025-05-30 19:29:25+00:00
Many practical applications of eval() boil down to accessing (and perhaps manipulating) scopes in a manner which the host language does not normally allow. Likewise, many potential dangers or pitfalls of eval() relate to how it allows (or does not allow) dynamically-assembled code to inherit access to some spatial or temporal scope of variables, definitions, "unsafe" libraries, and so forth. The interaction of eval() with scope is much a much more interesting design question than whether it accepts an AST, a string, or something in-between, except to the extent that non-stringy "programs" represent some form of reified closure.
by Veserv | 2025-05-30 19:29:40+00:00
Assuming it did not disengage prior to hitting the pedestrian, no.

If the pedestrian is on the ground near the car after the collision, it is very likely it will no longer be able to see the pedestrian and will drive over them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrV_whh4Z84&t=384s

Seen from the frontal angle clearly demonstrating it drives over the fallen child:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrV_whh4Z84&t=410s
by Maxatar | 2025-05-30 19:29:43+00:00
Terminology isn't the most important detail here and there's no real point dwelling on it, what's important are the actual fundamental concepts at play.

An oracle for the halting problem can not be used to prove or disprove the Continuum Hypothesis within ZFC. No amount of bickering over terminology can change that fact. You can claim that such an oracle can be used to show that the Continuum Hypothesis is independent of ZFC and that's true and something I explicitly pointed out in my reply to you, but that's not a general theorem prover at that point, that's a theorem classifier for a specific formal theory (namely ZFC).

ZFC is not the end-all be-all of first order logic and it's certainly not even a particularly good choice of formal model for dealing with Turing Machines. Your halting oracle will not be able to do the same kind of theorem classification for other formal theories, namely those that do not have a recursively enumerable set of axioms. The most obvious example of such theories are second order theories, but even if you restrict yourself to first order theories, you have examples of such theories like True Arithmetic where your halting oracle won't be able to classify propositions since even though it's a first order theory proofs can't be enumerated in the same way that proofs can be enumerated in ZFC (or other first order theories with recursively enumerable axioms):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_arithmetic

In general if the basis of your argument depends on nitpicking terminology, then that's a good sign you might not actually understand the fundamental concepts at play and are instead just regurgitating terms that you've heard from other people which is what I suspect you're doing here.
by macintosh-hd | 2025-05-30 19:30:51+00:00
You had a long back and forth with someone else in this post where you defended obvious dishonesty on the part of this group. They presented footage where FSD literally was not engaged in an ad showing its flaws, and it doesn’t matter if the driver signed paperwork or they had other footage where it allegedly was enabled and in total working order. Dan’s credibility was done when he didn’t backtrack and try again right there.

That is brazen dishonesty, and the fact that you will not admit that means you’re a waste of time. If you feel so strongly about it, maybe you should try to replicate the results so it can come from someone who has even a shred of trustworthiness.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-30 19:31:17+00:00
I'm sure the treasury department would love for the guy to appear in front of a judge.

However, he's also welcome to email an appeal [1].

Note: This is a civil penalty. Much like a traffic ticket and does not require a judge.

---

You won't necessarily show up in front of a judge if you get arrested. You may get released with no charges. You might also not get court time until a year+ from now inwhich case you'll probably plead guilty to time served regardless of the crime since it lets you out now.

Due process does not mean "judge approved". It just means consistent with written law.

[1]: https://ofac.treasury.gov/specially-designated-nationals-lis...
by ryandrake | 2025-05-30 19:31:43+00:00
From a guy's point of view, initiating a conversation with a random woman anywhere, not just in the gym, is fraught with peril, and probably not worth it. The difference between "flirting" and "creepy" is entirely in the mind of the recipient, and if you initiate a conversation, you really have no control over how it's interpreted. The downside can be pretty bad if it's received poorly.

I'm exceedingly grateful I'm already married and don't have to put up with this minefield anymore!
by robomartin | 2025-05-30 19:32:05+00:00
Where are the components coming from? I would bet these are assembly plants, far more so than manufacturing facilities. Do they make the motors, wires, chips, circuit boards, metals and coatings, displays, connectors, etc.

It is easy to look at a factory and think "we build this" and then, once you look deeper, you realize that you might only make 30% of it.

There are things that are far more serious than these imbalances. Watching an economic forum presentation on this topic today I learned that China is extracting 600 billion dollars in intellectual property PER YEAR from the west (mostly the US).

In case you are interested, here's the livestream. The China conversation is the second panel, after Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase CEO).

https://www.reaganfoundation.org/events/2025-reagan-national...
by internetter | 2025-05-30 19:32:21+00:00
lol the healthcare industry was definitely in my mind as I wrote this. Never worked there but I read a lot of postmortems and it shows whenever I use their digital products. Recent example is CVS.

Somehow, at some point, they decided that my CVS pharmacy account should be linked to my Mom's extracare. Couldn't find any menu to fix it online. So the next time I went to the register I asked to update it. They read the linked phone number. It was mine. Ok, it is fixed, I think. But then the reciept prints out and it is my mom's Extracare card number. So the next time I press harder. I ask them to read me the card number they have linked from their screen. They read my card number. Ok, it is fixed, I think. But then the reciept prints out and the card number is different—it is my mom's. Then I know the system is incredibly fucked. Being an engineer, I think about how this could happen. I'm guessing there are a hundred database fields where the extracare number is stored, and only one is set to my mom's or something. I poke around the CVS website and find countless different portals made with clearly different frameworks and design practices. Then I know all of CVS's tech looks like this and a disaster is waiting to happen.

Goes like this for a lot of finance as well.

E.g. I can say with confidence that Equifax is still as scuffed as it was back in 2017 when it was hacked. That is a story for another time.

Nobody bothers to keep things clean until it is too late. The features you deliver give promotions, not the potential catastrophes you prevent. Humans have a tendency to be so short sighted, chasing endless earnings beats without anticipating future problems.
by appcypher | 2025-05-30 19:32:28+00:00
> can you share some thoughts on how you compare or future direction?

Microsandbox does not offer a cloud solution. It is self-hosted, designed to do what E2B does, to make it easier working with microVM-based sandboxes on your local machine whether that is Linux, macOS or Windows (planned) and to seamlessly transition to prod.

> Do you also use Firecracker under the hood?

It uses libkrun.
by vessenes | 2025-05-30 19:32:45+00:00
Because you have source imagery and colors (and therefore specular and reflective details) from different angles you can add a view angle and location based component to the material/color function; so the material is not just f(point in 3d space) it’s f(pt, view loc, view direction). That’s made differentiable and so you get viewpoint dependent colors for ‘free’.
by throwaway7783 | 2025-05-30 19:33:21+00:00
I'm biased, but this is yet another thing my team has to build and maintain now.

I am not in the business of building and maintaining integrations, but trying to derive and surface signals that are useful to my business, from all the data (often crappy data) that's generated. Even just dumping data in a database is not sufficient, because it's not clean, not unified with other data, highly duplicative in many cases and so on.

I'm glad these options exist though, for teams that thrive on building everything themselves.
by cjs_ac | 2025-05-30 19:33:54+00:00
Your comment suggests that you're not familiar with the diversity in M&S' operation.

Marks and Spencers started as a department store; they still have this operation. They sell clothes, beauty products, cookware, homeware and furniture. All these things are sold in physical shops and online. Most of this is straightforward for an e-commerce operation, but the furniture will involve separate warehousing and delivery systems.

They also offer financial services (bank accounts, credit cards and insurance). These are white labelled products, but they are closely linked to their loyalty programme (the Sparks card).

Finally, they have their food operation: M&S is also a high-end supermarket. You can't do your food shop on the M&S website (although their food products are available from online-only supermarket Ocado), but you can order some food products (sandwich platters and party food) and fresh flowers from the website.

So M&S is a mid-tier department store and a high-end supermarket. These are very different styles of retail operation: supermarkets require a lot of data processing to ensure the right things get to the right shops at the right time to ensure that food doesn't go to waste but also shoppers aren't annoyed by the unavailability of staples like bread and milk.

Finally, M&S is traditionally fairly strong in customer service; it's not exactly Harrod's or Fortnum and Mason's, but their bra-fitting service, for example, has a legendary reputation. The internet isn't their natural home.

So all-in-all, you have a business doing complicated things online because they think they have to, not because they want to: a pretty clear recipe for disaster.
by kfreds | 2025-05-30 19:34:26+00:00
Interesting. Try reaching out to Mullvad's support as well if you haven't done so already. If I'm not mistaken they conduct censorship circumvention experiments from time to time together with customers. I'm sure they'd also be interested to hear about any long-term resilient low-bandwidth channels you've found, such as the syncthing relay network. Those are very useful for bootstrapping and configuration updates.
by zingababba | 2025-05-30 19:34:39+00:00
Happened to me, took me three years to fully recover. After 2.5 years my blood test was FINALLY showing levels under the top of the range for B6 serum. At the worst I had full body muscle spasms that would go on 24/7, all the big and tiny muscles in my arms, face, legs. The worst however was I had esophageal spasms constantly which I confused for heart issues for the longest time. I completely lost feeling in my fingertips and toes. The list goes on.

In all though I had pretty much every symptom listed here: https://understandingb6toxicity.com/b6-toxicity/symptoms/

It's actually pretty crazy, I tested recently because I was curious and for the first time since I completely stopped B6 I took a 10mg dose and that evening my muscle spasms came back, my nervous system is so whacked out from this. This experience is what turned me off from supplements, it's horrible.
by bonzini | 2025-05-30 19:36:32+00:00
The "exponent = (p + 1) // 4" in the Google code is 2^1277. To raise a number to such a huge power, you square it 1277 times (and that is what the Python function does). That works because if the initial value is "x", each squaring doubles the number of "x"s, and at the end you have 2^1277 of them.
by nicwolff | 2025-05-30 19:37:09+00:00
Did no-one click through to the technical white paper?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374638786_Proof-of-...

"Proof-of-Work CAPTCHA with password cracking functionality"

The "work" is "to use the distributed power of webusers’ computers" to "obtain suspects’ passwords in order to access encrypted evidence" and "support law enforcement activities".

Funny how that isn't mentioned anywhere in the linked site.
Why is the Microsoft Store delivering downloads with different hashes?
by nilslindemann | 2025-05-30 19:37:21+00:00
I just noticed that the Microsoft Store delivers an EXE with a different hash sum, every time I download an installer from its Store.

For example, try downloading the Windows Calculator twice, you will see that the files have different hashes (It may be necessary to close the browser and delete all browsing data in-between):

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfhvn5

For example, I get these two hashes for the "same" installer downloaded there:

73D31DE1B708204FC97D77EFEC7C82EA9FEDF03F 6F3BC3056F30566D0E1A1F4E268976C64C847B5A

And here two different scans for the "same" installer.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/40a4da31580660001aa58030d725a295854617499ee56aae5fe1e7691d3a8ac0 https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/4923068471e240229ff7ba2d046b5246055d79ca24465f5307540e680781ad7e

Why is MS doing this? It seems this creates unnecessary work for Virus Checkers. It also seems to be a data protection issue.
by bjackman | 2025-05-30 19:37:42+00:00
You cannot build a secure container runtime (against malicious containers) because underlying it is the Linux kernel.

The only way to make Linux containers a meaningful sandbox is to drastically restrict the syscall API surface available to the sandboxee, which quickly reduces its value. It's no longer a "generic platform that you can throw any workload onto" but instead a bespoke thing that needs to be tuned and reconfigured for every usecase.

This is why you need virtualization. Until we have a properly hardened and memory safe OS, it's the only way. And if we do build such an OS it's unclear to me whether it will be faster than running MicroVMs on a Linux host.
by runako | 2025-05-30 19:38:27+00:00
> to focus on your specialization and outsource your non-core expertise

Most retailers will argue that connecting with their core customers and delivering delightful experiences to them is their core expertise.

More practically, it will be tension between things like "our marketing department wants X on the site for summer" and "Shopify is planning on launching X in January." It will be less of a resistance to using a third-party provider and more that the third-party provider imposes constraints on the mode of contact with customers. That's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of consumer-focused companies.
by kirandas_reload | 2025-05-30 19:38:30+00:00
Hey HN!

I built Reload to help AI companies offer pay-as-you-go pricing instead of locking users into monthly subscriptions.

For users, it’s a wallet that works across different AI tools. You don’t need to subscribe to each one. Just load credits, use what you need, and keep the rest. It supports microtransactions, so you only pay for what you actually use, even if it is just a single prompt.

For developers, you can add a “Pay with Reload” button using OAuth and start offering usage-based billing in your app. It takes just a few minutes to set up.

Would love any feedback on the product or the site, especially from people building AI tools or using multiple agents.
by tptacek | 2025-05-30 19:38:31+00:00
The issue, at least with multitenant workloads, isn't "container vulnerabilities" as such; it's that standard containers are premised on sharing a kernel, which makes every kernel LPE a potential container escape --- there's a long history of those bugs, and they're only rarely flagged as "container escapes"; it's just sort of understood that a kernel LPE is going to break containers.
by Barbing | 2025-05-30 19:38:35+00:00
Interesting, first link changed now:

"Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 are hosted by Anthropic PBC and Google Cloud Platform."

They also mention:

"GitHub has provider agreements in place to ensure data is not used for training."

They go on to elaborate. Perhaps this kind of offering instills confidence in some who might not trust model providers 1:1, but believe they will respect their contract with a large customer like Microsoft (GitHub).
by lavelganzu | 2025-05-30 19:38:51+00:00
Isn't this merely a technological change? "A few decades or a century ago", being location-specific was the only possible option for a social club. Now there are more options; location-specific options still exist, and location-agnostic options exist also.

You can totally pick a convenient cafe or pub and start hanging out there & inviting your existing friends. In time you'll start to recognize the other regulars, and you can make a point of chatting with them regularly (but not overstaying your welcome especially early on!), find out what they're interested in, offer & request small favors, crack jokes, eventually a bit of friendly competition, casual debate about mutual interests while intentionally trusting them enough to let them change your mind a little, etc -- all the things you'd normally do to build a social connection with another man. The upside and downside of a location-based approach is that it's a very weak filter. The other regulars may be people whom it's a real stretch to learn to connect with.

Location-agnostic social activities are typically focused on an activity or interest, e.g. people who want to hike, watch a movie, play a game or sport, do political activism, do community service, etc. So the social group comes with a filter attached that ensures you will have an easier time connecting with them. This is great! There are some downsides, too, but nothing serious.
by westurner | 2025-05-30 19:39:13+00:00
From https://e2b.dev/blog/firecracker-vs-qemu

> AWS built [Firecracker (which is built on KVM)] to power Lambda and Fargate [2], where they need to quickly spin up isolated environments for running customer code. Companies like E2B use Firecracker to run AI generated code securily in the cloud, while Fly.io uses it to run lightweight container-like VMs at the edge [4, 5].

"We replaced Firecracker with QEMU" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36666782

"Firecracker's Kernel Support Policy" describes compatible kernel configurations; https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

/? wasi microvm kernel [github] https://www.google.com/search?q=wasi+microvm+kernel+GitHub :

- "Mewz: Lightweight Execution Environment for WebAssembly with High Isolation and Portability using Unikernels" (2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01129 similar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:b3657VNcyJ0J:sc...
by __natty__ | 2025-05-30 19:39:17+00:00
I like the simplicity of this project. I created my own open-source, no tracking captcha using both proof-of-work and image puzzle challenges 4 years ago as a side project for my studies and my former employer's internal hackathon [0].

At the time, it was an idea based on spam prevention active systems. However, for the browser, there are many issues with such solutions—if you can solve it, then bots can too. It slows them down a little, but that's about it.

[0] https://github.com/pilotpirxie/devcaptcha
by libraryofbabel | 2025-05-30 19:40:02+00:00
Much of interest here if you’re into poetry and Seamus Heaney. It surprised me to learn that he taught at Berkeley in 1970, at the height of the counterculture. Funny to think of him shuffling through the hippies in his tweed jacket, gently disabusing the students in his poetry class of their belief that they’re the next Allen Ginsberg.

He also just comes across as a friendly and kind guy mostly contented with his life. Rather unusual in a writer!
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-30 19:40:25+00:00
Yeah, you can imagine the headline they'd put on that one.

And that's how the ratchet works. Go to any subreddit that talks about relationships, and every time there's a man versus woman scenario, unless it's very clear that the woman was in the wrong, nearly all the women will side with the woman. But half the men will also side with the woman, because they don't want to offend the women -- even anonymous women on the Internet who almost certainly will never sleep with them. The other half of the men get downvoted to oblivion, or they learn to keep certain opinions to themselves, and it ends up looking like everyone thinks women are always right.
by pegasus | 2025-05-30 19:40:49+00:00
Any test?? It's failing plenty of tests not of intelligence, but of... let's call it not-entirely-dumbness. Like counting letters in words. Frontier models (like Gemini 2.5 pro) are frequently producing answers where one sentence is directly contradicted by another sentence in the same response. Also check out the ARC suite of problems easily solved by most humans but difficult for LLMs.