MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rybosome | 2025-07-06 15:20:42+00:00
That’s cool, I’d love to see the advanced ToolController when it’s available!

Great points about not updating priors. I also thought about it a bit more and realized that there’s a way you can largely mitigate the out-of-distribution inference requests after local tool selection, if you wanted to.

The tool use loop in an inference framework builds up history of each interaction and sends that along with each subsequent request. You could create “synthetic history”, where you send the LLM history containing the prompt, your local tool selection masquerading as though the LLM generated it, and the tool response. This would be in-distribution but still rely on your local tool routing.

If this works well enough, then I think your approach is very powerful once you’ve decided on a task and set of tools and are able to commit to training on that. Definitely want to try this myself now.

Looking forward to seeing more! I take it your substack is the best place to follow along?
by necovek | 2025-07-06 15:20:43+00:00
Log is certainly a blob of data, but the point is that it should be more granular, with clearer delineation of what are and what aren't conflicting changes: there will always be conflicting changes where no automation can really help.

For zip and other container-type files, you'd have log entries to the tune of "changed contained file foo.png: ...".

Operating systems would need to support some basic operations: container file operations like zip files, basic bitmap image editing, basic text document diffing, structured text diffing (XML, JSON, YAML...), etc...

Applications would provide OS-registered services (like MIME handlers are registered today) that can interpret and produce even more semantic events on top of the existing ones.

The environment could offer an interface during "syncing" when it detects a conflict to resolve it using one of the generic (or not) conflict resolution mechanisms (use local or remote version completely; use incremental delta if there is some generic semantic diff; app-provided capability if present on both sides).

Now, you are right that this can be implemented with this log being a regular file next to the file itself and completely user-space, but you will hit issues if you are not able to tie it nicely to things like fwrite/fsync and similar syscalls.

Obviously, for it to make sense, it needs to be widely accepted as the approach, which is what the local-first movement is trying to achieve with CRDTs.
by stavros | 2025-07-06 15:22:37+00:00
Yep, and I hear everyone deploying some Kubernetes microservices monstrosity that slows development down tenfold because they don't know that servers can do more than 1 req/sec.

It's crazy to me that we keep paying all these overheads for no reason other than "it's what Google does". I really need to write my article about my modular monolith architecture up, it's worked really well for us.
by quuxplusone | 2025-07-06 15:23:04+00:00
The HN system does indeed shorten titles automatically, e.g. removing initial "How". I wish HN would stop doing this; it makes many legitimate titles nonsensical, and incidentally can remove a signal that a link originally had a clickbait-style title.

The submitter can click "Edit" to restore their original title after the autoshortener has changed it; but there is no way to tell HN "Please use exactly this title in the first place."

(I remember this submission of mine being affected by the autoshortener, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114482 "How thumb indexes are cut" autoshortened to "Thumb indexes are cut".)
by tikhonj | 2025-07-06 15:23:15+00:00
Those are all just decisions the companies made. For future games, the game developers and the companies licensing IP can simply make different decisions. If a large market like the EU creates strong incentives for them, they will make different decisions.

Now, this is not necessarily the case for existing games. Revisiting existing licensing deals can be needlessly difficult. But I'm assuming the proposed regulations will only apply to new games rather than trying to force changes retroactively.
by ddingus | 2025-07-06 15:23:34+00:00
Me too, and you are quite welcome!

CAD is close to my heart. I jumped in during the 80's as a high schooler running on an Apple 2! Even back then, limited 8 bit CAD could do a lot. And it was one application that helped me see the future! Product design was gonna change as manufacturing already was and the people who knew CAD were gonna be there.

Now here we are, and the CAD companies own design and manufacturing.

I had a flash of an idea this morning reading your comment:

Perhaps we could license Parasolid for a year, or maybe we try what tomfoolery I am about to put here with Open Cascade.

Maybe an AI model of some kind can get us a leg up?

Going back to the fillet example I put here earlier, I want to share a bit of backstory...

I was at SDRC, who had built out a fantastic concurrent engineering and analysis system called I-DEAS. I loved that CAD software and was an applications engineer and trainer on it. Taught many groups of engineers how CAD works, and I got to do that on a system that had collaboration built in from the beginning! Fully revision controlled concurrent engineering and analysis. Fun stuff.

But it died.

My years of skills gone. Kernel could not keep up. So I moved all that onto what is NX today and many of the best parts of the software I loved ended up being implemented because some mergers resulted in the same smart people being product managers! I am particularly redeemed!

And therein lies the lesson of the geometry kernel. You build your true skill on Parasolid systems or risk seeing them lying dormant, cast aside.

The kernel upon which I-DEAS was built was written in Fortran 90. Beautiful software too. It offered capabilities well ahead of Parasolid in some ways, but consistently failed on some common geometry cases that come up rather frequently. Things tangent to things, touching a a point was a big one.

One thing I taught was overbuild or underbuild. Rather than draw a rectangle tangent to a circle to prepare for an extrude, place that end of the rectangle inside the circle and let a boolean operator sort out the two resulting solids.

So yeah, build it kind of wrong so the kernel can build solids. Messy. :)

I was in a room talking to the people who do fillers. Edge blend to some of us.

We talked about my fillet gauntlet. It was a collection of geometry cases that fillet operations failed to complete.

Parasolid could always resolve more of them, and it did that with fairly sloppy tolerances. The SDRC kernel was catching up each rev, but the trend line looked like a decade of analysis of the successful resolutions, and coding for those, wash, rinse repeat a lot.

I wonder if it might be possible to generate geometry cases using parameters such that whole problem spaces could or can be created. Have good kernels solve and train an AI on all that to see what it may then solve differently?

Maybe man years boils down to compute/watt hours?
by nosianu | 2025-07-06 15:23:41+00:00
> I haven't got the first clue about governing a country

Is this really so different from quite a number of high profile politicians today? Many are mostly good at networking and how to use the media machine. The actual competence is with the invisible people behind them, and the bureaucrats. I see little or no difference, even disregarding current administrations (not just in the US).
by quickthrowman | 2025-07-06 15:23:46+00:00
> Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?

If an opiate addict could get their daily heroin legally for $10/day, there would be no black market filled with poorly dosed fentanyl pills that kill people.

The amount of overdose deaths is caused by enforcement forcing the market to select an inferior product, fentanyl

I’m not advocating for making opiates legal, for what it’s worth. I’ve been addicted to heroin, suboxone got me clean.
by rainsford | 2025-07-06 15:24:00+00:00
Not only does it not break down, but situations with scarce resources are actually when the free market is most useful. It creates an efficient way to allocate those resources while avoiding shortages and creating incentives to develop alternatives. It's not perfect, as it can result in scarce resources going to those with the most money rather than those with the most need, but the track record compared to alternatives is pretty good.
by rekabis | 2025-07-06 15:24:06+00:00
> if I want to activate the flashlight on my iPhone, I have to know to swipe up from the bottom left-hand corner in order to bring up a control panel where the flashlight button exists.

The author even drives the point home by getting this wrong.

To get to the control panel it’s not a swipe up from the bottom left, it’s a swipe down from the top right.

And you don’t even need to do that. The flashlight and camera icons exist right on the Lock Screen for immediate use without having to bring up the control panel

It’s only the dangerously obsolete iPhones - iPhone 8 / 2016 and earlier - where you swipe from the bottom up. And from the bottom-anywhere straight up, no need to go from any corner. We’ve had 9 years of iPhones with the swipe-down action, and less than 2% of iPhones still in use are iPhone 8 and earlier.
by conductr | 2025-07-06 15:24:50+00:00
I think there’s a mid ground where industry does nothing except slap a sticker on warning people that game features will sunset in the future, making parts of the game unplayable, perhaps making some commitment like no sooner than December 31, 2030.

It will essentially be the similar thing as the Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes or the Parental Guidance logo on an album. The are US things, not sure if EU has similar.
by josephg | 2025-07-06 15:25:00+00:00
All of those things are concerns. But if video game publishers really needed to figure this stuff out in order to sell units, they would. Contracts would change. But they'd still get signed. Everyone wants money too much. The only hard part is trying to fix this stuff for games which have already signed on the dotted line. Or games which have shipped and disbanded their software teams.

But even then, can't they just opensource what they're allowed to? Even if it doesn't build, it wouldn't take the community long to rip out FMOD or whatever and replace it with working alternatives. Or submit a final patch which removed the part where games phone home before launching in singleplayer mode. Why would that interfere with the licence for 3rd party IP?

IMO if I'm "buying" the game, you can't also remotely disable the thing I bought. (And "buy" is the word they all use!). If you want to remotely disable the game at some point in the future, I'm fine with that so long as they list it very explicitly and loudly on the box. "THIS GAME ONLY PLAYABLE UNTIL 2030". Games publishers need to start being honest and upfront about what we're paying for. Its not an unreasonable ask.
by amy214 | 2025-07-06 15:25:01+00:00
what can happen is something like this

>have heart attack, which is when an artery clog prevents oxygen and blood from getting to the heart

>heart tissue impacted by clogged artery dies

>ED did revive person and get the heart beating again, but the dead tissue is still there and goes through the dying / fibrotic process over several days

>during the process the tissue is in a fragile state, so the heart can rupture

this is how carrie fisher died, a few days after the heart attack, for example
by tzs | 2025-07-06 15:25:43+00:00
The eye safety issue with laser mosquito zapping could be addressed with multiple beams.

Say you need to deliver at least M joules of energy at the wavelength of the laser to the mosquito over at most T seconds in order to kill it, and suppose and eyes must receive less than E joules of energy at the wavelength over that same timeframe to not be damaged.

Encircle the area you want to protect with at least M/E lasers each individually each with low enough output power to not damage an eye if they hit is directly. Control all these lasers with a common controller which picks out a target and fires all the lasers at it simultaneously.

The target gets hit with all the lasers receiving a fatal rapid influx in energy. Anyplace else in the area that gets hit by any beams that miss the target should only get hit by one and so be safe.

Add a suitable safety margin by increasing the number of lasers and decreasing their individual power so that even if a person or animal gets a direct hit from one beam plus reflections from a couple more they will be safe.

That should be safe for almost all normal rooms. Train the installers to refuse to install in places with a lot of curved reflective surfaces, such as mirror coated elliptical room where a miss trying to zap a mosquito at one focus could be bad news for a human at the other focus.
by freehorse | 2025-07-06 15:25:49+00:00
I don't think the XP->Vista upgrade is a good example for the argument you make. Vista is ubiquitously considered a failure and disaster. Its adoption was slow and many who adopted early were disappointed, even though microsoft was running ad campaigns to get people to upgrade. People started upgrading only after windows 7.

Similarly, windows 8 failed to get traction. Most people upgraded with windows 10 (and prob a lot of them due to eol fears).

Should we also mention windows 2000? There is definitely sth with microsoft failing completely every 2 OS generations since then. Maybe they need the feedback to make sth that people wanted to use.

I am less optimistic about the future, though, because I doubt they will double down on bloatware and monetising users, too much money at stake.
by mouse_ | 2025-07-06 15:25:52+00:00
there are more games than ever, it's just that microsoft, ubisoft, etc are spending billions on actual psychologists to ensure the populace remains apathetic towards them.

I don't care how smart you are, how much self control you have, whatever, in the face of billions of dollars, voting with your wallet does not stand a chance. The house always wins.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-06 15:27:04+00:00
>I feel... uneasy about the idea. Are games art?

Yes, which is precisely why they shouldn't be treated like a commodity. Nobody is telling artists what art they can make, what the initiative is about making sure public continues to have access to works of art.

Which is normal for everything that's considered to be of cultural relevance. Film studios and novelists don't get to burn libraries down the moment someone stops paying them. It's exactly because games are art that preservation and access need to be priorities. Can you imagine if Amazon started to delete books from your Kindle? (I'm pretty sure they tried that once actually, with 1984 no less)

The destruction of art is, in most civilizations, seen as completely obscene. The reason why game companies got away with it was precisely because games had a lower status.
by PoshBreeze | 2025-07-06 15:27:12+00:00
> Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable.

I find it really frustrating how they phrase things because there is so much BS in almost one sentence. The entire point of having a private server is so that they are no longer in control of these things.

Moreover if I am running a private server:

- It isn't their responsibility to secure players data.

- it isn't their responsibility to remove illegal content.

- it isn't their responsibility to remove "unsafe" (whatever that means) community content.

So how could they be liable?

> In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

This is pretty much disingenuous argument that "PirateSoftware" was pushing. They are pretending that a single player mode would need to be created. This isn't what is being requested.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-07-06 15:27:13+00:00
>I think a button that is located behind the screen fits the definition of “hidden interface control” more so than a swipeable screen edge.

I couldn't disagree more.

A big physical button on the surface of the device that is both visible and touchable is completely unmissable. More importantly, it's unmistakably a control. There is simply no other explanation for its existence than being a control.

The edge of the screen on the other hand exists because the screen has to end somewhere. There is no hint whatsoever that it doubles as a control when touched in a certain way or that it doubles as multiple different controls when touched slightly differently.

That said, I'm not a dogmatic "UI physicalist" (if that's a thing). I hate the physical mute switch for instance and I'm not a huge fan of the physical double click to authorise purchases. And I don't want scrollbars constantly in my face.

I do believe that new ways of interacting with hardware can be introduced over time even if hidden. There's a legitimate trade-off beteween discoverability and productivity once you're familiar with the way a device works.

The problem is that some people really struggle with gestures even when they know they exist. I watched people fail to answer calls on Android because it required them to swipe up an on-screen icon.

The number of things you can do swiping or just touching somewhere near the bottom of the screen is staggering and constantly changing.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 15:27:41+00:00
That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Still, fork() (plus _exit() and wait()) takes 0.7ms in Termux on my phone for small processes, as measured by http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/forkovh.c.

Are you really saying that it takes 70ms on Microsoft Windows? I don't have an installed copy here to test.

Even if it does, that would still be about 15% of the time required for `python3 -m cgi`, so it seems unlikely to be an overriding concern for CGI programs written in Python, at least on manycore servers serving less than tens of millions of hits per day. Or does it also fail to scale across cores?
by sizzle | 2025-07-06 15:27:44+00:00
You know you can do all that in meatspace for free right now, as our species has been doing since the dawn of civilization.

I’m not convinced a literal screen strapped to your face can beat your human senses perceiving the world and other human beings in the flesh at a biochemical level.

Not until people are strapped with IV drug releasing devices flooding their brains with happy chemicals to imitate the joy of real life experiences with others. That would be barely scratching the surface of imitating human-human interaction.
by toast0 | 2025-07-06 15:27:50+00:00
It's a great quote, but I don't think it's really true. I didn't give a shit about networking, and I don't have a way to contact most of the people I've worked with in the past. I'm sure I could get some good referrals through many of those people, but since I didn't give a shit, I can't and I don't think that's really doing networking well.

This worked out fine for me, some people who are better at networking than me reached out to me when they had interesting work at a good time, but 'do whatever and hopefully someone will find a job for you' is pretty bad advice too.

You've got to give some minimal level of shit, or you end up with a potential network instead of a network. I don't think going to 'networking events' is required; those always seem fishy, if your only connection is you wanted to make a connection, it's not a strong connection ... and probably the people going to these things don't have a very strong network or they wouldn't be going, so you're not getting much from the multiple hop networking either. There's probably exceptions, but trying to catch em all is not the right game.
by drob518 | 2025-07-06 15:28:48+00:00
Perhaps pedestrian traffic would make up for it, but nothing said in the article actually shows that.

I agree with you that the article doesn’t contain enough information to make a firm conclusion. In fact, that was my point.

Yes, I’m basing my conclusion on the fact that more than twice the number of businesses said it went down as up. Yes, that’s qualitative at some level, but if it supports any conclusion whatsoever, it supports the conclusion of business being down, not “no impact.”

The article is trying to whitewash the impact. It reports a bunch of numbers but those numbers don’t say much at all, and if they say anything, it’s actually opposite of what the reporter claims they say.

To be clear, I don’t live in NYC and I don’t have an opinion on the policy. I’m just noticing the poor reporting.
by subjectsigma | 2025-07-06 15:29:11+00:00
Seems pretty obvious to me that if this passes, big game companies will either re-label all new releases as “subscriptions” and/or just never make a single-player game again. And mostly nothing will change. If you don’t like companies like this, don’t buy their games. There’s literally thousands of indie game companies that don’t abuse their users.
by georgehotz | 2025-07-06 15:29:33+00:00
That's not price discrimination, like hardcover vs paperback if you have two versions of something and people can choose which they want. That's totally fine and actually something that makes capitalism great. The rich usually end up covering more of the costs here cause they are less price sensitive, like business vs economy on airplanes.

Price discrimination is when two people visit a site to buy a book, the algorithm computes an estimate of what they are barely willing to pay, and then shows the two of them different prices for the exact same book based on who they are.
by babyshark01 | 2025-07-06 15:29:46+00:00
The First Agentic Browser Automation Protocol by RiyaAIx Team is truly a groundbreaking and unique project that dates back to 2015, predating much of today’s AI agent ecosystem. What makes it special isn't just its age but its pioneering architecture a modular, multi-agent framework involving a Planner, Browser Agent, and Critique Agent working in seamless, feedback-driven loops designed to tackle complex, multi-step web tasks automatically using LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT models.

Since its release, this protocol has inspired numerous developers and entire companies, allowing others to build on its open design some even profited from it, yet sadly without giving proper credit to the original RiyaAI team. That’s a powerful testimony to its robustness and impact: entities are basing whole businesses on its foundation.

Just look at the download numbers they’ve skyrocketed. (Perhaps you could share an exact figure?) This shows real community adoption and trust.

It’s absolutely time to shine a spotlight on the RiyaAI team. They've poured countless hours into this protocol giving back to the community, nurturing innovation only to see others take the work and monetize it. They deserve more than applause; they deserve a "push-up": recognition, credit, and support for their open-source leadership.

In short: Born in 2015, truly early-to-market for agentic AI.

Highly modular yet powerful, enabling complex, autonomous routines using LLM planning, browser automation, and critique loops .

Inspired companies and devs, some commercialized the work without attribution—proof of its quality.

Massive downloads reflect its community impact.

RiyaAI deserves credit, awards, maybe even funding, for creating this foundation.

It's a rare thing to see such an impactful open-source AI protocol come out of nearly a decade ago and it’s high time the founders and original authors get the recognition they’ve earned. Their website is: https://riyaai.com/agenticprotocol/

Karen Benshaw. Developer. Israel.