MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-10 16:40:49+00:00
I wonder if they've validated demand with the water companies. Their website doesn't seem to talk about any successful deployments or partnerships with industry, beyond something that was getting started just as they were shutting down and which isn't robot related.

Thames Water already uses pretty hi-tech approaches to finding leaks including using underground microphones to find them via sound (with obligatory AI, of course), and then they have been trialling a chemical that can travel through the pipes and jam the leaks.

https://www.thameswater.co.uk/always-fixing/finding-leaks-wi...

https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/urban-water/thames-water-...

https://en.gutermann-water.com/2019/09/23/thames-water-finds...

They also know all about pigs, of course. So I wonder what the researchers felt their edge was that would let their approach do better than others. It seems from a quick check like the water companies are still primarily interested in hydrophonics and how to adapt those to plastic pipes.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-07-10 16:42:13+00:00
They are, but I think the keyword is "generalization". Humans do very well when innovation is required, because innovation needs generalized models that can be used to make very specialized predictions and then meta-models that can predict how specialized models relate to each other and cross reference those predictions. We don't learn arithmetic by getting fed terabytes of text like "1+1=2". We only use text to communicate information, but learn the actual logic and concept behind arithmetic, and then we use that generalized model for arithmetic in our reasoning.

I struggle to imagine how much further a purely text based system can be pushed - a system that basically knows that 1+1=2 not because it has built an internal model of arithmetic, but because it estimates that the sequence of `1+1=` is mostly followed by `2`.
by lutzh | 2025-07-10 16:42:19+00:00
I looked and Flix a while ago and found it really interesting - so much so that I wrote an article "Flix for Java Programmers" about it. Might actually be a bit outdated by now.. need to look at Flix's recent development again.

But if you're interested: https://www.reactivesystems.eu/2022/06/24/flix-for-java-prog...
by lesuorac | 2025-07-10 16:42:50+00:00
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.

Ok but why do people pick those insurance companies?

We see this across the board too and not just insurance companies. Governments low to pick the lowest bidder who then has massive cost overruns which has to put them above the second lowest bid in the end. Why is counter party risk never accounted for?
by grafmax | 2025-07-10 16:43:00+00:00
> We need to make sure that the AI is a good AI. And the thing that i think is most important for AI safety, at least my biological neural net tells me the most important thing for AI is to be maximally truth-seeking. so this is very fundamental. You can think of AI as this super-genius child that ultimately will outsmart you but you can instill the right values and encourage it to be sort of truthful, honorable, good things. The values you want to instill in a child that ultimately grow up to be incredibly powerful.

These are the words of a billionaire who has been supporting authoritarian and ethno-nationalist movements across the world, including playing a key role in the authoritarian takeover of the US government. He wants to instill “truth-seeking” as a “value” in Grok in anticipation of its future power.

But the authoritarian ethno-nationalist version of “truth” is not one based on science and objectivity. It’s the misanthropic “truth” widespread among ethnic-nationalist and authoritarian ideologies - “truth” that appeals to billionaires and disenfranchised members of the working class alike because it provides scapegoats without challenging the structural origins of that very disenfranchisement. A real commitment to truth would mean seeing past the exploitive power structure that Elon and billionaires like him inhabit.
by abeille | 2025-07-10 16:43:17+00:00
To put things into perspectives, let’s remember that anglophones in Québec, which represent about 10% of the population, have 3 universities, one of which is McGill, and have there theaters and artists, newspapers and tv shows. Many live in Montréal all there life without knowing a word of French, since it is possible to find almost everywhere someone that speaks English. By constrast, it is less and less easy to live only in French in Montréal, since it is not always possible to find someone that speaks French.
by talos_ | 2025-07-10 16:44:00+00:00
The original post was focused on history and language, and I added some political spice. Not discussing the politics of language (as in OP) is a bit outrageous.

You're right that French-Canadians are not guilt-free from discrimination et al. Québec only ever had French as an official language, but the last decades we've seen a series of dubious policies
by salawat | 2025-07-10 16:45:33+00:00
I disagree. I don't think transacting for transacting sake is a good thing. If anything I just see it as a vehicle for both obfuscation, and a means with which to arbitrage info asymmetry against retail investors.

And no, I don't think merely adding liquidity is worth that being practicable and nigh-impossible to unwind.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-07-10 16:45:53+00:00
I've run into some performance issues routing everything over a local wireguard link. I have a 10gig connection between my desktop and my NAS, though I only get ~1.1gbps over the wireguard link to the NAS. Without wireguard I can saturate the link.

I could probably tweak it, but I haven't had the bandwidth (ha) to troubleshoot it.
by BitwiseFool | 2025-07-10 16:46:15+00:00
Personal anecdote: As a child I played a lot of Sim City. In those games bridges must be perfectly straight and as a result I developed a mental model that curved bridges simply don't exist. When I first drove over a gently curved bridge in my late 20's I felt a serious disturbance to an irrelevant worldview that I never questioned.
by phkahler | 2025-07-10 16:46:19+00:00
One of the design goals (a constraint if you will) was to pass 300,000 people a day. You gotta move fast for that, and there's no way to take that turn at any kind of speed. So it fails at its primary purpose.

BTW It's not uncommon these days that enshitification causes products to fail at their primary function. See the original Google Nest thermostat failing to turn on the heat without an internet connection. There have been several others, but I don't remember them. It's sad when a mechanical mercury switch has better up-time than fancy tech.
by less_less | 2025-07-10 16:46:21+00:00
As I understand the paper, the point is that Fiat-Shamir does *not* give a correct proof of the program's output.

They gave a (maliciously constructed) program whose outputs are pairs (a,b) where certainly a != b (instead the program is constructed such that a = b+1 always). But you can get the corresponding Fiat-Shamir protocol to accept the statement "I know a secret x such that Program(x) = (0,0)", which is clearly a false statement.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-10 16:46:27+00:00
I don't think it's right. Despite the Internet, we really aren't in a constantly connected society. In fact, I'd argue we are less connected now than we have been for a long time. Everyone's "on" Social Media, but they're not socializing on it. They're spouting into the void, promoting and advertising themselves, tunneling themselves deep into echo chambers, but it's not really social. People write and write and write, but the only things they read are what the algorithms feed to them. I guess I'm gatekeeping socialization, but this doesn't seem like socialization to me.

When someone posts a clever quip to Twitter and gets 10,000 likes, this isn't socialization. It feels more like some weird performance art.
by evrimoztamur | 2025-07-10 16:46:51+00:00
"An ever-growing drive towards exploiting gambling instincts is being employed by AI coding agents and the companies developing them. The addictive nature of low-effort to high-output environment of LLM interfaces is being actively monetized, and incentives are once again stacked against you."

I decided to write about my experiences and observations about one of the less-discussed aspects of vibe coding: Its direct relationship to gambling, and how it's being marketed to inflate the AI hype cycle to the MOON!

I tried to be a little bit inflammatory, but please consider it seriously. Our relationship with AI agents is going to be an increasingly important one as they grow smarter. It's up to us to keep our instincts in check, and stay cool.

P.S. I would like to get in touch with people who think about this subject, are addicted to vibe coding and want to quit, and would like to provide more information/resources to substantiate this discussion, and expose the parties exploiting these addiction systems in the context of vibe coding.
by zygentoma | 2025-07-10 16:46:54+00:00
> The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!?

Well, it's a normal teenage party /in the US/.

I think in Europe, partying always looked a lot different (also different from country to country, here). I also mostly was bewildered by parties in teen movies from the early 00s.
by indigodaddy | 2025-07-10 16:47:02+00:00
Well I mean if you have an external endpoint where users/customers are reporting packet loss or connectivity issues and you have determined that your actual endpoint is not having issues for example, and you believe it to be a network issue somewhere along a route, then you can run this tool from various geolocations in the drop-down. I also like https://mtr.ping.pe/ which runs from a bunch of locations simultaneously
by Y_Y | 2025-07-10 16:47:26+00:00
They must have been walking around on a carpet of rats at some point.

For comparison, NYC has an area of 1223.59 km² and somewhere in the ballpark of 3 million rats ( https://mandmpestcontrol.com/pests/rats/3-million-rats-in-ny... ), which is a lower total density, but also Rapanui doesn't have quite the same multi-level infrastructure.
by regularfry | 2025-07-10 16:47:42+00:00
Wrong comparator. 1.5MW nominal output is comparable to a large wind turbine.

For instance, there's the https://www.esig.energy/wiki-main-page/general-electric-1-5-..., which has ~40m blades. The AR1500 (which is what these tidal generators are using) is smaller, with "only" 9m blades.

So it's significant in that these aren't toy devices, they fit in a very similar place in the engineering ecosystem as conventional wind. They should be a real competitor.
by leakycap | 2025-07-10 16:47:52+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'm a decent enough programmer and have noticed weird, unnecessary code sometimes being added along the way as I've worked with AI during coding, so I was curious if you had any concerns about leaning on a tool that has the ability to write code that you might not understand. Sounds like you do not have that concern, and I'm glad it worked for you.
by nyrikki | 2025-07-10 16:47:59+00:00
I haven't done a real review yet, but skimming it seems to relate to Arthur-Merlin[0] oracles and public fair coins.

If you view random numbers as normal numbers, they will seem to be algorithmically random, or at least exceed the complexity of any proof, or even practical proof.

Basically the work of Chatlin, where given the kolmogorov complexity of your verifier, you only have a limited number of bits in any L that you can prove anything.

Probably simpler to think about the challenges of proving a fair coins is fair.

They just have to produce an unfair coin that looks fair as a flawed analogy.

Fiat-Shamir depends on interactive proofs, which equals PSPACE, which seems huge, but it can be a hay in the haystack, and if you are using a magnet to reach into the haystack you will almost never pull out a piece of hay.

They are basically choosing the magnet for you.

[0] https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo:A#am
by simonw | 2025-07-10 16:48:14+00:00
> I always thought tasks like this are usually just handed to an other (i.e. vision) model, but the post talks about it as if it's the _same_ model doing both text generation and vision.

Most vision LLMs don't actually use a separate vision model. https://huggingface.co/blog/vlms is a decent explanation of what's going on.

Most of the big LLMs these days are vision LLMs - the Claude models, the OpenAI models, Grok and most of the Gemini models all accept images in addition to text. To my knowledge none of them are using tool calling to a separate vision model for this.

Some of the local models can do this too - Mistral Small and Gemma 3 are two examples. You can tell they're not tool calling to anything because they run directly out of a single model weights file.
by tehryanx | 2025-07-10 16:48:34+00:00
I do think the threat model here is a bit unique though.

If I'm running two MCP servers on my machine, I'm the one that installed them, I'm the one that assigned what permissions they have in my environment, and I'm the one that explicitly decided what level of access to give them within whatever resource they're accessing. That gives me reasonably strong control over, or at least full knowledge of, what data can be shared between them.

With MCP, I can use oauth to make very deliberate decisions about the scope of access I want to give the agent.

With MCP-B, it's the web application owner that installed the interface and what access it has to my data, and the agent running in my client gets access to whatever that third party deemed appropriate.

With MCP-B the agent has the same access I do by default, with the only restrictions being up to the app owner rather than it being up to me.

MCP auth is not perfect by any stretch, but the key thing it gives the user is the capacity to restrict what the agent has access to with some granularity. That's super important because the agent can't be trusted when it's consuming inputs the user didn't explicitly define. MCP-B doesn't have this, if you have the agent in your browser it has access to whatever resources you have so long as they were exposed by a tool call, which isn't somethign the user has any say in.
by barbazoo | 2025-07-10 16:48:35+00:00
> I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation.

Zuck, is that you? :)

> movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like

Teens (and pre-teens) having sex, doing hard drugs and drinking liquor is completely unlike "how parties often looked like" for anyone I know but YMMV.
by iraton | 2025-07-10 16:48:44+00:00
Yes, you're nit the first telling me this. At first i wanted to make full custom pcb with smd components. But it cost me too much to make just one and some components were difficult to find, so i opted to make more like a shield so is more easy to find the componets and piu easier to solder than SMD for those who have never done it before. This is the same.The last one is also valid for the reason why it was written in Arduino and not in C, that at least even those who are not so familiar with it can modify it
by maxbond | 2025-07-10 16:49:04+00:00
I think we should use more nuclear energy, I think nuclear powered container ships are under explored for instance. But it's not so simple. Nuclear energy programs can become nuclear weapons programs. A larger uranium mining and processing industry lowers the barriers of entry for building a weapons program. We're not going to exhaust our uranium reserves anytime soon. We're not going to be wiped out by a nuclear accidents, but we're heading into a future of stronger storms and more frequent wildfires, and nuclear power has a way of making disasters even worse.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-10 16:49:24+00:00
Also push your parents and friends to self-host their email /s

Everyone around me uses Whatsapp. 5% use Signal, 2% Yelegram and I know one gal who uses Viber. I have all of them.

Ditch <hugely popular> service is philosophically nice, but like with all of philosophy - pretty much useless in real life.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-07-10 16:50:57+00:00
What you're describing is absolutely true, and I've seen it, but I agree with the commenter that it's a good litmus test for shit organizations. I have learned that it doesn't matter if the name is changed to something better, I will still be working for people that think with their ass, and therefore, half my life will be annoying.

Rust also has negative connotations, arguably worse connotations. Seems to do fine, and I wouldn't want it renamed because a PM is on a power trip.

> but for incredibly understandable reasons: corporate drones are superstitious

Understandable in the sense that I get why a child would do this, not an adult who is supposed to know what they're managing. Unfortunately, the business world pretends "Project Manager" can be slotted into any domain. Now my days are spent correcting the AI notetaker of a guy who is paid 6 figures.
by wanderingstan | 2025-07-10 16:51:16+00:00
Note that OP didn’t say anything about “close to no developers”, only that they could tell they had become more productive.

I too know I am being more productive. The most concrete examples for my work has come from the ease of prototyping: making a quick quasi-working version of an idea is now insanely easy, so we’ve been able to explore (and adopt) ideas that would not have been worth the effort previously.
by sgarland | 2025-07-10 16:51:18+00:00
I legitimately don’t understand why a lookup table is ever seen as adding any meaningful amount of complexity.

SELECT a.foo, b.bar FROM alpha a JOIN bravo b ON a.id = b.alpha_id

The speed hit from an INNER JOIN on indexed columns is negligible, and will be dwarfed by network overhead for most places. As to flexibility, if you need a new value, insert it.
by lazyant | 2025-07-10 16:51:25+00:00
It's confusing but you can read it as (Rail Over) Bridge.

Defining acronyms/initializations the first time they are used is best practice[1]; I hate the opposite of just throwing around acronyms that the reader may not be familiar with.

[1] "Define them the first time you use them in content" https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-and-conve...
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-10 16:51:37+00:00
Your feelings against news focused on America are valid, but there's no denying that the second Trump administration is such a world-shaking event, in a scale not foreseen by mainstream media or markets, that it would be weird not to have it everywhere. "President of the richest country in history unilaterally tariffs the entire world without approval of Congress" is, like it or not, a bigger headline than Europe's endless regulatory arguments
by miles | 2025-07-10 16:52:11+00:00
> On a several occasions (most recently today), Thunderbird has "lost" my mail messages that are in my inbox when I move them to a local folder. Effectively it corrupts the messages - they appear in the local folder as 1 KB messages with no subject or sender info. They are empty messages.

Apple's Mail app has had a virtually identical bug since Catalina; Michael Tsai's article on the issue currently has 636 comments:

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...

After witnessing the bug myself, migrated to Thunderbird with Maildir enabled[1] for long-term storage; have yet to experience the issue despite a large database (>300,000 emails) and daily IMAP import to local folders.

[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_m...
by Ericson2314 | 2025-07-10 16:52:37+00:00
See Ralf's answer but let me give you a bit of extra flavor:

These functions do not memory accesses, they are both from an operational perspective essentially:

p, n -> (p, p + n)

The separation logics I've seen have all have what we might call a strong extensional calculi / shallow DSL embedding flavor. What that means is roughly that there is strong distinction between the "internal" program under scrutiny, and fairly arbitrary external reasoning about it.

I bring this up in order to say that we're very far from "what is the principal type of this expression?" type questions. There are many, many, ways one might type split_at/_mut depending on what the context requires. The interesting thing about these in Rust is really not the functions themselves, but & and &mut. Those types are stand-ins for some family of those myriad potential contexts, in the way that interfaces are always reifications of the possibilities of what the component on the other side of the interface might be.

In the "menagerie of separation logics" I was originally thinking of, there may not be singular & and &mut that work for all purposes. The most reusable form split_at indeed may be tantamount to the simple arithmetic pure function I wrote above, leaving to the caller the proof of showing whatever properties it needs are carried over from the original pointer to the new ones. Given the arithmetic relations, and the knowledge that nothing else is happening (related to the famous frame rule), the caller should be able to do this.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-10 16:52:43+00:00
You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.

There was never a time when GMail was better than plain old Outlook, but this is coming from someone to whom IMAP has always seemed like a really terrible solution in search of a nonexistent problem. My email database is important to me, and worth managing locally, as this thread more than adequately demonstrates.

Boss at the time: "You should quit using that old POP3 crap, and switch to IMAP. It's awesome." Boss a half-dozen times over the next few years: "Hey, can you forward me a copy of that email we got from XYZ a couple of years ago?"
by ryandrake | 2025-07-10 16:52:54+00:00
I don't think the point of a party is "ROI" either in terms of the dimensions of time, effort, or money. When I decide to host one, this kind of "cost" is assumed. I don't worry about it because I can afford it (in all three dimensions), and the point of hosting a get-together is not to make a profit on any of those dimensions or break even. I look at it as: I'm spending time+effort+money, and the return, for myself and everyone who attends, is not any of those three. It's getting some much needed socialization and a fun experience. I guess your point is that you're not getting as much fun out of it to justify the spend?
by nothrabannosir | 2025-07-10 16:53:00+00:00
How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later I still don’t know how to get thunderbird to do it.

Gmail:

- see all email bodies for a single conversation in one long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content

- in your inbox / archive view, mix both sent and incoming emails in such conversations, so I don’t have to toggle between Sent and INBOX or Archive

I would be happy with just one of these two but I genuinely can’t hack it.

I would personally go as far as to say: any email client which doesn’t do this, is wrong.
by reify | 2025-07-10 16:53:17+00:00
A jolly good reason to install Linux

I sometimes thank my lucky stars that for 20 years I have not had to run any anti-virus software or anti-malware programs, whether microsoft or third party, and wait for an eternity for them to finish.

not to mention windows update taking another eternity.

Nor piss about with windows firewall and defender.

I just wanted to freely surf the internet unburdened by the bloat that all windows has become.

I have tried every possible variety of distro over 20 years and they have all provided a road to freedom and sanity.

just look at that list below.