MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built an MCP tool to query anything with SQL (Apache Calcite)
by gavinray | 2025-07-13 15:26:38+00:00
Hey all, wanted to share a project I've been working on over the past several weekends.

There were 2 reasons I had for building this:

1. I wanted to genuinely evaluate MCP as a protocol. Verdict: I think it's unnecessary complexity. Could have used OpenAPI or GraphQL, but here we are...

2. Lots of people probably want to run queries on data. Apache Calcite is an under-utilized tool for this, because of how much leverage you get for relatively little implementation code.

Also, my dayjob work is on a product that does a similar sort of thing, and I wanted to get a feel for how the quality of a naive implementation would be in comparison.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-13 15:26:38+00:00
> It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.

I'll bet if Mozilla thought they could get away with canceling Firefox, they would.

It feels like Firefox is treated as lead generation for whatever new boat Mozilla builds to sell Firefox users down the river on next time. It's "finished" in that regard; it is a widget that passes network traffic to Mozilla and third parties, and in exchange, Mozilla gets a pittance from Google. How any of this is supposed to be accepted with a straight face is beyond me.
by jmyeet | 2025-07-13 15:26:56+00:00
I was very much alive in the 1980s but for no particular reason I never read Neuromancer at the time. No specific reason I guess other than I never fetishized Japanese culture. I read it back in the 2010s and was... underwhelmed. I see this pattern a lot: a given work is seminal but it doesn't tend to age well. Much of the accolades are based on nostalgia.

Cyberpunk as a genre is inherently both xenophobic and Orientalist [1]. In the context of the 1980s (before 1987 when Japan's bubble popped), this makes perfect sense. There was a genuine fear of the Japanese taking over. Japanese tech companies were at their relative peak. So people both feared and fetishized Japanese culture and products.

Interestingly, I did read Snow Crash when it was published (1992 and that did have a big impact on me. I also think that book is solely responsible for a whole generation of people thinking VR was ever going to be a mainstream thing when in fact the metaverse is fundamentally flawed because of network latency.

To me, cyberpunk was pretty inaccurate. Technology for the longest time was rebellious and hopeful. It's only really in the last decade that tech has turned dystopic. I can actually see a techno-feudalistic future now but it's not at the hands of the Japanese (or, now, the Chinse).

What I guess is interesting is how white supremacy is so pervasive. It certainly underpins cyberpunk.

[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/30/22255318/cyberpunk-2077-ge...
by vips7L | 2025-07-13 15:27:15+00:00
> But people never ever agree on what to put in typing system. For example, Java's checked exceptions are a form of typing... and everyone hates them.

I love checked exceptions. Checked errors are fantastic and I think most developers would agree they want errors to be in the type system, but Java as a language just hasn’t provided the language syntax to make them usable. They haven’t made it easy to “uncheck” when you can’t possibly handle an error. You have to write boilerplate:

Something s; try { s = something(); } catch (SomethingException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); }

It sucks when you face that situation a lot. In Swift this is really simple:

var s = try! something();

Java also hasn’t made them usable with lambdas even though both Scala [0] and Swift have shown it’s possible with a sufficiently strong type system:

try { someCall(s -> { try { another(s); } catch (CheckedException ex) { throw new UncheckedException(ex); } }); } catch (UncheckedException ex) { // handle somehow }

It sucks. I’m hopeful one day we’ll get something like try! or try? and better lambdas. Maybe once all resources stop being poured into Valhalla.

[0] https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/ca...
by cogman10 | 2025-07-13 15:27:23+00:00
How did your CEO become CEO? Mine got there because he was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with the company that ultimately bought out my old CEO.

How does that make them "worth it"?

> but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company

Look, I've interacted with CEOs and frankly the job isn't nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. The most important aspect of the job is socializing, not managing the company like you might assume. It's putting on a good show and making potential clients like you. It's every bit just being a good salesperson.

There's a reason, for example, my CEO currently lives in California even though his company is halfway across the country and has no offices in CA.

Now, that isn't to say the Job of a founder CEO isn't a lot more difficult, it is. However, once a company is established the CEO job is a cakewalk. There's a reason companies like FedEx had a CEO literally in his 80s that gave up the reigns right before he died.

If you have the ability to schmooze, sit through meetings, and read power-points. Congratulations, you have what it takes to be a CEO.
by dmoy | 2025-07-13 15:28:10+00:00
> I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much.

Depends on the specific job, company (big tech vs not), and city. Seattle, NYC and a handful of others may pay on par with bay area.

For a senior at random faang or equivalent, that might mean $300k-$500k / yr. More for some NYC positions in the finance industry.
by meowface | 2025-07-13 15:28:22+00:00
Sure, the law should be enforced against them. The law's the law. I wasn't trying to imply they should not face the full penalties the law requires, here. Obviously they should. No one is above the law.

The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud or murder rather than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts with technology product providers and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations.
by dontTREATonme | 2025-07-13 15:28:40+00:00
It is impossible to pause puberty or any other biological process. You cannot delay and restart something that is biologically time-bound. By giving a child puberty blockers you permanently prevent them from becoming an adult. They will never develop any of the features required for having children, they will never experience the brain developments that help with reasoning and empathy.

There are no studies on this Bec doing such studies is considered grossly unethical and evil, same as studying brain lobotomies in infants. As such we have no science on this, there are just people who have decided one thing and are performing live experiments without any controls. However, it should be noted that until very recently there was no significant incidence of unexplained child suicide, there was no significant incidence of unexplained teenage suicide, nor was there a significant incidence of unexplained young adult suicide. This is 100% social contagion, exacerbated by evil greedy pharmaceutical orgs who have latched on to small childhood insecurities and used them to build a multi-billion dollar industry mutilating and disfiguring healthy people.
by tompark | 2025-07-13 15:28:56+00:00
More context at: "Moonshot's Kimi K2 uses a 1T-parameter MoE architecture with 32B active parameters and outperforms models like GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-V3 on key benchmarks" <https://www.techmeme.com/250712/p11#a250712p11>
by Manuel_D | 2025-07-13 15:30:19+00:00
About 3% of people 50-65 identify as gay. 4% of 18-29 year old identify as gay. 1% of 65+ identify as gay. At most, the rate increased 4x over the span of half a century: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/23/5-key-fin...

Left handedness increased from about 5% to 12% over the span of more than 60 years: https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/history-of-left-handedness

By comparison rates of transgender identification among minors has increased by a factor of a hundred over the span of just 10 years: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rates-of-newly-recorded-...

We're talking about an increases that are multiple orders of magnitude greater, over a fraction of the time span.
by notaustinpowers | 2025-07-13 15:30:21+00:00
The current administration has already removed the requirement for federal police forces to wear body cameras. As well as made statements (but little action so far) to federalize the police force to be under the jurisdiction of the DOJ. Everything being recorded may not be the case very soon. Sorry, I’d get sources but I just woke up, I’ll edit this later with them.
by anakali | 2025-07-13 15:30:24+00:00
Thought of Prism Harmony's when I saw the post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549209 and wanted to share my own.

It does have unlimited usage for main models, up to 3 hours rate limits that are pretty clear on the account page.

(15 requests every 3h for premium models like o3 or Claude 4 Sonnet, 35 for models like o4-mini or gpt-4.1, etc.)
by alganet | 2025-07-13 15:30:36+00:00
The correct takeaway from this is not that word choice should not change. It does all the time. A pop song or a powerful speech can (and did) do that.

We also should not think exclusively of whoever chooses the datasets for training LLMs as directly choosing the words. Given the nature of language and how volatile it is, it's unlikely that such choices would matter anyway.

Instead, we should think of it as an event in which words are changing in a different pace. The main implication of this, in my opinion, is that meaning and intent should become more prevalent than word choice as people start to realize this trend.
by zahlman | 2025-07-13 15:30:52+00:00
I guess this is the one place I have to actually voice my complaint.

The entire thread is full of sneering and snark — dark allusions to fascism; unfounded (by logical necessity) allegations about the true motivations of people involved; and attempts to tie together all sorts of ideological enemies into a single outgroup, roughly labelled "Republicans". It is absolutely waging ideological warfare and it only seems to pass muster because it goes along with the community consensus rather than against it.

This has been happening on seemingly every vaguely politically-relevant, popular post for months. It didn't seem to be happening when I joined the site, months before the election. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ... seems like relevant reading here. With a note that this is from the previous cycle, and nobody has apparently learned a damned thing.
by zevv | 2025-07-13 15:30:58+00:00
I have been developing Lua-heavy embedded products as a freelancer for about 20 years now, including VoIP devices, home automation controllers, industrial routers, digital video recorders, and more. These systems typically consist of a Linux kernel, some libc implementation, the lua interpreter and a few 3d party libs support libs to help building the app. The Lua apps ranges from 30k to 100k lines of code, depending on the application. Some of these devices can be considered 'small' in 2025 terms: 8MB of flash, 64MB of ram. Lua is doing great here.

All of these products are still alive today, actively supported and making my customers good money.

Some things come very natural to Lua: Lua <=> C interfacing is a breeze, and while some modern languages are still struggling to figure out how to do proper async, Lua has been able to do this for decades. The language itself is minimal and simple but surprisingly powerful - a few smart constructs like coroutines, closures and metatables allow for a lot of different paradigms.

For new projects at this scale, I would still choose Lua + C/C++ as my stack. Over the last few years I have been visiting other ecosystems to see what I'm missing out on (Elixir, Rust, Nim), and while I learned to love all of those, I found none of them as powerful, low-friction and flexible as Lua.
by noufalibrahim | 2025-07-13 15:31:07+00:00
When id was pushing the envelope of technology (mid to late 90s) and creating more and more startling games, I remember thinking that none of them really had the appeal of many of the earlier games. And apparently Carmack thought that the story etc. of the game wasn't important. Reading masters of DOOM and watching my 8 year old play DOOM on an emulator made me reconsider. He had a jumpscare in a way that would have been impossible unless the game was so immersive and that is a technological feat. I do agree with you that one can go too far but it's not wholly a pointless side quest.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-13 15:31:19+00:00
> But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional.

It's not just that there's rarely accountability - there's explicitly no accountability.

People have sued officers, police departments, cities for the cost of damages from such mistaken raids (including ones that were completely negligent, like wrong street entirely) and the courts have explicitly ruled that they have zero reponsibility to pay for any of the damage caused.
by KineticLensman | 2025-07-13 15:31:36+00:00
> If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.

I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.
by esskay | 2025-07-13 15:31:37+00:00
The "crypto bullshit" which is a notice on the start page with an option to permanently remove and turn it off.

I swear people slating Brave here haven't actually even installed it.

Oh and its opensource, not like theres anything hiding in the shadows here, you can go and look at the code behind how its all working for yourself if you're that paranoid.
by belter | 2025-07-13 15:34:10+00:00
You were probably using Arista...

"...Cut through mode reduces switch latency at the risk of decreased reliability. Packet transmissions can begin immediately after the destination address is processed. Corrupted frames may be forwarded because packet transmissions begin before CRC bytes are received..."

https://www.arista.com/en/um-eos/eos-data-transfer?searchwor...
by meowface | 2025-07-13 15:34:54+00:00
That one is definitely a lot worse and a danger of a monopoly/extremely powerful market player. I would argue that a monopoly is not inherently "bad"* but has much more ability to do bad things if it chooses to, with not much potential recourse from others.

https://economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/ad-v...

*Strictly in an ethics and fairness sense. It might (or might not) be worse for consumers. Just worse in a kind of boring rather than nefarious or deeply harmful way.
by Tainnor | 2025-07-13 15:35:28+00:00
> The point I’m making is that: my boss would laugh me out of the room if I told him “You can’t measure the quality of my electronics designs or my delivery process; it’s art.”

You can find some kind of objective metric, e.g. bug count or time spent developing new features. That alone is super hard to get right, but even if you could, it wouldn't necessarily tell you which techniques lead to a better result. People have tried studying such things (e.g. do static types help) and the studies rarely come up with any effect.

I don't think that's necessarily because these things don't have an individual effect, but because there are humans involved and so, personal ways of thinking probably play an outsized role, so technique X might be a very good fit for person A, but not for person B.
by tacitusarc | 2025-07-13 15:35:31+00:00
Structs are representations of combinatorial types! In your file case, you could parse the input into a struct, and then accept or reject further processing based on that contents of that struct.

Of course, it would be reasonable to claim that the accept/reject step is validation, but I believe “Parse, don’t validate” is about handling input, not an admonition to never perform validation.
by KineticLensman | 2025-07-13 15:36:36+00:00
> The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC

Punk music was not in fact banned by the BBC. They sometimes refused to play the more outrageous tracks that had charted but a massive number got through. The songs weren't somehow eliminated from the charts.

> bands were at times left to tour elsewhere

You could have gone to any Uni town/city in the UK and there would have been punk bands playing in pubs and clubs. The table stakes were extremely low.
by eeue56 | 2025-07-13 15:36:47+00:00
Oh, there were definitely multiple things wrong. Bear in mind that this was 12 years ago, so this is just what I took away with me as an on-going learning. Obviously showing errors to users is an obvious takeaway, but it's a side discussion from affordance.

Results were sent as a CSV file - basically a raw export of the data the server got, not something that was read from the DB. So the operation to save to DB and to send the email were intended to be (almost) parallel operations. The errors weren't shown to users, though there was error handling for other cases that did show the user.
by mrkeen | 2025-07-13 15:37:19+00:00
There's a huge difference. One is an email_t to validate and one is a char* to validate.

As established, head is partial because there is no element to return if the list is empty: we’ve made a promise we cannot possibly fulfill. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to that dilemma: we can weaken our promise. Since we cannot guarantee the caller an element of the list, we’ll have to practice a little expectation management: we’ll do our best return an element if we can, but we reserve the right to return nothing at all. In Haskell, we express this possibility using the Maybe type

^ Weaken the post-condition. In some contexts null might be close enough for Maybe. But is Maybe itself even good enough?

Returning Maybe is undoubtably convenient when we’re implementing head. However, it becomes significantly less convenient when we want to actually use it! Since head always has the potential to return Nothing, the burden falls upon its callers to handle that possibility, and sometimes that passing of the buck can be incredibly frustrating.

This is where the article falls short. It might be good (the enemy of perfect), but it ain't PdV.
by alganet | 2025-07-13 15:38:13+00:00
It is expected that filtering based on digital content will become a thing for a while. It's one of those obvious, but misguided, uses of recent technologies.

I don't know about restaurants, but in regards to other kinds of silos, it is likely that those filters will go down once quality data availability becomes a problem.

In the restaurant analogy, you can say that if the salloon is empty, they'll let people in because they can't survive without them.
by xyzsparetimexyz | 2025-07-13 15:39:12+00:00
I'm a big fan of the aspects of the Sprawl world that weren't personally copied as much - the fuller domes over NYC and (this is surprisingly prominent in the book and a significant plot point) all the personal hologram tech.

It's personally very boring to read about how the book and technology is dated blah blah. The vibes still feel incredibly fresh to me and that's much more important. A lot of modern books (especially written during covid) won't nearly hold up as well
Facemash.in – Indian Facebook
by iharshgarg | 2025-07-13 15:39:47+00:00
I built a social network site called facemash.in …if you search ‘facemash india’ my site ranks #1. It is like a basic version of facebook.. Have a look!..If you like it, I can make good projects for you as well! It’s like a basic version of facebook with features like login, posts, comments, friends, chatting(realtime)..
by quickthrowman | 2025-07-13 15:39:48+00:00
4chan was started because posters in the Something Awful anime subforum could not stop posting underage child porn which was obviously against the rules.

To stop these disgusting freaks from polluting the SA forums with their child pornography and degeneracy, Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka closed the anime subforum (ATDRW aka Anime Tentacle Death Rape Whorehouse) and moot started 4chan.

So yeah, 4chans early legacy is ‘a bunch of pedophiles were mad they couldn’t share their abuse images’ which later transitioned into a love of fascism. What a great place… NOT.

P.S. Adults who like anime are fundamentally broken, it’s children’s entertainment.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-13 15:40:28+00:00
I hadn't read that piece, but it's the conclusion I got to after reading a lot of sci-fi in my YA years.

The sci-fi I enjoyed the most would make one impactful change, say allow for intergalactic travel like in The Forever War, or allowing people to backup and restore their brains like in Altered Carbon, and see where that leads.

Others just use sci-fi as a backdrop for an otherwise conventional story, without really engaging with the sci-fi elements. They can be good stories, but I enjoyed the former much more.
by Spooky23 | 2025-07-13 15:41:26+00:00
That’s a dangerous slippery slope. Most public officers (employees) are subject to a wide range of ethics and other regulations that impact post-service employment. In exchange, you’re indemnified for official acts and the government has a duty to defend you.

I’ve served in policy making roles at different levels of government. There’s a variety of businesses post employment that I’m not permitted to enter in post employment, some for 2-5 years, some indefinitely. Those restrictions are taken seriously, and I know that I’ll be held accountable.

Putting the onus on the employee is really enabling bad behavior - the issue is the poor governance of the police, and using the courts as some sort of cudgel won’t fix it, it will just create more corruption as the powers that be will hang out patsies to take the fall.

If the police are allowed to operate paramilitary forces, they need paramilitary discipline and rules of engagement. Army soldiers breaking rules of engagement get punished and officers sidelined and pushed out of the service. Police in many cases have been allowed to create cultures where everyone scratches each others back. Many police are veterans, and many privately will comment on the differences between those experiences.

IMO, the way to address the issues you describe is standard separation of duties. Invest in state and regional police forces, disempower local police, and move enforcement and investigation of police to a chain of command removed from the police. (Perhaps a State AG) When you need to blunt the variance associated with people’s poor application of discretion, the answer is usually a bureaucratic process.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-13 15:41:38+00:00
Are you talking about Judge Fleischer in Texas?

I do enjoy seeing those (well, I shouldn't).

The prosecutors are given the most absolute trash reports to work with. "Failure to ID, after a traffic stop." "What was the stop for?" "It doesn't say." "So no PC for the stop."

"A caller and said she thought someone was stealing their neighbor's U Haul. A man was observed walking on that street and taken into custody for ..." "For what? Walking while black?"

But no sympathy for the prosecutors either. Garbage reports, but they obviously don't read them pre-hearing, and have plainly become accustomed to judges rubber stamping their PC hearings.

I do like that he doesn't go 'lightly' with the defendants. "You got off lucky this time. You know it, I know it. Do better or it might not go the same next time", and when there is PC or other such, he doesn't put up with any bullshit either.

More judges like him are needed.