MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toasterlovin | 2025-07-09 00:58:50+00:00
As I said:

> Somewhat of a tangent

I was just using your comment as a launching point for a thought I've had rattling around in my mind for a while. You mentioned some people having an inclination toward what is old and Eastern. That's the "somewhat" and the "tangent" is that I then connected that to people who apply the same heuristic to religion.
by gerdesj | 2025-07-09 00:59:16+00:00
"We Chinese have lost the ritualistic practices that undergirded society 2500 years ago. Let us therefore just come up with a new set?

That sounds sensible to me.

"Who have been the most successful at inventing new rituals for our age? The Axis Powers starting with the 1936 Olympics. Hmm."

I don't know where that train of thought is going but the 1936 Olympics is generally considered a fact but not a happy one. Jesse Owens was a shining light there ...
by YZF | 2025-07-09 00:59:18+00:00
The Dinah Project, headed by a team of leading legal and gender experts, was established in response to the Hamas terror attack on Israel of October 7, 2023. Through the multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills of its members, the Dinah Project has become the leading resource for recognition and justice for the victims of Conflict Related Sexual Violence (CRSV) on October 7 and subsequently. Operating under the auspices of the Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women at Bar-Ilan University, the project aims to reshape the discourse on CRSV, by taking October 7 as a catalyst to develop groundbreaking tools and strategies that combat denialism and ensure accountability in CRSV cases worldwide.
by raspasov | 2025-07-09 01:01:03+00:00
I don't understand how that's more subtle than allowing random queries. It only feels different due to the additional probabilistic layer of indirection (the LLM), but the ability is still there.

> who can already submit random queries to Postgres any time they like

A predefined, static set of queries curated by a human with common sense. LLMs have no common sense. They have context.

An LLM that takes user input and has access to a database can generate and run any query. We don't understand what queries might be generated and under what input, and I don't think we will anytime soon.
by jppope | 2025-07-09 01:05:43+00:00
Serious question here, not trying to give unwarranted stress to what is no doubt a stressful situation for the supabase team, or trying to create flamebait.

This whole thing feels like its obviously a bad idea to have an mcp integration directly to a database abstraction layer (the supabase product as I understand it). Why would the management push for that sort of a feature knowing that it compromises their security? I totally understand the urge to be on the bleeding edge of feature development, but this feels like the team doesn't understand GenAi and the way it works well enough to be implementing this sort of a feature into their product... are they just being too "avant-garde" in this situation or is this the way the company functions?
by tptacek | 2025-07-09 01:06:28+00:00
You enforce more invariants than "free associate SQL queries given raw tickets", and fewer invariants than "here are the exact specific queries you're allowed to execute". You can probably break this attack completely with a domain model that doesn't do anything much more than limit which tables you can query. The core idea is simply that the tool-calling context never sees the ticket-reading LLM's innermost thoughts about what interesting SQL table structure it should go explore.

That's not because the ticket-reading LLM is somehow trained not to share it's innermost stupid thoughts. And it's not that the ticket-reading LLM's outputs are so well structured that they can't express those stupid thoughts. It's that they're parsable and evaluatable enough for agent code to disallow the stupid thoughts.

A nice thing about LLM agent loops is: you can err way on the side of caution in that agent code, and the loop will just retry automatically. Like, the code here is very simple.

(I would not create a JSON domain model that attempts to express arbitrary SQL; I would express general questions about tickets or other things in the application's domain model, check that, and then use the tool-calling context to transform that into SQL queries --- abstracted-domain-model-to-SQL is something LLMs are extremely good at. Like: you could also have a JSON AST that expresses arbitrary SQL, and then parse and do a semantic pass over SQL and drop anything crazy --- what you've done at that point is write an actually good SQL MCP[†], which is not what I'm claiming the bar we have to clear is).

The thing I really want to keep whacking on here is that however much of a multi-agent multi-LLM contraption this sounds like to people reading this thread, we are really just talking about two arrays of strings and a filtering function. Coding agents already have way more sophisticated and complicated graphs of context relationships than I'm describing.

It's just that Cursor doesn't have this one subgraph. Nobody should be pointing Cursor at a prod database!

[†] Supabase, DM for my rate sheet.
by verdverm | 2025-07-09 01:06:38+00:00
Someone posted Google's new MCP for databases in Slack, and after looking at it, I pulled a quote about how you should use these things to modify the schema on a live database.

It seems like not only do they want us to regress on security, but also IaC and *Ops

I don't use these things beyond writing code. They are mediocre at that, soost def not going to hook them up to live systems. I'm perfectly happy to still press tab and enter as needed, after reading what these things actually want to do.
by kelthuzad | 2025-07-09 01:06:46+00:00
I think that you should substantiate your claims instead of making low effort comments with zero elaboration. I've cited relevant passages from Astro's docs and I realized that it offers me the features I'm looking for, so I'm not sure what you're on about. Here are the "Key differences between Nuxt and Astro"[0] according to the docs:

- Nuxt is a Vue-based SPA (single-page application). Astro sites are multi-page apps built using .astro components, but can also support React, Preact, Vue.js, Svelte, SolidJS, AlpineJS, and raw HTML templating.

- Page Routing: Nuxt uses vue-router for SPA routing, and vue-meta for managing <head>. In Astro, you will create separate HTML page routes and control your page <head> directly, or in a layout component.

- content-driven: Astro was designed to showcase your content and to allow you to opt-in to interactivity only as needed. An existing Nuxt app may be built for high client-side interactivity. Astro has built-in capabilities for working with your content, such as page generation, but may require advanced Astro techniques to include items that are more challenging to replicate using .astro components, such as dashboards.

[0] https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/migrate-to-astro/from-nux...
by garaetjjte | 2025-07-09 01:08:19+00:00
>The new value was available earlier if it was a cache miss?

Apparently so. Maybe the logic is that it is available one instruction later if it's a hit, but when it's a miss it's stalls entire pipeline anyway, and resumes only when result is available.

One source of non-determinism that stayed for long time in various architectures were LL/SC linked atomics. It mostly didn't matter but eg. rr recording debugger on AArch64 doesn't work on applications using these instead of newer CAS extension atomics.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-09 01:09:10+00:00
Valiant effort. Sounds like Scrim was doing ok out there - but not great.

Bit of a shame to see we've domesticated dogs so much - and arranged our cities suchly - that dogs can't thrive without "rescuing".

For freedom to be a good thing, you also need control of the environment you're free in.
by kragen | 2025-07-09 01:09:16+00:00
I agree that it's a perfectly fine way to say it in the active voice, but I think it makes the sentence read slightly worse and require slightly more effort to understand. Certainly it's slightly longer. Possibly it depends on the reader; the passive voice seems to be more of an obstacle for Spanish-as-a-first-language speakers, for example, than for native English speakers.
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 01:09:44+00:00
> how is a print book the exact same market as a web/mobile text-generating human-emulating chat companion? If that holds, why can't I say a textbook is the exact same market as a film?

Because the medium is actually the same. The content of a book is not paper, or a cover. It's text, and specifically the information in that text.

LLMs are intended to directly compete with and outright replace that usecase. I don't need a textbook on, say, Anatomy, because ChatGPT can structure and tell me about Anatomy, and in fact with say the exact same content slightly re-arranged.

This doesn't really hold for fictional books, nor does it hold for movies.

Watching a movie and reading a book are inherently different experiences, which cannot replace one another. Reading a textbook and asking ChatGPT about topic X is, for all intents and purposes, the same experience. Especially since, remember, most textbooks are online today.
by immibis | 2025-07-09 01:12:10+00:00
The central smart contract is on the blockchain and can only be used if the internet is up. That's why you haven't solved anything here.

Your proposal is that since Alice and Bob can't communicate in real-time, either directly or indirectly, Alice does an interaction with a smart contract to lock some value and then Bob does an interaction with the same smart contract to unlock some value.

We can view the smart contract as some shared algorithm between Alice and Bob (if they are running their own nodes) or we can view it as something outside of them both (perhaps they are RPC customers of Infura). If Alice and Bob are running their own nodes, however those nodes manage to communicate with each other is a way they could just send the message to each other and not need a blockchain. And if they're both able to communicate with Infura, they could also swap Infura for Gmail and send each other a message the normal way (or if they can really only reach Infura for some reason, they can put their messages on the blockchain). But we are talking about designing systems that can work in scenarios where direct communication like this is impossible, and messages have to be forwarded hop-by-hop over a span of hours. You can't design a system for slow networking, that assumes the existence of a separate fast network just to run the payment system.

All nodes running a blockchain have to be in low-latency contact with each other. If you try to run Bitcoin in a network with multi-hour latency, you'll never reach consensus on which blocks are in the chain. You'll be hard-forking all over the place. You'd have to slow it down to, like, one block per week, but then it's far too slow to be useful for payments.

If a blockchain exists in such an environment, it exists on a tightly-coupled cluster of nearby nodes. And that cluster is pretty much the same as a single central node, from the perspective of the network. You don't gain anything by making it a cluster (except for redundancy, as usual).
by kragen | 2025-07-09 01:12:45+00:00
It depends on how often they're exchanging those photos, but it doesn't depend on the number of hops, or even the number of nodes, just the total number of publishers and the bandwidth desired by each publisher. In flooding every message gets transmitted (eventually) by every device, so the bandwidth available for the average publisher is the bandwidth of the slowest device divided by the number of publishers, regardless of how many hops or nodes there are.
by danans | 2025-07-09 01:13:38+00:00
> Support groups, fostering community through more local activities and places of belonging, funding social workers. I'm sure there's more.

In a post-labor-centric economy (if that's where we are heading with AI/automation) those are also among the things we'll need to figure out how to pay more people to do anyways.

There's tremendous value for society in paying people to care for the wellness of others, their communities, and the local and global environment. So therapists, park builders, environmental remediators, and more.

Communities composed of the wealthy already do this quite successfully for themselves today, as anyone who has driven through prosperous areas full of wellness services has observed.

The problem is we have to come up with ways of quantifying that value monetarily so it "makes sense" to markets and the signals they follow, which will otherwise completely ignore universal wellness as an objective, or even actively move against it, under the belief that the non-wealthy do not deserve the wellness that the wealthy enjoy.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-09 01:13:56+00:00
I don't know if the problems at the company that I worked for, came from the CEO, or many of the powerful General Managers.

At my company, "General Manager" positions were the ones that actually set much of the planning priorities. Many of them, eventually got promoted to VP, and even, in the case of my former boss, the Chairman of the Board.

When the iPhone came out, one of my employees got one (the first version). I asked to borrow it, and took it to our Marketing department. I said "This is gonna be trouble for us."

I was laughed out of the room. They were following the strategy set down from the General Managers, which involved a lot of sneering at the competition.

The iPhone (and the various Android devices that accompanied it), ate my company for breakfast, and picked their teeth with our ribs.

A couple of the GMs actually anticipated the issues, but they were similarly laughed out of their rooms.

I saw the same thing happen to Kodak (the ones that actually invented digital photography), with an earlier disruption. I was at a conference, hosted by Kodak, and talked to a bunch of their digital engineers and Marketing folks.

They all had the same story: They were being deliberately kneecapped by the film people (with the direct support of the C-Suite).

At that time, I knew they were "Dead Man Walking." That was in 1996 or so.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-09 01:14:39+00:00
All of the owners of the TV networks moved to streaming with varying degrees of success.

- Disney has owned ABC forever and Disney+ is fairly successful

- NBC is owned by Comcast and Comcast has moved more toward being a dumb pipe, streaming and is divesting much of its linear TV business.

- CBS/Paramount just paid off Trump and it yet to be seen what will happen to it
by averageRoyalty | 2025-07-09 01:16:14+00:00
When does music stop being "real"? If I use a vocoder? If I have a producer cleaning up the track? If I sing but somebody else produced the beat in Logic with digital instruments?

Lots of artists seem mad, but they're already using plenty of tooling. I see this as a natural evolution, and the outcome akin to the industrial revolution.
by tptacek | 2025-07-09 01:16:38+00:00
The thing I naturally want to say in these discussions is "human code", but that's semantically complicated by the fact that people use LLMs to write that code now. I think of "agent code" as the distinct kind of computing that is hardcoded, deterministic, non-dynamic, as opposed to the stochastic outputs of an LLM.

What I want to push back on is anybody saying that the solution here is to better train an LLM, or to have an LLM screen inputs or outputs. That won't ever work --- or at least, it working is not on the horizon.
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 01:19:10+00:00
> - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google. > - Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.

These are contradictory, because how, exactly, do you expect them to make money?

They push and advertise a paid VPN service and everyone loses their minds and acts like Mozilla is the evilest company there ever darn was. But they do nothing, and then they "respect users", but they rely on Google for revenue.

> - Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox. > - Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.

These are also contradictory and even contradict the first two. These side projects were not very successful, they were just well-liked. There's a difference.

If they push these side-projects, they're not focusing on Firefox, and they're disrespecting users, AND they're irresponsibly using their revenue. Oops.

And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?

Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-09 01:20:58+00:00
No (or yes..?)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44477779

Those 2 sets of aggregated data seem to correlate (cross-validate?), but I haven't checked numerically, hoped for some input from Paul first

So far, his website link seems VERY sus :)

narcissists/sadists are forced (try?) to be indirect, *but* also fair worse in "high-context", does that mechanism make sense?

(Come to think of it, Ireland makes sense now-- that HN post of sick graph pairs also comes to mind)

So-- you might disagree-- that's something [not puppy-/goldfish-like] that I am alright with leaving in the centrifuge (for) now ;)
by jmyeet | 2025-07-09 01:21:20+00:00
This will likely come with a one-time significant increase in inflation, at least based on other European countries.

When Germany converted to the Euro, the conversion rate was (IIRC) about ~2 DM to the Euro but from what I recall, a lot of everyday things went from costing 7 DM to 7 euro, effectively doubling in price. IIRC France was similar (ie ~6.5 francs to the Euro but 10 Francs went to 3 euro, etc).

I've tried searching for any studies on this to see if the effect was measured and, if so, whether it held with later countries joining the euro.

I'm a little surprised that the euro has been this stable for this long (going on 30 years). Finland debated leaving. IT's debated if there's even a legal mechanism to leave. We still have the problem that the ECB sets eurozone monetary policy with Germany and Greece being vastly different economies.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-09 01:21:58+00:00
I suspect they were talking about Scott Adams; not Michael Lynch (but it's fuzzy, due to ... unclear writing).

I'm not a huge fan of Scott Adams, because I disagree with his worldview, but I have other hills to die on.

He’s not wrong about this, but he’s just repeating very old “tribal knowledge,” about writing. I’ve been hearing the same advice, since I was a kid. Sometimes, I even follow it.
by majormajor | 2025-07-09 01:22:28+00:00
> But when the product can shift from "give me an app that makes it easier to do my taxes" to "keep me current on my taxes and send me status updates" that's a pretty radical difference in what the customer sees.

For a bunch of stuff - banks, online shopping, booking a taxi, etc - this shift already happened with non-LLM-based "send me notifications of unusual account activity" or even the dead-simple "send me an email about every transaction on my bank account." Phone notifications moved it from email to built-into-the-OS even.

The "LLM hype cycle" tweak becomes something like "have an LLM summarize the email instead of just listing the three transactions" which is of dubious use to the average user.
by 1123581321 | 2025-07-09 01:23:14+00:00
You seem confused about what he was saying. I’m sure you are familiar with unit testing philosophy with your experience. Calling a function and expecting a response does test the behavior of the application, just at a lower level than a request- or multi-request level spec. When he says rewriting a method he is referring to changing the logic of it; a refactor leaves the tests unchanged. That shouldn’t have needed to be spelled out to such a senior developer.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-07-09 01:23:39+00:00
From Bandcamp's Paypal setup page:

Please note: Starting summer 2025 Bandcamp will begin transitioning to a new payment system powered by Stripe. This new system is set to roll out in phases, but at the end of this transition PayPal will be removed completely and will no longer be a payout option. To ensure a smooth transition and avoid any interruptions to your payouts, we recommend updating to the new payment system as soon as possible.

------ Which links to the currently non-functioning page: https://bandcamp.com/bandcamp_payments
by bri3d | 2025-07-09 01:24:14+00:00
Shrug. I think this is a good illustration: it’s not the language that’s the issue, it’s the DOM. The DOM was and continues to be a terrible UI abstraction for applications.

What we really needed was Flex or XAML or Swing or even XUL, for that matter, to be built on a sandbox functional enough to make users happy but robust enough to run on the web. Instead each framework failed in turn to various platform dependency and/or security flaws until we ended up stuck with the DOM as our endgame.
by leereeves | 2025-07-09 01:24:28+00:00
That's not true. According to his own account, he was under investigation before anyone saw the meme.

Further, he said, "They took me to a room with several armed guards, where I had to hand over my shoes, mobile phone and backpack," before allegedly threatening him with a hefty fine if he did not unlock his cellphone for them. That is where the alleged meme of Vance came into play, along with a photo of Mikkelsen holding a homemade wooden pipe.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/25/norwegian-tourist-jd-...
by scubakid | 2025-07-09 01:24:50+00:00
Account linking for automated balance updates is our most upvoted and most controversial feature request.

I agree it would be really nice if it worked well, but my understanding from other founders is that aggregator reliability still leaves a lot to be desired in 2025, and is always a huge expense and support burden. As a small, bootstrapped team building a long-term planning tool where current balances are only a small piece of the picture, we need to be really careful about what we choose to take on. Currently there are still dozens of other high-priority feature requests that will also deliver real value but without those downsides.

I do go back-and-forth on this though. And I think eventually there will come a time for it.

Glad to hear you're enjoying the tool, and thanks so much for your support!

p.s. also might be worth noting that there is a plugin system, and community members have built integrations that can pull in balance updates automatically from some of the popular budgeting tools.
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 01:24:55+00:00
> My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.

Your main issue is in direct contradiction to most people's issue with Firefox - it relies on Chrome for revenue.

They repeatedly try other revenue streams and people hate them for that too. It's a lose-lose, because, for some reason, people hate Mozilla almost viscerally. They're held to such a frankly insane standard as compared to Chrome.

I mean, Chrome shits on users in every way you could possibly imagine and nobody seems to care. Chrome is married to Google and nobody complains. But Firefox is less married to Google and it's a 100x bigger problem. How? What's the formula here?