MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mwigdahl | 2025-06-04 19:56:49+00:00
I think the main differentiator here is the local installability and customizability. They're clearly targeting orgs that can't or won't use the actual cutting edge agentic models on the market for security or other reasons. Those places are going to need/want to work with a full enterprise sales pipeline, do the security reviews, BAAs, etc.

"Contact Us" is a dealbreaker for a lot of orgs, but for the ones that are the real intended customers here it's not a huge impediment.
by ivraatiems | 2025-06-04 19:57:04+00:00
The key driver behind Yarvin's ideology seems to be arrogance, covering perceived self-weakness. I think that's what makes it appealing to so many Silicon Valley "nerd king" type figures, and also why it has the form it does.

Yarvin comes off - not just here, but through his writing and his work - as absolutely obsessed with proving himself and being smarter than everyone. He admits he has the gifted child need to prove yourself drive, but he doesn't seem to have invested time in figuring out how to move past it or use it productively.

You can completely discard Yarvin's ideology - or even agree with it - and still see this in the way he works. His company, Urbit (not the name of the company but the name of its "product") is a ham-handed, hyper-complex "re-imagining" of pretty much every wheel in computing, from the OS to networking to programming languages. It has effectively no useful user-facing features, but a whole lot of design philosophy and programming language design. It creates lots of problems while solving almost none, but it looks impressive.

...which is to say it maybe actually isn't all that far off from his ideological and political writing, in the end.
by threecheese | 2025-06-04 19:58:00+00:00
It appears that a Meta app is communicating with a Meta client library and shipping Meta-sourced cookies, which from a Cookie Consent perspective should apply only to the first party hosting the JavaScript and using the cookie, and from a Meta Ads client is still true. So the Bad Actor argument is that Meta is collecting this data widely for many first parties (Meta customers), but wouldn’t they have this anyway? If they aren’t allowing two First Parties to know about each others user data, then aren’t they aligning with legal frameworks?
by Retric | 2025-06-04 19:58:07+00:00
Everything has some level of harm, the issue here is comparing relative vs absolute harm. Pointing out a positive doesn’t invalidate other harms, but finding the net effect requires everything to be considered.

Also, there’s significant questions around porn and early sexual activity with evidence in both directions. Unsurprisingly, people be complicated.

Just as an example the “explosion” of access to internet porn would, if the often stated theory of significant impact be correct, presumably have had population level impacts on when people first had sex but 1997 to 2007 showed ~zero changes. “The proportion of high school students who were sexually active has remained steady since 1997” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3064497/

Obviously being a survey the data is suspect but it is still a meaningful datapoint here. Political arguments don’t need to consist with reality but science does.
by jchw | 2025-06-04 19:58:31+00:00
Disagree. We could argue what counts as "exceptions", the jargon goes places (e.g. CPU exceptions are nothing to do with "exception handling" for example.) I'd argue that in the modern day programming language exception handling is the type where you have structured control flow dedicated to just the exception handling. Go has stack unwinding with panic and recover, but those are just normal functions, there's no try, no catch, and no throw, and no equivalent to any of those. C also has setjmp/longjmp which can be used in similar ways, but I wouldn't call that exception handling either.

But I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that one, since there's little to be gained from a long debate about what jargon either does or should subjectively mean. Just trying to explain where I'm coming from.
by antisthenes | 2025-06-04 19:59:28+00:00
> Discussing things does not "legitimize" them. No one is required to read The New Yorker.

Well, good thing you put that in quotes, because you seem to be using some definition of the word legitimize that is only apparent to you and not the general public. Discussing things does legitimize them, because it allots them time that could have been used for something else.

> Probably the length of time he's held and promulgated them.

Many people hold views their entire lives, or at least decades. I don't see New Yorker or Wikipedia write articles about them.

> You should have to prove it's a bad thing. Not the other way around.

You understand what context means, or just trolling?
by dheera | 2025-06-04 19:59:44+00:00
I think the reason it looks fake is because they actually have the math wrong about how optics and apertures work, and they make some (really bad) approximations but from a product standpoint can please 80% of people.

I could probably make a better camera app with the correct aperture math, I wonder if people would pay for it or if mobile phone users just wouldn't be able to tell the difference and don't care.
by profmonocle | 2025-06-04 20:00:02+00:00
Assuming that RFC1918 addresses mean "local" network is wrong. It means "private". Many large enterprises use RFC1918 for private, internal web sites.

One internal site I spend hours a day using has a 10.x.x.x IP address. The servers for that site are on the other side of the country and are many network hops away. It's a big company, our corporate network is very very large.

A better definition of "local IP" would be whether the IP is in the same subnet as the client, i.e. look up the client's own IP and subnet mask and determine if a packet to a given IP would need to be routed through the default gateway.
by cyberax | 2025-06-04 20:00:28+00:00
And why is this bad? I also disagree with pro-lifers. Especially about research restrictions they want to impose on others. It can be argued that such a viewpoint is too radical and maximalistic.

But as long as they themselves just stay away from stem-cells derived products, then it's their own personal choice. I also have no problems with, for example, Jehovah Witnesses that refuse blood-derived products.

If they have an ethics code, they are welcome to follow it, as long as they don't try to impose it on others.

In this particular case, accommodating even a maximalistic vegan position was not a big deal (just use hemoglobin from plants), so why not do it?
by LorenPechtel | 2025-06-04 20:00:35+00:00
Fire Triangle!

Normally you can extinguish a fire by depriving it of any of the three things fire needs. But a battery that goes up it has both fuel and oxidizer and will actually tend to react with water by getting hotter. The only solution is either isolation or massive amounts of water or other coolant.

It's not the energy of the fire, it's the difficulty in actually extinguishing it. Think of those trick birthday candles that relight themselves.
by and0 | 2025-06-04 20:00:37+00:00
RE: that Neil O'Brien piece

Demographic collapse? Sure, huge issue. But why is this happening? Why did it start happening before the other issues?

A rap group being critical of Churchill at an official event? Not really an issue. I don't think that is why Britain is failing. And I'll need citations for why moral introspection is demoralizing rather than uplifting and enlightening for a culture. Or maybe suggest something that the youth should feel good about rather than browbeating them for not being thrilled at the state of things.

Immigration? Not an issue for the USA after the great depression, which also had a massive welfare state.

I agree that Britain is collapsing, but not for those reasons. What a stunning lack of imagination.

e: Also, are migrants really to blame for Britain selling off all of its state capacity for pennies on the dollar since the 80s? Did migrants vote to violently eject Britain from the European economy in 2015? Any mention of that? Or would that type self-reflection hurt the cultural morale?

Maybe Britain would be better off with people who are a little less integrated with those values.
by JackSlateur | 2025-06-04 20:00:38+00:00
First commit: Feb 27th 2025

commit 3b2ae809e9256d292079bb15ea9fe49439a0779c Author: Kenton Varda <kenton@cloudflare.com> Date: Thu Feb 27 17:04:12 2025 -0600

Have Claude write an OAuth provider implementation.
by duskwuff | 2025-06-04 20:01:24+00:00
> Can you define "local network"?

Sure - a destination is "local" if your machine has a route to that IP which isn't via a gateway.

If your network is large enough that it consists of multiple routed network segments, and you don't have any ACLs between those segments, then yeah, you won't be fully protected by this browser feature. But you aren't protected right now either, so nothing's getting worse, it's just not getting better for your specific use case.
by Supermancho | 2025-06-04 20:01:41+00:00
> I'm from Russia and out there we know what real fascism looks like, it isn't mean tweets or cutting government funding, it's direct oppression from speech, activism, etc.

Real fascism is no different than the current US Executive. The difference is the amount of power currently wielded.

> Here in the US and other western countries, a person can go their entire life without being exposed to what real fascism is and what real oppression is

The common case is that Americans don't recognize it because it's so incremental that the larger goals are a footnote in discussions around specific acts or outlive the constituents/promoters. This state of executive vs a compromised judicial has been in the works since before I was born.
by cempaka | 2025-06-04 20:01:49+00:00
"Countries" as such do not have interests, no. This is a line the ruling class puts out when it wants to obscure the fact that its own interests are always prioritized, often to the great detriment of the vast majority of the country.

One could perhaps say that "governments" have interests, and in that case the interests of a genuine socialist state and an authoritarian regime that's just pretending to be one are quite different.
by leblancfg | 2025-06-04 20:02:37+00:00
I hate the idea of MCP servers being their own OAuth providers and IMO I wouldn't use this. MCP servers just shouldn't have to handle OAuth user management. The only reason PostgreSQL is needed here is to store OAuth tokens for its users. It works though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The draft spec[1] – soon to be published AFAICT – flips this on its head and says "no, the MCP server is an OAuth2 protected resource, just go and talk to this authorization server and I'll accept its tokens". The MCP server doesn't need to handle anything related to auth. That's much saner, and would recommend people build towards _that_ particular future in mind.

But also broadly speaking: I strongly believe the mental model needs to move to MCP servers are URLs. It should just be extra endpoints and controllers on top of your app. I don't want to `npm install mcp-your-app` or go through someone else's implementation, I want to hit `https://your.app.com/mcp` directly.

I guess it's fine having the separate infra for an MCP server used to connect to 3p services... but fingers crossed, your 3p services starts exposing MCP endpoints directly.

edit: Add URL, fix words

1. https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/draft/basic/au...
by Someone | 2025-06-04 20:04:00+00:00
> from the outside results are still guaranteed to be available in order - e.g. the instruction stream appears to be executed in order when observing the CPU from the outside.

> […]

> On some CPUs it does get tricky once memory is involved though (on ARM, but not on x86).

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

“Among the commonly used architectures, x86-64 processors have the strongest memory order, but may still defer memory store instructions until after memory load instructions.”
by jacob019 | 2025-06-04 20:04:50+00:00
This is correct. We have seen this over the years in our ecommerce business. I suggest using threat levels, you are under attack so the threat level increases until they go away. When the threat level is high, you require an exact match AVS. You might have more agressive filtering at the IP level, real users generally won't be datacenter IPs. Pay attention to the ASN, sometimes you'll get an attack from a network that legit customers never use, so you can just block the whole network. Keep an eye on your logs, you'll notice patterns. The attack is likely coming from a single entity, if you make it difficult to abuse your service, then they will move on.
by find | 2025-06-04 20:05:06+00:00
Basic research has a lot in common with startups. The unicorn rate is <1%, the best new ideas sound like bad ideas, and nearly all value from the best ideas is locked in the long-term future. The ideal startup/scientific program failure rate is not 0%, and could be 95%.

The current research system has serious problems, but we need accurate criticism to build a better future. "YC is all wasteful spending; why doesn't YC just choose to only fund the hits?" is absurd, but somehow we allow this argument when discussing NSF/NIH/DOE/DARPA.
by abelanger | 2025-06-04 20:05:17+00:00
I'm a big fan of https://github.com/humanlayer/12-factor-agents because I think it gets at the heart of engineering these systems for usage in your app rather than a completely unconstrained demo or MCP-based solution.

In particular you can reduce most concerns around security and reliability when you treat your LLM call as a library method with structured output (Factor 4) and own your own control flow (Factor 8). There should never be a case where your agent is calling a tool with unconstrained input.
by happytoexplain | 2025-06-04 20:05:42+00:00
>literature has improved in depth and characterization as much as any other field.

It hasn't.

1. Many fields experiencing development over the past century or two are much newer than literature, which might as well be a synonym for thought. During that time, those newer fields were, or currently are, in their early rapid-growth phase.

2. Literature is deeply on the subjective side of "fields", so it's a lot easier to argue that it has changed, rather than that it has improved.
by archagon | 2025-06-04 20:09:00+00:00
On the subject of Yarvin, I really appreciate FrankWilhoit's take[1]:

> Yarvin is only another horribly damaged person, squealing in pain in a pseudointellectual vocabulary. He has neither knowledge nor insight, but a gift for miming these things. The questions are, first, how might we stop so many children from being psychically tortured so that their minds become piles of bloody shred like this, and then second, why does anybody take it at face value when, rarely, one of them learns to scream in sounds that mimic high discourse?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459055
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-06-04 20:09:05+00:00
> How would you add 0.(3) + 0.2 + 0.(142857)?

Well I don't suggest that adding 1/3, 1/5 and 1/7 isn't more precisely done by keeping them as fractions and multiply them out to get (35+21+15)/105=71/105. In this case it's relatively easy to get an idea of the resulting value but the next computation with other fractions could give me 83742/36476 as you say which is harder to judge without doing the division as well, so the price for doing fractions as non-decimal fractions is that in order to get the sum of three numbers I'll generally have to perform 2 multiplications (ab)c to find a common denominator, than do 2*3=6 different multiplications with three different numerators to get the normalized numerators, then do 2 additions to get the resulting numerator, and finally 1 division to get a normalized answer. That's a whopping 8 multiplications, two additions and 1 division for the sum of three numbers.

If I am given the fractions as above I could also do three divisions to get their decimal expansions, followed by 2 additions to get the decimal expansion of the normalized result; this result will be imprecise in the general case but it can be as precise as I want to.

If I am given the decimal expansions right away then I can do 3+2+1=6 immediately to get 0.6 as an approximate answer which is not bad given that the correct answer is more like 0.6761904... and all I did was looking at the figures. The slightly harder 33+20+14 is already much closer with it's result, 0.67. There's no denying the fact that many mathematical problems are better done with fractions than with decimals but when doing things like physical measurements, decimal expansions are IMO more practical.
by skybrian | 2025-06-04 20:09:35+00:00
While this will help to block many websites that have no business making local connections at all, it's still very coarse-grained.

Most websites that need this permission only need to access one local server. Granting them access to everything violates the principle of least privilege. Most users don't know what's running on localhost or on their local network, so they won't understand the risk.
by singleshot_ | 2025-06-04 20:09:49+00:00
Do you think can change the brakes on your own airplane? How many disposable nicotine vapes are legal for sale in the US? How far do you have to be from a road to camp in a national forest? What is the Jones Act? Can you shoot down a drone? Do you have to obey a flight attendant? What is a nickel made out of? What are the elements of a pre trip inspection for a tractor trailer? Etc., etc.
by throw4847285 | 2025-06-04 20:10:29+00:00
It's the 17th not 16th Century, but I can't help think about the War of the Three Kingdoms. Already by that point the notion of a Divine Right of Kings was dinged enough that they could lop the head off of Charles I. And then, less than 40 years later, Parliament could trade out their king for a foreign one whom they liked better.

It just goes to show that the idea of a stable hereditary monarchy wielding absolute power has never been the whole picture. Monarchism is a smokescreen, replacing the messy reality of democratic life with an illusion that has never held up to historical scrutiny.
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-04 20:10:37+00:00
The point GP made was that unless the fire starts in the battery, the battery is unlikely to catch fire. Thus when an EV catches fire, as opposed to starts a fire, in the EV burns about the same as an ICE.

They even note this in the Sola fire report[1], that the EVs did not contribute anything particular compared to regular ICEs to how the fire evolved.

They even say there is so much plastic and composites in modern cars, regardless of power source, that they output twice the heat compared to old cars made mostly of metal.

[1]: https://www.rogbr.no/Rapporter%20og%20utredninger/Evaluering... (page 24)
by trod1234 | 2025-06-04 20:10:47+00:00
In a perfect world with a fair market, yes they should consider entering and competing given they could probably do better. This isn't either.

One doesn't simply walk into mordor.

To enter this market, it requires that you first receive a national bank charter.

Post 2008 crisis, the laws have changed to eliminate competition from any new champion. There were many new requirements that can never be met over the long haul, and act as a ticking timebomb until it fails (through no fault of the person/group trying to start a bank.

At last read, the one that stuck out to me was it required a board of directors who could not receive payment or incentive related to the position, and where they would be personally liable for the majority of decision of the board.

No financial incentive, all the liability, and the decision is unmanageable in other people's hands. No one with a right mind will do that.

There's also the reasonability tests for success that need to be granted by the state or OCC as well. I hear these change all the time, and with the level of deficit spending these days and other fed shennanigan's its hard to find a reasonable person that will say any new contender will have a chance against a long-term state/fed fund/granted monopoly.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-06-04 20:11:12+00:00
This.

I believe all recreational drugs should either be legal or else available by prescription with the explicit statement in the law that addiction management is a valid reason for a prescription. None of the controlled substances hoops. And I think *renewing* maintenance meds should be within the realm of the pharmacist.

But I think all agents for which resistance is a factor should be doctor only.
by kccqzy | 2025-06-04 20:11:59+00:00
The split horizon DNS model mentioned in that article is to me insane. Your DNS responses should not change based on what network you are connected to. It breaks so many things. For one, caching breaks because DNS caching is simplistic and is only cached with a TTL: no way to tell your OS to associate a DNS cached response to a network.

I understand why some companies want this, but doing it on the DNS level is a massive hack.

If I were the decision maker I would break that use case. (Chrome probably wouldn't though.)
by dml2135 | 2025-06-04 20:12:28+00:00
This is a result of there being a general consensus that video game consoles are "a thing" that we are all used to, and that the loosely-coupled movements of right-to-repair and antitrust are not seeking to disrupt the video game industry for fear of distracting from their larger goals.

It's an uneasy balance and it will be interesting to see where it goes once the dust settles on the current antitrust actions against big tech. I can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?

(I'm saying this all as a right-to-repair and antitrust advocate, by the way)

I think a lot of this is a result of nostalgia, and a recognition that the business model of the video game industry has depended on this sort of control for a significantly longer than the personal computing industry. So no one really wants to kill Nintendo like they don't want to kill Mickey Mouse. Or, more cynically, no one really wants Nintendo and other video game behemoths to step into this fight on the other side, because going after Big Tech is hard enough as it is.
by eikenberry | 2025-06-04 20:13:06+00:00
Didn't have time to make it through the entire (long winded) article, but is it wrong to boil down his thinking to the simple idea that a benevolent, competent dictator is the best form of government? I ask as this seems like a very simplistic and obvious idea. The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? History has shown that we have never discovered a system that did this reliably and I didn't see any indication that he had solved this problem. How do you ensure you get a Sun King and not.. something else.