MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by demosthanos | 2025-06-19 02:35:51+00:00
Yes, that's an interesting source that at least shows that our eyes can perceive things at those high frequencies, but I'm not sold that it generalizes.

The study actually demonstrates that perception of flicker for regular PWM does in fact trail off at about 65 Hz and is only perceptible when they create the high-frequency edge by alternating left/right instead of alternating the whole image at once.

It looks like the situation they're trying to recreate is techniques like frame rate control/temporal dithering [0], and since this article is now 10 years old, it's unclear if the "modern" displays that they're talking about are now obsolete or if they actually did become the displays that we're dealing with today. From what I can find OLED displays do not tend to use temporal dithering and neither do nicer LCDs: it looks like a trick employed by cheap LCDs to avoid cleaner methods of representing color.

It's an interesting study, but I don't think it redeems TFA, which isn't about the risks of temporal dithering but instead claims harms for PWM in the general case, which the study you linked shows is not perceived above 65 Hz without additional display trickery.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate_control
by AlienRobot | 2025-06-19 02:36:04+00:00
A problem is that you describe "access the internet," which is simply too low level for most real applications.

The permission should be "communicate with www.example.com" and if the app needs more than that, you come up with a different permission that is broader.

You want common use cases to have clear permissions so that users can make an informed decision when an app requires much broader access than other apps needed.
by squishington | 2025-06-19 02:36:22+00:00
I remember listening to a Robert Anton Wilson talk, where he claimed that he had read letters that Joyce wrote to a lover. These letters were only released many years after Joyce's death. Apparently they revealed that Bloom's Day occurs on the date corresponding to Joyce's first ever sexual experience for which he didn't have to pay money (a hand job, for which he was very grateful). Wilson thought it was funny because the common narrative (and that supported by the church) was that the date corresponded to his first kiss with his girlfriend. But actually the church was celebrating a hand job.
by kelnos | 2025-06-19 02:36:28+00:00
Hobbyist here, and while my issues have been fixed, I had a pretty bad experience. I had the 12th-gen Intel model I bought in 2022, and moderate amounts of load would trigger thermal protection and throttle all CPU cores to 400MHz. The throttling could last for seconds, or several tens of minutes, or even require me to power down the laptop for a while and come back to it later. (This was even though temperatures would always drop out of the danger zone in under a second.)

After nearly two years (two years!) of back and forth with support, including a mainboard replacement that didn't fix the problem, they finally upgraded me to the 13th-gen Intel mainboard, and the problems immediately went away.

Right now I'm struggling with a keyboard issue; a few of the keys intermittently don't register presses. I have a new keyboard that I ordered that I hope will fix the problem, and need to install, just haven't gotten to it. (I'm not sure if this is a result of a defect, or of one of my cats walking on the keyboard and possibly damaging it, so I'm not ready to blame Framework for this one.)

Aside from that, I haven't had driver issues, random crashes, or any problems with the USB ports. But I assume you're talking about Windows; I use Linux, so that's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

> My gut feeling is that something that can't be replaced easily in the Frameworks will die and it'll just end up being cheaper to replace the whole laptop.

The mainboard is of course the most expensive part, but it's still gong to be cheaper to replace it than the entire laptop. I don't believe there are any available replacement parts to the laptop that cost more than the full cost of the laptop.
by jjfoooo4 | 2025-06-19 02:37:30+00:00
It's very hard for me to understand what MCP solves aside from providing a quick and dirty way to prototype something on my laptop.

If I'm building a local program, I am going to want tighter control over the toolsets my LLM calls have access to.

E.g. an MCP server for Google Calendar. MCP is not saving me significant time - I can access the same API's the MCP can. I probably need to carefully instruct the LLM on when and how to use the Google Calendar calls, and I don't want to delegate that to a third party.

I also do not want to spin up a bunch of arbitrary processes in whatever runtime environment the MCP is written in. If I'm writing in Python, why do I want my users to have to set up a typescript runtime? God help me if there's a security issue in the MCP wrapper for language_foo.

On the server, things get even more difficult to justify. We have a great tool for having one machine call a process hosted on another machine without knowing it's implementation details: the RPC. MCP just adds a bunch of opinionated middleware (and security holes)
by vunderba | 2025-06-19 02:37:35+00:00
The second/third ones never really captured the magic of the first - part of that is because of the refreshing world building.

The rest of the trilogy felt... a bit self-indulgent for lack of a better description. Everything from the "When Harry Met Sally scene" with the drink to the interminably long fight scene with every possible "martial arts" weapon - I found myself rolling my eyes even as a teenager.

I haven't seen the most recent one. Like Star Wars, I sort of lost interest with the whole franchise.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-19 02:37:54+00:00
Or even banning at all. As you say, kick out of an abundance of caution. Any serious attempt at rule breaking is going to involve at least some basic obfuscation so if that's missing it's a strong indicator of a false positive.

That said, my snarky response is "I hope you learned your lesson about the need to restrict proprietary software to a container at all times".
by erulabs | 2025-06-19 02:38:13+00:00
The book “the lion in the living room” documents P-22 and LAs love for the cat very well, it’s a great read and I recommend it.

As much as I’m happy about this I find myself skeptical that wildlife will learn to use it. Do animals walk along the side of the highway looking for openings? Have there been any studies on the efficacy of these wildlife bridges?
by eadmund | 2025-06-19 02:38:24+00:00
> this transition

That begs the question of whether there should be or is a transition. From where I sit right now, there should not be and there isn’t. Wayland doesn’t meet my needs (not ‘needs’ in the sense of food and air, of course!) today, despite how interesting it is and despite the genuine improvements it offers in some ways. It may in the future, but until then any transition would be a net loss for me.
by dang | 2025-06-19 02:39:13+00:00
We don't want crude flamebait on Hacker News either, so please don't post it.

Edit: ok, that's enough. We've banned the account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44254450 (June 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44253910 (June 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801306 (April 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27656479 (June 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908459 (Dec 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19477912 (March 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471419 (March 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127248 (Oct 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892645 (Sept 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15958487 (Dec 2017)

Pity to lose such a great username, but not destroying the community is more important.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-19 02:40:09+00:00
`ssh -R` and `ssh -L` are amazing, and I just learned that -L and -R both support unix sockets on either end and also unix socket to tcp socket https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/noble/man1/ssh.1.html#:...

I would presume it's something akin to $(ssh -L /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/d.sock sh -c 'docker -H unix:///tmp/d.sock save | docker load') type deal
by gruez | 2025-06-19 02:40:50+00:00
You really can't put too much faith into the "you're unique!!" conclusions that fingerprinting sites give out. The sites don't receive much traffic, because only privacy nuts visit them, so any conclusions that you're "unique" (in the world?) is suspect at best. Most (all?) also take into account volatile attributes like the version number, which makes the previous problem worse by further reducing the actual sample size.

Suppose a fingerprinting site used (user agent, timezone, user language, screen resolution) as an uniqueness key for its fingerprints, and those were the only fingerprintable attributes. User agent changes often, basically every month for firefox and chrome, so the version information is basically garbage. If you had two firefox users visit the site two months apart, but with the same timezone, language, and screen size, then for all intents and purposes they're indistinguishable. However most fingerprinting sites will happily say "you're unique out of 1 million visitors!".

To make this even worse, people will inevitably revisit these sites and use "fingerprint blocking" extensions, which randomize various attributes. The fingerprinting sites aren't very sophisticated and can't tell attributes are being faked, so it'll record that as a new visitor, which has the effect of bumping the denominator even more. Instead of saying you're unique among 1 million users, it'll say you're unique among 10 million users, but that's a lie, because 9 million of those devices never existed.
by fellatio | 2025-06-19 02:41:04+00:00
Neat idea. This probably has the disadvantage of coupling deployment to a service. For example how do you scale up or red/green (you'd need the thing that does this to be aware of the push).

Edit: that thing exists it is uncloud. Just found out!

That said it's a tradeoff. If you are small, have one Hetzner VM and are happy with simplicity (and don't mind building images locally) it is great.
by tomhow | 2025-06-19 02:41:20+00:00
Please don't think we have haven't put any thought into this. It's not always a straightforward decision.

In this case the determining factor is that the original submission was not the verbatim speech that the speaker gave, and the speaker himself complained that that some of the transcription was inaccurate.

This then caused significant meta-discussion about the inaccuracy of the transcription. For the other comments that were about the content itself, we can't be sure if those comments were made in response to parts of the talk that were accurately or inaccurately transcribed.

We understand there may be overlapping comments, but that's a price we have to pay given the other considerations. No decision would be perfect, and it's not the same as usual "dupe" scenarios. We have to be a bit flexible when the situation is different from the norm in important ways.
by jgalt212 | 2025-06-19 02:41:26+00:00
> As someone who works in this tech space, nobody brings up how long fingerprints persist. And the reality is that even a really precise fingerprint has a half-life of only a few days

True that. We use cookies + fingerprints to monitor for license compliance (i.e. ensure users are not id/password sharing). Sometimes we can use a fingerprint to recover a deleted cookie, but not all that often. What would really help is a fingerprint transition matrix, so we could make some probabilistic guesses.
by refulgentis | 2025-06-19 02:42:47+00:00
I agree vehemently, I'm sort of stunned how...slow...things are in practice. I quit my job 2 years ago to do LLM client stuff and I still haven't made it to Google calendar. It's handy as a user to have something to plug holes in the interim.

In the limit, I remember some old saw about how every had the same top 3 rows of apps on their iPhone homescreen, but the last row was all different. I bet IT will be managing, and dev teams will make, their own bespoke MCP servers for years to come.
by refulgentis | 2025-06-19 02:45:12+00:00
Dumb question: in that case, wouldn't it not be an MCP server? It would be an LLM client with the ability to execute tool calls made by the LLM?

I don't get how MCP could create a wrapper for all possible LLM inference APIs or why it'd be desirable (that's an awful long leash for me to give out on my API key)
by thedufer | 2025-06-19 02:46:05+00:00
Typewriter keys cost money, and dropping the 1 allowed them to drop a key without significantly affecting the use of it. As far as I can tell, that's effectively the entire rationale.

This wasn't meaningfully the case prior; the printing press would've just needed more copies of 'l' if they'd dropped the 1s, and letters weren't as significant a portion of the cost of the machine, anyway. And afterwards came computers, which need to distinguish between the characters even if they're displayed the same way.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-19 02:47:09+00:00
https://environmentamerica.org/articles/do-wildlife-crossing...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9753749/

In my neighborhood (NY not VA) we had some people make a crossing for these guys this spring

https://www.virginiaherpetologicalsociety.com/amphibians/sal...
by agarren | 2025-06-19 02:48:45+00:00
I’d add that the potential to support other architectures is also a benefit. At the moment the framework 13 chassis supports risc-v [0] [1] with rumors about an arm variant.

Beyond practical repairability and sustainability, I appreciate the possibility of swapping out a mainboard for another with a completely different arch

[0] https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard

[1] https://store.deepcomputing.io/products/dc-roma-risc-v-mainb...
by _3yjt | 2025-06-19 02:49:14+00:00
What they are trying to do is recreating the situation that is more similar to actual light sources in computer screens and TV (varying flickering rate from different pixels/ areas). They are saying that the current threshold of 65Hz commonly reported are tested on light sources that are uniformed in flickering, which is not the case for actual screens. It is not about dithering.

Basically the claim is that when there are varying flickering frequency, the requirements for non-flicker frequency is much higher.
by mbrubeck | 2025-06-19 02:50:24+00:00
From over a decade ago, a paper on then-commercially-available browser fingerprinting tech, including a study of its deployment in the wild:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SP.2013.43 Nick Nikiforakis, Alexandros Kapravelos, Wouter Joosen, Christopher Kruegel, Frank Piessens, and Giovanni Vigna. 2013. Cookieless Monster: Exploring the Ecosystem of Web-Based Device Fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP ’13).
by causality0 | 2025-06-19 02:50:40+00:00
I love these types of videos. The ones for Jurassic Park and Jaws are also good. The problem with this type of content is that nobody has the time or money to do more than a couple of these videos so the body of work is spread over hundreds of different creators, making it next to impossible to find and watch a significant fraction of what's out there.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-06-19 02:50:59+00:00
The real Heart O' the City Hotel is in Chicago, like the rest of the place names in the movie (although the real name is Heart O' Chicago). The Wachowskis wanted to film there, but Major Daley (historic asshole and scumbag, in case you're not familiar) wouldn't let them. I can't remember what the rationale was, but then of course two Batman movies shot there.

The hotel: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh...
by btown | 2025-06-19 02:51:37+00:00
An interesting thought experiment is that a service that can both be triggered by, and write to, the same persistent queue can call an LLM in each iteration and create a self-evolving agentic workflow. Much like a Scrapy spider can recursively find new things to crawl, an agent can recursively find new things to do.

SQL is a great language to express “choose something from a priority queue and do something with it” but if you try to think about predefining your entire computation DAG as a single query rather than many queries over time, you lose the loose asynchronous iteration that gives an agent the same grace you’d give to a real-life task assignment. And that grace is what makes agentic workflows powerful.
by amy_petrik | 2025-06-19 02:51:50+00:00
> "[Zuck] has mediocre talent"I read it as he not talented himself. Not about the talent he employs.

I know Zuck personally and this is one of the big understandings to do with him. If you adjust his selector switch (just below the 3rd rib-like component on the pseudo thorax) to "science and engineering", you'll find he's the most brilliant guy ever, like Data from Star Trek! But this mode consumes some CPU cycles normally spent on hu-man interactions so he can come off as awkward.

A year or two back we switched it to "JW" (Jack Welch) and a sticky-fingered unix programmer spilled diet mountain dew all over the switch, it's been stuck there ever sense, hence here we are, hence the reputation for no-talent. It's there we just have to figure out how to get that switch jarred loose.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-19 02:52:06+00:00
Depends on the size, but I have seen a non-trivial number of GitHub projects that reference an .mp4 served by raw.githubuserassets.com in their readme

I would suspect the cheapest way of doing that is to create an issue, drag the mp4 onto it, and then you have a stable reference to use from within the readme
by demosthanos | 2025-06-19 02:53:20+00:00
No, they're specifically contrasting two types of displays and identify that the traditional way of measuring flicker effect does work for the traditional displays, regardless of image complexity:

> Traditional TVs show a sequence of images, each of which looks almost like the one just before it and each of these images has a spatial distribution of light intensities that resembles the natural world. The existing measurements of a relatively low critical flicker fusion rate are appropriate for these displays.

> In contrast, modern display designs include a sequence of coded fields which are intended to be perceived as one frame. This coded content is not a sequence of natural images that each appears similar to the preceding frame. The coded content contains unnatural sequences such as an image being followed by its inverse.

What's unclear to me 10 years down the road is if the type of display they're worried about is common now or obsolete. "Modern" in 2015 could be the same as what we have today, or the problems the study identified could have been fixed already by displays that we would call "modern" from our reference frame.

I don't know enough about display tech to comment on that, but they're very clear that if your display is showing frames in sequence without any weird trickery that the research method that gets you a 65 Hz refresh rate is a valid way to test for visible flickering.

EDIT: Here's another quote that makes the contrast that they're setting out even more clear:

> The light output of modern displays may at no point of time actually resemble a natural scene. Instead, the codes rely on the fact that at a high enough frame rate human perception integrates the incoming light, such that an image and its negative in rapid succession are perceived as a grey field. This paper explores these new coded displays, as opposed to the traditional sort which show only a sequence of nearly identical images.

It's possible that this is actually a thing that modern displays have been doing this whole time and I didn't even know it, but it's also possible that this was some combination of cutting-edge tech and cost-saving techniques that you mostly don't need to worry about with a (to us) modern OLED.
by Frotag | 2025-06-19 02:54:32+00:00
Can't edit my comment anymore but for anyone that's played Factorio, it feels a lot like that. Both in the way you slowly switch out hand-fed systems for automated systems that build on each other and in how you get a unique base (bot) out of it in the end. Plus there's something exciting about beating the game in a way the devs didn't envision and one that other players haven't.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-19 02:54:35+00:00
That's exactly why they're being released, though. If you manufacture a bogus case or plant evidence against someone, that's not probable cause. You're not acting within the acceptable norms of a just society, and the rectification of these cases is proof. Oftentimes the falsely persecuted will countersue, especially if they get an early injunction.
by amy_petrik | 2025-06-19 02:54:40+00:00
sourcee: beerfest (2006) ::

Barry Badrinath, down on his luck man-hooker: It's $10 for a BJ, $12 for an HJ, $15 for a ZJ... Landfill: [Interrupting] What's a ZJ? Barry Badrinath: If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
by lsaferite | 2025-06-19 02:55:16+00:00
An MCP Server can be many things. It can be as simple as an echo server or as complex as a full-blown tool-calling agent and beyond. The MCP Client Sampling feature is an interesting thing that's designed to allow the primary agent, the MCP Host, to offer up some subset of LLM models that is has access to for the MCP Servers it connects with. That would allow the MCP Server to make LLM calls that are mediated (or not, YMMV) by the MCP Host. As I said above, the feature is very limited right now, but still interesting for some simpler use cases. Why would you do this? So you don't have to configure every MCP Server you use with LLM credentials? And the particulars of exactly what model gets used are under your control. That allows the MCP Server to worry about the business logic and not about how to talk to a specific LLM Provider.
by mtbennett | 2025-06-19 02:56:21+00:00
Starting with consciousness as the fundamental is a cool idea, but others have done that in depth (e.g. IIT).

My approach is to say "I don't know what is fundamental" and identify what must be fundamental to all possible worlds regardless whether it is consciousness or something else. The answer then is that difference or change is fundamental. That is as true if we start with consciousness as it is if we start with physics.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-19 02:56:28+00:00
I think an overlooked approach is the snapchat model. Absolutely littered with client side integrity checks coupled with an automated obfuscation solution so that the checks in each binary end up being wildly different. Then you frequently push an updated binary and refuse to operate with out of date ones.

At least for competitive AAA titles I don't see why there couldn't be a daily update of the core binary. None of the assets would change so it wouldn't be a large update by any means. In effect it would prevent cheating by imposing impossible work and latency requirements on the tool authors.

The cost of doing this is employing at least one person with deep compiler knowledge who is capable of maintaining the automated system. Obviously that's far too much to ask of indie devs and is probably also out of reach for older titles in most cases.

This is of course all aside from the obvious and common sense but more expensive solution of player flagging, human review, and a binning algorithm (such as trust factor). Avoids needing to ban anyone in the first place and has the added benefit of being at least mildly effective against computer vision based botting solutions (for which there is fundamentally no solution).

Or just private servers and let the individual admins sort it out but god forbid players be permitted to run their own communities corporate might lose out on profit if that were a thing (can't risk another DotA after all).