MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2025-05-10 21:01:59+00:00
I think a key reason they missed mobile is that it was during Intel's peak dominance and growth. Mobile was smaller, less powerful chips at lower prices and lower margins than Intel's flagship CPUs in that era. The founders who built the company were gone and Intel was a conglomerate run by people hired/promoted for managing existing product/category growth not discovering and homesteading new categories. They managed the conglomerate with a portfolio approach of assessing new opportunities on things Wall Street analysts focus on: margins, total revenue, projected market size and meta-metrics like 'return on capital'.

It's classic Christiansen "Innovator's Dilemma" disruption. Market leading incumbents run by business managers won't assess emerging unproven new opportunities as being worth serious sustained investment compared to the existing categories they're currently dominating.
by monster_truck | 2025-05-10 21:02:11+00:00
I'm just not sure I understand what point they're trying to make.

Honestly, 6500 households of water a day is nothing. Individual cities often write more than this off in a day when rain overwhelms their watershed systems.

Even with perfect watershed recovery our ability to treat, utilize, and transport it back without losses is a far bigger concern. The average age of pipes in the US is approaching 50 years old. I've seen reports project the US will need to invest nearly 1T in the next 15 years to sustain the current system and rate of growth.

Hell, there was a 54 inch water main break in Detroit this winter that flooded ~120 homes. A conservative estimate for a pipe of that size leaking all of its water for 5-6 hours is 20-25,000,000 gallons of water. We're going to be seeing a lot more of that.

Another thing I see overlooked constantly is that many of these DCs are augmented with their own filtration systems which allow them to primarily consume greywater for a net gain.
Top Greatest Movie Soundtracks
by WalterBright | 2025-05-10 21:03:33+00:00
In no particular order:

1. The Blue Max

2. Ben Hur

3. The Lord of the Rings

4. The Planet of the Apes (1968)

5. A Fistfull of Dollars / For A Few Dollars More

6. Born Free

7. The Sound of Music

8. Jesus Christ Superstar

9. South Pacific

10. The Wizard of Oz

The music often makes the movie.

I only listed original scores, not existing music.
by dend | 2025-05-10 21:03:47+00:00
For local servers this doesn't matter as much. For remote servers - you won't really have any serious MCP servers without auth, and you want to have some level setting done between client and servers. OAuth 2.1 is a good middle ground.

That's also where, with the new spec, you don't actually need to implement anything from scratch. Server issues a 401 with WWW-Authenticate, pointing to metadata for authorization server locations. Client takes that and does discovery, followed by OAuth flow (clients can use many libraries for that). You don't need to implement your own OAuth server.
by tuyguntn | 2025-05-10 21:03:53+00:00
Because agents don't have a concept of accountability, even if they're capable enough to replace coordinator, we (humans) probably not going to let them do important things, we always want to have a final say, otherwise how do you know where it is going?

Imagine you are a trader and asked agents to build you a perfect trading system and they discuss every next buy/sell and take a call to execute the action.

How do you know in the long term you are making money? What if they decided to cheat on you and started buying stocks which will definitely crash in 1 month, while showing you a progress of profit by day trading other stocks. Would you just let them do what they're doing?
by yusina | 2025-05-10 21:04:02+00:00
Note that dietlibc is the project of a sole coder in the CCC sphere from Berlin (Fefe). His main objective was to learn how low level infra is implemented and started using it in some of his other projects after realizing that there is a lot of bloat he can skip with just implementing the bare essentials. Musl has a different set of objectives.
by fsh | 2025-05-10 21:04:35+00:00
The vast majority of people are paying separately for all kinds of stuff. I don't see a reason why software and digital services have to be different. In the early days, payment was difficult, but this has been long solved. I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition.

Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.
by immibis | 2025-05-10 21:06:11+00:00
No, it's all well-defined science. There's known mathematics for how the operations you do affect the probability distribution of the answer. The initial state can be prepared. It can't be measured after it's been prepared, because that would ruin it. But so what - that happens all the time in science. Your comment is like saying chemistry is a pseudoscience because if we put a pH indicator strip in before doing a certain reaction to prove it's an acid, the contamination by the indicator chemical stops the reaction from working.

We can simulate a quantum computer using a normal computer (in exponential time). Simulations of tiny quantum computers agree with the experiments using tiny quantum computers. We can also simulate less-tiny (but still pretty small because it takes exponential time) quantum computers. But we haven't built an actual one of those yet. It seems they're really hard to build But also no fundamental reason is known why it should be impossible to build one. Shouldn't it just be the same as a tiny one, but bigger? The tiny ones were hard enough to build, so maybe it's just really hard and we need better techniques.

Perhaps it will turn out to be a failed branch of science that leads to no practical applications, but it's certainly real science, studying real things and making testable predictions (which are true so far). I suppose your next objection will be that since we only have tiny quantum computers, non-tiny problems are pseudoscience, but that's like saying particle physics was pseudoscience before we built the Large Hadron Collider.

Recently 3Blue1Brown made a video attempting to explain Grover's algorithm, which is one of the main applications of quantum computing, that also covers basic ideas of quantum computing and some common misconceptions - have you seen it yet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQWpF2Gb-gU and followup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlsa9EBKDGI
by mondrian | 2025-05-10 21:06:28+00:00
Home building is interesting because I think a major blocker to monopoly-forming is the vastly heterogenous and complicated regulatory landscape, with building codes varying wildly from place to place. So you get a bunch of locally-specialized builders.

Regulation can increase concentration in a high corruption/cronyism environment — regulatory capture and regulatory moats. There is plenty of that happening.

In building, I think we have local-concentration, due to both regulatory heterogeneity and then local cronyism - Bob has decades of connections to the city and gets permits easily, whereas Bob’s competitor Steve is stuck in a loop of rejection due to a never ending list of pesky reasons.
by keybored | 2025-05-10 21:06:33+00:00
People are selling things that should be inalienable, ostensibly because they really need to. The most immediate, glaring problem is that they are poor. This can be answered:

> > Is it certain that impoverished people would weigh those potential consequences more heavily than being paid today?

The answer is: No, it is not certain. Why? Because they are poor.

Poor people have less agency. That’s just a fact. And they are being preyed upon by Altman. Making this about whether poor Filipinos are making an informed agreement with an AI bro is tone-deaf.
by andy99 | 2025-05-10 21:08:31+00:00
The failure modes from 2023 are identical to those today. I agree with the now deleted post that there has been essentially no progress. Benchmark scores (if you think they are a relevant proxy for anything) obviously have increased, but (for example) from 50% to 90% (probably less drastically), not the 99% to 99.999% you'd need for real assurance a widely used system won't make mistakes.

Like in 2023, everything is still a demo, there's nothing that could be considered reliable.
by itronitron | 2025-05-10 21:10:10+00:00
I think this is fairly recently normalized (although not the norm) in the US, the trajectory being facilitated by big box Costco stores where people buy their food in bulk for 'cost-savings' and then have an extra fridge or freezer, the next step being to buy a generator.

Many of my aunts and uncles grew up in Appalachia without indoor plumbing or electricity for most of their childhood. A cellar is more important than a generator, as the cellar doesn't require refueling and it also doubles as a shelter when there is a tornado warning.
by bradly | 2025-05-10 21:10:30+00:00
I appreciate your thoughtful replies. Sorry to have not expanded more before.

I think agree with you in spirit but maybe from a slightly different perspective. I see people divided between whether they spend the time they have control over consuming vs creating (content, art, whatever) more-so than their “work” but work is a pretty loose term.

I enjoy working on things. I enjoy pulling the weeds in my garden and I enjoy the sanding of my woodworking pieces. There is no morality in those individual tasks to me and I like a nice healthy garden and beautiful furniture.

Also, I’ve yet to have a salaried job where I wanted less three day weekends.

You are right that these topics are hard to talk about.
by jrockway | 2025-05-10 21:10:38+00:00
Yeah, this has always bothered me. I don't really know what the issue is. One possibility is that IT is a "cost center" and so by making it cost as little as possible, you are doing a good job of running the company.

I look at it more like a "productivity multiplier", where spending money wisely can make other departments more cost efficient beyond the cost you put into IT. I guess they don't teach that in business school, or everyone is already as productive as they can possibly be. Somehow I doubt it, though.
by ldubost | 2025-05-10 21:11:17+00:00
"Signal has sacrificed ease of use in favour of security by refusing to release a web app for some time.. they're doing pretty OK in terms of number of users. I think it's also fine to choose a different balance and favour ease of use more, but concessions to security based on your team's priorities should at least be acknowledged."

Again you mention Signal, a org bootstrapoed with a promise of 100m$ and way more funding than us. They have apps for iOS, Android, Linux, Mac, Windows. Are you realizing the comparison you do ?

You say our concessions to security should be acknowledged. Check our white paper.. We do mention code hacking on the server. When did we say we protect you from your computer setup ?

You want us to warn users about links more visibly. Fine, make reasonable proposals ?

You want us to make desktop apps.. We want that too.. We tell you it does not fully solve the issues you mention.

You want us to drop web apps like Signal who does not do that. We tell you this would kill CryptPad.

Yes the way you overstate the issue instead of telling activist to run their own servers, with a browser they control on an OS they control, is indeed hurting. You mention users are not knowledgeable. This FUD reduces the trust in our work. Sure I understand you are trying awareness.. Which for us ends up being social pressure.

Open Source is simple.. Don't complain, code... Contribute...

Ludovic
by r0m4n0 | 2025-05-10 21:12:08+00:00
More talent with less demand means lower wages and/or worse benefits. My situation at Google can’t be matched at Amazon or Meta (remote work, pay, WLB, other benefits). I’d have to compromise if the climate changes but not much will make me leave… ever. I have a friend that has been trying to get me to join a startup for years and the risk just isn’t worth the reward
by bqmjjx0kac | 2025-05-10 21:12:30+00:00
C looks friendly enough, but it has many nooks and crannies filled with undefined behavior (UB). If your program accidentally does something like overflow a signed integer, you're toast.

Raymond Chen has the best write up on UB that I've seen: <https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140627-00/?p=63...>.

In addition to the "obvious" undefined behavior, strict aliasing is subtle and poorly understood in my experience. Consider the following:

Foo ReadFooFromBytes(const char* data, size_t len) { Foo foo; assert(len == sizeof(Foo)); foo = *(const Foo*)(data); return foo; } Foo ConvertToFoo(Bar bar) { return ReadFromBytes((const char*)&bar, sizeof(bar)); }

The `ReadFooFromBytes()` function could exhibit undefined behavior, depending on the provenance of its pointer parameter.

If you gave it a pointer to a true array of chars, it's fine. If you use `ConvertToFoo()`, big bada boom. Truly baffling stuff, the first time you encounter it.
by hu3 | 2025-05-10 21:12:55+00:00
Please stare at your own links for a second.

Let me help you:

https://github.com/orgs/appleopen/repositories?q=sort%3Astar...

Their most popular repo in that entire account has 8 stars.

I have multiple personal repos with more usage than that.

As for the other link. More than half of those projects are Apple specific.
by ItsHarper | 2025-05-10 21:13:19+00:00
I'm not the person you responded to, but In my experience most people who choose the label of "atheist" have spent time looking into religion. The nonreligious people who haven't are much more likely to just describe themselves as non-religious.

As an atheist, the only time or two I've felt an urge to pray has been when I've felt very alone, and missed the comfort that came from praying and believing that someone with real power was listening. If that's what you believe, of course that's going to feel comforting (plus it provides opportunity for mindfulness and reflection).

Both fortunately and unfortunately, Christianity (which you did not mention, but your language is consistent with) did not hold up to scrutiny for me, so that full level of comfort isn't there, but thankfully many of the benefits can be found in meditation.
by dismalaf | 2025-05-10 21:13:45+00:00
Not sure a VC firm with a vested interest in Google failing should be allowed to have an opinion here...

I always thought the point of the government breaking up monopolies was to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, not simply to punish companies for being too successful.

If we want to talk about what's best for the economy and startups, there's a bunch of large companies that could be broken up for the benefit of society, but not sure that's entirely fair either.
by keybored | 2025-05-10 21:14:28+00:00
> True, but does that mean the solution is to force the starvation because their choice to alleviate it was insufficiently willing for our tastes? At least they’ll starve with two kidneys, and we hope the would-be kidney recipient can get by on dialysis a while longer?

That’s not what anyone who objects to this thinks and you know it. Anyone who objects to people selling away something dear because they are poor want (1) those people to not be poor and (2) those other people to not prey on them. People are outraged when people are forced to drink dirty water—they are not outraged at desperate people for drinking dirty rainwater.

It’s a false choice.

> By all means let’s engineer a world where people are never faced with crappy choices. But people are living in the present, not the glorious future: Taking away the choice in this case doesn’t seem to fix the situation, and deprives people of a benefit they’d accept if you let them choose.

I’m Sam Altman and I approve this message.
by jonas21 | 2025-05-10 21:14:41+00:00
It's great... except that it turns out to be a performance pitfall if the state needs to be frequently updated. The React Three Fiber docs mention this here:

https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/advanced/pitfalls#avoid-setstate-in...

To fix this, they suggest using useRef and manually updating the object. But then your code ends up just as complicated, if not more so, than if you had just stuck with vanilla three.js.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-05-10 21:15:01+00:00
This is a very important article but not one that applies to what the person is saying. They're not suggesting hardcoding knowledge into the system (i.e. through a predefined prolog program) but by having the LLM learn to use it as a tool, same as how an LLM will write and run Python instead of guessing the output of a program.

I don't think Prolog is the right tool for this, actually for the very reason stated in the Bitter Lesson (effective Prolog use requires imperative constructs like cuts).

It makes much more sense to have the LLM learn how to use a constraint solver or (automated) theorem prover which have really powerful search algorithms (the search part of the bitter lesson), same as how humans use them.
by Keyframe | 2025-05-10 21:15:06+00:00
now, I have a full SNES collection (without boxes since cardboard is hard to keep up), almost full N64 collection, and on my way to complete Mega Drive and Master System (with boxes) and probably more than halfway through NES games.. bunch of amigas, commodores, spectrums, SGIs, monitors, some exotics like Sam Coupe, Tatung Einstein, Schneider CPCs, etc. but this is on another level.

Future collectors beware though, even though I collected a whole bunch as you can see, at the end of the day I still play either on Analogue's with Everdrive or original machines (RGB of course) with Everdrives. Sometimes even, yes, emulators. If anything, I'd honestly donate to a digital archive and emulator development. Only thing right now that really can't be emulated are CRTs - but I am honestly convinced we're soon close enough if not already 98% there with great 4k OLEDs (like sony A95L series) and some pre-processing. I can tell by the pixels when I'm looking at both A95L and BVM20 and/or B&O TV which I also have, to my wife's disapproval.
by aurizon | 2025-05-10 21:15:30+00:00
They wasted the $$ that could have saved Intel by buying market shares back to the treasury to appease hedge fund managers and accountants to increase the share price/yield - a true 'bonfire of the Vanities', not to mention the 'Shitanium' = born dead all tries at resuscitation failed. That one also almost killed HP - it limps along - a broken thing
by byjy | 2025-05-10 21:16:24+00:00
DateTimeFormats is a Java library that lets you parse datetime strings by example — no need to remember pattern strings like "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS zzz".

Parsing example string: "Tue, 2024-03-19 15:00:00 America/New_York"

→ inferred pattern: "E, yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss VV"

Supports LocalDate, OffsetDateTime, ZonedDateTime, and Instant.

Ambiguity is deliberately rejected: "10/30/2025" is accepted, "01/02/2025" (ambiguous) is not.

Use parseToInstant(timeStr) or parseZonedDateTime(timeStr) for quick one-liner parsing.

For better performance in loops: use formatOf(...) once and reuse the formatter.

All inferred patterns are verified using DateTimeFormatter.parse() — no false positives. If it parses, it roundtrips.

Project: https://github.com/google/mug

Javadoc: https://google.github.io/mug/apidocs/com/google/mu/time/Date...

Feedback welcome — edge cases, weird formats, you name it.
by marcodiego | 2025-05-10 21:17:04+00:00
This and DRM and other restrictive anti-features like self destroying messages, un-recordable strings, unprintable files are all fully artificial restrictions. They make no sense when the source code is available since removing it is as simple as removing an if.

I payed for my device, it is mine, it is up to me to decide whatever I'll do with it. It is my right under the private ownership definition. The current situation on modern devices, especially smartphones, is ridiculous and a complete distortion of rights that are fundamental even for the roots of capitalism.

Users should organize and, at the least, avoid using such services even if it means to lose some convenience. Losing my freedom is not a fair price to pay for such conveniences.
by sunshine-o | 2025-05-10 21:17:21+00:00
> If you're just doing AI stuff or GPU compute, this board might actually be a decent option, all things considered.

Looking at the benchmark [0]

When I first saw the board I thought this might be the RPi of the "AI age" since it is IMHO the most affordable option with 64Gb of RAM.

But I am always cautious if we can really make the most of the so called "30 TOPS NPU"

- [0] https://github.com/geerlingguy/ollama-benchmark/issues/13
by brad0 | 2025-05-10 21:17:22+00:00
Showing my age here, but this reminds me of knex. You would get different models but you could make whatever you wanted out of the parts. It was a great creative toy back in the day.

I just took a look online and they’re still selling kits. I’m partial to the Ferris wheel.

https://www.basicfun.com/knex/
by mattw1810 | 2025-05-10 21:18:07+00:00
I think some of the advanced features around sampling from the calling LLM could theoretically benefit from a bidirectional stream.

In practice, nobody uses those parts of the protocol (it was overdesigned and hardly any clients support it). The key thing MCP brings right now is a standardized way to discover & invoke tools. This would’ve worked equally well as a plain HTTP-based protocol (certainly for a v1) and it’d have made it 10x easier to implement.
by buescher | 2025-05-10 21:18:08+00:00
The original NeXT computer was a gorgeously sexy machine but slow compared to competitive workstations and considered very expensive for what it was at the time. It also didn't have the software ecosystem of a less expensive loaded PC or loaded Mac II. It's easy to look back with hindsight and rose-tinted glasses, squint a little, and see a macOS machine but it wouldn't be that for many years.
by jrockway | 2025-05-10 21:18:27+00:00
I'm always a little embarrassed when I go to the doctor and tell them I'm a software engineer. I know your EMR system is terrible but if I had done it it would have been better. Sorry :(

(My primary care doctor's office was venture-funded at one point and they actually have a great system. But all my specialists are on MyChart and everything there is always a disaster. Doesn't even have a "preferred name" field, so it has to be noted on my records on a case by case basis and it's ... inconsistent.)
by Aurornis | 2025-05-10 21:18:43+00:00
I love all the comments imagining complex technical workarounds while skipping right over the obvious workaround of using a smartphone camera to take a picture of the screen (which was mentioned near the top of the article that everyone read, of course). Modern camera phones are wide angle enough that it’s not hard to grab a shot of the monitor out of frame.

> These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doing their jobs. The bad guys put way too much effort into espionage for this to work.

This is for preventing casual screenshots and reminding average office workers that meeting content is sensitive. It’s not an iron-clad tool for defeating dedicated espionage involving hidden pinhole cameras.

There have been similar arguments for ages about how if something isn’t iron-clad perfect protection then it’s pointless, but in the real world making something more difficult actually makes people think twice and stops most of the people who would casually do it.

See for example Snapchat’s screenshot notifications. It’s well known that there’s an elaborate way to circumvent it. However the fact that it takes a lot of work and there’s a risk of getting caught trying really hard to deceive the other party is enough to make most people not want to risk it.
by Seattle3503 | 2025-05-10 21:19:27+00:00
> This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".

AIs are using search indices more and more. Google has the largest, and there is risk of Google using its monopoly in search (in particular their index) to give themselves an unfair advantage in the nascent AI market.