MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CharlieDigital | 2025-07-03 16:24:01+00:00
> So maybe we need to look at ways to find a better abstraction for what MCP is great at, and code generation. For that that we might need to build better sandboxes and maybe start looking at how we can expose APIs in ways that allow an agent to do some sort of fan out / fan in for inference. Effectively we want to do as much in generated code as we can, but then use the magic of LLMs after bulk code execution to judge what we did.

Por que no los dos? I ended up writing an OSS MCP server that securely executes LLM generated JavaScript using a C# JS interpreter (Jint) and handing it a `fetch` analogue as well as `jsonpath-plus`. Also gave it a built-in secrets manager.

Give it an objective and the LLM writes its own code and uses the tool iteratively to accomplish the task (as long as you can interact with it via a REST API).

For well known APIs, it does a fine job generating REST API calls.

You can pretty much do anything with this.

https://github.com/CharlieDigital/runjs
by throw0101d | 2025-07-03 16:24:10+00:00
This coming from Arista is unsurprising because their original niche was low-latency, and the first industries that they made in-roads in against the 'incumbents' was finance:

> The low-latency of Arista switches has made them prevalent in high-frequency trading environments, such as the Chicago Board Options Exchange[50] (largest U.S. options exchange) and RBC Capital Markets.[51] As of October 2009, one third of its customers were big Wall Street firms.[52]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arista_Networks

They've since expanded into more areas, and are said to be fairly popular with hyper-scalers. Often recommended in forums like /r/networking (support is well-regarded).

One of the co-founders is Andy Bechtolsheim, also a co-founder of Sun, and who wrote Brin and Page one of the earliest cheques to fund Google:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bechtolsheim
by dfxm12 | 2025-07-03 16:24:36+00:00
FWIW, I see talking and listening as a chore, and I don't think many people are good at them. Each is better in different contexts and there is overlap, of course

If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.

This is not different from talking to someone who is too busy (or just doesn't want) to listen. Writing exists in a form that can always be referenced. There's no risk of playing telephone, no memory required, etc. It'll be waiting for when the person is ready to read it.
by less_less | 2025-07-03 16:24:47+00:00
If you imagine a polynomial L(z) that's zero at all the missing numbers, you can expand the coefficients out. For example, with 2 missing numbers (x,y), you have:

L(z) = z^2 - (x+y)z + xy.

You already have x+y, but what's xy? You can compute it as ((x+y)^2 - (x^2 + y^2))/2. This technique generalizes to higher powers, though I forget the exact details: basically you can generate the coefficients of L from the sums of powers with a recurrence.

Then you solve for the roots of L, either using your finite field's variant of the quadratic formula, or e.g. just by trying everything in the field.

* But wait, this doesn't actually work! *

Over fields of small characteristic, such as F_2^m, you need to modify the approach and use different powers. For example, in the equations above, I divided by 2. But over F_2^m in the example shown above, you cannot divide by 2, since 2=0. In fact, you cannot solve for (x,y) at all with only x+y and x^2 + y^2, because

(x+y)^2 = x^2 + y^2 + 2xy = x^2 + y^2 + 0xy (since 2=0) = x^2 + y^2

So having that second polynomial gives you no new information. So you need to use other powers such as cubes (a BCH code), or some other technique (e.g. a Goppa code). My sibling comment to yours describes the BCH case.
by georgeecollins | 2025-07-03 16:25:18+00:00
I had the pleasure to spend some time with Mark Cerny many years ago. He was honestly one of the most impressive people I have ever met. Down to earth and so, so smart. I also think it speaks volumes for Sony as a company that an American born video game developer (engineer not mba) has such an influential position. They are not insular and respect the craft.
by vidarh | 2025-07-03 16:25:21+00:00
No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much. Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared much more toward professional use, which was also reflected in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the professional market and mostly sold in the US and Canada.

The profile varied extensively by country - Germany as well had a market where Commodore was big in the business market, and while that was mostly PC's, it was also the reason for much of the success of the Amiga 2000, which also largely aimed at non-gaming users.

Commodore UK meanwhile, did fit your "profile" for the Amiga and was very much focused on games.

But Commodore UK was the subsidiary that remained most successful despite competition from consoles.

In fact Commodore UK survived the bankruptcy of Commodore International and did well enough that management tried to put together a buyout offer (but had to throw in the towel after Dell and Escom entered the process).

In other words, while you're right that competition from consoles and PC's of course mattered a lot, it was a lot more nuanced than that.

E.g. in the US, Commodore had burned its relationships to the ground, and so failed to get the low-end Amiga's out there as gaming machines too, and were nowhere near as successful as some of the subsidiaries like Commodore UK, and Commodore B.V (Netherlands; also briefly survived bankruptcy).

Where Commodore did best, it did okay in both the game market and in various professional niches, but that meant actually working the game market hard. E.g. Commodore UK did a "famous" bundle with the game for the 1989 Batman movie which drove relatively-speaking huge sales.

Had the rest of the subsidiaries done close to as well as Commodore UK, the company as a whole would've at least weathered the cash crunch that killed it in '94. Whether that'd have let them rebuild (e.g. by completing their next chipsets) or if it'd have just made them linger on in a zombie state another year, is an open question.
by jerf | 2025-07-03 16:25:24+00:00
I would also rule that in the D&D world there is effectively is no such thing as velocity or acceleration. Note that weapons do not do damage because of their weight or velocity; they simply... do it. Your Greatsword does 2d6 damage, because in their world, that's just what it does. Weapons may have "heavy" and "light" categories but those interact with other rules and are not the cause of damage. Velocity doesn't exist in the sense we think of it. A vague analog does, but it's really quite vague.

Really, the problem is the very selective application of real-world physics and game physics and then trying to very selectively obtain a particular outcome. If we want to play real-world physics, well, we all know the reasons why this isn't going to work in the real world. If you want to play D&D physics, then yeah, sure, the rod arrives at the other end of the line in one turn but with no more or less velocity than it started with, because "velocity" isn't even a concept in D&D. There is only "damage" in the D&D world, and there are no rules that state that handing off an item to the next person changes its "damage" any. Railgun a Greatsword from one end of the line to the other and a Greatsword still does 2d6 damage.

It does successfully demonstrate that the D&D rule set is a just a complete and utter failure as a Grand Unified Field Theory of Physics. I join the rest of the nerd world in shock and dismay at this outcome and encourage them to try harder next edition. If they'd just listen to my feedback and import the Standard Model this would all go away.

There's plenty of other ways to munchkin the rules to obtain absurd damage even completely within the ruleset. Fortunately. Or unfortunately. The reader may decide for themselves.
by trunksuzieross | 2025-07-03 16:25:48+00:00
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by schiffern | 2025-07-03 16:25:50+00:00
If you can tolerate +/- 5% gravity level (which should be doable), instead of a stick for the habitable area you can rearrange the modules into a more compact blob, which should reduce radiation shielding. In LEO it doesn't really matter but it's more important in deep space.

I sometimes hear this called a "barbell" design.
by badc0ffee | 2025-07-03 16:26:47+00:00
PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. But the PC did do well at puzzle games like Lemmings, text+graphics games like King's Quest, and sims like SimCity. That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical level, by 1992-94.

I think PC graphics had two major leaps forward in this era: VGA in 1987, and VLB graphics (on 486 machines) in 1992. The former brought an expanded colour palette, and the latter brought enough memory bandwidth that you didn't need dedicated blitter/sprite chips.
by nativeit | 2025-07-03 16:26:55+00:00
I see your point, but bear with me here--it kind of is.

I suppose if one wanted to be pedantically literal, then you are indeed correct. In every other meaningful consideration, the parent comment is. Maybe not Bash specifically, but #!/bin/sh is broadly available on nearly every connected device on the planet, in some capacity. From the perspective of how we could automate nearly anything, you'd be hard-pressed to find something more universal than a shell script.
by rtkwe | 2025-07-03 16:27:18+00:00
The problem comes from trying to mix real world physics with game mechanics only in ways that benefit the players and also applying rules where they don't fit [0]. Only the game mechanics allow you to pass it between the peasants so fast and the game already tells you what happens the last peasant throws it and it's a (likely non-proficient) attack with whatever item they're passing with the same range limitations that javelin or improvised weapon has. The item is only on average moving 1900 mph but it's really just being rapidly handed from person to person so the true velocity is a rapid sawtooth as the person moves it to pass it to the next person, enabled by the power of RAW itself to these feats.

[0] This is just an object being passed between creatures not a falling object so the Falling Object rules are irrelevant.
by rimunroe | 2025-07-03 16:27:28+00:00
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see someone cancel a subscription to a closed journal. I think that any research which is publicly funded should be available for free (and without a delay either). However, I don’t think that’s why these subscriptions are being cancelled, and it didn’t sound like the original commenter was trying to make that point.

There are a lot of valuable articles I’d want government employees to have access to so they could make evidence-based decisions, which outweighs whatever happiness I might feel about a publisher losing revenue.
by whiplash451 | 2025-07-03 16:27:38+00:00
It felt the same back in 2012-2015 when deep learning was flooding over computer vision. Yet 10 years later there is a net benefit for computer vision: a lot of tasks are now solved much better/more efficiently with deep learning including those that seemed "unfit" to deep learning like tracking.

I'm hopeful that VLMs will "fan out" into a lot of positive outcomes for computer vision.
by pixl97 | 2025-07-03 16:28:14+00:00
>Conversely, if I thought I didn’t need to be in a meeting, then I wouldn’t send a tool to gather stuff for me to then just ignore the tool output - because I don’t need it.

The only way you know that you didn't need to be at a meeting is to be at the meeting. Catch-22 is a fun game.

With dictation tools and analysis you can have meeting notes and then you or AI search for things that might affect you so you can reach out and correct the record.

Simply put in modern larger companies there is too much going on at any given time. Most companies of any size are made up many purchased companies and their applications that are kind of glued together into a corporate structure. You can blame culture rot on the participants, but most of the time they are being asked to do too much in a dysfunctional organization.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-07-03 16:28:47+00:00
Let's not pretend someone who sends an AI note taker, which also implies they have time to read notes taken by an AI of a meeting they couldn't find time to turn up for is someone lacking in time.

The prerequisite of reading notes written by an AI means you have time.

They should just be honest and say "I don't need to be in this" or "I don't want to be in this" rather than pretending they do.
by captainkrtek | 2025-07-03 16:30:46+00:00
My company started to use an AI note taker for interviews. I was skeptical but had no say and decided to reserve my judgement. What surprised me was how many notes it produced. it will write hundreds of bullet points which ends up feeling exhaustive to try and review. In addition it makes lots of mistakes, maybe due to misinterpreting what a candidate said, accents/audio issues. So while I didn’t have to type during the interview, I still have to write my own overall impression anyways. I’ve found practically zero value from it, it just feels gimmicky.
by antonvs | 2025-07-03 16:30:47+00:00
No, the issue is that doing a direct translation from a fundamentally unsafe language like C can't fix safety issues.

You'd have to do a proper rewrite, in which case you could write safe code from the start.

> Every new project is bound to have bugs that need to be ironed out during the time.

Not on the level of the kind of critical security and reliability bugs that unsafe languages foster. That's why CISA and the FBI both strongly recommend memory-safe languages.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-03 16:31:02+00:00
Oh boy, the subject of Egyptian identity is a complicated subject. Are they Arabs? Egyptians? Muslims? Mediterraneans? Pharaohs? Coptic? Bedouin? Berbers?

An "Arab" is not a race nor is it exclusionary with Ancient Egypt. If someone had an uninterrupted ancestory line from today to Ramasis II, those ancestors learned Arabic at some point and became Arabs or Muslims themselves.

Ok, most Egyptians I have known would immediately strike out Berbers/Amazeghs identity. They actively dislike "amazeghs" and consider them foreigners even though they look the same, speak the same language, and plenty are legally Egyptians with families that have lived there since the 17th century. Egyptians consider them imposters and maybe thats why they are hated more than the "obviously a foreigner". At least the latter isn't pretending.

But at the "Bedouin" the lines start getting blurred. They identify as independent tribes that partially moved from Arabia in the 7th or 8th century and they are very very adamant about their independence from the Egyptian state and their right to self determination and how they live. They are the libertarians of Egypt, except they actually practice a fully bedouin/nomad/libertarian lifestyle. The state is always fighting with them. Most regular Egyptians I knew consider them Egyptians despite their disapproval. Egyptians public like the bedouins in general. It's a romanticized existence.

The Arabic/Egyptian/Muslim/Christian/Coptic/Pharaonic/Roman/Greek/Ottomon identity of Egyptians (and arabs in general) is a subject of many books.
by otikik | 2025-07-03 16:31:17+00:00
This reminds me of the "Dual Octo-cat Flail", invented by a friend of mine.

A flail is basically a stick with a pointy ball chained to one end. It does one attack per turn.

A dual flail attacks twice (it has two balls).

Now replace each ball by an octopus. And each octopi is holding a cat on each of its 8 tentacles. So when you attack, the cephalopods attack, and that means that 16 angry felines attack. I think at the time they came up with this animals had some sort of guaranteed damage exception in some cases (perhaps in a previous DND version?).

Anyway it was completely OP.
by District5524 | 2025-07-03 16:31:44+00:00
I'm sure that was an important reason for the US and UK markets. I don't know much about the Swedish market, but in the Eastern European markets, game consoles were not popular at all until the very late 1990s. Gamers in the early 1990s used Commodore (and less affluents ZX Spectrums and clones), and later, as the article says, more and more PCs. In these parts, people were very short of money, which caused piracy to grow HUGE. Computers were also preferred due to being multipurpose. And console games were difficult to copy, so if you wanted to be a serious gamer, you had to have a PC. Even if you had the money to buy games, you couldn't really do that, because nobody really was selling actual games in these markets. With different currencies and limitations on hard currency exchange, you didn't spend those limited funds on games, even if you travelled abroad. Probably also as a consequence, playing on consoles was considered to be lame. It was for kids only. Hah, for those born in the 1990s only! So that was a bit different over here.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-03 16:31:49+00:00
I'm not aware of any convenient literature but it is relatively obvious once someone explains it to you (as it was explained to me).

At its root it is a cutting problem, like graph cutting but much more general because it includes things like non-trivial geometric types and relationships. Solving the cutting problem is necessary to efficiently shard/parallelize operations over the data models.

For classic scalar data models, representations that preserve the relationships have the same dimensionality as the underlying data model. A set of points in 2-dimensions can always be represented in 2-dimensions such that they satisfy the cutting problem (e.g. a quadtree-like representation).

For non-scalar types like rectangles, operations like equality and intersection are distinct and there are an unbounded number of relationships that must be preserved that touch on concepts like size and aspect ratio to satisfy cutting requirements. The only way to expose these additional relationships to cutting algorithms is to encode and embed these other relationships in a (much) higher dimensionality space and then cut that space instead.

The mathematically general case isn't computable but real-world data models don't need it to be. Several decades ago it was determined that if you constrain the properties of the data model tightly enough then it should be possible to systematically construct a finite high-dimensionality embedding for that data model such that it satisfies the cutting problem.

Unfortunately, the "should be possible" understates the difficulty. There is no computer science literature for how one might go about constructing these cuttable embeddings, not even for a narrow subset of practical cases. The activity is also primarily one of designing data structures and algorithms that can represent complex relationships among objects with shape and size in dimensions much greater than three, which is cognitively difficult. Many smart people have tried and failed over the years. It has a lot of subtlety and you need practical implementations to have good properties as software.

About 20 years ago, long before "big data", the iPhone, or any current software fashion, this and several related problems were the subject of an ambitious government research program. It was technically successful, demonstrably. That program was killed in the early 2010s for unrelated reasons and much of that research was semi-lost. It was so far ahead of its time that few people saw the utility of it. There are still people around that were either directly involved or learned the computer science second-hand from someone that was but there aren't that many left.
by ofermend | 2025-07-03 16:32:40+00:00
Well, we expect AI to become AGI sometime in the future. Some say it's here, others say it's in 5 years or 50 years or whatever. So imagine AGI is here already (for sake of argument), and really has superintelligence, and will be able to have agency. How do we need to treat "it"? Over history, humans and society created mechanism to overcome distrust, and our ability to collaborate is what helped us thrive. Should we think about our upcoming "relationship" with AI from that perspective as well?
by colpabar | 2025-07-03 16:33:09+00:00
I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?

But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people? I also remember when that psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem tweeted "suck it" when a group of people who were trying to use legal means to not get deported got deported. Fuck her.

You say it's a misperception, but I think we are all perceiving it exactly as they want us to. They are going to do whatever they can get away with by any means necessary and fuck you if you try to get in the way. Some people just think that's bad.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-03 16:33:15+00:00
Congratulations, your alternate history has delayed Mars colonization by several decades.

Because of the ISS we know that stays of greater than 12 months in zero gravity have real but minor impacts on the human body. So 3-4 month trips to Mars in zero-g are feasible.

If we assume they aren't, those trips would be far more resource intensive.
by bumby | 2025-07-03 16:33:23+00:00
It’s becoming a tired discussion, but this has already been covered. For someone willing/capable of dropping $30k-$50k in cash, $10/mo. is certainly a small effect size. Under certain cases, hybrid TCO will be lower. For example, if you’re buying an SUV, drive a lot, pay cash, and live in a high fuel cost locale. But that shouldn’t lead to a logical leap that hybrid costs are lower in the general case. (They still may be, but nobody has shown good, generalizable data to that point.)