MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ptero | 2025-05-10 19:15:57+00:00
> Just because we’ve become accustomed to these breaches of our privacy doesn’t mean they are good.

100% this. The fact that the governments and corporations have enough information at their fingertips to identify people from chance photos is, IMO, not good.

However that genie is out of the bottle and there is no way to get it back in. Cameras are ubiquitous and one can get a decent quality fingerprint from store camera footage. Any time I do eye exam the doctor takes an eye scan and uploads it somewhere. Passport biometrics are becoming required and most countries will match it with a face scan on border crossing. And this is just a tip of the iceberg.

I would like to be wrong, but IMO the only solution to the government being able to track anyone they like (or, rather, do not like) is via legislation, not technology. And with various 3-letter agencies being routinely allowed special access "because security" this path is unlikely to be viable either. My 2c.
by jonhohle | 2025-05-10 19:16:23+00:00
His has been my experience as well. The changes from System Preferences to Settings have been an abomination. Previously we had uniquely designed layouts for each setting. Now everything is a list. Now menus scroll without any indication that there’s more content. “Sheets” are no longer resizable and take up the center of the view. User space networking (cool) hangs while pegging one CPU (lame). Everything requires special permissions and several times a month I’m having to figure out why a program can’t access something. Writing programs forces using Swift UI APIs that don’t have equivalent functionality to their App Kit versions.

After over 20 years, I’m really unhappy with macOS. The last five years have have been a huge productivity regression.
by quantadev | 2025-05-10 19:16:41+00:00
Just like I saw with protocols like ActivityPub and IPFS, what happens is the developers of these protocols do a couple of reference implementations in their favorite languages, which work, but then when they write the actual "spec" of what they think they did in the code, they never get it fully correct, or even if they do it's messy, incomplete, or not kept up to date.

So as long as you're a developer working in one of those two languages you just take their code and run it, and all is fine. However for someone coming along trying to implement the protocol in a brand new language, it gets discovered that the protocol is insufficient and horrible and attempts to build based on the protocol are therefore doomed to fail.

I'm not saying MCP has already reached this level of chaos, but I'm just saying this is the failure pattern that's fairly common.
by h2zizzle | 2025-05-10 19:16:57+00:00
Well, no. The countries that have done this have almost invariably done it within a 30-year timespan. Japan after WWII, China at the turn of the century, the Netherlands starting in the 70s. Even American cities like DC have made significant strides just since the Covid pandemic.

Reminder that the US auto industry would have collapsed during the GFC without a bailout. Balancing food industry profits against the healthcare costs carried by the poor and middle class in this country becuse of the lack of access to high-quality food produces a net negative bottom line, one of many deleterious dynamics inflating both personal and public debt. But if you hide all of that, you get to go back to your constituents and say that you're supporting manufacturing jobs and shareholder value for their retirement funds.

It's a choice between securing a few people's livelihoods and lifestyles, and securing the general well-being of a lot more people. We could change that choice, and we could do it very quickly, if we wanted to. But people would rather CICO tut-tut strangers on the internet.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-05-10 19:17:08+00:00
Biometrics are not a viable solution to the sybil problem.

The more biometric tech converges on the ability to get a cryptographic hash of one's body, the further it retreats from the kind of thing that a layperson will trust. You end up with a root of trust that <1% of the population can verify and then you end up asking 100% of them to rely on systems built on that root. You're never going to be able to convince even a majority of people that some clever hacker hasn't cracked an iris scanner and associated millions of fake ID's with millions of AI's for scam purposes.

It needs to be the kind of thing that lets Alice assert that this key goes with Bob just after she shook Bob's hand in meatspace. Something where, in order for Bob to have two identities according to Alice, he'll have to meet her in meatspace twice and manage to have her not notice that she's already met him once before. PGP key signing parties were pretty much there, they just came too early (and not enough work was done to teach the masses about them).

The web becomes more of a dark forest with each passing day. Eventually the cost of maintaining your part of the trust graph will be lower than the cost of getting screwed by some root of trust that you can't influence or verify. I'm sad to say that I think the point where these lines cross is significantly down and to the right of where we are.
by callc | 2025-05-10 19:17:20+00:00
I might not have explained my position adequately. I am not commenting on how Google became immensely successful, but just looking at it today in its current state.

It seems like the end result of unchecked capitalism is monopolistic practices. Companies want to make as much $$$ as possible. The most effective way to do that is to become a monopoly and avoid/destroy/inhibit any amount of competition as possible.

I really see it as an unstable system. Which is why we need society to put laws in place to keep the system in check, so it doesn’t turn sour.

Basically there’s a “healthiness” scale of capitalism. I want healthy capitalism.
by luckylion | 2025-05-10 19:18:57+00:00
Regarding allowlisting the other major crawlers: I've never seen any significant amount of traffic coming from anything but Google or Bing. There's the occasional click from one of the resellers (ecosia, brave search, duckduckgo etc), but that's about it. Yahoo? haven't seen them in ages, except in Japan. Baidu or Yandex? might be relevant if you're in their primary markets, but I've never seen them. Huawei's Petal Search? Apple Search? Nothing. Ahrefs & friends? No need to crawl _my_ website, even if I wanted to use them for competitor analysis.

So practically, there's very little value in allowing those. I usually don't bother blocking them, but if my content wasn't easy to cache, I probably would.
by punkpeye | 2025-05-10 19:20:30+00:00
I think that transport is a non-issue.

Whatever the transport evolves to, it is easy to create proxies that convert from one transport to another, e.g. https://github.com/punkpeye/mcp-proxy

As an example, every server that you see on Glama MCP registry today is hosted using stdio. However, the proxy makes them available over SSE, and could theoretically make them available over WS, 'streamable HTTP', etc

Glama is just one example of doing this, but I think that other registries/tools will emerge that will effectively make the transport the server chooses to implement irrelevant.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-10 19:21:10+00:00
> I actually think government should create liability limits for vehicles

This is effectively already a thing in most US insurance markets. TDI (Texas) requires $25k minimum coverage for property damage, so in general this is what everyone is going to have.

If your car is worth more than that and someone runs into you and totals it, you are ~fucked unless you have additional un[der]insured motorist coverage on your side. Suing someone for the difference is a 10/10 nightmare experience. Many people who are driving like ass also seem to have really bad financial situations. There is such a thing as being so poor that you are judgement proof.

The overall effect of this is that drivers of high value (i.e., luxury) vehicles typically take it upon themselves to ensure the safety of their property. They don't make it the problem of everyone else. If their Faberge egg of a lambo gets wrecked, they understand the other parties probably aren't going to be able to replace it. Certainly, follow through with everyone's insurer and wring every policy dry, but the rest is up to the presumably wealthy luxury vehicle owner.

If you are driving a luxury vehicle and cant handle the risk of an underinsured driver totaling it, you should question if you can actually afford the vehicle.
by moepstar | 2025-05-10 19:21:52+00:00
Overall, your argument is not wrong - however...

The cost comes from "Tesla approved body shops" - which have some sort of monopoly on doing body work.

That is, if you don't want to possibly have arguments with Tesla if something is wrong which they may try to attribute to the car being repaired in some back-alley kind of workshop...

To add, body shops apparently rather replace whole parts which could have straightened out by a skilled repair guy.. for much less, achieving the same thing and even keeping the original panels, welds etc...

Talking about repairability - i really have to give Tesla credit for making the whole of all maintenance manuals (same Tesla themselves have) available for free.
by klodolph | 2025-05-10 19:21:59+00:00
“Arbitrary prolog in Haskell’s type system” is overselling it.

There are a lot of GHC extensions out there, so maybe some combination of extensions can bring this statement closer to reality. But, as stated, it’s pretty far away. There’s an important common thread shared by Prolog and type certain systems, which is unification, but Prolog gives you a lot of tools to control what happens when you go forward and backward:

+---+ >---| |---> | | <---| |---< +---+

Prolog is, after all, Turing complete by design. I don’t know if Haskell’s type system is Turing complete with enough GHC extensions enabled, but if it is, then it’s by accident.
by timeinput | 2025-05-10 19:22:43+00:00
I reach for a similar pattern a lot with postgres as I'm building up a system. Start with a think about the fields I know I want, and create the tables with them, and then store all the metadata I have lying around in a json column, then in 2 months when I realize what fields I actually need populate them from json, and then make my API keep them up to date, or make a view, or what ever.

I've found it really helpful to avoid the growing pains that come with "just shove it all in mongo", or "just put it on the file system", but not much cost.
by yashvg | 2025-05-10 19:22:50+00:00
TL;DR: YC just filed an amicus brief in the Google-search antitrust case. They tell the judge that (1) Google’s default-search/pay-to-play deals crushed the “kill-zone” around search, keeping VCs away; and (2) the coming wave of AI-search/agentic tools will suffer the same fate unless the court imposes forward-looking remedies—open Google’s index, ban exclusive data+distribution deals, bar self-preferencing, add anti-circumvention teeth, and even spin off Android if Google backslides. YC frames this as the 2025 equivalent of the 1956 Bell Labs decree and the 2001 Microsoft decision: rip open the gate so the next Google can be born.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-05-10 19:23:49+00:00
This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great idea for small search engine companies to have the same search index as Google.

Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-10 19:23:51+00:00
Dealing with anything financial has been the norm for car manufacturers for many decades.

Germany's Volkswagen for example has its own insurance and banking arm. The bank got established in 1949, however I couldn't find out when they expanded in insurance.

Kinda makes sense - selling cars is a cut-throat business with ever tighter margins, the real money is to be made in financing/leasing, insurance and aftersales services.
by fifilura | 2025-05-10 19:24:10+00:00
Major Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter just ran a story that the insurance cost for a Tesla has almost doubled in a year. While others remained more or less stable.

(Quaterly cost, full insurance)

Tesla Model 3: 3 338 kronor (70,3 percent increase since Q1 2024)

Tesla Model Y: 4 007 kronor (97,3 percent increase)

Kia EV6: 938 kronor (-4,7 percent)

Volvo EX40: 1 097 kronor (-9,8 percent)

https://web.archive.org/web/20250510192608/https://www.dn.se...

They speculate the reason is that relatively few companies insure Teslas. Maybe because they have their own insurance company, or maybe because the leasing company take on the risk. I don't know how this works exactly.
by blub | 2025-05-10 19:24:22+00:00
One Stephan T. Lavavej is worth more than 1000 random github rustaceans, some of which will be bots, AIs, rank amateurs, bought or North Korean spies. Any of the libraries has one or more Stephans.

Having paid maintainers, code review, test suites, strict contribution guidelines, etc is state of the art for open source software that some transitive crate dependency can only dream to achieve.
by Talinx | 2025-05-10 19:24:33+00:00
Well, actually... The LTS kernel with longest support before 6.15 is 6.1. It will be supported until December 2027 [1] which is a few months over 20 years after the last 486 CPU [2].

[1] https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20061009060120/http://developer.... as linked in the Ars Technica article
by throwanem | 2025-05-10 19:24:46+00:00
> It's insane that these cars are designed in such a way that even minor fender benders cost tens of thousands to repair.

Twenty years ago I paid about $2000 - not inflation-adjusted, that figure - to put a new bumper on an Audi whose owner, looking back, no doubt had much better reason than I to leave our respective insurance companies out of the matter. At the time it was a shocking amount. These days, even the inflation-adjusted equivalent - nearly five grand! - seems like something a lot of car owners are happy, or at least willing, to swallow.
by V__ | 2025-05-10 19:24:51+00:00
> Automating the easy things is how you build the skills, mindset, and muscle-memory to automate the hard things.

I agree with the statement, yet I think it misses the point. Hyperbole: Pressing play on a mp3 robs you of the experience of learning to play all instruments yourself. They key question is whether automating is a task one wants to improve in at all.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-10 19:26:23+00:00
This is paranoid drivel....

Tell me which is more likely.

1. There is a cabal of companies painstakingly working together to make the most convoluted software possible from scratch so they can dominate the market.

or

2. A few people threw together a bit of code to attempt to get something working without any deep engineering or systematic view of what they were trying to accomplish, getting something to work well enough that it took off quickly in a time where everyone wants to have tool use on LLMs.

I've been on the internet a long time and number 2 is a common software paradigm on things that are 'somewhat' open and fast moving. Number 1 does happen but it either is started and kept close by a single company, or you have a Microsoft "embrace, extend, extinguish" which isn't going on here.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-10 19:26:28+00:00
> All that said, I think Tesla and the EV industry as a whole will need to do a lot to bring down their repair costs. It's insane that these cars are designed in such a way that even minor fender benders cost tens of thousands to repair. I actually think government should create liability limits for vehicles to incentivize car makers to make repairable cars.

That's fundamentally impossible. Just look at car crash ratings and automotive deaths over the last decades.

These old rigid steel frames were damn easy to repair - but were deathtraps for people inside and outside, not to mention Cw values more similar to a brick wall than a F1 car. The reason modern cars are so crash-safe is because literally everything is a crumple zone, absorbing kinetic energy. You can't just heat up and bend affected parts any more, you got to replace them.

And on top of that, requirements on lower fuel usage mean that parts have to be aerodynamically optimized and as lightweight as possible, which means plastics and composite materials, hollowed out shapes and god knows what else. That's making parts more expensive to manufacture and replace as well.
by giantrobot | 2025-05-10 19:27:22+00:00
The lack of inline context is a failing of JSON and a very useful feature of XML.

Two simple but useful examples would be inline markup to define a series of numbers as a date or telephone number or a particular phrase tagged as being a different language from the main document. Inline semantic tags would let LLMs better understand the context of those tokens. JSON can't really do that while it's a native aspect of XML.
by throwanem | 2025-05-10 19:27:29+00:00
I'm not saying I can't see sense in that level of integration, just that I can't think of another automaker offhand that does business in the US that way, underwriting auto insurance policies specifically through a wholly owned subsidiary.

Maybe I would know differently if I'd ever bought a car new off the lot, but I'm still driving the one I bought in 2019 and back then it still made sense to look at buying new as mostly a waste of money.
by marssaxman | 2025-05-10 19:27:44+00:00
His colleagues likely didn't find the dust cover noteworthy. Within contemporary American gun culture, it would seem like a minor bit of braggadocio akin to a "Protected by Smith & Wesson" sticker or a "Warning: We Don't Dial 911" placard; tacky and unprofessional, but not something to take seriously. There's a whole little industry around AR-15 customization, offering thousands of options for engraved dust covers with all kinds of symbols and messages:

https://midstatefirearms.com/product/engraved-dust-cover-eje...

https://mcsgearup.com/ar-15-ejection-port-dust-cover-engravi...

https://www.wingtactical.com/firearm-parts/ar-15/upper-recei...

https://cordedarms.com/ExoticCovers1
by zbentley | 2025-05-10 19:27:49+00:00
I mean…the cloud message queues that use HTTP are not good examples of quality software. They all end up being mediocre to poor on every axis: they’re not generalizable enough to be high quality low level components in complex data routing (e.g. SQS’s design basically precludes rapid redelivery on client failure, and is resistant to heterogenous workloads by requiring an up-front redelivery/deadletter timeout); simultaneously, HTTP’s statelessness at the client makes extremely basic use cases flaky since e.g. consumer acknowledgment/“pop” failures are hard to differentiate as server-side issues, incorrect client behavior, or conceptual partitions in the consume transaction network link…”conceptual” because that connection doesn’t actually exist, leading to all these problems. Transactionality between stream operations, too, is either a hell-no or a hella-slow (requiring all the hoop-jumping mentioned in TFA for clients’ operations to find the server session that “owns” the transaction’s pseudo connection) if built on top of HTTP.

In other words, you can’t emulate a stateful connection on top of stateless RPC—well, you can, but nobody does because it’d be slow and require complicated clients. Instead, they staple a few headers on top of RPC and assert that it’s just as good as a socket. Dear reader: it is not.

This isn’t an endorsement of AMQP 0.9 and the like or anything. The true messaging/streaming protocols have plenty of their own issues. But at least they don’t build on a completely self-sabotaged foundation.

Like, I get it. HTTP is popular and a lot of client ecosystems balk at more complex protocols. But in the case of stateful duplex communication (of which queueing is a subset), you don’t save on complexity by building on HTTP. You just move the complexity into the reliability domain rather than the implementation domain.
by benzible | 2025-05-10 19:28:11+00:00
Yes, but Grover Norquist thought the path was tax cuts → Congressionally mandated spending cuts → worse government. Trump/2025/DOGE's big innovation has been skipping the first step and simply ignoring Congress' "power of the purse" and unilaterally (and illegally) withholding spending as they see fit [1]

The US constitutional system was always built on "norms," good faith, and an assumption that even personally corrupt actors in power won't act to burn the whole system down, or will fear the consequences of the rule of law. It's always been the case that Congress and the Supreme Court don't have cops or soldiers at their command, so the enforcement powers of 2 out of 3 branches of the federal government rely to some extent on fears that the system will find some way to dole out consequences, or a good faith belief in the rule of law. Even Nixon resigned once the Supreme Court ruled that he had to release the tapes.

However, the Supreme Court has essentially ruled that a president (at least, a Republican president) is immune from personal consequences for everything, so at this point an authoritarian-minded president can behave as a king. Congressional Republicans would likely prefer not to cede their power but more than that, they don't want to cross Trump for fear of being defeated in a primary by a Trump-backed challenger. The appeal of a job that at this point almost exclusively consists of debasing oneself is beyond me.

[1] A great primer on exactly why this illegal withholding of congressional spending is unconstitutional can be found in Senator Murphy's confrontation with DHS Secretary Noem earlier this week. Murphy documents how the department is illegally impounding funds, violating Supreme Court orders, and ignoring statutory requirements - creating precisely the constitutional crisis predicted when an administration decides it can simply disregard Congress's power of the purse: https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy...
by dang | 2025-05-10 19:28:31+00:00
Discussed a bit at the time:

The Deathbed Fallacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112241 - May 2018 (3 comments)

The background to this has been discussed here over the years:

Regrets of the Dying (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30593302 - March 2022 (142 comments)

The Top of My Todo List (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238124 - Aug 2021 (18 comments)

The Top Of My Todo List - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872613 - April 2012 (185 comments)

Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646379 - Feb 2012 (4 comments)

Top Five Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331535 - Dec 2011 (1 comment)

Top 5 Regrets People Make on their Deathbed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615886 - June 2011 (51 comments)

Regrets of the Dying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239 - Aug 2010 (90 comments)

If anyone finds links to other related discussions, please let me know and I'll add them!